Slightly before noon the next day Hook parked his car in the middle of a block lined on both sides with small rundown clapboard houses in a largely Mexican part of the city. Next to him, Icarus looked gloomily across the street.
“It’s the yellow one,” he said. “Or at least it was yellow once. And we’d better lock up. These Chicano kids will steal you blind.”
Getting out, Hook locked his side of the car and followed Icarus across the street and up onto the rickety front porch of the house. After Rita had left him around nine, he had called the young photographer again and this time got him, though Icarus had sounded barely conscious on the phone, hung over with sleep or wine or drugs. Hook had told him his problem, his need for more background information on Mrs. Rubin and Douglas and Liz Madera and their crowd, and Icarus had said he knew just the man, just the source. So here they were.
As Icarus knocked, Hook hoped that the man inside would answer the door quickly and get them in off the street, for he could not overcome his aversion at being seen in public with his flamboyant young friend, who today was setting off his mane of long orange hair with an ensemble that included a maroon velvet Edwardian waistcoat, red jeans, black shirt, and red-and-white polka-dot ascot. But the man inside was much too slow. Three subteen boys came walking by and they were not polite.
“Jesus, Tino! Wouldja dig that?”
“El Pavonito!”
“El Pavonito, sheeyit! El Queerito, ya mean!”
Then laughter.
But to Icarus it was nothing, water to the duck’s back of his aplomb. His weary heavy-lidded eyes remained just that. Finally the door opened—on a gray-skinned skeleton of a man sitting in a wheelchair, like a cadaver prepared for Egyptian burial.
“Come in, gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome to San Simeon.”
He slowly backwheeled away from the door, across the small living room’s linoleum carpet to a position next to a stout center-leg table burdened with bottles of wine and pills and liquid medicine, boxes of Kleenex and matches and cigarettes, a thermometer, books, glasses, and among other items a bowl of soggy half-eaten breakfast cereal. The table was evidently the man’s life support system and he did not stray far from it.
Icarus was introducing them. “Mr. Hook—Ray Oliver, the best reporter this town ever had.”
“I appreciate your seeing me,” Hook said.
Oliver grinned like a wolf. “Oh, I got time. A little time.”
On the drive over, Icarus had explained to Hook that the man was dying of lung cancer, had already had one lung removed and was just pottering around now waiting for the other to go. He also had arteriosclerosis, and thus pain as well as the expectation of imminent death, but he would not stay in a hospital. He was broke and refused to die in debt as a matter of principle, he said, one last nose-thumb at a society he did not particularly cherish.
Hook said, “I’m the father of the boy who—”
“Yeah, I know,” Oliver cut in. “Ike told me on the phone.” He looked at Icarus now and shook his head ruefully. “You know what you look like, kid? Gainsborough’s long-lost painting Lavender Boy. Or Lavender Lad I guess I should say, to keep the alliteration.” He laughed softly and began to cough.
Icarus smiled. “What’s a pavonito, Ray? You speak Spanish.”
“Pavonito? A peacock, I think. Little peacock.”
Icarus looked at Hook and shrugged.
Oliver turned his sunken eyes on Hook. “I’d like to help you,” he said, speaking slowly, spending each breath as if it were a diamond. “I ain’t particularly in love with Mr. Douglas and his crowd either, mostly because they steal things. They steal your work and your years, and then finally they steal your life. But legally, Mr. Hook. Never violently. So I think you’re barking up a wrong tree. But sit down anyway. Sit down.”
While Hook took an easy chair whose bottom sank almost to the floor, Icarus stretched out sideways on the davenport, like an Empire grande dame posing for David.
Hook said, “I’m not barking up any tree, Mr. Oliver. I don’t believe my boy committed suicide, that’s all. And I want to know more about these people who say he did. Icarus here—Ike—says you know more about this town and its people than anybody.”
Oliver made a face. “I doubt that. Did he also tell you I’m croaking?”
“Yes.”
“So you probably figure a dying man will tell you the truth, the whole truth, and so on.”
“I figured you’d tell me the truth, yes.”
Now Oliver lost his look of the gallows wit. “I have one pleasure, Mr. Hook,” he said, nodding at the table. “Drugs. Sweet morphine and its derivatives, its stepchildren and cousins. You see, I pretend I’m on the other side of the generation gap. I swing. Only thing is it costs money, and as you can see the medicos didn’t exactly leave me prosperous. I used to have a little house up on the Riviera—the local one, that long foothill back of us here. But it went too. The high cost of dying, you know.”
Hook took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and gave it to him. Oliver put it in his shirt pocket.
“Okay,” he said. “Where do you want to start?”
