Outfoxed

by Rita Mae Brown

“Goddamned son of a bitch will probably sue me. Jesus, I could kill him. You were right. You were absolutely right. It would never work. Why I ever supported him . . .”

  “It seemed right at the time. How’s your hand?”

  “Hurts.”

  “Come on. I’ll ice it down.”

  They heard the big Mercedes’s throaty purr. Then the car roared away.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t call an ambulance. It would have helped his case.” Bobby, overcome with rage mingled with grief, put his arm around his wife. “Is that what they call our daughters? Coke whores?”

  CHAPTER 50

  Walter Lungrun stood over the coroner—towered is more like it, for the county coroner, Gaston B. Marshall, stood five feet five inches in his shoes. Combative, shrewd, and careful, Marshall had the full confidence of the sheriff.

  Peter’s scalp was pulled down over his face as the tiny saw bit through his skull. Gaston would harvest tissues, peering into the miraculous body, finally stilled. He never lost his respect for the organism although he often had little respect for the soul that had inhabited it.

  “Damn good shape for an old man. Usually this generation, liver’s shot. Booze fueled social life. Still does, I guess.”

  As Gaston snipped and clipped, Walter observed with detachment. He had loved Peter but as far as he was concerned Peter had already vanished or gone to the next sphere. He wasn’t really sure and wisely kept it to himself. Patients feel more secure if they think their doctor believes in God.

  After the autopsy, Gaston scrubbed up.

  “Appears natural,” Walter said.

  “Yes. A heart attack pure and simple. I doubt the pain lasted for longer than a second or two. You saw the left ventricle.”

  “What’s left of it.”

  “Still, I treat each autopsy as though a murder may have been committed. Keeps me on my toes and we both know there are drugs that can create, if you will, a natural-appearing death. Each time there’s a medical advance there’s also an advance in murder—for the more intelligent. The less intelligent, the stone, bone stupid will bludgeon, crush a skull with a rock, splatter with a baseball bat. The next level up of the primates prefers a sharp instrument, a slit throat, a stab through the abdominal cavity. A grade above that I’d say that pistols are the preferred weapon. It’s when we start dancing with the poisoners that the game changes. And quite often those safecrackers that leave few fingerprints are women.”

  “I thought women killed less than men.”

  “Well, I think that’s true but I suspect they kill more than we know. We just don’t catch them. Remember the famous Alfred Hitchcock episode? Oh, hell, you’re too young, Walter, but maybe you saw it on TV as a rerun. You know the one where the husband has been killed with a blunt instrument. The wife is all worry and concern. She had a shank of lamb in the oven and decides not to waste it, so she feeds it to the policemen. Oh God, that’s a good one. Killed him with the frozen lamb, don’t you see?”

  “I have seen that one. Hitchcock was twisted.” Walter laughed.

  “I wonder. Maybe we all are.”

  “Gaston, you’re in a business where you see the worst. You and Ben Sidell. I guess criminal lawyers do, too. Has to affect your worldview.”

  “Yes, it does. When you see a five-year-old child whose face has been battered to pulp, she’s been strangled, raped, and then the corpse has been abused, you do kind of lose your faith in the goodness of man. Although if anyone could have restored my faith in the goodness of men it would have been Peter Wheeler. A gentle man, a gentleman. He probably saved more children than the Red Cross. Unwanted kids from rich families, unwanted kids from poor families, he’d teach them to ride, teach them to hunt. Today people don’t do that anymore, especially men. I guess they’re afraid someone will accuse them of being a child molester. Pretty much we’ve gotten away from taking care of one another.”

  “We’ll not see his like again,” Walter agreed. “He was good to me. He was good to everyone.”

  They strolled down the well-lit corridor to Gaston’s office filled with African violets.

  “Thank you for allowing me to observe.”

  Gaston’s smile, crooked, was nonetheless appealing. “Just wanted to see if you knew your stuff, kid. Last time I remember you you were staking out the end zone as your private domain.” As Walter smiled Gaston continued: “I want you to look at something.” He reached under his desk, pulling out a plastic bag. “Just took this out of the cooler.”

