2

Hook and Arnie were in the implement shed tuning the new four-wheel-drive John Deere when Chief Janson drove up and parked. Though a personal call by the chief was a rare occurrence, Hook did not sense that something might be wrong, not even when he saw how the man got out of the car, so laboriously, carrying his badged cap and looking everywhere except at Hook and Arnie in the building. Janson was a caricature of the small-town cop, a crude pot-bellied extrovert who wore his holstered thirty-eight special like a loincloth and divided his time almost equally between polishing the squad car and drinking free beer at Harry’s Tap and Billiards. As such, he was an easy target for the town’s many humorists, including Uncle Arnie, who at the moment was busily forgetting to hand Hook a Phillips screwdriver as Janson moved hesitantly toward them around his car.

“Well, what do you know?” Arnie mused. “J. Edgar way out here in the sticks. What you been up to, David?”

Hook did not answer. He was wondering why the chief had stopped near the fence and was not coming on into the building.

“Look at him,” Arnie said. “That gun ever goes off he’s gonna be shorter by a full inch.”

Hook barely heard him. The chief looked stricken, ill. Hook got up and walked out to meet him.

“Morning, Chief,” he said.

But Janson did not respond. He just stood there leaning against the fence, still not looking directly at Hook.

“What’s wrong?” Hook asked. “What’s happened?”

The chief’s eyes flickered at him and then slid away. “There’s been a accident, Dave.”

Hook had the feeling he was standing in front of a firing squad and though there was no sound yet, no report, the bullets were already on the way.

“Who? Where?”

The chief swallowed, shook his head. “In California. Santa Barbara.”

“Chris?”

Janson nodded.

“Go on.”

“He had a fall, Dave.”

“And—”

“They called just a while ago.”

Hook waited for a moment, but the chief did not go on. Somehow Hook got the words out. “Is he alive?”

Eyes streaming, Janson shook his head. “I am so sorry, Dave. Jesus, I am so sorry.”

So the volley was in Hook now, exploding in his body, gutting him.

“A fall?” he said. It sounded so silly.

“And the bastards—” the chief got out. “They said he done it hisself, Dave. They said it was suicide.”

The word was a reprieve. It was a command calling back the bullets, canceling his execution. Suicide. Then it could not be Chris. They had made a mistake.

The chief was crying openly. “I told this sergeant he was full of shit, Dave. I told him they just didn’t know Chris. Chris wouldn’t ever do that. Never in a million years, I told him.”

Hook was hanging onto the fence, trying to stand on legs made of plastic hose. “It’s a mistake,” he said. “It is not Chris.”

The rest of that morning passed like time during a drunk, a daze of activity that Hook would recall later only in bits and pieces. He remembered driving to Banner Hill to cash a check and to get Bobby and Jennifer out of school, and he remembered telling them about the accident later, when he had them safely back at the farm. He remembered Aunt Marian packing a bag for him, clumsily, with one hand, while holding the other in a fist pressed tightly to her mouth. And he remembered having to raise his voice to Bobby to make the boy understand that he could not go with him, that he had to stay behind with the others. But Hook had almost no recollection of the drive with Uncle Arnie to Lambert Field in St. Louis, or buying his plane ticket when he got there, or boarding the TWA jet he found himself on by one that afternoon. Throughout these hours, though, he was constantly aware that he was not doing the one thing that the Santa Barbara sheriff’s police had expected him to do, and that was phone them. Chief Janson had given him a number to call and the name of the officer to ask for, a Sergeant Rider. But Hook had not been able to force himself to the phone, out of fear that by learning more about the accident he might put to death the one frail hope he still had, and without which he doubted that he would even be able to make it to Santa Barbara. As it was, he felt a sharp recurring pain in his chest and shoulder; his body was rigid with tension; he had diarrhea; he could not eat. He could drink, however, and the stewardess in First Class, where he found himself seated, was dedicated to seeing that he did.

“A drink, sir? Do you want a drink?” Her tone implied that it was not the first time she had asked him.

He nodded. “Yes. I guess so.”

“What kind, sir? Martini? Manhattan?”

“Martini will be all right.”

As she moved on, Hook wondered about the way she had looked at him, with distaste and even fear, and he could not understand it. He knew he probably appeared distraught, but that alone did not seem enough to explain her look. Then he happened to glance down at his hands and he saw what had caused her reaction: without knowing it he had pulled a copy of Life magazine out of its binder and, rolling it up, had twisted it almost in two. His hands, locked on the torn cylinder, were purple, the knuckles white. His veins stood out like nightcrawlers. Quickly, he stuffed the mutilated magazine into the pocket in the seat in front of him, a window seat like his own. There was no one next to him, and the young couple across the aisle had not noticed, were seemingly absorbed in the John Wayne western playing on the screen up in front. Only the stewardess had seen him, and she probably had ascribed the thing to fear of flying. So he felt safe. Then he caught himself. What did it matter anyway? Was he fool enough to believe that if others thought all was right with him, then that was how it would be? Yes, he decided. He was fool enough. He was frightened enough.

When the stewardess brought his drink, he forced himself to meet her eyes. She smiled uneasily and hurried on to serve the other passengers. Hook downed half the martini in two quick swallows, hoping the alcohol would help somehow. Out the window the sky was cloudless and crystalline. The sun shone fiercely on the jet’s wings. Miles below, the earth looked cold and serene, a patchwork of tan and white and gray without a sign of life.

Coming in over Los Angeles, Hook was surprised at how clear it looked from above, and then he remembered that the winter desert winds had that effect upon the city, blowing the smog out to sea. He was not prepared for the size of the place either, its sheer sprawling immensity, beginning way out in the Mojave Desert and stretching to the ocean and as far down the coast as he could see from the jet, which circled wide out over the water in a holding pattern for ten or fifteen minutes before finally getting clearance to land.

On the ground, checking his watch, Hook realized that it was only two-thirty Pacific time, which meant he had an hour-and-a-half layover before the United flight departed for Santa Barbara. He decided to kill the time in an airport bar, and ducked into the first one he came to, a crowded T-shaped affair with a floor-to-ceiling window running the length of the room, and faced by a long low counter at which a score of travelers sat drinking and talking as they watched the jets coming in and taking off. The decor was sleazy modern, small plastic-topped tables with plastic bucket chairs on tubular legs. Hook found a corner table and ordered another martini, his third that afternoon. He did not particularly like the drink, but since that was what he had started with on the jet he wanted to stay with them now; his stomach felt queasy enough without his mixing drinks. Smoking, trying not to think, he finished the martini, still feeling nothing except the leaden weight of his fear. Near him, at the counter table, a gaudy old married couple on their way home from Hawaii were hurriedly sharing their lives’ secrets with a young couple with a baby. In the time it took for Hook’s fourth martini to be served he learned that the old woman hated Los Angeles and hippies, loved San Diego, had been married three times, urinated almost constantly in flight, and had had her left breast removed two years before, which made “this old bastard next to me here” love the remaining one twice as much. In return, the young couple revealed that in six years of marriage they had lived in five different cities in four states, that the husband was thinking of leaving his present job in Denver, and that they had almost ten thousand dollars in the bank.

Hook continued drinking, trying not to overhear any more of their conversation. Instead, he invited in the thought, the line of speculation, that had been circling around his mind like a hawk ever since the chief first brought him the news: What exactly were his chances? What was the likelihood that the body the Santa Barbara sheriff’s police had was not Chris’s but that of some other youth who had found or stolen his wallet? The last letter Hook had received from the boy had come from Taos, where Chris had spent a few days in some sort of commune, at the invitation of a friend of a friend who knew somebody—something like that. And he had been hitchhiking the whole time, all the way from Illinois over a month ago, so of course he had to have run into a lot of hippies by now, a lot of oddballs and bums and just plain thieves. One of them could have stolen his wallet. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. And perhaps the victim in this “fall” reported by Chief Janson, had been so crushed or mangled that he was unrecognizable, and the police might have had nothing to go on but Chris’s wallet and identification papers. So, yes, there was a chance the boy was still alive—the slenderest of chances.

Once again he tried consciously to think about something else. A young mother with two well-dressed preschool children, a boy and a girl, had taken the table next to his own. While the mother ordered a whiskey sour for herself and Cokes for them, the two children stood there between the tables staring at Hook. He thought of blowing smoke on them but settled for turning away, fixing his attention on a Japan Air Lines 747 jet loading on the ramp outside. The craft was unbelievably immense, a silver robot Gulliver being swarmed over by a Lilliputian ground crew, all busily tending to its vast needs and appetites. There was that to think about, to ponder in awe. But instead Hook found himself contemplating the black irony of the whole tragedy, that it should have happened in Santa Barbara of all places, for the town had figured crucially in his own youth, and in fact was one of the few places besides his farm where he had been truly and consciously happy.

