One Grave Too Many
Page 9
Easy climbed over the fence and no bells went off.
From here among the forlorn trees he studied the six buildings which made up the factory complex. He was five hundred feet from the warehouse, facing the loading ramps. Three trucks, the cab and trailer type, sat out behind the warehouse. Beside them were four panel trucks and a busvan. These smaller vehicles had Goftoys lettered on their sides.
“Up with your mitts, young fellow.”
Easy hadn’t heard him coming at all. He turned to see a heavyset old man in a tan uniform moving through the trees toward him. He had his revolver drawn.
“Some kind of industrial spy, by the look of you.”
Easy leaped straight up. He grabbed hold of the tree branch directly overhead and swung on it.
His feet hit the old guard smack in the stomach, knocked him over on his back.
Easy let go the tree, dropped to the ground and stepped hard on the guard’s gun wrist. He got the weapon out of the man’s hand before it was fired.
“Geeze,” said the guard, “geeze, I’m not so young anymore. You hadn’t ought to of done that.”
“Get up,” Easy told him, “and walk over to the warehouse there.”
“You hadn’t ought to mess around with me.” The old man, grunting and panting, got himself up. “I’m like a real policeman; you’re letting yourself in for a lot of trouble.”
Easy pointed the guard’s own gun at him. “You’re not a cop. You’re just a Goffman employee,” he said. “Come tomorrow that’s not going to mean anything at all. Now move.”
The guard moved.
Easy left him tied and gagged in the cab of one of the big trucks.
He made it to the Research & Design building without encountering anyone else.
CHAPTER 23
TINY LITTLE BLONDE GIRLS were walking around the room. A dozen of them, pink-cheeked and curly-haired, dressed in crisp polkadot pinafores. After every six steps each one would halt and say, “Hello, I love you!” and then commence walking again. All except one little mechanical doll. She kept walking and didn’t speak at all.
Goffman lunged from the black leather armchair he was hunched in. He gave the silent doll a kick which sent it up to crack against the ceiling. “Talk, you little bitch.”
Easy pushed the door of the apartment all the way open. “Let’s you and me talk Goffman.” He held his revolver in his hand.
Goffman sat back down. “I’ve got nothing much to say to you, Easy,” he said. “Better haul your ass out of here before I have you arrested for trespassing. How’d you get by the night staff anyhow?”
“Same way I got by Ennis and Mullin.”
“Hello, I love you!” said one of the dolls he’d been testing.
“What is it you want?” Goffman asked Easy.
“I came to get you.”
“You’re not the law.”
“I’ll turn you over to the cops. I could have done that with a couple of phone calls, but I want to see this through to the end.”
“Hello, I love you!”
Snorting, Goffman jumped up. He went around the room slapping the dolls off their feet. When they were all down he said, “What the hell would the cops want me for?”
“Three counts of murder.”
“You know how many attorneys I employ, Easy? I can rack your ass good for talking to me like this.”
“I’ve got Danny,” said Easy. “She’s not out at the park anymore. She’s in a motel with my secretary looking after her. And she’s agreed to talk to the police.”
“Talk about what? All the guys she’s screwed since we got married?”
“About what she saw at the Thorpe Ranch,” said Easy. “A long time ago, Goffman, when you cut your son’s throat. When you took the million dollars Marquetti buried there. Things like that she’ll talk about.”
“Who’ll believe her?”
“The cops,” said Easy. “Especially after I tie you in with the Feller killings for them.”
The old man sat down again. “How much?”
“You got me mixed up with Sandy Feller. I’ve got nothing to sell.”
“A nice kid Sandy used to be, not a punk like most of them nowadays,” said the old man. “Then he tells me he wants $250,000. A quarter of a million he wants to get the bones he dug up. I wasn’t about to get held up like that, Easy.”
“So you killed him instead.”
“Sure, I’d get rid of ten like him to keep hold of a quarter of a million bucks,” Goffman said. “You ever kill anybody, Easy?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s not so very hard. And it never bothers me afterwards,” the thickset old man told him. “Danny, though, she never got over what … the thing about Bill. She can’t forget it.”
