Too Sweet to Die

by Ron Goulart

  “I already have. She’s not there.”

  “I guess what I really want,” said Glanzman, “is to ask you to let me know is she in any kind of trouble. That’s the sentimental side of Glanzman talking to you.” He wiped his hands on a green cloth napkin, held the right one out to Easy. “Should you can’t get me at my office, try me here. I’m here a lot.”

  Easy shook hands with the little agent and left the delicatessen. The sidewalk immediately in front of the place was covered with grass-green carpeting.

  CHAPTER 3

  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.

  CHAPTER 4

  EASY DOODLED QUESTION MARKS on his memo pad. He hung up the phone, saying, “Another vote for San Francisco.”

  Nan Alonzo came into his private office, chewing the eraser end of a wooden pencil. “All Jill Jeffers’s friends say the same thing?”

  “The three I’ve been able to contact,” said Easy. “Each one tells me Jill was supposed to drive up to San Francisco for the weekend, alone. That she’d probably be staying with this Mitzi Levin. Nobody’s heard from Jill since last Friday.”

  “Well, here’s Mitzi Levin’s phone number,” said Nan, placing a pink memo in front of him. “And this is the information on the Jeffers girl’s car.” She added a second slip to the first. “The car hasn’t turned up wrecked or abandoned so far.”

  “What about hospitals?”

  “Nobody has anyone resembling her. Though an emergency hospital over in Santa Monica has a hit-and-run blonde who sounded good, until they mentioned she’s six feet two and speaks only Norwegian.”

  “Maybe we can get Killespie to settle for her.” He picked up the phone again, dialed area code 415 and then the San Francisco number of the Levin girl.

  The phone rang four times and then a soft girl’s voice said, “Good afternoon from the Cinema Azul Dirty Movie House. This is a recording. The current attractions at San Francisco’s favorite bawdy film center are A Bad Day for Hot Rocks plus Screwed & Tattooed. Matinees today at two and four. You owe it to yourself to see these two modern-day classics of the liberated cinema. Critic John Stanley of the Chronicle calls them, ‘A magnificent pair of …’ ”

  Easy pronged the phone, frowned at his secretary. “Now I know what’s playing. Get me her home phone.”

  Scratching her broad flat nose, Nan backed out.

  Easy rose and wandered around his office. He looked through the blinds at the small parking lot behind his Sunset Strip office. A television cowboy with silver hair was walking a fat peach-colored poodle among the cars.

  Nan returned. “It was unlisted, so it took me an extra minute to get. Here, I’ll dial it for you.”

  The cowboy’s fat poodle lifted its leg beside the rear tire of Easy’s dusty black VW, then thought better of it and trotted over to relieve himself on a new Mustang.

  “Miss Levin? Hold on please, Los Angeles calling.” Nan handed the receiver to Easy.

  “Hello, hello?” a girl was saying. It was the voice on the transcribed movie blurb, only a bit more nasal now.

  “I’m John Easy, Miss Levin. I’m a private investigator and I’ve been asked to locate Jill Jeffers.”

  “Who did you say you were?”

  “John Easy,” repeated Easy.

  “You could have saved yourself a toll call, Mr. Easy. I already told Jill’s agent I haven’t seen her in weeks.”

  “Jill mentioned to several people she was driving up to San Francisco this past weekend to see you.”

  “She never showed. Despite what she may have announced.”

  Easy said, “You know that if she stays missing much longer, Miss Levin, the police will come in on this. Now, do you have any idea where she might be?”

  After a short silence, Mitzi said, “Well, I didn’t actually see Jill this weekend, Mr. Easy. I did talk to her, though, on the telephone. I sort of promised her not to mention it, but if there’s a possibility she’s in some trouble, I guess I’d better, hadn’t I?”

  “Where’d she call you from?”

  “Carmel.”

  “Was she at her father’s? At the Nordlin place.”

