In the next hour Hook learned both a great deal and nothing—many facts and fancies about the people he was interested in, and yet nothing that had any apparent bearing on Chris’s death or why it had been labeled a suicide. Most disappointing of all was Oliver’s scant knowledge of Mrs. Rubin. About all he knew of her was that she had come to town six or seven years ago, that her husband had been a real estate agent for one of the local companies and had died of a heart attack in the YMCA swimming pool three or four years back. If they had any children, Oliver did not know about it. As he recalled, she began working for Douglas even before her husband had died. And to the local press she was known as a real barracuda. If there was no pickup on a Douglas news release they were as likely to hear from her as from anyone else in the outfit, and it was always gloves off and right for the crotch. But that was all he knew about her—as an employee of Jack Douglas. If she was a lesbian or a lush or if she liked balling young hippies, he had never heard anything about it. Nor did she swing at any level of local society, of which there were three, Oliver stated. At the top were a few old-line Spanish families and descendants of the Spanish land-grant Anglos. Then came the national rich, people who had once used Santa Barbara as a winter playground and then finally moved here to stay—and there was one hell of a lot of Ford and Mellon and du Pont money behind those high brick walls in Montecito, he said. And then at the bottom was the local rich, the new rich, the dagos and micks who had made it big catering to the whims of the other two groups with one hand while stealing them blind with the other. This last was the largest group by far. They ran the city, boosted it, pillaged it, and lived for the day they might move up a notch and be invited to a real honest-to-God upper-class dinner party instead of the usual sodden cocktail bashes they threw as religiously as their parents had gone to mass.

Jack Douglas was in this level, though probably near the top of it, Oliver said, since his father had been a businessman here before him, a pharmacist turned wholesale druggist, though the man never did make it very big, and finally sold out after the Second World War, a few years before he died. He had three daughters and just the one son, Jack, so what money Douglas had now was strictly through marriage to Doc Halverson’s daughter Jill. The Halversons had always been filthy with Union Pacific money, Oliver said, and Jill evidently had gotten a piece of it, which was a damn good thing for Douglas, because he ran that P.R. thing of his like a political campaign office pure and simple. It was a sure bet Uncle Sam was not getting rich off the outfit’s profits. Douglas had studied at USC, got his degree in journalism sometime in the mid-fifties. For four or five years he had worked as a reporter for the L.A. Times. Then he had come back up here and opened his own shop. Oliver figured Douglas had contracted the political virus in the mid and late sixties working on the Kennedy and Salinger campaigns, and especially Bobby Kennedy’s campaign in sixty-eight.