Just after the Armistice in 1945 he had gotten a ten-day leave from Long Beach, enough time to have flown back to Chicago to spend a week with his parents in their newly rented house in Evanston, but it had seemed like so far to go for so little. His father, who had fled home and farm at seventeen, operated under the apparent conviction that he had been sent to earth by God to infiltrate the marketing departments of various consumer goods manufacturers and find out which of their top executives and ass-licking underlings were not performing their jobs properly—that is, as he would have performed them—so that he might bring this failing to their attention before being asked to move on to other mission fields, as he invariably was. And like all prophets, his father suffered for his beliefs, but he was not at all loath to share that suffering with others, especially Hook’s mother, who over the years had been so consistently exposed to his attitude of aggrieved bitterness that in time it had become her life-style too. Together, they were like Victorian Methodist missionaries sweltering among the Hottentots, and consistently outraged that their charges wore so little clothing. So Hook had not bothered to tell them about his leave, and instead had taken the train up to Santa Barbara to swim and lie in the sand and be alone. He was nineteen and still a virgin, having failed to make it with, first, a whore, then with a gross ever-grinning Mexican girl his Navy buddies had fixed him up with in the hope of saving him from such an ignoble state of purity. But after that second failure they were no longer buddies so much as quiet mates who treated him with quiet scorn. So he went to Santa Barbara, alone.

He met her his first night there, while drinking beer in a tourist bar on the beach. Or rather he was picked up by her, was delivered by silver tray a card with the name Mrs. John R. Cunningham, Atlanta, Georgia, beautifully printed on it but almost obscured by the scrawled imperative: Join me. Though she was almost twice his age, she was still trim and attractive in a quiet moneyed sort of way, and it developed that he spent the rest of his leave with her, at the plush Biltmore Hotel on the beach, in a suite of rooms that was never without ice and booze and almost instantaneous service. She introduced him, first to a world of elegance, fine restaurants and exotic food and drink, mostly seafood and wine, which gave him the stamina to handle the second and far more dazzling world she also presented him with, that of sex. In nine nights and days he learned more from her, he was confident, than a squad of sailors could have learned in a year of weekend passes spent with the whores of Long Beach and Tijuana. He also learned to love the lady, though that was something she did not want to hear about, she said, because she was old enough to be his mother, and in fact had children of her own, plus a husband, back in Atlanta. Nevertheless her eyes had filled when they said goodbye at the railroad station.

“What’s the matter?”

He had never seen or heard from her since, nor had he ever tried to contact her. She would have been in her sixties now, an old woman.

“What’s the matter, mister?” It was the girl, standing almost at the edge of his table. And Hook realized it was not the first time she had asked him the question.

Her mother reached over and pulled her back, scolding the child, asking her where her manners were.

Hook finished his drink, paid up, and left.

The flight to Santa Barbara was actually not much more than a takeoff and a landing, since the ninety-mile distance barely gave the United jet time to reach cruising altitude before it had to start coming down again. As they came over the city Hook checked his watch: the time was four-forty. Through the window across the aisle he could see the sun already flattening as it dropped toward the Pacific out beyond Point Conception, bathing the Channel Islands and, out his window, the sea cliffs and the Santa Ynez Mountains behind the city in a scarlet glaze. The city itself lay mostly in shadow, its pervasive orange tile roofs and pastel fake adobe buildings stretching up the valley away from the beach, which cut between the palm trees and the blue of the sea like a scimitar.

As the DC-9 landed and taxied to the terminal, Hook did not know where he would find the strength to move when the time came. He felt not just weak but weighted, as if his body had turned to lead. He stayed seated until everyone else was out before he struggled to his feet and followed them down the steel stairway, heading for the small terminal. To the north, in the foothills of the Goleta valley, he saw not the neat ranks of lemon groves that had been there when he was young but houses, stores, shopping centers. In the other direction, a mile distant, was a stand of high-rise buildings, the university, he figured, the home of the bank-burners.

He thought of renting a car, already preparing himself for the possibility that the body would be Chris’s and he would want to stay on and find out the truth of what had happened, but it was a good ten miles to the city and he did not want to risk driving that distance feeling the way he did. As it was, he practically had to drag himself into a cab at the front of the terminal. The driver, a young man with long hair and a beard, did not open the door for him or take his bag. And they were a good distance from the terminal before he even bothered to ask Hook’s destination.

“The sheriff’s office,” Hook said.

The young man laughed. “Gonna turn yourself in, huh?”

Hook made no response.

“Just a little joke.”

Hook said nothing, hoping the youth would shut up.

But he did not. To the tune of “Till Somebody Loves You,” he sang out: “You’re nobody, till somebody busts you.” Laughing again, he searched for Hook’s reaction in the rearview mirror. Finding none, he wagged his head. “Boy, you ain’t much of a talker, are you?”

Hook told him to shut up and drive.

The downtown was pretty much as Hook remembered it, only bigger and busier. The streets were still lined with palm and hibiscus trees; the buildings were still all peach and white and buff adobe, with dark wood trim and tile roofs. Hook recognized the library, and then suddenly they were at the courthouse, styled by the natives as “the most beautiful public building in America,” a great white Moorish castle set on grounds as lushly green as mortician’s grass and covered with palm trees and other tropical flora.

The driver, surly now, had pulled over to the curb. “The sheriff’s office is over on the other side there,” he said, pointing. “The street’s one-way—I can’t go no closer. You owe me five-eighty.”

Hook fumbled in his wallet. It would be a half-block walk, and he was not sure he could make it. His bowels felt loose again; his limbs were quivering. He handed the driver a bill.

“That’s a five, man. I said five-eighty.”

Hook barely heard him. He took out another dollar and gave it to him, and the youth wagged his head again, amused, unbelieving.

“Man, you’re really with it. Now how about my tip?”

Ignoring him, Hook picked up his overnight case and walked away, vaguely aware that the young man was shouting at him, calling him a cheap sonofabitch and a motherfucker. But Hook did not stop. He was halfway to the entrance, a massive stone archway leading into the castle-like structure, and he had to concentrate all his energies on making it there. When he did finally, he was momentarily confused by a stone wall dead ahead, and then he saw the small sign stating that the coroner’s and sheriff’s offices were to the right. He went up a few stairs into a huge hall-like room with cool white walls and a wood counter behind which two uniformed officers sat at desks doing paper work while a pretty young woman worked at a switchboard off in a corner. There were other desks and tables, all empty. It was after five.

One of the officers, a deputy, got up and came to the counter.

Hook groped for his voice. “My name’s David Hook. You have a body…”

The word was electric, a charge transforming the deputy from a weary clerk into a grave and efficient servitor. “You’ll want Sergeant Rider,” he said, reaching for a phone, dialing.

Hook nodded. “That’s right—Sergeant Rider.”

“It’s after five—he could be gone by now. If he is, one of us can handle it.” The deputy turned away then, speaking quietly into the phone, probably giving the sergeant the option of being gone.

“The father,” Hook heard. “Here to identify the Hook boy.”

The Hook boy. So they at least were not in doubt as to whose body they had. It was settled in their minds, the identification just a formality to be gotten out of the way.

The deputy hung up. “He’ll be right down, sir.” He moved to open the gate that led behind the counter. “Why don’t you come back here and sit down?”

Hook thanked him but said he would rather stand. He was afraid that if he got off his feet he would need help getting up again.

“You’ve come pretty far, huh?”

Hook knew the deputy was only trying to help him, put him at ease, but he was in no condition to handle small talk, so he just turned away from the man. He wanted to light a cigarette but could not trust his hands to get the job done.

Hook did not know how long it took the sergeant to appear. It could have been ten minutes or only one; he had no idea. All he knew was that a burly authoritative man suddenly had appeared from a hallway beyond the deputies’ desks, and now he was talking with the deputy who had spoken to Hook. The man was only five feet eight or nine, but he was massively built, a weight-lifter type carrying an extra hundred pounds of fat on his belly and broad diva’s chest and loglike arms, which did not hang at his sides so much as stick out, as if ready, eager, for any threat anyone might be fool enough to direct at him. He was Hook’s age or older, balding, crewcut, with small hard laugh-squinted eyes. In one hand he carried a large manila envelope, sealed.

“Naw, I’ll take him,” Hook heard him tell the deputy. “When you make the fancy money we do, what’s a few hours overtime, huh? You’re glad to do it.”

The deputy grinned, sharing his cynicism. Then the man came around the counter. He thrust his hand out at Hook, who took it.

“Sergeant Rider, Mr. Hook. Sorry to put you through this, but we’ve got to have an I.D. on the body, of course. Afterwards, I can release it to you.”

Hook could not speak. It. The word, the gender, struck him like a fist in the stomach.

The sergeant led him out the door and down a stairway to the basement garage, which contained four or five sheriff’s police cars and a couple of unmarked cars. The sergeant led him to one of these. Inside, Rider told him that the county did not have a morgue.

