The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat (8 page)

“
A
ND
what do you think you're doing here, arsehole?” Doucetta stood at the dairy door, feet planted wide, with cane held crosswise to bar my team from entry.

The morning was not beginning well.

It was seven thirty, and the air was thick with the bleats of does waiting for their turn in the milking. A light rain was falling on the Tre Sorelle Dairy. Although I had passed by the place many times, I had never actually been on the premises.

It was even more impressive close up than from the roadside.

The dairy buildings and creamery formed a T that was at right angles to the long metal shed barns that housed the goats. The office and the milking parlor formed the bar of the T and faced the courtyard; the creamery where the cheese was made formed the shank. Both the house on the hillside overlooking the dairy and dairy buildings were constructed of pale pink stucco now dampened slightly with the misty rain. Building maintenance in a commercial farming operation is a continuous problem and frequently neglected. I was impressed to see that the worn spots in the stucco were neatly patched. One of the long wrought-iron scones was detached from the wall near the office door and the wall patching was in process, but at least the work was being done.

Wisteria wound around the eaves and the window jambs. The drive—more of a courtyard if one considered the fountain chiming in the center of the brick paving—was swept and free of detritus. The heavy flower scent mingled pleasantly with the odor of goat.

“Madam,” I said. “As I have explained—exhaustively—we have been sent by the university and the State of New York to assess the vulnerability of your dairy operation to pathogens inciting the rise in your somatic cell count.”

I could not have been clearer if I'd written out our mission on a chalkboard. Yet the confounded woman refused us entry!

Her fierce black eyes had the steady, unwavering glare of a lioness stalking warthogs. It was most unsettling. She turned them to Leslie Chou, who was cowering behind me. “This arsehole speaks English?”

“Yes, ma'am.” She poked her head over my shoulder. “We're just here to look. Honestly.”

Joseph, who had been watching this scene unfold with a very regrettable twinkle in his eye, said, “We're just here to offer some help, ma'am.” Then, to my astonishment he said,
“Il mio capo è testardo, ma una brava persona.”

She slammed the point of the cane on the stoop and took a step forward. She squinted at Joe's dark hair. “You Italian?” she said suspiciously.
“Che cosa fa un bravo regazzo come te con undisgraziato simile?”

My Italian was limited to a crash course I took when Madeline and I had gone to Rome on our honeymoon. But I believe Joe had told her I was as obstinate as a pig, and that she had asked him what a nice boy like him was doing witha…person…like me. I cleared my throat in a meaningful way.

Joe shot me an apologetic glance. “I do speak Italian. My grandmother,
donna
, on my mother's side.”

“You are here to pee in my milk and make it bad for the test!”

“No,
donna
, we're here to help you.”

She snorted. She sucked her lower lip with a very unpleasant sound. Then she said, “Okay. You come in.” She shook the cane at me. “But you speak English!”

Her first request, with which I thoroughly concurred, was to wear clear plastic overshoes to minimize the conveyance of any outside contaminants. Farm animals have varying immunity to a wide variety of infectious complaints that can be carried from barn to barn. Sore mouth, foot rot, and caseous lymphadenitis—not to mention pneumonia and bacteria-borne abscesses—are among the most dangerous. An unhappy goat gives far less milk.

Her second, third, and fourth requests were to shut up and speak English. Fortunately, Joe's Italian was up to the task of translating both my questions and her answers. Despite the fact that I knew she understood me quite well, our discussion took considerably more time than necessary. I felt as if I were playing Ping-Pong.

For some reason, perhaps due to an understandable case of nerves, young Leslie Chou was afflicted with a severe case of giggles throughout the tour.

I find well-run dairy operations very happy places to be. Good sanitation dictates a heavy use of concrete in construction. All the equipment is heavy-gauge stainless steel, except for the hoses, which are thick PVC plastic. A well-run dairy is always cool and slightly damp, like a grotto behind a waterfall. Unlike cattle, goats rarely pass manure in the milking parlor, and the entire process is very clean.

We began the tour at the milking parlor.

Goats are talkative creatures, particularly in comparison with cows, and the does conducted quite a conversation among themselves as they ambled into the parlor from the holding pen. One by one, Doucetta's employees, who appeared to be Mexican gentlemen, cleansed the does' udders with a disinfectant, and then attached the inflations to their teats.

The seasoned milkers were perfectly content to stand quietly while the vacuum lines did their work. Tre Sorelle's practice was to feed the does some grain during milking and the goats munched pleasantly. The Mexican gentlemen who handled the milking paid close attention as the udders emptied of milk, to the necessity of “stripping out” the udder, that is, making sure that as much milk was removed from the mammary gland as possible. Overmilking and the subsequent damage to the teats is a frequent contributor to mastitis. It did not seem to be a problem here. Each gentleman disinfected each teat with an iodine dip.

The care of raw milk—be it bovine, caprine, or ovine, has the same basic steps. The milk is collected and cooled to 38 degrees Fahrenheit with agitator paddles. If it is to be used raw, it is pumped into canisters and put straight into the cooler. It is heated to 185 degrees if it is to be pasteurized, and then stored in a refrigerated space. At large dairies, the entire process is automated from beginning to end. We observed each step of the process closely. In the milk room, I paid particular attention to the scene of the crime. A yellow police tape surrounded the middle tank. Doucetta jerked her thumb at it and snarled at me, “All that milk. Gone. Down the drain. That
carabinari
owes me some big check.”

I assumed she meant the Summersville Police Department. I decided not to pass the request on to Provost.

I made a quick sketch of the room's layout. The room was a rectangle, about sixty feet long by forty feet wide. The bulk tanks sat in the middle. There was a door at each end of the length, one to the outside office, the other to the milking parlor.

