Roughstock (A Gail McCarthy Mystery)

by Laura Crum

  "That's good."

  Travis still stared almost fixedly at the team roping, his usual lighthearted, youthful demeanor completely absent. In his stern expression was a faint resemblance to Jack's typical firm-jawed visage and I was reminded yet again of the talk that Trav was really Jack's son. And yet Bronc had said Jack was sterile.

  Deciding these were hardly questions I could ask Travis, I said, I hoped lightly, "The cops spent two days questioning me up in Tahoe. Have you been through that, too?"

  "Oh yeah. They came out and grilled me and Bronc. Don't make no difference, though. Bronc and I can give each other alibis." Trav said this firmly, then jerked his chin toward the chute. "I'm up in a minute."

  With the words, he wheeled the mare and trotted off, looking, I thought, relieved to be rid of me. Well, what did I expect? These were probably the last things he wanted to think or talk about. Still, it was odd the way he had volunteered that Bronc and he could alibi each other. Living on the same ranch as they did, it would be easy to see why this would be the case, but why was he so quick to tell me?

  And why so unfriendly? His unnatural reticence could be the way he dealt with grief, but somehow it had seemed more than that. Almost hostile. I wondered suddenly if Travis might believe Joanna had killed Jack and I was covering for her.

  Riding Gunner back to Lonny's trailer, I unsaddled him and brushed him, then took Blue for a slow walk. After that I drank a beer with a couple of friendly ropers while I watched Lonny and Bronc win the third pot of the day. Bronc managed to heel all three steers neatly by two feet to beat a good seventy teams, despite the fact that he was the oldest roper in the arena. I cheered them on happily, forgetting, for the moment, Jack's murder, and simply enjoying the sunny day and the ambiance.

  It wasn't until the roping was over and we were unsaddling Burt and Pistol, that trouble returned. It came in the form of a battered blue pickup that pulled in the front gate and rolled to a stop in the parking lot, not far from our rig. A woman got out and leaned on the fender, smoking a cigarette with jerky, abrupt motions. Tara Hollister.

  I couldn't stand Tara Hollister. Everything from her too obviously dyed blond hair to her hard-faced, tough-girl attitude, to her skintight, overly sexy clothes grated on my nerves, but nothing so much as the idea that she posed as a horse trainer. Despite the fact that to even a moderately knowledgeable eye she was not a very good hand with a horse, she had managed to convince a few even more ignorant folks of her abilities, and always seemed to have two or three horses "in training."

  I had a very low tolerance for the sound of Tara's deep, somewhat harsh voice pontificating along the lines of "that son-of-a-bitch just needs a shorter tie-down and a good whack alongside the head, and he'd be all right in the box." Mostly it was bullshit, and I guess I've got a low bullshit tolerance. But more than that, I thought Tara was often downright cruel, and I don't put up with cruelty at all.

  "There's Tara," Lonny said, following my line of sight to the figure beside the truck. "You gonna go over there and question her?"

  He was half playful, half serious; I'd already considered doing just that.

  "No," I said finally, "I'd better not."

  "Why not?"

  "Because I'm a witness in that trial she's involved in, and I'm afraid she'll ask me questions about that. It's tomorrow," I added, mostly to myself.

  "Trial?" Lonny said blankly.

  "Remember? The night she rode that sorrel gelding to death? Well, she's suing the former owner. You know."

  "Oh yeah." Lonny's face was rueful. "I forgot about that."

  I wasn't surprised. Lonny had a selective memory to go with his optimistic attitude; he tended to remember only those things that were pleasant or directly relevant to what he needed to do. The unpleasant and unnecessary details of life were neatly forgotten. And Tara's lawsuit, a matter of small claims court, was just such a sorry transaction. I didn't like to think about it either, as the whole thing seemed both sad, ridiculous, and awkward.

  "You ready to go?" Lonny grinned at me. His mind had clearly switched back to the enjoyable ending of a typical roping day-a drink, dinner, and a roll in the hay.

  "I guess so." My mind was elsewhere, but I obediently helped him load the three horses in the trailer and was putting Blue in the truck when I heard voices raised in the unequivocal tones of a major argument. Everyone in the arena heard; conversations and motion came to a fascinated stop as the whole place craned its attention on Tara Hollister and Bronc, who were shouting at each other over by his rig.