“We just use local mortuaries,” he said. “The one we’re headed for is just a couple blocks up. We’ll be there in a minute.”

They were out of the garage now, heading north on the one-way street that ran past the courthouse.

“Another thing’s a little different out here,” the sergeant went on. “At least, different in our county. The sheriff’s also the coroner. So, in effect, I’m acting as coroner right now.” He looked at Hook. “In case you were wondering.”

Hook nodded assent, a numb understanding. But he still could not speak. He had the feeling that the air was thinning, its oxygen content growing less by the second. He could barely breathe. His mouth was dry. The sergeant turned off on a side street and two blocks farther pulled into a parking lot behind the mortuary, a sprawling pale-pink building with meticulously kept grounds and a wrought-iron sign identifying the place as Bowman Brothers. Hook managed to get out of the car by pulling himself up, but he felt so unsteady on his feet that for a few moments he just stood there holding on to the door while Rider strode on ahead of him toward the building. Then, seeing that Hook was not with him, he stopped and turned.

“You okay?” he asked.

Hook threw the car door closed and started after him, on legs he could not feel.

“We better go around the front,” Rider said. “You never know what you’ll run into in these back rooms.”

The reception room was large and plush, presided over by a blue-haired lady with a voice as soft as the carpet under their feet. Mr. Bowman would be right with them, she said. He was just down the hall, in one of the “slumber” rooms. She had used the word, actually used it, without the slightest trace of a smile. And when the mortician appeared, Hook was not surprised to see that the man looked exactly like the woman, only male, with his face congealed in the same decorous mask of professional sympathy. One of the sergeant’s beefy hands lightly prodded Hook, indicating for him to move on, and he followed the mortician down a corridor and through a six-foot-wide door into a small antiseptic room divided by a plastic curtain. Without ceremony, the mortician went to the corner of the curtain and drew it open—on the body. It was long and thin, stretching the full length of the wheeled table under a clean white sheet. The mortician, ready, looked at the sergeant, who nodded for him to go ahead. The mortician drew back the sheet.

It was Chris.

So that execution which had begun on the farm with Chief Janson, and had been temporarily called back by the word suicide, was consummated now. Looking at his son, seeing even under the discoloration and swelling the beauty of the boy’s spirit manifest in every line and contour of his face, Hook felt his own death, the end of that life he had worked so patiently to rebuild out of the ashes of his wife’s passing. Now it was gone. He would never rebuild. He would never really live again.

He longed to touch the body, to throw himself on it. But he knew the repugnance he would feel at its stillness, its death.

“It is my son,” he said.

Sergeant Rider moved forward efficiently, turning him from the death table, motioning for the mortician to cover the body, which he did.

“I’m very sorry—he was a fine-looking boy,” Rider said. And then it was right down to business again. “I forgot to ask you before—I’ll need some identification.”

Hook took out his wallet and tried to hand it to the sergeant, but he would not take it.

“Just some I.D.,” he said. “Driver’s license will do.”

Hook fumbled through his wallet till he found it. His hands were like baseball gloves. The sergeant checked the card, and gave it back.

“Fine. Now I’ll just need your signature here, for the boy’s effects.” He gave Hook a ball pen and held a form up against the wall while Hook signed it. Then he gave Hook the sealed manila envelope.

“The body was posted this afternoon,” he said. “I don’t have the full report yet, but on the phone the doc told me the cause of death was a broken neck and general trauma. The boy fell about a hundred feet onto the beach. Alcohol in the blood was point-o-four. Which would figure out at about one-o at the time of death. If he wasn’t drunk, he was damn close to it. Anyway, we’re done with the body. As of now it’s yours. Why don’t you settle shipping arrangements with Bowman right now? I’ll wait in the reception room.”

Hook looked at the sergeant. “I have to make a phone call too,” he said.

“Sure. No problem. Take your time.”

After selecting a casket and paying Mr. Bowman to hold the body through another day, when he planned to fly back to Illinois with it, Hook called home from the mortician’s private office. Aunt Marian answered, accepting the collect call in the smallest voice he had ever heard from her. He told her the body was Chris’s, and there was a long interval then, over a minute, when no one was able to speak on the other end and he could hear them only in the background, especially Jennifer, crying the word no! over and over, and Aunt Marian trying to comfort her but at times breaking down herself. Hook strained to hear Bobby’s voice among them, but he could not and he wanted to shout into the phone for Aunt Marian and Arnie to look after the boy above all else. Then Arnie came on, and Hook spoke with him for a few moments and then told him that he wanted to talk to Bobby and Jennifer. In turn, Hook told them that they all still had each other and that they needed each other now more than ever and that he needed them too. Finally he told Aunt Marian that he planned to fly home with the body the next day and that he would call again before leaving and tell them when he would arrive, and he asked that Arnie make arrangements with the Rohmer Funeral Home in Banner Hill.

When he hung up, he was drenched in sweat, but he no longer felt so weak, probably because there was nothing left to fear or dread now. He had touched bottom. He had lost all there was to lose.

Mr. Bowman, waiting outside his office, walked with him to the reception room, where they found Sergeant Rider leafing through a magazine. As they came in, he tossed it onto a table and, sighing, grunting, heaved himself to his feet. It had been a long day, his expression said—but a day like any other. Not waiting for him, Hook plunged on outside, into the growing darkness, and somehow made it to the car. Sagging into the front seat, he sat there waiting for the sergeant, finally alone with the knowledge, the certitude that he would never again see Chris alive. Not ever. He would grow old, and he would die. The sun would become a dead star and the earth a cinder circling it. And still he would not see his son alive again. Never. At the thought, he heard some dumb animal sound torn out of his body.

The door opened and Rider struggled in behind the wheel. “Get everything taken care of?” he asked.

For a time, Hook could not speak. “We have a lot to talk about,” he said finally.

“That’s what I’m here for. Wouldn’t you rather wait, though? Get some rest? Nothing’s gonna change. It’ll all be here in the morning.”

“I’d like to talk now, Sergeant.”

Rider started the car, backed around, and headed out of the parking lot. “Okay. But not here. Let’s get comfortable. I got a thirst—you mind?”

“No.”

“I figured not. You’ve had a few today yourself, I’d imagine.”

Hook decided not to wait on the sergeant’s comfort. “The police chief in Banner Hill, he said you called it a suicide.”

“That’s right.”

“I know this is what you’d expect a father to say. Any father. But in this case, it’s true, Sergeant. My boy didn’t kill himself. I don’t care what your facts are. I don’t care if you were there and saw it happen. You are wrong. My son did not kill himself.”

Rider kept his eyes on the road. “You’re right, Mr. Hook. That’s what I’d expect a father to say.”

Turning, Hook searched the man’s beefy countenance for a trace of irony or ridicule. There was none. Past him, out the car window, Hook saw the courthouse again, only this time its facade, for they were moving south on the next street over. The building was floodlit in the darkness, a blazing white temple of tourism as much as justice.

At the next street, Rider turned off and parked, and they got out. Hook followed the sergeant along the walk, lined with hibiscus trees, to a pedestrian causeway—a paseo, to the natives, as Hook remembered. On each side were typical picturesque Santa Barbara shops selling antiques, gifts, Persian rugs, securities. They were all closed. At the end, where the paseo turned left, was a sidewalk café with empty umbrella tables surrounding a raised fishpond. Rider led him back into the restaurant itself, which looked as if it had once been the lobby of some small hotel for rich widows, and indeed there were a number of them, or at least their kind, sitting at the tables now, chattering and picking at their food. The sergeant went into a small alcove off the bar and took a corner booth, heaving his bulk into it with a luxurious grunt. Hook sat down across from him. The waitress, like the bartender, gave Rider a big smile and some kidding; he was evidently a favorite there. He ordered a manhattan, a double. Hook ordered coffee.

“All right,” Hook told him. “I’m listening.”

Rider took out his cigarettes and offered one to Hook, who rejected it. The sergeant lit one himself, taking his time. Hook watched him with a cold, growing anger.

“We’ll be served in a minute,” Rider explained. “Just as soon not have the girl overhear anything, okay?”

“You could stop talking when she’s here,” Hook suggested.

“You’re a farmer, I believe your police chief said.”

Hook nodded, waiting, trying to control himself. “I raise cattle.”

“Your boy didn’t like it, huh?”

“He was waiting to be drafted. He wanted to see the country.”

The waitress came with their order and Rider asked her how her back was. It was better, she said, but not as good as it would be if she would only change jobs, get something where she could lie on her back all day. The sergeant laughed with her. Then she left.

“She’s a friend,” he explained. “I didn’t want to just clam up when she got here. You know how it is.”

“She’s gone now,” Hook said.

Rider took a quick drink, grimly set it down. “So she is. And now you want me to talk. Okay. Here’s the story as we have it so far. We think it’s the truth—there’s no reason for it not to be the truth—but we’re not about to call the case closed as yet. On the other hand, there are two witnesses, in substantial agreement, so there doesn’t appear to be any need for an inquest. Not yet, anyway.”

