“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.”
“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.