"Aw, blush," I said.

"But if you tell-what's her name?"

"Susan."

"If you tell Susan, won't it make her a little unhappy to no good purpose?"

"It may make her a little unhappy, but the purpose is good."

"Easing your conscience?"

"Pop psych," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"The world's not that simple. I tell her because we should not have things we don't tell each other."

"Would you want to know?"

"Absolutely."

"And if you knew, would it be the end?"

"No. Dying is the only end for me and Suze."

"So you're not so all-fired wonderful. You don't risk that much by telling her."

"True," I said.

"But?"

"But what."

Candy's hash was barely nibbled. She poked at it with her fork.

"But there's more," she said. "I've oversimplified it again."

"Sure."

"Tell me."

"What difference does it make?" I said.

"I want to know," Candy said. "I've never met anyone like you. I want to know."

"Okay," I said. "I wouldn't do anything I couldn't tell her about."

"Are you ashamed of this?"

"No."

"Would you do something that would make you ashamed?"

"No."

She poked at her hash some more. "Jesus," she said. "I think you wouldn't. I've heard people say that before, but I never believed them. I don't think they even believed themselves. But you mean it."

"It's another way of being free."

"But how-"

I shook my head. "Eat your hash," I said. "We have a heavy crime-busting schedule. Let's fortify ourselves and not talk for a while." I ate more hash.

Candy opened her mouth and closed it and looked at me and then smiled and nodded. We ate our hash in silence. Then we paid the check, went out, got in Candy's MG, and drove to Century City.

Oceania Industries had executive offices high up in one of the towers. The waiting room had large oil paintings of Oceania's various enterprises: oil rigs, something that I took for a gypsum mine, a scene from a recent Summit picture, a long stand of huge pines. On the end tables were copies of the annual report and the several house organs from the various divisions. They had t.i.tles like Gypsum Jottings and Timber Talk.

There was no one in the reception room except a woman at a huge semicircular reception desk. Her fingernails were painted silver. She looked like Nina Foch.

"May I help you?" she said. Elegant. Generations of breeding.

I asked, "Are you Nina Foch?"

She said, "I beg your pardon?"

I said, "You left pictures for this?"

She said, "May I help you?" Stronger this time, but no less refined.

Candy gave her a card. "I'm with KNBS. I wonder if we might see Mr. Brewster."

"Do you have an appointment?" Nina said.

"No, but perhaps you could ask Mr. Brewster... "

Nina's eyes narrowed slightly. "I'm sorry," she said. "Mr. Brewster sees no one without an appointment."

"This is rather important," Candy said.

Nina looked even more severe, but patrician. "I'm sorry, miss, but there can be no exceptions. Mr. Brewster is-"

"Very busy," I said, ahead of her.

"Yes," she said. "He is, after all, the president of one of the largest corporations in the world."

I looked at Candy. "Gives you goose b.u.mps, doesn't it," I said.

Candy placed her hands on the desk and leaned forward. She said to Nina Foch, "Some very disturbing charges have been leveled at Mr. Brewster. I should like, in the interests of fairness, to give him a chance to deny them before we go on the six o'clock news with the story."

Nina stared at us in a refined way for a moment and then got up abruptly and went through the big bleached-oak raised-panel door between the painting of the pine trees and the painting of the oil wells. In maybe three minutes she was back.

She sat behind her big circular reception desk and said, "Mr. Brewster will see you shortly." She didn't like saying it.

"Freedom of the press is a flaming sword," I said. Candy looked at me blankly.

"Use it wisely," I said. "Hold it high. Guard it well."

"A. J. Liebling?" Candy said.

"Steve Wilson of The Ill.u.s.trated Press. You're too young."

She shook her head again and did her giggle. "You really are goofy sometimes."

A tall man with platinum-blond hair and a developing stomach came into the reception room and hustled by us toward the bleached-oak door. His glen plaid suit fit well, but his shoes were shabby and the heels were turned. He went through the oak door and it closed behind him without sound.

Nina Foch was erect at her desk, without expression and apparently without occupation. She looked elegantly at the double doors that led out of the reception room to the ordinary corridor beyond.

A smallish man with a dimple in his chin and the look of a gymnast strode in through those double doors. Nina smiled at him. He nodded at her and did not look at us. He wore a Donegal tweed suit and a white shirt with a red bow tie. His shoes were tan pebble-grained brogues. He went through the oak door.