  Walter opened it. Reynard was inside. He carefully removed the fox, stitched up after his autopsy.

  Gaston explained, “Ben Sidell was going to give him to Amy Zolotou”—he mentioned the vet—“but I asked that she come here so we could examine him together. You know, very little work has been done on foxes because they’re considered vermin. Vets don’t know much. . . . I mean they’re canids.” He used the proper medical term, not “canines.” “But they aren’t identical to dogs. We have a lot to learn about these little stinkers.”

  “He’s beautiful.”

  “Healthy. Stomach was full of corn. He’d just eaten. Either heading back to his den or just in it.”

  “Be awfully hard to bolt a fox from his den unless the killer had a Jack Russell.”

  “So whoever it was waited for him to return. Sat up in the early-morning hours.”

  “Upwind. If he’d smelled a human he’d have scampered off. Damn shame.” Walter stroked the glossy head.

  “He’d been cooled but not frozen. I don’t think he was dead more than six to seven hours before he was dragged.”

  “Have you talked to Jane Arnold?”

  “Yes. She said in order for the scent glands to be effective—she said on his pads and by his anus—he’d have to be fresh. If he went into rigor mortis, a hound could smell the fur, of course, but the scent really comes from the pads and especially the anus or urine. I never knew that.”

  “She’d know. The killer knew, too.”

  “Put in the refrigerator, I’d say. Then hidden and picked up somewhere during the hunt. Might even have been packed in ice to ensure freshness but not frozen. It’s a damned queer thing.”

  “Does Ben want to keep him for evidence?”

  Gaston shook his head. “No. He’s got our report. Photos. Amy Zolotou was good, by the way. Good vet. His head and his brush are in pretty good condition, considering he was dragged.”

  “Do you mind if I take him?”

  “No. What are you going to do with him?”

  “Go to the taxidermist. Thought he could mount the head and the brush.”

  “You might not want to identify this fox, Walter.”

  “I won’t.” His eyebrows lowered a moment. “But seems a crime to waste a good fox.”

  “That’s one way to look at it.” Gaston put Reynard back in the bag. “I’d say that this fellow was my most unusual subject.”

  CHAPTER 51

  The red taillights of Walter Lungrun’s car glaring like banshee eyes receded down the driveway. They were the only pinpricks of light in a night raven black.

  Sister watched from the mudroom. She was grateful that Walter had stopped by to offer sympathy over Peter’s death and to tell her he’d seen the fox’s body. He carefully did not mention standing in on Peter’s autopsy.

  While biologically on schedule, Peter’s death certainly was untimely in other respects. She relied on his wisdom, his sense of people.

  Raleigh stuck his nose in her hand. “Don’t worry.”

  Rooster, brought home from Peter’s, was so sad it made her heartsick to see him. Even Golly was nice to him. She’d brought the chickens home, too.

  She patted Rooster’s head, then flicked her black-and-blue wool scarf off the peg, slipped into a worn but warm olive quilted vest, pulling on a barn coat with a flannel lining over that. She and Raleigh walked out the back door.

  The mercury had plummeted into the low twenties. She walked past the stable, the dutch doors shut
against the cold. She heard Lafayette snoring, which made her laugh. She’d never met a horse who could make as much noise sleeping as her trusty gray partner.

  Two hundred yards away she passed Doug’s cottage, the pale straw-colored leaves on the Indian corn attached to the front door rustling in the light wind. She heard laughter within. Cody’s car was parked on the other side of Doug’s truck. The farm road ran between Doug’s cottage and Shaker’s bigger old-fashioned Virginia farmhouse on the right, a hundred yards farther down. A single light shone from the upstairs bedroom, the lace curtains pulled on each side. He was reading Patrick O’Brian sea stories, no doubt. Shaker, like millions of others, loved those tales. And like millions of other men he felt he’d been born in the wrong time. Luckily for Shaker, his work was physical and occasionally dangerous. Most poor sods chained in front of computer screens could only dream of adventure or they lived for the weekends where they did what men are supposed to do: run, jump, climb, battle the elements and sometimes each other.

