Angels in Heaven (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  I thought. "I think she's a poet because it's easier than working," I said. "It gives you an excuse to hang around the house all day and raid the icebox, and it also gives you something to tell your friends you are that they're not."

  "Be serious, can't you, unless you are," Evonne said crossly. "Sara is an orphan, as you know."

  "I ought to," I said, "it was only me who found out who her real parents were—and for nothing, may I add."

  "Yeah," she said. "Good old big-hearted Vic, we all know."

  I thought that low blow was rather uncalled for, but I let it pass for the time being.

  "Do you know what she told me orphans do a lot?"

  I could think of a few things I would do a lot if I was an orphan, like run away, like sneak into the girls' dorm, but I said (perhaps wisely), "No."

  "Daydream," Evonne said. "Daydream."

  "Shee-it," I said.

  "Yeah," said my beloved. "Is the penny starting to drop?"

  I hung my battered, empty head.

  "And it is not too difficult, is it, to trace some kind of connection between daydreams and writing poetry?"

  "All right," I said. "All right."

  "Another thing, big boy," Evonne said. "Why do you think she's a punk?"

  "Well, that one's easy," I said, desperately trying to think of some answer that wouldn't get me killed. What I thought was, she was a punk mainly if not entirely to irritate the shit out of me and the other adults in her ken, but what I said was some rubbish about peer pressure and adolescent role playing and the necessity of overthrowing the previous generation's values and standards.

  "Oh, that," my darling said with a dismissive wave. "That might be why she became one in the first place, but the reason she still is one now is she doesn't know how to stop without looking like she's chickening out."

  "Oh," I said.

  "So all you have to do is come up with a good reason for her to stop," Evonne said, giving my hair a tousle. "You're a bright lad, occasionally. That shouldn't be too hard."

  "No, no," I said. "But it won't be too easy, either, knowing what a stubborn nerd she can be." Evonne gave me a look, so I added hastily, "But I'll try, I'll seriously try, if you seriously try to put even the idea of San Diego out of your mind forever." I looked at Evonne's guileless countenance, then a chilling thought came to me. "If I thought," I said, "if I even suspected you cooked up this whole San Diego fantasy just to soften me up about Sara . . ."

  "Why, sweetikins," Evonne said. "Perish the thought and get us another drink, and then maybe I'll be strong enough to see what you look like in your brand-new glasses that I know you got on Saturday and I can see right there in your shirt pocket and you've been too scared to put on before now."

  "As long as you don't call me 'Prof,' " I said. "One in the family is enough."

  CHAPTER THREE

  What with one thing and another and then the first thing again, I didn't get back to my place till seven-thirty or so that evening, and when I did, I couldn't help noticing the LAPD squad car, complete with Mickey Mouse ears on top, parked in my driveway (right where I usually parked) waiting for someone. I hoped it was Godot, but I wasn't about to bet on it.

  I parked out in the street so I wouldn't have to move the car later to let the cops out, while I frantically tried to figure out what the dickens they wanted with me this time. I cannot deny there were one or two trifling matters they might conceivably want to run over with me, and one matter not so trifling they might want to run over with me downtown while a very strong light shone on my face. Who of us has not some minor peccadillo to hide, especially in my kind of work? Although I seldom did repos anymore, I had recently, with the aid of a pal to do the steering, repossessed a Chris-Craft down Huntington Harbor way to oblige another pal—without sticking too closely to the letter of the law of the land or the sea. And there had been that slight fracas a while back when I had to get mildly violent with a senior citizen who was about four foot six in all directions and had more chins than the Shanghai phone book and the Hong Kong yellow pages put together, and who wouldn't cough up the $999.95 she owed me for a new set of locks plus a burglar alarm system I'd installed in her apartment in West Hollywood.

  And all right, if you must know, I'd had the mildest of altercations the week before with a drunken yokel who threatened he'd bring charges against me for grievous bodily harm, emotional distress, inciting to riot, and unlawful assembly when all I'd done was give him a few playful taps in the men's room over at the Two-Two-Two. It wasn't my fault he lost his balance and the condom dispenser fell on his head. It was his fault for being loud and obnoxious to a couple of Jim's patrons, two well-dressed, quiet young chaps who were sitting on the sofa in the corner minding their own business, sharing a brandy Alexander and holding hands.

