Jack and the Beanstalk (Matthew Hope) (13 page)

Once, back in Chicago while I was still a teenager, I’d tried to get a sixteen-year-old girl drunk so that I could pry her out of her virgin fortress panties. She’d passed out cold on me, and I felt like a burglar as I fumbled around under her skirt. I quit when the shame and the guilt got too heavy for my seventeen-year-old conscience. I never knew whether she was really drunk or not. I did not know whether Sunny was drunk now, but she certainly seemed on the way toward Blotsville.

“Why are you staring at me?” she asked.

“No reason.”

“There’s a reason. I’m a beautiful girl in a loose kimono—do you know who wrote
The Open Kimono
?”

“Who?” I said.

“Seymour Hare,” she said, and smiled. “You’re wondering where all this is going to lead, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m wondering if you’re getting drunk.”

“You don’t have to worry about that. Let me reconstruct it for you, okay?” she said, having a little trouble with the word “reconstruct” this time. “My brother Jack needed forty thousand dollars so he could realize his lifelong dream of becoming a goddamn
snapbean
farmer—”

“
Was
that a dream of his?”

“I’m being facetious. Who knows
what
was in his head?
Ever?
So, fine, he wanted to own a snapbean farm. I suppose that’s better than a string of empty stores to rent to gypsies. Listen, do I
really
have to beg for a little gin around here? Sunny’s very thirsty, Mr. Hope.”

“Sunny’s getting sloshed,” I said.

She said nothing. She shoved herself out of the chair, exposing a great deal of smooth suntanned thigh when the kimono parted, and went directly to the bar. “Help yourself, Sunny,” she said. “Thanks, I will,” she said, and poured freely into her glass. “Are you looking at my ass?” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought you might be,” she said, and turned and smiled and said, “Cheers. Where was I?”

“Your brother needed forty thousand dollars...”

“Correct. So he decided that the way to get it was illegally. To great men come great thoughts. All he needed was something to rob.”

“Which bank did he hold up?”

“No, not a bank, Mr. Hope. Would
you
rob a bank if your mother owned a cattle ranch?”

“I’m not following you,” I said.

“Cows,” she said.

“Cows,” I repeated.

“Yes, sir. My brother was stealing cows.”

“Your mother’s cows?”

“Yes, sir, my mother’s cows.”

“How do you know that?”

“I
didn’t
know it. Until I started piecing it all together. I’m a lot smarter than Mother gives me credit for, you know.” She sipped at her drink, looked at what remained in her glass, and then said, “I guess you know October is a busy time for us—well, from the beginning of October to the middle of November. Busy time on any ranch. We normally put the bulls on the cows come early spring...”

“Put them on the cows?”

“Well, yes, put them out for breeding, take them off in the summer sometime. Figure February to June for them to do their
work, the bulls. It takes nine months from conception to delivery, same as a human. We’ll have heifers dropping calves all through the late fall and early winter—depending on how well the bulls covered them. That means the calves are ready to be taken off the cows—”

“Taken off the cows?”

“Weaned. Usually when they’re ten months old. We separate the cows and the calves in different pastures, put the calves on feed for a week or ten days, till they’re ready to get out there and eat grass on their own. This is usually in October, November sometime. That’s when we run our pregnancy tests, too—did my mother show you our squeeze chute?”

“Yes.”

“Front end holds the cow’s head up while we drench her—that’s giving her the medicine she needs. We use a big syringe, the hands do the actual work, no need for a vet there. A vet works the
back
end, though, wears a long plastic sleeve while he shoves his arm up the cow’s cooze—are you familiar with the word ‘cooze,’ Mr. Hope?”

“I’m familiar with it.”

“Feels around up there to see whether there’s the beginning of a calf or not. We hope for an eighty-five-percent pregnancy rate—which varies, of course. But that’s what we hope for. We turn the pregnant cows out to pasture again, put the open cows in another pasture for—”

“You’re losing me again.”

“Open cows? The ones that aren’t pregnant. We sell them, Mr. Hope. Simply because we can’t afford to keep them unless they deliver a calf every year. October’s our biggest selling time. Not only for open cows, of course, but for whatever’s ready to move on.”

