by Ron Goulart
Easy had worked his way along the plank to within a foot of the window.
“I’ve always figured you for some kind of fairy anyhow, Ennis,” Danny was saying. “That’s why it’s so easy for you to kiss Jake’s ass. To drag me around wherever he tells you.”
“This is all for your own good, he says, mam. He expects some kind of trouble the next few days and he thinks it’ll be better if …”
“Sure, better if I can’t talk to anybody. So he locks me up in the gay 90s whorehouse,” said the girl. “He wants me out of the way till he can get everything swept under the rug.”
“I wouldn’t know about that, mam.”
Lowering himself to his hands and knees, Easy began to move by the window. There was just enough room for him to pass without being seen by anyone in the room.
Once clear of the window he stood again, made his way over the scaffolding to the other lighted window. He wanted to know where the other man, Mullin, the sometime gardener, was.
There was no sound coming out of the room that went with this lighted window.
Easy waited a moment, then eased along the plank to take a look into the window.
What he saw was Mullin looking out at him with a .45 automatic in his hand.
CHAPTER 20
WITHOUT HESITATING EASY THREW himself back off the plank.
The automatic went off, smashing the window and sending a shower of jagged glass down through the dark after him.
He hit the ground hard, landing on one knee and an elbow. It was his right arm and for a moment he couldn’t use it to draw out his own gun.
He rolled over the cobblestone street toward the house.
“Son of a bitch,” said Mullin upstairs.
A smaller sprinkling of shards of window glass came flickering down. Then the scaffold board buckled, swaying slightly.
Easy was under the scaffolding now. He got to his feet. He kept flexing the fingers of his right hand. He reached up with his left, catching hold of a piece of the metal frame.
“Hey, that son of a bitch is out here someplace,” Mullin shouted. His heavy footsteps shook the plank he was walking on.
Quietly, Easy pulled himself upward again. Stopping when he was directly below the board the other man was standing on, he braced his feet against a crossbar.
Ennis’ window was yanked open. “What son of a bitch?”
“That detective son of a bitch.” Mullin knelt on the board, extending his head out over its edge.
Easy had been waiting for that. He pushed up on the back side of the board hard.
The board tilted and flipped the bulky Mullin off. Reflex made him squeeze the trigger of the automatic as he plummeted down. The slug bounced off the cobblestones and bonged a length of pipe in the scaffolding.
Mullin made a great gasping noise when he hit. There was a sharp cracking. He stayed as he hit, all tucked in on himself. He didn’t get up.
“Mullin, where is he?” Ennis called out of his open window. “Hey, Mullin.”
Easy lowered himself carefully down to the street, his progress hidden by the scaffolds.
As Ennis came climbing out onto the board outside his window, Easy let himself in through the front door of the house. None of the rooms on the first floor were furnished.
He moved across the bare moonlit room and went up the staircase. There was a runner of flowered carpeting padding the steps.
The room at the top of the stairs had a green throw rug on the floor. A card table with a transistor radio on it was against one wall, a folding chair in front of it. There was a canvas cot against the other wall and Danny, wearing a short black skirt and a white blouse was sitting on it looking toward the open window. Her long auburn hair was tied back with a green velvet ribbon. An open box of saltine crackers was on the floor beside the cot.
Easy crossed the threshold. The light was coming from an old floor lamp near the doorway. He reached out and yanked the chain.
Then in the darkness he ran across the room to the window.
“Sweet Jesus, now what?” Danny said in a low voice.
Ennis sensed something. He was starting to turn around out on the scaffold. There was a nickel-plated .32 revolver in his hand.
Easy stepped through the open window and hit Ennis on the jaw before he could do anything. Then he chopped the gun out of his grasp.
The gatekeeper teetered back, on the brink of falling off the plank.
Catching hold of his shirt front, Easy pulled him back into the room.
“You son of a bitch,” said Ennis, stumbling.
