Free A Savage Place by Robert B. Parker

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 titles 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 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