Ron Goulart - John Easy 03 - The Same Lie Twice (9 page)

“Yo!” called a voice inside the yellow adobe. “There in a minute.”

Easy unbuttoned his coat and absently flexed his right arm.

The door was set flush with the ground. There were no steps up. It swung inward now to show a smiling handsome young man. “Good morning,” he said. He was wiping at his tan face with a white terry towel which had
Hospital Property
stenciled across it in faded blue. “Just getting myself ready for another day. Would you be a lost tourist?”

“I’m John Easy. I’m down from Los Angeles. You’re Gabe Hickey?”

“That’s me,” grinned the lean handsome young man, resting the towel around his neck like a casual muffler. “The famous unknown painter.”

After a second Easy said, “I’m a private investigator. I’m looking for Gerry Santos.”

The handsome young man’s grin dropped away. He took hold of each end of the clean white towel. “Hey, listen. I’m glad you’re here, sir. I’ve been quite worried about Ger. Come on in and maybe we can put our heads together on this.” A little of his grin returned as he opened the door wider.

The odors of the small living room-dining room came out at Easy. A faint scent of turpentine, a less faint scent of corn oil used for frying and, overriding the others, a strong smell of pine.

Easy went into the room suddenly. He drove the wood door into the handsome young man and slammed him hard against the whitewashed inside wall. He followed the door, pulled it off the tan boy and grabbed him by the wrist. Twisting one slender arm up behind the boy’s back, Easy spun him so the boy shielded him from the room’s only other door.

“Holy Christ!” said the young man. “What’s eating on you?”

“Where’s Gabe Hickey?”

“Shit, man, I’m Gabe Hickey. Like I told you.”

“Your neighbors haven’t heard about the miracle yet.” Easy put more pressure on the bent arm.

“What the fuck are you babbling about, man?”

“I stopped at the bodega a block from here to make sure where Gabe Hickey’s house was,” said Easy. “The guy there used the word
lisiado
in referring to him, which means crippled, I’d guess Hickey is a paraplegic. The wheelchair tracks outside point to that.” Easy jerked the .32 revolver out of the handsome young man’s waistband, where it had been resting in the curve of his back. “And Rudy ought to cut down on that pine-tree aftershave.”

“Hot dog, a regular Sherlock Holmes.”

“Where’s Hickey?”

“Why don’t you use your fucking bloodhound nose to sniff him out?”

Easy half-turned the boy and slapped him twice across the face with his big hand. “I want him now.”

“Shit, man,” said the handsome young man. “He’s okay. We stuck him in his bedroom after Rudy and Domingues got through with him.”

“Is Domingues the one with the crewcut?”

“That’s him.”

“Meaning you must be the one who used the blackjack on me the other night.”

“Not me, I never saw you before this morning,” the boy insisted. “If I’d cold-cocked you you wouldn’t be walking around today, man.”

“Let’s walk over to the bedroom door,” said Easy. He kicked out a foot and got the front door slammed shut.

“You don’t have to make a Bogart movie out of it. Rudy and Domingues are long gone. They left me here to greet you.”

“Even so.” Easy pushed him in front of him.

They passed a cheap easel with a large painting of the corn fields when everything was first ripening. “He’s not much of an artist,” observed the young man.

“Reach out and pull the door open.”

“I tell you, man, there’s nobody in there but that cripple spade.”

“Open it.”

Giving a disgusted sigh, the handsome young man took hold of the wrought-iron doorlatch and pushed the door inward.

Against the bed was a chrome wheelchair. A young Negro was tied in the chair with clear plastic surgical tape. Another wide strip masked his mouth. He was slumped slightly to the right, but his eyes were open and watching Easy and the handsome young man. The sleeves of his blue striped pajamas were rolled up. Small raw burns spotted his black arms.

“I suppose you didn’t do this either?” said Easy.

“No, man. Domingues is the one who’s big with a hot cigarette.”

Easy looked around the small shadowy bedroom. No one else was here. The roll of surgical tape had been dropped next to a raw wood bookstand, directly below a rosewood crucifix. Easy tripped the handsome young man. Keeping one foot on his back, he reached over for the tape. He taped the boy’s hands together behind his back, then pulled his feet up together and wound them in with the trussed-up hands.

