As she rides by

call to Father Romero, and he was in; he promised to bring along a spare dicky, too. Then I got on to Benny the Boy, after calling three different numbers, which was about par for tracking him down; I finally got him at the manager’s apartment in one of the buildings he owned in Anaheim. Owned not in his own name, needless to say. Owned by a company registered in the Cayman Islands, also needless to say. Remind me to tell you sometime about the advantages of having real estate in the U.S. owned by some offshore company, friends; your beady, bloodshot eyes will pop in jealous dismay, as mine did when Benny told me when I was in the hospital one time. I forget what for, but it sure wasn’t the mumps.
    So I asked Benny how he was. He said he was OK, how was I? I said
    I was OK, how was his girl? He said she was OK, how was my dog? I said he was OK, so was Evonne, so was Sara, and so was everyone else I knew in the world, and asked him what size dicky he wore.
    He had to admit he did not know, as he did not know what a dicky was. I said I hoped a dicky was that fake shirtfront with attached collar that preacher types wore. He said oh. Then he said, why? I told him why; he said, copacetic, Victor, I will be there, and hung up. All right, I thought to myself, we are in the groove today, we are truckin’, baby. Who is left? Naught but Injun Joe—who is supposed to call by tomorrow morning, and if I’m out, the day after tomorrow morning—and S. (Sad Sack) Silvetti, whom I promptly dialed. Well, I didn’t dial her, if you want to nitpick, I dialed her number.
    Of course she was in; she was always in, it seemed like; you’d think she’d leave the apartment once in a while at least to walk through fallen leaves and haunt graveyards and fall drearily in love with anarchists in berets and wear a long cape even in the summer and stick old candle stubs in used Chianti bottles and do all them other poetic things as well.
    She was thrilled to hear from me, although she tried futilely to hide the fact behind her habitual barrage of insults, vulgarity, and unwanted references to such peripheral matters as my age, my thinning locks, lack of sartorial sense, and so on and so on. She really could be—and generally was—as tiresome as a mole removal treatment at a Mexican dermatologist’s.
    When she finally stopped to take a breath, or maybe it was to sharpen her quill, I jumped in.
    “Friday,” I said. “Five-thirty, at my office; that’ll give us a half hout to rehearse before the meeting starts.” j
    “Rehearse what?” she said suspiciously. “And what meeting, Alcoholics Anonymous, or in your case, unanonymous?”
    “A meeting of concerned citizens is what meeting.”
    “Concerned about what?”
    “Concerned about the Pussycat Adult Cinema Company putting up a new porno theater right next to my office,” I said.
    “What you’re probably concerned about is they won’t let you in free,” she said. “So what do you want me to do about it, picket the joint? No way, Jose.”
    “I want you,” I said patiently, “to act the challenging role of the President of the Wade Dean Christian Students’ Movement. As the president of the Wade Dean Christian Students’ Movement is a girl, you will unfortunately have to discard your male attire for the evening. And as she is a high school student of, say, eighteen max, you will have to look and act like a girl high school student of eighteen max. I’ll explain the rest of it when you get here Friday, toodle-oo.” And I hung up.
    In case any of you are vaguely wondering what she was doing in male garb in the first place, may I say that once upon an idle moment I had queried her on that same subject, and gotten back some load of nonsense about George Sand, whoever he was, and George Eliot, whoever he was; make sense of that if you can.
    That Tuesday was also enlivened by the mailman, for once in his life. Usually my mail was so boring that a “Dear John” letter was something to look forward to. At least it didn’t try to vend me something I didn’t want for a lot of money I didn’t have. A tip: If a stamped, self-addressed envelope is enclosed, put another company’s rubbish in it and mail it back, that’s what I do.
    Anyway. From Sneezy came a whole sheaf of papers. Translated more or less into English, the facts in the case involving Jonesy’s missus were more or less these:
    She, Mrs. Leonard Richard (Mary) Jones (nee Clark; address given) and a friend, one