THE CHUBBY GIRL IN the leather jumper was carrying a cardboard nude man under her arm. She stopped in the blue tile foyer of the small movie house, tugging at her long straight hair.
Easy walked past the closed ticket booth and tapped on the locked glass doors of the Cinema Azul Dirty Movie House with his middle finger. “Mitzi Levin?” he said to the girl on the other side of the blue-tinted glass.
“Box office opens at one forty-five,” called the chubby girl. “You’ve got a half hour to wait nearly.”
Taking one of his business cards out, Easy held it up to the glass. “I’m John Easy, up from LA,” he said at the locked door. “I’m looking for Jill Jeffers.”
To his left a purple and gold hand-painted poster announced: A Bad Day for Hot Rocks …Starring NADA! “A sincere work of art … an honest depiction of the deplorable working conditions in your average massage parlor … I was enchanted.” MacQuarrie, San Francisco Examiner. Several photos of naked girls framed the text.
Chubby Mitzi Levin tugged at her long hair while squinting at Easy. She propped her naked man against a soft-drink machine, came up to the glass door. “What?”
“I’m looking for Jill Jeffers,” he repeated.
The door opened a few inches and one chubby hand pulled his card inside. “John Easy & Associates, Detective Services,” she read. “That’s interesting. How do you get to be a private detective?”
“You have to pass a written test.” Easy pushed against the door with one shoulder.
Mitzi backed. “I talked to you on the phone. I told you I didn’t know anything.”
Inside the blue lobby now, Easy said, “Did you know Jill’s car was worked on right around the corner, at Piet’s German Car Garage, last Saturday?”
Mitzi shrugged, returning to the naked cardboard man. “Her car isn’t her.”
“Piet himself says she picked the car up in person at about one-thirty Saturday. He stayed open an extra half hour waiting for her.”
“He would,” said Mitzi. “His brains are in his balls, if you’ll excuse the expression.” She carried the figure over and placed it next to a coming attractions poster. “How does he look here?”
“It brightens up the room,” said Easy. “What about Jill?”
The chubby girl hitched up her short leather jumper, adjusted an arm bracelet. “Do you like blintzes?”
“I’m from Los Angeles. I have to.”
“I’m about to fix lunch. I just have time before this whore house, if you’ll pardon the expression, opens for the matinee. I live up above. Come along.”
Easy followed the chubby girl up a carpeted stairway, along a linoleum corridor, through an iron door, up a corkscrewing metal staircase and through another metal door.
Mitzi spread out her plump arms. “Dis is da place.”
The long low living room had one big high window that let in the early afternoon sunlight and street noise. The wood floors were rugless, cluttered with cardboard boxes, film cans, piles of photos and posters. An opened-out sofa bed sat, unmade directly beneath the round window. Scattered across the pale blue sheets were tangles of knotted thread and unstrung beads.
“I wasn’t expecting company,” explained Mitzi. “Not suit and tie straight company at least. These are frozen blintzes, is that okay by you?”
Nodding, Easy walked in her wake, through the lanes between boxes and toward the alcove kitchen.
One opened carton was brimful of glossy photos of a nude girl in bed with a horse. Easy asked, “Jill was here?”
Mitzi adjusted a copper wrist bracelet, then opened a dented blue refrigerator. “Yes, she was.”
The kitchen table was strewn with cut-up Victorian prints of match girls, wild flowers, obscure animals. An open pair of scissors and a pot of paste sat on a breakfast plate next to the remnants of Canadian bacon and eggs.
Stepping around the table, Easy said, “You didn’t admit that before, Mitzi. Not to me, not to Jill’s agent. Why?”
Mitzi located a frying pan under one of the kitchen chairs. “I’m not the best housekeeper in the world.”
Easy moved to her, took hold of one chubby arm. “You’ve got enough stuff in here to distract you all day,” he said. “Stop sidetracking and tell me.”
“I thought I was helping her.” Mitzi twisted free and slammed the pan on a sooty stove burner.
“Helping her how?”
