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bunch of green waves, whoooosh, and when I woke up, it was another morning in sunny Santa Monica, Air France had taken off, and I’d just come all over my lilypink sheets.
    You could say life is made up of just such simple pleasures.

3
    â€œI’m the man from Sears,” I said. “I’ve come for the helicopter.”
    The sign said Bay Isle Club—Members and Guests Only, and in case you doubted it there was a (discreet) red-and-white barrier before the entrance to the drawbridge and a sixty-year-old stormtrooper sitting next to it in a glass kiosk reading the Playboy centerfold with both lips.
    â€œHonh?” he said, glancing out at me without seeing.
    â€œThe eggbeater,” I said, handing him my card. “Sorry, but one of your inmates defaulted on his payments.”
    The happy glaze drifted south from his eyes.
    â€œWhat’s your business, buddy.”
    â€œTwink,” I said.
    â€œAll right, let’s cut out the funny stuff, if you’re another of them newspaper …”
    â€œBeydon,” I said, gesturing at my card. “Philip Beydon. I’m expected.”
    He turned back into the kiosk, held the card up to his eyes, dialed a number. A minute later the barrier lifted, and he was already too busy with his playmate to see my goodby wave.
    The Bay Isle Club, Members and Guests Only, was on a narrow finger of filled-in land sticking out into a manmade marina some forty miles south of L.A. The hideaways were long and narrow jobs, and the perspective fooled me at first. I mean, from the bridge you wouldn’t have said super-rich, just middling garden-variety. But each house fronted on the water, each with its own lawn and dock, and backed onto a paved alley which was deserted as I drove through.
    I parked in front of the Number 11 garage, a three-holer big enough for a small fire department, and walked down a path under an arched bougainvillea trellis to a high heavy wood gate with a silver B on it. Before I could even knock, the silver B swung back and a silent moon-faced aztec let me in. He was about my height but twice my width, with straight black hair scowling over his eyes and as somber as a priest getting ready for the sacrifices. He led me through a small tropical garden, where goldfish the size of footballs lounged under the lilypads of a pond, and up a path of polished redwood stumps to the entrance.
    The house split in two. Behind me over the garage were the slave quarters, but up on top of them was a glass-walled glass-roofed studio which, I guessed later, was where Nancy Beydon used to darn her socks between masterpieces. The aztec led me to the main branch, also three stories, through French doors, up three marble steps and into a gallery two stories high and shadowy, which ran most of the way to Honolulu. Down the middle went one of those endless tables like in the old-fashioned novels where the host sits at one end, the hostess at the other and the hero somewhere in between, with nobody in shouting distance but a handful of ghosts. Except this one had a top of inlaid marble of the kind they don’t grow this side of the Atlantic. The chairs were throne-sized with bigger ones at the ends, and there were sideboards behind them and tapestries on the walls which maybe weren’t Bayeux but close enough to fool most of us peons. Here and there in the open spaces was statuary on pedestals, and cherubs grinned down at you from the gloom, and you got the feeling that whatever Hearst had left behind in the Old World, the Beydons had snapped up.
    Not your taste maybe, but it’s always a little impressive to see what they do with it.
    Up above on the second story a balcony ran all the way around and doors led off to parts unknown, but we went through a ground-level door and down a curving flight of steps, heading for the dungeons. Then through another door and onto another balcony, where there was a hardwood floor down below, bright lights in the