The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat

by Claudia Bishop

  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?”

  “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 th
e 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?

  Seven

  “BEATS 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 calle
d 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.”