In the next hour Hook learned both a great deal and nothing—many facts and fancies about the people he was interested in, and yet nothing that had any apparent bearing on Chris’s death or why it had been labeled a suicide. Most disappointing of all was Oliver’s scant knowledge of Mrs. Rubin. About all he knew of her was that she had come to town six or seven years ago, that her husband had been a real estate agent for one of the local companies and had died of a heart attack in the YMCA swimming pool three or four years back. If they had any children, Oliver did not know about it. As he recalled, she began working for Douglas even before her husband had died. And to the local press she was known as a real barracuda. If there was no pickup on a Douglas news release they were as likely to hear from her as from anyone else in the outfit, and it was always gloves off and right for the crotch. But that was all he knew about her—as an employee of Jack Douglas. If she was a lesbian or a lush or if she liked balling young hippies, he had never heard anything about it. Nor did she swing at any level of local society, of which there were three, Oliver stated. At the top were a few old-line Spanish families and descendants of the Spanish land-grant Anglos. Then came the national rich, people who had once used Santa Barbara as a winter playground and then finally moved here to stay—and there was one hell of a lot of Ford and Mellon and du Pont money behind those high brick walls in Montecito, he said. And then at the bottom was the local rich, the new rich, the dagos and micks who had made it big catering to the whims of the other two groups with one hand while stealing them blind with the other. This last was the largest group by far. They ran the city, boosted it, pillaged it, and lived for the day they might move up a notch and be invited to a real honest-to-God upper-class dinner party instead of the usual sodden cocktail bashes they threw as religiously as their parents had gone to mass.
Jack Douglas was in this level, though probably near the top of it, Oliver said, since his father had been a businessman here before him, a pharmacist turned wholesale druggist, though the man never did make it very big, and finally sold out after the Second World War, a few years before he died. He had three daughters and just the one son, Jack, so what money Douglas had now was strictly through marriage to Doc Halverson’s daughter Jill. The Halversons had always been filthy with Union Pacific money, Oliver said, and Jill evidently had gotten a piece of it, which was a damn good thing for Douglas, because he ran that P.R. thing of his like a political campaign office pure and simple. It was a sure bet Uncle Sam was not getting rich off the outfit’s profits. Douglas had studied at USC, got his degree in journalism sometime in the mid-fifties. For four or five years he had worked as a reporter for the L.A. Times. Then he had come back up here and opened his own shop. Oliver figured Douglas had contracted the political virus in the mid and late sixties working on the Kennedy and Salinger campaigns, and especially Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in sixty-eight.
“I think it got to him all of a sudden,” Oliver said. “All that hair and teeth. All that glamour. All those joyful black and brown faces shining up at Kennedy, believing in him. La Raza. The great dark unwashed. And suddenly that was him up there, you know? Jack Douglas—a man of the people. A man with a cause. After all, Kennedy’s politics were new to Kennedy, so why couldn’t they be new to Douglas as well? Anyway, the light of the Lord did strike him and he was blinded. And, lo, he did change his spots. Until then his life had been strictly cunt and golf and fishing. Now it’s politics and cunt and golf and fishing.”
Hook studied the dying man’s face, his sad eyes and wolfish smile. “You don’t much like him,” he said.
Oliver shrugged broadly, burlesquing his innocence. “How can a person not like him? He’s charming and good-looking and a liberal to boot. Which is more than can be said for most of the cavemen in this burg. The only thing is—as they say—I wouldn’t care to share a foxhole with him. But then I’m not about to, am I?”
Moving on to Liz Madera, Oliver’s cynicism lost none of its ripsaw edge. Though they could be bought and sold ad infinitum by Douglas and his peers, Liz Madera and her father belonged in that small point at the top of the social pyramid, according to Oliver. The Maderas had made their mark in the area long before Colonel Frémont and his battalion raised Old Glory over the Presidio in 1846. Her grandfather and great-grandfather had been in real estate and ranching, fairly wealthy men both of them, but not anywhere near wealthy enough to build the kind of estate that could have survived the prodigality of Phil Madera, Liz’s old man. His tastes ran to polo and yachting and jaguar hunting and an occasional rape—this last probably the most expensive in the long run. So he had been forced to marry rich women, four or five of them at last count, as Oliver remembered—that many because none had lacked either the grounds or the means for quick divorce. His first wife, Liz’s mother, had shot herself when the girl was around nine or ten; in fact, Liz was the one who had found her body. Ironically, the cause of it all—Daddy—did not even learn about the suicide until weeks after the funeral. He had been cruising along the Mexican coast in his yacht, with one dead radio and two live ballerinas. Since then he had become pretty much persona non grata in Santa Barbara society. But when he needed a wife—income, that is—there always seemed to be one available, though they had tended to become successively less affluent and attractive. Oliver had not heard much about him in recent years. Then, grinning, he added, “Maybe he’s dying of cancer.”
