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Authors: Ron Goulart

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BOOK: One Grave Too Many
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“Blue and gold?”

“You’re exceptionally flippant today.” Hagopian poured the vegetable juice into a Dixie cup. “You’re probably crotchety because Jill’s going away to Spain. Obviously in no mood to discuss the more sacred and profound things of life, like Melody’s tits. Jill really going?”

“Should be winging her way eastward by now.”

Holding an empty cup toward Easy, the writer asked, “Join me?”

“Do you still allow beer in the house?”

“I hate to admit it, but yes.” He fetched Easy a bottle of German dark beer out of his refrigerator. “Do you have any idea how many additives there are in beer?”

“I’ve already given up cigarettes, coffee and hard liquor.” Easy got up to find himself a glass. “If I cut out beer I won’t have any vices left at all. As it is, my parish priest yawns during my confessions.”

“You really were a Catholic once, weren’t you?”

“I was even an altar boy,” answered Easy, pouring the dark beer.

“Really? So was I. The real reason I got into that line of work was that in the rec hall behind the church they had the only pool table in our part of Fresno.” He took a sip of his juice. “Too much turnip.”

Easy reached inside his shirt. “Know who this is?” He tossed the glossy photo of the pair of hands toward Hagopian.

The picture did one spin through the air-conditioned air and then the circle-eyed writer caught it. “Yum yum,” he said after studying it. “This is what you call an appetite shot.” He squinted. “Yeah, that’s a carton of Bascom’s Margarine in the background there, the newest package. Sure, this must be Danny Lane. She’s a hand model now, specializing in hand shots for commercials. You know, some girls have nifty tits, others have pretty photogenic hands. I’ve always thought it would be interesting to be whacked off by a hand model, but I …”

“Did Marks & Feller do that particular commercial?”

“Hey, John, you’re getting to be very knowledgeable about show business and peripheral show business as it is practiced in this wacky town. Yeah, M&F did this.”

Easy reached into his shirt again. “Would this redhead be Danny Lane, too?” He got up, handed his friend the ten year old enlargement.

After trying a little more of his juice, Hagopian took the photo. “Sure, that’s Danny. Notice her smile, half wistful and half bitchy. Those are the kind of broads to avoid. I know, I’ve had to avoid about two dozen of them in the last year alone. She’s got sharp pointy tits, too, always a bad sign.” He scanned the picture further. “There’s Marks himself, looking even more boyish than he does today. Who’s the big Sophia Lorenesque girl here?”

“My client, Gary Marks’ sister.”

New circles formed beneath Hagopian’s eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Marks seems to be missing.”

“A missing guy, that’s a switch for you. Usually you’re bringing back lost girls,” observed Hagopian. “It’s not too much turnip, it’s too much radish.” Setting the paper cup aside he tapped the photo. “Does this zoftig sister of his think perhaps he’s run off with Danny?”

“It’s one possibility.” Easy returned to the rocker. “Know who she’s married to?”

“Let me think.” He ran a thumb along a wrinkle on his forehead. “Oh, sure, to Goffman.”

“Huh? That’s Goffman in the picture. He’s supposed to be hiding out in Canada.”

“No, no, not this young a Goffman. I mean the rich old Goffman, the guy who owns Goftoys down in Hawthorne.”

Easy rocked back and forth once, frowning. Then he took out the third picture. “My client is reluctant to talk about her late father. His name is vaguely familiar to me,” he said. “Vincent Marquetti.”

Hagopian smiled, walking toward his rows of filing cabinets. “Marquetti was one of the better known swindlers in these parts a few years back,” he said as he walked into the lane between two rows of files. “When you consider how much competition there is in LA, you know a guy has to be damn good to move to the top of the swindler trade.”

Following the writer, Easy asked, “What was Marquetti’s dodge?”

“He pulled a deal like Bobby Baker and the salad oil king and such. Got a lot of loans on assets which turned out to be less than he pretended. He netted several million bucks before they caught on to him.” He halted before a drawer, pulled it half way out. “Since I have the largest private collection of news clippings in this entire wacky area I can give you more background on Marquetti than even the
LA Times
morgue.”

“And they don’t serve beer.” Easy flipped through the newspaper and magazine clippings in the manila folder Hagopian handed him. “Yeah, I remember Marquetti now. What happened to all the dough?”

“Marquetti gave some of it back when they grabbed him, but a couple of million just got frittered away apparently.”

Easy studied a few more of the clippings. “He went to prison roughly nine years ago.”

