Ron Goulart - John Easy 03 - The Same Lie Twice (3 page)

Easy refolded the clipping and rubbed it against his chin. “Despite his denials, the Maybe Club is a swingers’ hangout, isn’t it?”

“A wife swappers’ enclave, sure.”

“According to the rules of the game, Joanna would have to have a mate to swap, wouldn’t she?”

“Yeah, somebody besides poor Jim sitting at home with a light burning in the window.”

“I’ll have to find out who that was,” said Easy. He asked his friend to look up Darrel Skane, the psychodrama therapist Joanna was supposed to have seen, and a couple of friends whose names her husband had provided. Hagopian came up with one news story on Skane, nothing on the others.

After refiling the Skane clip, Hagopian said, “You’re probably going to have to spend some time in San Ignacio.” He walked Easy back to the parlor area of his warehouse.

“Yeah. Why?”

Hagopian sat, reaching again for his tennis shoes: “No town is goofier than our own beloved LA, John, but San Ignacio runs a close second. They don’t say this in the guide books, but San Ignacio is a good town to stay out of,” he said. “And be careful you don’t step in any corruption.”

“Corruption? I hadn’t heard anything about that.”

“I listen in at more places than you do,” replied the dark writer, tugging the second white shoe on. “All the information I have doesn’t come from press clippings. The local government of San Ignacio, up to and including the mayor, may not be as wholesome and upright as it could be. I mention this because I hear the cops over there are on the take, too. So maybe you ought to play it careful, take along a little bribe money.”

Easy said, “Police officers who take bribes? What’s law and order coming to?”

“I guess I’m being redundant,” said Hagopian, grinning.

Easy grinned back at him and headed for the door.

E
ASY SHIELDED HIS EYES
with one big knobby hand and looked through the glass wall of the small private theater. Inside the dim place, crouched on the low bare stage, a lean man was holding a skillet over a hot plate. Easy rapped hard on the rain-smeared glass, caught the crouching man’s attention and pointed to the locked door to his right.

The man inside didn’t do anything for nearly a minute, then he rose up and made a come-around-back gesture.

Circling Darrel Skane’s private psychodrama theater, Easy was walking along a cliff edge. The gray choppy Pacific was three hundred feet straight down, ribboned by a gray stretch of San Ignacio beach. As Easy caught the knob of the rear door a warm wind, thick with rain, swept around him.

Skane was kneeling at the hot plate, shaking something out of a cruet into the skillet. He didn’t look at Easy.

Easy walked to the front row of folding chairs, unbuttoned his damp $250 sport coat and sat. “Am I interrupting one of your private psychodramas?” he asked after a few seconds.

“Patience, sport,” said Skane. “This is my lunch hour.” He was as tall as Easy, only half as heavy. After flicking more dark fluid out of the cruet, he felt the dusty stage until his hand hit a spatula.

While Skane flipped whatever it was he was frying, Easy reached into his coat to get out a small copy he’d had made of one of the pictures of Joanna Benning. He leaned back, the photo resting on his knee, watching Skane. The hollow-beamed ceiling of the theater amplified the sound of rain.

Skane placed a patty on a slice of dark bread, spread an offwhite substance on it, slapped another slice of dark bread on it and took a bite. “Yuck,” he said.

Easy waited until Skane had swallowed. He stood and walked to the stage edge. “I’m looking for this girl.”

The lean gap-toothed Skane ignored the photo, holding his homemade sandwich up toward Easy. “A soyburger, with soy sauce and soy mayonnaise,” he said. “Yuck.” He dropped the sandwich off to one side, then swung his legs over the rim of the stage. “My wife thinks I ought to be on a high-protein diet. If I could just once get that woman out here to participate in one of our psychodrama sessions … we’d find out what it is that’s gnawing at her. First she decides I ought to fatten up, then I ought to slim down. My weight fluctuates more than the Dow Jones averages.”

“What about this woman?” Easy held out the photo.

Skane took it. “Oops, got soy sauce on it. Sorry, there, all wiped off.” He frowned over Joanna Benning’s picture. “Listen, sport, I’ve got a good idea.”

“Yeah?”

“Suppose we switch roles. You be Darrel Skane and I’ll be … what is it? … John Easy,” suggested Skane. “It should provide us both with some interesting and valuable insights into ourselves. Want to try that?”

“No.”

Skane poked his tongue into the slot between his two front teeth. “Uh huh,” he said. “Lots of people are reluctant to give the psychodrama concept a try … my wife, to name one. You’d be surprised what getting outside yourself can do, Easy.”

“While I’m still inside myself, let me ask you again if you know Joanna Benning.”

“I don’t know Joanna Benning.” The lean therapist was watching the sandwich at his right. “You know, I better go ahead and eat that thing. Otherwise it gives trouble.” Reluctantly he retrieved his soyburger and tried a small bite. “You know, sport, I’ve been doing some heavy thinking since your secretary called and made this appointment for you.”

Easy rested one hand on the stage, waiting for Skane to go on.

“Simply because a man doesn’t have an actual medical degree, a fancy piece of high-grade paper in a black frame, he tends to be treated in a second-class way.” Skane paused to sadly chew. “Why shouldn’t those of us on the frontiers of psychotherapy have the same rights as our more tradition-bound brothers? An MD doesn’t have to talk about his patients.”

Easy said, “You don’t have to talk to me, Skane. You can save your information for the police.”

“What do the police have to do with it?”

“This girl has been missing for a week,” Easy told him. “She told her husband she was coming to see you. If I don’t find her soon, the cops will have to join in.”

“Coming to see me? I haven’t laid eyes on her for two long months or more, sport.”

“You do know her then?”

“Not as Joanna Benning.”

“As Joan St. John?”

His eyes on the picture, Skane answered, “Yes, that’s who she said she was.”

“Do you have an address on her?”

“No. She made a point of paying for each session on the spot. I told her I’d put her on my mailing list for pamphlets and such, but she preferred to pick them up here.” He took another few mournful bites of the sandwich. “A very attractive woman, whatever her name is. She radiated a sort of upbeat intensity, yet at the same time she seemed very … I don’t know …”

“Vulnerable?”

“As good a word as any,” said Skane. “The two occasions when she took part in an actual drama situation, it was quite illuminating. It seems when she was about eleven her father …”

Easy cut in. “Was she friendly with anyone else who came here?”

Skane put the soy sandwich down again. “I can’t eat this damn thing, I’ll have to face my wife’s wrath.” He glanced up at the shadowy ceiling before meeting Easy’s eyes. “Yes, there was somebody. I suppose that’s why I really agreed to talk to you in the first place, Easy.”

“She came here with someone?”

“Not at first. At first she was alone, very much solitary. After a few weekly sessions she became friendly with one of the guys.”

“What’s his name?”

“I think what attracted her to him was the fact he had a similar fouled-up childhood,” said Skane. “Then so many of us do.”

“His name?”

“Moseson,” answered Skane. “Phil Moseson.”

Easy wrote the name on one of the small file cards from his breast pocket. “Can you give me his address?”

“I can,” said Skane slowly. “It’s not likely to do you much good, though.”

“Why?”

“Phil Moseson was found dead last week.”

S
UNNY BOY SADLER WAS
sitting alone on a high stool in front of his bar. The Maybe Club consisted of two long low rooms which made an L around a corner in downtown San Ignacio. The ocean was a block away. Sadler was five and a half feet tall and weighed slightly over two hundred pounds. He was wearing white levis and a black fringed shirt, leaning on the polished wood bar with his chunky hands ringing a martini glass. To the left of his glass rested a cassette player.

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.”