Rider tried for irony. “Well, he was playing cards with three other men at the time. If you think that’s good enough, then yes, he has an alibi.”

“It depends on who the men were.”

For a long time the sergeant just stood there staring at Hook. Then he grinned crookedly and shook his head in mock despair. “I’ll be seeing you,” he said.

After eating lunch at a drive-in, Hook had gone back to his motel to wash up and consider what his next moves should be, but he had not been able to relax there and before he knew it he was back in his rented Galaxie again, only this time heading out of the city, on Cliff Drive, toward Mrs. Rubin’s beach house. He knew it was probably a stupid thing to be doing, that he could even wind up being arrested for trespassing, but he felt it was worth the risk because he might be able to learn a few things this way he could never learn with the two occupants of the house on the scene. And anyway there were the neighbors to be checked out. The fact that they had told Sergeant Rider they had seen nothing and heard nothing the night of Chris’s death did not eliminate them in Hook’s mind as sources of possibly valuable information. For one thing, there was now another day to ask them about—Tuesday. Maybe they had seen the tall blond young man at the house on that day, a good forty-eight hours before he fell to his death. And there were other things a neighbor might know about Elizabeth Madera and her friends, things Hook wanted to know too. As to why any of these neighbors would open up to him, a stranger, he felt that simple human nature favored his cause, that they would help him either out of sympathy for his loss or because of antipathy to Miss Madera, whom an older and plainer female neighbor would surely find very difficult to like.

But once he arrived at the beach house Hook found that his great expectations were only that. The sun was so bright it was almost impossible to see anything through the house’s windows, which reflected the brilliance of the day like mirrors. He walked through the row of shaggy eucalyptus trees to the house next door and found no one at home there except a short stout Mexican maid who promptly claimed an almost total ignorance of anything, anybody, anytime. The owners of the house had a muy big boat and they went fishing much of the time, and were fishing now, down off the coast of Baja, she guessed, although of course she was not sure about that either. Yes, she had heard about the terrible thing that poor boy had done next door, but she had not been here at the time, in fact came in only twice a week now, on Tuesdays and Fridays, so all she knew about the tragedy was what she had read in the newspaper. Had she seen the boy over there on Tuesday, the day before his death? Oh no, she almost never even looked over there, because she had so much work to do right here—the house was a large one and her employers wanted it kept so clean you could eat off the floors if you wanted. No, she did not know either of the women who lived next door. She had seen them at a distance a few times, but that was all. And now, if the gentleman would please excuse her, she still had much work to do.