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with them. Anything more?”
    “Hagopian was by on his way to have his Jaguar fumigated, though that has nothing to do with this case.”
    “Fumigated?”
    “It turns out the girl he loaned it to was letting a mortician friend of hers use her car for funeral processions.”
    “You can’t fit a coffin in a Jag.”
    “The fellow in Oxnard is a pet mortician. You know, dogs and cats and …”
    “Goodbye, Nan.”
    “Bye.”
    Easy put the little pink phone away, glanced at his watch. “I guess I have time for a shower,” he said. He went in and joined Marlys.

CHAPTER 8
    T HE CHUBBY GIRL IN the leather jumper was carrying a cardboard nude man under her arm. She stopped in the blue tile foyer of the small movie house, tugging at her long straight hair.
    Easy walked past the closed ticket booth and tapped on the locked glass doors of the Cinema Azul Dirty Movie House with his middle finger. “Mitzi Levin?” he said to the girl on the other side of the blue-tinted glass.
    “Box office opens at one forty-five,” called the chubby girl. “You’ve got a half hour to wait nearly.”
    Taking one of his business cards out, Easy held it up to the glass. “I’m John Easy, up from LA,” he said at the locked door. “I’m looking for Jill Jeffers.”
    To his left a purple and gold hand-painted poster announced: A Bad Day for Hot Rocks …Starring NADA! “A sincere work of art … an honest depiction of the deplorable working conditions in your average massage parlor … I was enchanted.” MacQuarrie, San Francisco Examiner. Several photos of naked girls framed the text.
    Chubby Mitzi Levin tugged at her long hair while squinting at Easy. She propped her naked man against a soft-drink machine, came up to the glass door. “What?”
    “I’m looking for Jill Jeffers,” he repeated.
    The door opened a few inches and one chubby hand pulled his card inside. “John Easy & Associates, Detective Services,” she read. “That’s interesting. How do you get to be a private detective?”
    “You have to pass a written test.” Easy pushed against the door with one shoulder.
    Mitzi backed. “I talked to you on the phone. I told you I didn’t know anything.”
    Inside the blue lobby now, Easy said, “Did you know Jill’s car was worked on right around the corner, at Piet’s German Car Garage, last Saturday?”
    Mitzi shrugged, returning to the naked cardboard man. “Her car isn’t her.”
    “Piet himself says she picked the car up in person at about one-thirty Saturday. He stayed open an extra half hour waiting for her.”
    “He would,” said Mitzi. “His brains are in his balls, if you’ll excuse the expression.” She carried the figure over and placed it next to a coming attractions poster. “How does he look here?”
    “It brightens up the room,” said Easy. “What about Jill?”
    The chubby girl hitched up her short leather jumper, adjusted an arm bracelet. “Do you like blintzes?”
    “I’m from Los Angeles. I have to.”
    “I’m about to fix lunch. I just have time before this whore house, if you’ll pardon the expression, opens for the matinee. I live up above. Come along.”
    Easy followed the chubby girl up a carpeted stairway, along a linoleum corridor, through an iron door, up a corkscrewing metal staircase and through another metal door.
    Mitzi spread out her plump arms. “Dis is da place.”
    The long low living room had one big high window that let in the early afternoon sunlight and street noise. The wood floors were rugless, cluttered with cardboard boxes, film cans, piles of photos and posters. An opened-out sofa bed sat, unmade directly beneath the round window. Scattered across the pale blue sheets were tangles of knotted thread and unstrung beads.
    “I wasn’t expecting company,” explained Mitzi. “Not suit and tie straight company at least. These are frozen blintzes, is that okay by you?”
    Nodding, Easy walked in her wake, through the lanes between boxes and toward the alcove