The Archer Files: The Complete Short Stories of Lew Archer, Private Investigator

by Ross Macdonald

  “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.”

  “What did his brother die of?”

  “He never told me exactly, but I think he was shot in some kind of hunting accident. George was a guide and packer in the Fraser River Valley below Mount Robson. That’s where Fernando comes from, the Mount Robson country. He won’t go back on account of what happened to his brother.”

  “What did he say about his brother yesterday?” I asked.

  “That he was going to get his revenge for George. I got so scared I couldn’t listen to him. I went out and fed the dogs. When I came back in, Fernando was loading his deer rifle. I asked him what he was planning to do, but he walked right out and drove away.”

  “May I see the rifle?”

  “It isn’t in the house. I looked for it after he left today. He must have taken it with him again. I’m so afraid that he’ll kill somebody.”

  “What’s he driving?”

  “Our car. It’s an old blue Meteor sedan.”

  Keeping an eye out for it, I drove up the highway to the Hoopers’ canyon. Everything there was very peaceful. Too peaceful. Just inside the locked gate, Allan Hooper was lying face down on his shotgun. I could see small ants in single file trekking across the crown of his bald head.

  I got a hammer out of the trunk of my car and used it to break the padlock. I lifted his head. His skin was hot in the sun, as if death had fallen on him like a fever. But he had been shot neatly between the eyes. There was no exit wound; the bullet was still in his head. Now the ants were crawling on my hands.

  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 head.

  “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 i
f 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 until 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.

  CASE NOTES

  PREFACE TO THE CASE NOTES

  After the death of Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar) in 1983, his handwritten manuscripts and plot notebooks became part of The Kenneth Millar Papers, held at the University of California, Irvine.

  Within those notebooks, Macdonald’s eventual biographer found fragments of several unfinished Lew Archer short stories and novels dating from the early 1950s to the middle 1960s.

  It was Macdonald’s habit, over the years, to write the beginnings of possible Archer tales which he might (or might not) then or later continue.

  The following eleven items are starting points for Lew Archer adventures that never occurred, cases begun but never finished (at least, not with these particular people and circumstances).

  Knowledgeable readers will note that certain pages in some of these recaptured pieces of Lew Archer’s alternate pasts bear oblique resemblance to finished stories and books in the author’s oeuvre.

  Some may take special pleasure in making connections between these entries (arranged in estimated chronological order, from 1952 to 1965) and the published works. Detective Lew Archer himself might have enjoyed such a challenge. Author and scholar Ross Macdonald certainly would have.

  —Tom N
olan

  THE 13TH DAY

  I picked her up in a bar near Union Station. Or maybe she picked me up. I’ll never know. I was waiting for someone quite different: a man who knew a man who had sold a contaminated mainliner to the hopheaded young brother of a friend of mine. Don’t bother to remember those four people. The boy is dead, and the man who knew the pusher never turned up.

  It was one of those incredibly rundown places catering to the incredibly rundown people who live at night in the vacant heart of the city: pushers and pushed, hustlers of various sexes, Pershing Park nature-lovers driven indoors by the rats, fugitives from Alcoholics Anonymous. The bartender was a fat Mitropan named Curly who hid his violent hatred of them all behind thick layers of flesh and a Santa Claus smile. He told me tales of the Vienna woods: Krafft-Ebing would have loved them: while the specked electric clock behind his head moved round from midnight to one and on to one-thirty. Various draggletail blondes assaulted my virtue and registered no sale. I nursed a bottle of beer and then another, fighting off depression. Another hour in the place would have put me permanently on the wagon.

  Twenty minutes before closing time, she came in. The bartender saw her first, and his smile slipped, dislodged by sheer surprise. I turned on my stool to see what could surprise him, what impossible human wreck or unheard-of freak. Nothing like that. She was simply a young lady in a midnight blue suit and dark harlequin glasses with dark blue rims. Though she had been well-groomed, her hair and face were slightly disarrayed, as if a storm had struck her a glancing blow. When she took off her glasses, I saw that the storm was inside of her. Her eyes were a turbulent dark blue. I also saw that she was almost beautiful. Hers was a thin nervous long-legged brunette beauty, the kind that has a history. The kind that it is dangerous to touch, unless you want to become a character in history.

  I didn’t, but I couldn’t look away from her. There was quality in her clothes, in her face, in the way she held herself and had done her hair. She had no right at all to be there, I thought. Perhaps she read the thought on my face and decided that I was safe. In any case she came towards me and sat on the stool to my left. Her scent was subtle and wry.