“Tell me about it.”

“You already know about it. Sergeant Rider must have told you.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“I suppose he made it sound like something I do all the time, picking up hitchhikers. Picking up young men.”

“But you don’t.”

“Never before.”

“Why this once?”

“I don’t know. Just him, I guess. Your son. The way he looked.” She shook her head ruefully. Her eyes were heavy with anguish and puzzlement.

Hook took a long drink of his vodka and set the glass down. “Go on,” he said.

“Well, it just happened, that’s all. I didn’t plan it. They’re always lined up there on 101, dozens of them sometimes, and most of them are creeps, you know. Losers. Drug freaks. And there are these four stoplights right in a row, so you usually hit one of them, and that’s when the hitchhikers come right up to the car, practically crawl in with you, so I usually lock the door.” Again the look of pain came into her eyes. “He didn’t do that. He just stood there, looking at me for a moment, and then he looked away as I looked back at him. But it was the way he did it, you know? With a touch of shyness. Or decency. Or—” Her eyes ransacked the room for help. “He was, somehow—beautiful, you know?”

Hook said nothing.

“I don’t mean just his looks.”

“I know.” Hook studied her face, avid now, open, trusting him. It was a mistake on her part. “This boy who had nothing to live for,” he said.

She reacted as if he had slapped her hard, going pale for a moment, then flushing with anger and resentment as she recovered her balance. “That’s right,” she said. “And maybe it doesn’t make any sense. But I can’t help that. It happened just the way we told the sergeant. It is the truth, Mr. Hook. It is the sickening, awful, horrible truth.”

Hook said nothing. The vodka, flat, went down like water.

“I wish I could help you,” she went on. “I wish I could change it all, make it different than it is. But I can’t.”

“You picked him up around noon yesterday.”

“Yes. I guess maybe I thought he was hungry. Anyway, I was lonely. I wanted to talk with someone.”

“And you took him to your place then.”

Stabbing out her cigarette, she nodded. “I made him a big lunch. French toast and bacon and scrambled eggs. I think he ate a half-dozen by himself.”

“So he wasn’t feeling too bad then.”

“I guess not.”

“Did you drink then?”

“We opened a bottle of Chablis. I like white wine. He said he did too.”

“And all of this time the two of you talked?”

“Yes.”

“What about?”

She lifted her glass and took a drink. Hook had the feeling that she was buying time, using it to think very hard and fast.

She put down her glass. “Mostly me, I’m afraid. I used him, your son. I admit that. You see, I’m not much of a success at life, Mr. Hook. Not at college, not at marriage, not at a career. I’m sort of a disadvantaged minority of one, you might say. The Maderas go way back, back to the glorious old days of Spanish California. Saddlemakers, we were at first. And then we sold real estate for a few generations. And now—well, now my father simply sells the name Madera. To rich widows, one at a time. In fact, I hear the elegant old bastard still lives around here somewhere, cleaning paintbrushes for some fat rich old lady artiste. But I don’t worry about him, because when she passes on—and I believe that’s the way her kind goes—well, there’ll still be another ten thousand more just like her for him to choose from. We grow them here in Santa Barbara—widows who do watercolors and wear floppy hats and sandals, and keep two-legged lap dogs with pedigrees. Preferably Spanish.”