He took another drink and grimaced, as if he were trying to remember something, and failing. Hook waited for him to continue.

“Yesterday around noon your boy was hitchhiking down here on 101. You go through any time of day you’ll see a dozen of them trying to thumb a ride—hippies mostly, but some of them straight, like your kid. I figure he probably got a ride up from L.A. in the morning. Anyway, around noon this girl—this woman—picked him up. She’s about twenty-five, divorced, goes by her maiden name, Madera. Elizabeth Madera. A very beautiful girl. Comes from a very old Santa Barbara family.” The sergeant’s voice heaped scorn on the phrase. “And here that means something special. It’s kind of like a hunting license.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning some of ’em swing pretty high, wide, and handsome—and without having to pay dues. In some societies this girl might be labeled a whore. Here, she’s aristocracy.”

Hook was getting impatient. “Where’d she take him?”

Rider took another drink. “Home. To a beach house she shares with an older woman, a widow name of Dorothy Rubin. Actually it’s the Rubin woman’s place. Miss Madera just ‘stays there’—whatever that means. Anyway, she took him home. He was out there thumbing, probably hoping to get a lift to Big Sur or San Francisco. Instead he gets a ride about three miles up the coast to the beach house. Now you don’t have to be a genius to figure what Miss Madera had in mind—or why he accepted. Sex, Mr. Hook.”

“Go on.”

The sergeant scowled down at his drink. “You’re not going to like any of this—probably won’t believe it even. But this is the way it was. All I’m telling you is what we have from the statements the two women gave.”

“Go on, Sergeant.”

“According to Miss Madera, she fixed your boy a big lunch. He ate it. They drank some wine. And then they went to bed.” Rider’s eyes fell away from Hook’s, and he drained the last of his manhattan. “Nothing happened,” he went on. “According to her, your son was impotent. He couldn’t get it up.”

“I know the word,” Hook said.

“So your son became depressed. He started drinking vodka instead of wine and late in the afternoon he either passed out or just fell asleep, and didn’t wake up till around eight in the evening. Mrs. Rubin was home by then—she works for a public relations firm in town. She wanted to kick your boy out, she says, but Miss Madera wouldn’t do it. She—Madera—tried to be nice to him, she says, and talk with him, but he started drinking again. He called himself a fake and a fag, and said he always had been a fag and had never even admitted it to himself, but he knew it now and he couldn’t live with the idea. She couldn’t reason with him, couldn’t even talk with him, so she went to bed. Around eleven. Mrs. Rubin was also getting ready for bed. She says she’s used to Miss Madera picking up strays—that the girl’s just got too big a heart for her own good. Mrs. Rubin didn’t like it that your son was there and drinking, but it didn’t bother her too much either. His whole generation are crybabies, she says. So when he kept talking about having nothing to live for, it didn’t really faze her.”

Hook broke in, unable to keep from repeating the phrase. “Nothing to live for?”

Rider nodded. “That’s what he kept saying, that he had nothing to live for. But Mrs. Rubin says it didn’t bother her because he was drunk. ‘Just a drunk kid feeling sorry for himself’—I think that was how she put it. Anyway, she went into the bathroom to do whatever it is women do before they go to bed. And when she came out, he wasn’t where she’d left him in the living room. He was gone. She went out onto the wood deck that runs across the sea side of the house. And then she saw him. He had gone down the steps from the deck and had walked right out to the edge of the cliff above the beach. As she watched him, he drew back his arms—” The sergeant drew back his own arms, demonstrating. “And he jumped. Without saying a word.”

The sergeant settled back, studying Hook for a reaction, which Hook was sure showed in his eyes. From the beginning of the policeman’s tale, the first mention of the sex and impotence, Hook’s anger had been growing, until now it was all cold rage.

“Just like that, huh?” he said. “And he jumped. Without saying a word.”

The sergeant shrugged helplessly. It was not his story, the gesture said. He was only recounting what he had been told. “You don’t believe it,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Because it isn’t true, Sergeant.”

Rider tipped up his empty glass, taking an ice cube in his mouth. Reflectively sucking on it, he asked if Hook could produce any rebuttal testimony, any girls Chris had known and had sex with.

“As far as I know, he was a virgin.”

“That don’t help.”

“So I have to prove his innocence,” Hook observed. “But this Madera woman doesn’t have to prove his guilt.”

The sergeant shook his head. “She proved nothing. All she did was give us a possible motive for an act that was witnessed by another person. Alone, either of their statements might be suspect, but together they amount to something. And wishing it was otherwise won’t change a thing. You’ve got to have facts. Relevant facts.”

“Suppose I flew out his brother and sister and some of his friends from high school, and you talked to them? Suppose you found out that very few young men ever had more to live for than my son?”

“Kids change, Mr. Hook.” The sergeant signaled for another drink, and asked Hook if he would like something besides coffee. Would he like to eat?

Hook ignored the questions. “He was a track star, Sergeant. A miler. He was an honor student. He was elected president of his senior class without even wanting the job, or even running for it. He was loved by—” But suddenly Hook could not continue. To say another word would have been to cry out, to rage.

The sergeant mumbled something about what a damn shame it all was, and that Chris had indeed been a fine-looking boy.

The waitress served the sergeant’s drink and exchanged Hook’s cup of cold coffee for a steaming hot one. And there was no banter this time.

When she left, Rider apparently had decided it was time for straight talk and unpulled punches. “He may have been all that, Mr. Hook, but I’m afraid it doesn’t cut any ice. There’s still Mrs. Rubin’s statement. She saw him jump. Saw him.” The sergeant punctuated his words by tossing off a good part of his drink.

“Why should she lie?” Hook asked him, and saw in the sergeant’s eyes that it was just the question the man had been waiting for, a trump card in a game he did not particularly care to win.

“That’s exactly the point, Mr. Hook. What reason would she have to lie about your boy? None. She didn’t even know him.”

“Why don’t we ask her? Why don’t we go there now?”

Rider shook his head. “Maybe tomorrow. I asked both of them today if someone came to identify the body, would they mind talking with them. No dice. And it’s understandable, I guess. They’re both overwrought, especially the Rubin woman.”

“I feel for them.”

Rider met Hook’s eyes for a moment longer and then looked down at his drink. In his jaw a muscle tightened, relaxed, tightened again. He was not enjoying himself.

“Isn’t it a fundamental right to face one’s accuser?” Hook asked him.

“They’re not accusing you of anything. Or your son.”

“Just of killing himself.”

The sergeant wearily shook his head. “Again—one of them claims to have witnessed the act—that’s all.”

“And the other neatly supplies the motive.”

Rider put his face in his hands and rubbed it, mauled it, like an infant waking. He sighed. “Mr. Hook, please try to understand this. The death happened a few minutes after midnight on this very day. So there’s still a heckuva lot of investigating to be done, questions that will undoubtedly come up—and be answered. In our book right now the cause of death is listed as undetermined. And that’s just what it is. It appears to be a suicide at this point, and that’s about all we can say. If new facts come up, and those facts indicate something besides suicide—don’t worry, an inquest will be held. And if anybody seems to be guilty of anything, they will be indicted. It’s that simple. We’re not in the business of covering things up. Or protecting anybody. And I mean anybody.”

Hook nodded understanding, concurrence. But nothing had changed as far as he was concerned. “I still want to talk to them.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Rider repeated. “I’ll try again tomorrow.”

“Tonight, Sergeant.”

Rider shook his head again. “No chance.”

Hook lit a cigarette. He wanted to be rid of the sergeant now. He had heard all he needed or cared to hear—from him. Rider asked him if he had had anything to eat all day. Had he checked into a motel yet? Did he want to collapse?

“I’ll be all right, Sergeant. I can take care of myself.”

Rider looked at his watch. “It’s seven. Can I drop you anywhere? Come on, let me drive you to a motel. You need rest. You gotta be worn out.”

“I’ll be all right,” Hook repeated. “Thank you for your trouble.”

The sergeant looked exasperated. “I just can’t leave you here like this,” he protested. “At least let me drive you to a motel. Get you checked in.”

“I think I’ll stay here, Sergeant. Have a few drinks, eat something, then take a cab to a motel. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry about me.” Hook said it calmly, easily, and he saw in the sergeant’s eyes, in the sudden resignation there, that his words had done the job. Shrugging agreement, Rider squeezed out of the booth and stood up, taking the bar check with him.

“Okay then. Suit yourself,” he said. “You give me a call in the morning, though, all right? I’ll pick you up and we’ll go out to the scene—whether the ladies feel like talking or not.” And suddenly his hand was on Hook’s shoulder, in a brief impulsive contact that seemed to surprise him as much as it did Hook. “You take it easy, now,” he said.

And then he was gone.

