Leaving the building, Hook walked back past City Hall and turned right on De la Guerra Street, heading for his car in the next block. When he reached it and got in, he checked his watch. The time was four-twenty, which meant that he would probably be sitting right where he was for the next forty to sixty minutes watching the front of a handsome beige-colored building farther up the block and across the street. It was the kind of place, the kind of setting, a January freeway commuter in Chicago or New York City might envision in some soaring moment of fantasy, an urban white-collar worker’s own true dream of heaven. Like the other half-dozen structures with which it shared the block, the building was individual in its design and shape, yet similar in its fake adobe construction and orange tile roof and superb state of repair. There was a fence in front of it, a low concrete pediment with a graceful iron grillwork above, and it opened into a red-brick courtyard with orange and lemon trees and a fountain that actually founted—all surrounded on three sides by the U-shaped, two-story building. Each story had its own wide veranda bordered by a wrought-iron railing that repeated the design of the front fence. There was no sign on the building, in fact no signs anywhere except on the doors to the various office suites, and for the most part these were no more than an inch high, discreet gold-leaf letters on black backgrounds. They could not be seen from the street. To know which office was whose, you had to go through the gate and look for yourself—which Hook had done before breakfast that morning. On the door he was watching now, the first on the second floor of the west wing, the sign read: jack douglas associates / public relations counseling.

Hook did not know precisely who or what he expected to see. All he knew was that the lady who claimed to have watched his son take his life was probably in the building now and would be leaving within the next hour, perhaps with young Ferguson or maybe even with her employer.

So Hook waited, and watched. A few persons entered the building, a few came out of it, but none by way of the door to Douglas’s suite of offices. Hook smoked one cigarette after another and in time darkness began to fall as gradually as winter rain, until finally after five o’clock the light was almost gone. Yet he was able to make out the faces of the people who began to trickle out of the building then, pretty young secretaries at first, then a number of older ones, and finally the men, the few professionals who had not already departed for home or bar.

At ten after five a young blonde secretary came out of Douglas’s office and fled happily down the stairs. Hook’s eyes wanted to follow her long-legged stride up the street but she had not locked the door behind her, in fact had left it slightly ajar, so Hook knew someone else would soon be coming out after her. And now that person came—Dorothy Rubin, moving with the ponderous assurance of a man, a powerful man. She locked the door behind her and checked it, and then started down the stairs, shunning the banister all the way. And even though she was carrying a large handbag and her dyed hair was bouffant and carefully set and her coat fur-collared and feminine, she still managed to cut a decidedly masculine figure, even an ominous figure, as she crossed the courtyard and disappeared into a corridor that led to the parking lot behind the building. Hook started his car and waited, hoping that she would turn in the direction he was parked, for otherwise he knew he would probably lose her in the five o’clock traffic.