THREE CHUBBY FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS in hot-pants and sleeveless white shirts were passing around a homemade cigarette on the dry narrow lane in front of a low stucco apartment house. Easy parked his dusty black Volkswagen and got out. The early afternoon sky had turned a scrubby brown, air hung heavy.
“There’s one big mother,” observed one of the girls.
“I bet he’s got some yard on him,” said another.
“No, some of those big guys have little tiny ones,” said the third chubby girl.
Easy stuck change into the lopsided parking meter and started to walk up Cherokee.
A legless man came rolling out of a gritty alley between two orange apartment houses. His wooden cart had rusty roller skate wheels. After brushing into Easy, he said, “Have some compassion for the afflicted, won’t you?”
“Want a push someplace?”
“Screw you.” The legless man propelled himself away by fisting the hot gray sidewalk.
At the corner an out-of-work actress of fifty-six came out of the tiny diagonal grocery store carrying a red net bag of groceries. She was dressed in silk. A blond young faggot with thin eyes was holding her arm and laughing close to her crusty white face.
Easy walked on until he came to a lone stunted palm tree growing out of the sidewalk, then turned to his right. He moved down a narrow alley and stopped at its end. In front of him was a large brownstone warehouse. Midpoint on the new oaken door was a small brass nameplate reading HAGOPIAN. Easy knocked.
“Is that you, Buff?” The door swung inward and a dark middle-sized thirty-nine-year-old man peered out. He had curly black hair, a hawk nose. His dark eyes were underscored again and again with shadowy lines. “Hey, it’s John Easy. Enter. A new case maybe?”
“Yeah. Who’s Buff?”
Inside the big warehouse it was cool. The place was full of long rows of high green filing cabinets. In among the aisles was a room-size clear space set out with Victorian furniture. When they were seated there Hagopian asked, “Do you know of any airlines that operate out of Oxnard?”
“Nope.”
Hagopian began rocking in the dark bentwood rocker he’d chosen to sit in. “Neither do I. Particularly out of a mortuary in Oxnard. I may have been hoodwinked.”
Easy said, “You loaned your Jaguar to this girl, huh?”
When Hagopian nodded new rings grew under his dark eyes. “Buff. A lovely girl, though a little small upstairs. She’s statuesque, John. Or can you be statuesque if you have small tits?”
“So you loaned the car to this allegedly statuesque girl and she didn’t bring it back,” said Easy. “Hagopian, I thought you took a vow not to loan your car out to women any more.”
“Hell, I took a vow of chastity when I was twelve and thinking of entering the priesthood.” Hagopian got up and crossed to a small refrigerator. “A beer?”
“Dark, if you have.”
“See, Buff told me she’s a stewardess for a non-sched airline.” Hagopian produced two bottles of dark German beer. “And last week she asked if she could use the Jag to drive to the airport and I said sure. She hasn’t been back since, but I figured, you know, with a non-sched airline, maybe she flew to Ethiopia or the Polar regions or someplace.” He uncapped the bottles. “Then this morning the Oxnard police call and tell me they’ve got my car impounded. It was blocking the driveway at a mortuary and they couldn’t get the hearses in and out.”
Easy took a bottle of beer from the dark writer. “When I talked to you a couple of weeks ago you were in love with a girl who rode a bicycle.”
“That was Kim.” Hagopian narrowed one eye, studying the foam in his green beer bottle. “She got to be too wholesome for me. I didn’t mind the alfalfa sprouts for dinner or the brewers yeast in my morning tomato juice. But that five-mile jog before we could screw was annoying.” Hagopian sipped some dark beer. “This is a nutty town, John. I’m starting to suspect I may give off some kind of vibrations which attract only nutty broads.”
“A five-mile run every day is good for you.”
“I wanted to screw her more than once a day,” explained Hagopian. “Hearing about my true-to-life romances is probably not why you came here.”
Easy drew a photo of Jill Jeffers from the inside pocket of his $250 sport coat and unfolded it. “Know her?”
Hunching slightly, Hagopian approached the picture. “Oh, sure. Jill Jeffers. I interviewed her for TV Look about six, seven months ago. She didn’t seem to have anything approaching total recall when it came to her past life.”
“She’s only been Jill Jeffers for two years,” said Easy, dropping the glossy picture to the flowered rug. “Before that she was Jillian Nordlin, daughter of former State Senator Nordlin.”
