She nodded. "It's disappointing though," she said.

"What is?"

"That you're not faster than a speeding bullet."

"Think how I feel," I said.

We swung into the entrance of the Beverly Hillcrest. "Take a shower," she said. "Have a drink. Dinner in the room. Get rid of jet lag. Have a night's rest. I'll pick you up at eight thirty tomorrow morning, and you start working."

"You'll be okay tonight," I said.

"I was all right last night."

I got out. A servant took my suitcase. Everyone else watched Candy SIoan drive away. The folks at the Hillcrest didn't seem too much more laid-back than I was.

Chapter3.

IF YOU LOOKED straight out from the small balcony outside my room at the Beverly Hillcrest, you could see the Hollywood Hills and the sign that said HOLLYWOOD, and the spa.r.s.e high-rises along Sunset and Hollywood boulevards. If you looked down, you could see the parking lot and the side entrance to the hotel. In between the parking lot and the hills you could survey the immaculate, peculiar stillness of Beverly Hills.

I drank coffee and ate a slice of fresh pineapple and some whole wheat toast. It was seven in the morning. I had neglected to bring my silk robe with the velvet lapels and was forced to lounge on the balcony shirtless, wearing a pair of blue shorts and no shoes. My feet were pale and eastern-looking. Actually so was my chest. Humiliating. I finished breakfast. By seven fiftcen I had on my running shoes and a beige T-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and I was heading north on Beverly Drive at an easy jog. The T-shirt had one of tluosc computer-printout pictures of Susan on it. We'd thought it was funny in a shopping mall last December. I figured the beige color would look like a tan froun a distance.

The streets were spotless and empty of foot traffic. The houses were predominantly SpanishTudor-Colonial-Modern, showing the influences of Christopher Wren, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Walter Disney. Across Wilshire I was into the heart of sleekness. Three short blocks at a faster pace and it was behind me. I was across Santa Monica Boulevard and back in residential elegance.

I ran up Beverly to the little park in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel on Sunset, turned around, and ran back down Rodeo Drive. Huge palms with pineappley bark lined the streets. Back across both Santa Monicas. (Was there anywhere else, I thought, that had two streets running side by side with the same name? No, I thought. There wasn't.) Rodeo Drive was even more epically chic than Beverly Drive. The names of internationally known hairdressers graced the windows of small buildings elegantly crafted of fake stone and make-believe stucco. People didn't seem to get up early here. I was still nearly alone, and the shops were mostly closed. If I were an international hairdo superstar, I'd probably sleep in myself. I wondered if they all talked funny, or just the ones I'd seen on television. Maybe you have to talk that way or when you're in New York, you can't get into Studio 54.

I arrived back at the hotel at eight with a pretty good sweat worked up. At eight thirty I had showered the sweat off, shaved, and put on my best warmweather wardrobe. Summer-weight blue blazer, gray slacks, yellow Oxford shirt from Brooks Brothers, b.u.t.ton-down collar worn without a tie, top two b.u.t.tons open so I would look real Coast. In the breast pocket of the blazer I had a yellow silk show handkerchief; on the feet, cordovan loafers; on the right hip, a gun. I slipped into a pair of sungla.s.ses I'd bought once in the Fairmont Hotel in Dallas. Then I checked the mirror. Should I unb.u.t.ton the shirt two more b.u.t.tons and wear a bullet around my neck on a gold chain? Too pushy. They might think I was an agent.

The phone rang. I answered. A man's voice said, "Mr. Spenser?"

"Yes."

"My name's Rafferty. I'm in the lobby. Candy Sloan asked me to come by and get you. She's been hurt and wants to see you."

"I'll be right down," I said.

"I'm driving a yellow Mazda RX7. I'll be right outside the door."

I went down the seven flights rather than wait for the elevator.

Rafferty was where he said he'd be. He was standing on the driver's side with the door partially open, one foot in the car.

I got into the Mazda, and he slipped into his side, snapped it into gear, spun the car around in the driveway, and rammed it out of the driveway and onto Beverly Drive at a considerable rate.

"What happened?" I said.

"She got beat up."

"Is she all right?"

