Later, after cigarettes, and after a number of unsuccessful attempts at conversation—did he like movies? did he go to many of them? she dug them herself, much more than TV, because they told it like it really was—she lapsed into silence and finally fell asleep. He looked at her lovely breasts and abundant hair, at her Latin darkness, and wondered if he would have taken her at all if she had been blonde, if she had not borne at least a physical resemblance to Elizabeth Madera.

8

Slightly before noon the next day Hook parked his car in the middle of a block lined on both sides with small rundown clapboard houses in a largely Mexican part of the city. Next to him, Icarus looked gloomily across the street.

“It’s the yellow one,” he said. “Or at least it was yellow once. And we’d better lock up. These Chicano kids will steal you blind.”

Getting out, Hook locked his side of the car and followed Icarus across the street and up onto the rickety front porch of the house. After Rita had left him around nine, he had called the young photographer again and this time got him, though Icarus had sounded barely conscious on the phone, hung over with sleep or wine or drugs. Hook had told him his problem, his need for more background information on Mrs. Rubin and Douglas and Liz Madera and their crowd, and Icarus had said he knew just the man, just the source. So here they were.

As Icarus knocked, Hook hoped that the man inside would answer the door quickly and get them in off the street, for he could not overcome his aversion at being seen in public with his flamboyant young friend, who today was setting off his mane of long orange hair with an ensemble that included a maroon velvet Edwardian waistcoat, red jeans, black shirt, and red-and-white polka-dot ascot. But the man inside was much too slow. Three subteen boys came walking by and they were not polite.

“Jesus, Tino! Wouldja dig that?”

“El Pavonito!”

“El Pavonito, sheeyit! El Queerito, ya mean!”

Then laughter.

But to Icarus it was nothing, water to the duck’s back of his aplomb. His weary heavy-lidded eyes remained just that. Finally the door opened—on a gray-skinned skeleton of a man sitting in a wheelchair, like a cadaver prepared for Egyptian burial.

“Come in, gentlemen,” he said. “Welcome to San Simeon.”

He slowly backwheeled away from the door, across the small living room’s linoleum carpet to a position next to a stout center-leg table burdened with bottles of wine and pills and liquid medicine, boxes of Kleenex and matches and cigarettes, a thermometer, books, glasses, and among other items a bowl of soggy half-eaten breakfast cereal. The table was evidently the man’s life support system and he did not stray far from it.

Icarus was introducing them. “Mr. Hook—Ray Oliver, the best reporter this town ever had.”

“I appreciate your seeing me,” Hook said.