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.”
“Thanks.”
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.
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.