The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat (9 page)

“Is there a stream?”

She nodded toward the hedgerow that bifurcated this pasture from the one adjacent.

“Let's begin there.”

If the does drank from a marsh, there was a distinct danger of coccidiosis infection in the herd. But I put paid to this notion when I saw the water wagon parked by the stream's edge. This equipment is quite useful when raising stock on pasture. The wagon is loaded with a thousand-gallon tank of water. The water runs through a gravity hose to a stock tank on the ground. It is a simple and effective way to get clean water to stock. The tank was free of mold and algae and manure. The water looked clear enough for humans to drink, although we would take samples of all of it.

We descended from the wagon. Joe, dogged by Ashley and Marietta, went to the water tank and then the stream to take samples. Leslie and I split up, and walked along either side of the small stream checking for noxious weeds. Goats are susceptible to a wide variety of toxins: rue, wild cherry, yew, all the nightshades, nettles, vetch—the list is extensive. Perhaps the most dangerous is bracken fern, which acts on the central nervous system and gives the animal a case of the blind staggers. Tre Sorelle's pastures consisted mainly of timothy, clover, dandelions, purple nettle, borage, fescue, and a bit of alfalfa. There was the occasional multiflora rose or honeysuckle bush that had not yet succumbed to the caprines' voracious browsing habits. We spot searched that pasture, and the seven beyond it.

We found nothing poisonous at all.

We returned to the dairy sometime well after three o'clock. My case was filled with samples of grasses, weeds, and water. Good research dictated that we run the appropriate tests, but I doubted that anything of significance would turn up.

“Back at square one,” Joe said as he unkinked himself from the wagon ride.

“Very likely,” I agreed. “It's a pretty little problem, isn't it?” I sat down on a decoratively painted milk can.

Joe put his hand on my shoulder. “You look hungry, Doc. We missed lunch, didn't we?”

I admitted to a desire for lunch.

Marietta backed the wagon to its usual parking spot. At the sound of the Percheron's hooves clattering on the pavers, the door to the dairy opened and Doucetta stamped onto the stoop. She waved her cane, presumably to get my attention. “Hey! Arsehole!”

“Grandmamma.” Marietta turned from loosening the bit and shook her head at the old lady. “I just spent the afternoon with Dr. McKenzie and he's a perfectly nice old man. Stop calling him names.”

Old man? I looked sternly at the woman over my spectacles.

Doucetta stamped a little farther down the steps. “So? Did you find poison in my pastures?”

I shook my head. “We've taken samples, Mrs. Capretti. But your pastures appear to be in excellent shape.”

“I told you so.”

Joe shut the rear hatch on the Bronco and came over to stand by me. “
Donna
,” he said. “You run a great place here. You know your goats. Why do you think the tests are coming back the way they are?”

“Finally,” she said. “Somebody has the brains to ask
me
. All of you big important people are running around blabber, blabber, blabber. Test this. Test that. But nobody asks me.”

She was right. Perhaps because she was so old, perhaps because she was foreign, perhaps because she was female, we had overlooked the most important source of information about the goats. Madeline was right. I had a great many prejudices to set aside. “My apologies, madam,” I said.

“A madam,” she snapped, “is the boss of a whorehouse, right? I am not your madam. As for my goats?” She thrust two fingers in the air and muttered, “
Maledizione.
”

“Cursed?” Joe said.

“Ever since my grandsons were driven from this land,” she said dramatically, “there has been a curse on this place!”

Marietta shook her head. “You don't really believe that, Grandmamma.”

“Do I not? Have all the scientists and other nosy people who have butted into my business told me otherwise?”

“No,” I admitted, “we have not. But if you are cursed, madam, it is through a man-made agency. And I promise you, we will get to the bottom of this.”

Doucetta muttered something Joe refused to translate. Then she retreated to the dairy office and slammed the door.

I sat back down on the milk can to think.

“You
are
tired, Dr. McKenzie,” Leslie said with concern. “Can I get you something cold to drink?”

“I am not sitting down because I am tired, I am merely taking the opportunity to reflect,” I said testily. “I am perfectly capable of beginning all over again from the top.”

“I don't think starting over'd get us anywhere, though,” Leslie said. “I can't find a place to go from here except for the goats themselves, and that doesn't seem likely. They look perfectly fit. She doesn't keep on the older milkers. She culls the herd for malformed teats and low production. She staggers the kidding, too. This is all totally by the book.” She looked at the neat barns, the well-kept buildings, the closely shaved lawn, and the pots of bright pink geraniums. She rattled the wrought-iron sconce that still hadn't been replaced on the building. “This is a fabulous place. It's heaven.”