Easy said, “Feller didn’t have the skeleton with him.”
“No, the simple bastard had it hidden up at his place. After I got rid of him I went over his car. Nothing there.”
“Did his wife hear you when you broke in to look for it in his house?”
“No, she was sound asleep. I got rid of her to be sure I was safe. So nobody would bother me while I was searching around. Turned out Sandy stashed the bones out in his garage, in one of those big plastic garbage bags. I didn’t even need to go into the damn house at all if I’d looked there first.”
Easy said, “We can go now.”
“You don’t look as greedy as Sandy,” said the old man. “Suppose I was to offer you …”
The floor bounced.
“Hello, I love you!” said one of the golden-haired dolls.
The walls swayed.
Books began hopping out of the tall thin bookcase. The glass in the windows rattled, rattled harder and harder. Then two of the windows exploded inward. Broken glass sprayed the room.
“It’s a quake,” roared the old man.
The whole building was groaning.
Suddenly a coffee table leaped up and slammed hard into Easy’s left side. Easy staggered, tripped over a fallen doll.
“So long, you bastard.” The old man was out of his chair. He kicked Easy in the chest as he went by.
Everything stopped shaking. Easy got up and heard Goffman thumping down the stairs. “It’s not over yet,” he said to himself as he headed for the ground floor.
Easy was two strides out of the R&D building when the next quakes came.
The huge teddy bear made an enormous ripping, rending sound and toppled from its perch. It came smashing down through the night, breaking into great chunks when it hit the ground.
The ground was undulating, rippling like the surf. Cracks started zigzagging across the ground, widening and widening.
Easy jumped over the rent which opened directly in his path. He saw Goffman running in the direction of the warehouses.
The buildings kept shaking; broken glass was sputtering out of windows and hunks of plaster cascaded down.
The old man reached the parking area behind the warehouses. He pulled himself up into one of the panel trucks. The engine came alive.
All the trucks, even the big ones, were bouncing up and down.
Then there was stillness again.
Easy dived toward a wall as Goffman came gunning toward him in the panel truck.
The old man missed, went roaring on across the plant grounds toward the front gate.
Maybe I can borrow a truck and tail him, Easy thought and went jogging for the nearest small truck.
More quakes started up. Worse this time. They shook the earth and the buildings with tremendous force.
One of the big trucks began to rock, then it flipped over on its side with a gigantic hollow thump.
Easy remembered the guard.
He’d left the old man in one of the trucks which was still standing. Climbing up to the cab, Easy tugged the door open and pulled the guard out off the seat.
He got him clear and a few yards away just as a wide crack opened in the ground directly beneath the truck. The right front wheels dropped into
the hole, grating and banging. The whole truck slumped far to the right.
Easy cut the old man free, undid his gag.
After spitting, the guard said, “We’re not going to make it through this one. This is worse than Long Beach in the thirties.”
Easy saw Goffman’s panel truck now. The old man had turned on the lights and the vehicle was starting up one of the freeway ramps. Too late to chase him.
All at once the ramp wasn’t there. It seemed to dissolve up there in the darkness, turning to rubble while still in the air. Concrete and metal came thundering down, dust went spiraling up in giant clouds.
The panel truck dropped straight down through a hundred feet of nothing. An instant before it hit the lights went out.
Then the quakes stopped.
“Glory be,” said the old guard, “we made it after all.”
“Some of us,” said Easy.
CHAPTER 24
HAGOPIAN WAS SITTING CROSS-LEGGED on the rug in the middle of his parlor area. “My John Easy file is waxing fat,” he said while he razored out another newspaper clipping. “They spelled your name with two S’s in the San Amaro Sentinel.”
“At least they didn’t print my high school graduation picture.” Easy was resting in the bentwood rocker, a bottle of dark ale held on his knee.
“No, this is a pretty good shot of you coming out of the San Amaro police station,” said the writer. “You look relatively guileless.” He set the newspaper aside, picked up another paper from the pile next to his knee. “Here you are coming out of Beverly Hills police headquarters. Still looking guileless, but your coat’s too wrinkled.”
“I’ll start using clothespins.”
