I found my way into the Hoopers’ study, turned off the stuttering teletype, and sat down under an elk head to telephone the courthouse. Carlson was in his office.
“I have bad news, Sheriff. Allan Hooper’s been shot.”
I heard him draw in his breath quickly. “Is he dead?”
“Extremely dead. You better put out a general alarm for Rambeau.”
Carlson said with gloomy satisfaction, “I already have him.”
“You have him?”
“That’s correct. I picked him up in the Hoopers’ canyon and brought him in just a few minutes ago.” Carlson’s voice sank to a mournful mumble. “I picked him up a little too late, I guess.”
“Did Rambeau do any talking?”
“He hasn’t had a chance to yet. When I stopped his car, he piled out and threatened me with a rifle. I clobbered him one good.”
I went outside to wait for Carlson and his men. A very pale afternoon moon hung like a ghost in the sky. For some reason, it made me think of Fay. She ought to be here. It occurred to me that possibly she had been.
I went and looked at Hooper’s body again. He had nothing to tell me. He lay as if he had fallen from a height, perhaps all the way from the moon.
They came in a black county wagon and took him away. I followed them inland to the county seat, which rose like a dusty island in a dark green lake of orange groves. We parked in the courthouse parking lot, and the sheriff and I went inside.
Rambeau was under guard in a second-floor room with barred windows. Carlson said it was used for interrogation. There was nothing in the room but an old deal table and some wooden chairs. Rambeau sat hunched forward on one of them, his hands hanging limp between his knees. Part of his head had been shaved and plastered with bandages.
“I had to cool him with my gun butt,” Carlson said. “You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you – you know that, Fernando?”
Rambeau made no response. His black eyes were set and dull.
“Had his rifle been fired?”
“Yeah. Chet Scott is working on it now. Chet’s my identification lieutenant and he’s a bear on ballistics.” The sheriff turned back to Rambeau. “You might as well give us a full confession, boy. If you shot Mr Hooper and his dog, we can link the bullets to your gun. You know that.”
Rambeau didn’t speak or move.
“What did you have against Mr Hooper?” Carlson said.
No answer. Rambeau’s mouth was set like a trap in the thicket of his beard.
“Your older brother,” I said to him, “was killed in a hunting accident in British Columbia. Was Hooper at the other end of the gun that killed George?”
Rambeau didn’t answer me, but Carlson’s head came up. “Where did you get that, Archer?”
“From a couple of things I was told. According to Rambeau’s wife, he was talking yesterday about revenge for his brother’s death. According to Fay Hooper, her husband swore off guns when he came back from a certain hunting trip after the war. Would you know if that trip was to British Columbia?”
“Yeah. Mr Hooper took me and the wife with him.”
“Whose wife?”
“Both our wives.”
“To the Mount Robson area?”
“That’s correct. We went up after elk.”
“And did he shoot somebody accidentally?” I wanted to know.
“Not that I know of. I wasn’t with him all the time, understand. He often went out alone, or with Mrs Hooper,” Carlson replied.
“Did he use a packer named George Rambeau?”
“I wouldn’t know. Ask Fernando here.”
I asked Fernando. He didn’t speak or move. Only his eyes had changed. They were wet and glistening-black, visible parts of a grief that filled his head like a dark underground river.
The questioning went on and produced nothing. It was night when I went outside. The moon was slipping down behind the dark hills. I took a room in a hotel and checked in with my answering service in Hollywood. About an hour before, Fay Hooper had called me from a Las Vegas hotel. When I tried to return the call, she wasn’t in her room and didn’t respond to paging. I left a message for her to come home, that her husband was dead.
Next, I called R.C.M.P. headquarters in Vancouver to ask some questions about George Rambeau. The answers came over the line in clipped Canadian tones. George and his dog had disappeared from his cabin below Red Pass in the fall of 1945. Their bodies hadn’t been recovered until the following May, and by that time they consisted of parts of the two skeletons. These included George Rambeau’s skull, which had been pierced in the right front and left rear quadrants by a heavy-caliber bullet. The bullet had not been recovered. Who fired it, or when or why, had never been determined. The dog, a husky, had also been shot through the head.
