“I’ve got a good mind to go back in and tell Mr Sileo how you worked it.”
“Really? Come on, then. I’ll go in with you.”
“Get the hell out of here!”
He chuckled, slammed the door, and walked away.
My fingers trembled as I lit a cigarette. There was no mistaking my reaction now – I was no longer frustrated, I was angry. If the man had been my size – or smaller – I would have chased after him and knocked out the remainder of his front teeth. I also considered, for a short moment, the idea of telling Mr Levine how he had been cheated. All they had to do was to inventory their remaining lighters (there couldn’t be too many of them in stock, an expensive item like that) and they would soon find out that they were one short. But after the cold way they had treated me, I didn’t feel like telling them anything.
A policeman’s head appeared at the car window. “Is this your car, sir?”
“Of course.”
“Will you get out, please, and join me on the sidewalk?” He walked around the front of the car and I unfastened my seat belt and slid back across the seat; I was more than a little puzzled.
“Take a look,” he said, pointing at the curb when I joined him on the sidewalk. “You’re parked well into the red zone.”
“That isn’t true,” I said indignantly. “Only the front bumper’s in the zone; my wheels are well behind the red paint. There’s supposed to be a little leeway, a limit of tolerance, and I’m not blocking the red zone in any way—”
“Don’t argue with me, sir,” he said wearily, taking a pad of tickets out of his hip pocket. “Ordinarily, I’d merely tell you to repark or move on, but this time I’m giving you a ticket. A good citizen in a green raincoat reported your violation to me at the corner just now, and he was a gentleman who had every right to be sore. He said he told you that you were parked in the red zone – just as a favor – and you told him to go to hell. Now, sir, what is your name?”
SLEEPING DOG
Ross Macdonald
The day after her dog disappeared, Fay Hooper called me early. Her normal voice was like waltzing violins, but this morning the violins were out of tune. She sounded as though she’d been crying.
“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 huarachas. 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—”