Write me a Letter

feet. ” C’est la vie. Thanks anyway, it was just a chance.”
    ”May I pop into the ladies before I go, dear?” Momma asked Tin-Thieu.
    ”Sure,” she said. She led Momma out of the room; I presumed that what Momma really wanted was a quick look around at the rest of the apartment. I told Finger-Lickin’ Good how much I’d enjoyed his playing the night before.
    ”Thank you very much,” he said with becoming modesty. ”It helps if you enjoy what you’re doing.”
    ”How true,” I said. We sat smiling at each other until the ladies came back.
    ”You should see the bedroom!” Momma gushed. ”It’s so chic! So uncluttered!”
    ”Take a bow, Tin-Thieu,” D. Gresham said. ”It’s all her work.”
    Momma went on raving about the bedroom all the way to the door and then back up the path. As soon as we climbed into the Olds again, she unlocked the glove compartment and switched on the police radio inside.
    ”What’s up?” I said. ”Calling the cops?”
    ”Right on, dear,” she said. She got on to Control, identified herself, and asked for a patrol car to meet up with us a couple of blocks down the street, and directed Control to direct the patrol car to take a route that did not have it pass, sirens blazing, directly in front of D. Gresham’s uncluttered bedroom.
    ”It couldn’t have been the guitars,” I mused aloud, ”although a couple of those Fender Rhodes looked like custom jobs to me and worth a small fortune.” All right, I may not be a great connoisseur of faience, sue me, but guitars I do know something about. Back east one time in the long long ago when all things still seemed possible, I labored as a gopher/chauffeur/bodyguard for a pop star whose star ascended mightily for a brief span until its inevitable wane due to the old and trite reasons. However, thus it was that I gained what little expertise I had on the subject of custom Rhodes and one-off Martins, to say nothing of the customs of rising pop stars before, after, and sometimes during their gigs.
    ”Not the guitars,” Momma agreed. She hooked up her seat belt, made me do likewise, and drove us off down the street to our rendezvous.
    ”No fair if it was something you saw I didn’t,” I said. ”Like in the uncluttered bedroom you adored so much.”
    ”You saw it, too,” she said.
    ”Ah yes,” I said. ”The carpet he was sitting on. Mongolian. Early nineteenth. Fourth dynasty. Did you ever see such closeness of weave!”
    Momma grinned at me.
    ”A silver, copper, and brass gau ,” she said. ”Not too old. I suspect it was made by one of the Tibetans living in Kalimpong, West Bengal . Elaborately repoussed. Chased silver face. Ornamented with the traditional eight Buddhist symbols of good fortune. Not enormously valuable but highly collectible.”
    ”That there tinny shrine thing?”
    ”That there tinny traveling shrine thing.” She pulled up at our meeting place and backed deftly into a parking space between two cars that obviously wasn’t big enough. ”Silly of him to keep it, really, but it is gorgeous and I guess he figured no one would ever spot it as the real thing and even if someone did, so what. It was on one of the lists I ran through before we left.”
    ”Little did he reckon on Mighty Mom dropping in for tea,” I said. Momma beamed and slouched down in her seat so she could keep an eye on D. Gresham’s entrance in her wing mirror.
    ”I wish that bloody patrol car would get here,” she said.
    ”What’s the hurry?” I said.
    ”What if D. Gresham gets to thinking?” said Momma. ”Wonder how they got my name and address, he thinks. Had to be from Ron, he thinks. He calls up Ron. ‘Did you give my name and address to a private detective named V. Daniel or a Captain Chapman?’ ‘No,’ says Ron, ‘but I did give it to some mother called Don Upton who said he was getting married next month.’ ”
    ”Oh-oh,” said V. Daniel.
    ”Adiós, amigos,” said Momma. ”D. Gresham is out of there pronto with that there tinny shrine thing tucked under his arm.”
    ‘And maybe a Hockney or two under his shirt,” I said. ”Why didn’t you collar him then and there? You’re a cop.”
    ”One thing you learn, and you learn it the hard way,” she said.
    ”As if there was any other way,” I said.
    ”Always, always phone in for a backup first.”
    ”What about me?” I said indignantly. ‘A girl couldn’t want a better backup than me.”
    ”An official one, dear,” she said, patting my