  The only other thing I thought it might be, in May I'd been involved in a particularly sloppy divorce case—one that made the Seburns', with all its twists and turns, seem like a stroll in the park on a midsummer's eve. Things had finally gotten so messy that three of the people involved had vowed havoc would descend on poor little me one way or the other, and what was a cop car in my driveway but potential havoc?

  But deep down I knew the boys in blue were there for another reason. I could see it writ large and clear.

  One of the cops, the one on the driver's side, got out when he saw me approaching.

  "Victor Daniel?"

  "That's right. Is it about my mother?"

  "I'm afraid so," the cop said. "Mrs. . . . Miner—would that be her name?—reported her missing a few hours ago, at four forty-two actually. Normally we wouldn't even be called in on something like this until at least twenty-four hours had passed, but someone must know someone, because we got a call an hour ago to look into it."

  "My brother," I said. "He knows someone. A. Daniel, Lieutenant, LAPD, currently assigned to Records Division downtown. Mrs. Miner would have called him when she couldn't get me."

  "Gotcha." The cop nodded. "Frank figured it was something like that," he said, indicating his partner, an older cop who was still in the car, reading.

  "However it happened, thanks for coming," I said. "I appreciate it. So what's the story? Is Mrs. Miner around?"

  Mrs. Phoebe ("Call me Feeb") Miner was a tough old duck who was the landlady of the apartment I shared with Mom three weeks on and then three weeks off, when she went to Tony's. Feeb lived under us and was my mom's best friend.

  "She's out looking," the cop said. "She'll be back in a while, she's been checking in every hour just in case. I said she'd do better staying by the phone, but she had her own ideas."

  "She usually does," I said.

  "We hung around because we didn't want there to be no one here when you showed up."

  "That I appreciate too," I said. "Who are you two thoughtful gentlemen anyway?"

  He introduced himself, then the older cop, Frank, who was still getting on with his reading. Then he said, "I understand your mother's taken off before."

  "Fourth time this year," I said. "She's usually back in a few hours, but once it was two days."

  "Where did she go that time?"

  "She couldn't remember," I said. "She's got a version of something called Alzheimer's disease. It can make you forget things."

  "It can also make you forget how to do things you've done all your life, like light a cigarette or take a bus," the cop in the car called out. "You forget the names of things too—anomia that's called. Sometimes you repeat things people say to you. That one is called exholalia or something like that."

  The younger cop looked at his partner with pride and told me, "He does that all the time."

  "It's called reading a book Once in a while instead of looking at beaver," the other cop said mildly.

  A few minutes later they took off, after assuring me that a description of my mom and what she was wearing, according to Feeb, was already out and a lot of fuzz all over town were already keeping their eyes peeled for her. Frank roused him
self sufficiently from his literature to suggest again that one of us stay by the phone in case. I said one of us would and thanked them again.

  Well, Feeb showed up in her old rattletrap about a quarter of an hour later, greatly distressed, her electric blue hair all over the place, and wanting to take all the blame, as she was more or less Mom's keeper when I wasn't around. They were supposed to be continually in touch with a simple beeper system I'd rigged up, but Mom forgot to wear her end of it sometimes and mislaid it sometimes and didn't wear it on purpose sometimes.

  Anyway, Mom finally turned up over at my brother's in a taxi just after three A.M., unharmed, unmugged, and otherwise fine. Tony's wife, Gaye, told me over the phone Mom even seemed a little elated by her escapade. I had a glass of buttermilk to settle my tummy and went to bed and ran over in my mind the whole sorry story one more time.

  Tony and I were at our wits' ends trying to figure out what to do. We couldn't keep Mom with us much longer, it was getting impossible—and getting riskier to leave her alone even for a few minutes. We weren't about to put her in some state or county charity facility; nuff sed. The best we could do would be to get her into a first-class home somewhere near, and I'd actually gone to look at one in Glendale that was possible. What wasn't possible was for me and Tony to come up with ten thousand dollars a year from his LAPD salary and my pittance. With a wife, two kids, a cat, and a mortgage, Tony was stuck in his job, so that left it up to me, V. (for Victor) Daniel. It was Mel Evans who'd suggested the possibility. He had departed from a huge law firm—one of those with senior partners and junior partners and accountants and paralegals and legal secretaries and all the rest—to start up on his own a while back, and he'd heard that his ex-company's one-man (plus secretary) investigation department was about to lose its one man.