  She walked under the allée of hickories. The front drive was lined in maples. Much as she adored the intense fall color, she liked this back farm road with the hickories. It had a safe feel and in the summer the leaves formed a canopy over the dirt road. The hickories shorn of their leaves guarded the lane like dark, symmetrical sentinels.

  The lane forked. To the left it ran up to the base of Hangman’s Ridge, snaking finally up to the great oak itself. To the right it curved into the hound graveyard.

  Sister pushed open the wrought-iron gate, smooth on its hinges. In the middle of the square under the walnut tree reposed a larger-than-life stone statue of a hound running. On the front it read: REST, DEAR FRIENDS. WE WILL HUNT AGAIN SOMEDAY.

  On each side of the base, a bronze plaque was bolted and each hound’s name was engraved, birth date and death date.

  The plaques, representing forty years of Jefferson Hunt hounds, were filled. Newer plaques were affixed to the wrought-iron fence. The last one, bearing three names, had Archie’s name freshly carved.

  A stone bench under a crabapple tree nestled in one corner. Sister sat down, Raleigh at her feet.

  A fat snowflake twirled earthward, soon followed by another and another. The dark sky now had a pinkish cast.

  Raleigh leaned shoulder to shoulder with Sister on the bench.

  “Orion and Thurman, Bachelor and Button, Laura and Grinch.” She sighed. “I was young then and oh that seems so long ago, Raleigh, and yet like yesterday.” She read aloud other names. “Yoyo, Chigger, Splash, and Schooner. What good hounds. How lucky I’ve been in this life to have known such hounds. To be able to stay healthy, to have good friends. I think foxhunters are as nutty as golfers. You can’t think about much else, really.” The snow dropped thicker and faster. “You know, Raymond wanted to be buried here but his mother wouldn’t hear of it. She dragged him to Hollywood in Richmond. He’s with his kin and two presidents, John Tyler and I can never remember the other one. He’d rather have been with the hounds. Ray Junior is on the hill. Someday I’ll be with him. I think about moving Big Raymond. Once his mother died I guess I could have but then—” She put her arm around the glossy black shoulders. “It seems I should leave well enough alone. I guess they’ll plant Peter with his people. They’re all up by Monticello. It’s funny how families come back together in death. So often they couldn’t do it in life but once dead, people who hated one another are laid side by side. If that great day comes and the tombs give up their dead, can you imagine the shock? You pop out of your grave and there’s your brother, Fred, who you would happily dispatch all over again. Ha.”

  “Something’s outside the cemetery.”

  She hugged him closer. “Archie was the best. Brave and true. Diana, Cora, and Dragon didn’t back down but poor Archie paid for his courage. If you’d been there, you’d have jumped right in. Raleigh, you’re young and may you live a long time. You’ll be with me at the end. I promise. Golly, too, spoiled-rotten cat.” She smiled, determined not to cry. “I look at this ground and four decades of my life are here. It doesn’t seem possible. Losing Archie doesn’t seem possible. And Peter Wheeler. If you could have seen Peter in his forties and fifties. What a man. God, what a bizarre time.” She shivered, not from the cold. Sniffled. Collected herself and said with quiet determination, “I’m going to lay a trap for our killer. I can’t tell a soul and I refuse to kill a fox. I’d like to get the killer for killing the fox as much as for killing Fontaine. Damn him.” She paused. “Thanksgiving hunt. If only the foxes will cooperate.”

  As she said that Inky came out of hiding. “Don’t chase me,” she said to Raleigh. “I’ll help.”

  “I’ll tell the hounds.”

  Sister, startled, blinked. “You.”

  Inky blinked, then scampered away, leaving perfect fox prints in the gathering snow.

  CHAPTER 52

  A long polished table left just enough space to squeeze in and out of one’s chair. Vin Barber wanted a conference room like the conference rooms the ritzy Charlottesville and Richmond lawyers had. But Vin couldn’t get along with a plethora of partners and so kept his practice to himself and his son—more to himself, since his son was an unimpressive specimen.

  Vin was, nonetheless, a good lawyer whose specialty was real estate and conservation, the two being allied.

  Sitting at the head of the table, his bald head bent over the long legal briefs encased in heavy light-blue paper, spectacles down his nose, Vin could have walked out of a Daumier lithograph, minus the wig and robes, which would have improved his appearance.