“I figured she has a good reason for dropping out of sight.” Mitzi poured cloudy peanut oil in the skillet.
“What would a good reason be?”
“Some guy probably,” said Mitzi.
“Do you know who?”
“No.”
Easy leaned against the blue refrigerator, arms folded, watching the chubby girl. “Why’d you tell me she was in Carmel?”
Mitzi concentrated on slicing the frozen blintz package open with a rusty butcher knife. “I ought to wear glasses,” she said, squinting. “I was only trying to stall you.”
“Then Jill didn’t really phone you from there?”
“Have you checked in Carmel already? I suppose you have, if you’re here.”
“Yes,” said Easy. “Nobody admits seeing her.”
“You talked to her father?”
“I saw his private secretary. Old Nordlin is supposed to be too sick to talk to the outside world.”
Oil sputtered up at Mitzi when she dropped the blintzes into the pan. “Shit, if you’ll pardon the expression,” she said, wiping at her cheek. She exhaled, turned to squint at Easy. “I really don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her since Saturday night. Covering for her is an old habit, a hard one to break. That’s the only reason I lied to you.”
Arms still folded, Easy said, “You were hoping she was in Carmel, though, weren’t you?”
Mitzi shook her head, her long straight hair flickering. “No. I made up Carmel. Because of her father and all. I’m not shitting you, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
“What about Saturday night?”
“Where’s my mother humping, if you’ll forgive the expression, spatula?” Mitzi shook a silverware drawer, jabbing chubby fingers into it. “You ought to go talk to Dean.”
“Dean who?”
“Dean Constance. Maybe his fame hasn’t reached your part of Los Angeles yet. He’s one of our leading dirty movie makers. He’s richer than shit, if you’ll pardon the expression.” She located a bent-handled spatula and turned the sizzling blintzes. “Dean lives in an enormous mother of a place over in Ross. You know where Ross is? You go across the Golden Gate Bridge and instead of turning off to Sausalito you keep on straight for a while. A very rich town.”
“Is that where you and Jill were Saturday night?”
“Dean has a continuous party going,” said the chubby girl. “Jill and I looked in Saturday.”
“Who’d she leave with?”
“It’s who I left with that pertains,” said Mitzi. “Can you believe at a party with over a hundred freaky people in attendance I end up with a nice young clean-cut Jewish lawyer. I did and left with him. I never saw Jill after that.” She sniffed, noticed smoke spinning up from the skillet and jerked it up off the burner. “Julia Child I’m not.”
Easy unfolded his arms, flexed his wrists and his knuckles made a crackling sound. “You’re still not telling me everything.”
“Yes, I am,” insisted the chubby girl. “I really am.”
“You’re worried about something.”
“No, I’m not.”
Easy asked, “Are you afraid somebody’s done something to Jill?”
“No,” said Mitzi. “Good sweet Jesus, if you’ll pardon the expression, this is the waning of the twentieth century. Girls do odder things than dropping out of sight for a few days.” She dropped the skillet on top of the flower prints on the table.
“What about suicide?”
Mitzi turned away, walked to a wall cabinet. Finally, her back to him, she said, “For who? Me.”
“You know Jill,” said Easy. “I only know her secondhand. People tell me she’s been depressed lately, upset. Do you think suicide’s a possibility?”
Mitzi faced him, holding two chipped plates. “I don’t think suicide is hereditary, though maybe Jill’s father would like her to think so. She’s not likely to do what …” She stopped, closed her eyes for a second.
“You had an unpleasant thought just then,” suggested Easy.
Mitzi side-handed a pile of prints off the table and set a plate down on his side of it. “A mind reader you aren’t. I was only thinking if I don’t stop shooting the shit, you should pardon the expression, and start eating lunch I’m going to be late opening the box office. I don’t want a bunch of impatient deadbeats smashing down my doors.”
“I thought you only got cinema buffs.”
“In San Francisco it’s hard to tell one from the other.” She slapped two charred yellow blintzes down on his plate.