The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat

by Claudia Bishop

  “You know what’s not going to be hopeful? That tax assessor’s future ability to bear children, that’s what’s not going to be hopeful.” Madeline’s eyes are a deep sapphire; when she is irked, they turn navy blue. On these very rare occasions, it’s wise to give the woman room to breathe.

  Joe and Allegra exchanged glances. “Well,” Allegra said brightly, “I’m off duty today, so I think I’ll go out and school Tracker for a bit.”

  “And since we’ve got a barn call to make, maybe we’d better get a move on, Doc.” Joe shoved himself to his feet and began to clear the table.

  “Excellent idea, my boy,” I said. “Unless, my dear, you need me here to fight the good fight for you?”

  “Oh, no, darlin’,” Madeline said with an exceptionally sweet smile. “I’m takin’ care of this myself!”

  Two

  AT some time during the course of our first farm call that morning, a person or persons unknown coshed Melvin Staples, the milk inspector, over the head and dumped the body into the four-hundred-gallon bulk tank at the Tre Sorelle Dairy.

  I was not to discover this fact until later.

  And Cases Closed, Inc., was not to take on its third case of murder until later still.

  But I am getting ahead of my story.

  We left Lincoln at home, under the cool of the willow that hangs over the pond, and Joe and I were on the road at 9:45 precisely. The first of our two barn calls was a progress check on two cases of mastitis at the Crawford Dairy; the second a follow-up on a case of founder at the Swinford Vineyard. I confess to being quite at home in the environs of a professional operation like the Crawford Dairy. Abel Crawford milks more than five hundred cows and ships a little less than three thousand pounds of milk a day. The place is efficiently run, the animals well treated, and the veterinary bill promptly paid. Both human and bovine employees are happy. Madeline says that such farms are my natural milieu.

  She is far less sanguine about my attitude toward the ill-equipped hobby farmer. My wife knows me well. In the face of such clients as Jonathan and Penelope Swinford, I tend to lose my aplomb.

  I apprised Joe of this as we pulled into the drive leading up to the Swinford barns. “You will discover, my boy, that the amateur farmer can create holy havoc with his animals, with the best of intentions.”

  Joe looked around and whistled in appreciation. “Some amateur,” he said. The winery was one of many such that have sprung up in the Finger Lakes area within the past fifteen years. As the reputation of our grapes spreads worldwide, growers are buying up local farms and transforming them into showplaces like this one. The winery itself sits at the top of a high hill to the right of the house and barn. It resembles an elegant ship, with the prow hanging over the lip of hill. Visitors to the tasting room have an unparalleled view of the rich valley of grapes below.

  On this Saturday morning, the August heat lay like a comforter over the vines, concentrating the sweetness in the fruit. It was a lush and welcome view.

  The house was an expensive reproduction of a nineteenth-century Carpenter Gothic. The barn was straight out of the glossier ads in Equus: a copper cupola topped the cedar shake roof; the four stalls each debouched to neatly fenced paddocks; flowerbeds alive with marigolds, geraniums, and lavender surrounded the whole.

  It was all very pretty.

  A brand-new four-horse specialty trailer was parked at the far end of the outdoor arena.

  It was all very expensive.

  “Oh, the vineyard itself does very well. Swinford knows his grapes. He makes a tolerable red zinfandel and an extremely fine Chardonnay. If his wife and daughter had as much knowledge of horse care as the family does of oenology, we wouldn’t be here at all.”

  Joe flipped through the file. “You and Ally saw the mare Sunny on Monday. Diagnosis was laminitis secondary to overfeeding.”

  “Correct.” I set the emergency brake, got out of the vehicle, and retrieved my case from the trunk. I headed toward the barn. Joe followed me, still absorbed in the case file.

  “You treated the animal with anti-inflammatories. Hey, this is the third visit in six days.” He looked up, a slight frown creasing his brow. Joe is tall and skinny. His skinniness is deceptive, as he is quite muscular. “What’s going on? It should have resolved itself by now if it was just because the mare got into the feed bin.”

  “Correct,” I said again. We walked to the barn, and I pulled the main door open. A blast of cold air met us. Joe’s jaw dropped. “It’s air-conditioned?”

