He said, "Oh?"

"I need it, Zeke. This is important to me."

"Tell me about it."

She did, everything, except the name of her eyewitness. Zeke sat motionless and looked right at her as she talked.

"And if you break this thing open, it will mean a lot to your career," he said when she was through.

"Absolutely," Candy said. "More air time, more feature stuff, more hard-news a.s.signments, maybe a shot at the networks, who knows. I know that it's still hard for a woman to push her way up through the men in the news business. And if I can't handle a real story when it starts to break, it will be much harder."

Zeke nodded. He looked at me. I had my arms crossed and was watching the occasional pedestrian go by on Sunset.

"That explains the big fella here," Zeke said.

"He's a bodyguard," Candy said. "He's not doing the investigating for me."

"No skill-work," I said, "just heavy lifting."

Zeke nodded. He tucked his lower lip under the edge of his mustache and sucked down on his upper lip. "An agent doesn't make it out here by gossiping to the press about studio heads," he said.

"I know. It's background. I'll never quote you," Candy said.

Zeke sucked on his upper lip some more.

"It's not just the career, Zeke," Candy said. "It's... the fat son of a b.i.t.c.h beat me up. Dragged me into a van and punched and slapped me and threw me out on the Ventura Freeway like an empty c.o.ke can."

The tall woman with the gray suit stuck her head in the door.

She said, "Excuse me, Zeke, but we're going to screen those clips that Universal sent over." She talked with her teeth clenched and without moving her lips. She was like someone Central Casting had sent over to play an Ivy League executrix. I looked at Candy. She wasn't looking at me. She was looking hard at Zeke. Zeke looked at his chronograph. He looked at Candy.

"Go ahead without me, Mary Jane, I can't leave right now."

One point for old Zeke.

"Want us to reschedule?" the executrix said.

Zeke shook his head and made a slight dismissal gesture with the first three fingers of his right hand.

"I'll give you a file memo of my reaction, Zeke," she said, and pulled her head out of the room. Zeke unclasped his hands and rubbed the bridge of his nose with his thumb and forefinger.

"I'm a.s.s-deep in file memos from Mary Jane," he said.

"She got lockjaw?" I asked.

"No," Zeke said. "She went to Smith."

"What about Summit Studios, Zeke?" Candy said.

He nodded at the door. "Could you close that for me," he said. I got up and closed it.

"And Roger Hammond," Zeke said when the door was closed.

Candy nodded.

"I have heard," Zeke said, "that Hammond got into a lot of fiscal difficulty about five years ago and that somebody in a West Coast Mob family bailed him out."

"Who was the mobster?"

"I don't know."

"Personal or business?" Candy said.

"Business. I heard he mismanaged the studio into an economic pit. He had a lot of money out that did not return investment. He bought a lot of bad properties, packaged them wrong, and they bombed. He couldn't get the product into the theaters after a while. So then I heard he started embezzling from the profitable releases to cover the losses on the bombs, and he started juggling books so that his bosses wouldn't know how bad it was."

"His bosses are who?" Candy said.

"Oceania Limited: Petroleum, Timber, Mineral Processing, and Moviemaking." Zeke shook his head and made the kind of mouth movement you make when you've gotten ashes on your tongue.

"Oceania catch on?" I said. Candy looked at me and frowned. "Oops," I said. "Am I in your s.p.a.ce?" Candy shook her head in small annoyance looked at Zeke.

"Did they?" she said.

"Catch on?" He shrugged. "Hammond is still there."

"Because he got money from a mobster to cover the losses?"

Zeke nodded. "That's what I hear."

"What did the mobster get?" Candy said.

"I don't know," Zeke said. "It's not the kind of thing I want to know too much about. What I hear about mobsters they must have got something."

"They got Hammond," I said.

"What do you mean 'got'?" Candy said.

"Like Mephistopheles 'got' Faust," I said. "But they won't wait to collect."

"Why are you so sure?" Candy said.

"It's too easy. They bail him out and now they own him, and they're in the movie business and he fronts it. Dirty money goes in, clean money comes out."

"You think the Mob controls Summit Pictures?" Candy said.

"If what Zeke hears is right, I can almost promise you," I said.

Candy looked at Zeke. "What do you think?" she said.

He shrugged. "He'd know more about that than I would, I think."

Candy looked back at me. "It makes sense, doesn't it."

I nodded.

Zeke said, "I will deny ever saying anything about this, Candy."

"You won't have to," Candy said. "I'll never mention you. You can trust me."

He nodded. "There's no one else I would have talked to," he said.

"It would be nice to believe that, Zeke," she said. ' They looked silently at each other for a while and I looked out the window. Then Candy said, "Thank you, Zeke," and we got up and left.

Chapter9.

