Angels in Heaven

Hollywood Hills into
my beloved San Fernando Valley.
    “ ‘Pardon me, boys, is that the Chattanooga choochoo?’ ” I sang, turning into my driveway and cutting the motor.
    “Mom! I’m home!” I sang out as I
opened up the front door. “Yoo-hoo.”
    No Mom.
    I checked her room.
    No Mom.
    I checked my room and the bathroom
just in case.
    No Mom.
    I’d noticed something different about
her room, and went back in. What was it? ... Her quilt, a patchwork made by her
aunt Someone, wasn’t on the bed. None of her personal belongings were on the
table beside the bed. The picture of me and Tony as kids and Mom and Pop that
was always beside her bed wasn’t beside her bed.
    All right.
    Maybe she took them all with her when
and wherever she went with Feeb, although they hadn’t been in the bag I’d
helped her pack and had carried downstairs to Feeb’s for her. But a quilt? Not
even my mom would take a quilt on holiday. I checked both closets, both were as
bare as the proverbial baby’s buns. So were all the drawers in the dresser.
Being a highly trained and skilled detective, it took me no time at all to come
up with the answer: Mom had done a moonlight flit on her little boy.
     
     
     

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
     
    I checked the top of the small bar
that separated the kitchenette area from the front room, because that’s where
we left notes for each other, on a memo pad I’d been lucky enough to find in my
stocking the Christmas before and which featured the old Dutch Cleanser lady
holding a broom, the handle of which was the pencil. There might be a note
saying Mom had run away to join the circus. Or maybe she’d found another man.
What the note I found did say was, “Feeb knows all, Feeb tells all.” I knew
Feeb was home, as I’d seen her battered old heap downstairs in the drive when
I’d parked mine, so I lumbered down to my landlady’s. She had her door open waiting
for me.
    “OK, Feeb, tell all.”
    “Sit down first,” she said. “Want a
cup of coffee or something? I got some fresh.”
    “Don’t mind if I do.” I sat down in
one of the two recliners that faced the fake fireplace. Feeb poured out two
cups from her automatic coffee maker, added the necessary, then brought them
over. My cup had a picture of two insipid children holding hands on it.
Underneath was written in a kid’s scrawl, “Love is ... sharing your last jelly
bean.”
    “All right, jelly bean,” I said after
taking a sip. “Out with it. Where’s Mom?”
    “In a home,” Feeb said. “Want a
brownie? Made ’em myself.”
    “Later, maybe. What home?”
    “It’s called Hilldale. It’s in the
hills between Glendale and Pasadena. I get there in about half an hour.”
    “How come she’s in a home all of a
sudden? When did you two come up with that idea? How come she didn’t wait till I got back?”
    “Now hold your horses, Vic. Your
mother knew exactly what she was doing. We’ve been talking about it for
months.”
    “Oh, you have, eh?”
    “Yes, we have and don’t get snitty
with me. It’s a fine place, my girl friend Shirl’s father is there—you know
Shirl—and I go visiting with her sometimes ’cause she hasn’t any other family.
It’s run by a really marvelous man, Dr. Donald Fishbein. Everyone calls him
Doctor Don.”
    “I am looking forward to meeting
marvelous Doctor Don,” I said.
    “So let’s go, soon as we finish our
coffee,” Feeb said. “You can visit any time out there up till eight-thirty.”
    I finished my coffee, went back
upstairs, changed into visiting clothes—a clean Hawaiian shirt, cream cords,
and tan moccasins—then got a lightweight blue fake-suede wind-breaker out of
the closet. I had three fake-suede windbreakers of assorted colors, which I—the
great expert, the canny, street-smart know-it-all—got conned into buying; so if
anyone wants one, size XL, cheap, you know where to come. It’s called the
Italian scam, for some reason. What happens is you’re walking along the
thoroughfare minding your own business, and a guy in a car perusing a map hails
you and calls you over. His story is he’s a salesman on the road with his
samples and he’s just lost all his dough either at Vegas or the races and he
has to peddle the last of his samples dirt-cheap for gas money to get home.
You, being so street-smart and all, know the guy’s lying, but you probably
figure, like I did, that what he’s really unloading are hot goods that fell off
the back of a truck somewhere. And of