M. Ruth Myers

A week before Christmas, 1942, a crook makes off with presents intended for poor kids at an after-school youth center, bashing the handyman over the head in the process. Private investigator Maggie Sullivan, no fonder of kids than she is of the cut-rate fee she accepts for the job, soon suspects there's more to the burglary than meets the eye. The handyman, recuperating at home, seems to have been addled by the blow to his head..
He keeps insisting he was attacked by an angel. As she ferrets her way to the truth, Maggie is helped by a pair of ten-year-old girls and a flamboyant local woman who in the 1920s was a notorious speakeasy owner and now is a very rich pillar of society with a tendency to take over. This SHORT STORY features characters from novels in the author's Maggie Sullivan mystery series.