Angels in Heaven

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.
    Anyway, about Mérida I found out nada. It was there on the map of Mexico, of course, down there in the southeast
corner in the bend of Yucatán, not that far away from Guatemala and what used to be called British Honduras, but there was no separate entry giving any
details. The atlas did say, at the beginning, some rubbish about it was once
thought that the world was a flat disk surrounded by a lot of water and
Paradise was in the Far East somewhere, which was terribly picturesque and all
that but not exactly helpful.
    I was in the midst of listing some of
the items I very much wanted to know about Mérida when Benny showed up, looking
as ever the exact opposite of what he really was. What he looked like was Sonny
Tufts’ (Sonny Tufts!) kid brother—with his now beardless baby face, round,
innocent eyes, and just the hint of a cowlick in his neatly trimmed
ginger-brown hair—but behind that angelic exterior lurked a soul of the purest
larceny. Not only had Benny never made an honest nickel in his life of guile,
hanky-panky, and knavery, but he loathed the very idea. He told me once he’d
begun his life of artful dodging at the age of two when he found out how to
cheat his sister playing Fish, and he’d never looked back since.
    We were pals, for some strange
reason, me and Benny the Boy; we were close. As an example of the depth of our
friendship, he let a good ten seconds pass before making a crack about my new
glasses, and then all he said was, “Bifocals or regulars?”
    “Here,” I said, tossing him Billy’s
letter. “Read and inwardly digest.”
    He read, while I told him a bit about
Billy and me and dear old Davenport. Being a gentleman, I left out the part
about Marge Freeman’s lingerie. When he was done, he handed the letter back to
me. Then I remarked casually, “Mérida, Mérida. If I remember correctly, did you
not visit that part of the world a couple times last year?”
    “Yep,” said Benny. “And the year
before that.”
    “I don’t believe you ever told me
exactly what it was you were doing down there.”
    “Nope, I never did,” said Benny.
    There followed a long pause.
    “Well, moving right along to greener,
more verdant pastures,” I said, “tell me this. Have you got a lot on right now,
my closemouthed friend?”
    He shrugged. “The usual—this, that,
and the other. You?”
    I shrugged and filled him in on my
meeting with J. J.
    “I do have something that could be
very, very sweet coming up next month,” Benny said. “But that’s next month.”
    I was always interested in hearing
about Benny’s scams, so I asked him, “Like what?”
    “We’re going to sell this high roller
an interest in one of the Dodgers’ farm clubs.”
    “Do you happen to own an interest in
one of the Dodgers’ farm clubs to sell?”
    “Of course not.” He scoffed at the
notion. “That’s what makes it so challenging.”
    “So you could be available for a
little caper?”
    “There’s a good word for busting
someone out of a Mexican jail,” he said. “Caper. I like it. What did you call
World War Two, a tiff? As for being available, Victor, let me put it this
way—when do we start?”
    “We’ve started already,” I said.
“There’s an Aero-Mexico flight