Stand Up and Die

by Frances Lockridge

  Captain Heimrich wore glasses as he read the Times. He was a broad man and a solid one. His face appeared, now as he read and ate, to be a carving from some hard and darkened wood. He finished his coffee, neatly rearranged the Times and then dropped it into a waste-paper basket. He folded the paper in which his sandwich had been wrapped and dropped the neat square in the basket with the Times.

  A uniformed trooper, young, properly wedge-shaped, walked to the desk Heimrich occupied and stood in front of it, his stance military. He said, “Sir.”

  “Yes?” Heimrich said.

  “The sergeant said I should take it up with you, captain,” the trooper said. “He says there’s nothing to it, but take it up with you if I want to. My name’s Crowley, captain. Brewster sub-station. About this thing at the Landcraft place, sir.”

  Heimrich merely shook his head.

  “It was in the papers,” Crowley said. “Nothing much. I’ve got it here some place. On page ten of the Times.” He reached toward his hip pocket. Heimrich reached into the waste-paper basket and retrieved the Times. He turned to page ten. “There,” Crowley said, and pointed. Heimrich read:

  BULL TRAMPLES BREEDER

  Brewster Woman Hurt Fatally

  by Enraged Angus

  He read on. The dateline was Brewster, New York. He read:

  “Mrs. Margaret Landcraft, widely known breeder of Aberdeen Angus cattle and owner of Deep Meadow Farm three miles north of this Putnam County village, was fatally injured late tonight when a prize bull, supposedly gentle, trampled her in its stall in one of the farm barns.

  “The accident occurred during a buffet supper Mrs. Landcraft was giving prior to the annual sale at Deep Meadow Farm, which was to have been held tomorrow. More than a hundred persons, including Mrs. Landcraft’s two sons, were within sight of the barn in which the accident occurred. Several, including the sons, Harvey and Wade Landcraft, ran to the scene when they heard the bull bellowing violently, but arrived only to find Mrs. Landcraft dead in the animal’s stall.

  “The animal was generally considered harmless, according to Wade Landcraft, who assisted his mother in operation of the farm, and Alec Ballard, the farm manager. What caused it to turn on its owner is unknown.”

  Heimrich finished reading and took off his glasses. He looked at Trooper Crowley.

  “Regrettable, naturally,” Heimrich said. “But we can’t arrest the bull, can we?”

  The younger man flushed slightly. “No sir,” he said. “The sergeant mentioned that, captain.”

  “I’m sure he did.” Heimrich closed his eyes momentarily. He opened them. “Go ahead, Crowley.”

  “I know the bull,” Crowley said. “Went around with Dad once to look at him. Wanted to see a cow worth eighty thousand dollars.”

  “Um-m,” Heimrich said. “That much?”

  “More, probably,” Crowley said. “It’s insured for that much. I understand it’s as high as you can go. The Deep Meadow Angus are famous, captain.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “He’s a damn big animal, captain,” Crowley said. “Weighs a ton anyway—more, probably. Got very short legs and no horns. Maybe you know that, sir?”

  Heimrich shook his head.

  “Black Angus are beef animals,” Crowley said. “My father runs a dairy farm, but he’s interested in Angus. Only—you’ve got to have a kind of money we haven’t got.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “Dad sells hay to Deep Meadow sometimes,” Crowley said. “I went there with him once, and he showed me this bull. Dad went into his stall, pushed him and said, ‘Move over, Prince,’ and Prince just moved over. Dad said to come on in and look him over and I said, ‘Not me.’ Dad laughed and said he knew kittens that were more dangerous, that Prince wouldn’t hurt a fly—or, he guessed, anything but a fly. Then when Dad heard about his being supposed to have trampled Mrs. Landcraft—well, he said he didn’t think it was possible.” Crowley paused. “Dad knows animals, captain.”

  Heimrich tapped the newspaper. “The bull bellowed,” he said. “They found Mrs. Landcraft in the stall. Somewhat—battered, I gather.”