I walked over to the courthouse to pass the word to Carlson. He was in the basement shooting gallery with Lieutenant Scott, who was firing test rounds from Fernando Rambeau’s .30/30 repeater.
I gave them the official account of the accident. “But since George Rambeau’s dog was shot, too, it probably wasn’t an accident,” I said.
“I see what you mean,” Carlson said. “It’s going to be rough, spreading all this stuff out in court about Mr Hooper. We have to nail it down, though.”
I went back to my hotel and to bed, but the process of nailing down the case against Rambeau continued through the night. By morning, Lieutenant Scott had detailed comparisons set up between the test-fired slugs and the ones dug out of Hooper and the dog. I looked at his evidence through a comparison microscope. It left no doubt in my mind that the slugs that killed Allan Hooper and the dog Otto had come from Rambeau’s gun.
But Rambeau still wouldn’t talk, even to phone his wife or ask for a lawyer.
“We’ll take you out to the scene of the crime,” Carlson said. “I’ve cracked tougher nuts than you, boy.”
We rode in the back seat of his car with Fernando handcuffed between us. Lieutenant Scott did the driving. Rambeau groaned and pulled against his handcuffs. He was very close to the breaking point, I thought.
It came a few minutes later when the car turned up the lane past the Hoopers’ mailbox. He burst into sudden fierce tears as if a pressure gauge in his head had broken. It was strange to see a bearded man crying like a boy, and whimpering, “I don’t want to go up there.”
“Because you shot him?” Carlson said.
“I shot the dog. I confess I shot the dog,” Rambeau said.
“And the man?”
“No!” he cried. “I never killed a man. Mr Hooper was the one who did. He followed my brother out in the woods and shot him.”
“If you knew that,” I said, “why didn’t you tell the Mounties years ago?”
“I didn’t know it then. I was seven years old. How would I understand? When Mrs Hooper came to our cabin to be with my brother, how would I know it was a serious thing? Or when Mr Hooper asked me if she had been there? I didn’t know he was her husband. I thought he was her father checking up. I knew I shouldn’t have told him – I could see it in his face the minute after – but I didn’t understand the situation till the other night, when I talked to Mrs Hooper.”
“Did she know that her husband had shot George?”
“She didn’t even know George had been killed. They never went back to the Fraser River after 1945. But when we put our facts together, we agreed he must have done it. I came out here next morning to get even. The dog came out to the gate. It wasn’t real to me – I was drinking most of the night – it wasn’t real to me until the dog went down. I shot him. Mr Hooper shot my dog. But when he came out of the house himself, I couldn’t pull the trigger. I yelled at him and ran away.”
“What did you yell?” I said.
“The same thing I told him on the telephone: ‘Remember Mount Robson.”’
A yellow cab, which looked out of place in the canyon, came over the ridge above us. Lieutenant Scott waved it to a stop. The driver said he’d just brought
Mrs Hooper home from the airport and wanted to know if that constituted a felony. Scott waved him on.
“I wonder what she was doing at the airport,” Carlson said.
“Coming home from Vegas. She tried to call me from there last night. I forgot to tell you.”
“You don’t forget important things like that,” Carlson said.
“I suppose I wanted her to come home under her own power.”
“In case she shot her husband?”
“More or less.”
“She didn’t. Fernando shot him, didn’t you, boy?”
“I shot the dog. I am innocent of the man.” He turned to me: “Tell her that. Tell her I am sorry about the dog. I came out here to surrender the gun and tell her yesterday. I don’t trust myself with guns.”
“With darn good reason,” Carlson said. “We know you shot Mr Hooper. Ballistic evidence doesn’t lie.”
Rambeau screeched in his ear, “You’re a liar! You’re all liars!”
Carlson swung his open hand against the side of Rambeau’s face. “Don’t call me names, little man.”
Lieutenant Scott spoke without taking his eyes from the road. “I wouldn’t hit him, Chief. You wouldn’t want to damage our case.”
