Angels in Heaven (Vic Daniel Series) Read online

  ANGELS IN

  HEAVEN

  David M Pierce

  Copyright © 2014, David M. Pierce

  For Rick

  Critical praise for David M Pierce and the Vic Daniel series:

  "Pierce has an original voice and puts a sweet spin on genre conventions."

  -New York Times Book Review on DOWN IN THE VALLEY

  "Down in the Valley is a wonderful addition to private eye literature. It's witty, literate, and wise."

  -Tony Hillerman

  "Madcap storytelling and nutso types whose smart mouths run in overdrive…Pierce is a master of off-center characterizations and the oddball narrative view."

  -Publishers Weekly

  "If there isn't already a cult following for David M Pierce's V. (for Victor) Daniel novels, there soon will be. Now is your chance; pick up these novels, and read them right away. Impress your friends with your savvy, clairvoyance, and impeccable taste."

  -The Drood Review on WRITE ME A LETTER

  "Vic is a free spirit, an easygoing chap with a realistically cheery outlook on life…An entertaining, off-beat series."

  -Washington Post Book World on ROSES LOVE SUNSHINE

  "Full of clever tricks and surreptitious preparations. Just the right book for an upbeat mood."

  -Library Journal on ANGELS IN HEAVEN

  "The effort of having his tongue planted firmly in his cheek has not kept David M Pierce from crafting a delight in WRITE ME A LETTER."

  -Washington Times

  "A delightful addition to a wonderful series."

  -Baltimore Sun on WRITE ME A LETTER

  DAVID M PIERCE, born in Canada, has pursued the typical career path of an aspiring writer—aluminum company slave, furniture salesman, reporter, truck driver, door-to-door magazine salesman, stage manager, actor, bartender, and hat check girl. Besides his three previous Vic Daniels mysteries—Down in the Valley; Hear the Wind Blow, Dear; and Roses Love Sunshine—he has written lyrics for Alice Cooper, Chad 'n Jeremy, and John Entwhistle and co-wrote and acted in the musical comedy Captain Crash vs the Zorg Women, Parts 5 & 6. After many years in London and Los Angeles, David M Pierce now lives in Paris. Angels in Heaven is his fourth Vic Daniels mystery.

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  I once read on a lavatory wall the word pitiful described as the "state of an enemy after an imaginary encounter with oneself."

  I have another description of pitiful—the state of one V. Daniel (me) as I sat slumped over my secondhand desk in my God-knows-how-many-hand office on a certain Monday morning late in September, in the year 1987.

  And the fact that this office was in that scurvy part of California known as the San Fernando Valley, where smog is as common as dandruff on a bible salesman's collar and just about as chewy—well, that wasn't a big boost to my morale either.

  Pitiful was putting it mildly. Pitiful was something to look forward to when I felt better, a lot better.

  And from whence derived this emotional prostration?

  Not from, say, a trifle like a fortieth birthday. That had come and gone four years ago. Not from, say, the mere death of a loved one or some other petty excuse, such as the old family doctor telling me that I had but one more month to live before dying in excruciating agony from a parlay of leprosy of the balls and cancer of everywhere else. Nay, nothing so shabby, so one-horse, so niggardly.

  No, the cause of V. Daniel's degrading gloom lay right there on the peeling veneer in front of me. The items in question had, two days previously (a windy Saturday), cost me altogether just over one hundred dollars. And although commonly referred to as "they," they were really only one item and came in a fake leather case, or small sheath.

  I took them out reluctantly, polished them on the flimsy bit of rag the optician had generously included, and put them on. True, I could see better. True, I no longer had to bend over and peer at my computer screen from a distance of six inches. True, I could probably thread a needle now after, say, ten tries instead of a hundred, but how many needles does a macho guy like me thread in one lifetime, not very many, and who cares anyway?

  I got up and went back to the small washroom at the rear of the office and looked at myself in the streaky mirror for the tenth time that hour. Arthur Miller wore glasses; who laughed? But Woody Allen wore glasses and everyone laughed at him. And Clark Kent. And Sergeant Bilko. And Hirohito.

