In that ersatz world he ate a candy bar made of flavor substitutes and watched a Danish film that told in living color the tale of an eighteen-year-old girl’s personal triumph over frigidity. For a good portion of the film she was nude, a modern Alice in Wonderland innocently moving on from the rudimentary pleasures of masturbation to the higher accomplishments of copulation and fellatio and cunnilingus and finally orgy. Hook watched the huge images moving in the darkness, the acres of technicolor flesh, and yet he did not really see any of it. His mind was elsewhere, on Douglas and Parnelli and Dorothy Rubin. For this was the first real chance he had had to sit back and think about them as other than suspects in Chris’s death. Now they were guilty, each of them, and he knew it, and knew the world would soon know it. So for the first time he was able to think about the degree of their guilt. The suicide lie was of course a simple matter, Mrs. Rubin’s act alone, part and parcel of her ugliness and loneliness and, perversely, her normality. She had craved love or at least sex and had tried to get it the only way she knew, as crudely as a ghetto mugger seizing cash, and rejected, had converted all that pent-up need into easy hatred and revenge. But as for Chris’s death, there Hook could not find any simplicity. All he knew for sure was that Douglas and Parnelli had been on the cliff alone with the boy, fighting with him, and the thing had happened. Beyond that, he could not be sure of anything, whether Chris had indeed lunged at them and missed, gone over the edge due to his own momentum, or whether one or both of the men had thrown him over in a moment of drunken rage. Even then it was not much—only manslaughter, death caused without design or premeditation. So that was all Hook was left with—the sexual frustrations of a middle-aged woman, a senseless accident, or the casual brutality of a pair of drunks. In the way of twentieth-century guilt it was not much, in fact was almost innocence. And to the average liberal mind—to a liberal such as Hook had considered himself until recent years—it should have been innocence enough. To understand was to forgive, was it not? And Hook understood.

But he did not forgive.

If Chris’s death were truly only a senseless accident, then that was how he would judge those involved—without sense or mercy. And if Douglas or Parnelli had actually done it, acting out of drunken instinct, so Hook would act out of instinct now. And all the lineaments of his soul called for redress, for justice, for vengeance. He could not possibly accept Chris’s death in the cold blood of rationalism. It would have been like observing the passing of the sun with a benediction.

When he left the theater it was almost five o’clock and already growing dark. He walked to El Cielito and telephoned Rider again, and again got the same response. The sergeant was out. Was there anyone else Hook would talk to? No, but he did want to leave a message, that he would be coming in at nine the next morning to give Sergeant Rider new information regarding the alleged suicide of Christopher Hook two weeks before. The switchboard operator said she could not guarantee that Rider would be in his office then either.