Ron Goulart - John Easy 03 - The Same Lie Twice Read Online Free

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.

IV
    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