Alone, Hook sat facing the bare wall in the alcove. He knew that within an hour he would be there, at the place where his son had died, and he knew it would be an act of madness to some degree, an act without any of his usual caution or circumspection. So he wondered about his sanity at the moment. His eldest son was lying on a table under a sheet a half-dozen blocks away, and yet here he was, not weeping, not lying on some lonely motel bed staring at the ceiling and longing that the ache in his heart presaged some final fatal bursting, not in the expectation that he would then be with his wife and son again in some mystic nether dimension but rather that he would simply be free once and for all time, free of life, no longer an inmate of this crowded planetary madhouse where nature somehow had accomplished the crowning monstrosity of developing a race of mortal gods, of thinking animals, beings designed for no other purpose, it seemed, than to suffer.

That should have been his reaction, Hook felt. Instead, here he was, not at all the bitter philosophic mourner of his expectations but suddenly all cold blood and colder rage—and suddenly hungry too, he realized, as the waitress came to his table to warm his coffee. He ordered a T-bone steak dinner and a vodka on ice.

When the waitress served his drink she asked him if he would like to switch to the other side of the table, so that he would not be facing the wall. He told her no, that he would stay where he was.

The cab driver who answered his call turned out not to be the one who had driven him in from the airport, and for that Hook was grateful. This one was old and taciturn, a Mexican-American with wine on his breath, and when Hook told him where he wanted to go, all the man did was grunt before throwing the battered Ford into gear and driving off. The telephone book listed Dorothy Rubin’s address as 2010 Cliff Drive, a road Hook remembered from the old days, when Mrs. Cunningham had treated him to a champagne picnic on a lonely stretch of beach west of the city. They had stayed there well past nightfall, making love part of the time but mostly just sitting together huddled between blankets and wordlessly communing with the driftwood fire he had built. That night she had gone down on him for the first time and he remembered it afterwards not only as one of the most intensely pleasurable experiences of his life but also liberating, even shattering, for until then his innocence was such that he had thought of the act only in relation to whores and perverts. Back at the hotel she had continued his education by having him join her in the bathtub, where they spent almost an hour drinking more champagne and soaping the sea salt off each other’s body, and where a Mexican-American waiter bringing in a late-night supper saw them together through the open bathroom door. His expression, a comic mask of studied indifference in which his black eyes kept drifting rebelliously to the open door, set them laughing like the half-drunk lovers they were, once he had left the suite.

Now, watching the old man as he wheeled the car through the December night, Hook reflected that in this age of cataclysmic change, things really had not changed all that much, not even in twenty-five years. The Mexican-Americans, like the blacks, were still serving the white man, only now the whites had been taught to feel guilt at that servitude.

He could not see much outside the cab. There were more houses than he remembered, more lights, and then suddenly they were past the lights, driving through darkness up a steep curve in the road until they came to a level again, and he was able to see lights out at sea. Trees, hills, a few houses kept moving between him and the ocean, blocking his view of it. After a while the driver slowed the cab and began checking the rural mailboxes along the road. Finally he turned in at a narrow blacktop lane where three mailboxes rested on an ornate wrought-iron frame.

“Man, I hope you got friends waiting for you up there,” he said.

In the darkness ahead a few dim lights burned forlornly. Hook asked him what he meant, wondering if the man had heard about the accident and was referring to it.

“It very dark is all.”

Hook asked the man to come back for him in an hour.

“That depend.”

Ahead, the headlights picked the name Rubin out of the darkness—a small reflector-type sign on the carport of the first of three houses spread along the cliff.

“On what?” Hook asked. “Your tip?”

Braking, the driver gave an affirmative shrug.

Hook looked at the meter. It read $3.05. He took out a five-dollar bill and gave it to him. “Will that do it?”

The old man was unimpressed, but he allowed that he would come back in an hour.

“At ten?”

The man nodded, bored by the discussion. Hook got out. The cab backed around and drove off, leaving him alone in the driveway facing the rear of the house. And suddenly Hook felt a tremor of panic, for it struck him that he had not prepared for this moment at all, had let his mind wander throughout the drive from downtown, as if there were no question that once he confronted the women they would both automatically break down and confess to him that truth which Sergeant Rider with all the powers and sanctions of his office had not been able to elicit in hours of questioning. Then just as suddenly Hook knew the way he would go, and figured he must have known all along in some secret circuit of his being, and that had been the reason for his aplomb in the cab. He would have to play the innocent, of course, the hick, the stolid bereft peasant come to view the site of his son’s passing, not unlike a typical Santa Barbara tourist making the rounds before glumly picking up his mementoes—in this case the broken body of his son—and going home to wherever it was he came from.

He pressed a button next to the back door. Inside, chimes sounded.

As he waited, Hook surveyed the scene, what he could see of it in the soft yellow light of the twin lantern-type lamps bracketing the driveway. Inside the carport were two sports cars: a maroon Jaguar XK-E and a white Triumph convertible. Behind them, parked in the driveway, was a Volkswagen sedan whose pastel color he could not be sure of in the yellow light, though he could make out the California license plate: 847AOF. Like the other two cars, it had a Douglas for Congress sticker on the bumper. The car was important. It meant that the two women were not alone. Beyond it, on the other side of the driveway, a scraggly lawn led to a row of eucalyptus trees that to Hook’s Midwestern eyes looked like battlefield casualties, blasted and torn, their bark hanging in tatters about the bare bones of their trunks. Through the trees he could see the lights of the other two houses, which, like Mrs. Rubin’s, were low and sprawling and of the same glassy modern design, all probably the work of the same architect.

Now a light came on over the door and someone looked out at him from behind the drapes in a floor-to-ceiling window to his right. Finally the door opened a crack, still chained.

“Yes?” It was a woman.

“I’m the father of Christopher Hook.”

Her face went pale, a cold puffy face sticking out of a fake leopard housecoat. Her hair was wound up in rollers.

“What do you want? What are you doing here?”

Somehow Hook got it out. “My son died here today.”

“We told Sergeant Rider all—”

“Who is it?” It was a man’s voice.

The woman turned away from the door. “It’s the father, for Christ sake!”

“Let me talk to him.” Now the man appeared in the opening, a young man, small, blond, androgynous, wearing an old-fashioned tweed suit with a vest, a button-down shirt and paisley tie. His face was ashen.

“What did you want, sir?”

“I’m not here to hurt anybody,” Hook reassured him. “I just want to see what happened. Where it happened.”

The face relaxed. “Yes. Of course—come in.”

He closed the door to unchain it, but for a time it remained the way it was, closed. Hook could hear the woman protesting. “I just don’t want him in here, that’s all! He’s got no business here! I told the sergeant!”

He heard the young man trying to quiet her and then their voices became almost inaudible as they moved away from the door, but he did catch the young man’s final words: “Think! Dorothy! Use your head!” Then after a few moments Hook heard the chain being slipped out of its rail, and the door opened. The young man smiled apologetically.

“Come in, Mr. Hook. And please forgive us. It’s been a hard day for Mrs. Rubin too—I mean besides yourself. Please accept our sympathy.”

It was an oddly formal little speech, like a child’s rote recitation in Sunday school. Entering, Hook said nothing, and the young man closed the door behind him. He was smaller than Hook had judged from outside, almost a half-foot shorter than Hook’s own six-one. He could have been twenty-four or thirty; Hook could not be sure.

“My name’s Ferguson,” he said. “Richard Ferguson. Mrs. Rubin and I work for the same company. I thought I’d stop by tonight and see if I could help. It’s been a real trauma—a real shock for both of them.”

So he was not expected to know the word trauma. It was a good sign. “Both?” Hook asked.

“Miss Madera. She lives here with Mrs. Rubin. She was here when the—when the accident occurred.”

Hook nodded comprehension, then turned, looking for the women, but neither of them was in evidence. The house was a split-level. He and Ferguson were on the upper level now; to his right was a kitchenette and dining bar, to his left a hallway, probably leading to a bedroom and bath. In front was a balustrade overlooking a handsomely furnished living room with a stone fireplace, beamed ceiling, and a front glass wall looking out on a broad redwood deck and, beyond, in darkness, the cliffs and the ocean. A wood fire hissed in the fireplace.

He followed Ferguson down the carpeted stairway to the living room. The young man headed for the bar across the room.

“Would you like a drink, Mr. Hook?”

“No thank you. I had a couple on the plane. I flew in this afternoon.” It sounded stupid. It would do.

Ferguson poured a few fingers of Black Label scotch into a glass and sipped at it.

“I admire your strength,” he told Hook. “I mean, how you can come here tonight. I don’t think that I——”

“I’d like to talk with the women.”

“Of course. Mrs. Rubin will be right back out. But she is upset. She can’t talk long. You do understand, I hope. I mean, the poor woman—” At Hook’s glance, he fell abruptly silent.

“I’d like to talk with Miss Madera too.”

“Oh, she’s not here. She’s not in yet.”

“There are three cars in back.”