  "That's my horse, you know damn well he is. He was born out of one of Jack's mares while I was married to Jack, and I'm taking him back." Tara's usually low voice was shrill with anger.

  "Bullshit." Bronc spat on the ground at Tara's feet. "This horse is mine just like everything on that ranch is mine. And if you were a man, you ring-tailed bitch, I'd make you remember it."

  He turned and led Willy toward the rear of the trailer, every muscle of his body hard. Tara raised her arms, hands curled into claws, and sprang on his back, her fingernails gouging at his face. Lips pulled tight over her teeth, she screeched, "You think so, you motherfucker? Try it."

  There was a collective gasp. Thrown punches were not unknown at roping arenas, and I had witnessed two twentyish women clawing at each other in precisely this way a month ago, over a blond kid I would have said was not worth the trouble. But the spectacle of a woman attacking a man of Bronc's age seemed absurdly shocking.

  Bronc was doubled over, Tara clinging to his back, clawing and kicking as his arms sought a purchase on her body, angry ejaculations shooting from his mouth. Tara, for her part, was still screeching, though I couldn't make out words anymore.

  By this time people nearby had recovered from their surprise at the sight, and two youngish ropers jumped into the melee and grabbed Tara, pulling her off Bronc. She was still shouting insults and made some attempt to claw at the men holding her, at which one of them shook her lightly with a muttered "Calm down."

  Bronc, for his part, wiped the blood from a wicked-looking scratch on his cheek, and turned to take Willy's reins from Trav, who had caught the startled horse. He stared at Tara, being held by her elbows, and then spat again. "You'll have this horse over my dead body, you little murdering bitch."

  He led Willy into the stock trailer, loaded Trav's mare behind him, tied the two horses and latched the door, then walked around and got in his pickup. Trav climbed in the passenger side quickly. Starting the engine, Bronc said a brief "Thanks" to the two men who were still holding Tara, and pulled out of the parking lot. Only when his rig disappeared down Martinez Road did Tara's captors release her.

  Rubbing her elbows, she glared at them malevolently, then climbed into her own truck and proceeded to skid out of the parking lot in an adolescent display of bad temper. The whole crowd watched her departure, eyes wide. This was definitely the stuff of which gossip was made.

  "Whew." Lonny had started his truck and was nosing it out of the parking lot at a considerably more sedate pace. Ignoring the little knots of chatting, gesticulating ropers gathered by their rigs, he bumped on down the drive toward the road. Lonny wasn't much of a gossiper.

  Left to myself, I might have stayed to talk, but my motives, I assured myself, were more professional than mere curiosity. If anyone had ever looked like a creature who could murder out of rage, Tara's contorted face had looked it this afternoon.

  "How in the world could he have married her?" I said out loud.

  Lonny had no trouble understanding what I meant. He shook his head, then smiled deprecatingly. I looked at him curiously; his expression was almost sheepish.

  "What are you thinking?" I demanded.

  "I'm almost embarrassed to say it."

  "Come on."

  He sighed. "Jack was in his fifties. Just a little older than I am." He glanced in my direction. "Tara's what, mid thirties? And whatever else you can say about her, she's got a good body. She makes sure you notice." H
e gave a brief laugh.

  "You're saying he married her just to get in the pants of a youngish, decent-looking woman? That he was so stupid, or going through such a mid life crisis that he didn't look beyond that? That's hard to believe."

  I thought about Jack as I had known him-a handsome, wealthy man, a confirmed flirt certainly, but not obnoxiously so. I'd seen no hint of desperation in his eyes. And there would have been no reason for it. Plenty of women would have been willing to take on Jack Hollister.

  "Why?" I asked Lonny. "Why would you think that?"

  Lonny didn't answer, but looked more sheepish than ever.

  Watching his profile as he drove, the answer dawned on me by degrees. "Is that what you feel about me?"

  His hesitation was its own answer. "Of course not," was what he eventually said. "But I've wondered, sometimes, if there wasn't an element of that. It bothers me a little."