  “He’d—well, it looked as if he’d walked on her, captain. She was—all crushed. Broken. She was a big woman. Big and strong. And—she knew animals too. Prince especially.”

  “I don’t know animals,” Heimrich said. “It seems to me I’ve heard bulls are not to be trusted. That they’ll be gentle one minute and berserk the next.”

  Crowley nodded. “That’s what they say.”

  “But?”

  “Well,” Crowley said, and hesitated. “I suppose that was it. Only—well, Dad knows a lot about cattle, captain. If he says Prince is gentle—well—”

  “Apparently he killed this woman.”

  Crowley nodded.

  “The doctor’s satisfied?”

  Crowley nodded again.

  “The bull killed her,” he said. “I guess there’s no doubt about that. I suppose it’s just the way it looks. All right, sir. I’ll—”

  But Captain Heimrich had closed his eyes. He made a slight movement of one hand, and Crowley waited. Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “I suppose somebody could stir up the most gentle animal,” he said. “Goad him. That’s what your father thinks?”

  “Yes,” Crowley said. “That is—he’s got no way of knowing.”

  “The county people are satisfied, I take it?”

  “Yes sir. Seem to be, anyway.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Aside from your father’s conviction the bull’s gentle, is there something else, Crowley? You know these people, naturally. You know what I mean.”

  “Well,” Crowley said, “I can’t say I know them, captain. Just met them. Somebody banged up their mailbox—went along for a couple of miles banging up all the mailboxes. You know how it is. I met Mrs. Landcraft then. She was pretty sore.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You find out who did it, Crowley?”

  Crowley shook his head.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t suppose you had. You know the sons?” He checked with the Times. “Wade and Harvey? They live there?”

  Wade did; Harvey lived in New York. Crowley thought that Harvey—the elder of the two—visited the farm only occasionally. “Got a wife doesn’t like the country much, from what I hear,” Crowley said. “Show girl they say she is. On television.”

  Heimrich smiled faintly, for the most part inwardly. Things got around in the country. A good trooper absorbed, hardly knowing he did so. Crowley was on his way, apparently, to becoming a good trooper. Heimrich nodded.

  “Wade’s planning to marry the Merritt girl,” Crowley said. “Nice people, the Merritts. Been in the county a long time. Almost as long as the Wades.”

  “Wades?”

  “Mrs. Landcraft was a Wade.”

  The bull was not alone in having pedigree, Heimrich thought, and did not say. Instead, he said he gathered there was no older male Landcraft. Mrs. Landcraft had been a widow? Or divorced?

  She had been a widow; the widow of John Hamilton Landcraft, and at the name Heimrich nodded. It was little more than a name to him, but it was to some degree a name to almost everyone. Landcraft had been a corporation lawyer of renown and, presumably, of high fees. Crowley told what he knew, starting with that.

  John—John Hamilton—Landcraft had bought Deep Meadow Farm some forty years before and taken up the breeding of Aberdeen Angus, more or less as a hobby. He must have had a good deal of money; as a hobby the breeding of pedigreed cattle can come high. Shortly after buying the farm, he had married Margaret Wade, the daughter of a neighbor, and then in her early twenties. Landcraft himself must have been forty.

  “This was all before my time,” Crowley said. “But you pick things up. You know how it is, sir.”

  Heimrich nodded to that.

  Landcraft and his wife had lived on the farm, expanding the herd slowly, for some twenty-five years. A great deal of money had gone into the farm, but Landcraft appar
ently was making plenty. They had produced, in addition to prize cattle, two sons. Then, in his late sixties, when Mrs. Landcraft was around fifty, Landcraft had died. That would be—“oh, about a dozen years ago. I was a kid and I remember watching the funeral. Biggest one we’d ever had around there.”

  Mrs. Landcraft had continued to run the farm. Wade had gone to Cornell, taking the agricultural course. Harvey, the elder, had gone to Dartmouth.

