by Ron Goulart
Twangy Western music was roaring out of the little machine, filling the musty bar room. A dusty nasal voice sang, “A woman she’ll swear to love you an’ love you ’bout all your life, then she’ll meet another man around the corner and tell the same lie twice.”
Sadler punched the music off and said, without turning, “Want to fix yourself a snort? Go right ahead, help yourself.”
Easy was stopped at the threshold of the room, up to his ankles in the tired sawdust that covered the floor. “I’m John Easy. My secretary called you.”
“I figured as much.” Sadler was watching him in the long yellowish mirror above the bar. “Most of my customers don’t come out before sundown. You won’t mind if I whip myself up another little belt while we talk, Easy?”
“Go ahead.” Easy came in, taking the stool two over from the fat club owner.
Sadler shifted his wide buttocks and swung a booted foot tentatively toward the sawdust floor. The stool tilted. He caught the bar to hoist himself off his seat. He almost tripped on the dented brass rail while walking around the bar. “Despite,” he said, “my reputation, Easy, I am always willing to talk to representatives of the law, professional or private. Can I build you a martini? I’m making a whole crock of them.”
“No, thanks.” The two long rooms of the club were partitioned with flats of plywood stained a deep brown. The partitions and the booth walls were covered over with photos, hundreds of color enlargements of laughing and smiling people.
Pouring gin from a bottle labeled Discount Club Gin, Sadler said, “Actually there’s nothing wrong with exchanging mates, so long as it’s done in a friendly cordial way. It’s the furtiveness that kills the fun, as I can testify. In my day our culture wasn’t as open and I, probably influenced by the sort of clean-living yoyos I played on the screen, went ahead and married all the bimbos I wanted to put the boots to. Most of them anyway.” He tapped the rim of the blue glass pitcher with a vermouth bottle.
“I’m interested in a girl named Joanna Benning.” Easy produced a picture.
“Name rings no bells.”
“She may be calling herself Joan St. John.” He held the photo across the bar.
Sadler’s hand made two butterfly swoops before his fingers contacted the picture. Then, before he got it up to his blurred eyes, it fell in the silver bar sink. “I’m getting over a touch of the flu, excuse it.” He wiped the photo, studied it. “Oh, sure enough. That’s Joan. This proves my point about intelligent well-brought up people subscribing to the swinger ethic.” Clutching the pitcher and holding it tight against his low-hanging front, Sadler began to work his way back to Easy’s side of the bar.
“When’s the last time you saw her?”
Sadler stumbled, sloshing gin on his fringed shirt. “Joan? Not for a couple of weeks, which is understandable.”
“Why understandable?”
Holding the martini pitcher out straight in front of him Sadler made his way back to his stool. “Well, I figure as how the poor kid is in mourning.”
“For Phil Moseson?”
“Poor Phil.” Sadler sidestepped to a booth, dropping his pitcher down onto a checkered tablecloth. He jabbed a finger toward the dark wall of pictures. “A nice-looking man, very decent.”
Easy went over to the former movie cowboy’s side. The picture Sadler’s finger was tapping showed Joanna Benning in a Maybe Club booth with three other people. The man sitting next to her was heavy-set, affable-looking, about thirty-five and blond. “That’s Moseson beside her?” Easy had stopped at the offices of the San Ignacio Pilot and looked up the stories on Moseson’s death before coming to meet Sadler. The newspaper photo of Moseson had been eight years old.
“That’s him, poor Phil,” said Sadler. “Could you get my glass from over there? This darn flu has really left me wobbly. You’d think with all the money we’re spending on the space program they could come up with a cure for …”
“You’re sure you haven’t seen Joan since Moseson died?” Easy brought the martini glass to Sadler.
“No, not once, not at all.” Sadler leaned over and made a slumping drop into the booth. He poured a fresh drink, then toasted the grinning color image of Phil Moseson. “A nice decent guy, had a good job as an accountant with one of the best outfits in town here. Too bad, the poor bastard.”