In Ferguson’s alert eyes Hook saw that his words had been a mistake. The young man was on guard now, warned.

“I mean she’s outside,” he said. “Walking. She’s a great walker, Liz is.”

“Maybe we could find her.”

“I wouldn’t know where to look in the dark. She walks on the beach. She could be anywhere.”

“She wasn’t a witness anyway. She didn’t see anything.” It was the woman again, Mrs. Rubin, coming down from the upper level. She was dressed as before, but with the addition of a scarf over her hair and rollers.

“But you did,” Hook said.

“Yes, I did.”

“Sergeant Rider told me about it. What happened. What you saw.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I don’t know. Just to see where it happened, I guess. See if you could add anything.”

Mrs. Rubin sat down on the davenport and, flipping open a box on the coffee table, took out a cigarette and lit it, her movements those of a man, a big man, rough, careless. Watching her, Hook wondered if that was why she had a younger woman living with her, as a mate, a lover, someone to play female to her tough ballsy male.

“There’s nothing to add,” she said. “I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m sorry for you and your family but I’m afraid this whole thing just isn’t our concern. Your boy wasn’t invited here, Mr. Hook—certainly not to stay. We both tried to get him to leave. Frankly, what it all boils down to is he just happened to choose our place to kill himself. It’s that simple.”

“Dorothy, for Christ sake!” Ferguson remonstrated.

“Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? And isn’t that what this gentleman came here for—the truth?”

Hook said nothing, for fear his voice would break. He went over to the fireplace and stood there staring down at the blaze, trying to keep control of himself. Then Ferguson was at his side, holding out a drink.

“Scotch,” the young man said.

As he took the drink, Hook saw something move out on the deck, beyond the glass wall. It was the young woman. She was just standing there in the darkness, looking at him. As Sergeant Rider had said, she was beautiful, strikingly beautiful, with thick long black hair parted in the middle and hanging sea-damp down around a finely shaped face dominated by large grave eyes. She made no move to come on in.

“Mrs. Rubin is very upset,” Ferguson explained again. “She’s not herself.”

Hook turned from the window in time to see Mrs. Rubin angrily bite off a fresh outburst at a look from the little man. Evidently Hook had underestimated Ferguson’s power, and it bothered him. He could not get a true reading on their relationship, who was running whom. But at the moment he was more interested in the girl, who slid open one of the glass doors leading to the deck and came in now, with a surge of cold salty air. She closed the door behind her and stood there hugging her arms, trying to get warm. She was wearing faded jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Her feet were bare.

“This is Mr. Hook,” Ferguson told her. “He’s the father of the boy.”

She said nothing, registered nothing.

Ferguson looked at Hook in panic. “Miss Madera.”

Hook nodded, but said nothing in the face of her reaction to him, the way her eyes unblinkingly regarded him, not with hostility so much as a kind of unashamed, even arrogant, self-assertion.

“Just what can we tell you? What is it you want to know?” It was Mrs. Rubin.

Hook turned to her. “I can’t believe my son would kill himself.”

“Well, I saw him.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Maybe he was on dope. Maybe he thought he could fly. They do, you know, these kids. It happens.”

“But didn’t my son do it on purpose? Because he had ‘nothing to live for’?”

Mrs. Rubin’s eyes went flat with anger. She almost smiled. “So you don’t want to be spared, huh? You want it right in the gut.”

“I want to know what happened.”

“You know what happened! You said you talked to Sergeant Rider already. So you already know what our statements are.”

“And there’s no change in them?”

“How could there be? We can’t very well change what happened, can we?”

Hook looked at Miss Madera, who immediately turned away and went over to the fireplace. “Is there anything you can tell me?” he asked.

Still not looking at him, she shook her head. Hook waited a few moments to see if she would change her mind, but she continued to stand there staring down at the fire, with her back to him. Hook turned to Ferguson.

“I’d like to see where it happened,” he said.

“The cliff, you mean?”

“The cliff.”

Glancing nervously at Mrs. Rubin, the young man nodded. “All right. Sure. But I’ll have to get a flashlight. It’s in the kitchen, Dorothy?”

She was lighting another cigarette. “Top right-hand drawer.”

As Ferguson hurried up the stairs to the kitchenette, Hook moved closer to the fireplace, so that Miss Madera had no choice but to meet his eyes or turn away again and admit that she could not face him.

“Did he—did my son also say it to you? That he had nothing to live for?”

Again she shook her head. “I had gone to bed.”

It was the first time he had heard her voice, and it held no surprises for him, was both soft and strong, with the unmistakable timbre of old money, authority.

“That was after he had ‘failed’ with you.” Hook threw it at her without warning, a sucker punch, and suddenly her dark eyes shone with tears. Again she turned away from him.

But Mrs. Rubin came charging to the rescue, jumping up from the davenport. “Can’t you see she’s had it, for Christ sake! Just because you don’t have any feelings, buster—coming here like this—”

“Shut up, Dorothy.” Miss Madera said it quietly, easily, and when the big woman promptly lapsed into silence Hook was again at a loss to understand the relationship the three of them had with each other.

Now Miss Madera faced him squarely. “I just can’t talk about it now, Mr. Hook. I’m sorry.”

She swept past him then, heading for the back of the house. At the same time, Ferguson came down the stairs from the kitchen, carrying the flashlight. Watching him walk, the almost female hips swishing toward him, Hook wondered if the young man’s effeminacy might not be just skin-deep, a covering for something weasel-tough and cunning underneath. Now Ferguson flipped on the deck lights outside.

“When Mrs. Rubin went into the bathroom to get ready for bed, your boy was right there, drinking,” he said, indicating a chair close to the bar. “And when she came out he was gone. She turned on the light. This door was open.” He slid open the glass deck door, and Hook followed him outside, onto the deck. “So she came out here to see where he was. As you can see, with the light on you can see to the edge of the cliff. He was standing—”

“I know all that,” Hook cut in, heading for the end of the deck, where he went down the stairs. Ferguson followed him across the lawn, which became scraggly and rough as they neared the cliff edge. There, Hook took the flashlight from him and played it along the cliff face and the beach below, a dark-gray strip against which the surf came rolling in white and frothy and then turned coal-black as it slipped back into the sea. The cliff itself was not sheer; even leaping outwards, pushing off, a man would have struck it on the way down.

“It’s pretty frightening now, at night,” Ferguson said. “But during the day it can be quite beautiful. Most days you can see the islands.”

Turning, Hook played the flashlight along the top of the cliff, thrusting its faint white finger through the eucalyptus trees at the two other houses. The nearest was at least two hundred feet away, so it was understandable that no one in either house had seen or heard a thing. Hook turned off the flashlight. As he handed it back to Ferguson he saw Miss Madera standing on the deck watching them. She had changed her clothes.

Hook asked Ferguson about her. “Does she work for the same people as you and Mrs. Rubin?”

“No. Liz doesn’t work.”

“Who is it you work for?”

“Jack Douglas. He’s running for Congress.”

“What are you—his campaign manager?”

“In a way, yes.”

“And Mrs. Rubin?”

“Well, you see, we both are part of Jack Douglas Associates. It’s a local P.R. firm. Public relations,” Ferguson explained. “And now Jack is—well he’s between campaigns, actually. He came very close to winning it last year. So we’re already pointing for next November.”

“And where does Miss Madera fit in?”

“She doesn’t.”

“Just lives here, huh?”

“She’s a friend of Mrs. Rubin, that’s all.”

Hook contemplated the bland mask of Ferguson’s face. “You resent these questions?”

“Not at all. I know what you must be going through. I’d want answers too, in your place. But—” And suddenly the mask was sweating.

“But what?”

“Nothing. It’s not important. I just don’t know if I’d have the strength to come here like this. I mean, so soon.”

“Maybe my son and I weren’t close.”

“That would explain it.”

“Or maybe people in shock do strange things.”

“But would they know they’re in shock?”

“Some might.”

The young man shivered visibly. “I’d better get back in,” he said. “I should have worn a coat.”

When they got back on the deck, Miss Madera asked Hook if he had a ride back to town and he told her that he had a cab coming.

“I’ll drive you,” she said.

Ferguson laughed uneasily. “He just said he had a cab coming, Liz.”

“That’s all right,” Hook said. “I can leave money for the cab.”

Now Ferguson looked alarmed. “No, I really don’t think she should, Mr. Hook. Not the way she’s been feeling today. If you don’t want to take the cab, I can drive you. I was going to leave soon anyway.”

But Liz Madera was not listening. She had started down the deck stairway. “We can go around the side,” she said. “I already have my keys.”

“Liz, you better not! I’m telling you!”

Hook had already taken out a five-dollar bill and now as he held it out to Ferguson, the little man, his face scarlet, could barely bring himself to look at Hook. It had been a mistake, his outburst, and they both knew it and knew the other knew it.

Taking the bill now, Ferguson tried to smile. “It’s been a rough day,” he said.