“Yeah, and died there four, five years ago.” Hagopian poked a hand in among the news items. “Yeah, here it is. ‘Convicted Swindler Suffers Stroke in Prison.’”

“Here they all are in the obit. ‘… survived by a son, Gary Marquetti of Santa Monica; a daughter, Mrs. Gay Holland, and a sister, Mrs. Theresa Costello of Manzana.’ That must be the aunt in the desert.”

“So Gary Marks is Gary Marquetti. I didn’t remember that.”

Easy gave him back the folder. “Got anything on Danny and her husband?”

Shoving the drawer shut, Hagopian wandered on. “Around this bend.” He entered a new lane between file cabinets. “I put her in the same drawer with the old man.” He stopped in front of a chest-high drawer marked GE-GO. “You’re not interested in this cheesecake stuff she did before she got sedate?”

“As long as you have it to hand.” Easy took the dozen large photos. “Yeah, sharp and pointed, just like you said.”

“I never forget a tit.”

“They airbrushed everything in those days.”

Hagopian cocked his head to look at the pictures along with the detective. “No, she shaved it. That was a fad with some skin models around then.” He produced another folder. “Here’s the old guy, Jacob Goffman.”

Easy went through the material on the girl’s husband. “People keep handing him things.”

“Local paper photographers, even on the edges of the glamour capital, don’t have much in the upstairs. ‘Stand there and smile when they hand you the certificate, Mr. Goffman.’ That’s a spooky smile, by the way. He looks like a mean son-of-a-bitch.”

“You didn’t like Danny’s smile either.” He put the folder away. “Got an address on her?”

“Not a current one. I don’t imagine a prominent industrialist like Goffman is listed in the phone book, but I can dig up
her
address,” promised Hagopian. “Thing is, I can’t do it until after sundown. Right now I’ve got to run over to the Me & Jesus Commune.”

“Which is?”

“John, if it weren’t for me you wouldn’t know anything about the main currents of life in LA and environs,” said Hagopian. “
TV Look
wants me to interview a new pea-brained and sparse-titted starlet and at the moment she happens to be a Jesus freak, living out in the Valley with a clutch of Jesus freaks who call themselves the Me & Jesus Commune.”

“Well, maybe they’ll have a pool table.” Easy headed for the door.

CHAPTER 5

T
HE MAN NEAREST THE
door was barking. The man next to him on the low black sofa shook his head. “Pretty piss poor,” he said. “It’s no wonder you haven’t been getting many calls. You got no believability. Like this …” He wrinkled his nose and commenced yelping and howling.

Easy walked by them, and by the other five actors waiting in the outer office of Marks & Feller. It was a black and white room, chill, with high walls of eggshell white, black chairs and sofa. He stopped before the white desk and asked the black receptionist, “Is Feller in?”

The slim black girl looked up at him. “Let’s hear you bark.”

“Woof,” he said.

She frowned, poking one long finger into her afro. “That’s godawful,” she decided. “And yet there’s a kind of zany downbeat quality about it … it’s so rotten it’s almost good. Do it again, will you?”

“I won’t bark any more unless I get some money in front,” said Easy. “Meanwhile, would you tell Feller John Easy’d like to see him. I’m a private investigator, working for …”

“Shit,” said the receptionist, “you mean you ain’t a voice man?”

“Nope.”

“And you aren’t here to audition for our Kane’s Kanned Kanine Burgers spots?”

“I’m looking for Gary Marks, his sister hired me to find him.”

The girl poked all five fingers of her left hand into her hair. “You think something bad’s really happened to Mr. Marks?”

“That’s what I’m here to talk to Feller about.”

The black girl got up from behind her desk. She was nearly six feet high. “It would be grotesque if Mr. Marks were lying dead somewhere and us here doing a dog food commercial. Come on, I’ll take you to Mr. Feller’s officer.”

Glancing at the girl’s extremely long bare legs, Easy followed her into a black and white hallway. “What makes you think he might be dead?”

“Mr. Marks is so gung ho about this outfit … he’d have to be dead or dying to stay away,” she answered. “He’s usually here day and night.”

“I hear he’s been taking some time off to see one of your television spot girls.”

The receptionist said, in a very flat voice, “I wouldn’t know about that.” They reached a white door with six STP stickers and a picture of a plaster hot dog stuck on it. The black girl knocked.

“Yo?” said someone inside.

