Free Angels in Heaven by David M Pierce

being worried to being
disgusted to being angry.
    When she finally simmered down, I
said, “If you’re still being seen in public with a violent roughneck like me,
we’re invited for a thank-you feast next door tonight sometime.”
    “Me too?” said the twerp immediately.
    “Of course,” I said warmly. “And
listen, Doris, I didn’t mean to ride you. I think you look terrific and thanks
for doing it.”
    “Get stuffed, Prof,” she had the
nerve to say. “I like you better when you’re being your real self, a grumpy,
miserly old fart.”
    “Attagirl, Doris,” I said. “I’m glad
to see you’ve only changed externally.”
    We made a rough date for later, and
the ladies exited, leaving me to get on with my chores. I hoped Willing Boy
liked the Doris Day look. I wished Benny would call; I was getting impatient
with just putting in the time.
    By four-thirty or so I’d had enough
and was clearing up my desk when I did get a call, but it wasn’t Benny, it was
Mrs. Silvetti, Doris’s adoptive Mom. I’d met her and her hubby, Max, a couple
of times, once at the Silvetti apartment, east of me off Woodman Avenue, and
then at Lubinski, Lubinski & Levi’s (Family Jewelers For Over Twenty
Years) reopening party. The missus was a pleasant, short lady in her middle
forties, I guess, although guessing people’s ages isn’t the easiest game in Tinsel Town, Cal. It turned out Mrs. Silvetti had called to thank me.
    “I don’t know how you did it,” she
said. “I almost fell through the floor when Sara came in a while ago.”
    “Me too,” I said. “But it was nothing
much. I somehow came up with the idea that Sara was tiring slightly of her
number and, given the right encouragement, might drop it. Nothing, really.”
    “Max’ll just curl up and die,” she
said. “Max will take one look at her, fall on the floor, kick his little legs
in the air, and shout, ‘God be praised.’ ”
    “It might be better,” I suggested,
“not to make a big thing about it, to underplay it, like I did. Say something
casual lihke, ‘You look nice, dear. Done your hair differently?” Mrs. Silvetti
laughed. “Differently,” she said. “Differently!”
    I took the opportunity to ask her how
she felt about Sara’s going down to Mexico with me and my friend Benjamin for a
few days on a completely safe, routine investigation.
    “Of what?” she of course wanted to
know.
    “Eh, penal conditions,” I said, not
entirely mendaciously. “I need someone to help with the paperwork, and I
naturally thought of Sara, as she’s bright and she types and she can spell
everything except weird. Naturally she would be properly, indeed,
generously recompensed, and needless to say, all her f expenses covered.”
    “Well, it might be good for the child
to get away for a while,” Mrs. Silvetti said. “Max and I are always saying our
pet needs some excitement in her life.”
    If you only knew, I thought. If Max
ever found the copies of all Doris’s silly reports she once told me she was
keeping for possible publication when she became famous, he’d not only fall on
the floor and kick his little legs up in the air, he’d have an instant coronary
occlusion. Anyway, that took care of one of my problems. Now all that remained
were a jailbreak, a country break, and that dear old mother o’ mine.
    As it happened, what to do with Mom
while I was off capering in southern climes was resolved five minutes after I
arrived home that early evening. What I was planning on doing was what I always
did when the need arose—ask Tony and Gaye to take her, and then I would keep
her whatever extra days were involved when my turn came around again, my niece
and nephew didn’t mind, they liked their old gran, but my brother and
sister-in-law, especially Tony, always made me pay for the favor somehow. I put
it down merely to a younger brother’s jealously, but I could be mistaken, I
suppose.
    Anyway, when I told Mom it looked
like I’d be going away for a