Easy hit him again. “Everybody seems to feel that way around here.”
Ennis dropped to the rug.
The lamp came back on. “Well, it’s Boston Blackie to the rescue,” said Danny.
Genuflecting beside the stunned Ennis, Easy tugged off the man’s shoes.
“Would you two rather be alone?” Danny returned to the cot, sat down and crossed her bare legs.
Easy used Ennis’ shoe laces to tie his hands and feet together behind him. When he finished he stood and asked the girl, “Only two of them?”
She nodded. “The one you just gift wrapped and Mullin. Are you going to hogtie him, too?”
Easy went over to the window and carefully looked out. “No need to.”
“You mean he’s dead down there?”
“Not dead, but incapacitated. Broke a leg, among other things. He’s still out.”
“Apparently,” said Danny, “a good deal of shit has hit the fan as far as Jake is concerned. He didn’t want anyone hobnobbing with me for a while, especially you.”
“Sandy Feller and his wife got killed.”
“I didn’t know that. No one told me,” she said. “Not an accident?”
“Somebody cut their throats.”
“Oh.”
Easy crossed to her. “I want to talk to you now.”
The girl stood up, brushing close against him as she did. “That’s all you ever want to do. What does it take to turn you on?”
He put his hands on her shoulders. “Different circumstances than these,” he answered. “Now let’s …”
“Smartass.” She moved around him, went out into the dark hall. “I don’t want to talk with Ennis making like a bearskin rug on the floor.”
Easy followed her through the dark house.
CHAPTER 21
THERE WAS NOTHING IN the big room but moonlight. The bare walls, the high unpainted ceiling, the dusty floor all glowed a pale white.
Danny walked across the room, her feet stirring up chalky dust, and stopped near the large curving bay window. “Nostalgia,” she said, looking out at the gabled roofs of the other mock Victorian houses. “What a lot of crap.”
Easy stopped in the center of the room. “Who was buried at the ranch?”
The girl twisted a strand of her auburn hair around her forefinger. “What ranch?”
“Thorpe Ranch,” he said. “Who was in the hole?”
“Some amusement park this is,” Danny said, her back to him. “Not a drop to drink in the whole frigging place.”
“It was Bill Goffman, wasn’t it? He never ran anywhere.”
“What difference does it really make? So he got a small headstart on the rest of us.”
“It matters because somebody gave him that headstart, because somebody probably cut his throat.”
Slowly Danny turned around. “I didn’t have anything to do with it. Not anything directly to do with it.”
“Bill knew Gary’s father had buried the dough there at the ranch.”
The moonlight turned her a harsh blue-white. “Yeah, Bill knew,” she said. “He knew and I knew. Bill worked there, you know, and we stayed there at night sometimes. We’d buy a half-gallon of the cheapest red wine you could get and then we’d make love. Sometimes in the back of the livery stable, sometimes in the jail and, once, on top of the bar in the Yellow Dog Saloon. Kid stuff.”
“And one of those nights Marquetti went
out there to hide his money,” said Easy.
“That’s right, Easy. He didn’t see us but we saw him. Old Marquetti went up to boot hill and then he climbed up into the woods, all the time carrying this cardboard carton,” said Danny.
“Bill followed him, saw where he buried the stuff?”
She looked out into the night again, touching the glass with her fingertips. “Not then, but the next day Bill went up and found the place in the woods where the old man had buried something. But we were afraid at first, didn’t want to poke around too much.”
“After they put Marquetti in prison,” said Easy, “then you could do something.”
“Yeah, Bill figured out what must be buried there. The papers were full of it there for awhile, a couple million dollars that had sort of vanished.” She took her fingers away from the glass, pressed her hands against herself just below her breasts. “Bill told me about what he’d guessed. By that time of course Bill wasn’t working there anymore. So we made a plan … we planned to go there to the Thorpe Ranch late at night and dig up the money.”
“But you told someone else.”
