Too Sweet to Die (2 page)

“Killespie has no idea where she’s gone to?”

“He thinks Jill Jeffers mentioned driving up the coast for the weekend.”

“Could mean anyplace from Santa Barbara to Portland.”

Easy said, “She’s supposed to drive a ’68 Porsche. The car’s not in her garage.”

Nan sat in the client’s chair. “Want me to call Matcha at DMV?”

“Who’s Matcha?”

“The man at the Department of Motor Vehicles we give twenty dollars to now and then.”

“I thought that was Fritch.”

“Fritch quit to go to work for a state senate committee studying crime and graft in government.”

Easy scratched at his short-cropped yet shaggy hair. “And that’s why they call him Honest John,” he said. “All right, call Matcha and find out the license number and engine number on Jill Jeffers’s Porsche. I take it Sergeant Weinbaum is still with LAPD and not off fighting graft with Fritch.”

“He’s still a cop.”

“Ask Weinbaum if Jill Jeffers’s car has been in any accidents in the last four days. It’s a little early, but maybe it’s turned up abandoned. Ask that, too.”

Nan stood up. “Doesn’t this girl have any relatives, family she might be visiting?”

Easy waved the thin publicity handout at her. “Judging by this, Jill Jeffers didn’t even exist before 1970.”

The delicatessen was green. Its plaster walls were painted a thin underwater green, the plywood booths were a darker thicker green. The flooring was emerald linoleum. The two frail waitresses were starched turquoise uniforms and caps.

Noam Glanzman was alone in a booth against the rear wall, nibbling glumly on a bright green dill pickle while he slowly turned the pages of a thin copy of
The Hollywood Reporter
which was spread out next to his pale green plate. “Trouble for Glanzman,” he said, noticing the approaching Easy. “Alls I see out of this more trouble for Glanzman.” He was a small man and his bright clothes made his wary fifty-year-old face stand out pale.

“You said you wanted to see me,” the big detective told the agent. “When my secretary talked to you.”

“She’s got a nice way of talking, your secretary. Maybe I can get her some voice work if she’s interested.”

Easy sat opposite the small faded agent. “Why trouble?”

Taking another gloomy bite of the pickle, Glanzman answered, “Maybe now Glanzman doesn’t want to talk after all. I’m a sucker for anybody with a nice way of talking, is why I agreed to your secretary.”

“You know something about where Jill Jeffers is?”

“Glanzman’s rep is going to take a nose dive over this. Killespie will put me on his shit list,” said Glanzman. “All these dumb cunts. Why does Glanzman represent so many dumb cunts? You can’t depend on them?”

“Has Jill Jeffers done this before? Disappeared for a few days.”

“Not her. She’s one of the few reliable cunts on Glanzman’s client list.” He finished the pickle and sadly studied the quarter of a corn beef on Russian rye sandwich still on his green plate. Then he frowned up at Easy. “You got a nice gaunt face. A good cowboy face. But nobody is buying cowboys from Glanzman this season, so forget it. Listen, Easy, I’ll tell you something.”

“Good.”

“Glanzman is enigmatic. Half of me is a nice lovable paternal type, the other a hardnose and cunning tummler. Against my better judgment I’ll listen to my lovable side.”

“Let’s both listen.”

“The thing Glanzman is worried about,” said Glanzman, “is getting in bad with her old man. That’s one shit list Glanzman doesn’t want to get on.”

“You mean her father? Who is he?”

“I shouldn’t really tell you.” Glanzman sighed, slumping back in the green booth. “Jill Jeffers isn’t Jill Jeffers. Glanzman promised to keep her secret, but this is an emergency. Her real name is Jillian Nordlin. Mean anything to you?”

“Any relation to the Nordlin who used to be a state senator?”

“Her old man.” Glanzman decided to eat the remnant of sandwich. “He’s Leonard Nordlin. They used to call him the little boss of California. He retired about five years ago on account of a bad heart. Got himself a big place up in Carmel with a wall around it I hear.” His pale head ticked sadly from side to side. “Glanzman doesn’t like to mess with little bosses of California, past or present.”

“Could Jill be there, in Carmel?”

Glanzman chewed for several seconds, with his eyes half-closed. Swallowing he said, “I doubt it. They disowned each other a couple years back, when she decided to try show business. That’s the last place she’d be.”

“Jill told Killespie she was driving up north. How about San Francisco then?”

“No. Glanzman already checked with that dingbat friend of hers in Frisco. Jill hasn’t been there.”

“Which friend, some guy?”

“No, another dumb cunt. She runs a dirty movie house up there in Frisco. Her name is Mitzi Levin. Imagine a nice Jewish cunt running a blue movie palace. The seventies are going to be another schmucky decade. Glanzman is glad his three marriages have been childless.”

Easy had taken out his notebook. Mitzi Levin’s was one of the names he’d copied off a letter at Jill Jeffers’s cottage. “Mitzi Levin on Ellis Street in San Francisco, huh? A close friend of Jill’s?”

“Jill is a very aloof girl, distant, not close to anybody really. She’s not a dyke or anything, just sort of cool. She’s likable, though. Glanzman doesn’t handle any cunt who isn’t likable.”

“Okay,” said Easy. “Jill isn’t in Carmel, she isn’t in San Francisco. Any idea where she is?”

“No.”

“You wanted to talk to me about her.”

Glanzman chewed through the last of his sandwich. He put his small knobby hands palms down on the green tabletop. “She’s been funny the last month or so. Odd. Glanzman is worried about her.”

“Odd how?”

“Depressed, bitchy,” said Glanzman. “Alls I can say is that lots of times lately she’s had a faraway look on her, like she was trying to remember something and was just on the edge of catching it but couldn’t.”

Easy sat watching the small agent. “You think she’s depressed enough to kill herself?”

Glanzman didn’t meet Easy’s eyes. “Glanzman would rather not say,” he said. “Maybe, however, somebody ought to look around her place on Scenario Lane.”

“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.

T
HREE 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.”