“Ah!” Hagopian’s eyebrows climbed and wrinkles quivered on his high wide forehead. “I knew she looked familiar.” He gestured at the filing cabinets. “I have a whole fat folder on her ill-fated family.”
“Why ill-fated?”
“Leonard Nordlin has had two severe heart attacks in the past three years or so,” said Hagopian, beckoning Easy to follow him. “Jill Nordlin had some kind of breakdown about four years ago. Worst of all, her mother committed suicide about then.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“Nobody can remember everything,” said Hagopian. “Which is why I started my own private clipping morgue.” He moved sideways down a cool lane between cabinets. Stretching up he tugged out a heavy drawer. “The Nordlin file should be here. Who are you working for on this and why?”
“Marco Killespie,” said Easy. “Jill Jeffers was doing a spot for him. She didn’t come back to work this Monday. Since Killespie has got two-thirds of a root beer commercial shot, he’d like her to come back and finish it.”
“Killespie.” Hagopian laughed, his eyes going wide. “Remember that girl Pam I was going with, had tits like casaba melons. Killespie used Pam in one of his commercials once. He’s a perfectionist and he took seventy-six takes getting the perfect shot of Pam scratching her ass for one of his humorous panty girdle spots. Imagine, John, somewhere in some film archives there are thousands of feet of film showing nothing but Pam’s sweet little ass.”
“Make an interesting documentary for PBS,” said Easy. “What have you got on Jill Jeffers?”
Hagopian rested his beer bottle on the floor and held a thick manila folder in both hands. “I’ll give you the suicide first. Here it is. ‘Ex-Senator’s Wife Takes Life.’ ” He passed Easy a clipping from the Los Angeles Times. “Picture, too. She looked a good deal like Jill, didn’t she? A little mean, but very vulnerable.”
“All women look vulnerable to you. That’s why you keep giving your car away.” Easy skimmed through the story of suicide. “Elizabeth Janes Nordlin, age forty-seven … killed herself in Carmel four and a half years ago … stuck a hose on the exhaust of her Mercedes and ran it into the car … in the garage of former State Senator Nordlin’s palatial Carmel home … Mrs. Nordlin had been despondent recently and was under a doctor’s care.” He glanced at Hagopian. “What’s that mean?”
“A breakdown and another suicide try a year or so earlier. Pills that time,” said Hagopian. “I’ve got the clippings on that, too. Oh, and the doctor in the case was none other than James Duncan Ingraham himself.”
“The guy who just wrote the book?”
“Scream Yourself Sane.” Hagopian nodded. “That’s him. He invented something called Howl Therapy and he’s practicing it, accompanied by large fees, at his private hospital up near Carmel.”
“You said Jill had a breakdown. Was there any suicide attempt there?”
“Nothing that got into the press.” Hagopian extracted another clipping. “ ‘Nordlin Daughter Collapses At Graveside.’ ”
“ ‘Lovely dark-haired Jillian Nordlin,’ ” read Easy.
“Looks like she dyed her hair to become Jill Jeffers.”
“ ‘Miss Nordlin will recuperate from her recent tragic loss at a private sanitarium, according to a spokesman for former Senator Nordlin.’ Would that be Dr. Ingraham’s little hideaway again?”
“Right. She was there six months. She came out and shortly dropped out of sight,” said Hagopian. “I guess Dr. Ingraham did better by her than he did her mother.”
“Until now.”
“You think there’s a chance Jill went off someplace to kill herself?”
“I don’t know,” said Easy. “Her agent seems to be worried about the possibility.”
“Well, this is the town for it. The suicide capital of the world,” said the dark writer. “Some of them come here and go nutty, while others come out here with the sole ambition of giving me tsurris. The rest want to jump off a bridge.”
“San Francisco’s the town for that.”
Hagopian unfolded a front-page story. There was a two-column photo of a heavy man with a taut face. “Here’s the father, Leonard Nordlin.”
“Maybe I’ll talk to him.”
“Be cautious, John,” warned Hagopian. “I understand he’s still pretty powerful in this state.”
“I’ll phone him first.”
“Sometimes I think I should have stayed in Fresno and entered the family agriculture business,” said Hagopian. “There’s hardly any opportunity for graft doing these half-ass interviews for TV Look.”
Taking the clippings about the missing girl and her family, Easy returned to the parlor clearing. He sat in a wing chair for long minutes, tapping the papers on his knee.