  I made no response to the obvious. Instead, I called out, “Halloo!” and Penelope Swinford came out of the tack room.

  Penelope would benefit from a month or two of Madeline’s cooking. She is skinny, and she was dressed in immaculate breeches, paddock boots, and a white sleeveless shirt that smelled faintly of bleach. Her hair was white blonde and roached as short as any filly’s for the summer. “Dr. McKenzie!” she said. “I am so glad to see you! Ally’s not with you today? She gets on so well with Sunny! But of course, you do, too!” She smiled at Joe. “I take it this is your other assistant?”

  Joe reached out and shook her hand firmly. “Joe Turnblad, Mrs. Swinford.”

  “Delighted to meet you, Joe.” Penelope turned to me. “Ashley’s just up at the house. They sent her home from work today, of course. I mean, you heard about the trouble at Tre Sorelle.”

  I was not interested in any trouble at the dairy. Wherever Doucetta Capretti wielded that goat-headed cane, there was bound to be trouble. “I’d like to see the horse,” I said.

  “Oh! Sure! Of course! Sunny’s not doing too well, I’m afraid. I suppose it’s just as well that Ashley’s home today so she can talk to you directly. I’ll give her a call and get her down here. Come into the tack room for a moment.” We followed her into the lavishly appointed room, which I, of course, had seen, and Joe had not. There was a small but well-equipped kitchen. A sectional couch sat in front of wall-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the outdoor arena. The wall opposite the windows was hung with two Steuben saddles, sleek leather bridles, and turnout blankets embroidered with the initials APS.

  Penelope buzzed the intercom, chirped brightly into it, then turned to us. “She’ll be right down, Dr. McKenzie.” She gestured toward the kitchenette. “Can I get you some iced tea? Or coffee?”

  All this opulence made me testy. “And the mare?”

  “Oh! Of course. Please come this way.”

  The Swinfords had four horses, an Arab, a Throughbred-Quarterhorse cross with superb hunter conformation, and two Hackney ponies. All were expensive. All were immaculately groomed. All were unexercised, overfed, and had the temperaments of spoiled children.

  Sunny was one of the two Hackney ponies. She stood cautiously in the middle of a pile of pristine cedar shavings. I had ordered a strict reduction in feed. Founder is a real danger to a fat horse, and Sunny was still as fat as a Duroc sow. As I approached, she pinned her ears flat against her head, and swung around her hind end. It is the supreme irony of a veterinarian’s life that—just like people and dentists—your patients sometimes loathe the sight of you. Sunny was eager to kick me from here to kingdom come.

  “Sunny!” Penelope said, as one would to an overindulged baby. “How’s my girl today?” She put her hand in her pocket and withdrew a granola bar. “Here’s a treat for my girl.”

  “Stop!” I roared.

  Penelope, Joe, and the horse all jerked to attention. I took the granola bar, broke it into pieces, and threw it into a nearby garbage tote. In a considerable state of irritation, I said to Joe, “The twitch, if you please.”

  Joe removed the twitch from the carryall and followed me into the stall. The twitch is one of the most basic and useful tools available to the veterinarian. Mine is constructed of a length of soft leather—actually, any soft, pliable rope will do—and one pinches it around the animal’s upper lip. It operates quite well to get a badly behaved animal’s attention. Joe applied the twitch to Sunny’s muzzle. H
e is deft, and he is fast. Sunny didn’t have to time to do more than sneeze and give me an evil grin.

  I bent to examine the mare’s hooves. “Laminitis is an extremely painful condition of the horse hoof, Mrs. Swinford,” I said. “The blood pools in the hoof, and there is nowhere for it to go. Imagine, if you will, that you have whacked your thumbnail with a hammer. And then you have to walk on it.”

  “Oh.” Penelope shuddered.

  Sunny rolled a cranky eye at me.

  “I do see that you have been giving her the bute,” I said. “She isn’t in pain, although with these feet, she should be. That’s good.” I dropped Sunny’s left fore and picked up the right. Then I pinched a roll of fat on the mare’s barrel. “You have been feeding her grain and hay, have you not? This mare hasn’t dropped an ounce since I saw her last.” I pulled at my mustache in frustration. “That’s very bad. As a matter of fact, it is close to criminal.”

