They roared off through the rain and soon were threading the torturous curves of Mulholland Drive, heading up into Sherman Oaks. The rain and sudden cold made the car’s windshield steam up and it was impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. The headlights were drowned in gusting walls of rain.

Twice they found themselves on the shoulder of the road, with nothing between them and a sheer drop except a few inches of gravel. Once, on a hairpin curve, Brenda nearly steered into an oncoming set of headlights. Which car had drifted onto the wrong side of the road, it was impossible to tell.

Oxnard was just as drenched when the car finally glided to a. stop as when he had first climbed in. But now he was soaked with clammy nervous sweat. Brenda seemed perfectly at ease, though.

“Here we are,” she said cheerfully.

“Here” was a low-slung modernistic house perched on the shoulder of a hill, in the middle of a long winding street lined by similar houses. Brenda had pulled the car up on the driveway, so that by sliding out on the driver’s side they could splash across one small puddle and dive directly under the protective overhang at the front door.

The door was more ornately carved than Queequeeg’s sarcophagus, a really handsome piece of work. Hanging squarely in, the middle of it, under the knocker, was a tiny hand-lettered sign that said:

TRY THE BELL with a drawing of a hand pointing one finger toward an all-but-invisible button, hidden behind a flowering shrub. Brenda touched the doorbell button and a speaker grill set above the door grated:

“Yeah?”

“Ron, it’s Brenda.”

“Brenda?”

“Brenda Impanema… from Bernard Finger’s office.”

“Oh, Brenda!”

“Can we come in?”

Oxnard was beginning to feel foolish, standing out there with the wind cutting through him, wet and chilled, all the rain in Southern California sluicing down around them, watching a girl he had just met talking to a door.