“You coming?” he asked her.

“No.”

He shut the car door then and walked through the archway and across the red-brick courtyard to the stairs that led to the second-floor portico and the offices of Jack Douglas Associates. Lemons hung like gaudy Christmas trinkets on the trees and he had to duck under the bougainvillea that climbed one side of the staircase, small red blossoms that evoked in his mind images of bare-breasted Gauguinesque women forever waiting on a white man’s whim. So the sense of unreality persisted. It was as if he were walking into battle, through a formal garden.

Just inside the door a receptionist smiled up at him from a stack of newspapers out of which she was apparently scissoring articles. He remembered her from last week, the long-legged girl he had watched skip down the stairs at five o’clock.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“My name is Hook. David Hook. I want to see Mr. Douglas.”

“Do you have an appointment?”

“I won’t need one.”

“He’s in a client conference now, sir. Mr. Parnelli and Mr. Ferguson too. Perhaps if you left a number where—”

“How long will the conference last?”

She had stopped smiling now. “I have no idea.”

“Is Mrs. Rubin here?”

The girl reached for her phone. “I’ll ask if she can see you.”

Hook looked beyond her at the half—dozen office doors facing the reception room, which had a warm old moneyed ambience, gleaming dark wood walls and sturdy pre-World War II Grand Rapids furniture upholstered in red leather and resting on gray wool carpeting that gave like wet loam underfoot. The first door, closed, and beyond which he could hear men’s voices, apparently was to the conference room. The one farthest back would be to Douglas’s office, he figured, knowing the hallowed tradition that placed the top man as far as possible from his clients. Through the second door he saw a glass case jammed with football trophies, undoubtedly Parnelli’s, so he headed for the next door in line. The receptionist was calling after him, asking him if he would please wait by her desk. But she was too late. Hook was already standing at Mrs. Rubin’s door, watching her as she absently stabbed a console button on her phone and picked it up, dragging on a cigarette and hurriedly exhaling as she croaked an irritable “yes?”—and at that moment saw him.

Her expression—her reaction—would have been no different if he had been a naked savage. The phone spilled out of her hand and clattered on the glass desktop. Behind him the receptionist was trying to speak around him.

“He just came on in,” the girl said. “I couldn’t stop him.”

But Mrs. Rubin was back in control now, carefully replacing the phone on its cradle, then leaning back in her high-backed executive chair and clasping her hands across her torso, which was stuffed into a dress of peach-colored jersey.

“That’s all right, Carol. I’ll talk to him. But maybe you could get us some coffee first. Would you like a cup of coffee, Mr. Hook?”