“For goats,” Marietta said dryly. She slipped a halter over the Perch's head and clipped his lead line to the hitching post. “And if you can handle the fact that the nearest Barneys is three hundred miles due south.” Her eyes flickered over Leslie's garb; the young student was dressed in khaki shorts, work boots, and a T-shirt that read “Goats Are Great.”

“Yeah, well, you can see how far into Barneys I am,” Leslie said with a grin. “Now, if you're talking Lincoln Center, I'm your woman.”

“What's Barneys?” Ashley asked.

The ensuing conversation between the three women was close to incomprehensible to me. Joe began to pack up the Bronco preparatory to our departure. I sat on the milk can and looked over the notes I'd taken throughout the day. We would come back to take random samples of the does' milk, but I was reasonably certain Neville's suggestion of sabotage was becoming a real possibility. But who? And why?

If the sabotage was connected to Melvin Staples's murder—as it surely must be—what deadly knowledge did poor Melvin have?

“
B
EATS
me what he was up to,” Mrs. Staples said.

After a restorative hamburger and onion rings at the Embassy, Leslie headed back to her student digs in Ithaca, and Joe and I stopped by the Staples's home to see what information could be gleaned from the widow.

Kelly Staples was a short, compact woman with cropped brown hair and a direct manner. Two toddlers wound themselves around her legs. There were circles under her eyes, and she was pale under her summer tan, but she was composed and readily agreed to discuss the case with us.

The house was a neatly kept bungalow in that section of Summersville where real estate prices remain modest. The living room was small, with a wide-screen TV in one corner and a couch in a blue tweed sort of fabric opposite. The brown-and-white carpet had the texture of a sheepdog's winter coat. The place was littered with toys. As we sat down, an older woman came in from what must have been the kitchen and took the youngsters away with her.

“Thanks, Ma.” Kelly rubbed her forehead a little wearily. “I was on a sleepover with her in Syracuse when I heard Mel passed. She came back with me to help with the kids. Usually we fight like cats and dogs. But she's been a real help, especially with all this funeral stuff.”

“The body's been released, then?” I said.

“What? Mel, you mean? Yeah. That Provost called me around lunchtime.”

“Excellent,” I said. This meant the forensics report and the autopsy would be available to Simon, and, therefore, to me.

Mrs. Staples looked suspiciously at me. “What'n the heck you mean by that?”

“What Dr. McKenzie means is that it's excellent you don't have to wait around to make the arrangements for Mr. Staples's…passing,” Joe said. There was a particular politeness to Joe's tones that I had begun to notice on more than one occasion. When we had visited the Swinford barns, for example. And he had interceded in just that way when Doucetta swelled up like an irate cobra over a perfectly simple request to pull samples from the bulk tanks. Curious.

“You may know that Neville Brandstetter has retained my firm to investigate the murder of your husband,” I said. “We…”

“I thought you two were vets.”

“We are. Well, Joseph is a third-year.”

“A veterinarian's investigating Mel's passing? Is it because he works for the ag and markets department?”

“Mrs. Staples, I am a detective.”

She looked confused. “Okay,” she said uncertainly. “You were asking if Mel'd been acting kind of weird lately? Yeah. He was. And I didn't know what he was up to, although knowing Mel, it was probably some woman.”

“Some woman,” I repeated, mainly to gain some time to consider how to form the next question. “Women were a frequent distraction for Mr. Staples?”

“Call him Mel,” she said, “everybody called him Mel. Blondes, brunettes, redheads.”

Jealousy. The oldest motive of all. It was Iago who called it “the green-eyed monster.” It had doomed many a poor soul.

“You don't seem all that upset by it,” Joe suggested tactfully.

She shrugged. “The way he explained it, with some guys, it's motorcycles. With others, stock-car racing. This was a lot less dangerous.”

“More or less a hobby of his, then,” I ventured.

She brightened. “Yeah. That way it doesn't sound too bad, does it? I mean, I have to tell you, at the beginning, it kind of sent me off the deep end, you know? I was fit to spit. But then, well, look at him.” She rose from the recliner where she had been sitting and went to an étagère kind of affair against the wall. “Here.” She picked up a photograph and thrust it at me.

