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

thing. Otherwise it gives trouble.” Reluctantly he retrieved his soyburger and tried a small bite. “You know, sport, I’ve been doing some heavy thinking since your secretary called and made this appointment for you.”
    Easy rested one hand on the stage, waiting for Skane to go on.
    “Simply because a man doesn’t have an actual medical degree, a fancy piece of high-grade paper in a black frame, he tends to be treated in a second-class way.” Skane paused to sadly chew. “Why shouldn’t those of us on the frontiers of psychotherapy have the same rights as our more tradition-bound brothers? An MD doesn’t have to talk about his patients.”
    Easy said, “You don’t have to talk to me, Skane. You can save your information for the police.”
    “What do the police have to do with it?”
    “This girl has been missing for a week,” Easy told him. “She told her husband she was coming to see you. If I don’t find her soon, the cops will have to join in.”
    “Coming to see me? I haven’t laid eyes on her for two long months or more, sport.”
    “You do know her then?”
    “Not as Joanna Benning.”
    “As Joan St. John?”
    His eyes on the picture, Skane answered, “Yes, that’s who she said she was.”
    “Do you have an address on her?”
    “No. She made a point of paying for each session on the spot. I told her I’d put her on my mailing list for pamphlets and such, but she preferred to pick them up here.” He took another few mournful bites of the sandwich. “A very attractive woman, whatever her name is. She radiated a sort of upbeat intensity, yet at the same time she seemed very … I don’t know …”
    “Vulnerable?”
    “As good a word as any,” said Skane. “The two occasions when she took part in an actual drama situation, it was quite illuminating. It seems when she was about eleven her father …”
    Easy cut in. “Was she friendly with anyone else who came here?”
    Skane put the soy sandwich down again. “I can’t eat this damn thing, I’ll have to face my wife’s wrath.” He glanced up at the shadowy ceiling before meeting Easy’s eyes. “Yes, there was somebody. I suppose that’s why I really agreed to talk to you in the first place, Easy.”
    “She came here with someone?”
    “Not at first. At first she was alone, very much solitary. After a few weekly sessions she became friendly with one of the guys.”
    “What’s his name?”
    “I think what attracted her to him was the fact he had a similar fouled-up childhood,” said Skane. “Then so many of us do.”
    “His name?”
    “Moseson,” answered Skane. “Phil Moseson.”
    Easy wrote the name on one of the small file cards from his breast pocket. “Can you give me his address?”
    “I can,” said Skane slowly. “It’s not likely to do you much good, though.”
    “Why?”
    “Phil Moseson was found dead last week.”

V
    S UNNY BOY SADLER WAS sitting alone on a high stool in front of his bar. The Maybe Club consisted of two long low rooms which made an L around a corner in downtown San Ignacio. The ocean was a block away. Sadler was five and a half feet tall and weighed slightly over two hundred pounds. He was wearing white levis and a black fringed shirt, leaning on the polished wood bar with his chunky hands ringing a martini glass. To the left of his glass rested a cassette player.
    Twangy Western music was roaring out of the little machine, filling the musty bar room. A dusty nasal voice sang, “A woman she’ll swear to love you an’ love you ’bout all your life, then she’ll meet another man around the corner and tell the same lie twice.”
    Sadler punched the music off and said, without turning, “Want to fix yourself a snort? Go right ahead, help yourself.”
    Easy was stopped at the threshold of the room, up to his ankles in the tired sawdust that covered the floor. “I’m John Easy. My secretary called you.”
    “I figured as much.” Sadler was watching him in the long yellowish mirror