“Otto’s gone.” Otto was her one-year-old German shepherd. “He jumped the fence yesterday afternoon and ran away. Or else he was kidnapped—dognapped, I suppose is the right word to use.”
“What makes you think that?”
“You know Otto, Mr. Archer—how loyal he was. He wouldn’t deliberately stay away from me overnight, not under his own power. There must be thieves involved.” She caught her breath. “I realize searching for stolen dogs isn’t your métier. But you are a detective, and I thought, since we knew each other…” She allowed her voice to suggest, ever so chastely, that we might get to know each other better.
I liked the woman, I liked the dog, I liked the breed. I was taking my own German shepherd pup to obedience school, which is where I met Fay Hooper. Otto and she were the handsomest and most expensive members of the class.
“How do I get to your place?”
She lived in the hills north of Malibu, she said, on the far side of the county line. If she wasn’t home when I got there, her husband would be.
On my way out, I stopped at the dog school in Pacific Palisades to talk to the man who ran it, Fernando Rambeau. The kennels behind the house burst into clamor when I knocked on the front door. Rambeau boarded dogs as well as trained them.
A dark-haired girl looked out and informed me that her husband was feeding the animals. “Maybe I can help,” she added doubtfully, and then she let me into a small living room.
I told her about the missing dog. “It would help if you called the vets and animal shelters and gave them a description,” I said.
“We’ve already been doing that. Mrs. Hooper was on the phone to Fernando last night.” She sounded vaguely resentful. “I’ll get him.”
Setting her face against the continuing noise, she went out the back door. Rambeau came in with her, wiping his hands on a rag. He was a square-shouldered Canadian with a curly black beard that failed to conceal his youth. Over the beard, his intense, dark eyes peered at me warily, like an animal’s sensing trouble.
Rambeau handled dogs as if he loved them. He wasn’t quite so patient with human beings. His current class was only in its third week, but he was already having dropouts. The man was loaded with explosive feeling, and it was close to the surface now.
“I’m sorry about Mrs. Hooper and her dog. They were my best pupils. He was, anyway. But I can’t drop everything and spend the next week looking for him.”
“Nobody expects that. I take it you’ve had no luck with your contacts.”
“I don’t have such good contacts. Marie and I, we just moved down here last year, from British Columbia.”
“That was a mistake,” his wife said from the doorway.
Rambeau pretended not to hear her. “Anyway, I know nothing about dog thieves.” With both hands, he pushed the possibility away from him. “If I hear any word of the dog, I’ll let you know, naturally. I’ve got nothing against Mrs. Hooper.”
His wife gave him a quick look. It was one of those revealing looks that said, among other things, that she loved him but didn’t know if he loved her, and she was worried about him. She caught me watching her and lowered her eyes. Then she burst out, “Do you think somebody killed the dog?”
“I have no reason to think so.”
“Some people shoot dogs, don’t they?”
“Not around here,” Rambeau said. “Maybe back in the bush someplace.” He turned to me with a sweeping explanatory gesture. “These things make her nervous and she gets wild ideas. You know Marie is a country girl—”
“I am not. I was born in Chilliwack.” Flinging a bitter look at him, she left the room.
“Was Otto shot?” I asked Rambeau.
“Not that I know of. Listen, Mr. Archer, you’re a good customer, but I can’t stand here talking all day. I’ve got twenty dogs to feed.”
They were still barking when I drove up the coast highway out of hearing. It was nearly forty miles to the Hoopers’ mailbox, and another mile up a blacktop lane that climbed the side of a canyon to the gate. On both sides of the heavy wire gate, which had a new combination padlock on it, a hurricane fence, eight feet high and topped with barbed wire, extended out of sight. Otto would have to be quite a jumper to clear it. So would I.
