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 bumps, 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 Illustrated 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 hell 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 glasses 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, hell, I shoulda guessed. You’re Grumpy.” Candy put her head down and her shoulders shook.
It wasn’t a giggle. She was laughing. Amber Glasses 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 album 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.