Danny said, “Yes, but I didn’t expect …”
“You told Bill’s father, Jacob Goffman.” Her head nodded up and down once. “Yes, I was … I was seeing him at the same time. Bill didn’t know anything about that. I mentioned it to Jake. I really didn’t have any idea he’d …”
“Cut himself in.”
The girl lowered herself to the dusty floor. Sat with her slim back pressed hard against the wall. “When Bill and I went there that night … that night Jake was there. He was waiting in the woods,” she said. “After Bill and I had done all the digging … that’s like Jake, let somebody else do the dirty part … after we did the digging and found the money …”
She stopped talking, ran a hand back and forth across her stomach. “You should have seen that money, Easy. Jesus, there was so much of it … wads of cash. Big thick rolls of bills, wound with fat rubber bands. All of it stuffed in mason jars. You know, the kind of jars your grandmother used to put up pickles in … there was over a million in cash in those silly god damn jars.”
“Then Jake killed his son.”
“He … he came out of the woods from behind Bill … I don’t … I don’t think Bill ever knew who it was,” she said in a low faraway voice. “He … he cut him … cut his throat. Then he dumped him in the hole where the money’d been.”
“While you watched.”
“What the hell did you expect me to do?” She pushed herself up, stood facing him. “Your god damn right I watched. Shit, I even helped him shovel in some of the dirt. You think I was going to run for the cops? Jake could just as easily have killed me, too. That was a big hole.”
“And if you’d made it to the cops you wouldn’t have got to keep any of the money.”
“Yeah, right, Easy. I wasn’t going to say goodbye to a million bucks,” said the girl. “How many people live long enough to make that kind of money?”
“So you said goodbye to Bill and married his father,” said Easy.
“Jake used the money, very carefully, to start his toy business,” said Danny. “He’s worth three million now.”
Easy didn’t say anything.
Danny took a step toward him. “Stop looking at me like I was a piece of shit you didn’t want to step on. I don’t really care what you think of me.”
“What do you think of you?”
“Thank you, R. D. Laing.”
Easy said, “Sandy Feller contacted Jake Goffman last night, didn’t he?”
“I don’t know.”
“That has to be why Feller’s dead,” Easy told her. “Why they found him down by the ocean this morning with his throat cut.”
“You mean … Jake did it?”
“Feller hung around with all you people,” said Easy. “From the time you were all kids. When Gary told him the message his father left Feller put it together faster than we did. He went out to the Thorpe Ranch last night.”
“Too late to find any money.”
“But he found a skeleton in that hole. Bill Goffman’s skull and bones,” continued Easy. “Again Feller put things together, because he knew all of you. He knew about your husband’s sudden rise a few years ago. A sudden rise that coincided with the disappearance of Bill Goffman. Feller wanted to make money and he figured that, even though he was too late for Marquetti’s dough, he had something pretty valuable to sell. He figured your husband wouldn’t want that skeleton found. He called your husband and offered to sell him his son back.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said the girl. “Please, Easy, I don’t want to hear any more.”
“We haven’t even gotten to why Feller’s wife was killed, too,” said Easy.
“Just stop it,” said Danny. She came up to him, took hold of his arm. “Please, just get me away from here. Now.”
“Where’s Jake Goffman now?”
“He told everybody he was going up to SF for a Few days,” she said, still holding tight to his arm.
“But he’s really holed up at the Goftoy plant down in Hawthorne. He’s got a suite of apartments there up above the Research & Design building. Ennis called him there twice since we’ve been here.”
“I’ll go see him.”
“He’s got guards at night.”
“He had guards here,” said Easy.
CHAPTER 22
THE NIGHT STAYED HOT. Easy reached across the front seat of his car and rolled down the passenger side window. Everything smelled like fertilizer around here. It was a few minutes shy of midnight and he was driving south from Hollywood toward Hawthorne.