  The phone rang. I went back into the office proper and picked it up.

  "Hello?"

  "Eh, hello," said a deeply resonant male voice. "With whom am I conversin'?"

  "With Victor Daniel," I said, adding somewhat bitterly, "now known to one and all as Four-Eyes."

  "Yeah, well," the man said. He hesitated a minute. "Eh, see, it's like this, you were referred to me by my agent."

  "By name of?"

  "Oh, yeah, Bobby Seburn? The one you once did a job for? Him."

  "Ah yes," I said. "I remember it well." I had indeed once done a job for Mr. Robert Seburn, who was the type of recently invented combination agent and personal manager who handled sports people—golfers in silly footwear, petulant tennis players, basketball players, baseball players, and others of that overpaid subspecies. Mr. Seburn had wanted to divorce his wife and suspected that sufficient grounds existed. Not being averse to taking on such demeaning chores, I had agreed to look into it. It turned out that his wife was involved with someone else, all right—one of her girl friends—but like the man said, that is another story, and anyway it's already been told.

  "Would you be a sportsman, sir?" I asked my mystery caller.

  "You could say that," he said cautiously. "Eh, how's by you if I drop by sometime later today? I'm cool up till two-thirty."

  "You name it," I said. "I'll be here."

  We settled on one-thirty and hung up on each other. Hmm, I thought. Wonder what his story is. A sportsman, you could say. Sounded to be a black man. Statistically highly unlikely to be a golfer—there were only about two blacks on the professional circuit. He might be a designated hitter for the New York Yankees; he sounded worried enough. Well, I would just have to wait and see, wouldn't I?

  As it was then just after ten o'clock, that left me three and a half hours to fill, time enough to do a chore that I'd been putting off for no good reason but sloth, for a lawyer friend who had an office downtown near MacArthur Park. I wouldn't have to drag my weary but otherwise gorgeous bod all the way down there, though, as the work involved was more or less in my part of town, which was more or less Studio City.

  The chore was: to prove that one of my shyster pal Mel "The Swell" Evans' clients, a seventeen-year-old Latino whose given name was Ronaldo Isidro but whose gang name was—appropriately, according to Mel—Blades, could not possibly have gotten from point A, his abode on Roscoe, to point B, the scene of the crime (a stabbing), Tony's beer bar down on Lankershim Boulevard, in fifteen minutes. There were witnesses galore who swore Blades was in his casa ("house," to you illiterates) till seven forty-five the night in question, and another set of witnesses galore who swore the stabbing (in the lower tummy) happened at eight o'clock prec
isely, as some TV show they were all waiting for had just started. The assailant had not been identified by any one of the roomful of witnesses, unsurprisingly, but the cops had arrested Blades because (1) he was a member of a rival gang of the dead youth's, (2) these gangs hated each other, (3) Blades had been heard to say often, loudly, and publically that he (the slain youth) was already dead but just didn't know it yet, and (4) Blades wasn't called Blades because he shaved a lot.

  For those, like yours truly, who did the occasional job for those like Mel who weren't big enough to have a handy chap like me on their payroll full-time, alibi checking was a common and routine assignment most of the time. One had to be careful, though, to leave no conceivable loophole in one's statement, not even a hint of one, not even a mistake in syntax. So I got out my trusty memo pad, courtesy of M. Martel, Stationer, and neatly listed all the possible ways for a young, virile (overlooking such afflictions as undernourishment, lack of vitamins, drug addiction, and the like) male to get from point A to point B.

  Car. Bike. Motorcycle. Roller skates/skateboard. Foot. Plane. Boat. Helicopter. Train. Subway. Bus. Goodyear blimp. Flying carpet. Levitation. That seemed to about cover it.

  Rule out the fantastic. Rule out plane and helicopter. Likewise trains, as there weren't any. Likewise subway, as there wasn't one. Likewise boat, as the one river in the neighborhood had only a foot of water in it most of the time, and anyway, it ran the wrong way. That left car, foot, bus, bike, motorcycle, roller skates/skateboard. Method, attention to detail, logic—such are the attributes of the superior man.

