Janice and her brother glared at me, but Daddy’s wishes took precedence over their bruised egos, or rib cages, as the case might be. Janice’s plucked brows met briefly over her nose, but she kept from wrinkling her forehead. It pays to work for a woman’s magazine-you learn good tips on how to preserve your face. She put her cell phone into the side compartment of her briefcase and told me to follow her. Her brother stayed in step next to me.

When we got to the executive suite, the other brother took me into his father’s office. Augustus Llewellyn was sitting behind his desk, a leatherinlaid partners’ specimen that might have been a couple of hundred years old. There were a number of interesting antiques in the room besides the desk, but the one that caught my eye was an old hand press standing on an octagonal table.

I walked over to look at it. “Good evening, sir. Is that what you used to print T-Square on?”

Llewellyn ignored me, turning to his children and telling them they could leave. When the son I’d elbowed protested that I might be violent, his father managed a small smile. “If she harms me, you’ll know exactly who did it, and you can have her arrested. But for now I want to be alone with her. And that means you, too, Marjorie.”

The last remark was addressed to the older woman, who I assumed was the secretary I’d spoken to the day before. When all four had left, I pulled up one of the two contemporary chairs in the room and faced Llewellyn across his desk. He folded his hands in his lap but didn’t speak.

“I’m the detective whom the Whitby family-“

He cut me off. “I know that you and your underlings have been questioning my staff recently, young woman. Not much happens in this company that I don’t know about.”

“Then you know that Marcus Whitby wanted to see you shortly before he died. Did he talk to you about his meeting with Olin Taverner?”

“If he did, that would be of no concern to you.”

“You agreed to see me, Mr. Llewellyn,” I said gently. “I think if you knew what Taverner had told Whitby you wouldn’t need to talk to me. So I’m assuming you didn’t see Marc Whitby before he died.”

He nodded slightly, but didn’t offer any comment.

“Olin Taverner held on to a secret, or maybe a series of secrets, about people in New Solway, and people involved in ComThought-the Committee for Social-“

“Yes, I know what ComThought is, or was.” He cut me off again. “And I know Taverner was obsessed with it as a Communist front. I don’t think they were ever the threat to America’s safety that Olin claimed, but I had my fill, of the left at Flora’s all those years ago. They were a ramshackle lot who turned on each other like rats in a proverbial barrel. They had no real interest in the working man or woman, only in their stupid revolutionary rhetoric. America rewards self-determination. They could never see that.”