Carlson subsided, and we drove on up to the house. Carlson went in without knocking. The guard at the door discouraged me from following him.
I could hear Fay’s voice on the other side of the door, too low to be understood. Carlson said something to her.
“Get out! Get out of my house, you killer!” Fay cried out sharply.
Carlson didn’t come out. I went in instead. One of his arms was wrapped around her body; the other hand was covering her mouth. I got his Adam’s apple in the crook of my left arm, pulled him away from her, and threw him over my left hip. He went down clanking and got up holding his revolver.
He should have shot me right away. But he gave Fay Hooper time to save my life.
She stepped in front of me. “Shoot me, Mr Carlson. You might as well. You shot the one man I ever cared for.”
“Your husband shot George Rambeau, if that’s who you mean. I ought to know. I was there.” Carlson scowled down at his gun, and replaced it in his holster.
Lieutenant Scott was watching him from the doorway.
“You were there?” I said to Carlson. “Yesterday you told me Hooper was alone when he shot Rambeau.”
“He was. When I said I was there, I meant in the general neighborhood.”
“Don’t believe him,” Fay said. “He fired the gun that killed George, and it was no accident. The two of them hunted George down in the woods. My husband planned to shoot him himself, but George’s dog came at him and he had to dispose of it. By that time, George had drawn a bead on Allan. Mr Carlson shot him. It was hardly a coincidence that the next spring Allan financed his campaign for sheriff.”
“She’s making it up,” Carlson said. “She wasn’t within ten miles of the place.”
“But you were, Mr Carlson, and so was Allan. He told me the whole story yesterday, after we found Otto. Once that happened, he knew that everything was bound to come out. I already suspected him, of course, after I talked to Fernando. Allan filled in the details himself. He thought, since he hadn’t killed George personally, I would be able to forgive him. But I couldn’t. I left him and flew to Nevada, intending to divorce him. I’ve been intending to for twenty years.”
Carlson said: “Are you sure you didn’t shoot him before you left?”
“How could she have?” I said. “Ballistics don’t lie, and the ballistic evidence says he was shot with Fernando’s rifle. Nobody had access to it but Fernando and you. You stopped him on the road and knocked him out, took his rifle and used it to kill Hooper. You killed him for the same reason that Hooper buried the dog – to keep the past buried. You thought Hooper was the only witness to the murder of George Rambeau. But by that time, Mrs Hooper knew about it, too.”
“It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense, just like in the war. Anyway, you’ll never hang it on me.”
“We don’t have to. We’ll hang Hooper on you. How about it, Lieutenant?”
Scott nodded grimly, not looking at his chief. I relieved Carlson of his gun. He winced, as if I were amputating part of his body. He offered no resistance when Scott took him out to the car.
I stayed behind for a final word with Fay. “Fernando asked me to tell you he’s sorry for shooting your dog.”
“We’re both sorry.” She stood with her eyes down, as if the past was swirling visibly around her feet. “I’ll talk to Fernando later. Much later.”
“There’s one coincidence that bothers me. How did you happen to take your dog to his school?”
“I happened to see his sign, and Fernando Rambeau isn’t a common name. I couldn’t resist going there. I had to know what had happened to George. I think perhaps Fernando came to California for the same reason.”
“Now you both know,” I said.
THE WENCH IS DEAD
Fredric Brown
1
A fuzz is a fuzz is a fuzz when you awaken from a wino jag. God, I’d drunk three pints of muscatel that I know of and maybe more, maybe lots more, because that’s when I drew a blank, that’s when research stopped. I rolled over on the cot so I could look out through the dirty pane of the window at the clock in the hockshop across the way.
Ten o’clock said the clock.
Get up, Howard Perry, I told myself. Get up, you B.A.S. for bastard, rise and greet the day. Hit the floor and get moving if you want to keep that job, that all-important job that keeps you drinking and sometimes eating and sometimes sleeping with Billie the Kid when she hasn’t got a sucker on the hook. That’s your life, you B.A.S., you bastard. That’s your life for a while. This is it, this is the McCoy, this is the way a wino meets the not-so-newborn day. You’re learning, man.
