“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.”