“Move on to
where
?” I asked.

“Mother’s what’s known as a cow-calf lady, Mr. Hope. Bottom end of the food chain. Next step up is the stocker, he’s a buyer who comes to the ranch to look over the herd, we’ll sell him five, six hundred head at a time, by what we call private treaty. He’ll put the calves out to richer pasture—wheat, oats, rye, what have you. We’ll sell some of the calves at four hundred fifty to five hundred pounds, right off the cow. Some of what we sell are calves we’ve already wintered, they’ll weigh maybe six-fifty, seven hundred pounds. We sell them
all
at live weight, put them on the scale right in the pens, before they’re loaded. The price will fluctuate, depending on the supply of cattle at the time we’re selling. It’ll vary, oh, from a high of a dollar a pound to a low of fifty-five cents. The current price on steer calves is sixty-eight cents a pound. Anyway, your stocker’ll fatten them up by a couple of hundred pounds, and then sell them to the
next
man up the line—what we call a feeder, or a feed-lot operator.”

“What does
he
do?”

“Pens them, feeds them from troughs—corn, soybeans, very rich stuff, we’re talking US Choice here, Mr. Hope. He’ll add another few hundred pounds to each of them, and then sell them to the packer. Your average steer going to slaughter will weigh somewhere between a thousand and twelve hundred pounds. Your packer will dress the steer and send it on to your butcher, and he’ll end up as a steak on your dinner table—the
steer
, not the butcher. End of the food chain.”

“Okay,” I said. “What makes you think your brother—”

“Hold on just a second,” she said. “I told you we sell any open cows we find, usually for the going hamburger price of about forty cents a pound. At the same time we sell any cows who aren’t good for breeding anymore. Usually they’re seven or eight years old, in there someplace. You’ve got to remember it takes almost
four years for a cow to be worth anything to a breeder. Figure a year for her as a calf, another year as a yearling, a third year as a bred heifer, and then seven or eight months for suckling her calf—almost four years. That’s a sizable investment to carry. This is a
business
, Mr. Hope. Those cows out there
aren’t
pets.”

“I realize that.”

“So we’ll sell off any open cows, or used-up cows, or crippled cows, or bad-eyed cows—”

“Bad-eyed?”

“Cancer of the eye. The crippled ones and the bad-eyed ones usually go to the cat-meat man. He sells them to the pet-food people, or if there’s a circus in town—well, lions and tigers eat a lot of raw meat, and they don’t care if it’s stamped US Choice. Are you following all this?”

“I think so.”

“Okay. We take one herd at a time to the crevice the night before we weigh them and sell them. Makes it easier than doing it at the crack of dawn. Each herd is about two hundred head, give or take. Out of that two hundred, we’ll find maybe fifty open cows—twenty percent of them—and maybe another ten
bad
cows, your crippled ones, your sick ones. Those all go for hamburger or cat meat. We leave the culls in the crevice, move the good cows into the pens.” She paused, looked into her glass, found it was empty, and went to the bar to fill it again. She turned from the bar, lifted the glass, drank without toasting this time, and then said, “I think my brother was winnowing off some of those cows. The open ones, the sick ones—”

“What makes you think so?”

“The phone rang one night at the beginning of last October—this was long before Jack moved into his condo. I know it was a Wednesday night because the stocker was coming the next day, a Thursday, to look over the herd we’d already penned. I picked up
the extension phone downstairs. Jack was on one end of the line. A man with a Spanish accent was on the other.”

She drank again. By my count, she had already consumed four glasses of gin, and was working on a fifth. I wondered how she was able to keep all of this straight with so much alcohol inside her.

“The man with the Spanish accent said, ‘Are we still on for tonight?’ Jack said, ‘We are.’ The man said, ‘How many?’ Jack said, ‘Fifteen at thirty,’ The man said, ‘Same time?’ Jack said, ‘Yes,’ and hung up.”

“What’d you make of that conversation?”

“Nothing—at the time. I only began thinking of it since he was killed.”

“And what does it mean to you now?”