When he finished he said to Gabe Hickey, “I’m John Easy. I’m a private investigator from Los Angeles.”

“Shit, I wouldn’t trust him, man,” said the boy on the wood-plank floor.

Easy stepped over him and yanked the tape off Hickey’s face.

The black young man shook his head and spit blood. “This is getting to be just like LA around here,” he said. “What angle are you playing?”

“I’m trying to keep them from killing the girl and Santos,” said Easy. “Do they have them?”

“No.” Hickey licked more blood from his lips. “Gerry and Joanna left here two days ago, had a chance to lease a house over in Segado. That’s thirty miles from here, a little harbor town.”

Easy said, “I saw a doctor’s shingle two blocks back. Is he somebody who can treat those burns?”

“Dr. Palma? Sure, he can treat anything and keep quiet afterward.”

“I’ll get you there,” said Easy as he unwound the tape from around Hickey’s wrists. “Then you can tell me exactly where Santos and the girl are.”

“Why not?” Hickey spit more blood. “I’ve been telling everybody. You know, I had to tell those other two mothers.”

“I figured that.” Easy stepped behind the wheelchair and was about to push it.

Hickey told him, “Don’t do that.” He caught the wheels and rolled himself around the fallen young man and out of the room.

“Are you going to leave me here with the cockroaches, man?”

Easy said nothing further to the handsome young man.

T
HE FIVE WHITE HOUSES
looked like giant steps leading down the terraced hillside to the sea. The house closest to the beach was the one Easy wanted. He stood in the shade of a cluster of palms near the topmost house in the spill of five. To his right the land dropped away, zigzagging down to the waters of the gulf, thick with spikey brush and a few huge red flowers. The gulls in these parts looked clean and white as they skimmed the horizon. They reflected the bright high morning sun like fragments of mirror glass.

A high stucco and adobe brick wall ran alongside the five harbor town, houses. Its jogs paralleled those of the terraced hillside. Easy patted his shoulder holster, and jumped to grab the red brick topping of the wall. He boosted himself to the wall top and went walking down its narrow width tightrope fashion.

A plump fifty-year-old Mexican in black trunks and black-lens glasses sat up on a rubber raft floating in the pool in the first vast yard Easy passed. “
Que pasa
?” he called in a mild voice.

“
Nada
,” Easy replied. “
Nada
.”

He encountered no one else on his descent toward the house Joanna and Gerry Santos were supposed to be renting. When he came to the next to the last house in the row he leaped and caught the railing of a wrought-iron side balcony. He went from the black balcony up onto the tile roof, to the half which tilted gently seaward.

The roof ended four feet from that of Joanna’s. Easy jumped again, sailing over bright green foliage, and caught hold of a tan stucco chimney. He went up the tiles gingerly, hesitated at the peak of the roof and then let himself over onto the down-slanting side.

Looking down between his feet he could see the walled patio below. There was a pool here, too. Half Olympic size, lined with turquoise tiles and bordered with wide tiles of a brownish gold.

As Easy watched a dark-haired young man in a white shirt, tan chinos and desert boots came running into view. He dodged around a row of huge potted cactus. A silenced gun made two metallic puffing sounds. The running boy suddenly seemed to be crucified against the bright day. For an instant. Then he crumpled in on himself, falling into a fat white-needled cactus. The cactus’ bright orange pot cracked, exploding dry mud and shards of pottery into the clear blue pool. The young man shrank further in on himself, then jerked out full-length.

Rudy, the curly-haired man Easy had encountered in San Ignacio, came out into the intense sunlight. He was in his shirt sleeves and for a moment he didn’t seem to know what to do with the gun in his hand. He walked once around the dead boy, his glistening shoes crunching on jagged pieces of the cactus pot. Rudy nodded once to himself and kicked a lump of dry dirt over the lip of the pool into the water. He shifted the gun to his left hand before going back out of sight.

From down inside the two-story house came the sound of a girl screaming and sobbing at the same time.

Easy let himself continue down the slope of the tile roof. There was a balcony under the second-floor window. He landed on the red tile flooring of the balcony, facing the bedroom and with his .38 revolver in his big right hand.

The room was empty. Easy went in. This was an extra bedroom, with a dry dusty unused smell. Large mural-like framed paintings of revolutionary Mexicans struggling with symbolic evils splotched the white walls.

