“Levine made me go shopping with him at Barneys,” Graham explained grumpily.

“I like the look,” Neal said.

“You also like English poets,” Graham accused. True.

The limo pulled onto a side street and up to the gate of a film studio. Neal looked at the crazy quilt combination of nineteenth-century building facades, Quonset huts, and enormous movie billboards on the other side of the gate.

“I’ve seen movies about this,” he said.

The security guard at the gate approached the driver’s window.

“They have a meeting at Wishbone with Anne Kelley,” the driver said with no discernible effort at courtesy.

The guard gave him a placard for the windshield and opened the gate.

“Building Twenty-eight,” he said.

“No kidding,” the driver snapped, then steered the limo through the narrow streets of the studio, edging past a group of young men dressed as 1920s gangsters and a small platoon of harried production assistants carrying clipboards. He eased the big car into a slot marked guests-limo across from a big Quonset hut and opened the back door.

“Wishbone Studios, right through that door.”

“Oh boy,” Neal said.

The driver rewarded him with a wry smile. He had delivered any number of cocky screenwriters to this door and picked them up half an hour later when they weren’t so cocky, when that Oscar-winning screenplay in the briefcase had turned to just another pile of paper. If they didn’t hit the limo bar on the way in, they’d sure enough hit it on the way out.

Neal saw the big Hollywood sign on a hill behind the studio. It seemed less real than it did on television or in the movies, but maybe that was the idea. He followed Joe Graham into Building 28.

He’d expected the polished, plush setting of the stereotypical Hollywood mogul, but he didn’t get it. Wishbone Studios was stripped for speed. A utilitarian metal desk defined the edge of a small reception area.