Hook asked him about Liz then, but did not learn very much. The old reporter knew very little about the young man she had married—he was from L.A. or San Francisco, he thought. And it had been a very short marriage, as he remembered. She was back in action not long after the honeymoon. And though a lot of people probably considered her something of a tramp, a chip off the old block, Oliver did not. “Phil Madera was—is—a hedonist pure and simple. But with the girl, I think the whole thing is a kind of death-wish. That’s the way it is with most broads like her. They run after pleasure, weeping all the way.”
Hook tried to pin him down on specifics. Had he ever heard anything about her and Mrs. Rubin, a possible lesbian relationship? No, nothing like that. Did he ever hear if it was her practice to pick up hitchhikers and take them home? Oh Christ no, he didn’t know any of these people that well, in that kind of detail. He just knew about them in general, their background and so forth, that was all. Ignoring the objection, Hook asked him if he had heard anything about Liz having any current lovers other than Douglas.
“No, I don’t know any of that,” Oliver repeated. “I can’t help you there. About all I know is what I’ve told you—she’s beautiful and damned, just like in Hollywood.” Now he smiled and shook his head reflectively. “Jesus, though, I remember about ten years ago. You know, every summer we have our big Fiesta celebration here, and the main part of it is the parade. The rich folks put on fancy costumes and ride their horses and carriages past the poor folks who cheer and throw flowers at them. At least that’s the way it’s been in the past, though I got a feeling the Brown Berets are going to start throwing grenades one of these years. Anyway, this one parade about ten years ago—I’m standing on the sidewalk in the shade, half-boozed of course, wanting to either throw up or laugh at all these jackass honky dentists and plumbers and bond vendors trying to make like Spanish grandees—you know, the sombreros down over their eyes and their asses spilling over the saddles. And then all of a sudden here comes Madera and his daughter on a pair of matched black Arabian stallions—and all Arabian horses got to be stallions, right?—it’s a law. Anyway, here they come, and I’m telling you they weren’t no Kiwanis clown and his Girl Scout daughter. The costumes belonged on these two, and the horses belonged under them. They were Spain in the eighteen-hundreds—the Duke de la Madera and his beautiful daughter Dona Elizabeth. She wasn’t Fiesta queen that day or ever—because of him, I guess. But by Jesus, I bet she left behind her five thousand men and boys incurably in love. I know I was. I didn’t speak to my wife for a month afterwards.”
Hook smiled at the story, enjoying its blend of the cynical and the romantic. He liked Oliver and worried that he might be overtaxing him. But they were not finished yet. There were still Douglas’s two “associates” to ask about. So instead of getting up to leave, Hook took out his pack of cigarettes.
“Mind if I smoke?” he asked.
“Hell, I haven’t quit myself.” The old reporter took his own pack off the table and lit up. “I don’t believe all that scare talk,” he scoffed. “What proof they got?”
Hook looked away from his doomed grin. “What about Richard Ferguson and this ‘Bo’ Parnelli?” he asked. “You know anything about them?”
That afternoon Hook learned more about Ferguson and Parnelli—in person. After he drove Icarus home, he had lunch alone at a small sidewalk café on State Street. He expected his next stop—questioning Douglas’s dentist friend—to be equally routine, one more motion to go through before checking Douglas off his list. If the future congressman had had to establish a false alibi—if he had had to ask someone to lie for him, commit perjury for him—he would have stopped with Pamelli and Ferguson. There would have been no reason to involve a third person and every reason not to. So Hook expected no surprises at the office of Herbert Hammer, D.D.S.
But he was wrong.
Hammer’s office was on upper State Street, in a large Spanish-style house converted into a series of suites where the various doctors performed their various specialties, of which dentistry did not appear to be the least, judging by Hammer’s elegantly furnished waiting room. And his attractive receptionist only strengthened this suspicion, for her voice had all the softness and assurance of very old folding money. Arriving at slightly before three, Hook gave her his name and explained that he did not require any dental work, that all he wanted to do was talk with the doctor for a few moments about a matter concerning a mutual friend, and that he would wait for the doctor to fit him in at his convenience.
And wait he did. He read Time and Esquire and then turned to the women’s magazines, while an interminable parade of Hammer’s patients came in one at a time and sat for a while and then were called into the inner sanctum and emerged twenty or thirty minutes later, made another appointment with the receptionist, and left.
At four-thirty, as he was finishing McCall’s, Hook looked up and saw the small dapper figure of Richard Ferguson enter the room. Smiling, Ferguson came over to him, said hello and that he was happy to see him again and wondered if Hook could spare a few minutes outside, “where they could talk.” The room by then was full of harassed mothers and restless schoolchildren, most of whom had stopped what they were doing in order to hear exactly what Ferguson had to say.
