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 beard.
“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 if 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 till 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.”