One Grave Too Many Read Free

should have heard all this frumus.”
    “People get used to noise in a neighborhood this close to campus,” said the missing man’s sister. “And the couple in the house next door are on vacation. The fellow on the other side was out of town Monday and Tuesday. I’ve already asked him if he knew anything about Gary.”
    Back in the living room Easy, eyes narrowed, surveyed the devastation. He crossed to the wall near the bedroom doorway, touched at an indentation in the plaster board. Then sniffed at it. “Somebody got knocked into the wall,” he said. “Fairly recently.”
    “You mean you think there was some kind of fight?”
    “Not a fight maybe.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Someone may have worked your brother over.” He turned to face her. “You really don’t know what they were looking for?”
    “No, I don’t have any idea, as I just told you. Simply because my …” She closed her mouth, turning away from him.
    Easy waited a few seconds before returning to the bedroom. He circled the bed, gathering up two other photos. They, like the picture of the hands, had been pulled out of their frames. The black frames, making lopsided diamond shapes now, were tangled on top of a swirl of T-shirts and shorts. “This one your father?” asked Easy, holding up a tinted photo of a chunky bald man.
    “Yes,” she answered from the threshold. “Gary kept it on his bureau. I think that other one will be of more use to you, though.”
    The second photo was a color blowup of a snapshot. It had been taken at some kind of Western ghost town; false front buildings showed in the background. In the foreground stood four young people, smiling into the sun. “You had a sad smile then,” said Easy.
    “Yes, that’s me on the end.” She came to stand close beside him. “A long time ago, almost ten years. How hopeful and innocent we all look … except for Danny.”
    Easy touched the photo. “Is this Danny, the red-haired girl?”
    “Danny Lansky, yes,” Gay answered “How’d you know … Danny isn’t a usual girl’s name.”
    “You wouldn’t have sounded that way if you were talking about a guy,” he said. “Danny the one your brother’s been seeing again?”
    “Yes.”
    “Which one of these guys is your brother, the short dark kid here?”
    “Yes, that’s Gary, the short one. Then he was still hoping he’d grow a few more inches.”
    “Was Danny his girl?”
    “No … well, she wasn’t supposed to be. She was engaged to Bill. That’s Bill standing between Danny and me. He had that sort of clumsy but lovable style some tall men have. Bill Goffman.”
    “Danny’s present husband wouldn’t be this Goffman?”
    Gay took the photo from him, studying it. After a moment she said, “No, Bill’s long gone. Most of us figure he took off for Canada around 1965, a pioneer draft dodger. Nobody’s heard from him since. He and Danny had some kind of big quarrel, I think, and he just took off. Some of the people, most of them really, that I knew back then I never think about … but Bill I wonder about now and then.”
    Gently, Easy retrieved the photo. “Where was this picture taken?”
    “The Thorpe Ranch. You know, they used to shoot a lot of Western TV shows there, over in the San Fernando Valley,” she said. “My father owned it once. Bill worked there summers and weekends, and the rest of us hung around there quite a bit.”
    “Is your brother likely to have gone there?”
    “Now? I don’t see why.” She lowered herself down to sit on the edge of the bed. “Gary’s not particularly nostalgic about the Thorpe Ranch.”
    Easy reached across her tan legs for the photo he’d found earlier. “And why was he sentimental about this?” The picture showed a woman’s hands spreading a pat of margarine on a steaming muffin.
    Gay shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t remember seeing that before. It’s probably just something from a TV commercial he and Sandy worked on.”
    “Would he be