  Car—well, that I could cover. I did have a car after all, a beauty too, I may add—a pink and blue Nash Metropolitan in perfect condition except for the shocks and plugs. Foot—that unfortunately meant running, which left me out. But was my landlord Elroy not a jogger and did he not owe me one? Bus—that was me again. Bike . . . now who did I know who was crazy enough to ride a bike in L.A. My brother Tony's two kids had bikes, but I never saw them use them and I sure wasn't going to ride around on one of those wobbly things.

  Someone once said, When in doubt, ask a woman. I think it was a woman. So I called up one, my woman, if I may put it so grossly. She was working but, I felt, not displeased to be disturbed for a few minutes by her wandering boy.

  "Evonne, sweetheart, don't get me wrong," I said, "but do you know anyone who rides a bike and who is young, male, and fit?"

  "Only a million," she said, naturally enough, as she worked as personal assistant to the vice-principal of a large high school that was only a few blocks away from my office.

  "Could you possibly have two of them present themselves at my office complete with bikes this lunchtime for a short but well-paid assignment?"

  "Sure, sweet pea," Evonne said. "What's it all about?"

  So I told her what it was all about, and then the conversation drifted into other, more intimate areas that frankly are too sensational to detail here. After blowing her a deeply felt kiss, I rang up Elroy, my office landlord, who not only owned the small cluster of one-story buildings that included my place of work but also a good deal of other real estate in and around Studio City.

  "My man, my main man!" he exclaimed after I'd explained my humble needs to him. "Consider it done. I'll see you anon. Sooner than anon."

  Then I took a deep breath and called up Sara Silvetti, a young female of my acquaintance who occasionally, when I had no other option, served me as a sort of girl Friday, only in her case it was more like Monday.

  "Sara? It's me, your main man," I said when she'd finally answered the phone. "Hope I'm not disturbing you in the middle of something important, like writing an ode to your mistress's eyebrow." I should mention here that Sara, if you took her word for it, was a poetess, but as far as I was concerned, the rubbish she wrote made "Queen for a Day" seem intellectually stimulating.

  "Rock on, Pops," the twerp said. "Sooner or later you'll come to the point, and I hope it's sooner 'cause I got more important things to do than shoot the breeze with grumpy old has-beens like you."

  Like what?" I scoffed.

  Like putting garbage down the chute, like washing some tights, like eating some roughage, like a million things."

  Well, pardon me ever so," I said. "I did not know we were going through an active phase. Listen, gruesome, want a job"

  "Doing what, Pops?" she said suspiciously. "Risking my life again for peanuts?"

  "I merely want you to roller-skate, or skateboard—the choice is yours, they are roughly equal means of transportation—from point A to point B. Then I want you to go back to point A and skate to point B again. Is that so much to ask?"

  "Depends where points A and B are, don't it, master mind?" she said. " 'Cause if point A is in South Dakota and point B is in Tasmania, you can forget it."

  "Grow up, for God's sake," I said wearily.

  "You grow up," she said. "What do you want to be when you grow up, anyway?"

  "The opposite of you," I said. "A kindly grandmother. And points A and B are only a few minutes away from each other, so get over here, will you?"

  "I'll think about it," she said and hung up on me. Was I worried? Not a whit. She'd come all right, she was probably already out the door. If there was one thing she loved more than racking her feeble adolescent brain for rhymes for surfboard: uppers; gross; like, man; weed; pot; far out; yeccch; and the few other words that formed the basis of both her vocabulary and her poems, it was what she called "sleuthing" for me.

  Sleuthing? I ask you. I've never sleuthed in my life.

  I had one more call to make to complete the list, and that was to Willing Boy, another kid I let rob me blind from time to time for doing some simple task. This one worked for the delivery/message service I used regularly. So I called the service and the lady dispatcher there informed me that Willing Boy was available and then added, as she always did, that he was already on his way, although I knew full well he was still lounging in the back room, combing his hair and looking at pictures of Evel Knievel in Motorcycle Monthly.

