12

At a quarter after nine the next morning Hook was wakened by the ringing of the telephone in his motel room. Hung over and still half asleep, he was not sure at first who it was on the line, just some small urgent voice going much too fast for him, so that finally he had to tell the person to slow down and start over.

“It’s Icarus,” the voice said. “You know—Icarus.”

“Yes. Good morning.”

“You all right?”

“You woke me, that’s all.”

Then again the voice began to speed up. He had news for Hook. Important news. “There’s this kid I know. He found out Chris had stayed with me and that you’re in town checking up on Chris’s death and all. And, well, that’s what he wants to see you about. He says he’s got proof Chris didn’t kill himself. He was there, he says. He was a witness. But he’s afraid to come out in the open—don’t ask me why. He wouldn’t tell me. And I guess he wants money. A hundred dollars, he said.”

“Will he meet me?”

“That’s what I’m calling about.”

“Where? When?”

Icarus had to explain it twice before Hook understood. There was this monastery, the youth said, Mount Calvary Monastery, halfway up the mountain slope, at the very end of Mount Calvary Road, which connected with Mountain Drive or El Cielito—Hook could check his map to make sure which it was. The road was a lonely one-lane affair all the way up, a narrow blacktop curving back and forth up the mountain, with nothing on either side but boulders and trees. This boy, the “witness,” would be parked along it somewhere in a pickup truck at six o’clock that evening, when it would be good and dark. Once Hook “eyeballed” the truck, he should park and get out.

“The kid says he wants to see you first,” Icarus explained. “To make sure it’s you. Don’t ask me why. He sure is scared of someone.”

Hook did not suggest who he thought that someone might be. “And he said he’ll want a hundred dollars?”

“That’s right. That’s what he said.”

“All right. Six o’clock. Tell him I’ll be there.”

After he had hung up, Hook rediscovered his hangover, like a sack of feed dropped on his head. Getting up, he went into the bathroom and showered. And gradually the night before, all the long hours of drinking with Douglas, began to uncover itself in his mind like some grotesque bird struggling out of its shell. He recalled having gotten Douglas out of the hippie house and into his car and then somehow driving him home to Montecito, with what combination of raw determination and purblind luck he could only guess at, marvel at. And he remembered Douglas on his knees in the attic retching as if he were trying to bring up not vomit but a part of his own being, some foul malignancy laced into his very spirit. Hook wanted to stop the process right there, push the ungainly chick back into its shell, but it would not go, and despite his exhaustion and hangover, he knew what he had felt then, watching Douglas, in fact still felt, almost the anguish of a father, a brother. He did not want to like anything about Douglas, wanted only to think of him as a shallow egocentric monster, a man who had pushed the vices of self-love and ambition beyond the point of criminality. But after last night, Hook found it impossible to think of the man in those terms alone. Now there was also his rueful sense of humor, his self-mockery and his honesty and vulnerability, none of which Hook considered normal baggage for an ambitious and arrogant politician, especially one who could be a casual participant in man slaughter and then just as casually join the conspiracy to cover it up.