That was the other thing—not Sam’s hand clutching mine in excitement while a good guy in black dueled a bad guy in red, white and blue; but the thought it prompted: that another boy, who’d also have been almost eleven, would never give his father that simple joy, or himself experience the delight of seeing Zorro in person, triumphing over evil.

I might not have made that connection if Bobby Greenlease had not been on my mind of late—after all, the dead boy had in part prompted this trip to L.A. Maybe I’d have just put Sam on a plane home if the Greenlease kidnapping of five years ago had not cropped up again, in however unlikely a way, a few days before.

* * *

It began, as much does, in Washington, D.C.

The town’s most despised, fearsome journalist worked and lived (when he wasn’t on his farm) in a townhouse tucked away on the corner of the kind of cobblestone Georgetown street where few Americans could afford to reside—not even in reconditioned slave quarters. After dark, in the glow of gas streetlamps, the yellow-brick, Early American-shuttered, brass-trimmed house had an antiquated charm that even Walt Disney would consider a little much.

The blue-eyed blonde of perhaps thirty who answered the bell had assigned her curves to a white silk blouse, a navy blue pencil skirt and bright red heels, a patriotic ensemble indeed, unassuming but for its contents. Her name was Connie and we’d met. She wore horn-rimmed glasses that weren’t fooling anybody—this was Drew Pearson’s latest “fair-haired girl.” Pearson’s middle-aged wife, who rarely strayed from the family farm, either did not care or had learned how to pretend she didn’t.

“He’s expecting me,” I said.

“Oh I know,” she said. We knew each other fairly well. The last time we’d commiserated about what a cheapskate her boss was had been at the Mayflower, where she’d come over.

I followed her, eyes fixed impolitely exactly where most men would, past a glimpse of a living room and adjacent formal dining room, down a few steps into a bullpen of desks where young men and women sat at machine-gunning typewriters and spat dialogue out of The Front Page on telephones between insistent ringing. Smaller offices fed this newsroom-like area, whose walls were hugged by filing cabinets and a brace of news tickers attended by several anxious young men, who had to be wondering how their journalism degrees had led them here.

Connie paused outside the open door of Pearson’s office, where her boss sat transfixed as he typed a few million words a minute on his Smith Corona on its stand to one side of his scarred schooner of a wooden desk. He wore a maroon smoking jacket (though he was not a smoker and didn’t provide an ashtray for any who were), a big man, burly not fat, who even sitting down looked tall. For such a formidable figure, he had a prissy aspect, his egg-shaped head and waxed mustache reminiscent of Christie’s Poirot.