  We were both silent. Lonny was fourteen years older than me, hardly the gap of the century. But it was a gap, nonetheless, and there were times when I noticed how youthful I appeared next to him. Normally this was pleasant, but there were moments when it struck me as mildly incongruous. After all, the farcical elements of a May/December romance were as old as human history.

  "So," I said slowly, "you're saying that Jack, and maybe you, were, shall we say, thinking with your peckers when you got involved with younger women."

  Lonny laughed. "I hope it's not that simple. But there's an element of that in most men. Jack had a lot of it, I think."

  I chewed on that awhile. I had to admit, the subject was becoming a lot more personal, and I was perhaps more interested in Lonny's motivations than Jack's. Eventually, though, I dragged my mind off my own feelings and tried to analyze what Jack's motivation for marrying Tara might have to do with his subsequent murder.

  "So let's say Jack married her because she was relatively young and good-looking and could ride a horse. An ornament to his manhood, shall we say, something he could take to the roping arenas and be all puffed up about. Maybe she was good in bed, even. But he rapidly grows disenchanted, and starts running around on her, which we all know he did. So Tara demands a divorce and a bunch of money and, we suppose, gets it. So where'd the money go, anyway-she doesn't look rich."

  Lonny seemed relieved to be off the subject of his own motivation and back on Jack and, for once, entered into the spirit of investigation with some enthusiasm. "She did for a while. This was before you started to go roping. Right after Tara broke up with Jack she was driving a rig that must have cost a quarter of a million and buying horses hand over fist. She bought a pretty fancy place, too, or so I heard. But over the last couple of years it's all disappeared."

  I nodded. I'd heard this. "As to where it went," Lonny looked mildly disgusted, "I don't know this, but I've been told she uses drugs."

  He said it as if it were a contaminated subject, which to a man of his age and stamp, it was. I felt less strongly about it, though those few people I'd known who were habitual users of cocaine or speed had not been likable characters. And, it struck me suddenly, the taut, high-strung, irritably nervous energy they'd sometimes displayed seemed to fit Tara's apparently irrational attack on Bronc. Could some sort of drug-induced frenzy have prompted her to murder Jack? That and the idea she'd inherit?

  "Drugs can run through your money," I commented.

  Lonny said nothing, but I knew he and I were both thinking of a well-to-do roper we both knew who had started indulging in cocaine several years ago. He'd managed to relieve himself of a successful tractor dealership, several hundred acres of inherited farm land and a paid-off family ranch in remarkably short order and was currently living in a battered travel trailer on an old friend's property without a nickel to his name. If he could manage it, so could Tara.

  All right, I said to myself, she could have run through the money on fast living and wanted more, Bronc said she knew the terms of the will, drugs could have made her irrational enough to kill, but was she in Tahoe that night? Of course, that didn't necessarily mean anything. She could have promised to split her inheritance with whoever did the dirty work for her. But Bronc had called her a "murdering bitch." And he had been suddenly silent the other night when I had asked him if he thought Tara killed Jack. What did Bronc know?

  And there was something else. I turned back to Lonny. "That whole fight she just had with Bronc was over Willy. Do you know anything about that?"

  "Not really. I did hear her get into it with Bronc before about that horse. She seems to think she has some right to him."

  Now how did that connect? I suddenly felt like laughing. Was I about to construct a scenario in which Tara murdered Jack in order to get Willy away from Bronc?

  Sensing my change of mood, Lonny reached across the seat and took my hand. "What do you say we forget all this stuff and go have a nice dinner at the Harbor Inn?"

  The Harbor Inn. I smiled at the thought. A spectacular view of the old boat harbor at Moss Landing, complete with ancient piers, sea otters, pelicans, and herons, not to mention equally spectacular fresh fish to eat. And I would, of course, be seeing Tara the next morning, like it or not. Time enough to think about her then.

  "You're saying that if I quit worrying about this murder for tonight you'll take me to dinner at the Harbor Inn?"

  "And show you a good time, too." Lonny's grin was full of promise.

  "You're on."

  TWELVE

  At nine o'clock the next morning I was pacing the cold halls of the county building, searching for small claims court. It wasn't, fortunately, a place I was familiar with, and I was several minutes late as I slipped in the door and found a spot in a back pew. The room was fairly full of people, most of whom I didn't recognize, but a few were glaringly familiar.