“Somebody worked him over,” said Easy. Sadler shivered before gulping down his glass of gin. “There wasn’t all this senseless violence in my day. And yet somebody’s always criticizing us for a little harmless wife trading. You can laugh at those old singing cowboy films of mine, but let me tell you no kid ever …”
“Why do you think Moseson was killed?”
“No reason,” said Sadler. “Some young junkie got caught playing burglar and decided to beat the crap out of poor Phil.”
“Anybody he knew around your club who might do that?”
“I don’t cater to junkie break-in artists, Easy.” Sadler refilled his glass, getting gin on his wrist. “You see, folks who work out their sexual hangups in an outgoing and healthy way, they don’t get weird.”
“Was Joan St. John living with Moseson?” According to the newspaper Moseson lived alone.
“Whoa,” said Sadler, laughing. “I only sell them booze, I don’t compile their autobiographies. Joan and Phil were pretty close, that’s all I know. A handsome couple, as we used to say in my day.”
“Moseson has a sister,” said Easy. “You know her?”
Sadler started to shake his head, grimaced, stopped. “Send these poor young bastards over to ’Nam and they pick up the dope habit and the clap and all kinds of new strains of flu,” he complained. “Boy, this one really hit me hard.”
“Moseson’s sister?”
“Never met the lady. I understand she’s a very quiet and conservative broad, a librarian. Lives by herself down along the beach someplace.”
“Moseson never tangled with anybody here, nobody who might have tried to take Joan away from him?”
The old cowboy laughed again. He drank his latest martini down more slowly. “You don’t get the big picture, Easy. When folks have an open, no regrets, sex life there’s no need for a lot of violence and aggression. You take an uptight guy like Nixon, if he got his ashes …”
Easy pointed a thumb at the picture on the wall. “Who are those two with Joan and Moseson?”
“Be a whole lot easier to drink right straight out of the pitcher, less likelihood of spillage,” Sadler said. He lifted the pitcher, glancing at the wall of photos. “That’s Ned and Jeannie Mowatt, two swell young people. Young and bright, very much in love. I know you can’t understand this, Easy, but …”
Easy had taken a file card from his pocket. “Ned and Jeannie Mowatt. Were they particularly close to Moseson and Joan?”
“Right you are,” said Sadler, his lips on the rim of the upturned pitcher. It gave his voice a hollow underwater sound. “The Maybe Club has been the birthplace of a good many lasting lifelong friendships, in the year and a half we’ve been in business.”
“Anyone else Joan was close to?”
Sadler shrugged and gin ran out of the pitcher and down his scalloped chin. “By the very nature of its operation, Easy, you’re going to find a good many people who, despite what the press and the media say, wouldn’t actually … what point was I trying to make?”
“Who else did she know in the Maybe Club set?”
“Oh, yes. You see, Easy, in a club where people swap and trade … well, you meet a lot of different people. Not one-night stands exactly, not lasting lifelong friendships either.”
“The only lasting lifelong friendship you know of is Joan’s with the Mowatts?”
“Right you are, Easy,” said Sadler. “Maybe you ought to talk to them. A swell couple, young and bright. You want their address?”
“I already have it,” said Easy.
VI
THE MUDDY WHITE CAT pounced again, making a low mechanical-sounding growl. The dying mouse pulle
d itself slowly across the wet red-brick porch. It was bleeding a harsh bright scarlet. The cat caught it again, tearing at its throat.
Easy stepped around the struggle and rang the doorbell of the Mowatt house. Down on the gently curving street, laurel trees were planted every fifteen feet. There were three-bedroom ranch houses, all siblings, every two hundred feet all along this inland block.
The mouse gave a tiny scream and died. The mud-splotched cat made a chuckling sound as it picked up the dead mouse in its teeth.
The yellow door of the house opened and a girl screamed. “Oh, damn you, Timothy. Drop that, put it down. Damn you.” She was tall and husky, a freckled blonde wearing tan shorts and a candy-stripe jersey pullover. She screamed again, waving a hand at the triumphant cat. Ashes from her cigarette speckled the dirty cat. “Damn you, Timothy.” Another cat, this one a pale orange, leaped between the girl’s long legs and slapped at the dangling mouse. “Not you too, Martha.”
