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.