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

above the bar. “Most of my customers don’t come out before sundown. You won’t mind if I whip myself up another little belt while we talk, Easy?”
    “Go ahead.” Easy came in, taking the stool two over from the fat club owner.
    Sadler shifted his wide buttocks and swung a booted foot tentatively toward the sawdust floor. The stool tilted. He caught the bar to hoist himself off his seat. He almost tripped on the dented brass rail while walking around the bar. “Despite,” he said, “my reputation, Easy, I am always willing to talk to representatives of the law, professional or private. Can I build you a martini? I’m making a whole crock of them.”
    “No, thanks.” The two long rooms of the club were partitioned with flats of plywood stained a deep brown. The partitions and the booth walls were covered over with photos, hundreds of color enlargements of laughing and smiling people.
    Pouring gin from a bottle labeled Discount Club Gin, Sadler said, “Actually there’s nothing wrong with exchanging mates, so long as it’s done in a friendly cordial way. It’s the furtiveness that kills the fun, as I can testify. In my day our culture wasn’t as open and I, probably influenced by the sort of clean-living yoyos I played on the screen, went ahead and married all the bimbos I wanted to put the boots to. Most of them anyway.” He tapped the rim of the blue glass pitcher with a vermouth bottle.
    “I’m interested in a girl named Joanna Benning.” Easy produced a picture.
    “Name rings no bells.”
    “She may be calling herself Joan St. John.” He held the photo across the bar.
    Sadler’s hand made two butterfly swoops before his fingers contacted the picture. Then, before he got it up to his blurred eyes, it fell in the silver bar sink. “I’m getting over a touch of the flu, excuse it.” He wiped the photo, studied it. “Oh, sure enough. That’s Joan. This proves my point about intelligent well-brought up people subscribing to the swinger ethic.” Clutching the pitcher and holding it tight against his low-hanging front, Sadler began to work his way back to Easy’s side of the bar.
    “When’s the last time you saw her?”
    Sadler stumbled, sloshing gin on his fringed shirt. “Joan? Not for a couple of weeks, which is understandable.”
    “Why understandable?”
    Holding the martini pitcher out straight in front of him Sadler made his way back to his stool. “Well, I figure as how the poor kid is in mourning.”
    “For Phil Moseson?”
    “Poor Phil.” Sadler sidestepped to a booth, dropping his pitcher down onto a checkered tablecloth. He jabbed a finger toward the dark wall of pictures. “A nice-looking man, very decent.”
    Easy went over to the former movie cowboy’s side. The picture Sadler’s finger was tapping showed Joanna Benning in a Maybe Club booth with three other people. The man sitting next to her was heavy-set, affable-looking, about thirty-five and blond. “That’s Moseson beside her?” Easy had stopped at the offices of the San Ignacio Pilot and looked up the stories on Moseson’s death before coming to meet Sadler. The newspaper photo of Moseson had been eight years old.
    “That’s him, poor Phil,” said Sadler. “Could you get my glass from over there? This darn flu has really left me wobbly. You’d think with all the money we’re spending on the space program they could come up with a cure for …”
    “You’re sure you haven’t seen Joan since Moseson died?” Easy brought the martini glass to Sadler.
    “No, not once, not at all.” Sadler leaned over and made a slumping drop into the booth. He poured a fresh drink, then toasted the grinning color image of Phil Moseson. “A nice decent guy, had a good job as an accountant with one of the best outfits in town here. Too bad, the poor bastard.”
    “Somebody worked him over,” said Easy. Sadler shivered before gulping down his glass of gin. “There wasn’t all this senseless violence in my day. And yet