“Of course,” Hook said. He put down the magazine and followed him out into the hall. And on the way he did some fast thinking, trying to figure out what Ferguson’s unexpected appearance might mean. One thing it meant, of course, was that Hook had not been sitting in Hammer’s office for almost two hours by accident. The dentist had known who he was and had not wanted to talk with him, had called Douglas’s office and told them to deal with him, told them that he was their problem, not his. And yet that did not make sense either. If Hammer had substantiated Douglas’s alibi with the police, why not do it again now, with Hook?
In the corridor, Ferguson led him toward a big muscular balding man standing just inside the front door, waiting for them. Hook knew immediately, from what the reporter Oliver had said about him, that this was the redoubtable “Bo” Parnelli, ex-Santa Barbara High School and USC football star and now great good friend, drinking buddy, associate, and “gopher” of Jack Douglas.
As Ferguson introduced them, Parnelli tried to crush Hook’s hand.
“Been looking forward to meeting you, Mr. Hook,” he said.
His smile flicked on and off, like a muscle flexed, though it did manage to communicate a substantial satisfaction with himself. He was about thirty-five, Oliver had said, a fanatic jockstrap, a surfer, skin-diver, golfer extraordinaire, with some of his finest muscles between his ears. In contrast to Ferguson’s vested tan tweed suit and paisley tie, he was wearing a mod green, gold, and olive sport coat-slacks ensemble.
“What is it you wanted to talk about?” Hook asked them.
Parnelli’s attitude was palsy, confidential. “Well, to be honest, Mr. Hook, it just isn’t the kind of thing we can handle here with a few words. We just want to talk with you, that’s all. About a lot of things, you know? Get to know you. Let you get to know us.”
Hook looked at Ferguson and the little man’s eyes drifted away. He appeared uneasy, embarrassed. Apparently this get-together was not his idea, not his show.
“That couldn’t hurt anything, could it?” Parnelli pressed.
“I guess not.”
“Well, fine, then. Real great. What say we all go down to El Paseo and have a few drinkies? On me.”
“And get to know each other,” Hook said, deadpan.
“Right on. That’s the idea.”
Hook did not want to appear eager. “I’ve been waiting here quite a while to talk with Dr. Hammer.”
“Well, that’s the problem,” Ferguson slipped in. “He called up just a while ago, said you were here. And I’m afraid he doesn’t want to talk with you.”
“Oh?”
“He’s a very busy man,” Ferguson explained.
Hook smiled wryly. “That doesn’t leave me much choice, then, does it?”
Parnelli already had his car keys out, and now he gave them to Ferguson. “You take my car, Rich. I’ll drive with Mr. Hook.” He turned to Hook. “If that’s all right with you?”
“Of course.”
On the way, Parnelli sounded at first like a one-man chamber of commerce. What did Hook think of their little burg here, their paradise by the sea? It was one hell of a lot sunnier than where Hook came from, he was willing to bet on that. In fact, it was one fantastic town if you ever really stopped and thought about it. Everything a man could possibly want was right here. The sea. The mountains. Great people. Good schools. Clean beaches. Cleaner than ever, in fact. Then the chamber got down to business.
“But let me tell you, it ain’t like this in very many places anymore. Poverty, unemployment, pollution, racism—that’s the story in most places today. And you know what it’s going to take to fix it all—to make it all like this? Men like Jack Douglas. Men like him in government, that’s what it’s going to take.”
Finished, he slipped Hook a glance freighted with import, making sure his meaning had not been missed. It was like being reminded that one had just been run over by a truck. And it brought to mind something else Oliver had said about Parnelli, that he was not sure why Douglas kept him around, whether it was just for laughs or for his “name,” his by now strictly local celebrity, or whether Parnelli actually earned his keep—a possibility Oliver seriously doubted, because the man was outrageously accident- and lawsuit-prone, was forever totaling sports cars and settling barroom disputes with his fists, especially any involving the reputation of his boss, to whom he was ferociously dedicated. “He’s a violent sonofabitch,” Oliver had said.
“You been in El Paseo yet?” he asked now.
“Yesterday. At that sidewalk café they have in the courtyard.”
“Naw—I mean inside. The restaurant. The bar.”
“No. Not yet.”
“You’ll like it. Especially this time of year. No tourists.”
Throughout their short drive together, not one word was mentioned about Chris’s death or why Hook was here in this “paradise by the sea.” But it would come, Hook knew. He would wait for it, and it would come.
As Parnelli had predicted, Hook found that he did like the bar at El Paseo. Parnelli had chosen a table in the farthest corner, next to a small fireplace in which gas flames licked at a pair of metal logs. Hook had taken the short end of the L-shaped seat, so that in effect he sat alone, facing both Parnelli and Ferguson on his right. But it gave him a fine view of the rest of the bar and the empty restaurant, which was darkening rapidly as night fell, for like the courtyard café it sat in the open air, only canopied now, in December, a great long room surrounded on three sides by what looked like the exterior of an old Spanish fort with a wood veranda fronting the second story all the way around. Hook could imagine a mantillaed Ava Gardner leaning sexily against one of the vine-covered veranda posts while Tyrone Power in a Zorro outfit tossed up a rose from below; the place had that kind of authenticity. All this Hook saw through the three graceful arches that separated the restaurant from the bar, which itself was roofed over, with a dark wood ceiling resting on great hewn beams. Inside the arches was a row of black leather booths, then small tables, then the long bar behind which a grayhaired bartender in a red jacket presided with magisterial authority. Above him, on the back wall, hung a mural-size painting depicting Indians or Mexicans migrating somewhere en masse—out of Santa Barbara? Hook wondered.