“I was going to cooperate,” said the girl who had cried out.

“But he wasn’t,” said Rudy.

“You shouldn’t have done that,” said the girl. “You shouldn’t have done that, killed him.”

“We should have let him keep running,” said Domingues.

They sounded to be directly below this bedroom, probably in the living room. Easy moved silently across the Indian throw rugs. The room’s polished wood door was a quarter-open.

“My god,” said the girl. “Phil and now Gerry.”

“You shouldn’t sleep with so many of them,” said Rudy. “It would save us time.”

“Speaking of that,” said Domingues. “You think we have time to knock off a little ourselves?”

Rudy said, “I don’t see why not. We got here ahead of schedule almost.”

“And ahead of that bastard Easy,” Domingues said, laughing.

“So I’d say we can afford to take our time.”

“Well, you know what I’d like to have her do first,” said Domingues.

“You know what I’d like to have you do?” Easy was at the head of the stairs, where he could see the three of them clearly.

Domingues, the man with the short-cropped hair, was to the left of Joanna. He had one hand tangled in the girl’s dark hair. His other hand was empty.

Rudy was on the other side of the straightback chair the girl was tied to, his gun still in his left hand.

Easy said, “Rudy, let the gun fall.” He started down the stairs.

Rudy threw himself behind the chair Joanna was tied to. His gun made a woofing sound and a piece of wall behind Easy shattered into little nuggets of plaster.

Easy leaped over the iron-stair rail and landed in the living room next to Domingues. Getting his arm around the crewcut man’s neck, he spun him to face Rudy’s gun.

Joanna stamped both high-heeled feet on the floor, shoving. She got the chair to topple over sideways.

Rudy, finding himself out in the open, went back a step, pivoted and ran. He went out a glass door still open from the flight of Gerry Santos.

Easy didn’t try to follow. He shoved Domingues toward a sofa, bent him against it and searched him. He found a .45 automatic and a Boy Scout knife.

Domingues laughed. “We figured you’d be dead back in Choza by now.”

“Now and then,” said Easy, “people tend to underestimate me.”

J
OANNA BENNING TURNED HER
face toward the wide-open window of the Volkswagen. “What crop is that growing there?”

Not turning to look at the flickering afternoon fields they were passing through, Easy said, “I’m not sure.”

“I thought you were sure of everything,” the girl said. “Positive and a hundred percent sure.”

Easy did not answer.

“Whatever it is, they have to squat to harvest it,” said Joanna. She was more attractive, warmer, than her formal model photos had indicated. Her face was thinner, and the faintly blue shadows under her eyes made them seem brighter. She rested one arm on the sill, trailing her fingers in the hot still air. “I don’t think you tied up that man securely enough. Didn’t mention it at the time and spoil your daring rescue.” She swung round to watch him. “I’ve been thinking, though. Those were sloppy knots. When I was a girl my father used to take me camping up around Russian River—you know where that is? Well, anyway. He taught me how to make good knots. Even if he didn’t get round to imparting much else of a positive sort. I really think that man will get loose.”

“Let’s hope so,” said Easy.

Joanna was wearing a short denim skirt. She ran the fingers of her left hand along the inner side of her left thigh, from skirt hem to knee. “You want him—what was his name? Domingues—you want Domingues to get loose?”

“Any time now, since we’re two hours away from Segado.”

“What about the sweet-smelling one? You’re sure he’s not following us?”

“I’m sure.” Easy’s eyes automatically checked the rear-view mirror.

“Another thing I don’t feel right about,” said Joanna. “Leaving Gerry there like that and not telling anyone. My god.”

“We don’t,” Easy said, “want to be detained in Mexico, especially in a Mexican jail.”

“I didn’t do anything. It was—the other one—Rudy? It was Rudy who killed Gerry. For no reason.” Still rubbing at her leg, she asked, “What do you think will happen to Gerry, to his body?”

“If all goes well, Domingues will untie himself and then ditch the body someplace.”

“My god.” Joanna pinched herself. “You mean you’re anticipating those gunsels or whatever they are will dispose of Gerry in some … some nameless hole here in Mexico? That’s awful.”

“Were you planning to come back down here once a month to put flowers on his grave?”

The lovely girl almost began to cry. She caught herself, then inhaled with nostrils flaring. “Screw you, Easy.”