  Within fifteen minutes or so, all my troops had gathered, including of course Sara, who was the first to arrive. Did I mention she was, as well as being a poetess, a punk? Sara was a punk like the pope was you know what, like I liked chili dogs heavy on the grease, and like they didn't like me.

  That September morn she waltzed into my office seemingly straight from a cast party of the Rocky Horror Picture Show—her yellow hair sprayed up into points in the new, daring, porcupine look; her skinny frame draped in an old herring net worn over an orange body stocking with so many holes, locusts must have wintered in it. On her feet were an elegant pair of wedgies—too bad they were different colors. She had a pair of roller skates slung over one bony shoulder, and strapped on her back was a stuffed elephant with a zipper in it, so apparently it doubled both as a pet and a backpack. Her lipstick was black. Her fingernail polish was white. On one cheek she had drawn with an eyebrow pencil a crisscrossed hatching effect that presumably represented a scar.

  "I say!" she said as soon as she'd come in. "Get the prof! What are those specs for, Prof, you in disguise?"

  I'd actually forgotten I had the damn things on, so I whipped them off and hurriedly tucked them away in a pocket.

  "I am, as a matter of fact," I said. "I occasionally do have to look like I have an IQ of more than fifty, unlike some I could mention. And I adore your hair like that. It is hair, I presume, not just one of Bozo the Clown's fright wigs." That one was rather neat, I thought.

  "Now I know what to get for your birthday, Prof," she said, snapping her beringed fingers in a phony air of discovery, as if she'd been up nights thinking about it. "A year's supply of Sight-Savers."

  I was just preparing my withering retort when Willing Boy pulled up outside on his beloved Yamaha, cut the motor, and then gave us a wave through the reinforced glass of my front picture window, which I noticed still needed washing. He'd no sooner come in when Elroy went jogging past, disappeared out of sight,
then came back again, looked in the window, did a take, disappeared again, then reappeared again running backward. I don't know—some days everyone thinks he's a comic.

  After he'd finally come in, I introduced everyone to everyone and asked them to kindly settle down so we could get on with it. Sara perched by my shoulder on the corner of the desk, as was her wont, but not mine. Elroy took the spare chair facing me, and Willing Boy propped his lanky frame against the wall and tried to appear attentive, which was difficult with the amount of leg, albeit spindly, that Sara was showing.

  Willing Boy was a tall, tanned, handsome youth with shoulder-length blond hair that he was addicted to coiffing with a foot-long plastic affair he kept tucked in the back pocket of his leathers. He had done many a chore for me in the past, some of them legal.

  The ponytailed Elroy was not much older than Willing Boy. He'd come into his real estate empire some years before, when his parents, two uncles, and an aunt or two died in a horrific car crash one rainy night outside Riverside. To everyone's amazement but his own (since he had a well-founded reputation for being a total space cadet), he had done extremely well. He too was a good-looking young man, although not the knockout that Willing Boy was. Despite his riches, it was Elroy's fancy to dress down, way down, usually in torn cutoffs, $1.99 K-mart T-shirts, and the cheapest flip-flops on the market, but that day he had for jogging purposes put on a disgraceful pair of tattered sneakers instead.

  I looked them over—ah, my brave boys and my bonny tomboy lass—once more into the breach we go.

  "Everyone got a watch?" I said.

  Everyone did but Sara. I sighed and lent her mine.

  "Please ensure that all your timepieces are in working order."

  They all did.

  "Everyone know where the corner of Roscoe and Lankershim is?"

  Everyone knew but Sara. I sighed, got out my Rand McNally, and pointed it out to her.

  "Point A," I said," is an apartment building at 11167½ Roscoe. Point B is a Mexican beer bar called Tony's at 52005 Lankershim. We will proceed in convoy to point A, me and Sara and Elroy in my car, Willing Boy on that death trap of his. When I say go, we all head for Tony's in our various ways and means, making a precise note of the time we get there. Everyone got a pen and paper?"