The house beyond the gate was low and massive, made of fieldstone and steel and glass. I honked at it and waited. A man in blue bathing trunks came out of the house with a shotgun. The sun glinted on its twin barrels and on the man’s bald head and round brown, burnished belly. He walked quite slowly, a short, heavy man in his sixties, scuffing along in huaraches. The flabby brown shell of fat on him jiggled lugubriously.
When he approached the gate, I could see the stiff gray pallor under his tan, like stone showing under varnish. He was sick or afraid, or both. His mouth was profoundly discouraged.
“What do you want?” he said over the shotgun.
“Mrs. Hooper asked me to help find her dog. My name is Lew Archer.”
He was not impressed. “My wife isn’t here, and I’m busy. I happen to be following soybean futures rather closely.”
“Look here, I’ve come quite a distance to lend a hand. I met Mrs. Hooper at dog school and—”
Hooper uttered a short, savage laugh. “That hardly constitutes an introduction to either of us. You’d better be on your way right now.”
“I think I’ll wait for your wife.”
“I think you won’t.” He raised the shotgun and let me look into its close-set, hollow round eyes. “This is my property all the way down to the road, and you’re trespassing. That means I can shoot you if I have to.”
“What sense would that make? I came out here to help you.”
“You can’t help me.” He looked at me through the wire gate with a kind of pathetic arrogance, like a lion that had grown old in captivity. “Go away.”
I drove back down to the road and waited for Fay Hooper. The sun slid up the sky. The inside of my car turned oven-hot. I went for a walk down the canyon. The brown September grass crunched under my feet. Away up on the far side of the canyon, an earthmover that looked like a crazy red insect was cutting the ridge to pieces.
A very fast black car came up the canyon and stopped abruptly beside me. A gaunt man in a wrinkled brown suit climbed out, with his hand on his holster, told me that he was Sheriff Carlson, and asked me what I was doing there. I told him.
He pushed back his wide cream-colored hat and scratched at his hairline. The pale eyes in his sun-fired face were like clouded glass inserts in a brick wall.
“I’m surprised Mr. Hooper takes that attitude. Mrs. Hooper just came to see me in the courthouse. But I can’t take you up there with me if Mr. Hooper says no.”
“Why not?”
“He owns most of the county and holds the mortgage on the rest of it. Besides,” he added with careful logic, “Mr. Hooper is a friend of mine.”
“Then you better get him a keeper.”
The sheriff glanced around uneasily, as if the Hoopers’ mailbox might be bugged. “I’m surprised he has a gun, let alone threatening you with it. He must be upset about the dog.”
“He didn’t seem to care about the dog.”
“He does, though. She cares, so he cares,” Carlson said.
“What did she have to tell you?”
“She can talk to you herself. She should be along any minute. She told me that she was going to follow me out of town.”
He drove his black car up the lane. A few minutes later, Fay Hooper stopped her Mercedes at the mailbox. She must have seen the impatience on my face. She got out and came toward me in a little run, making noises of dismayed regret.
Fay was in her late thirties and fading slightly, as if a light frost had touched her pale gold head, but she was still a beautiful woman. She turned the gentle force of her charm on me.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” she said. “Have I kept you waiting long?”
“Your husband did. He ran me off with a shotgun.”
Her gloved hand lighted on my arm, and stayed. She had an electric touch, even through layers of cloth.
“That’s terrible. I had no idea that Allan still had a gun.”
Her mouth was blue behind her lipstick, as if the information had chilled her to the marrow. She took me up the hill in the Mercedes. The gate was standing open, but she didn’t drive in right away.
“I might as well be perfectly frank,” she said without looking at me. “Ever since Otto disappeared yesterday, there’s been a nagging question in my mind. What you’ve just told me raises the question again. I was in town all day yesterday so that Otto was alone here with Allan when—when it happened.” The values her voice gave to the two names made it sound as if Allan were the dog and Otto the husband.
“When what happened, Mrs. Hooper?” I wanted to know.