“I think they were talking about cattle. I think Jack was going to raid the crevice, cull out fifteen of the sick or open cows, and sell them at thirty cents a pound live weight.”

“To this man with the Spanish accent?”

“Yes.”

“Does your cat-meat man have a Spanish accent?”

“No, Ralph’s a cracker through and through.”

“So this was someone else.”

“Someone willing to buy cattle in the dark with no questions asked.”

“Are your cattle branded?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. No one’s going to question anybody about where he got the cows he’s selling farther on up the line. Branding isn’t even
required
in the state of Florida.”

“How’d you hit on thirty cents a pound?”

“Ten cents less than the price of hamburger or cat meat. These cows were being
stolen
, Mr. Hope—they had to be sold under the market price.”

“And these cows would weigh what?”

“Eight, nine hundred pounds each.”

“That would come to something like two-fifty a cow.”

“Two-fifty, three hundred, somewhere in there.”

“Times fifteen cows...”

“I figure he’d have netted something like three, four thousand dollars. On one herd
alone
, remember.”

“And you say there are five herds?”

“Five herds. I think Jack milked all of them—excuse the pun.”

“So you’re figuring he culled from all five herds...”

“Right. Made himself something like twenty thousand dollars.”

“How’d he get the cows off the ranch?”

“He was stealing only fifteen at a clip. All he had to do was wait till everybody was asleep, and then unlock the southwest gate near the crevice. His Spanish buyer rolls in, and it’s off to market in a gooseneck trailer.”

“With no one seeing them?”

“At two, three in the morning? Anyway, Jack probably gave Sam a cut to keep him looking the other way.”

“Sam?”

“Watson. Our former manager. Who suddenly got it in his head to pick up and head west. About the same time Jack moved into his condo.”

“Wouldn’t your mother have realized what was going on? So
many
cows missing? Fifteen from each
herd
? Doesn’t anyone
count
them?”

“Every spring and every fall. But who does the counting, Mr. Hope?”

“Who?”

“The manager. And if Jack paid him off...”

“To falsify the count?”

“Sure. You think anyone would know? My mother sees a bunch of cows out in the pasture, you think she knows exactly how many are out there?”

“Well, it sounds...”

“It sounds right, admit it.”

“Except for one thing,” I said. “
Twenty
thousand dollars ain’t
forty
thousand dollars.”

“Twenty for
October
alone,” she said. “How about if he’d been doing this for a long time? How about if he started right after my father died? My mother didn’t know her ass from her elbow about cows, he could’ve stolen the whole
ranch
from under her, for all she knew about the business.”

“You’re saying...”

“I’m saying Dad died two years ago, on the glorious Fourth, a week after Jack’s birthday. Okay. Let’s say Jack started culling the minute Dad was gone. That would have given him the fall calf crop
that year
, and the spring and fall calf crop
last
year. Three crops, Mr. Hope. At twenty thousand a crop. Well, maybe a little less. Maybe he started small, a few cows at a time. Even so, it’s easy to see how he could’ve put aside forty thousand, isn’t it?”

“You’ve got a whole lot of maybes in there,” I said.

“Have the police got anything better?”

“Even if he
was
stealing, how does that explain his murder? Who do you think killed him?”

“
That
I
don’t
know. His Spanish partner? A burglar who found out he had a big pile of money under his mattress? Who knows? The point is, if he was involved in cattle rustling—that’s a felony, Mr. Hope, you can get five years in prison for it—Jack had to be running with some pretty hard types. He could have got himself into
any
kind of mess, is what I’m saying. And ended up dead for it.”

“
Maybe
again.”

“Maybe, sure. But no maybes about stealing those cows. I
know
what I heard on the phone, and I
know
he was talking discount hamburger prices with a guy who had a Spanish accent. And I
know
he ended up with forty thousand bucks to spend on a snapbean farm. The numbers don’t add up to coincidence, Mr. Hope, I’m sure of that.”

There was a long silence.

She looked at me.

She smiled over the rim of her glass.

“Are there any bedrooms in this house?” she asked.

“Two,” I said.

“Why don’t we go use one of them?”

I looked at her.

“You’d like to, wouldn’t you?” she said.