“At eleven o’clock on a Thursday night, you mean?” Ken said. He was staring at me like I was an idiot. Like there was drool coming down my chin.

I said, “You think the Japanese are doing this?”

“I think the Weasel does jobs for people. He is a scumbag for hire. He does jobs for the studios, record companies, brokerage houses, even the realtors. He’s a consultant. The Weasel now drives a Mercedes 500SL, you know.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Pretty good on a reporter’s salary, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yeah, I would.”

“So. You got on the wrong side of somebody? You do that last night?”

“Maybe.”

“Because somebody called the Weasel to track you down.”

I said, “I can’t believe this.”

“Believe it,” Ken said. “The only thing that worries me is the Weasel’s source inside Parker Center. Somebody in the department’s leaking him internal affairs stuff. You okay inside your own department?”

“As far as I know.”

“Good. Because the Weasel is up to his usual tricks. This morning I talked to Roger Bascomb, our in-house counsel.”

“And?”

“Guess who called him all hot and bothered with a question last night? The Weasel. And you want to guess what the question was?”

I said nothing.

“The question was, does serving as a police press-officer make an individual a public personality? As in, a public personality who can’t sue for libel?”

I said, “Jesus.”

“Right.”

“And the answer?”

“Who cares about the answer? You know how this works. All the Weasel has to do is call a few people and say, ‘Hi, this is Bill Wilhelm over here at the L.A. Times. We’re going with a story tomorrow that says Lieutenant Peter Smith is a child molester, do you have any comment on that?’ A few well-placed calls, and the story doesn’t even have to run. The editors can kill it but the damage is already done.”

I said nothing. I knew what Ken was telling me was true. I had seen it happen more than once.

I said, “What can I do?”

Ken laughed. “You could arrange one of your famous incidents of L.A. police brutality.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Nobody at this paper would cover it, I can promise you that. You could fucking kill him. And if somebody made a home video? Hey, people here would pay to see it on video.”

“Ken.”

Ken sighed. “I can dream. Okay. There’s one thing. Last year, after Wilhelm was involved in the, ah, change of management over in Calendar, I got an anonymous package in the mail. So did a few other people. Nobody did anything about it at the time. It’s pretty dirty pool. You interested?”

“Yeah.”

Ken took a small manila envelope from the inside pocket of his sport coat. It had one of those strings that you wrap back and forth to close it. Inside was a series of photos, printed in a strip. It showed Willy Wilhelm engaged in an intimate act with a dark-haired man. His head buried in his lap.

“You can’t see the Weasel’s face too well in all the angles,” Ken said. “But it’s him, all right. Action snap of the reporter entertaining his source. Having a drink with him, so to speak.”

“Who is the guy?”

“It took us a while. His name is Barry Borman. He’s the regional head of sales for Kaisei Electronics in southern California.”

“What can I do with this?”

“Give me your card,” Ken said. “I’ll clip it to the envelope, and have it delivered to the Weasel.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“It’d sure make him think twice.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not for me.”

Ken shrugged. “Yeah. It might not work, anyway. Even if we squeeze the Weasel’s nuts, the Japanese probably have other ways. I still haven’t been able to find out how that story ran last night. All I hear is, ‘Orders from the top, orders from the top.’ Whatever that means. It could mean anything.”

“Somebody must have written it.”

“I tell you, I can’t find out. But you know, the Japanese have a powerful influence at the paper. It’s more than just the ads they take. It’s more than their relentless PR machine drumming out of Washington, or the local lobbying and the campaign contributions to political figures and organizations. It’s the sum of all those things and more. And it’s starting to be insidious. I mean, you can be sitting around in a staff meeting discussing some article that we might run, and you suddenly realize, nobody wants to offend them. It isn’t a question of whether a story is right or wrong, news or not news. And it isn’t a one-to-one equation, like ‘We can’t say that or they’ll pull their ads.’ It’s more subtle than that. Sometimes I look at my editors, and I can tell they won’t go with certain stories because they are afraid. They don’t even know what they are afraid of. They’re just afraid.”

“So much for a free press.”

“Hey,” Ken said. “This is not the time for sophomore bullshit. You know how it works. The American press reports the prevailing opinion. The prevailing opinion is the opinion of the group in power. The Japanese are now in power. The press reports the prevailing opinion as usual. No surprises. Just take care.”

“I will.”

“And don’t hesitate to call, if you decide you want to arrange mail service.”

I wanted to talk to Connor. I was beginning to understand why Connor had been worried, and why he had wanted to conclude the investigation quickly. Because a well-mounted campaign of innuendo is a fearsome thing. A skillful practitioner—and the Weasel was skillful—would arrange it so that a new story came out, day after day, even when nothing happened. You got headlines like GRAND JURY UNDECIDED ON POLICEMAN’S GUILT when in fact the grand jury hadn’t met yet. But people saw the headlines, day after day, and drew their own conclusions.

The truth was, there was always a way to spin it. At the end of the innuendo campaign, if your subject was found blameless, you could still mount a headline like GRAND JURY FAILS TO FIND POLICEMAN GUILTY or DISTRICT ATTORNEY UNWILLING TO PROSECUTE ACCUSED COP. Headlines like that were as bad as a conviction.

And there was no way to bounce back from weeks of negative press. Everybody remembered the accusation. Nobody remembered the exoneration. That was human nature. Once you were accused, it was tough to get back to normal.

It was getting creepy, and I had a lot of bad feelings. I was a little preoccupied, pulling into the parking lot next to the physics department at U.S.C., when the phone rang again. It was assistant chief Olson.

“Peter.”

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s almost ten o’clock. I thought you’d be down here putting the tapes on my desk. You promised them to me.”

“I’ve been having trouble getting the tapes copied.”

“Is that what you’ve been doing?”

“Sure. Why?”

“Because from the calls I get, it sounds like you aren’t dropping this investigation,” Jim Olson said. “In the last hour, you’ve been out asking questions at a Japanese research institute. Then you’ve interrogated a scientist who works for a Japanese research institute. You’re hanging around some Japanese seminar. Let’s get it straight, Peter. Is the investigation over, or not?”

“It’s over,” I said. “I’m just trying to get the tapes copied.”

“Make sure that’s all it is,” he said.

“Right, Jim.”

“For the good of the whole department—and the individuals in it—I want this thing behind us.”

“Right, Jim.”

“I don’t want to lose control of this situation.”

“I understand.”

“I hope you do,” he said. “Get the copies made, and get your ass down here.” And he hung up.

I parked the car, and went into the physics building.