  Penelope peered at me over the stall door. “But she’s starving. Surely just a quart or two of grain can’t hurt.”

  “Absolutely not!” I roared. “You will load this horse up and deliver her to my clinic. Instantly!”

  “Yes, Dr. McKenzie.”

  “And you will not give her one ounce of feed of any kind!”

  “Yes, Dr. McKenzie.”

  I stepped back from the mare and nodded at Joe. He released the twitch. Sunny sneered at me, then nudged at my pockets, presumably looking for sugar. I stepped into the aisle. “You can pick her up in three weeks or so. And I warn you, there is going to be a considerable farrier bill. It’s a certain bet that the sole on the left fore has rotated, and the hoof will have to be trimmed and shod with speciality shoes.”

  “Yes, Dr. McKenzie. Of course, the cost is not a problem. We love Sunny. She was Ashley’s first pony.”

  “You are loving her to death, madam. If you need help loading the pony up, Joe will give you a hand.”

  “You mean right now, Dr. McKenzie?”

  “If not sooner.”

  “Hey, Doc. Hey, Ma. What’s going on?”

  Ashley trotted into the barn like an Afghan hound on parade at Crufts: long, lean, and blonde. She flipped her hair and batted her eyelashes at Joe. “How’s Sunny doing?”

  “Dr. McKenzie’s taking her to the hospital, honey,” Penelope said. “The treatment he’s been giving her here just doesn’t seem to be helping.”

  I bit my mustache. “It is the treatment you are giving her, madam, that—”

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you around before,” Joe interrupted. “Ashley, is it?”

  “There is a great deal too much of her to see at the moment,” I pointed out. The child was dressed—half dressed—in a top that ended far short of her belly button and a pair of shorts not up to the job of covering her buttocks.

  Joe put his hand on my shoulder. “Joe Turnblad, Ashley,” he said, extending his hand. He shoved me gently aside. It is not at all like the boy to be rude. Perhaps I was being a bit testier than necessary. Madeline occasionally reminds me that human beings deserve the same sort of consideration one gives one’s animal patients.

  “Hey, Joe,” Ashley said. “I know I haven’t seen you around before.” She wriggled in front of her mother. The two of us withdrew to the side, while Joe and Ashley circled around one another. It reminded me of the ritual mating dance of the bowerbird.

  “Is Sunny going to be okay, Dr. McKenzie?” Penelope asked anxiously. “I’d just die if anything happens to her.”

  I frowned. The woman loved the horse, that was clear. But she had to understand that the animals are not children in horse suits. “Madam,” I said. “How would you fare if your routine was to walk twenty miles a day, eating plain, low-protein grass at twenty-minute intervals, drinking five gallons of water a day from untreated streams, sleeping standing up?”

  “Me?” She blinked rapidly. “I guess I’d starve to death.”

  “I guess you would. But that, Penelope, is an ideal life for a horse. Movement. Grass. Fresh air. Water from the stream. You are killing your animals with kindness. Get rid of the air-conditioning! If you must keep the animals in a stall, at least keep a rational amount of manure in the shavings. Not a lot—but a small sufficiency. Keeping the stalls this clean dries out the hoof. Better yet…” I threw my arm in a wide circle. “Put the animals outside where they belong! Otherwise your horses will be…”

  “Deader than a doornail,” Ashley said in a thrilling voice. “Honest to God. Right there in the bulk tank.”

  The mention of a corpse got my attention.

  “What did you say, my dear?”

  “You haven’t heard?” Penelope said. “Oh, my goodness. That poor milk inspector, Melvin somebody…”

  “Staples,” Ashley said. “And oh. My. God. What a hunk. It’s a shame, that’s what it is. I was, like, totally freaked out.”

  “Ashley found him stark-staring dead. My poor baby!” Penelope shuddered and drew her daughter close. Ashley shrugged her mother’s arm away with an absentminded pat of affection. Clearly, the discovery of Melvin Staples’s body, hunk or no, hadn’t discomposed her much.

  I smoothed my mustache. “How unfortunate for you, my dear. Please tell me what happened.”

  “It’s my summer job. I do, like, data entry for Mrs. Capretti. Anyhow, so I’m sitting at the computer keying in all this crap about pounds of milk per goat and I hear a whack-bang!”