There were only ten or twelve other patrons in the bar, most of whom had been the recipients of a clout on the back and some shout of greeting by Parnelli on his way back to the corner table. Now though he was settled in, the drinks had been served—a martini for him, scotch for Hook and Ferguson—and it was time to get down to business.
“Well now, Mr. Hook,” Parnelli said. “Where were we?”
“I believe we were trying to save the country.”
“Right,” Parnelli agreed. “And believe me, it needs it. It needs saving like it never has before.”
“And you’re afraid I might get in the way of that.”
Parnelli looked at him like a teacher whose slowest pupil had come up with a correct answer. Smiling, he looked at Ferguson. “Now I like that, I really do. See, Rich, everybody isn’t like you after all. I’m not the only one who likes to come right to the point. He puts his cards right on the table, same as me.” He turned back to Hook. “You see, Rich and me, we got this little difference of opinion. I’m a man who believes in saying what has to be said and doing what has to be done. But Rich here, he’s a little more cautious than I am—maybe because he’s a hell of a lot smarter, who knows? Got a master’s in poli sci at Stanford, Rich has, and believe me he can write position papers and articles and speeches that are goddamn works of art. But he’s got this cautious streak, haven’t you, kid? So when the Doc called this afternoon, well, we had this little difference of opinion about what to do. Jack’s down in L.A. on business, so it was up to us, see? And I said let’s talk with the man. Right? What can it hurt?” He grinned now at Hook as if it were the two of them, partners, ranged against laughable little Ferguson.
Hook nodded. He understood—but not everything. “The dentist,” he said, “how did he know who I was, or what I wanted? I only gave him my name.”
Parnelli’s grin, his eyes, suddenly went flat. He turned hopefully to Ferguson.
“Jack must have told him you’d be dropping in,” the young man said. “Jack gave you his name yesterday, didn’t he?”
“Along with yours.”
Parnelli had recovered now. “Right. And now we’re getting to the heart of the matter, Mr. Hook. You see, that’s the point of this whole thing—if you’d come to the two of us we could’ve saved you lots of time. The night your son died we were playing poker—the two of us, Doc Hammer, and Jack. I lost forty bucks, for Christ sake. We didn’t break up till after one o’clock.”
Ferguson was nodding solemnly. “That’s the truth, Mr. Hook.”
Hook lit a cigarette, dragged on it, blew the smoke down toward the fireplace. “It’s funny,” he observed. “You’d think the dentist could have taken off a few seconds to tell me that.”
Parnelli shrugged. “Like Rich said, he’s a very busy guy.”
Hook nodded reluctantly, pretending to understand, to agree. As he drained his glass, Parnelli signaled the waitress for another round, and Hook could see in the man’s expression, in the sudden lack of tautness in his beefy face, that he thought his team had it won now; they were out in front by ten points and there were only seconds left to play.
“Believe me, Mr. Hook,” he said, “we all feel for you. We really do. I mean we know what a goddamn personal tragedy this thing must be for you. All we’re trying to do is make sure you don’t turn it into a national tragedy as well.”
Hook knew he had heard him correctly, yet he could not help repeating the word. “National?”
Parnelli nodded grimly. “That’s right—national. That’s what I think it would be to ruin the career of a man like Jack Douglas—a national tragedy.”
For a moment Hook thought the man was putting him on, but Ferguson’s look of cold, angry embarrassment convinced him otherwise.
“What Bo means,” Ferguson said, “is that this country right now desperately needs the kind of politician Jack is—someone who’s really concerned for the people, someone who’ll really work to help them.”
“That about says it,” Parnelli agreed.
The waitress served their second round of drinks just then, so Hook had time to compose himself, to resist competing urges to either laugh in their faces or dump the table over on them, which strongly appealed to him as a clownish act befitting such a pair of clowns, or more accurately, a clown and his keeper.
When the girl left, Hook said that he was not out to ruin anybody’s career unless that person had had something to do with his son’s death.
Parnelli shook his head at Hook’s innocence. “But that’s just it, Mr. Hook. These days you can ruin a man politically with nothing more than gossip. It don’t even have to get in the papers. All it takes is for the wrong people to hear about it—the power people, the money people—and that’s it.” His index finger sliced across his thick neck. “Your man is dead. He’s had it. And all it takes is a rumor. A guy like Jack, on the way up, why he’s a sitting duck for someone like you.”
