Angels in Heaven

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. I
    “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 himself 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 me 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