“Good afternoon,” said Easy.
Jeannie Mowatt looked at him and brought her cigarette back to her lips. “Can you do something?”
“Such as?”
“Take that poor mouse away from him.”
Easy bent. He rapped his broad knuckles across the back of the growling white cat’s skull. It dropped the mouse. Easy scooped up both the cats and held them toward the big attractive girl. “Both of these yours?”
Jeannie Mowatt hesitated, then took the two animals. When she touched them goosepimples broke out on her bare arms and legs. “Yes. We’ve got four of the things.” She scowled at Timothy, whose whiskers were spattered red. “He was such a sweet gentle kitten. I didn’t even think we’d have to have him fixed.” She clutched a cat under each arm. “Could you do me one more favor?”
“Sure,” answered Easy.
She gave a terse nod of her head toward the dead mouse. “If I get a dustpan and a whisk broom will you dispose of that? I can’t stand touching dead things.”
Reaching into his pocket, Easy withdrew a blank file card. He picked the mouse up by its tail and dropped it on the card. The rain had thinned the spills of blood away to a faint foamy pink. “Did you have some specific last resting place in mind?”
The husky blonde watched Easy’s rough weathered face for a few seconds. She smiled and said, “Would you mind carrying him through to the garbage cans out back?”
“Okay.”
Jeannie backed up, still clutching the cats against her large breasts. “Straight through and out the sliding doors to the patio.”
Easy wiped his feet on the shaggy welcome mat. The long dim hallway, which cut straight through the house, was carpeted in thick gold. It smelled of cigarette smoke and dying flowers. Easy strode the width of the house, opened the patio doors and dropped the dead mouse and file card into one of the three green plastic garbage cans.
“You seem to know your way around our house,” said the girl when he ducked back inside.
“I’ve been in similar places.”
She let the two cats fall to the floor. “God, they are all alike, aren’t they? Mar Vista Estates. You know what mar vista means?”
“It implies you should be able to see the ocean.”
“My husband did see it when he was up on the roof fiddling with the TV antenna.” She took a deep drag on the cigarette. “He’s at work at the moment.”
Easy’s secretary had checked with one of their phone company contacts, who’d used a backwards directory to give them Ned’s full name and address from the phone number Joanna’s husband had found. “My name is John Easy,” he told the girl.
“Jeannie Mowatt.” She held her arms straight out. “Look at that, I’m all goosebumps. Just feel.”
Easy refrained from feeling. “I’d like to talk to you and your husband.”
The girl stepped forward suddenly, grabbed hold of Easy, kissed him. “Sorry. I get impulses like, this sometimes, when I’m upset.”
Easy swallowed, put his hands on her shoulders and eased her back and away from him. “You’d better let me tell you who I am.”
“John Easy, you already told me.” She folded her arms under her breasts. The nipples showed dark and hard under the thin jersey. “That’s enough of an introduction for me.” She inhaled deeply on the cigarette. “Jesus, you don’t know how depressed and lonely these rainy days make me. Even though we can’t see the frigging ocean we get the fringe benefits. The days it isn’t raining it’s foggy.”
“I’m a private investigator,” said Easy.
A calico cat came down the hall and the girl jumped aside to let it pass between them. Her eyes narrowed. “What’s wrong?”
“I’d like to talk to your husband, too,” Easy told her. “Where does he work?”
Jeannie took two wide-legged steps backward. “What’s wrong? Why do you want Ned?”
Easy asked, “Do you know a girl called Joan St. John?”
She took three quick puffs. “I don’t want to talk to you, Mr. Easy.”
“Do you know where Joan is?”
“I don’t want to talk to you I said. I don’t have to.”
“She’s been missing for a week.”
“I couldn’t care less,” said Jeannie. She walked away from him toward the front door. “I don’t want to talk to you and I don’t have to.” Grabbing the door handle, she jerked it open. A warm dampness and the loud sound of heavy rain rushed in. “You’d better go away, Mr. Easy.”
“For now.” As Easy went out he handed her one of his business cards.
