Too Sweet to Die Read Free

running a blue movie palace. The seventies are going to be another schmucky decade. Glanzman is glad his three marriages have been childless.”
    Easy had taken out his notebook. Mitzi Levin’s was one of the names he’d copied off a letter at Jill Jeffers’s cottage. “Mitzi Levin on Ellis Street in San Francisco, huh? A close friend of Jill’s?”
    “Jill is a very aloof girl, distant, not close to anybody really. She’s not a dyke or anything, just sort of cool. She’s likable, though. Glanzman doesn’t handle any cunt who isn’t likable.”
    “Okay,” said Easy. “Jill isn’t in Carmel, she isn’t in San Francisco. Any idea where she is?”
    “No.”
    “You wanted to talk to me about her.”
    Glanzman chewed through the last of his sandwich. He put his small knobby hands palms down on the green tabletop. “She’s been funny the last month or so. Odd. Glanzman is worried about her.”
    “Odd how?”
    “Depressed, bitchy,” said Glanzman. “Alls I can say is that lots of times lately she’s had a faraway look on her, like she was trying to remember something and was just on the edge of catching it but couldn’t.”
    Easy sat watching the small agent. “You think she’s depressed enough to kill herself?”
    Glanzman didn’t meet Easy’s eyes. “Glanzman would rather not say,” he said. “Maybe, however, somebody ought to look around her place on Scenario Lane.”
    “I already have. She’s not there.”
    “I guess what I really want,” said Glanzman, “is to ask you to let me know is she in any kind of trouble. That’s the sentimental side of Glanzman talking to you.” He wiped his hands on a green cloth napkin, held the right one out to Easy. “Should you can’t get me at my office, try me here. I’m here a lot.”
    Easy shook hands with the little agent and left the delicatessen. The sidewalk immediately in front of the place was covered with grass-green carpeting.

CHAPTER 3
    T HREE CHUBBY FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD GIRLS in hot-pants and sleeveless white shirts were passing around a homemade cigarette on the dry narrow lane in front of a low stucco apartment house. Easy parked his dusty black Volkswagen and got out. The early afternoon sky had turned a scrubby brown, air hung heavy.
    “There’s one big mother,” observed one of the girls.
    “I bet he’s got some yard on him,” said another.
    “No, some of those big guys have little tiny ones,” said the third chubby girl.
    Easy stuck change into the lopsided parking meter and started to walk up Cherokee.
    A legless man came rolling out of a gritty alley between two orange apartment houses. His wooden cart had rusty roller skate wheels. After brushing into Easy, he said, “Have some compassion for the afflicted, won’t you?”
    “Want a push someplace?”
    “Screw you.” The legless man propelled himself away by fisting the hot gray sidewalk.
    At the corner an out-of-work actress of fifty-six came out of the tiny diagonal grocery store carrying a red net bag of groceries. She was dressed in silk. A blond young faggot with thin eyes was holding her arm and laughing close to her crusty white face.
    Easy walked on until he came to a lone stunted palm tree growing out of the sidewalk, then turned to his right. He moved down a narrow alley and stopped at its end. In front of him was a large brownstone warehouse. Midpoint on the new oaken door was a small brass nameplate reading HAGOPIAN. Easy knocked.
    “Is that you, Buff?” The door swung inward and a dark middle-sized thirty-nine-year-old man peered out. He had curly black hair, a hawk nose. His dark eyes were underscored again and again with shadowy lines. “Hey, it’s John Easy. Enter. A new case maybe?”
    “Yeah. Who’s Buff?”
    Inside the big warehouse it was cool. The place was full of long rows of high green filing cabinets. In among the aisles was a room-size clear space set out with Victorian furniture. When they were seated there Hagopian asked, “Do you know of