  Sister sat on his right and Bobby Franklin sat on his left. As president of Jefferson Hunt, Bobby needed to attend the meeting.

  Having just heard the last will and testament of Peter H. Wheeler, they were stunned.

  “Remarkable!” she exclaimed.

  Bobby folded his hands together. “Yes, but can we meet his conditions?”

  “I’d damn well try if I were you,” Vin, characteristically direct, said.

  Bobby leaned across the table toward Sister. “Live to one hundred.”

  “God willing.”

  “No joint-masters.” Vin put his hands behind his head. “You don’t really want one anyway, do you? Even if Crawford wrote big checks, can you imagine talking to him on the phone every twenty minutes? He’s high-maintenance. Like to run you wild.”

  “We can manage without a joint-master but operating expenses don’t diminish, as you know. Inflation affects us as well as General Motors.” Sister grasped the economics of the club, which is more than some masters. “We’ll find a way. But let me be clear: All of Peter Wheeler’s estate is held for Jefferson Hunt so long as I live and so long as I don’t take a joint-master. And he has left an annual income of fifty thousand dollars a year from his portfolio to maintain the farm.”

  “Correct.”

  “That’s not the tricky part.” Bobby, like most fat people, sweated easily and he was sweating now.

  “I know.” Sister frowned.

  “The tricky part is that once you have passed on, Doug Kinser must be the next master. Jesus, the board will hit the roof.”

  “Because he’s black?” Vin questioned.

  “For some, I expect their hemorrhoids will flare up,” Sister dryly replied. “But no, the real reason is the board of governors wants to govern. This removes from them the right to elect their master annually. Not so much a problem now but quite the issue when I’m dead and gone.”

  “Doug would be the first black master in the country. In the world,” Bobby thought out loud. “Course, he’s only half black.”

  “People don’t see it like that.” Vin tapped the eraser end of the pencil against the blue cover. “If you look the tiniest bit black, then you’re black.”

  “Like the old race laws. If you have one percent Negro blood in your veins, you’re Negro.”

  “Virginia had laws like that?” Bobby was appalled.

  “Not just Virginia. Many states. M
idwestern states. People feared mixing the races.” Vin paused. “The idea was like to like, I guess. I remember my grandma saying to me, ‘Stick to your own kind.’ There’s a logic to it,” he honestly added. “I can’t say that I agree with it but there’s a logic to it.”

  “Bobby, our bylaws state that the master must be elected by the board of governors, who are in turn elected by the membership.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. As long as you live, we don’t have a problem.”

  “We do if I get decrepit.”

  “You can still be master. You can still control the kennel and the hiring and firing. Someone else can be field master. We don’t have a problem. Oh, we’ll hear some quibbles about how you should have a joint-master but I can deal with that and so will others,” Bobby confidently predicted.

  “Do we have to tell the membership of this?”

  “Well—” Bobby unfolded his hands, making a tepee out of them.

  “No one need know the full contents of this will so long as you enact its provisions,” Vin added. “There’s enough money annually for you to pay a salary, let’s say, put a first whipper-in at the house and he has to care for it. It could be quite comfortable.”

  “Yes.” Sister’s mind was roaring along at a mile an hour. “Vin”—she leaned toward him—“I don’t mind if this will is read to the membership, but can we wait until after Thanksgiving hunt? It’s only two weeks away.”

  “Of course. We can do anything you say. Do you accept the terms of Peter’s will?”

  “I do and may God rest his soul. There won’t be a day of my life that I don’t think of Peter and thank him in my heart.” She couldn’t finish. She broke down.

  Bobby reached in his jacket, bringing out a linen handkerchief with an F embroidered on it. “Here.” His eyes wa-tered, too.

  She wiped her eyes. “Another question. Peter wishes Doug to succeed me, which really is the best plan—”

  Bobby interrupted. “But he has no money.”

  “We’ve got a few years left to figure out how to make sure he does have the resources to run the club. There are bigger obstacles. First, we must convince the club that the title of hunt secretary carries almost as much weight as master.”