The girl threw it at his wide back, slamming the door against him and the rain.
VII
THE OFFICE WAS BROWN. The thick drapes, keeping out the view of Santa Monica’s share of the Pacific Ocean, were a rich earth brown, the heavy rug was a sand color, the subtly patterned wallpaper a pale cocoa. Dr. Gill Jacobs was a lean man of forty-three, wearing a tan suit. His dark hair and beard were short-cropped. A floor to ceiling bookshelf, holding mostly thick volumes in pale brown wrappers, stretched up immediately behind him. “A good many men in my profession wouldn’t talk to you at all,” he said to Easy in his low even voice.
Hunkered in the coffee-colored patient’s chair facing Jacobs’ desk, Easy said, “I appreciate that.”
The psychiatrist’s desktop was a clutter of memo pads, letters, steepled open books, thin magazines with all-print covers. His stubby fingers tapped on the clutter as he spoke. “I’m willing to discuss Joanna with you because I’m concerned about her,” Dr. Jacobs said.
“You know her under her real name?”
“Yes, it came out before she ceased coming here,” answered the psychiatrist. “We talked several times about her various identities, the life patterns she was trying out.”
“When she was Joan St. John,” asked Easy, “did she have an address, someplace she lived?”
“I doubt it. She did have a checking account under that name. You might try the bank.”
“I have.” Joanna had used. Phil Moseson’s address when she opened the account. She had a balance of $14.
“Don’t get the idea she was someone with a multiple personality. You usually encounter something like that only in films,” said Dr. Jacobs. “She was always Joanna, playing out her games. Protecting herself from harm.” His head bobbed, his right hand stopped flickering across memos and envelopes to tug at his short beard. “She’s a very attractive girl, you know, with considerable potential.”
“Do you have any idea where she might be now?”
“Nothing specific, no,” said the psychiatrist. “What can you tell me, Mr. Easy? Your secretary wasn’t too detailed on the phone.”
Easy told him how long the girl had been missing and some of what her husband had said.
Dr. Jacobs said, “I assume you’ve already checked out the obvious possibilities.”
“Yeah. Joanna’s not in the hospital, the morgue or jail. Her car hasn’t turned up abandoned. None of the people her husband thinks of as her friends know wher
e she is, so far as I can tell.”
“That’s negative, but hopeful.”
“When did you see her last?”
The psychiatrist flipped his desk calendar backwards. “Joanna stopped keeping her appointments over … four weeks ago.”
Easy said, “Did she talk to you about Phil Moseson?”
“Yes, she talked to me about almost everything. She was living with Moseson, off and on, in his home in San Ignacio. When she wasn’t with her husband.”
“Moseson was killed last Friday.”
“Yes, I know.”
“The same day Joanna disappeared. Do you think she could be involved in his death?”
“She didn’t kill him. Moseson was beaten to death, pistol-whipped,” said Dr. Jacobs, “and apparently tortured. Not a woman’s way of killing, even these days. Certainly not anything Joanna is capable of.”
“Something she could be involved in.”
Stopping both his flickering hands, Dr. Jacobs said, “Some people seem to precipitate violence. I can’t swear Joanna didn’t, somehow, contribute to Moseson’s death. She isn’t likely to have been an actual accomplice, though.”
“Is she likely to have known someone else, someone she made jealous enough to kill Moseson and take her off with him?”
“I’m not certain.”
“She was seeing someone besides Moseson?”
“Joanna had another name, you know, which she used sometimes. Her maiden name of Joanna Feyer. When she called herself Joanna Feyer she hung around with Gladys Waugh and her circle.” His fingers began tapping again. “She could have met almost any kind of man there.”
“Who’s Gladys Waugh?”
“She claims to be a witch,” explained the psychiatrist. “A gross, ugly woman. She and her so-called coven inhabit, infest more aptly, a ramshackle Victorian mansion in the San Ignacio hills.”
“Did Joanna tell you about any particular guy in this Gladys Waugh’s group?”
“No, that segment of her game-playing she was reticent about. She must have sensed I thought the witchcraft idea a little ridiculous.”