“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.”