There was no answer. An English sheepdog padded into view, regarded the two of them indifferently, then returned to the kitchen. Douglas looked at Hook with a gesture of comic despair.

“Can you beat that, huh? The breadwinner comes home from a hard day in the mines, and what does he find? Nobody. Not a goddamn soul. Makes a guy feel real important.”

As Douglas went down a hall to the left, looking into the rooms opening off it, Hook surveyed what he could see of the house—the dining room, living room, and part of the kitchen—and found it a pretty close approximation of the lavish decor Hollywood once had considered comfortable middle-class. The style was basically Spanish, though without the clean uncluttered look Hook associated with that tradition. And he figured the reason was as much a matter of finances as of taste, that only a woman totally free of budgetary concerns would have so overburdened a house with oil paintings, sculptures, art objects, and just plain bric-a-brac.

Douglas came back to the foyer. “My wife must be at the club,” he said. “Probably went with a friend, because her car’s still here.” He crossed into the living room and roughly pulled a photograph off the wall, one of at least a score, each framed as if it were a miniature old master on loan from the Louvre. He brought it over to Hook, a color snapshot of Douglas and his wife and two children posing on skis in a snowy mountain setting that contained a chalet in the background. They all looked handsome, healthy, happy. Douglas’s finger rapped on the figure of the girl.

“Tammy here,” he said. “She’s sixteen. Probably out having an abortion somewhere. And Jack Junior—I figure he’s down the street shooting up with one of his junkie friends.” He grinned at Hook and tossed the picture onto a grand piano a good twenty feet away. “After all, kids got to do something, right?”

Hook said nothing. Douglas went over to a marble-topped liquor cart, picked up a bottle of scotch and headed for the front door.

“Come on. I’ll show you where the real action is here in town. Heavy, I’m telling you. We’ll have to beat ’em off with clubs.”

On the way out Hook asked him if he was sure he wanted to drive with an open bottle in the car, and Douglas laughed happily.

“Jesus Christ! Tomorrow he crucifies me. Today he worries I might get arrested for drunk driving.” He got into Hook’s car and took a long pull on the bottle. “Anyway, you’re doing the driving,” he concluded. “I’ve got nothing to worry about.”

The place with the “action” Douglas had promised turned out to be only a few blocks away, a darkly posh Montecito restaurant crowded with elderly people going at their food and drink as if they hoped to uncover youth and happiness at the bottom of it all, like Orphan Annie’s image in a childhood cereal bowl. Around a piano bar, a half-dozen desperate-looking old women sat with a few surviving males, all trying to move and shake in rhythm with the tune being played by a handsome young black man with a rigid smile and eyes of molten hatred. As in the penthouse bar, there were people who knew Douglas and tried to have a few words with him, but he simply walked past them now, heading for a second bar at the rear of the restaurant, where he promptly picked up two hard-looking young women—whores or socialites, Hook could not tell—and shepherded them and Hook to a vacant table.