Hook smiled coldly. “Someone like me?”
“Someone in your position. You know—someone with your problem.”
“Yes, my problem,” Hook nodded. “I take it you think I ought to just forget about it and go home.”
Shrugging, making a face of rueful regret, Parnelli saw no other course open to him. “Look, you may have a legitimate beef,” he admitted. “Who knows? Maybe your kid didn’t jump. But the point is, whether he did or didn’t—it’s got nothing to do with Jack Douglas. He wasn’t even there. He was with us, playing cards, just down the street here. Now maybe Mrs. Rubin was seeing things that night. Maybe she was—what’s the word?—hallucinating. Hell, she’s around fifty. Maybe she’s having a rough menopause—who knows? I sure as hell don’t. So all I’m saying is during this crusade of yours, Mr. Hook, try not to hurt the innocent, okay? The helpless. And by that I don’t just mean Jack Douglas. I mean all those people he’s going to help give a better life to. I know that sounds corny, but I can’t help it. That’s how I feel.”
Hook was looking down at his drink now, choosing not to meet Parnelli’s flat burning gaze, much as he did not like to stare into the eyes of a dead animal, like the sea lion on the beach or the dog he and Bobby had slain, for it was in the eyes that death spoke directly to you, there that it had its sting and victory, its last and final word, which of course was why those midwives to death, the doctors and clergy and morticians, were so quick to close the eyes of the newly deceased, to foster myths of rest and sleep and slumber that would never survive the open stare of the dead. And oddly, Hook saw something kindred to this in Parnelli’s eyes, a kind of death, a denial of humanness—the innocence of an animal, or an absolute corruption. He knew he would not get anywhere arguing with the man or even trying to discuss the matter with him, especially with Ferguson there to protect him and watch over him. No, Hook figured his only hope was the hour and the booze, that if he sat back and acknowledged the error of his ways, if he rolled over for the man—well, there was supposed to be truth in wine, was there not? So why should there not also be truth in martinis? Parnelli was a big man, well over two hundred pounds and very little of it fat, so chances were he would be able to drink a great deal without becoming falling-down drunk. Yet his temperament suggested to Hook that he would get high quickly and easily, on just a few drinks, that he had the kind of fragile ego that would enjoy the support of alcohol. For himself Hook was not worried. He had always been able to hold his liquor well, and since Chris’s death the stuff had seemed only to affect his body, to make it dull and heavy while his mind burned colder, clearer than ever.
So Hook sat back and drank, and let himself look troubled and full of doubt, and even admitted that he might have let himself get carried away by his grief. All he had wanted, he said, was to find out the truth. It certainly had not been his intention to destroy anybody’s political career, especially that of a liberal, because he himself had always been a liberal and believed that the more of them there were in Congress, the better. And he said that he had to admit Douglas did not seem like the kind of man who would harm anybody, that when Hook had met him out at the beach house yesterday the man had been straightforward and open with him, had not acted like a man with anything to hide.
“Of course not!” Parnelli boomed, happy now, smiling. “Because he didn’t have anything to hide.”
“I guess I must have figured I owed it to my son,” Hook said. “I had to look at every angle.” The past tense was not unintentional, and Parnelli went after it like a week-old calf for mother’s milk.
“Christ, nobody blames you, Mr. Hook—and hey, what is your first name anyway? I can’t keep calling you mister.”
“Dave.”
“Dave! Good name. Well listen, nobody blames you, Dave. We’d probably done the same goddamn thing in your shoes, right, Richie?”
Ferguson nodded, but Hook could see that the young man was not a believer yet by any means, that he was coolly studying Hook’s every glance and word and inflection for the slightest note of falsity. And Hook did not underestimate him. The dying Oliver had said that Ferguson did indeed have a master’s degree in political science from Stanford. He was about thirty, the reporter estimated, a bachelor for whom politics was sex and religion and art all rolled into one. After college he had worked for HEW in Washington, D.C., then in Sacramento, where he had met Douglas, had recognized him as a possible comer, and promptly signed on board. And he would just as promptly jump ship, Oliver figured, once he was convinced Douglas was not going anywhere. He would move on to another candidate and work just as diligently for him, for his real career was himself, his future as a power behind the scenes, and the bigger the scene and the greater the power the better he would like it. He was shrewd, tireless, well-informed, and supplied Douglas not only with words and political expertise but with substance as well, that amazingly flexible socioeconomic political philosophy the new young politicians all favored, because their campaigns and positions and votes had to be able to respond efficiently to the changing sands of sophisticated computerized voter profiles, and thus could not be based on anything so unwieldy as a belief or conviction. Ferguson was, Oliver said, a tiny political Edgar Bergen with a large Charlie McCarthy sitting on his lap. So Hook knew that he had to play to him as much as to Parnelli now. What the big man would swallow whole, the little one might reject altogether.