At the close of milking, we observed the cleansing process. There are four dairy cleaning agents mandated by both state law and common sense: alkaline and acid detergents for cleansing, and iodine and chlorine for sanitizing. All the equipment was washed with tepid water and an alkaline cleaner, followed by hot water and an acid cleaner, to avoid a buildup of casein, a by-product of milk. Finally, there is a chlorine santizer cold-water rinse.

Were milking goats an Olympic competition, Tre Sorelle would have scored a ten.

There was one other thing worthy of note. On the parlor and the milk room side, the dairy emptied out completely once the milking and the cleanup were finished. The three workers went on to their assignments at the creamery and that side of the dairy was totally deserted, until milking began again.

Doucetta led us back to the dairy office. Ashley Swinford, who apparently needed very little time to recuperate from her discovery of the body, was back at her desk. She wore a Tre Sorelle T-shirt, white jeans, and a flirtatious smile for Joe.

Doucetta planted herself in front of me. Despite the pugnacity exhibited by her outthrust jaw, I sensed that she was eager for my opinion.

“Please tell Mrs. Capretti that I am most impressed with the professionalism of her dairy,” I said to Joe.

This apparently needed no translation. “Told you, arsehole,” Doucetta said. “My milk is perfect.”

“Just to be on the safe side, there is one other potential source of contaminants, and that is the feed,” I said. “Joe, would you please ask Mrs. Capretti if we may take samples of the grain and hay? I'll send them up to Cornell to be tested.”

Doucetta laughed skeptically. But she nodded agreement.

“I'll get it,” Leslie said. “If that's okay with you, Mrs. C.”

“Go,” Doucetta said. Leslie went but not, I noticed, before she cast a worshipful glance at Joe and a worried look at Ashley's blonde magnificence.

“And we will walk the pastures, if you please,” I said. “The caprine autoimmune system…”

“English!”
Doucetta shouted.

“A lot of weeds are poisonous to goats,” I said.

“We have no such weeds,” Doucetta said flatly. “If we do have such weeds, some snake put them there. You, maybe.”

“Madam, I assure you—”

“You know what?” Ashley interrupted brightly. “I'll bet Marietta would haul you guys around the pasture in the farm cart. They've got more than five hundred acres, Dr. McKenzie. It'll take you all day if you walk. We don't run tours on Monday, so she'll just be hanging around anyhow. Shall I call her down, Mrs. C.?”

“Call her,” Doucetta said. “Let him take the tour. Let him see if he can find one single thing wrong with my land. Ptoo!” And she spit.

Then she steadied herself on her cane and held out her hand. At last, a gesture of goodwill. I took it and shook it heartily. Doucetta snatched it back. “Forty-five bucks,” she said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The tour costs fifteen dollars a head. There are three of you. Three times fifteen is forty-five dollars.” She thrust her hand under my nose. “Fork it over.” She gave me an evil smile. “Fork it over. That is a colloquialism. My English is a little better than yours is, maybe? For example, I do not say…” She puffed up her chest and said self-importantly, “There is a primary cost associated with the transportations of a person or persons around the environs of our establishment. I say: the tour is fifteen dollars American. Each. Eleven-fifty in euros. We do not accept pesos. Fork it over, arsehole.” She swung her cane up and poked me in the chest. “English!”

Just then, Leslie came back with a plastic bag of grain and hay samples, the sample bottles, and the CMT tally sheet. Ashley and Marietta followed her. These timely arrivals prevented me from uttering a most ungentlemanly imprecation.

This granddaughter of Doucetta's was tall and slender, with a cloud of exquisite black hair and an aquiline nose. Joe, who had been slouched against the desk, straightened up with an audible snap as she came into the room. I am not good at women's ages—it would be a lot handier if one were allowed to examine their teeth—but she seemed to be in her midthirties, despite the fact that there were no lines at all in her smooth complexion.

Marietta greeted me courteously, dismissed Leslie with a flick of her long eyelashes, and proceeded to dissuade her grandmother from extortion. We went outside to wait for her to fetch the horse, who turned out to be a pleasant, strong old fellow named Pete. Joe gave her a hand with the harness, and we were soon aboard.

I sat beside her on the perch seat of the wagon. Joe, Ashley, and Leslie sat along the benches in back. “It all depends on your approach,” Marietta said, when I thanked her for driving us gratis. “Grandmamma thinks that everyone's a crook and if they aren't crooks, they're out to take advantage. Probably,” she added affably, “because she's a crook and she's an ace at squeezing the last nickel out of the tourists.”

“A crook?” I said, alertly.

“Oh, just the usual stuff, you know. A lot of the store receipts are in cash, for instance. Most of that doesn't see the inside of a bank account, much less show up as taxable income. My aunt Caterina handles the bookkeeping and it drives her bananas. And haven't you noticed it's the people who
are
something—like crooked or out for themselves—that think other people are, too?”

“You may have a point.”

More to the point was why this exceptionally pretty woman was being so forthright with me about her grandmother's accounting practices. Mentally, I filed that away under Items to Mull Over While Drinking Scotch.

We drove out of the driveway and down the dirt road that ran through Tre Sorelle lands. There were tightly fenced pastures on either side. The milking does had been herded out of the barn and through a steel-sided lane that led directly to the two front pastures. Happy goats graze with their tails straight up in the air. Like puppies, they wag them when particularly pleased. The does in these pastures appeared more than content.

We drew up to the first gate and stopped. Ashley jumped out of the back, opened the gate, and ushered us through. She closed it behind the cart and resumed her seat.

Marietta shook the reins and the very well-put-together Percheron broke into a jog trot. “Any particular place in this pasture where you want to start?”