  “You know who she really is then?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m not really sure where she was, Mr. Easy. She never said,” explained the girl. “She called me early Saturday to say she had some things to take care of in Carmel and might not get up to see me at all. She didn’t. I’m sure she’s okay, though, don’t you think?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Jill can be erratic at times,” said Mitzi. “She’s a very talented person, and you know how they can be.”

  “She’s two days late for an acting job,” said Easy. “Is she usually that erratic?”

  “No.” The girl’s voice was faint. “Jill is almost always an hour or two late, but not two days.”

  “What did she have to attend to in Carmel?”

  “I really don’t know, Mr. Easy,” said Mitzi. “Listen, please. Jill doesn’t really want people knowing she’s part of the Nordlin family. Being Jill Jeffers has been good for her. It would be really too bad to spoil that. Do you understand?”

  Easy asked. “How did she sound?”

  “What do you mean? She sounded like she always does.”

  “Not depressed?”

  Mitzi inhaled, then made a small snorting sound. “You’re thinking about her family, not her, Mr. Easy. No, Jill would never … never do away with herself. I’m sure.”

  “Okay. Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “Not really, no. Except I hope you find her.”

  After hanging up Easy narrowed one eye at Nan, who was over tuning the air conditioner. “Did you look up little boss Nordlin’s number?”

  “Yes.” Nan told him the Carmel phone number.

  While dialing Easy drew circular borders around the question marks on his memo pad.

  “Good afternoon. Nordlin residence,” answered a woman with a gentle Mexican accent.

  “I’d like to speak to Leonard Nordlin.”

  “One moment, sir.”

  Easy heard footsteps walk away on hardwood floors.

  Then a new phone was picked up and a precise male voice said, “Who am I speaking to, please?”

  “I’m John Easy, calling from Los Angeles. Mr. Nordlin?”

  “Unfortunately Mr. Nordlin is ill and can receive no calls,” replied the precise voice. “I am Cullen Montez, Mr. Nordlin’s private secretary. What did you wish to discuss with Mr. Nordlin, Mr. Easy?”

  “His daughter.�
��

  Cullen Montez said, “If it’s more of her unpaid bills I must make it perfectly clear to you Mr. Nordlin is no longer financially responsible for Jillian. Are you with one of the shops down there, Mr. Easy?”

  “I’m a detective. Jill has been missing for several days.”

  “A police detective?”

  “Private. I’ve been retained to locate her.”

  “I see,” said Montez. “Of course we’re concerned about Jillian, Mr. Easy. I hope your inquiry won’t reach the point where well have to disturb Mr. Nordlin over it. May I ask if there is any suspicion of foul play?”

  “Not yet,” said Easy. “You haven’t seen the girl within the past few days?”

  Montez chuckled softly. “I fear not, Mr. Easy. Jillian has not been a frequent visitor in recent years. Her father’s illness has not brought her rushing to his bedside with any regularity.” Montez paused. “Am I to assume that your client, Mr. Easy, has not taken this matter to the police?”

  “So far, no,” answered Easy. “Jill supposedly called someone from Carmel last Saturday, Montez. If she wasn’t at home, where was she? Do you have any idea?”

  Another soft chuckle. “With a girl such as Jillian one never knows,” said Montez. “I can state with some certainty it’s unlikely Jillian was in Carmel at all recently. The senator has a great many friends and associates in this area. Had Jillian been seen in the vicinity I would have been informed. Now I must get back to my duties. I trust you will let me know as soon as you learn anything positive. Goodbye, Mr. Easy.”

  “What did you find out?” Nan asked.

  Moving away from his metal desk, Easy said, “Cullen Montez probably wears perfume.”

  “He wouldn’t let you talk to Nordlin?”

  “Nordlin is supposed to be too sick.” He put his big hands in his trouser pockets. “I have a feeling everybody is being untruthful with me.”

  “That’s one of the symptoms of paranoia,” the short broad Nan told him. “We were discussing it in my group therapy session the other night.”

  Easy strode to the back door. “Call the Kearny Detective Agency up in SF and ask them to go talk to the Levin girl. Also get them to check on Jill’s Porsche, see if the cops have picked it up anyplace in San Francisco.” He opened the door.