Angels in Heaven

whispered.
    “No!” I exclaimed.
    He nodded sheepishly.
    “Totally one hundred percent legit,
not a scam anywhere?”
    He nodded again.
    “What kind of business might it be?”
    “Sleeping,” he said, getting up to
go.
    “Aha,” I said. “Sleeping. So you are
the mystery water-bed king of Yucatán.”
    “No,” he said, “I’m the mystery
hammock king of San Diego.” And with that Delphic utterance he took his leave.
     
     
     

CHAPTER FIVE
     
    Shaking my head sadly, I watched
Benny drive sedately away in his old Ford that he’d parked just outside. I
noticed that he had a new bumper sticker: “Please drive carefully, the life you
save may be mine.” I sighed, and then, right out of nowhere, I had a good idea.
It was so good I couldn’t believe I’d thought of it. I called Bat Girl—a new
name for Sara I’d just dreamt up, as she was bats—and in my most dulcet of
tones invited her out to luncheon. Bat Girl was surprised but pleasantly so and
agreed to meet me at one-thirty at a steak and lobster joint nearby that I knew
she liked. She liked the Nus’ Vietnamese restaurant that was right next to me
even more, but it was closed. I’d seen a sign in the window that morning
reading, “Death in Family. Opens again Wed. 11:00 AM. Thanking You.” Me and the
Nus had been friends for years; I liked everything about them except for their
beef in hot peppers.
    Then I went back to the mail,
wondering if it held any other little surprises out of the past, such as a
postcard from Marge Freeman saying she’d be passing through L.A. in a few days
and wouldn’t it be swell if we could get together in some dimly lit piano bar
where we could hold hands and talk about the old days. It is perhaps
unnecessary to state that mere was no such postcard. Someone from Orange County had written me asking what my fee would be for following someone three nights
a week; I wrote back and told her. Then I opened an appealing epistle from one
Patrick O’Brien (14), who said he was contemplating taking one of those courses
advertised in comics and the cheaper men’s magazines, 0n how to become a
detective in the privacy of your own home, and did I, as a working
professional, think it would be a suitable start to his career in detection?
    Forget it, was what I told him. The
only person a course like that could possibly benefit would be the small-time
hustler (e.g., Benny at the start of his career) who was peddling his outdated
and badly printed leaflets. Then I opened two checks and one bill and chucked
the usual handful of junk mail unopened into the wastepaper basket under the
desk. I couldn’t help noticing the basket was not only full but overflowing, so
I took it to the alley out back and emptied it into the big galvanized iron bin
next door, managing to dump a substantial amount of gunk onto my neighbor’s rabid
nuisance of a cat, who had jumped up to see what was going on.
    While I was doing so, I spied with my
little eye a dirty, white, unmarked panel truck, with two dimly viewed guys in
the front seat, slowly drive up the alley toward me. It stopped outside the
back door of the emporium next to the Nus restaurant next to me. The place was
owned by the Nus’ cousin Mr. Nu, who sold and rented videocassettes and peddled
all manner of home entertainment equipment and also things like cordless
telephones and Walkmans. Trucks were often drawing up at Mr. Nu’s back door,
sometimes in the wee small hours of the morning, loading and unloading various*
merchandise, so I went back to my desk and thought no more about it for a good
ten seconds. Then it struck me that if the Nus were closed because of a death
in the family, why wouldn’t Mr. Nu, their cousin, also be closed? Was he not of
the same family? And if he was closed, what was that panel truck doing parked
there. It merited a closer look. It also merited me getting out one of my .38
Police Positives from the locked drawer in my desk where it lived when I was in
the office. I spun the cylinder to check that it was loaded (it was), waited a
minute, then picked up the wastepaper basket again, with my right hand on the
bottom and, being a southpaw, my left hand, the one holding the revolver,
hidden just inside the top of the bin as if I was holding down a load of
rubbish that would otherwise spill out.
    Then back out again I went, whistling
cheerfully. The truck was still there, its motor idling, but the front seat was
empty. Still whistling cheerfully, I began