Hook did not respond. When they reached the oceanfront drive, Douglas told him to turn left, and he did.

In silence they arrived at the motel, parked, and took the elevator up to the penthouse bar, which had a typical three-in-the-afternoon atmosphere, like a gathering of strangers at a wake. A pair of businessmen sat in solitude at the bar, each apparently more interested in his drink than in a small attractive Eurasian girl sitting a few stools down, talking languorously with the bartender, a stocky freckled man who called a warm hello to Douglas as he and Hook entered. Two overdressed, overpowdered old women were equally excited by Douglas’s arrival and avidly bent his ear at the windowside table where they sat nursing tall frosted drinks full of shrubbery. But Douglas pushed on, to a window table at the far side of the room, which was L-shaped and Polynesian, all potted plants and rattan and cane furniture. Across from their table was a huge aquarium in which a colony of lobsters moved fitfully, like creatures in a delirium dream.

The waitress, a collegiate-looking girl wearing a split hip-hugging sarong and halter, came smiling to their table. Douglas of course knew her.

“Ginny, honey,” he said, “I want you to take it easy today. Just bring us a bottle of Cutty Sark, some glasses and ice.” He looked at Hook. “That all right with you? Scotch?”

Hook said it was. The girl left.

“You like it here? The room, I mean? The view?”

Hook looked out the window through the palms at the beach, the sea, the Channel Islands—where he had almost drowned just yesterday morning, an age ago. “Not particularly,” he said.

Douglas got out a cigarette and lit it. “They do a big night business here. Got this brother-and-sister team. Both sing and play a whole mess of instruments—sort of a two-man band. Great sound. You’d like it.” He paused for a few moments then, sat there smoking and watching Hook with a vague, ironic smile. “But then that wouldn’t interest you, would it? Nothing but the matter at hand. Nothing but nailing old Jack Douglas’s ass to the barn door.”

“That’s about it.”

Douglas wagged his head in mock sorrow. “Hook—I’m afraid you’re a monomaniac.”

“Better that than a fool.”

“Which is what I am?”

“I’d say so.”

“And why is that? Why am I a fool?”

But the waitress had returned to their table, with the glasses and ice and the bottle of scotch. She started to break open the bottle but Douglas told her not to bother, that he would do the honors, and she left in the warm glow of his politician’s smile. As he uncapped the bottle and poured their drinks, he asked again why he was a fool.

“To let it come to this. If you’d stayed at Liz’s that night, what would it have meant? A plea of involuntary manslaughter. Probably a suspended sentence.”

“And a suspended career.”

“That would have been so bad? I can’t see why. I can’t see any qualities in you the public is in such desperate need of.”