  She paused. All eyes were on her.

  “It came from the milk room. So I get up and I go over to the door and pull it open a little bit. It’s a big, heavy door, you know, so I tug it open a little bit more and I see the door at the other end of the room closing, like.”

  “Closing like what?” I asked.

  Ashley blinked at me. If I hadn’t known for a fact she was an honors student in economics at Ithaca College, I would have thought her handicapped. Madeline tells me I have little empathy for the young. “With a bang?” I said impatiently. “Or softly, as if someone were sneaking out?”

  “That’s a big, heavy door with a counterweight. You can’t bang it shut. It closes in its own sweet time.”

  “I see. And then?”

  “And then I go into the room and look around.” She mimed tiptoeing about, looking from side to side. “And it was like I was guided. I mean, I just went to the tank and pulled open the lid and there he was. Splooshing around in the milk. We had to dump the whole batch,” she added briskly. “Mrs. C. pitched a screaming fit.”

  “And then what happened?” Joe asked. He was gazing at the girl in fascination.

  “Then I went, ‘Wow.’ And then I went and got Mrs. Capretti and Mrs. Celestine and they called the cops and they sent me home.”

  “Any indication of the cause of death?” I asked.

  Ashley shrugged. “There was a big dent in his head. The milk was pink from the blood. But I suppose they’ll have to wait for the autopsy to know for sure.”

  Law & Order has much to answer for. The young seem to know a great deal about the processes of criminal investigations. “A big dent in his head,” I repeated. “Well. It’s unlikely that Mr. Staples opened the tank hatch, smacked his head against the rim, and fell into the tank, isn’t it?”

  “Golly,” Penelope said. “Who knew dairies were so dangerous?”

  Her daughter looked at her with affectionate contempt. “Gee, Mom. Maybe it was, like, murder. D’ya think?”

  “DEATH of a milk inspector,” Joe said. “It sure sounds like murder to me.”

  We were back at the clinic. The pony Sunny rambled painfully around our indoor arena, which has a soft floor of sand, shavings, and recycled rubber. She would have one thin flake of very dry hay twice a day for the next two weeks and all the water she could drink. I wanted to knock at least one hundred pounds from that pudgy frame. As I had thought, the X-ray of the left fore revealed a slight rotation of the coffin bone, and as soon as the inflammation in the hooves died down, our farrier would begin the slow process of resh
aping the hoof. With luck, she’d be sound for light hacking, but only time would tell.

  Lincoln was at my side, keeping a sapient eye on the pony’s behavior. We have three horses of our own: Ally’s Tracker, Andrew, my elderly Quarterhorse, and a Shetland named simply Pony. Horses are herd animals, and they prosper only in the company of others. As Sunny became more comfortable, she would join the others for company. For now, Lincoln himself was on the job. From the way she bared her teeth at the collie, she didn’t see it as a privilege.

  “Murder, indeed.” I turned my attention from the pony’s problems to those of the late milk inspector, Melvin Staples. We had done all we could for the pony. Now it was time to do what we could for the deceased.

  “He didn’t drown without help,” a voice behind me said. I turned to see Simon Provost leaning against the arena wall, arms folded across his chest. The Summersville chief of detectives is a man of modest demeanor and a deceptively mild expression. I greeted him with pleasure.

  “Simon! I had intended to look you up. And here you are. This is fortuitous.”

  “You got a minute, Doc?”

  “I do,” I said cordially. “Shall we repair to the office?”

  I had purchased the thirty-acre farm called Sunny Skies some forty years ago, when I had first come to Cornell as an associate professor. The barns, the indoor arena, and the paddocks were the primary attraction. It was only upon my marriage that the house and gardens began to flourish into the comfortable place that they are today, under the attentions of my wife. The outbuildings have always been splendid. The barn has twelve stalls, attached at an L to the large indoor arena. The clinic is housed in the former tack room. It is well, if modestly, equipped. There is a small office, where I receive the occasional client, a room and a toilet in back, where Joe makes his quarters, and a operating-cum-examination room with a clinic chemical analyzer, an X-ray machine, and various other necessities I picked up as Cornell shed equipment outdated for its purposes.