by Ed McBain
“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.
I kept looking at her.
“Am I wrong?” she said.
“You’ve had too much to drink,” I said.
“In vino veritas,” she said.
I looked at the clock. A mistake.
“The night is young,” she said.
“Sunny,” I said, “if I thought for a minute you were sober...”
“I am dead cold sober,” she said, and stood up and loosened the sash of the kimono, and opened the kimono, and then shrugged out of it and let it fall to the floor at her feet in a tangle of black-and-white Japanese squiggles. She put her hands on her hips. “Don’t you think I look dead cold sober?” she asked.
I thought a lot of things in those next several moments while she stood with her legs apart and her hands on her hips, her head tilted somewhat defiantly, her eyes challenging and wide as they m
oved from my face downward over my chest and my waist, and then lower, and held lingeringly to ascertain what she already knew, a thin certain smile widening her mouth, the languid eyes coming up to meet my own again. I thought, oh, so many things. I thought first that she was old enough to know what she was doing, and I thought that if she said she was sober, then who was I to doubt her word? And I thought back to Chicago and the back seat of my father’s steamy Oldsmobile where a sixteen-year-old girl named Joy Patterson lay back with her eyes closed and her breath heavy, and her legs spread, either really drunk or feigning drunkenness while I explored the ribbed tops of her nylon stockings and the soft white thighs above them, and drew back my trembling hand when at last it touched the silken secret patch of those undefended panties. Pulled it back with the certain knowledge that if Joy was drunk, this was rape, and if she wasn’t drunk, this was not the way to go about making love on a starry summer night with a partner pretending to be lox spread upon a sacrificial bagel.
And then, oddly and suddenly, I thought of Dale O’Brien, and I remembered that I’d spoken to her not five hours ago (my eyes glancing at the clock again, Sunny’s eyes following them, “Oh, we have time,” she murmured) and I remembered what Dale had said about feeling like some kind of whore, and I thought this wasn’t the way to forget her, however much she loved someone else, the way to forget Dale was not through substitution but by choice, and Sunny McKinney was offering no choice; Sunny McKinney was about to throw me and brand me the way she might have a steer. And I realized that allowing her to claim me would only be the equivalent of that unconsummated Chicago rape all those years ago, Joy either drunk or joylessly submissive, a seven-dollar rape for sure because that was what I’d paid for the bottle of booze we’d consumed in the back seat of my father’s car while somewhere out on the lake somebody played a mandolin.
So I stood there looking at Sunny, both of us motionless, our eyes locked, brown against pale blue, both of us aware of my visible masculine response, her eyes flicking downward again to ascertain and to verify, and I thought suddenly of Charlie and Jeff, and I thought of all the offers ever made by American gangsters who were certain they would not be refused. And I thought of the extravagant gift Sunny was offering, and it seemed to me that it was as much a genuine present as a chunk of meat in an iron-clawed trap would be to a bear searching for honey in the woods.
I did not think I wanted my head banged yet another time against a varnished hatch-cover tabletop. So I looked at Sunny one last time, and then I turned away and sighed heavily and said, “Please put on your clothes,” and I felt like what my daughter would call a nerd, but I also felt somehow better than I had since the night Charlie and Jeff had beaten me senseless, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care why, and I didn’t even watch while Sunny went out onto the terrace and dressed silently in the moonlight.
She searched in her purple leather shoulder bag for the car keys—she was wearing a denim wraparound skirt now, and a purple halter top to match the bag, and the pair of blue clogs—impatiently rummaging among Kleenex tissues and a crumpled package of cigarettes and several sticks of chewing gum and a purple leather wallet, and finally found the keys, and went to the door, and turned to me before going out and said, in all seriousness, “You’re not a fag or anything, are you?” And without waiting for my answer, she went up the walk to where she’d parked the red Porsche. The car started with what sounded like an angry roar, and then scratched away from the curb.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
4
* * *
I DID not talk to Bloom until Monday morning.
I had learned early on in my relationship with him that it was best to tell him everything I knew as soon as I knew it, because things left unsaid had a way of coming up later either to haunt or to embarrass me. But a call to his office on Saturday informed me that he had the weekend off, and I was reluctant to disturb him at home. I frankly didn’t know whether Sunny’s theory about a series of cattle thefts committed by her brother in cahoots with a Spanish-speaking stranger would hold up under police scrutiny, but it seemed to me that Bloom should know about it; whatever he did with the information later was his business. At the same time, I didn’t want to break in on his weekend; Monday morning would be time enough. Telling him, of course, would also mean telling him about Sunny’s moonlight visit, but I did not plan to mention her naked dip in my pool or her later modest proposal. There were some things even Bloom did not have to know.