I had never seen Melvin Staples alive. He resembled that short, crazy Australian who so disastrously attempted
Hamlet
some years ago. Although Staples appeared much taller.

“You see those eyes?” Kelly asked somewhat rhetorically. “Women just went apeshit for him.”

“But he always came back to you?” Joe said.

“Yep.” Her confidence was absolute. “Loved me, loved the kiddies.”

Of the many locutions I despise, “kiddies” is chief among them. I sighed. Then I said, “I truly don't wish to distress you, Mrs. Staples. But if I were to tell you that Melvin seems to have made arrangements to move in with one of his lady friends, it would seem to belie his pledge of constancy.”

“Huh?”

“He was shacking up with an older woman,” Joe said bluntly.

She furrowed her brow. “You mean that ditso Mrs. Brandstetter?” She sat up a little. “Hey! You said a guy named Brandstetter hired you? Any relation?”

“Her husband.”

“You can tell Mrs. Cradle Robber that Mel was in it for the money. She's fifty if she's a day, for cripes' sake.” She sat on the edge of the recliner and bent forward in a confiding way. “She was going to give Mel that Mercedes she drives. You seen that thing?” She sat back, triumphant. “She might have already done that. In that case, I'd get it, wouldn't I?”

I bit my mustache. Madeline wasn't there to tell me not to do it, so I bit it again.

“Lieutenant Provost said that someone sent you pictures of Mrs. Brandstetter and your husband through the mail?” Joe asked. “Was there any kind of demand associated with them?”

Suddenly, the woman became very shifty. She looked away from me and out the living room window. “Nah.”

“They just came out of the blue?” I said. “I find that very curious, Mrs. Staples.”

Joe leaned against the wall, his arms folded. He reminded me of someone. Philip Marlowe, that was it. If he'd had a fedora, he could have been the great detective's double. “You took those photographs, didn't you, Kelly? If you didn't get the Mercedes from Mrs. Brandstetter, you were going to hit up her husband.”

She licked her lips. “There's no law against that.”

“There is most certainly a law against blackmail,” I said sternly.

“You!” she said, with swift viciousness. “Like you can't afford anything you want. People like you get treated a lot different from people like us. You know how hard it is to get a break these days? I'm telling you this, Dr. McKenzie, if we hadn't gotten a break on the taxes on this place, me and my kids would be out in the street!”

“A break on your taxes,” I repeated.

“Yeah. Like I said, Mel was up to something and whatever it was, he wasn't about to tell me.”

“Up to something with whom?”

She looked surprised. “That tax inspector. Brian Folk.” She made her hands “talk” to one another. “He and Mel were
pst
,
pst
,
pst
, like two little old ladies all the time. Whatever they were up to, that Brian sure gave us a break with the assessment.” She looked sulky. “Of course, now that Mel's passed I suppose the blessed taxes'll go up again. And it'll be a cold day in the hot place before I get my hands on that Mercedes, I suppose.” She sighed sentimentally. “Poor old Mel. His timing was always rotten.”

The younger of the two children came listing into the living room. He was rapidly followed by his sibling. There was an acrimonious discussion over a red plastic truck. Over the ensuing shrieks, Joseph and I prepared to take our leave. I turned to her as we headed out the door. “Was it unusual for your husband to work a six-day week?”

“You mean how come he was out at the dairy on a Saturday?”

“Yes. He had taken a third sample of milk earlier in the week. Did he say anything to you about why he was at the dairy again?”

“Who knows? Maybe he was trying to stick it to the old hag that runs the place. She's a real terror, that one.”

We said our good-byes, although I found it very hard to remain courteous as we did so.

Once in the car, we both leaned back in the seats and exhaled.

“She's something else.” Joe shook his head. “It never occurred to me to wonder why he was back at the dairy so soon. Do you think it's important?”

“I don't know.”

He put the key in the ignition. “Where to now, Doc?”

“I think I need to let Provost know about the blackmail attempt. It may be a significant factor in the investigation.”

Madeline and Lila Gernsback had a standing date to go swimming at the high school on Monday nights, and she wouldn't be back until nine o'clock or so. There was a cold supper waiting in the refrigerator for Joe and me at home. I was eager to hear Simon's reaction to the interview with Kelly Staples, so I dropped Joe off at the house and went on to the police station in the hope that he hadn't left for the day. My luck was in. I summarized the results of my interviews to date, ending with the curious fact of the low assessment.

