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an idea for an article that pleased both Boyd and Ethan Meyner greatly. To the great surprise of Wall Street, Meredith, Mead & Co., one of the country's most distinguished investment banking houses, merged with Canby, Schnell & Co., a wire house with a wide network of retail customers and a déclassé reputation. Rice, like every other phone user living in Manhattan's more affluent zip codes, received frequent cold calls from stockbrokers promising untold riches to those wise enough to open accounts with them. None were more ubiquitous or persistent than the phone jockeys for Canby, Schnell (which had continued to use its household-word name after the merger). Rice, who had roomed at Harvard with a son of a Meredith, Mead partner, could not believe that that old-line, not to say stuffy, firm had anything to do with the churning, hard-sell tactics of its newly acquired Canby, Schnell division.
    With the cooperation of Meyner, he put his suspicion to the test. Meyner found a friend who was a long-standing investment client of Meredith, Mead and persuaded him to furnish a list of his holdings. The publisher turned these over to Rice, who posed as a new customer to Canby, Schnell and submitted the list of Meredith, Mead–approved investments for evaluation. Needless to say, the Canby, Schnell assessment was that the customer had not been served well; allocations between debt and equity and among industry sectors were wrongheaded; decisions to buy and sell were ill timed. In other words, Canby, Schnell could do better by this customer than his sleepy existing broker, whosoever that might be.
    Faces in the affected shops were crimson when Freddie's story appeared. Meyner and Boyd were jubilant. That jubilation increased a week later when the head of the Canby, Schnell division resigned "to pursue other interests" and the establishment dailies covering the story had to make begrudging reference to Rice's
Sur
veyor
piece when speculating on the reasons for the resignation.
    Scoop was roundly congratulated by his new friends at Elaine's on the Meredith story. To them it was a perfect job—an original idea, a devastating conclusion arrived at by clever legwork, a tweak (actually a purpling, hard pinch) to an iconic institution.
    As the weeks went by, the irregulars at the restaurant kept asking Scoop (they now called him that to his face) what he was going to do for an encore. He tried to act appropriately mysterious, but the truth was he had not come close to sniffing out a new opportunity.
    It was while he was in the doldrums that Boyd called him in. "You know who Sue Nation Brandberg is?" he asked.
    "Yeah," Freddie replied. He had done his homework on the local celebrities, and besides, as an aficionado of the ballet, he had noticed in the programs a reference to the Harry and Sue Brandberg Toe Shoe Fund (little realizing that its genesis was a
real
story of the sort Justin Boyd would relish).
    "Good. Her dog is dead. There may be a story in it."
    Scoop's heart sank. He had heard his new friends at Elaine's scoffing at journalism "out there," where one might be relegated to covering the story of a cat stranded up a tree.
    Boyd saw the look of disappointment on his young reporter's face and quickly added that "the dog was shot."
    More like it, Rice thought. But as his editor recounted the details, "about Wombat, or Woo-woo or some such name," he found himself wondering how on earth he could track down the three black-suited killers. Again, his doubt showed in his expression.
    "It's a tricky business, too. I promised Sue we wouldn't blow the cover of her alien houseboy. I've been mulling that over and I think the best approach is for you to interview the fellow, let him tell you what he knows. We'll peg him as an anonymous source who came to you out of the blue. I'll get Sue to give you a big 'No comment' and we'll go with the mysterious-anonymous-source story. His name is Gink, or some such, but we'll just call him