Oliver grinned like a wolf. “Oh, I got time. A little time.”

On the drive over, Icarus had explained to Hook that the man was dying of lung cancer, had already had one lung removed and was just pottering around now waiting for the other to go. He also had arteriosclerosis, and thus pain as well as the expectation of imminent death, but he would not stay in a hospital. He was broke and refused to die in debt as a matter of principle, he said, one last nose-thumb at a society he did not particularly cherish.

Hook said, “I’m the father of the boy who—”

“Yeah, I know,” Oliver cut in. “Ike told me on the phone.” He looked at Icarus now and shook his head ruefully. “You know what you look like, kid? Gainsborough’s long-lost painting Lavender Boy. Or Lavender Lad I guess I should say, to keep the alliteration.” He laughed softly and began to cough.

Icarus smiled. “What’s a pavonito, Ray? You speak Spanish.”

“Pavonito? A peacock, I think. Little peacock.”

Icarus looked at Hook and shrugged.

Oliver turned his sunken eyes on Hook. “I’d like to help you,” he said, speaking slowly, spending each breath as if it were a diamond. “I ain’t particularly in love with Mr. Douglas and his crowd either, mostly because they steal things. They steal your work and your years, and then finally they steal your life. But legally, Mr. Hook. Never violently. So I think you’re barking up a wrong tree. But sit down anyway. Sit down.”

While Hook took an easy chair whose bottom sank almost to the floor, Icarus stretched out sideways on the davenport, like an Empire grande dame posing for David.

Hook said, “I’m not barking up any tree, Mr. Oliver. I don’t believe my boy committed suicide, that’s all. And I want to know more about these people who say he did. Icarus here—Ike—says you know more about this town and its people than anybody.”

Oliver made a face. “I doubt that. Did he also tell you I’m croaking?”

“Yes.”

“So you probably figure a dying man will tell you the truth, the whole truth, and so on.”

“I figured you’d tell me the truth, yes.”

Now Oliver lost his look of the gallows wit. “I have one pleasure, Mr. Hook,” he said, nodding at the table. “Drugs. Sweet morphine and its derivatives, its stepchildren and cousins. You see, I pretend I’m on the other side of the generation gap. I swing. Only thing is it costs money, and as you can see the medicos didn’t exactly leave me prosperous. I used to have a little house up on the Riviera—the local one, that long foothill back of us here. But it went too. The high cost of dying, you know.”

Hook took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and gave it to him. Oliver put it in his shirt pocket.

“Okay,” he said. “Where do you want to start?”