“Brian Folk gave the Staples's a break on their assessment? That has to break some kind of state law, doesn't it?” Provost looked expectantly at me, then pulled open the lower drawer of his desk and thumbed through the files in its interior. He pulled out a thin manila folder and opened it up. “Federal civil laws, state criminal laws…Okay. Here we are. State statutes. Howie Murchinson. This guy is an expert on the statutes around this kind of stuff. This is a Hemlock Falls number.” He looked up at the clock on his office wall. “Shoot. It's after six. Do you suppose he's still there?”

“I have no idea.” He punched the numbers into the phone. I reached for the week's edition of the
Sentinel
, which was lying on Provost's desk.

“That so,” Simon said into the phone. Apparently, Howie Murchinson was still at his law office in Hemlock Falls and willing to answer Simon's questions about Brian Folk's tax-assessing practices. “Well, sir, I couldn't say. Not verified, no. We'll get right on it. Thank you, sir.” He hung up. I looked at him expectantly.

“Nice fella, for a lawyer.” Simon clasped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “But he couldn't give me a straight answer, either.” He gazed ruminatively at the photograph of his wife and teenaged son prominently displayed on his desk. “‘Subjective,' he said. Unless the rate's so low it'd be obvious to a blind baboon that Folk's giving the Staples's a break. And then you have to prove bribery, which involves a lot of evidence we sure as heck don't have at the moment. But it's my impression that it can be done.” He smiled beatifically. “Oh, I'd like to nail that sucker, Doc.”

“A fair number of Summersvillians would appear to agree with you.” I'd been perusing the
Sentinel
as Simon made his call. “Did you see Rita's editorial?”

“‘Boot on the Taxpayer's Neck'? You bet I did. She's a firecracker, that Rita.”

I folded the paper and placed it back on his desk. “Other than a desire to impress his overlords in Albany, can you think of a reason why Brian Folk would be so egregious in his estimates of the value of our local property?”

“To be fair,” Simon said uncomfortably, “I made some calls around the county and it looks as if Summersville's way behind on property valuation. Old Nicky Ferguson's heart was in the right place, but apparently, he wasn't very responsible. So a large part of this is the piper being paid.” He leaned forward suddenly. “But I find the hanky-panky between Staples and Folk pretty interesting, don't you?”

I nodded. “It's worth exploring. Mrs. Staples said that Melvin's body has been released for burial?”

“Yep.”

“So the autopsy report's complete? And I take it the scene-of-the-crime people are finished with the site. The dairy was open for business today. Which means the forensics data are available?”

Simon groaned, rubbed his hands over his face, looked from side to side as if the gods of justice were looming over his shoulder, then retrieved a file from the top of his desk and handed it to me. “And I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't make a big noise about the fact that I've passed this stuff on to you.”

I'd looked immediately at the “probable weapon” box on the autopsy sheet. “‘A blunt weapon with a metal head, perhaps a ball-peen hammer with an extended handle'?” I lowered the report and looked Simon in the eye. “An oak cane with a brass goat's head, perhaps?”

Simon nodded.

“Have you confiscated the cane?”

Simon nodded again. Then he corrected himself. “Nope. I'm a liar. I got the warrant to allow us to take it in as material evidence. To be perfectly accurate, I sent Kevin Kiddermeister out to pick it up.” He looked at the clock on his office wall again. “He ought to be back any minute now.”

Kevin was the newest recruit in the Summersville police force. He must have drawn the short straw. “If he isn't dead.” I shuddered.

“He can take care of himself,” Provost said with a doubtful air. “And the Kiddermeisters have all made a career out of police work anyhow, so it's not as if I sent in a virgin sacrifice, for Pete's sake.” We looked at each other. Simon said, “She's ninety-four. And she doesn't weigh more than that soaking wet.” Then he said, “Maybe I better give him a call.” He withdrew his cell phone from the pocket of his jacket and was about to speed-dial when there was a tap at the door and Kevin Kiddermeister walked in. Like all the Kiddermeister men, he was blond, blue-eyed, and blushed easily. He was blushing now, but he carried the cane, rather as a veteran centurion of Rome must have carried the eagle standard after a successful attack on the Gauls. And like the centurion, he carried battle scars, a lump on his jaw, to be precise. Simon made a sympathetic noise. “Clocked you one, did she?”