“There’s nothing to add,” she said. “I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m sorry for you and your family but I’m afraid this whole thing just isn’t our concern. Your boy wasn’t invited here, Mr. Hook—certainly not to stay. We both tried to get him to leave. Frankly, what it all boils down to is he just happened to choose our place to kill himself. It’s that simple.”

“Dorothy, for Christ sake!” Ferguson remonstrated.

“Well, it’s the truth, isn’t it? And isn’t that what this gentleman came here for—the truth?”

Hook said nothing, for fear his voice would break. He went over to the fireplace and stood there staring down at the blaze, trying to keep control of himself. Then Ferguson was at his side, holding out a drink.

“Scotch,” the young man said.

As he took the drink, Hook saw something move out on the deck, beyond the glass wall. It was the young woman. She was just standing there in the darkness, looking at him. As Sergeant Rider had said, she was beautiful, strikingly beautiful, with thick long black hair parted in the middle and hanging sea-damp down around a finely shaped face dominated by large grave eyes. She made no move to come on in.

“Mrs. Rubin is very upset,” Ferguson explained again. “She’s not herself.”

Hook turned from the window in time to see Mrs. Rubin angrily bite off a fresh outburst at a look from the little man. Evidently Hook had underestimated Ferguson’s power, and it bothered him. He could not get a true reading on their relationship, who was running whom. But at the moment he was more interested in the girl, who slid open one of the glass doors leading to the deck and came in now, with a surge of cold salty air. She closed the door behind her and stood there hugging her arms, trying to get warm. She was wearing faded jeans and a black turtleneck sweater. Her feet were bare.

“This is Mr. Hook,” Ferguson told her. “He’s the father of the boy.”

She said nothing, registered nothing.

Ferguson looked at Hook in panic. “Miss Madera.”

Hook nodded, but said nothing in the face of her reaction to him, the way her eyes unblinkingly regarded him, not with hostility so much as a kind of unashamed, even arrogant, self-assertion.

“Just what can we tell you? What is it you want to know?” It was Mrs. Rubin.

Hook turned to her. “I can’t believe my son would kill himself.”

“Well, I saw him.” She stubbed out her cigarette. “Maybe he was on dope. Maybe he thought he could fly. They do, you know, these kids. It happens.”

“But didn’t my son do it on purpose? Because he had ‘nothing to live for’?”

Mrs. Rubin’s eyes went flat with anger. She almost smiled. “So you don’t want to be spared, huh? You want it right in the gut.”

“I want to know what happened.”

“You know what happened! You said you talked to Sergeant Rider already. So you already know what our statements are.”