“This one goes in my Goffman file.” He sliced a portrait of the old man off the front page of the LA Times. “Killing your own son. That’s something you don’t run into too often.”
“Most fathers stop somewhere short of that.”
Hagopian stretched out an arm to grab up a manila folder. “You’re none too jolly today, John,” he said. “It could be some kind of biochemical imbalance in your body … which reminds me.” He poked his fingers into the watch pocket of his slacks, worked out an assortment of pills. “Forgot to take these at lunch time.”
“What are they?”
“Vitamins. Although this yellow and orange one looks an awful lot like the antibiotic I took when I had the clap.” He dropped the pills on his tongue one by one and then swallowed them all at once. “Melody gives them to me. I’m not sure what they all are, but I really feel great these days.”
Easy drank some of his beer.
Hagopian held the picture of Goffman up and studied it. “Sort of biblical finish for the old gentleman,” he said. “Earth opening up and swallowing him. Maybe God isn’t dead after all.”
“He ruined a hell of a lot of LA just to get Goffman.”
“I hate to get an advantage from someone else’s misfortune,” said the TV Look writer, “but it turns out Jiminy can’t stand earthquakes.”
“That’s Jiminy, the starlet who found God in the San Fernando Valley?”
“The one with the incredible enlarging tits; her, yeah. She dropped by my place that night to look over the photos and my rough notes.”
“I didn’t know they let her loose.”
“She quit the Me & Jesus thing,” explained Hagopian. “She discovered meditation was more in her line. Anyway, the minute the first quake hit she grabbed hold of me and wouldn’t let go. Fortunately, as I quickly pointed out to her, my bedroom is virtually quakeproof. We spent the night there.”
“That’ll give her plenty to meditate about.”
Hagopian returned to his clipping. “Sandy Feller, poor bastard.” He sliced out a small funeral announcement. “I thought he was pretty much content with his hot. Marks & Feller has been doing pretty good.”
“Not good enough for Feller, not quick enough,” said Easy. “Digging money out of the ground seemed a lot faster than earning it with funny dog food commercials.”
“Imagine digging that big hole in the ground and finding nothing.”
“But he found Bill Goffman’s remains. Right away he guessed what had happened back in the past. So he decided to blackmail old Goffman.”
Hagopian slipped the picture of Goffman away into a folder. “That not the face of a guy you’re going to blackmail too easily,” he said. “Goffman made a date to meet Feller and then killed him instead of paying off?”
“Yeah,” answered Easy. “When he discovered the skeleton wasn’t in Feller’s car he went out to his house.”
“And why’d he kill Sandy Feller’s wife?”
“He just felt like doing it.”
“A goofy part of the world we live in, John.” Hagopian got up off the floor. “You think Gary Marks can keep the ad shop going?”
“I talked to him on the phone an hour ago. He tells me he had six new client prospects call in the last couple days.”
“Ah, the power of the press.” Hagopian, skirting the newspapers and the folders on the floor, went over to his juicer. “Have you also been communicating with Gay Holland?”
“Nope, but she called me.”
“No doubt to convey some thinly-veiled invitation to put the boots to her.”
“She asked me to come over to dinner next week.”
“You accept?”
“Told her I was going to be out of town.”
Hagopian’s eyebrows went up; new circles appeared beneath his eyes. “Is that true, John?”
Easy finished the ale off. “I’ve had a lot of complicated cases these past few months,” he said. “That business with Jackie McCleary coming back from the dead, then the job where I met Jill Jeffers, followed by finding Joanna Benning down in Mexico and now all this frumus over Marquetti’s money.”
“Those all happened in the last four or five months? Seems more like four or five years.”
Rising up, Easy said, “So I’m going to take a small vacation.”
“Out of the country perhaps?”
“I’ve been thinking about Spain.”
“Spain,” said his friend. “Isn’t Spain the very country where Jill is making her movie?” He stuffed a stalk of celery into the top of his juicer. “Well, don’t stay over there forever, huh?”
Easy held out his hand. “Don’t worry,” he promised, “I’ll be back.”
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1974 by Ron Goulart
Cover design by Erin Fitzsimmons
978-1-4532-5723-4
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