Angels in Heaven

CHAPTER ONE
     
    I once read on a lavatory wall the
word pitiful described as the “state of an enemy after an imaginary
encounter with oneself.”
    I have another description of pitiful —the
state of one V. Daniel (me) as I sat slumped over my secondhand desk in my
God-knows-how-many-hand office on a certain Monday morning late in September,
in the year 1987.
    And the fact that this office was in
that scurvy part of California known as the San Fernando Valley, where smog is
as common as dandruff on a bible salesman’s collar and just about as
chewy—well, that wasn’t a big boost to my morale either.
    Pitiful was putting it mildly.
Pitiful was something to look forward to when I felt better, a lot better.
    And from whence derived this
emotional prostration?
    Not from, say, a trifle like a
fortieth birthday. That had come and gone four years ago. Not from, say, the
mere death of a loved one or some other petty excuse, such as the old family
doctor telling me that I had but one more month to live before dying in excruciating
agony from a parlay of leprosy of the balls and cancer of everywhere else. Nay,
nothing so shabby, so one-horse, so niggardly.
    No, the cause of V. Daniel’s
degrading gloom lay right there on the peeling veneer in front of me. The items
in question had, two days previously (a windy Saturday), cost me altogether
just over one hundred dollars. And although commonly referred to as “they,”
they were really only one item and came in a fake leather case, or small
sheath.
    I took them out reluctantly, polished
them on the flimsy bit of rag the optician had generously included, and put
them on. True, I could see better. True, I no longer had to bend over and peer
at my computer screen from a distance of six inches. True, I could probably
thread a needle now after, say, ten tries instead of a hundred, but how many
needles does a macho guy like me thread in one lifetime, not very many, and who
cares anyway?
    I got up and went back to the small
washroom at the rear of the office and looked at myself in the streaky mirror
for the tenth time that hour. Arthur Miller wore glasses; who laughed? But
Woody Allen wore glasses and everyone laughed at him. And Clark Kent. And Sergeant Bilko. And Hirohito.
    The phone rang. I went back into the
office proper and picked it up.
    “Hello?”
    “Eh, hello,” said a deeply resonant
male voice. “With whom am I conversin’?”
    “With Victor Daniel,” I said, adding
somewhat bitterly, “now known to one and all as Four-Eyes.”
    “Yeah, well,” the man said. He
hesitated a minute. “Eh, see, it’s like this, you were referred to me by my
agent.”
    “By name of?”
    “Oh, yeah, Bobby Seburn? The one you
once did a job for? Him.”
    “Ah yes,” I said. “I remember it
well.” I had indeed once done a job for Mr. Robert Seburn, who was the type of
recently invented combination agent and personal manager who handled sports
people—golfers in silly footwear, petulant tennis players, basketball players,
baseball players, and others of that overpaid subspecies. Mr. Seburn had wanted
to divorce his wife and suspected that sufficient grounds existed. Not being
averse to taking on such demeaning chores, I had agreed to look into it. It
turned out that his wife was involved with someone else, all right—one of her
girl friends—but like the man said, that is another story, and anyway it’s already
been told.
    “Would you be a sportsman, sir?” I
asked my mystery caller.
    “You could say that,” he said
cautiously. “Eh, how’s by you if I drop by sometime later today? I’m cool up
till two-thirty.”
    “You name it,” I said. “I’ll be
here.”
    We settled on one-thirty and hung up
on each other. Hmm, I thought. Wonder what his story is. A sportsman,
you could say. Sounded to be a black man. Statistically highly unlikely to be a
golfer—there were only about two blacks on the professional circuit. He might
be a designated hitter for the New York Yankees; he sounded worried enough.
Well, I would just have to wait and see, wouldn’t I?
    As it was then just after ten
o’clock, that left me three and a half hours to fill, time enough to do a chore
that I’d been putting off for no good reason but sloth, for a lawyer friend who
had an office downtown near MacArthur Park. I wouldn’t have to drag my weary
but otherwise gorgeous bod all the way down there, though, as the work involved
was more or less in my part of town, which was more or