Third and fourth rounds of drinks were served, with Ferguson passing each time, and the conversation got around to football, how Parnelli had been an all-state halfback in high school but that USC had turned him into a linebacker, which he realized now had actually been a real compliment to his abilities, because it was back about then that defense began to come into its own and to be recognized as every bit as important as offense, but he sure as hell had pissed and moaned at the time. Hook, in turn, explained that though he had never played the game himself in college it was still his favorite sport, and he and his sons—son, he corrected—were especially high on pro ball, in fact were great fans of the Chicago Bears despite the fact that they lived only forty miles from St. Louis. Parnelli was no Bear fan by a long shot, he said, but he had to admit the best ball, the roughest ball, was played in the Central Division—the “Icebox Division,” he called it.
“Anyway,” he said, “they sure make those fucking Rams look lousy year after year.”
Hook noted the adjective. “The Rams do lose the big ones,” he agreed.
“The Rams are shit!” Parnelli snorted, scowling down at his drink, shaking his head. “They drafted me—I suppose you’ve heard that.”
No, Hook had not. He neglected to add that until two days ago neither had he heard of “Bo” Parnelli.
“Yeah, they drafted me. Let me work my balls off at summer camp, and then what do they do? They cut me—too late for any other team to pick me up. And then after a year’s layoff nobody’s interested in you anymore. You’ve had it.”
Hook nodded sympathetically. “It’s like show business. Making it or not making it is just a matter of luck. Look at the pro record of the Heisman Trophy winners. Nothing.”
Parnelli looked at him in loving gratitude, even raised his glass in a toast. “Here’s to you, man. By Christ, you know football. You know what it’s all about. The breaks—that’s what it’s all about.”
He was already slurring his words, and when he signaled for another round now, Ferguson delicately suggested that maybe they ought to stop drinking and have dinner instead. “Remember, Jack’s going to want to go out at seven tomorrow,” he added.
Parnelli ignored the suggestion about having dinner, but the other excited him, and he turned to Hook. “Hey, that’s right. Hey, you ever go spearfishin’, Dave?”
“Never. The water’s kind of cold this time of year, isn’t it?”
“Not skin divin’,” Parnelli laughed. “With a wet suit.”
“No. Never have.”
“Well, come on out with us tomorrow. Jack’s got this boat, the Skipjack, a forty-foot sportfisher. We usually go out once or twice a week. Out to the islands. It’s great. You’d have a great time.”
Hefting his fourth drink, Hook gave the matter thought. “I don’t know about going into the water, but I could watch, I guess. Just the two of you?”
“Oh, maybe Liz Madera too—she comes along sometimes. But so what? Join us anyway.”
Hook had no idea what he might be letting himself in for, but the look of alarm spreading on Ferguson’s face gave him all the confirmation he needed.
“Sure,” he said. “I’d like to go.”
Pretending to be amused now, Ferguson looked wonderingly at Parnelli. “Bo, what are you talking about? Mr. Hook can’t go out with Jack and Liz. For Christ sake, you forgotten what he’s doing here? You think he’s here on a pleasure trip? Don’t you remember why we’re sitting here with him now, what we came here to talk about?”
As Parnelli looked down at his little partner a muscle tightened in the slab of his jaw. Very softly he said, “Who are you to tell me? Ain’t you been listening? Ain’t you heard one word this man has said? He’s all right. He’s okay. You take my word for it, hear?”
“Look, Bo, for heaven’s sake. You—”
“Will you shut up!”
“Bo, come on. You’ve had enough. You—”
“Shut up, I said.” Parnelli uttered it with a quiet deadly menace, and Ferguson evidently heard in it the same thing Hook did—the physical man’s final effort at non-physical communication—for he said nothing more.
Parnelli sat there watching him, waiting. Then, the victor, he turned to Hook. “Seven in the morning, at the harbor. I’ll meet you where the breakwater starts.”
Hook nodded. “I’ll be there.”
Later, when Parnelli had gone to the men’s room to relieve himself, Ferguson hurriedly explained to Hook that he should not take Parnelli’s invitation seriously.
“I’m sure you can see it’s impossible,” he told Hook. “And I can guarantee you that’s how Jack Douglas will feel about it. So if I were you I just wouldn’t show up. But don’t say anything to Bo about it now. He’s got a pretty short fuse. Two drinks and he thinks he’s back on the gridiron.”
Hook was afraid that if he did not agree with Ferguson, by morning Douglas would call the thing off, and he did not want that to happen.
“I guess you’re right,” he said. “I’ll forget about it.”
