The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat (11 page)

“And now that Thelma's come into this inheritance, she'd like us to spend more time together. Which,” he added in an overly hearty tone, “I would like to do, of course.”

I looked helplessly at my wife. It was clear that Victor had come to us for assistance. Of what type, I couldn't imagine. She sat down next to Victor and took his hand warmly in her own.

“Don't you even think about quittin' the university. Thelma needs something important to do with her life, Victor. And the two of you just got a pot load of something that'll let her do it.

“She's going to become Summersville's best-known cheese maker.”

“
I
just couldn't see any way to nose around the Caprettis' business unless we had a logical reason to ask all the questions,” Madeline said. “Mrs. Capretti's not the most sociable soul, apparently, but from what they tell me down at the Embassy, she's a real sharp businesswoman. If Thelma walks up to her and says she's thinking about opening a cheese shop, and she's going to want to sell Tre Sorelle cheeses in it, Mrs. Capretti's got to pay her some mind.”

It was Tuesday morning. We were on Route 96, headed toward the dairy and the first of Madeline's cheese-making classes. The clinic was in Joe and Allegra's capable hands. I was to meet Leslie Chou at the dairy and we planned to finish up the QMPS and take a repeat set of random samples of milk from the doe herd and the milk line.

“Thelma needs something to take her mind off punishing poor Victor for that little lapse he had last month. Startin' her own business will be just the ticket. I think I had a pretty good idea, if I do say so myself. We're going to kill two birds with one stone. Get the inside skinny on who wants to mess up that perfectly nice dairy, and give Thelma an interest in life other than tormentin' her husband.”

The little lapse in question was an affair with one of his students.

“Do you think that's why Thelma is demanding Victor quit his job and start golfing?” I said. “To punish him? I find that very hard to believe.” And quite excessive, I thought. All the poor fellow did was have an affair. He had apologized most abjectly.

Madeline's face is quite expressive. “Austin, you just don't understand women!”

“But…Thelma? Cheese making?”

“You probably forgot all about this, Austin, but the woman majored in home ec at Cornell thirty-five years ago when the school offered such a thing. And she minored in accounting.”

“Thelma?”

“Thelma.”

I drove along in silence. The pink stucco buildings of the dairy appeared in the distance. “Have you discussed this with her?”

Madeline smiled the smile that makes two dimples in her cheeks. “Not directly. But you heard what I told Victor last night. You two just shut up and leave it to me.”

I pulled into the dairy's drive, and parked where the sign indicated I should. Thelma's Hummer was already there. It had attracted the admiring attention of the dairy workers, Ashley Swinford among them. Ashley raised her hand in greeting and trotted over to say hello. “Hi, Dr. McKenzie. Hi, Mrs. McKenzie. How's Sunny doing?”

“She's lost a good fifty pounds,” I said, “and she's due to lose at least seventy-five more. I am happy to say she's much improved. Allegra has her under light excerise. She may be ready to come home sooner than I'd thought.”

Ashley fell in step beside us as we proceeded along the path to the creamery. “That's great. I miss her. I talked to Ally yesterday and I'm going over to ride at Mrs. Gernsback's this afternoon after I get off work. I think she wants what I know about Mel's murder. I mean, she's part of your detective agency, isn't she?”

“If you know anything germane about the murder, you should tell the police,” I said. “But yes, she does want to talk with you. At my request, she's going to ask you for some background on the people in the dairy.”

“Really?” We stopped at the entrance to the creamery. The door was open to a large room with a concrete floor. Long stainless-steel tables were set around the walls. The center of the room held workstations with sinks in the middle and counter space on either side. There were seven or eight people in the room, Thelma among them. “I don't know if I can help,” Ashley said dubiously. “But I'll try. You know it's weird. I didn't, like, feel all that much after I found Mel upside down in the bulk tank? I was, like, totally cool with it? But last night…” She stopped and rubbed her bare arms, as if struck by a chill. “I had the most awful dreams.”