  Tara, of course, I spotted at once, looking incongruous in a boldly patterned, clingy rayon dress. She was flanked by a couple of young, rough-looking ropers that I recognized by face though not by name. They were fringe hangers-on in the roping world, usually too broke to own a horse or come up with the entry money, but often standing on the sidelines, beer in hand.

  In another corner, with a scowl on his face, was a heavyset middle-aged man named Harvey Reynolds, the defendant. A sometime roper of limited capabilities, he had sold Tara the horse that had subsequently died. Harvey was surrounded by quite a group of people, several of them ropers who had been at Freddy's yesterday. This whole gang was chatting freely together, whispering loudly, and casting plenty of glares at Tara.

  My own position here was somewhat ambiguous. I was the vet Harvey had used when he'd owned the horse in question, a long-necked sorrel gelding he'd called JD. I was also, sadly, the vet who had been on call the night the horse had tied up and eventually died. Tara would no doubt have preferred Jim, my boss, but what she'd gotten was me, to our mutual dissatisfaction. In terms of the horse it hadn't made any difference; poor JD would have died no matter who had been treating him.

  I was only glad I hadn't been there to see what led up to his demise; the story-which I'd heard recounted by several people-was bad enough at second hand. Apparently Tara had been training on the gelding that night in her usual fashion, jerking and janging on the bit when he wouldn't stand perfectly still in the box, and eventually resorting to whipping him over and over with the rope. Predictably, this made the horse worse, and Tara had run steer after steer on him in a futile effort to tire him into submission, despite the fact that he was clearly already exhausted.

  According to universal consensus, she'd competed in the last pot with the horse wringing wet and starting to tie up. Several people had mentioned this to her, to no effect. She'd shrugged them off with a "He can run one more steer." In actual fact, she'd run six more, or tried to. By then the horse wasn't able to run.

  I'd arrived several hours later at her place on an emergency call to find JD going into shock. I had him hauled down to the clinic and pumped fluids into him all night long, to no avail. By the next day he was in
renal failure, and Tara was told the horse needed to be put down. I'd been so reluctant to deal with her that I'd asked Jim to make the call, and he'd reported that, as I'd expected, she'd blustered on and on about it being possibly my fault the horse was dying-which was palpably untrue, but par for the course with Tara.

  After sufficient reflection, it seemed, she'd decided she would be unlikely to win a suit against me, and so had elected to sue the former owner of the horse, on the grounds that JD had a chronic problem with tying up, and Reynolds had failed to reveal this to her. Unfortunately for her, I'd been Harvey's vet the whole time he'd had the horse, and this simply wasn't true. JD had colicked once, which Tara had heard about through the roper's grapevine, and she was ignorant enough to suppose that the two problems were interchangeable. In actual fact they were quite different, both medically and practically speaking, not to mention that a whole arena of people could attest to the fact that the horse had tied up because Tara had overridden him, and he had almost certainly died because she didn't quit riding him when his muscles started to stiffen.

  I'd been called into this ridiculous affair by both the principals. Tara seemed to expect that I would testify to the fact that the horse had died of tying up and that I had had to treat the horse for Harvey for the same condition. And Harvey, who knew good and well that the horse had colicked with him, not tied up, was expecting me to say so. Which I would. Tara wasn't going to like it. I just hoped she wouldn't resort to clawing my eyes out.

  By the time the courtroom was called to order it was nine-thirty and I was already tapping my foot impatiently. I was virtually drumming my fingers and toes an hour later; every party had been called except ours. When the place was empty but for the little contingent of ropers, the bailiff finally called Tara Hollister versus Harvey Reynolds and we all trooped up to stand in front of the judge's bench. As plaintiff, it was left to Tara to begin.

  She made a statement full of histrionics and pathos about how she had bought the horse in good faith, was devastated when it died, and aghast when she had heard from other ropers that the horse had tied up when Harvey owned him. She felt that Harvey should have disclosed this when he sold her the horse. There was lots more along these lines, all in a whiny pseudo-feminine tone that contrasted oddly with her gravelly cigarette smoker's voice.