Her voice sank lower. “I can’t help suspecting that Allan shot him. He’s never liked any of my dogs. The only dogs he appreciates are hunting dogs—and he was particularly jealous of Otto. Besides, when I got back from town, Allan was getting the ground ready to plant some roses. He’s never enjoyed gardening, particularly in the heat. We have professionals to do our work. And this really isn’t the time of year to put in a bed of roses.”
“You think your husband was planting a dog?” I asked.
“If he was, I have to know.” She turned toward me, and the leather seat squeaked softly under her movement. “Find out for me, Mr. Archer. If Allan killed my beautiful big old boy, I couldn’t stay with him.”
“Something you said implied that Allan used to have a gun or guns, but gave them up. Is that right?”
“He had a small arsenal when I married him. He was an infantry officer in the war and a big-game hunter in peacetime. But he swore off hunting years ago.”
“Why?”
“I don’t really know. We came home from a hunting trip in British Columbia one fall and Allan sold all his guns. He never said a word about it to me but it was the fall after the war ended, and I always thought that it must have had something to do with the war.”
“Have you been married so long?”
“Thank you for that question.” She produced a rueful smile. “I met Allan during the war, the year I came out, and I knew I’d met my fate. He was a very powerful person.”
“And a very wealthy one.”
She gave me a flashing, haughty look and stepped so hard on the accelerator that she almost ran into the sheriff’s car parked in front of the house. We walked around to the back, past a free-form swimming pool that looked inviting, into a walled garden. A few Greek statues stood around in elegant disrepair. Bees murmured like distant bombers among the flowers.
The bed where Allan Hooper had been digging was about five feet long and three feet wide, and it reminded me of graves.
“Get me a spade,” I said.
“Are you going to dig him up?”
“You’re pretty sure he’s in there, aren’t you, Mrs. Hooper?”
“I guess I am.”
From a lath house at the end of the garden, she fetched a square-edged spade. I asked her to stick around.
I took off my jacket and hung it on a marble torso where it didn’t look too bad. It was easy digging in the newly worked soil. In a few minutes, I was two feet below the surface, and the ground was still soft and penetrable.
The edge of my spade struck something soft but not so penetrable. Fay Hooper heard the peculiar dull sound it made. She made a dull sound of her own. I scooped away more earth. Dog fur sprouted like stiff black grass at the bottom of the grave.
Fay got down on her knees and began to dig with her lacquered fingernails. Once she cried out in a loud harsh voice, “Dirty murderer!”
Her husband must have heard her. He came out of the house and looked over the stone wall. His head seemed poised on top of the wall, hairless and bodiless, like Humpty Dumpty. He had that look on his face, of not being able to be put together again.
“I didn’t kill your dog, Fay. Honest to God, I didn’t.”
She didn’t hear him. She was talking to Otto. “Poor boy, poor boy,” she said. “Poor, beautiful boy.”
Sheriff Carlson came into the garden. He reached down into the grave and freed the dog’s head from the earth. His large hands moved gently on the great wedge of the skull.
Fay knelt beside him in torn and dirty stockings. “What are you doing?”
Carlson held up a red-tipped finger. “Your dog was shot through the head, Mrs. Hooper, but it’s no shotgun wound. Looks to me more like a deer rifle.”
“I don’t even own a rifle,” Hooper said over the wall. “I haven’t owned one for nearly twenty years. Anyway, I wouldn’t shoot your dog.”
Fay scrambled to her feet. She looked ready to climb the wall. “Then why did you bury him?”
His mouth opened and closed.
“Why did you buy a shotgun without telling me?”
“For protection.”
“Against my dog?”
Hooper shook his head. He edged along the wall and came in tentatively through the gate. He had on slacks and a short-sleeved yellow jersey that somehow emphasized his shortness and his fatness and his age.
“Mr. Hooper had some threatening calls,” the sheriff said. “Somebody got hold of his unlisted number. He was just telling me about it now.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Allan?”