“Murder is awful,” Madeline said. “You get any more of those dreams, you'll want to talk to your mother about it.”

“It's not,” Ashley said, as if struck by an amazing thought, “like you see it on TV.”

Murder is not like you see it on TV.

But the cheese-making class was exactly like those cooking shows that one
does
see on TV, complete with a perky chef in the person of Caterina Celestine, Doucetta's eldest daughter. She had been a lovely woman in her youth. But age—or perhaps her notorious husband—had put lines of strain around her mouth and eyes and dusted her hair with gray. She wore an apron with the brightly colored Tre Sorelle logo. Her hair was pulled back under an unattractive plastic cap, a necessity in food preparation in these heavily legislated times, but when she smiled, you saw the woman she had been.

In the course of my study of cattle, I had of course learned the basics of cheese making. But the knowledge was forty years out of date, and I remained in the class, curious to see if time had made a difference in technique.

It had not. There are over five hundred types of cheese, and it is all created the same way. Cheese is curdled milk drained of whey. Milk is heated to a temperature suitable to activate the bacteria in the enzyme rennet and then curdled with the rennet, which can be derived from animal or vegetable sources. A starter culture is added to the mixture. The cheese may be pressed or merely molded. It is then aged in a cool environment until the cheese maker decides it is worthy of consumption. There are many variables in cheese making, and the deliciousness of the product depends on the skill of the preparer. The freshness and clarity of the milk, the dirt of the animals, the variety of rennet, and the strain of starter culture are just a few of the variables. Even the temperature and humidity of the room and the type of equipment can affect the end result.

The room was open to the outside air—refreshing on this pleasant August day. And the equipment was of the finest stainless steel and the best quality plastic. I counted eight students, excluding Madeline and Thelma, and the population was just as varied as the cheeses Caterina displayed to the class. There was a couple who could be from nowhere other than New York. A lawyer and a stockbroker, from the gist of their somewhat acrimonious conversation. There was a family with a cheerful blonde wife and mother accompanied by two talkative boys and a bored-looking husband. Looking quite out of place were two young men in sunglasses, older than Joe by some years, dressed in identical rumpled linen suits and dark T-shirts. Caterina cast the two a somewhat nervous glance, and then welcomed the class to the dairy.

She proposed to make Feta cheese. It takes about ten pounds of milk to make a pound of cheese, so she began with a twenty-gallon supply of raw goat's milk. Unlike cheddars, Goudas, and the infinitely more complicated blue cheeses, Feta comes from a simple recipe and doesn't need to be ripened at a controlled temperature. It is ideal for the beginner, since it merely requires brining in a 14 percent solution before it is edible.

I watched for a few moments, and then mindful of my task as a Quality Milk Production Services team member, I went to search for Leslie Chou.

I found her in the milk room. She stood looking down into the four-hundred-gallon bulk tank, staring at the body of Brian Folk, Summersville's latest tax assessor.

 

“
I
T
is just a cryin' shame that these young girls have to find the bodies,” Madeline said in a fierce whisper. She sat next to Leslie on the front steps to the dairy office. Her arm was around the poor girl, who didn't seem to realize she was crying.

“Leslie, what was it that brought you into the milk room?” I asked.

“I don't know that now's a good time to ask questions, Austin.”

“It's okay, Mrs. McKenzie.” Tears poured down Leslie's face, misting her spectacles. She removed them, cleaned them with a tissue Madeline took from her capacious purse, and put them back on again. She blinked at me and sniffed, still crying away like a little spigot. It was most distressing. “I was looking for you, Professor. I'd collected twenty samples from the does still waiting to be milked. You said to go ahead without you, right?”

“I did, indeed,” I said in a somewhat over-hearty way. I am never sure what to do when women cry. I took a tissue from Madeline and polished my own spectacles. “All labeled and stored correctly, I assume?”

“Yes, sir.” The tears ebbed from a torrent to a trickle. “I put them in a metal case and locked it. Nobody touched those samples but me.”

