Too Sweet to Die Read Free Page B

once. He’s a perfectionist and he took seventy-six takes getting the perfect shot of Pam scratching her ass for one of his humorous panty girdle spots. Imagine, John, somewhere in some film archives there are thousands of feet of film showing nothing but Pam’s sweet little ass.”
    “Make an interesting documentary for PBS,” said Easy. “What have you got on Jill Jeffers?”
    Hagopian rested his beer bottle on the floor and held a thick manila folder in both hands. “I’ll give you the suicide first. Here it is. ‘Ex-Senator’s Wife Takes Life.’ ” He passed Easy a clipping from the Los Angeles Times. “Picture, too. She looked a good deal like Jill, didn’t she? A little mean, but very vulnerable.”
    “All women look vulnerable to you. That’s why you keep giving your car away.” Easy skimmed through the story of suicide. “Elizabeth Janes Nordlin, age forty-seven … killed herself in Carmel four and a half years ago … stuck a hose on the exhaust of her Mercedes and ran it into the car … in the garage of former State Senator Nordlin’s palatial Carmel home … Mrs. Nordlin had been despondent recently and was under a doctor’s care.” He glanced at Hagopian. “What’s that mean?”
    “A breakdown and another suicide try a year or so earlier. Pills that time,” said Hagopian. “I’ve got the clippings on that, too. Oh, and the doctor in the case was none other than James Duncan Ingraham himself.”
    “The guy who just wrote the book?”
    “ Scream Yourself Sane. ” Hagopian nodded. “That’s him. He invented something called Howl Therapy and he’s practicing it, accompanied by large fees, at his private hospital up near Carmel.”
    “You said Jill had a breakdown. Was there any suicide attempt there?”
    “Nothing that got into the press.” Hagopian extracted another clipping. “ ‘Nordlin Daughter Collapses At Graveside.’ ”
    “ ‘Lovely dark-haired Jillian Nordlin,’ ” read Easy.
    “Looks like she dyed her hair to become Jill Jeffers.”
    “ ‘Miss Nordlin will recuperate from her recent tragic loss at a private sanitarium, according to a spokesman for former Senator Nordlin.’ Would that be Dr. Ingraham’s little hideaway again?”
    “Right. She was there six months. She came out and shortly dropped out of sight,” said Hagopian. “I guess Dr. Ingraham did better by her than he did her mother.”
    “Until now.”
    “You think there’s a chance Jill went off someplace to kill herself?”
    “I don’t know,” said Easy. “Her agent seems to be worried about the possibility.”
    “Well, this is the town for it. The suicide capital of the world,” said the dark writer. “Some of them come here and go nutty, while others come out here with the sole ambition of giving me tsurris. The rest want to jump off a bridge.”
    “San Francisco’s the town for that.”
    Hagopian unfolded a front-page story. There was a two-column photo of a heavy man with a taut face. “Here’s the father, Leonard Nordlin.”
    “Maybe I’ll talk to him.”
    “Be cautious, John,” warned Hagopian. “I understand he’s still pretty powerful in this state.”
    “I’ll phone him first.”
    “Sometimes I think I should have stayed in Fresno and entered the family agriculture business,” said Hagopian. “There’s hardly any opportunity for graft doing these half-ass interviews for TV Look. ”
    Taking the clippings about the missing girl and her family, Easy returned to the parlor clearing. He sat in a wing chair for long minutes, tapping the papers on his knee.

CHAPTER 4
    E ASY DOODLED QUESTION MARKS on his memo pad. He hung up the phone, saying, “Another vote for San Francisco.”
    Nan Alonzo came into his private office, chewing the eraser end of a wooden pencil. “All Jill Jeffers’s friends say the same thing?”
    “The three I’ve been able to contact,” said Easy. “Each one tells me Jill was supposed to drive up to San Francisco for the weekend, alone. That