"Suit must itch like h.e.l.l in California," I said to Candy. She smiled. Nina uncrossed her legs behind the desk and recrossed them the other way. She made an adjustment to the skirt hem.

A third man came in through the double doors. He nodded at Nina. Halfway across the room he stopped in front of the couch and looked at us. First at Candy. Then at me. Then at Candy again. He nodded. Then he looked at me again for a long time. He was a big guy, my size maybe, with longish hair styled back smoothly, the ears covered except where the lobes peeped out. He had on a good three-piece gray suit with a pink windowpane-plaid running through it. His aviator gla.s.ses were tinted amber. As he stood looking at us he had the suitcoat open and his hands on his hips. Truculent.

"Are you Grumpy, Sneezy, or Doc?" I said. Candy started to giggle and swallowed it.

"You, I know," he said, looking at Candy, hands still on his hips, the double-vent suitcoat flared out behind him. "You, I don't," he said to me. "Who are you?"

"I asked you first," I said.

"If I don't like you, you got troubles," he said.

"Aw, h.e.l.l, I shoulda guessed. You're Grumpy." Candy put her head down and her shoulders shook.

It wasn't a giggle. She was laughing. Amber Gla.s.ses looked at me for another ten seconds, then turned and went through the door.

Candy's face was pink, and her eyes were bright when she looked at me. "Spenser," she said, "you're awful. Who do you suppose he was?"

"Security," I said. "I'll bet my alb.u.m of Annette Funicello undies on it."

"You made that up," Candy said.

"Wait and see," I said.

"No, I mean the part about Annette Funicello."

"Oh, yeah," I said. "But a man's only as good as his dream."

We waited perhaps five more minutes. Then a soft chime sounded at Nina Foch's desk. She picked up a white and gold phone that looked like it came from the Palace of Versailles. She listened and then put the phone down.

"You may go in now," she said. She didn't like saying that either.

The rug as we walked toward the door was deep enough to lose a dachshund in. I opened the door for Candy. It was hung so precisely that it seemed weightless. Candy took a deep breath.

I said, "I'm right beside you, babe."

She smiled and looked at me briefly and nodded. "I'm glad you are," she said. Then we walked through the door.

Chapter11.

WE WERE IN a room lined with bookshelves. There was leather furniture around and, on a round mahogany table in the middle of the room, a large globe. At the other end of the room was another door. It was open. The room beyond the open door seemed very bright. Candy preceded me. Sneezy, Grumpy, and Doc were sitting on a long couch to our right. The wall opposite the door was all gla.s.s, and the long green view of the L.A. Country Club below was a dazzler. In front of the wall, at right angles to the couch, was a desk about the size of Detroit. Behind it sat a man with large white teeth and dark hair flecked with gray. His face was deeply tanned. He wore a dark blue pin-striped suit with a vest that had lapels. His tie was an iridescent gray-blue tied in a small knot under a white pincollar. He looked like the centerfold in Fortune.

He said, "You're Miss Sloan. I've seen you on the news. And your a.s.sociate?"

Candy said, "Mr. Spenser."

"I'm Peter Brewster," he said. "This is Tom Turpin, our director of corporate public relations." He gestured at the guy with the glen plaid and the shabby shoes. "And Barrett Holmes, our legal counsel"-the gymnast with the dimpled chin. "And Rollie Simms. Mr. Simms is our director of corporate security." I grinned at Candy. "Since I understand you are about to level an accusation, I thought it would be prudent to have these gentlemen witness it. Barrett, if it's actionable, I'll want you to take steps immediately."

I said to the trio on the couch, "Excuse me, but which one of you three guys speaks no evil?" Brewster gave me a basilisk stare.

He said, "I have very little time for humor."

I said, "But an awful lot of occasion."

He gave me that stare again.

Candy said, "Mr. Brewster, I have information that organized crime has infiltrated Summit Studios: Do you have any comment on that?"

"Shouldn't you take that question to Roger Hammond at Summit?"

"I have."

"And his response?"

"He had us put off studio property."

Brewster nodded. "The nature of your information?"

"I can't give you details, but I have an eyewitness."

"To what?"

"To a transaction involving Summit personnel and a member of the Los Angeles underworld."