So he started back toward Santa Barbara wondering why he had bothered to drive out to the house in the first place. What had he learned? Did it look like the house of a murderer? No—no more than the “murderer” himself looked like a murderer. And Hook was beginning to face it now, that ever since meeting Douglas that morning and talking with him he had been losing his gut conviction that the man was somehow involved in Chris’s death. The fact that Douglas had gone out to the beach house with Liz Madera, had even allowed himself to be seen alone with her, knowing that Hook was in town and what he was after—it just did not smell of guilt. But even more to the point, Douglas simply did not seem like the violent and jealous type, in fact seemed more like its antithesis, cool and calm and sure in his sense of his own worth, the kind of man not likely to be shaken by a mistress’s infidelity, especially in a milieu in which infidelity was the rule, almost the one true badge of belonging. And there was also the matter of how Liz Madera had reacted to Hook’s indictment of Douglas—with amusement more than anything else. The lady did not protest nearly half enough. So the simple fact was that Jack Douglas had not turned out to be the man Hook had imagined during the trip home with Chris’s body and through the long days of the funeral and the longer days afterward. No, that man had existed only in Hook’s mind, had been born and fleshed there, and Hook mourned his passing now, because he feared his death also meant the death of Hook’s hopes for swift redress and, yes, vengeance—for Liz Madera had been right about that too, that poison in his blood. He felt it now, could admit its existence, live with it. Still, more than anything else he wanted the truth. But right now that truth did not seem to involve Jack Douglas.

So where did that leave him?

It left him with Dorothy Rubin.

And twenty minutes later, in El Cielito, the restaurant where Sergeant Rider had taken him that first night in Santa Barbara, Mrs. Rubin was still with him. She was the one who claimed to have seen Chris jump; she was supposedly the last one to have heard him say he had nothing to live for; and probably most important, she was the only one obviously filled with hatred, possibly sick with it, sick enough to commit murder. So as he took a stool at the end of the bar and ordered a vodka and tonic, Hook tried to conceive of what possible circumstances, what intricate mechanism of character and cause and effect could have resulted in Chris’s “suicide.” But there was nothing to go on, no raw material for even hypotheses. Was the woman a lesbian? Did she have a lover? Or lovers? Was she broke? Or rich? Was she a widow? A divorcée? He had no idea, in fact knew next to nothing about her. And that was a lack he was determined to end as soon as possible, and even tried to make a beginning now, by pumping the bartender. But the man was so busy Hook could not get anywhere with him, and contented himself with the drink and a cigarette, then another drink, and left before nine o’clock.