Lieutenant Scott spoke without taking his eyes from the road. “I wouldn’t hit him, Chief. You wouldn’t want to damage our case.”
Carlson subsided, and we drove on up to the house. Carlson went in without knocking. The guard at the door discouraged me from following him.
I could hear Fay’s voice on the other side of the door, too low to be understood. Carlson said something to her.
“Get out! Get out of my house, you killer!” Fay cried out sharply.
Carlson didn’t come out. I went in instead. One of his arms was wrapped around her body; the other hand was covering her mouth. I got his Adam’s apple in the crook of my left arm, pulled him away from her, and threw him over my left hip. He went down clanking and got up holding his revolver.
He should have shot me right away. But he gave Fay Hooper time to save my life.
She stepped in front of me. “Shoot me, Mr Carlson. You might as well. You shot the one man I ever cared for.”
“Your husband shot George Rambeau, if that’s who you mean. I ought to know. I was there.” Carlson scowled down at his gun, and replaced it in his holster.
Lieutenant Scott was watching him from the doorway.
“You were there?” I said to Carlson. “Yesterday you told me Hooper was alone when he shot Rambeau.”
“He was. When I said I was there, I meant in the general neighborhood.”
“Don’t believe him,” Fay said. “He fired the gun that killed George, and it was no accident. The two of them hunted George down in the woods. My husband planned to shoot him himself, but George’s dog came at him and he had to dispose of it. By that time, George had drawn a bead on Allan. Mr Carlson shot him. It was hardly a coincidence that the next spring Allan financed his campaign for sheriff.”
“She’s making it up,” Carlson said. “She wasn’t within ten miles of the place.”
“But you were, Mr Carlson, and so was Allan. He told me the whole story yesterday, after we found Otto. Once that happened, he knew that everything was bound to come out. I already suspected him, of course, after I talked to Fernando. Allan filled in the details himself. He thought, since he hadn’t killed George personally, I would be able to forgive him. But I couldn’t. I left him and flew to Nevada, intending to divorce him. I’ve been intending to for twenty years.”
Carlson said: “Are you sure you didn’t shoot him before you left?”
“How could she have?” I said. “Ballistics don’t lie, and the ballistic evidence says he was shot with Fernando’s rifle. Nobody had access to it but Fernando and you. You stopped him on the road and knocked him out, took his rifle and used it to kill Hooper. You killed him for the same reason that Hooper buried the dog – to keep the past buried. You thought Hooper was the only witness to the murder of George Rambeau. But by that time, Mrs Hooper knew about it, too.”
“It wasn’t murder. It was self-defense, just like in the war. Anyway, you’ll never hang it on me.”
“We don’t have to. We’ll hang Hooper on you. How about it, Lieutenant?”
Scott nodded grimly, not looking at his chief. I relieved Carlson of his gun. He winced, as if I were amputating part of his body. He offered no resistance when Scott took him out to the car.
I stayed behind for a final word with Fay. “Fernando asked me to tell you he’s sorry for shooting your dog.”
“We’re both sorry.” She stood with her eyes down, as if the past was swirling visibly around her feet. “I’ll talk to Fernando later. Much later.”
“There’s one coincidence that bothers me. How did you happen to take your dog to his school?”
“I happened to see his sign, and Fernando Rambeau isn’t a common name. I couldn’t resist going there. I had to know what had happened to George. I think perhaps Fernando came to California for the same reason.”
“Now you both know,” I said.
THE WENCH IS DEAD
Fredric Brown
A fuzz is a fuzz is a fuzz when you awaken from a wino jag. God, I’d drunk three pints of muscatel that I know of and maybe more, maybe lots more, because that’s when I drew a blank, that’s when research stopped. I rolled over on the cot so I could look out through the dirty pane of the window at the clock in the hockshop across the way.
Ten o’clock said the clock.
Get up, Howard Perry, I told myself. Get up, you B.A.S. for bastard, rise and greet the day. Hit the floor and get moving if you want to keep that job, that all-important job that keeps you drinking and sometimes eating and sometimes sleeping with Billie the Kid when she hasn’t got a sucker on the hook. That’s your life, you B.A.S., you bastard. That’s your life for a while. This is it, this is the McCoy, this is the way a wino meets the not-so-newborn day. You’re learning, man.
Pull on a sock, another sock, pants, shirt, shoes, get the hell to Burke’s and wash a dish, wash a thousand dishes for six bits an hour and a meal or two a day when you want it.
God, I thought, did I really have the habit? Nuts, not in three months. Not when you’ve been a normal drinker all your life. Not when, much as you’ve always enjoyed drinking, it’s always been in moderation and you’ve always been able to handle the stuff. This was just temporary.
And I had only a few weeks to go. In a few weeks I’d be back in Chicago, back at my desk in my father’s investment company, back wearing white shirts, and B.A.S. would stand for Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. That was a laugh right now, that degree. Three months ago it had meant something – but that was in Chicago, and this was LA, and now all it meant was bastard. That’s all it had meant ever since I started drifting.
It’s funny, the way those things can happen. You’ve got a good family and a good education, and then suddenly, for no reason you can define, you start drifting. You lose interest in your family and your job, and one day you find yourself headed for the Coast.
You sit down one day and ask yourself how it happened. But you can’t answer. There are a thousand little answers, sure, but there’s no big answer. It’s easier to worry about where the next bottle of sweet wine is coming from.
And that’s when you realize your own personal B.A.S. stands for bastard.
With me, LA had been the end of the line. I’d seen the Dishwasher Wanted sign in Burke’s window, and suddenly I’d known what I had to do. At pearl-diver’s wages, it would take a long time to get up the bus fare back to Chicago and family and respectability, but that was beside the point. The point was that after a hundred thousand dirty dishes there’d be a bus ticket to Chicago.
But it had been hard to remember the ticket and forget the dishes. Wine is cheap, but they’re not giving it away. Since I’d started pearl-diving I’d had grub and six bits an hour for seven hours a day. Enough to drink on and to pay for this dirty, crumby little crackerbox of a room.
So here I was, still thinking about the bus ticket, and still on my uppers on East Fifth Street, LA. Main Street used to be the tenderloin street of Los Angeles and I’d headed for it when I jumped off the freight, but I’d found that the worst district, the real Skid Row, was now on Fifth Street in the few blocks east of Main. The worse the district, the cheaper the living, and that’s what I’d been looking for.
Sure, by Fifth Street standards, I was being a pantywaist to hold down a steady job like that, but sleeping in doorways was a little too rugged and I’d found out quickly that panhandling wasn’t for me. I lacked the knack.
I dipped water from the cracked basin and rubbed it on my face, and the feel of the stubble told me I could get by one more day without shaving. Or anyway I could wait till evening so the shave would be fresh in case I’d be sleeping with Billie.