“Very good. Very wise.” I cleared my throat. Simon and the full panoply of scene-of-the-crime people, med techs, and policemen would be here within minutes. I'd closed and locked both doors to the milk room. Thelma stood guard at the milking parlor end, and Madeline and I stood guard at the other. No one could get into the room without passing through the office. And to pass through the office, one had to pass through us. “And so you took a shortcut through the milk room?”

She took a deep breath. “Not exactly. I guess I'm like any other rubbernecker. I wanted to see where Melvin Stap…” She bit her lip.

“Take a deep breath, sweetie,” Madeline said.

Leslie leaned into Madeline's soft bosom. “Anyhow. I was curious. I lifted the lid and looked in and there he was.”

The tears were suddenly replaced by shaking.

“All right, now, Leslie,” Madeline said. “We're goin' to go sit in the car so you can put your head back and not think about this for a bit.” She cast a beseeching glance at me. “You suppose Simon would pitch a fit if I just took her along home?”

I hesitated.

“Honest,” Leslie said, “I don't know how come I'm acting like this. I'm fine, really.”

Ashley emerged from the small crowd of people who had gathered in the driveway. It was composed of the family and New York couple from the cheese-making class and four of the dairy workers. The two men in sunglasses had disappeared. And there was no sign of Caterina. “Hey, Leslie,” Ashley said soberly. “You okay?”

“Sure.” This was delivered between chattering teeth.

“That's, like, how I felt last night when I thought about finding Mel,” Ashley said. “I got up and drank some hot tea. You want to come with me and see if I can make you some hot tea? There's a kettle and stuff in the store.”

“You found one, too,” Leslie said.

“Yeah.” Ashley paused. “It was, like, totally gross.”

Leslie hiccupped and smiled. “Tea'd be good.”

Ashley looked at Madeline and me. “Is that okay?”

“I think it'd be good for both of you,” Madeline said firmly. She looked up, as we all did, at the sound of sirens careening down Route 96. “You stay in the store, mind. The lieutenant is going to want to talk to you after a bit.”

Kevin Kiddermeister pulled up with a screech of tires. He shut off the police siren, but left the red lights flashing. The ambulance was right behind him. The siren died with a wail, and the EMTs jumped out of the cab. Behind both vehicles, at a slower pace, came Simon in his old Ford Escort.

“Tell me it's not Brian Folk,” he said, as he got out of the car. He jerked his head at Kevin, who began setting up yellow police tape. The young patrolwoman with him went to the crowd of onlookers and started taking names and addresses.

“I would love to be able to tell you it isn't. But it certainly appears to be.”

“Dead?”

“Very. And not recently.”

Provost shook his head and made a disgusted noise. “Damn! I should have talked to the SOB last night. We'd better see what we got here.”

Madeline touched my arm. “I'm going to find Thelma.”

I nodded.

I followed Simon into the office, and from there to the milk room itself. We paused just inside the door. The EMTs pushed past us and went straight to the body.

“Try not to touch anything but the poor soul himself,” Simon said.

No more than a cursory examination was needed. Folk had been dead for some hours. And he had not died in the bulk tank. It had taken me no more than a moment to see that full rigor mortis had set in—which meant the time of death had been between eight to ten hours before Leslie's discovery. And both knees had been broken to make the body accommodate the size of the bulk tank. So he had not been hit over the head and drowned, as Staples had.

Someone was sending a message. To whom and about what was yet to be determined.

The forensics team was next to arrive. Simon watched them at work, his eyes flicking back and forth from the tank to the room itself. After a bit, he gestured to me. “Not much more I can do here. You saw what I saw, I take it?”

“The time of death was at least eight hours ago, if not more. This hot weather may have retarded the onset of rigor if the body had lain outside for any length of time. And he was killed elsewhere and brought here fairly recently. I looked at my watch. “Within the last hour, I should think.”

Provost eyed me narrowly. “And why is that?”