“I didn’t want to alarm you. You weren’t the one they were after, anyway. I bought a shotgun and kept it in my study.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“No. I make enemies in the course of business, especially the farming operations. Some crackpot shot your dog, gunning for me. I heard a shot and found him dead in the driveway.”
“But how could you bury him without telling me?”
Hooper spread his hands in front of him. “I wasn’t thinking too well. I felt guilty, I suppose, because whoever got him was after me. And I didn’t want you to see him dead. I guess I wanted to break it to you gently.”
“This is gently?”
“It’s not the way I planned it. I thought if I had a chance to get you another pup—”
“No one will ever take Otto’s place.”
Allan Hooper stood and looked at her wistfully across the open grave, as if he would have liked to take Otto’s place. After a while, the two of them went into the house.
Carlson and I finished digging Otto up and carried him out to the sheriff’s car. His inert blackness filled the trunk from side to side.
“What are you going to do with him, Sheriff?” I asked.
“Get a vet I know to recover the slug in him. Then if we nab the sniper, we can use ballistics to convict him.”
“You’re taking this just as seriously as a real murder, aren’t you?” I observed.
“They want me to,” he said with a respectful look toward the house.
Mrs. Hooper came out carrying a white leather suitcase which she deposited in the back seat of her Mercedes.
“Are you going someplace?” I asked her.
“Yes. I am.” She didn’t say where.
Her husband, who was watching her from the doorway, didn’t speak. The Mercedes went away. He closed the door. Both of them had looked sick.
“She doesn’t seem to believe he didn’t do it. Do you, Sheriff?”
Carlson jabbed me with his forefinger. “Mr. Hooper is no liar. If you want to get along with me, get that through your head. I’ve known Mr. Hooper for over twenty years—served under him in the war—and I never heard him twist the truth.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it. What about those threatening phone calls? Did he report them to you before today?”
“No.”
“What was said on the phone?”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“Does Hooper have any idea who shot the dog?”
“Well, he did say he saw a man slinking around outside the fence. He didn’t get close enough to the guy to
give me a good description, but he did make out that he had a black beard.”
“There’s a dog trainer in Pacific Palisades named Rambeau, who fits the description. Mrs. Hooper has been taking Otto to his school.”
“Rambeau?” Carlson said with interest.
“Fernando Rambeau. He seemed pretty upset when I talked to him this morning.”
“What did he say?”
“A good deal less than he knows, I think. I’ll talk to him again.”
Rambeau was not at home. My repeated knocking was answered only by the barking of the dogs. I retreated up the highway to a drive-in where I ate a torpedo sandwich. When I was on my second cup of coffee, Marie Rambeau drove by in a pickup truck. I followed her home.
“Where’s Fernando?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I’ve been out looking for him.”
“Is he in a bad way?”
“I don’t know how you mean.”
“Emotionally upset.”
“He has been ever since that woman came into the class.”
“Mrs. Hooper?”
Her head bobbed slightly.
“Are they having an affair?”
“They better not be.” Her small red mouth looked quite implacable. “He was out with her night before last. I heard him make the date. He was gone all night, and when he came home, he was on one of his black drunks and he wouldn’t go to bed. He sat in the kitchen and drank himself glassy-eyed.” She got out of the pickup facing me. “Is shooting a dog a very serious crime?”
“It is to me, but not to the law. It’s not like shooting a human being.”
“It would be to Fernando. He loves dogs the way other people love human beings. That included Otto.”
“But he shot him.”
Her head drooped. I could see the straight white part dividing her black hair. “I’m afraid he did. He’s got a crazy streak, and it comes out in him when he drinks. You should have heard him in the kitchen yesterday morning. He was moaning and groaning about his brother.”
“His brother?”
“Fernando had an older brother, George, who died back in Canada after the war. Fernando was just a kid when it happened and it was a big loss to him. His parents were dead, too, and they put him in a foster home in Chilliwack. He still has nightmares about it.”
The Archer Files Page 43