"What do you mean, 'Is she all right?" he said. "You ever seen anybody beat up?"

"How badly is she hurt?" I said.

"She'll recover."

"Who beat her up?"

"Ask her."

We wheeled onto Santa Monica toward West Hollywood. Rafferty drove very economically and very fast. He was strong-looking, deeply tanned, with a Strong neck and muscular forearms. He wore a green Lacoste polo shirt, pale Levi's jeans, and blue Tiger running shoes with green crosshatched striping. His face was chiseled and full of character, with a dimple in each cheek and one in the chin. He wore his hair longish and combed back. It was brown and sunlightened. In short he was manly and gorgeous. Except it was all in miniature. He couldn't have been taller than five feet six, and he probably weighed a hundred and fifty.

I said, "It is kind of you not to burden me with information overload. Just looking at me, you could probably tell I need facts in very small doses."

He slammed the car into a left turn where Santa Monica meets Doheny and we were going uphill on Doheny toward Sunset.

Without looking at me, he said, "Don't f.u.c.k around with me, Jack, I've handled bigger guys than you."

"And weren't they surprised," I said.

We turned off Doheny just below Sunset and onto Wetherly Drive.

"She wants to see you, so she'll see you," Rafferty said. "But anytime after that, you want to try me out, wise guy, why, start right in."

I didn't seem to have him intimidated.

We stopped in front of a small neat house among many small neat houses on Wetherly Drive. They built close together in L.A. A lot of good-looking vine that I couldn't identify grew over the blank front of the house. We went down the narrow pa.s.sage between this house and its neighbor. Rafferty unlocked the door and we went in. The floors were polished hardwood, to the right was a large living room. The back wall of the living room was gla.s.s and looked out onto a pool and a small cabana that occupied all there was of the backyard. The pool sparkled with blue water-clarified, filtered, and pH-balanced-and the effect in the living room was of s.p.a.ce and nature in a remarkably small area. Candy Sloan half sat on the couch in front of the gla.s.s wall, her feet up, wearing a blue silk bedjacket with a mandarin collar. One eye was closed; her lip was badly swollen and showed the loose end of a st.i.tch at one corner. There was a darkening lump on her forehead, above the good eye. When I came in, she moved her face slightly. I a.s.sumed she was smiling. The movement obviously hurt, and she stopped.

"I guess they were serious," she said. She barely moved her mouth. Her voice was normal and seemed out of place, issuing from the battered face.

"Anything broken," I said.

"No."

"How about the body? Ribs? Anything?"

"They just hit me in the face," she said. "Messed it up."

I nodded. Rafferty had gone to the alcove off the living room and poured coffee from an electric percolator on the sideboard. To his right I could see a stand-up kitchen.

"I should've been here," he said.

"It didn't even happen here, Mickey," she said. "We've been through this. Let's not do it again."

"How about the bozo you hired." Rafferty tossed his chin at me. "Him. Where the h.e.l.l was he?"

"Mickeyl" she said. The force of her saying it made her wince.

He drank some coffee and was quiet, but the cords in his neck were still taut.

I said, "Tell me about it."

She said, "After I dropped you off, I went back to the station. I had to tape a three-minute insert for the six o'clock news. Right after I got through taping, I got a call from someone named Danny. He said he had something hot on the series I'd been doing and wanted to meet me. He wouldn't talk on the phone and said he was being followed. He said he'd meet me in Griffith Park in the zoo parking lot. He said he'd be driving a black van with orange flames painted on it and Nevada plates."

Talking was a bit of an effort for her. She stopped.

"And you went, G.o.ddammit, by yourself," Rafferty said. "Why in h.e.l.l didn't you call me?" He had set his coffee down on the dining table and was grinding his right fist into his left palm as he talked.

"I'm a reporter, Mick," she said. "I am not just a G.o.dd.a.m.n talking head that reads somebody else's stuff off the crawl."

"You're also my woman," he said.

"No, Mickey. I'm my woman."

With his teeth clenched Rafferty said, "s.h.i.t," walked into the small kitchen, leaned his hands on the counter, and stared into the sink. The position made his shoulders hunch up.

