Angels in Heaven

Station told me Lt. Carstairs
was off sick for a week, and I didn’t want to bother him at home, even if he
was there and not off being sick shooting craps in Reno. Which meant the case
of the beleaguered basketball player would remain in limbo for a while longer.
    Then I had a visit from the Nu clan,
all of them—the Nus from next door with their grown-up kids, Johnny and Linda,
and the diminutive Mr. Nu from next door to them. Mr. Nu was just back from the
local police station, where he’d heard the whole story, and he’d come by to
thank me for my efforts on his behalf, which he did with great politeness and
not a little dignity. The Nus graciously invited me and any other guests I
might care to bring to eat with them that evening. I accepted for myself and
Evonne politely, with considerable dignity of my own. Mr. Nu pressed a large
package on me as an additional thank you; when all had left, I opened it and
discovered not what I was secretly fearing, a selection of the latest in adult
videos, but a gorgeous brand-new matrix printer to go with my Apple II,
something I’d long wanted so badly that although I might not have killed for
one, I certainly would have severely wounded for one, as I had done, come to
think about it.
    I got my computer out of the safe and
was fiddling around trying to hook up the printer when Benny called from
darkest Yucatán.
    “ ¡Amigo!” he said. “¿Cómo
estas?”
    “OK, OK,” I said. “How about you?”
    “ Muy bien, compadre,” he said.
“I’m at the San Carlos, on the top floor near the pool, room 333. Got it?”
    I said I had it.
    “Just reporting in,” he said. “I’ll
call later with all the news.”
    “Attaboy, Benny,” I said. “Soon as
you can. And, Benny, at the risk of pulverizing your feelings, when you do
phone with the real McCoy, be careful you don’t go through too many strange
switchboards.”
    “That’s why I’m calling later,’’
Benny said. “ Buenos días, amigo.”
    “The same to you with bells on,” I
said.
    He hung up. So did I. The phone rang
again immediately. It was my nearest and dearest, my favorite blonde in the
whole wide world and then some.
    “Don’t be a smart aleck” was the
first thing she said.
    “I haven’t said a word,” I said.
    “No, but you will,” she said. “So
don’t.”
    “Evonne, my little cherry
cheesecake,” I said, “what are you talking about?”
    “You’ll find out,” she said. I heard
a click in my ear, the click that the phone makes when someone hangs up on you.
    I shrugged. Ah, the ladies, I mused,
not for the first time, and then went back to fiddling with the printer. I had
just gotten to the stage where according to the instructions everything was
connected properly and there was power everywhere and I had entered all the
right instructions but the thing still wouldn’t work, when I had to pack
everything away and lock up and drive downtown to the courtrooms on top of the
old County Sheriff Building and give evidence in a fraud case I’d worked on for
Mel the Swell six months ago. What happened was, this sucker bought a small
piece of real estate out in the canyon, part of a whole development, on which
he was planning to build his dream house, but he found out accidentally almost
immediately afterward to his shock, to say nothing of his horror, that the
company he purchased the land from did have legitimate title to it, all right,
but it did not have planning permission to build dream houses or any other
kind.
    So what Mel had needed was someone
else to go through the whole procedure again, but this time checking that the
vendors, in their sales talk, did indeed fraudulently promise the right to
build, which, as it turned out, they did, to me, the next sucker in line. It
was slightly tricky, as the timing had to be right. The vendors, a smooth
husband and wife team—or so they claimed—the David Harrisons, were undoubtedly
going to take off for Rio at some time with all the deposit money they could
collect. However, we did not want them to do so with either the money I forked
over or Mel’s client’s $14,500. But the Harrisons weren’t about to fork over
‘he deed of ownership to me until I’d forked over a lot of money to them.
Finally, we worked it out so Mr. Harrison» got picked up ten seconds after he’d
cleared my (Mel’s) check at the Bank of America on Sunset and Fountain, and
that was that.
    The David Harrisons were being finally
arraigned, which| means they