The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat

by Claudia Bishop

  “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 doubtfu
l 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?”

  Kevin gave me a half salute and nodded to his chief. “Yessir. I ducked the wrong way. You told me she was right-handed? Turns out she’s ambi-whatsis.”

  Ambidextrous. Curious, I glanced at the Nature of Wound subcategory on the autopsy report. “A right-handed perp, in any event,” I said. I observed the goat-headed cane, carefully wrapped in plastic. “Well done, my boy.”

  Simon rose, took the cane, and locked it in the evidence cabinet. “Yep. You can get along home, now, Kevin.”

  “Yessir.” He turned to leave and hesitated, one hand on the office door. “It’s not all going to be like this, is it?”

  “Could have been worse,” Simon said thoughtfully. “She could have had a gun.”

  Kevin shut the door with a nervous bang.

  I read through the reports from Syracuse.

  Neither the forensics nor the autopsy provided much joy. Staples’s fingerprints were found outside the stainless-steel rim of the bulk tank. The thumbprints and the heel of the hand were under the rim, the fingers of both hands were inside. Brush marks on the lower half of the tank had possibly been made by someone’s knees. The scenario was obvious: Staples had been struck on the head while bending over the tank, sagged against it, and been tipped over. The actual cause of death was drowning. From the amount of milk splashed on the floor around the tank, the victim had struggled a little.

  “I don’t see the old lady as a viable suspect,” Provost said.

  “Archimedes would disagree.”

  Provost closed his eyes, and then opened them again. “I’ll bite, Doc.”

  “‘Give me a lever and I’ll move the world.’ Archimedes said that, not I,” I added impatiently. “It wouldn’t take a huge amount of strength to tip the body into the bulk tank. If he were badly stunned—and from the description of the head wound, he would have hardly been conscious as he went under—he wouldn’t have struggled much.” I thought about it. What I knew about ageing was confined to the remarkable resilience of animals and the annoying changes in my own body. “Let’s say it’s not totally impossible.” I paged through the rest of the report. “The cleanliness of the dairy is a hindrance. There are no data of note anywhere except the tank.” I replaced the papers in the file and handed it back to Simon. “No witnesses. No forensics. Whatever case we make, Provost, is bound to be circumstantial.”

  “So it’s going to come down to motive?” Simon didn’t look happy. “The law likes hard fact, Doc.”

  I cast a glance at the cabinet that held the cane. “We may have the means. Intensive questioning of the suspects can establish opportunity. And just plain research will support the motive. There are quite a few avenues to pursue.”

  “You think so?” Simon demanded. “Who’ve we got for suspects? A ninety-four-year-old widow? A jury’s going to love that.”

  “Then our first step should be to establish the parameters of our investigation by eliminating who is not a suspect. I may have mentioned before that a criminal investigation involves the same thought processes used in diagnosing a pathological condition.”

  “Yeah, Doc.”

  “Fact find, assess, and conclude.”

  “Yeah, Doc.”

  “Our first step is to rule out.”

  “Yeah, Doc.” He sighed. “It’d be nice if we could rule out more chatter on the disease model.”

  “You mean you’d like to cut to the chase, as they say.”

  “You got it in one.”

  I leaned back in my chair and steepled my fingers. It occurred to me that it would be very pleasant to have a Scotch in my hand. “There is something to consider about this case that is very odd. An anomaly, if you will.”

  Simon rolled his eyes.

  “Until I discover the source of the contamination of the milk, we have two issues to consider. I believe the contamination to be sabotage, designed to close the dairy down. Why close the dairy down? We have the murder of the milk inspector: the motive seems to be revenge for his womanizing, in which case the sabotage and the murder are unrelated; or his accurate reporting of the MSCC levels, that, too, would work to close the dairy down. In which case his murder and the sabotage are unconnected. Unless Staples was the saboteur. But I believe the two are connected. I just don’t know how.”

  Provost rubbed his forehead. “I think I’m getting a headache. You mean somebody could have killed Mel out of jealousy—and somebody else is trying to close the dairy.”

  “Let’s take the murder on, first. I am close to discovering the antecedents of the other problem. We will reserve a conclusion on that for a later time.”

  Provost shook his head, as if bothered by flies. “The murder. Yeah. Now. I don’t need to tell you that most murders are committed by the vic’s loved ones.”