I walked over to the percolator and poured some coffee into a mug. "Then what?" I said. I sipped some coffee. It was weak.

"I went to Griffith Park. The van was there. I got out of my car and walked over to it. A man got out of the back of the van. I walked over to him and he shoved me into the back, came in after me, and the van started up. While it drove around, the man in the back beat me."

"Did he say anything?"

"Yes. He said, 'I'm not going to kill you this time, I'm going to mess up your face.' And he hit me. And he said, 'If you keep snooping around, I'll kill you.' And then he hit me some more. I covered up as much as I could, but he was much stronger."

"And?"

"And after about ten minutes they dumped me out on the Ventura Freeway and drove off. I never lost consciousness."

"Who found you?"

"Highway patrol. They took me to the hospital and then I got in touch with Mickey, and he came and brought me home."

"Cops get a statement from you?"

"Yes."

"Description of the guy?"

"Yes."

"License number?"

"Yes. But they didn't seem too excited. Said it was probably stolen for the occasion."

I nodded. "Tell me about the guy."

"Short, fat, very strong, balding, black mustache and goatee, tattoos on the knucklcs ot one loand and here," she indicated the crotch of her thumb and forefinger, "on the other."

"hnow what they said?"

"Jesus Christ." Rafferty had returned from the kitchen. "How is she supposed to remember what they said. The guy's punching her."

I looked at him for a moment. "Mickey," I said, "if you keep annoying me at my work, I'm going to make you wait in the car."

"Try it, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You won't make me do nothing."

"Mickey," Candy said, stretching out the last vowel. "He has to ask. That's what I hired him for. You're just making it harder."

"Not as hard as I can make it," Mickey said. "You shouldn't have hired him in the first place, big-deal eastern hotshot. He don't know his a.s.s from a freeway out here."

"Mickey," I said.

"You got me," he said to Candy. "You don't need him."

"Mickey," I said a little stronger.

"Sure he's big, but how quick can he move. How far will he go. He don't care about you. He's just a f.u.c.king employee."

A tear started down Candy Sloan's cheek. Then another one.

I asked, "Mickey, do I have to prove it?"

He didn't say a word, but he raised his right hand toward me and beckoned me with it slowly, moving his feet slightly as he did so, into a kind of right-angled balance, the left foot pointed at me.

Candy said, "Jesus Christ."

I said, "Listen, Mick. I know what's bothering you. It would bother me. It would bother me even more if I was a subcompact, but there's no point to this."

He gestured at me again, his left arm a rigid diagonal across his body, his knees bent.

"I weigh fifty pounds more than you do. I used to be a fighter. I am good, and more than that, it's what I do. I am a professional. n.o.body your size has ever come close."

He slid, almost skittered across the room, and snapped a short chop at the side of my neck where it joins the shoulders. I hunched up the muscle and took the chop. It was good but it was a welterweight chop. He was out of his division.

I pushed out a slow right-hand punch that missed his head by a foot. He pounced on the arm, turned his hip into me, and tried to throw me. I didn't let him. I kept the arm bent so he couldn't work against my elbow and braced my front leg so he couldn't pivot me over his hip. He heaved into his throw and nothing happened. We stood in strained counterpoise for a minute. Then, with my left hand, I took a good hold on his belt at the small of his back and lifted his feet off the ground. At the same time I forced my right arm back in against his neck until I could get a grip on his shirt front. He tried to spin loose, but with his feet off the ground he didn't have a lot of traction. I shifted my feet, arched my back a bit, took a deep breath, and jerked him up over my head, holding him horizontal to the floor. The ceiling in the living room was just high enough.

"Mick," I said, trying to keep my voice easy, as if there was no strain to it, "either we agree to be pals, or I fire you through that window."

I don't think I pulled off the no strain part. "Quick," I said. My arms felt a little trembly. He wasn't as heavy as a barbell, but he wasn't as nicely balanced either.

"Yes," he said.

I set him down on his feet. He was very flushed, and his breathing was quick and short. He stared at me without any sound but the quick breathing. His eyes were very wide. His nostrils seemed flared and pale. One eyelid trembled.