  The job paid thirty-seven thousand, plus the usual side benefits like stolen paperclips and Christmas parties, and one call from Mel could set up an interview with the company prez. Mel figured I'd probably land the job too—what with my expertise, his rave recommendation, plus the fact that he was like that with his old prez.

  And it wouldn't be so bad.

  Lose a little so-called freedom, true. But what is freedom but a much overworked word. What is toiling for the rulers but a more subtle way of toiling for the underdog. And what is life but a slow death, no matter where you look at it from.

  So given the latest development, mañana I would give Mel a call and ask him to give his ex-prez a call, and the Prez's secretary would give me a call, and then I would not long afterward call on the prez and deeply dazzle him by my wardrobe, sincerity, experience, devotion to duty, and overall willingness to be a part, a humble part, of a sincerely great, public-spirited organization.

  Having finally made the decision, I immediately felt lousy, so much so that I forgot to set my alarm and was late getting into the office the following morning. And by being late, I got there after the mail had already arrived, and decided to open it before calling Mel. Prevarication, I think it's called. And in the mail, along with a tempting offer from a company selling Shetland ponies ("New to California! How your kiddies would love one!") was a surprising epistle that changed everything.

  The epistle was in an official LAPD envelope and addressed correctly to me in handwriting I recognized as Tony's. On the back he had scrawled, "This came for you." He hadn't also scrawled "SWAK." Inside the first envelope was a second one, brown, stained, with Mexican stamps. It was addressed to me care of my brother care of the Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles, California, U.S.A.

  I put on my specs and read:

  Dear Running Deer,

  August sometime. Not much paper so I'll keep it short & sweet. Hope this gets to you. Remembered your bro. was an L.A. cop and hoped still was. I'm in high sec. prison Febrero Segundo 50 miles west Mérida, Mex. Done 2, 4 more years to do and will never make it. Buddy, I need out. Dysentery, malaria, infected hand. God wouldn't recognize me. NOT here for dope, murder, anything heavy. Gov't can't help. Get me out, buddy, somehow, or I'll die in this hole. Money no object. For Christ's sake, please. Gray Wolf, known here as John Brown.

  Were you ever a kid? Did you ever build a treehouse or maybe just a shack in the woods with your best friend? And did you ever nick your fingertips and press them together and, using your secret Indian names, bond yourselves together in blood?

  Old Running Deer did once. With my best friend Billy, Billy Baker, aka Gray Wolf.

  I read the epistle a second time, then a third, then looked, I suppose somewhat blankly, out of the window for a spell.

  Davenport, Iowa. Way back in the long ago. Lux Radio Theater. Camay. Modess, Because. Quick, Kato. Jell-O, folks. Mortimer, how can you be so stupid?

  The Daniels (us) lived at 114 Elm, the Bakers in an almost identical house on Oak, number 113, one street over. It was a house I knew almost as well as my own, as our backyards not only adjoined each other but had over the years practically merged into one, a process hastened by the tail end of a summer storm that flattened the wooden fence we shared in common and that no one had ever bothered to replace.

  Billy, nicknamed Sabu for some long-forgot reason—perhaps his size (short) or his coloring (olive, from an Italian grandmother)—had been my closest friend for as far back as I could remember, except when we fell out about something serious like the Dodgers vs. the despicable Yankees; or why Terri MacPherson, age nine, had sent him a Valentine's card but had sent me some highly realistic fake caca in a small jewelry box, gift wrapped; or how come Billy would never let me fire even one shot from his Red Ryder BB rifle. We sat beside each other in grade school and in high school and even lined up beside each other on the left side of the line (he was end) for the mighty Packer High Panthers. We once got disciplined together by the principal for vulgar behavior: when our cheerleaders begged the spectators to give them a "P" during a game, we stood up and pretended to have one. I liked football. It let me bully smaller kids legally. Billy hated it, but remember I'm taking about days so long ago that everyone who wasn't a girl or in a wheelchair had to turn out for the team, even sissies, even fat kids with funny shoes and glasses.

