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.