After breakfast I went upstairs to the roses and my daily cigarette. I then called my answering service.

“I got any messages?” I asked Renata Forman when she answered.

“Only one, Mr. Rawlins,” she replied. “A Mr. Oldstein called and said that he needed to talk to you about a woman named D-Donata Delp, uh, Delphine. He said that he’d come to your office at around eight this morning. I told him that this was Saturday but he said that you’d want this information.”

“Did he leave a number?”

“No, sir, he did not.”

I parked in front of the WRENS-L offices a few minutes past 6:00, figuring to be there early so I could reconnoiter this Mr. Oldstein before he got to see me. I locked and bolted the first-floor private entrance and then set up a stool at the upper window so I could watch the street without being seen.

Waiting was, and is, the detective’s stock-in-trade. It felt good sitting in shadow while the sun bore down on the place my quarry would reveal himself. I spent thirty-six minutes watching for what the morning would bring.

It wasn’t yet 7:00 when a late-model emerald-green Caddy pulled up behind John’s Pontiac. There was no one on the street that early on a Saturday morning.

Three men got out of the luxury car. They were all big men, white men; not businessmen, but bruisers who meant business. Two wore pale-colored, short-sleeved, loose-fitting, button-up shirts. The last member of the squad was Eddie Brock. His suit looked to be sharkskin. Fitting attire.

The men walked as a unit to the front door. I couldn’t see them when they got that close to the building, but I heard the doorknob refusing to turn and then the muscular jostling of the lower door. I checked the .45 revolver in my hand and silently praised Whisper Natly for insisting that the access door on the bottom floor be solid, steel reinforced, and anchored in an unmovable frame.

Downstairs the men banged and pounded; then it sounded like they were trying to pick the lock. When everything failed they moved back to the curb and looked up at my spy window.

I leaned into the darkest corner, still watching. Brock peered into the shadows that cloaked me. After another failed foray at the entrance the men went back to the car and waited for an hour and forty-seven minutes.

Sitting there watching from darkness, I wondered what had changed. Why did Eddie Brock mean me harm? And how much harm? No one worked on a Saturday. He and his men could have killed me easily.

I waited a full hour after they’d gone before going back downstairs to my car.

I’d made it up to Sunset and was tooling down the Strip when, on impulse, I stopped at a phone booth and called Terry Aldrich’s hippie house.