  “A fact known to all,” I agreed.

  “So how d’ya see Mrs. Staples as the perp?”

  I shook my head. “She was in Syracuse with her mother the day of the murder. The alibi’s been verified by the mother, but duplicity is the hallmark of this particular family, so you might want to get third-party verification.”

  Provost looked at me admiringly. “You know what I don’t get? I don’t get how you can use so many words and not run out.”

  I was completely nonplussed.

  Provost smiled slightly. Then he looked at his notepad. “Okay. Next is the jealous husband. I checked on that class he said he was at. He wasn’t there for most of it.”

  I shifted in my seat. “Neville,” I finally admitted, “does not have a verifiable alibi. But Luisa swears he didn’t know with whom she was involved until you let the cat out of the bag, which, of course, was sometime after the crime was committed.” I deliberated. “To be frank with you, Simon, if Neville had done it, it would appeal enormously to this woman’s vanity. I do not trust her as a witness. Which is why I trust her initial statement that she kept Neville in the dark. If we are assessing probabilities here, I would place Neville’s probable guilt at a very low number.”

  “You don’t think he did it,” Simon said, with an air of not having heard one word in ten.

  “I do not.”

  “And what about the missus?”

  I frowned. Not at the thought of Luisa’s guilt, which was pleasing, but at the locution. “I doubt it. She says she was waiting for Staples at the apartment in Ithaca the morning of the murder. She spent the time pouring out her troubles to a sympathetic neighbor. That is easily verified. Not to mention the fact,” I added with some distaste, “that she is a shrieker and a hysteric. There would have been a noisy altercation in the milk room. Ashley would have heard them.”

  “Which brings us back to the Caprettis and their kin.”

  “Doucetta has the volatility to commit the murder. Anyone who has a stake in the inheritance would have a substantial revenge motive. If the bad samples kept turning up, there’s no question the dairy’s reputation would suffer. You know how hysterical the public at large becomes over food contamination issues. A leak to the press about what is essentially pus in the milk would create a firestorm of dismay.”

  “Pus,” Provost said with a revolted air.

  “That’s a fair approximation of how a reporter might look at it.”

  “So
we’ve got Marietta, the granddaughter. Caterina and the husband, Frank.” He tapped his pencil on his yellow pad. “I know Frank Celestine. He bowls on the same nights I do.”

  “I haven’t met him. Does he have the nous to commit murder?”

  “If I knew what you just said I could tell you. What he is, is a blowhard and a bully. And that construction company of his is a joke.” He wrote on the yellow pad, then said, “Now we come to my favorite.”

  “Brian Folk.”

  “According to Mrs. Staples, Folk and Mel were thick as thieves.”

  “And may have been thieves, from what we already know.”

  Provost nodded. “Right. So he and Mel have a falling-out. He follows him to the dairy ’cause he’s there to take another flippin’ sample. And whack, Mel ends up face-first in drink.”

  “Which leaves the dairy out of it altogether.”

  “Right.”

  “But what about the elevated MSCC?” I protested.

  “You said the two things are separate.”

  “I said they appear to be separate,” I corrected him. “I also said I believe them to be connected.”

  “I tell you a couple of rules about murder, Doc. I call it the School of the Blindingly Obvious. Which is basically, the simplest answer’s the right one. If it’s staring you right in the face, you’d be an idiot to look any farther.”

  “Fair enough, as far as it goes,” I said. “So you believe that next step is to rule out Brian Folk?”

  “Seems a good place to start. I’ll get Patty to do a record search in the morning, see if there are any felonies in his background. And then I’ll tackle the little SOB himself.”

  I rose somewhat stiffly from my chair. “Madeline has signed up for the cheese-making seminar at the dairy. Her first class is tomorrow. I thought I might look in on it with her. The cheese maker is Caterina Celestine, whom I have not met. But I have an uneasy feeling about the place. Something odd is going on. And I believe Folk has nothing to do with it.”

  I returned home through the deepening twilight. I hadn’t seen my wife or my dog since breakfast. The hot dog I’d eaten had proven a most unsatisfactory lunch. I had missed my late afternoon drink on our porch, where Madeline and I discussed the events of the day. There was an ache in my joints that was becoming all too familiar. The hours-long trek through the pastures that afternoon had brought muscles into play that had been unused for some years.