On the way he stopped at a drive-in and choked down a pair of doughy hamburgers, canners-and-cutters beef if ever he tasted it. But then he knew his palate was somewhat spoiled by the corn-fattened prime Black Angus beef he enjoyed daily at home. While other beef-raisers often fattened cheap dairy steers for their own use, Hook had always figured that if his beef was fine enough for the hotels and restaurants of Chicago and New York, then it was also fine enough for the Hooks. And anyway he doubted that he could have endured the sight of a dairy steer on his farm; he was a snob in that at least.

Montecito was to Santa Barbara as Beverly Hills was to Hollywood—adjacent, separate, unequal. In Santa Barbara people lived and worked; in Montecito they only lived. It was a bedroom community, and to Hook’s eyes it looked as if each bedroom had its own dressing room and bath. It also had trees, great drooping sycamore and eucalyptus and live oak crowding the narrow serpentine streets so tightly Hook wondered how drunks ever managed to negotiate the maze at night, as he was trying to do now, sober, driving slowly, watching for street signs. What houses there were sat far back from the road, looking as dimly lit as forest cabins through the trees, and in front of each there was usually a rustic stone wall or iron-bar fence, the kind Carl Sandburg said would be penetrated only by death and rain and tomorrow.

By the time Hook found Sutton Lane he was convinced that he was driving the only non-foreign, non-sports car on the western seaboard, and he was happy for the difference, because most of the natives apparently thought of the streets as strictly one-way, their way, and swerved their low-slung Jags and Porsches and Triumphs out of Hook’s lane at the very last second, as if “chicken” and not polo or tennis were the favored local sport. But then Hook reminded himself that they knew the roads and did not expect to find a jealously preserved historic fig tree growing in the center of the pavement just over the next hill or beyond the next bend.

The house at 300 Sutton Lane was newer than most in the area, modern and glassy, though it too had the required stone wall along the road. In the back, above a picket of small Mediterranean cypress, the superstructure of a swimming-pool slide was visible. A late-model station wagon was parked in the attached three-car garage, which also had a basket and board above the door. And as Hook watched now, as he was about to drive on, a boy came dribbling a ball out of the darkness of the garage and hooked a shot up at the hoop. If he was the son Douglas had mentioned, the twelve-year-old, then he was small for his age. His hair, long and bowl-cut in the style of the Kennedy young, flopped like a pennant as he moved and jumped under the basket. Hook depressed the accelerator and drove on, not anxious to have the boy see him and run inside and report to his mother that a strange man had stopped his car to watch him—Hook already had enough problems without adding that.