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.”