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Heading to Wilshire, I’m careful to obey all traffic laws and stoplights. This would be a lousy day to get a ticket.

A lousier day, I mean.

I PARK THE car down the block from the Evermore Creatives Group. Far enough away not to be noticed, but close enough to see the main entrance. It’s an ordinary office building. A concrete, steel, and glass shoe box tipped on its side along a quiet section of the boulevard. Mostly hotels, drugstores, and lunch joints down here for the tourists who can’t afford thirty dollars for a room-­ser­vice burrito.

Candy moved up to the front seat when we parked, but hasn’t said much since. She’s just been screwing around with her phone. I roll down the window and have a smoke. Couriers with packages and snappily dressed men and women go in and out of the building. A lousy actress from a C-­minus caper movie I saw a while back comes outside, walking a husky on a leash. A FedEx truck pulls up. The driver unloads packages and takes them inside. A ­couple walks by holding hands, eating tacos.

“I don’t know if I can do this much longer. The excitement is killing me.”

Candy shushes me.

She likes to play a game on her phone called Mecha Disco. It’s sort of like Dance Dance Revolution, but with robots and lasers that blow up the dancers when they can’t follow the beat. But she isn’t wearing her headphones and her phone isn’t beeping and shaking like a Martian vibrator. I lean back in my seat, trying to see what she’s doing.

“Stop that,” she says.

“What are you doing?”

“Just ’cause I’m away from the computer doesn’t mean I can’t do background research on Evermore Creatives.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“Not especially. They’ve been around since the thirties. They used to handle a lot of musical acts, but couldn’t compete with the big agencies, so they went small and boutique.”

“Who do they handle now?”

“Mostly ghosts. A lot of famous ones too. The big agencies worked with them when they were living—­”

“And ECG got them when they kicked. It’s a smart deal. ­People are dead a lot longer than they’re alive.”

“But they still represent some regular acts too,” she says.

“Probably to keep up appearances. No one wants to be pigeonholed in this town.”

“Get this. They make a lot of money selling wild-­blue-­yonder contracts.”

“Of course. Every star needs one.”

“No. They sell to civilians. It’s almost as big as their ghost business. Isn’t that a little weird?”

She’s right. I puff the Malediction. A guy walking by with a yoga mat under his arm makes a face when he passes through a cloud of my fumes.

“Excuse you,” he says.

I wave to him.

“Have a blessed day.”

“There’s something I don’t understand,” says Candy.

“Why does a talent agency brand its clients?”

“Exactly. That doesn’t sound like a business–client relationship. That’s more like . . .” She searches for the right word. “Ownership.”

“Maybe they owned Eric Townsend. I want to know why a talent agency is doing business with the White Light Legion.”

Candy stares at her phone. She’s still mad, but at least she’s talking.

“We don’t know that they are,” she says. “It could just be the one guy.”