The first question he asked was, “What was she doing there?”
“Well...she was swimming,” I said.
“In your pool?” he asked.
“Yes, in my pool, of course in my pool.”
“You mean she came there for a swim?”
“No, but she was swimming when I got there.”
“Did you know she was coming?”
“No, it was a surprise.”
“You mean she just came over with her bathing suit, and popped into your pool...”
“Well, no, she wasn’t wearing a bathing suit.”
“Oh, she was nude,” Bloom said.
So much for keeping secrets from Detective Morris Bloom.
I told him everything she’d told me.
“She was nude during all this?” Bloom asked.
“No, she was wearing a kimono,” I said.
“She’s a very beautiful girl,” Bloom said thoughtfully.
The telephone line went silent. Bloom did not ask, and I did not offer. Gentlemen both, I thought.
“And she thinks he stole how many cows?” Bloom said at last.
“Fifteen at a clip.”
“From five herds?”
“Right.”
“How much is five times fifteen?”
“Seventy-five.”
“So he could’ve stolen seventy-five cows each spring and fall, is that what she told you?”
“Something like that.”
“That’s a lot of cows, Matthew.”
“I wouldn’t want them in my bedroom, that’s for sure.”
“Did she have any idea who this Spanish guy might be?”
“None.”
“Well,” Bloom said, “if he really was stealing cows, that would let out dope, wouldn’t it? As a source of the money, I mean.”
“Sunny doesn’t think he was involved in dope,” I said, and then told him about Jack’s having spanked her when he’d caught her smoking a joint.
“Spanked his older sister, huh?” Bloom said.
“According to her, yes.”
“Kinky,” Bloom said. “Don’t you think?”
“Well,” I said.
“You spank a six-year-old, that’s discipline,” he said. “You spank a twenty-three-year-old who’s your sister, that’s kinky. Didn’t the girl think it was kinky?”
“She didn’t seem to.”
“Was this a regular thing between him and her? Spanking her, I mean?”
“I have no idea.”
It suddenly occurred to me that Bloom and I lived in two different worlds. On Bloom’s block, a murder had been committed, and he wanted to know why, and a twenty-year-old boy spanking his twenty-three-year-old sister was an unnatural act that warranted thought and discussion. The spanking had been mentioned only casually by Sunny, and I myself hadn’t given it a moment’s further thought. But now that Bloom had focused attention on it, it did seem somewhat peculiar, and I wondered—as he had a moment earlier—whether it had been a regular occurrence in the McKinney household. And then I wondered what other unnatural actions or deeds or possibly even thoughts confronted Bloom on a daily basis. Given the undisputed fact that he dealt day and night with the aftermath of violence, how far beyond that did his professional horizons extend? What undreamed-of horrors was he forced to contend with as a routine part of his working day? And what sort of man could hope to deal continuously with murder, rape, sodomy, child abuse, burglary, robbery, assault—the list seemed endless—without havi
ng his entire perspective distorted by a world he accepted as “natural”? What did Bloom talk about when he was with his wife? I felt suddenly as if I did not know him at all.
“Take down her panties, or what?” he asked.
A matter-of-fact question.
Bloom’s world.
“She didn’t say.”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “Kinky. Twenty-three-year-old beauty shacking up with a pimply-faced kid who stacks oranges, and meanwhile getting her ass spanked by her younger brother. Very kinky. I think I’ll give the mother a ring, find out if her son was in the habit of taking down his sister’s pants. Thanks a lot, Matthew, this is all very helpful. Have you given any thought to when you want to go a few rounds with me? How about this afternoon, does that sound okay?”
“Sounds fine,” I said.
“Drop by here around five, five-thirty, okay?” Bloom said. “We’ll walk over together, the gym’s right next door. Wear an iron jock,” he said, and hung up.
At two o’clock that afternoon, I received a phone call from Harry Loomis. He told me he’d discussed the entire matter with his client, and they had a counteroffer for me, and he wanted me to come to his office to hear it. When I asked why he couldn’t simply give it to me on the phone, he said, “You want to hear it, you come on out here,” and hung up. I called Bloom to tell him we’d have to postpone the lesson, and we set a tentative date for the next day at five. It was two-fifteen when I left the office, and I did not get to Ananburg till three-thirty. I was in an extremely foul mood after the long trip, and the Iron Maiden in Loomis’s outer office did nothing to raise my spirits. Neither did Loomis himself. His counteroffer, as it turned out, was something he could have given me on the phone, and I was mad as hell that he’d dragged me all the way out here to listen to it.
“As I understand this,” I said, “Mr. Burrill—”
“If you been listenin’, you got it,” he said.