At this hour of the night the VW radio brought in strange and faraway stations. Right now it had a station from New Mexico. The announcer, a young man with a surly tenor voice, was apparently in the process of quitting his job and had decided to play his own records instead of the station’s.
At the moment it was an old blues. “Well, there’s one kind favor I ask of you. Yes, there’s one kind favor I ask of you. Please see that my grave is kept clean.”
“Know what that was, you boobs out there?” asked the disc jockey in his surly tenor voice. “That was Blind Lemon Jefferson. Bet you never heard of him before you spoon-fed nitwits. No, because all you do is consume our plastic culture, never thinking, never inquiring. Now here’s a record by Leroy Carr. Never heard of him either, have you, you poor benighted rubes.”
“Nobody’s happy,” said Easy and clicked the radio off.
Ten miles further along he pulled into an all night gas station.
A very fat young man in a speckled white uniform came trotting out of the glaringly lit office. He got a look at Easy and began moving slower. “All the cash is locked in the safe and I can’t open it,” he called from ten feet away.
“Two bucks worth of regular.”
The fat boy moved a little closer. “You’re not a stickup artist?”
“Nope.”
“Sorry.” The boy approached the window. “You look, if I may say so, sir, very mean and formidable in there.”
“I was thinking about something else.”
“I get scared here nights. Just me and all these lights. Low lead regular or regular regular?”
“Doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, yes, it does, sir. Low lead will help us save our air.”
“Nothing’s going to save LA, but make it low lead.”
After lifting the bonnet and thrusting in the hose, the fat boy came back to talk to Easy. “To young people such as myself, sir, ecology is very important. We’ll inherit this world from you older people some day after all.”
“I’m planning to leave my share to my cat,” said Easy. “Know where the Goftoy plant is from here?”
“Oh, yes. You stay on this road for another ten miles. Then you’ll come to a big interchange thing, with a bunch of ramps crisscrossing way up in the air. You’ve got to get on the one that’s hard right.”
“Th
anks.”
The fat boy looked toward the gas pump. “Oops, I’ve given you $2.10 worth of gas.” He ran to pull the hose out.
Way up in the night a huge teddy bear went slowly round and round. The bear was ten feet tall, made of clay painted over with thick enamel. It reminded Easy of the cowgirl who used to watch over the Strip. Six small pastel spotlights, the kind they used to illuminate funeral parlors and motels, were shining up at the revolving bear as he turned up there on the roof of the Goftoy administration building. Every five seconds the word Goftoys materialized over the teddy bear’s head, spelled out in neon tubing.
Easy drove down the street which fronted the plant complex. There was a metal wire fence around everything. To his left stretched three acres of blacktop parking lots. All empty now, except for a lone old Buick with its tires gone and its hood gaping open.
A guard in a tan uniform was sitting in a little glass hut on the other side of the six foot high wire fence. The glass walls allowed for a clear view of the .38 revolver holstered on his hip.
Easy drove on.
He spotted one other guard. This one was walking from the building with the revolving teddy bear toward a smaller building a hundred yards beyond it. There were lights on upstairs in that smaller building.
“That should be the R&D building,” Easy said to himself.
A patrol car approached from the opposite direction and the lookout cop eyed him.
Easy assumed a bland expression and checked his watch. “Oy, I’m late for the graveyard shift.”
The cops passed him and receded, passing on by the Goftoy setup.
Easy went two blocks beyond and swung into an alley between a garage and a store calling itself Wickerville. The windows of the store were full of wicker.
A truckload of pipe rumbled by on one of the ramps up above.
Keeping in shadow as much as he could, Easy went back to Goftoys. He headed for the rear of the place.
The moon had clouded over during the last half hour. The night was still warm.
There wasn’t any guard house at the back of the factory grounds. A strip of dreary park about a hundred feet wide bordered the fence on the Goftoy side. Being this close to the freeways hadn’t helped the grass and the trees. Even the ornamental iron benches looked a little stunted.