“Yes, it has.” Leaving him there, Hook followed Miss Madera around the house to the garage.

Hook had never ridden in a Jaguar XK-E before, and he found the experience something like sealing oneself up in a bomb, albeit a bomb that held rigidly to the twisting coast road despite the fact that Miss Madera drove as if sixty miles an hour were the legal minimum. In the cramped quarters, however, it was not the car he was aware of but its driver. She had changed into a blue miniskirted dress with shiny knee-high black boots and a matching short raincoat that left her thighs exposed inches from his own hand tightly gripping his knee. And there was also the smell of her, something subtler than perfume, more natural, more animal, perhaps sea air melded with the salts of her own sweat, or simply some strangely clean and cutting body musk—Hook did not know. But he knew its effect. There had been times in the years since Kate’s death when he had thought the sex urge in him was almost dead, often three and four weeks at a time when he would not even have to give the matter thought, and then suddenly it would be upon him again, like a malarial fever, and he would have to invent some excuse to go to St. Louis, where he would find release with a whore or pickup. Now he felt that same fever—on the day of his son’s death, and toward this woman who probably had caused that death—and it filled him with self-contempt. He looked over at her in anger, trying to concentrate only on the matter at hand, which was to get some sort of reading on her motive for driving him back to town, but all he could see in the stark white glow of the dashboard was the woman, the dark eyes and sensuous mouth, and they told him nothing. So he decided to ask.

“Why did you want to drive me?”

She kept her eyes on the road. “I don’t know.”

“Wasn’t it to talk, Miss Madera? Don’t we have a lot to talk about?”

She shook her head, not in denial so much as puzzlement, doubt. “I couldn’t just leave it the way it was, that’s all. I mean Dorothy and Richard letting you come in, showing you where it happened, and saying so long, that’s it, tough luck.” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I am so sorry, Mr. Hook. I am so sorry.”

Hook looked away from her tears. “I still want you to tell me about it.”

But she preferred to change the subject, remarking that he did not have a bag. He told her that he had left it in Sergeant Rider’s car.

“Can you get along?” she asked.

“No problem.”

She had turned onto the oceanfront drive by now and they were growling past the city marina, with its hundreds of yachts rocking expensively in the light swells of the harbor. Ahead, on the city side of the drive, were the tourist motels, each with its own discreet sign of identification, no flashing neon stars or arrows to dragoon one in off the street, for of course this was Santa Barbara, Hook remembered, and not apple-pie America. Across from the motels and restaurants was the long scimitar of sand he had seen from the air, and in between, lining both sides of the road, twin rows of date palms with their shabby skirts of dead fronds, which he had found ugly even as a youngster in the Navy. “Like French ticklers on a hairy cock,” a fellow Midwestern swabbie had described the trees then, and as far as Hook could see the simile was still every bit as accurate as it was gross.

“You won’t talk about it?” he asked her.

She did not answer.

“All right, then. Any motel will do.”

But she did not turn in as they passed the first few blocks of motels.

“I could use a drink,” she said. “In fact, I need a drink. Will you have one with me?”

Hook looked at her. “In silence?”

She shook her head. “Any way you want.”

“All right,” he said. “Sure.”

She turned in at a place that looked at first glance like some kind of rustic wood fort, with its walls canted inwards, pyramid style, as if it had been designed against that revolutionary day when the unwanted would want in. But going inside, Hook saw that the “wood” walls were actually poured concrete and the rusticity strictly modern. The place was sumptuous, dark, candle-lit—and almost abandoned. A young woman in a muumuu-type dress led them past a few couples drinking around a hexagonal table in the center of which a gas fire blazed around fake wood. A half-dozen people were at the bar; a few couples sat drinking alone at tables; and one large noisy group was having dinner at three tables pulled together across the room.

The hostess showed them to a small table against the back wall and took their order, a vodka on ice for Hook and a daiquiri for Miss Madera. She got out a cigarette and lit it with the table candle, ignoring the match he was about to light, so he used it on a cigarette of his own. For a few moments longer the two of them just sat there, she studying him with a cool open gaze, barren of any slightest hint of fear or defensiveness or hostility, so Hook saw no reason not to go to the heart of the matter.

“In the car,” he said. “When you said you were sorry—”

“Yes.”

“I meant to ask you why. Was it your fault, Miss Madera? His death?”

She did not even blink. “In a way, yes. If I hadn’t picked him up, the whole thing might not have happened.”

“But that’s all? There’s no other way you were at fault?”

“I wish I could say there was. I have a feeling it would help you.”

“You mean I want someone to blame. Someone to put it all on.”

She regarded him coolly, without pity now. “It’s only natural, isn’t it? It must be a hard thing to accept, that your child would kill himself. You’d want to believe anything but that.”

“Yes, you would.”

“And you won’t accept it, will you? I can see that. You never will accept it.”

Again he agreed with her. “That’s right. I never will.”

As the waitress served their drinks now, Miss Madera looked down at the table. When they were alone again she stirred her daiquiri, sipped at it, and set it down, still not looking at him.

“All right then,” she said. “Blame me. I did pick him up. I don’t deny that. If I hadn’t, he wouldn’t have died where he did. That at least is true.”

“Tell me about it.”

“You already know about it. Sergeant Rider must have told you.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“I suppose he made it sound like something I do all the time, picking up hitchhikers. Picking up young men.”

“But you don’t.”

“Never before.”

“Why this once?”

“I don’t know. Just him, I guess. Your son. The way he looked.” She shook her head ruefully. Her eyes were heavy with anguish and puzzlement.

Hook took a long drink of his vodka and set the glass down. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, it just happened, that’s all. I didn’t plan it. They’re always lined up there on 101, dozens of them sometimes, and most of them are creeps, you know. Losers. Drug freaks. And there are these four stoplights right in a row, so you usually hit one of them, and that’s when the hitchhikers come right up to the car, practically crawl in with you, so I usually lock the door.” Again the look of pain came into her eyes. “He didn’t do that. He just stood there, looking at me for a moment, and then he looked away as I looked back at him. But it was the way he did it, you know? With a touch of shyness. Or decency. Or—” Her eyes ransacked the room for help. “He was, somehow—beautiful, you know?”

Hook said nothing.

“I don’t mean just his looks.”

“I know.” Hook studied her face, avid now, open, trusting him. It was a mistake on her part. “This boy who had nothing to live for,” he said.

She reacted as if he had slapped her hard, going pale for a moment, then flushing with anger and resentment as she recovered her balance. “That’s right,” she said. “And maybe it doesn’t make any sense. But I can’t help that. It happened just the way we told the sergeant. It is the truth, Mr. Hook. It is the sickening, awful, horrible truth.”

Hook said nothing. The vodka, flat, went down like water.

“I wish I could help you,” she went on. “I wish I could change it all, make it different than it is. But I can’t.”

“You picked him up around noon yesterday.”

“Yes. I guess maybe I thought he was hungry. Anyway, I was lonely. I wanted to talk with someone.”

“And you took him to your place then.”

Stabbing out her cigarette, she nodded. “I made him a big lunch. French toast and bacon and scrambled eggs. I think he ate a half-dozen by himself.”

“So he wasn’t feeling too bad then.”

“I guess not.”

“Did you drink then?”

“We opened a bottle of Chablis. I like white wine. He said he did too.”

“And all of this time the two of you talked?”

“Yes.”

“What about?”

She lifted her glass and took a drink. Hook had the feeling that she was buying time, using it to think very hard and fast.

She put down her glass. “Mostly me, I’m afraid. I used him, your son. I admit that. You see, I’m not much of a success at life, Mr. Hook. Not at college, not at marriage, not at a career. I’m sort of a disadvantaged minority of one, you might say. The Maderas go way back, back to the glorious old days of Spanish California. Saddlemakers, we were at first. And then we sold real estate for a few generations. And now—well, now my father simply sells the name Madera. To rich widows, one at a time. In fact, I hear the elegant old bastard still lives around here somewhere, cleaning paintbrushes for some fat rich old lady artiste. But I don’t worry about him, because when she passes on—and I believe that’s the way her kind goes—well, there’ll still be another ten thousand more just like her for him to choose from. We grow them here in Santa Barbara—widows who do watercolors and wear floppy hats and sandals, and keep two-legged lap dogs with pedigrees. Preferably Spanish.”

Hook was finding it difficult to sort out what she was saying, for the alcohol had reached him all of a sudden, and he was beginning to feel his exhaustion. It seemed like a month ago that he had gotten out of bed on the farm at his usual five-thirty, and in fact it had been almost twenty hours, he estimated, for it was about eleven Pacific time now. He pushed his drink away and dragged deeply on his cigarette, determined to see the evening through.

“And that’s what you talked to my son about?” he said.

She smiled sadly, almost sardonically. “Not really. I guess I’m just trying to change the subject. The other hurts. I guess I just don’t have your particular kind of sang-froid.”

