Ron Goulart - John Easy 03 - The Same Lie Twice (4 page)

“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.

T
HE MUDDY WHITE CAT
pounced again, making a low mechanical-sounding growl. The dying mouse pulled 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.

T
HE 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 where 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.”

Easy said, “Her husband gave me several things she’d left lying around, clues to what she’s been up to.”

Dr. Jacobs’ head bobbed again. “Yes, that’s Joanna’s way. She isn’t capable, I don’t believe, of doing anyone direct harm. She hurts people in less than overt ways. Leaving incriminating clues for her husband to find, for instance, is a way of hurting him and letting him know she’s being unfaithful. You know, it’s also a plea for help. She’s saying to him, ‘Why in the hell don’t you stop me, now that you know about this?’ ”

Leaning toward the psychiatrist, Easy asked, “Did she leave you any clues, anything to tell where she might be now?”

“Sometimes she talked about going away altogether, leaving the country,” said Dr. Jacobs. “I doubt she would, though, because she really does love her husband.”

“How about Mexico?” said Easy, remembering what Hagopian had told him.

“You’re right,” replied Dr. Jacobs. “Mexico was one of the places she talked of running away to. I think she’s never actually been there, been to any place beyond Tijuana and Baja. She has an idealized view of the simple life in Mexico.”

“Did she have a place picked, a specific spot in Mexico to run to?”

“Not that I … wait now.” The psychiatrist half turned in his mahogany-brown leather desk chair. “There was something which came up during a session, something to do with a place in Mexico.”

“Do you tape your talks with your patients?”

Ticking his middle finger against his temple, Dr. Jacobs answered, “No, I depend on what I can remember. I don’t even take notes. Let me see … I think Joanna met someone at that witchcraft congregation. This person had some link with Mexico. No, I can’t recall anything more.”

“Why did she stop seeing you?”

“I don’t exactly know. That happens. Coming close to some insight into yourself can be as frightening as finding yourself on the brink of a high cliff. You pull back because you’re afraid of falling into an abyss.”

“She hasn’t been in touch with you since she quit coming here?”

“No. I wish she had.”

“Okay.” Easy got up.

“I’ll let you know if I do hear from her of course,” said Dr. Jacobs, rising. “I’d appreciate your letting me know should you locate her. No one can force her to come back and see me. I hope she may want to. I’m still optimistic about Joanna. She can be helped if only …”