The receptionist opened the door. “A Mr. John Easy to see you, Mr. Feller. He’s working for Mr. Marks’ sister.”

“Goodo,” said Feller. “Come on in, Easy.” Feller was perched on the edge of a large black metal desk. When the girl had closed the door and departed he said, “Isn’t that the greatest ass you’ve ever seen?”

“Nope.”

Feller was a small man of thirty-one, very tan. He was almost completely bald. He was wearing white bellbottom trousers and a candy-stripe body shirt. “Really? Is it because it’s a Negro ass that you don’t like it?”

“It may be that I’ve seen a lot more than you have and have more to compare it with.”

Feller chuckled, and appeared to be tickling himself in the ribs as he did. “Neato,” he said. He bounced off his desk, went around behind it to sit down. “Listen, Easy, I think all this stuff about Gary being missing is so much crapola.” Behind his head was a vast corkboard rich with clippings, tearsheets, memos, labels and bits of paper.

“I was at his cottage with his sister.” Easy took a chair facing Feller.

“Now she’s got a great ass, too,” said the smiling man. “You’ve got to admit that.” Out of the corner of his eye he was looking at a pinned-up magazine ad showing three girls in bikinis walking out of the surf and away from the camera.

“Somebody,” Easy told him, “tore your partner’s place apart.”

The bald young man’s smile lessened. “I didn’t know that.”

“And it looks like they may have worked him over some.”

“You mean, beat him up?”

“Yeah.”

“Boy, what’s this society coming to? We might as well be living in New York or San Francisco.”

“Can you think of any reason,” asked Easy, “why someone would do what they did?”

“No, I really can’t. When Gay got all excited I didn’t really think too much about it. But now …”

“Did Gary keep a lot of money around his cottage?”

Feller laughed. “I don’t think anybody would go to his digs looking for money,” he said. “Oh, we’ve been doing pretty good with M&E the past couple years, but Gary and I still only take home around $25,000 a year each after all the expenses and sundries get taken care of.” He paused, tapping his fingers on his desktop. “It’s funny; we’ve been planning something like this, our own advertising agency, since we were kids practically. We figured by age thirty we’d both be millionaires. I keep telling my wife it’s harder to become a millionaire than I thought. Gary’s wife couldn’t wait.”

“Where is his ex-wife?”

“Over in England someplace and remarried,” answered Feller. “He didn’t go off to see her, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

“You’ve known Gary since you were kids,” said Easy. “Then you also know Danny Lane.”

Turning his back to Easy, Marks brushed at an old college dance bid tacked to his corkboard. “That’s something I’m not too very happy about. When she first walked in here to audition for that margarine thing last winter I thought—
Great
! Here’s a chance for Danny to do something for
us
for a change. Here she was, doing commercials for fun, and married to old Goffman. I had visions of our getting a piece of the Goftoy account. That’s a billing of $12,000,000 a year.” He faced Easy again. “Instead Gary falls for her all over again and they start having an affair. Bad business thinking on his part. You shouldn’t lay the wife of an account you’re trying to pitch.”

“Did you know Bill Goffman?”

“Sure, he worked for Gary’s dad. Back then his father, old man Goffman, wasn’t the toy tycoon he is now.”

“And Danny’s married to Bill’s father?”

“Yeah. She seems to collect Goffmans,” said Feller. “Well, no, actually she collects more guys than that. It’s a damn shame, Gary’s getting hung up with her.”

Easy said, “I need her address.”

“She hasn’t seen Gary in a week. I phoned her right after Gay got so upset.”

“I want to talk to her.”

Feller picked a memo off his desk and, without looking at it, crumpled it into a ball. “Look, Easy, if you go right to the Goffman house … that’ll really screw everything up.”

“And if Gary doesn’t turn up soon the cops are going to get in on this. They’re even less subtle than I am.

“Okay, okay.” Feller sat motionless for nearly a half minute, then he picked up a ballpoint pen and scribbled an address on a slip of paper. “Here you go. You might ask Danny what happened to the pitch reel I gave her to show her husband.”

CHAPTER 6

“W
AIT A MINUTE,” SAID
the man with the scythe.

Easy was stretching up out of his dusty VW, which he’d just parked on a wide circle of gravel in front of the four-car garage.

The man was as big as Easy, heavier with a belly hanging over the waistband of his beltless khakis. He wore an old man’s grey sweater and a grey cap. When he got closer Easy could smell the earth and manure clinging to him.

BOOK: One Grave Too Many
11.85Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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