Hook ignored her thrust. “When you talked—was he morose then? Was he depressed?”

“Not then, no. Not till—afterwards.”

“You mean after he failed. After he couldn’t make love to you.”

Nodding, Miss Madera looked at him wonderingly. “You must be a glutton for punishment.”

“These were the last hours of his life,” he said. “I want to know about them.”

“You’re very tough, aren’t you? Or is it just unfeeling?”

Watching her, Hook dragged again on his cigarette, exhaled. Through the smoke her eyes looked brilliant with something like outrage. “Maybe you felt more for him than I did,” he said. “You think that could be it?”

“You tell me.”

Hook shook his head. “I don’t have to, Miss Madera. I know what I felt for my son.”

“Then why aren’t you with him? Why aren’t you mourning?” It was an accusation.

“There’ll be time enough for that.” In his exhaustion Hook had to speak very slowly and carefully. “Right now I’m more interested in his life, the kind of life he lived. The kind of boy he was. I don’t want anyone taking that away from him now, after he’s gone.”

Miss Madera was looking down at her empty glass, revolving it slowly. She did not look up at him.

“And what kind of life was that, Mr. Hook?”

But before he could say anything, the waitress came to the table again and Hook ordered another daiquiri for Miss Madera, nothing for himself.

“Was it pastoral and blissful?” she asked, all irony now. “Was it so masculine there was absolutely no chance that he—”

“It was a good life,” Hook cut in. And then he went on flatly, coldly, as if he were reading the bill of fare on the restaurant’s menu. “His mother died about seven years ago in a car crash. I have two other children, a boy sixteen and a girl fifteen. They were close. But each was closer to Chris. My aunt and her husband also live with us. The farm is a large one by Midwest standards, over a thousand acres. We raise Black Angus cattle. It’s a good farm. And beautiful country, colder than this, and hotter too, and harder. But we like it. We’ve always been happy there. Chris was happy there. He was a very popular boy. I don’t like the word, but it fits in his case. He was well-liked. Girls and boys and men and old ladies—they all liked him. And we—we loved him. He was generous and decent. And bright. And strong. And he was funny too, in his way. He made you smile more than laugh.”

Hook had the feeling that Miss Madera was forcing herself to meet his eyes, for throughout this speech of his she sat staring rigidly at him, almost not blinking. Her expression was flat, neutral.

“That’s the boy who left us a month ago,” Hook went on. “That’s the boy who jumped off your cliff because he had nothing to live for.”

Now she looked away, across the room at the fire blazing in the center of the drinking couples, who were all laughing loudly at something. “People change,” she said.

Hook shook his head in weariness and futility. “Miss Madera, don’t you think a father would know whether his son was queer or not? Don’t you think I ever overheard my boys talking, and knew something about their sex life?”

Hook thought he saw a wetness in her eyes again. She was pushing back her chair, preparing to get up.

“I have to go now,” she said. “I really do. It’s late. I’m sorry for you. I’m sorry for everything, Mr. Hook. I really am.”

And now there was no doubt about her tears. They shone in the firelight. He reached out and took hold of her wrist, holding her there at the table a moment longer. Time had run out; what had to be said he would say now.

“I’m not trying to find out if your version is the truth. I know it isn’t. I know you lied—that you all lied. But I have to find out why. I have to find out what really did happen.”

She looked down at her wrist in his hand, and as he relaxed his grip she pulled her arm free slowly, almost voluptuously, watching him with her huge grave eyes.

“I’ll find out,” he told her. “I’ll find the truth if I have to come here and live.”

“Will that bring him back?”

“You admit you lied, then?”

“No. I’m just saying it won’t bring him back. Nothing will bring him back. Ever.”

Somewhere Hook found his voice. “I know that. But you want to take more than his life. And I won’t let you have it.”

He struggled to his feet as she got up from the table now. She repeated that she had to leave. She asked him if he wanted a ride to a motel.

“It’s not far,” he told her. “I can walk.”

She started to say something more, and then just turned and walked away. Watching her, Hook was reminded of Hemingway’s reference to Lady Brett as having the lines of a racing yacht, for that is what Liz Madera’s progress across the room was like, a sleek craft moving through still water, trailing waves of attention that spread ever wider through the small crowd until she finally disappeared out the front door. For some reason it angered him that she was so attractive, and that her anguish or fear or whatever it was she was feeling made her seem even more so to him, giving weight and substance to her beauty.

He signaled for the waitress and she came almost immediately, a young girl, very mod, like the other waitresses, the busboys, the girl in the muumuu. As he gave her money for the drinks and a tip, he asked her if she knew the woman he had been drinking with, and she smiled quizzically, wrinkling her nose.

“But you were with her,” she protested.

“I know her name, that’s all. I want to know more about her.”

The girl’s amusement began to die. “Oh, I guess I’ve seen her, but I don’t know her.”

On impulse, Hook took another five-dollar bill out of his wallet. “Ask some of your friends that work here, will you? Anybody can tell me about her, I’ll give them this.” He showed her the bill.

Nodding, but looking frightened now, she left him and went over to one of the bartenders, an older man who appeared to be in charge of things. She said something to him and he looked across the room at Hook and then back at the girl and shook his head. Then both of them returned to work, ignoring him. Hook waited a few minutes, finishing a cigarette. Then he got up and left.

Outside, the coolness of the night struck him as fresh as rainfall, even though it smelled of the sea, that fabled odor of fish and brine that to him was not half so sweet as the bouquet of spring clover. Above the palms across the street the moon had turned the deserted beach into an extension of itself, white and cold and barren.

He had crossed State Street and was halfway up the next block, heading toward the row of motels there, when he heard footfalls behind him. Turning, he saw one of the busboys from the restaurant coming after him, running across the street against the traffic light. By the time he reached Hook, he was almost out of breath.

“Mister, you serious about that five bucks?”

“Yes. Why? You know her?”

“Liz Madera? Sure. Who don’t?”

“I don’t.”

“She’s a swinger.”

“That, I know. Tell me what I don’t know.”

The boy was short and muscular, shivering in white chinos and a Hawaiian shirt. “Like what?”

“Whatever you can think of.”

The youth grinned, not very attractively. “For one thing, you won’t get anywhere with her. She’s Jack Douglas’s girl.”

“The man who runs for Congress?”

“Among other things.”

“What other things?”

“Like he’s just a wheel, that’s all. He’d be pretty tough competition.”

“Is he married?”

“Sure. He’s establishment, man. But not too establishment, if you know what I mean.”

It was something, perhaps everything. And anyway Hook was too exhausted to stand there any longer, so he took the five-dollar bill out of his pocket and gave it to the youth, who thanked him.

“One more thing,” Hook said. “Did you hear about the boy who was killed this morning, on the beach, north of town?”

“He jumped, didn’t he? The paper said he jumped.”

“A witness said he did, a Dorothy Rubin. You know anything about her?”

“Never heard of her. Why?”

“Just checking. That’s it, then. Thank you.”

“Sure man. Take it easy now.” Immediately the kid was off and running again, this time toward a green light.

Hook checked into the first motel he came to, and as soon as he was in his room he began to feel ill as well as exhausted. He went into the bathroom to get a drink of water and suddenly found himself on his knees, vomiting his steak dinner into the toilet. Afterwards, dousing cold water on his face at the sink, he stared into the fluorescent-lit mirror at an older version of himself. Normally he thought of himself as a fairly young-looking forty-five, weatherbeaten and lined perhaps, but still lean and hard, still basically young. But the image in the mirror was that of an old man, a survivor of some ultimate calamity. Hook turned from it. He would have liked to take a shower before going to bed, but he did not have the strength and in fact managed only to get off his coat and shoes and trousers before collapsing into the too-soft bed. He did not expect to sleep at all but it came in time. It came off and on throughout the night, like recurring spells of madness.

Once he dreamed he was on the deck of Mrs. Rubin’s house, lying on his back with Liz Madera sitting astride him, naked under her shiny black raincoat and smiling sadly down at him as she guided his sex into her body and began to move against him. There was a muffled shouting in the distance, the cursing and panting of men fighting, and Hook wanted desperately to find out what was going on but he could not move except in answer to the rhythms of his rider. Near the deck railing the little girl from the Los Angeles airport bar watched him gravely.

The dream ended in exhaustion, not orgasm. But even then it was preferable to another, in which he found himself back in the identification room at the Bowman mortuary, sitting in a steel-tube chair with Chris’s broken body draped in his lap. In a kind of paternal pietà, he sat there crooning and talking to the boy, rocking him, stroking his face, trying to manipulate his eyes and mouth in order to get them working again, for the idea seemed to be that the boy was merely in some sort of profound sleep and that if Hook only had time enough he would be able to wake him finally. It seemed like hours that he kept at it, even trying mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at the end. Then a harsh bell sounded and the fight was over.

It was his seven o’clock call. It was day. It was time to take Chris home.