The little man was on his feet then, shaking Hook’s hand, thanking him for joining him and Parnelli and talking over “this little problem” of theirs. He apologized that he had to leave so suddenly but he still had some work to do at the office and it was now or never. Then he hurried to the bar, signed the check, and scurried out of the restaurant, heading for the men’s room, Hook surmised, though he could not be sure, because it was located outside, off the corridor leading to the restaurant.
Sitting there alone at the corner table, Hook bet himself another scotch that he would not see either of them again that night, and he won. When the drink was served he ordered dinner, abalone steak amandine, and it proved to be quite different from the fare at the Banner Hill bowling alley grill.
Back at his motel room, Hook could not relax. Somehow he felt both tense and logy at the same time. He was used to long days of physical labor and he could feel its lack now more in his mind than in his body, a ragged nervous edge he normally did not have. So he decided to go out and walk, to do his thinking on his feet, and there was much to think about this night, much to try to sort out in his mind.
He put on a sweater and his raincoat and left the motel, crossing Cabrillo Boulevard to the beach and moving laboriously through the soft sand toward the shoreline, where the sand would be hard enough for easier walking. The beach was deep at this point, a good hundred yards from the street to the water. When he reached the shore he turned east, heading under the wharf on which were a restaurant and fish markets and facilities for the boats that serviced the oil rigs and the islands. Beyond the wharf it was open beach for miles, like a road at midnight, a long gray strip of pavement curving away from him into darkness. The night, like the last two days, had the fierce clarity of mountain air, with stars almost as brilliant as the distant row of streetlights diminishing down the palm-lined drive, and Hook found it all difficult to accept as December, as Christmas, yet the holiday was only a week away now. Even if he was not finished here by then he would have to fly home, he knew, be there for the holidays, for Bobby and Jennifer would need him then, just as he would need them, on this their first Christmas without Chris.
So he felt the pressure of time, that it was slipping away from him, yet he did not feel totally frustrated. It had been a long day and he had learned a great deal. The only problem was he did not know what value to put upon the things he had learned. He had started the day fairly well convinced that he would have to begin concentrating on Mrs. Rubin, that the combination of Jack Douglas’s straightforward manner and his alibi supported not only by his employees but by a responsible third party just did not add up to his being involved. But that had been before the third party, the eminent dentist, had panicked. And Hook still could not figure out why he had. What Parnelli and Ferguson had done after the dentist’s call, that Hook could understand. It made sense that they would be disturbed by Hook’s crusade even if their employer and candidate had had nothing to do with Chris’s death, for a politician was vulnerable to rumor. On the other hand, if Douglas was involved, they probably had even more reason to rise to his defense, for in all likelihood then they too might have been involved in the crime or accident, whichever it was, as accessories if nothing else. And in fact, of all the things Hook had learned today the one that stood out most vividly in his mind was Parnelli’s low threshold of violence, both as Oliver had reported it to Hook and as the onetime football hero himself had almost demonstrated it on Ferguson in the bar. No great leap of the imagination was required to relate that defect to Chris’s death—Chris’s violent death.
Yet Hook felt that despite everything that had happened, everything he had learned today, he still was not any closer to knowing what actually had occurred at the beach house that night and early morning. About all he could do was try to imagine what had happened, take his small cast of characters and move them this way and that, much as the Pentagon’s think-tankers sat around dreaming up “scenarios” of apocalypse. When he considered just Chris and the two women alone he could only imagine Chris’s death as having been an accident, that the boy might have smoked marijuana on top of the alcohol he had drunk and which had shown in his blood level, and thus stoned, happy, flying, had walked off the cliff in darkness. To Hook, any other interpretation involving just Chris and the women would not wash. For the boy was an inch taller than Hook’s own six feet one and he weighed one hundred and seventy pounds, all of it hard as bone. He could have picked up the ladies, one in each hand, and dropped them over the cliff. So if it was true that just the three of them had been there, Hook felt he had to rule out violence as a possibility. And yet that interpretation still left the problem of Chris’s “suicide,” why the women had lied about that.
On the other hand, when Hook considered the possibility that the boy’s death might not have been an accident, then a man or men automatically came into the picture—but who, how, or why Hook could not be sure.
Perhaps tomorrow on the boat he might find some answers, and if not then maybe the next day or the day after that. Ultimately he was not worried, for if he continued to get nowhere he would simply go out to the beach house alone some night and drag the enigmatic Mrs. Rubin to the cliff edge and there discuss the matter with her. She might press charges against him afterward, but that prospect did not worry him half so much as the fear of never finding out, never knowing what had happened to his son.
As he continued down the beach it occurred to him that the same stars shining on him now, all except those low in the west, were shining on the farm as well, giving to the snow cover there a cold blue light that would be luminous in the darkness, and against which the cattle as they moved and stirred would appear as flattened silhouettes, black holes torn in the canvas of the night. In his mind Hook could hear them, hear the ice crackling as they moved, see their breath rising in the brittle air, and it made him feel very far from home.