The Same Lie Twice by Ron Goulart

The Same Lie Twice is the third of four volumes in Goulart’s John Easy private investigator series, set in 1970’s Los Angeles. This one has a slight connection to the previous volume, Too Sweet to Die, as it opens with Easy skinny-dipping in a pool with Jill Jeffers, the missing girl from that novel. Having rescued the damsel in distress from heaven knows what perfidious fate, Easy apparently has captured the prize – with that being a long relationship with the slim blonde heiress. The connection is that her friend Joanna has now disappeared and Easy’s long-standing forte of rescuing lost girls comes into play once again.

Joanna and Jim Benning have an odd relationship. He is a struggling copywriter and she is a former model with a penchant for wandering off overnight or for a weekend and returning. Jim tells Easy that he makes $25,000 a year, but Joanna thinks he is worth “a hell of a lot less.”

This time though she went to San Ignacio, an imaginary town, to attend psychiatric sessions. The only clues are a number in her purse and checks made out to a Dr. Gill Jacobs, but signed as Joan St. John, but definitely in her handwriting. And, of course, to seal the lid on this troubled marriage – if it should still be labeled as such – a matchbook from a swapper’s club in San Ignacio.

Easy pokes around the psychiatric facility and finds that Joanna was friendly with one man there who “had a similar fouled-up childhood,” Phil Moseson. But, dear Phil was found dead the previous week. Easy finds that the pair had been at the swingers’ club. Things get odd still when Easy pays a visit to Phil’s surviving sister, Lana Moseson and her pet monkey. Lana was a “frail woman of forty” who tells Easy she has three problems, funny-looking, flat-chested, and drunk. She throws a six-pack literally at him and tells him to open his beer and that Joanna was the bitch who gave Phil the terrific ideas that got him killed.

It is as if you can scratch the surface and find that beneath the surface there are all these odd, off-kilter people drifting through life and Joanna is one of them, caught up in a backfiring blackmail scheme, and on the run to Mexico to escape three tough guys who want what they think she has.

The Same Lie Twice succeeds quite nicely as a fast-paced private eye story with the emphasis on what is hidden behind the doors of all the houses that line the seemingly placid streets of Southern California. It might be just be a bit of a rather tarnished golden dream at that.