  “Still plenty of money,” Heimrich said.

  Crowley hesitated. He said, then, that he supposed so.

  “At a guess,” he said, “it’s mostly tied up in the place. You don’t get cattle like that for peanuts. The whole shebang costs plenty to run. They’ve got farm trucks and a couple of station wagons but Mrs. Landcraft drove around mostly in a 1950 Plymouth. Good car and all that but—well, most of the people around there—people with big places—go in for Cadillacs. You get the picture, sir?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. This time he did not immediately reopen them, and when he spoke it was not in direct answer to Crowley’s question, which at the moment was, in any case, unanswerable.

  “When you come down to it,” he said, “all you’ve got’s a hunch. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  The good-looking young man flushed under his tan. He said, “O.K., sir. Sorry I took your time,” and started to stand up. Heimrich opened his eyes, then.

  “Now Crowley,” he said. “Sit down. What’s wrong with having a hunch?”

  Crowley sat down, but he shook his head.

  “A good deal of the job’s in having hunches,” Heimrich said. “Get a hunch, check up on hunch. You see some men in a car and something doesn’t look right. Just a hunch. So you check up. Most of the time, everything is right, naturally. Sometimes it isn’t. You work that way?”

  “Oh,” Crowley said, “sure.”

  “Sure,” Heimrich repeated. “So do I. You’ve got a hunch there’s something wrong with this Landcraft setup. The bull’s too gentle. But there’s something more. What is it?”

  Crowley shook his head again.

  “Now trooper,” Heimrich said. “Think.”

  Crowley appeared to. He spoke hesitantly.

  “Nearly as I can say it,” he said, “it’s the wrong thing to have happened to her—the wrong kind of thing. You—well, you just can’t figure her having an accident.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “She was a big woman,” Crowley said. “Bigger than most men. And—she seemed to sort of run things, if you know what I mean. Be in charge of them. You figure—oh, with some people a car’s going to get away from them, or a ladder’s going to break, or a knife slip. Some people—” He stopped. He shrugged. He looked at Heimrich, and Heimrich, his eyes wide open now, nodded. “Hell,” Crowley said, “you just wouldn’t figure an accident would have the nerve to happen to Mrs. Landcraft.”

  Heimrich nodded again. But he said, “Of course, a bull isn’t exactly an accident, in that sense. But I see what you mean. She sounds like a forceful woman.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes, in passive rejection of a locution he found trying.

  “Difficult to live with, probably,” he said.

  “About that, I don’t know, sir,” Trooper Crowley said. “Like I said, I only met her a couple of times. But maybe—well, they say she did have run-ins with some of the people around here. Nothing serious. You know the sort of thing. Nothing anybody would get really—well, sore about. Anyhow, not sore enough to—” He stopped.

  “Stir up the animals,” Heimrich said. “In this case, literally. But—you’ve a hunch someone did. Your father has. You’d—what? Been expecting something?”

  “If I was, I didn’t know it,” the trooper said. “Maybe. But—”

  “But not this,” Heimrich said. “Not an accident in a bull pen.” He paused. “I can’t recall,” he said, “ever having heard of murder by bull. Rather an interesting notion. Not that there’s anything to go on, naturally. The sheriff’s satisfied, you say? The D. A.?”

  “Yes,” Crowley said.

  “But,” Heimrich said, “you had to have a hunch. I’d have started a few days’ leave”—he looked at his watch—“half an hour ago. Sergeant Forniss, who works with me, has already started his.” He looked at Crowley, with slight reproach.

  Crowley started to say he was sorry, but Heimrich shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’d rather like to see this bull that’s so damn gentle.”

  He got up. He was a very solid man.

  “You may as well come along with me, Crowley,” he said. “Maybe you’ll have another hunch.”