Pull on a sock, another sock, pants, shirt, shoes, get the hell to Burke’s and wash a dish, wash a thousand dishes for six bits an hour and a meal or two a day when you want it.
God, I thought, did I really have the habit? Nuts, not in three months. Not when you’ve been a normal drinker all your life. Not when, much as you’ve always enjoyed drinking, it’s always been in moderation and you’ve always been able to handle the stuff. This was just temporary.
And I had only a few weeks to go. In a few weeks I’d be back in Chicago, back at my desk in my father’s investment company, back wearing white shirts, and B.A.S. would stand for Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. That was a laugh right now, that degree. Three months ago it had meant something – but that was in Chicago, and this was LA, and now all it meant was bastard. That’s all it had meant ever since I started drifting.
It’s funny, the way those things can happen. You’ve got a good family and a good education, and then suddenly, for no reason you can define, you start drifting. You lose interest in your family and your job, and one day you find yourself headed for the Coast.
You sit down one day and ask yourself how it happened. But you can’t answer. There are a thousand little answers, sure, but there’s no big answer. It’s easier to worry about where the next bottle of sweet wine is coming from.
And that’s when you realize your own personal B.A.S. stands for bastard.
With me, LA had been the end of the line. I’d seen the Dishwasher Wanted sign in Burke’s window, and suddenly I’d known what I had to do. At pearl-diver’s wages, it would take a long time to get up the bus fare back to Chicago and family and respectability, but that was beside the point. The point was that after a hundred thousand dirty dishes there’d be a bus ticket to Chicago.
But it had been hard to remember the ticket and forget the dishes. Wine is cheap, but they’re not giving it away. Since I’d started pearl-diving I’d had grub and six bits an hour for seven hours a day. Enough to drink on and to pay for this dirty, crumby little crackerbox of a room.
So here I was, still thinking about the bus ticket, and still on my uppers on Ea
st Fifth Street, LA. Main Street used to be the tenderloin street of Los Angeles and I’d headed for it when I jumped off the freight, but I’d found that the worst district, the real Skid Row, was now on Fifth Street in the few blocks east of Main. The worse the district, the cheaper the living, and that’s what I’d been looking for.
Sure, by Fifth Street standards, I was being a pantywaist to hold down a steady job like that, but sleeping in doorways was a little too rugged and I’d found out quickly that panhandling wasn’t for me. I lacked the knack.
I dipped water from the cracked basin and rubbed it on my face, and the feel of the stubble told me I could get by one more day without shaving. Or anyway I could wait till evening so the shave would be fresh in case I’d be sleeping with Billie.
Cold water helped a little but I still felt like hell. There were empty wine bottles in the corner and I checked to make sure they were completely empty, and they were. So were my pockets, except, thank God, for tobacco and cigarette papers. I rolled myself a cigarette and lighted it.
But I needed a drink to start the day.
What does a wino do when he wakes up broke (and how often does he wake otherwise?) and needs a drink? Well, I’d found several answers to that. The easiest one, right now, would be to hit Billie for a drink if she was awake yet, and alone.
I crossed the street to the building where Billie had a room. A somewhat newer building, a hell of a lot nicer room, but then she paid a hell of a lot more for it.
I rapped on her door softly, a little code knock we had. If she wasn’t awake she wouldn’t hear it and if she wasn’t alone she wouldn’t answer it.
But she called out, “It’s not locked; come on in,” and she said “Hi, Professor,” as I closed the door behind me. “Professor” she called me, occasionally and banteringly. It was my way of talking, I guess. I’d tried at first to use poor diction, bad grammar, to fit in with the place, but I’d given it up as too tough a job. Besides, I’d learned Fifth Street already had quite a bit of good grammar. Some of its denizens had been newspapermen once, some had written poetry; one I knew was a defrocked clergyman.
The New Mammoth Book of Pulp Fiction Page 55