  Oh, dear. Billy Baker. Billy was smart. He could do fractions. He knew where Czechoslovakia was. He could even spell it. He read books that weren't on the official reading list, and I'm not talking about Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Gang-bang or God's Little Acre—we all read those. Strangely enough, I became something of a reader myself, later. Orphans may daydream a lot, but so do people in the clink, whatever type of clink it may be, and is not reading a type of daydreaming too, Evonne, my precious?

  Well. Billy's pop owned and ran a small trucking business and was also a useful all-round handyman, and when Mr. Baker and my pop found us kids wanted to put up some sort of a clubhouse using the wood from the blown-over fence, they decided to draw up the plans for us and took to sitting out back in one or the other's garden drinking lemonade that we knew was spiked but we weren't supposed to, filling page after page with highly detailed plans until me and Billy finally built the thing ourselves without plans, and for all I know it's still there. It was, of course, in that shack that Running Deer and Gray Wolf swore brotherhood until the last smoke signal rose and the last tale had been told.

  Sabu and I used to work for his pop weekends and summertimes, me as slave labor doing chores like toting two thousand bathroom scales from the warehouse along a plank into one of the trucks, him on the road with his older brother, Ed, learning the true trucker creed—which stops had the greasiest foods, the biggest tits, and the worst music.

  Different as we were, we shared one common dream (two, if you count getting Marge Freeman's trainer bra off): getting out of town and staying out. Don't get me wrong. I love Davenport and I always will. I go back every chance I get, like every centennial of the town's founding.

  Somehow it came to pass that we both in our own ways did manage to get out of town, although in my case I didn't have a lot of choice. I was se
nt down south to a farm for bad boys outside Springfield, while Billy miraculously made it to state college. Hell, in those days it was a big deal even to finish high school without getting thrown out or knocked up. And Billy got through college too, graduating in something like bus. admin., and then he went to a couple of places I forget and then to New York, while I went to a couple of places I'd like to forget and then, finally, out to the West Coast.

  We kept in touch for a while and actually contrived to meet once, in Chicago, but the rest was silence, like the Sphinx, I think it was, said. Mom wrote Mrs. Baker once in a while and still exchanged Christmas cards with her, so I guess that's how Billy knew that Tony joined the cops after he came out of the army. Why Billy hadn't written to his mom and asked her to forward the letter to me was another question. Perhaps he didn't want her to know he was in Mexico, let alone serving as rat food in a high-security slammer there.

  All of which led, of course, to a further question: could Running Deer, once the strongest and bravest of all the Apache, ignore the cunning, master tracker Gray Wolf's cry for help? Not while the wind still whistled through the sycamores, he couldn't. It would unfortunately mean I would have to postpone calling up Mel, dazzling the prez, losing my soul, signing my life away, and buying a decent suit, but had Running Deer spoke with forked tongue that afternoon in the shack after school? Forget it, redskin brother.

  I got out the memo pad again.

  On the top I wrote, in capitals, "MEXICO."

  Under that I wrote, "1. Diarrhea medicine (large size)." Under that I wrote, "2. Make that 2 bottles." And under that, "3. Call Benny."

  I called Benny.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Benny was in.

  Although highly displeased to have been rudely awoken at such an ungodly hour (ten-thirty), he agreed, after simmering down, to make it to my office as soon as possible. To pass the time until he came, I first gave LAX—the main Los Angeles airport—a quick call, dropped by Mrs. Morales's for a coffee, then went back to the office and got down from my small shelf of reference books a Reader's Digest World Atlas so I could see what it had to say about Mérida. The handsomely bound volume had been a Christmas present from Porcupine Head a couple of years earlier. I had no doubt at all she'd obtained it by some simple fraud; in my day what you did was to use the address of some friend or friend of a friend who was leaving town and whose apartment lease only had a month to go. Then you joined assorted record-of-the-month clubs and book-of-the-month dittos under a phony name, and you collected all the bonuses they gave you for joining, one of which was often the Reader's Digest World Atlas, and then you either sold them or gave them to hicks like me for Noël, hoping I didn't know how the scam worked.