"I WANT TO go to dinner," Candy said, "and I want you to escort me."

"I'll risk that," I said.

We went to The Palm on Santa Monica. The walls were covered with clumsy murals of show-biz celebrities in caricature. But my plate was covered with medium-rare b.u.t.terflied lamb chops and asparagus with hollandaise.

I drank a little beer. "You have a plan?" I said.

"Keep talking and asking," she said. She ate a scallop carefully. "That's what investigative reporting is. Talking, asking; asking, talking."

I nodded. "Who you going to ask and talk with next?"

"Somebody at Oceania."

"Got a name?"

"No. Any suggestions?"

"Why not the president. Might as well get as close as we can to G.o.d." I ate some lamb chop.

"I agree. We'll do it tomorrow morning," she said.

A man next to us-dark suit, white French cuffs, large oynx cuff links-said to the waiter, "Tell Frank I'm out here and tell him to give me that center cut he's been saving."

The waiter, an old man with no expression on his face, said, "Yes, sir. How you want that?"

The middle-aged man said, "How do I want it? Frank knows d.a.m.n well how I want it. Barely dead."

He raised both hands as if measuring a fish while he spoke.

The waiter said, "Rare. Very good, sir." He went away.

The middle-aged man was with a smooth red-haired young woman in a low-necked green dress and a younger man in a gray three-piece suit and a striped tie. They were all drinking red wine.

"Wait'll you see the piece of beef Frank'll have for me," the middle-aged man said. He looked around to see if I was impressed. He had a diamond pinkie ring on his right hand. "You shoulda had a piece, honey," he said to the woman beside him. She smiled and said yes, she probably should, but she could never eat all that. The guy in the gray suit drank his wine rapidly.

I said to Candy, "Would it violate the terms of my contract if I told that guy to shut up about his G.o.dd.a.m.n roast beef?"

Candy smiled. "I think you're just supposed to concentrate on protecting me. I think you're supposed to give etiquette instructions on your own time."

When we left, the middle-aged man was eating a piece of rare rib roast and talking with his mouth full about the weaknesses of French cooking, and the problems he'd had with it on his last trip to Europe.

With a little pull from the Sound of the Golden West we had gotten Candy, under a phony name, the room adjoining mine at the Hillcrest. As we drove, the streets in Beverly Hills were as still as an empty theater in the night. The lobby was deserted.

We were alone in the elevator.

At her door I took her key and opened the door first. The room was soundless. I reached in and turned on the light. No one was there. I opened the bathroom and looked behind the shower gla.s.s. I opened the sliding closet door. I looked under the bed. No one was there either.

Candy stood in the doorway watching me. "You're serious, aren't you."

"Sure. Just because it's corny to hide under the bed doesn't mean someone wouldn't do it."

I slid open the doors to the small balcony. No one there either. I went to the door connecting my room with hers. It was locked. "Before you go to bed, remember to unlock this," I said. "No point me being next door if I can't get to you."

"I know," she said. "I'll unlock it now."

"No," I said. "Wait until I've checked out the room."

"Oh," she said. "Of course."

"I'll go over now. Lock the corridor door behind me and chain it. I'll yell through the connecting door if it's okay."

She nodded. I went out, went into my room, and made sure it was empty. The connecting door was bolted from each side. I slid my bolt back and said, "Okay, Candy."

I heard her bolt slip and the door opened. She was on the phone, the phone cord stretched taut across the bed as she had to reach to unbolt the door. As she opened the door she said, "Thank you," into the phone and hung up.

"I just ordered a bottle of cognac and some ice," she said. "You want a drink?"

"Sure," I said. "Your place or mine?"

"This isn't a pa.s.s," she said. "I'd just like to sit on the balcony and sip some brandy and talk quietly. I'm a little scared."

I thought about the balcony. We were seven floors up, on a corner; there was no balcony beyond us. The one next to us on the other side was mine. The ones on the next floor were directly above. It would be a hard shot. And you'd have to have been smart enough or lucky enough to get a room above us with the right angle. I said, "Okay, the balcony is good. But we'll turn the lights off. No point in making a better target than we need to."

The bellhop brought the bottle of Remy Martin, a soda siphon, two gla.s.ses, and a bucket of ice. I watched while Candy added in a tip and signed the bill. Then we shut off the lights and took the tray out onto the balcony.

Lights speckled the Hollywood Hills. There was a faint sound of music from the rooftop lounge above us. On Beverwil Drive a cab idled. I opened the bottle and poured two drinks over ice with a small squirt of soda. Candy took one and sipped it. She had kicked her shoes off and now she put her stockinged feet up on the low cement railing of the balcony. She was wearing a plum-colored wraparound dress, and the skirt fell away halfway up her thigh. I stood leaning against the doorjamb and watched the other balconies. Mostly.