  III

  They had been polite at Carmel, the county seat. The district attorney had been polite; the medical examiner had been polite. There had been hardly anything in the attitude of either, or of the detectives of the district attorney’s office, to indicate a suspicion that Captain M. L. Heimrich, of the criminal identification division of the New York State Police, had taken leave of his senses. If he was not satisfied with the obvious facts, the fullest cooperation of everyone would, naturally, be offered—was offered, then and there. But, the facts were obvious.

  “She went into the stall—it’s really a pen—with this big bull,” the district attorney explained, and he was patient. “The bull was loose in the stall. You know what bulls are, captain. Anybody’s crazy who trusts a bull.”

  This particular bull, Heimrich pointed out, mildly, was supposed to be gentle. He didn’t, he added, know much about bulls. He could not remember that, in his experience, bulls had previously come up.

  “Everybody knows you can’t trust a bull,” the district attorney said. “Maybe they act gentle, sure. Maybe they’re gentle for a long time. Then they turn and gore you. While back, a farmer around here was damn near killed by a bull he’d raised from a calf. It used to follow him around. Hell, it used to try to follow him into the house and when it couldn’t it’d stand outside and cry. That’s what they say, anyhow. So, one day when the bull was three, four years old, it turned on the man and knocked him down and gored him. Put him in the hospital for months.” He regarded Heimrich; he spoke with finality. “That’s the way bulls are, captain,” he said. “You can’t trust them.”

  Heimrich nodded. He’d heard that, naturally. No doubt it was true. Was Mrs. Landcraft gored?

  “Well,” the district attorney said, “no, she wasn’t. She was just sort of—well, crushed. You know why that was, captain? The bull hasn’t got any horns. That’s the only reason. He did all right without them.”

  “You raise cattle yourself?” Heimrich asked, and was looked at with astonishment.

  “Good God no,” the district attorney said. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Heimrich agreed that it had probably nothing to do with anything.

  “Young Crowley’s just proving what a smart cop he is,” the district attorney said. “But it’s up to you, captain. As I said, we’ll cooperate.” He paused. “Fully,” he said. “Just bring us something.” He smiled, faintly, at his own words. Heimrich went to talk to the doctor who had examined what remained of Mrs. Margaret Landcraft, recently so resolute.

  “Crushed,” the doctor said, succinctly. “A ton of bull leaned on her. Knocked her down and trampled her. From the looks, he might have rolled on her. She might as well have been pushed against a brick wall by a truck.”

  “The bull was supposed to be gentle,” Heimrich said.

  “I heard that story,” the doctor said. “Also, I saw what he did to the woman. Maybe he had been and—well, went bad. That happens, you know. Stallions. Bulls. As a matter of fact, even tomcats. Friend of mine had a cat for years. Nice, friendly cat. All at once, it turned savage and clawed my friend up. Had to have it killed. Just as they will this bull, probably. Remember, when they used to use work cattle, they turned them into oxen.”

  Probably he was right. Males did, sometimes, grow more deadly as they grew old
er. Did the doctor know whether this bull had been getting along in years?

  The doctor did not. All he knew about the bull was that he was black, and low-slung, and apparently had got his owner in a corner and killed her. That was what he had been told, anyway. The body had been removed from the stall when he saw it. He understood that somebody—he thought a photographer from some magazine or other—had taken a picture before the body was removed. Although what he planned to do with it, the doctor couldn’t guess. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You didn’t find anything that was out of line? No injuries the bull might not have caused?”

  “She wasn’t shot, or stabbed or poisoned,” the doctor said. “I take it that’s what you have in mind?”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes briefly. “I haven’t anything in mind. I’m told the bull was gentle. Always had been. Crowley’s father knows cattle, the boy tells me.”

  “Listen,” the doctor said, “there was a man around here—a man who knew cattle as well as Crowley does—who practically brought a bull calf up by hand. Then one day—”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I heard. You didn’t notice anything out of the way?”

  “She was dead,” the doctor said. “She was alive when the bull started on her. She died, primarily any way, of a crushed chest. The bull killed her.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Well.”

  He stood up.