The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat

by Claudia Bishop

  “Excuse me,” I said. “I need to spend just a few minutes with Gordon.”

  “Hello, Doc,” he said glumly as I approached the bar. “Sit down and have a cold one.”

  “It’s a bit early in the day, thank you.” I settled onto a stool. “Although I will have a cup of coffee, Deirdre.”

  “Heard you were out to the dairy this morning,” Gordy said. He was a big, rubicund fellow with the remnants of blond hair in a fringe around his scalp. His usually jovial manner was absent.

  “I was, indeed.”

  He consumed half of his Rolling Rock in one swig. “Rita’s gonna be on me like flies on a dead raccoon.”

  “Ah, yes.” It was an election year. In less than three month’s time, Gordy’s tenure as town supervisor would be either renewed or not.

  “He came recommended, you know.”

  “Brian Folk,” I said.

  “I’ve been catching a lot of heat. Nicky Ferguson kind of fell down on the job, if you catch my drift.” He tapped the beer bottle. “Couple of these, and Nicky’d kind of look the other way. Say you put one of those aboveground pools in for the grandkids. After a beer or two, Nicky didn’t think that’d add much to the total tax package so he’d overlook it. This Brian Folk had a whole different attitude. You put a couple of gnomes in the front garden and, blam, you’re looking at a six percent increase.”

  “And Folk was recommended by whom?”

  “By who, Doc,” he said with a kindly air, “recommended by who.”

  “The preposition is the object of the sentence,” I said rather testily, “and the proper case is the dative.”

  Gordy blinked at me, as if I’d been speaking a language other than our own. “Is that a fact?”

  “It is not a fact, as such; it is a rule of language. And where did you find Brian Folk?”

  “He did a good job over to Covert. They were in the same kind of spot we are. The assessments were way behind the increase in house prices. Brian—he didn’t care who you were or how many beers you gave him—he’d up the price on the house of Jesus Christ himself. And the town needs the tax revenue, Doc. No question about it. If we want to keep our streets clear of snow, the garbage picked up, the old folks home running the right way, we got to have the budget to do it. I know people don’t like it, but where will we be at if we don’t wake up to the facts?”

  “I voted for you in the last election, and I’ll vote for you again, Rassmussen. I think you’re a responsible politician, all things considered. I also think you’re ducking my question. Who urged Folk on you?”

  “It was that one up at the dairy.”

  “Tre Sorelle? The goat dairy?”

  “Yeah. Frank Celestine.”

  I excused myself from the rest of lunch and hastened down to Provost’s office. He was in. And he was very interested in what I had to tell him.

  The police station in Summersville has one cell. It is carpeted and it has a television. Its floor-to-ceiling bars face Provost’s office. Simon and I walked across the hall to the cell and looked in. Celestine stared sullenly back.

  “For heaven’s sake, why?” I said. “Why did you urge Rassmussen to hire a tax assessor who would up the appraisal on your own mother-in-law? And why did Gordy follow your recommendation?” (What remained unspoken was why anyone would follow up on a recommendation made by Frank Celestine. The man was a notorious slacker.)

  “I imagine there was a little quid pro quo, as far as Gordy was concerned.” Simon scratched the back of his head. “You offer to pave Gordy’s driveway, Celestine? Or maybe give the village a good price on fixing up the high school auditorium?”

  “It was just a freakin’ bit of business,” Celestine said. “And yeah, I lowballed the estimate on the high school.” He snickered. “Or at least Gordy thought I did. Made him look good to the board.” He had a high, unpleasant giggle and an annoying propensity to use it. “You should have seen Doucetta’s face when the assessment came in the mail. I was keeping an eye out for it, you know. Delivered it to her myself.”

  “And it was just to annoy your mother-in-law?”

  “Why not? She’s spent the last forty years annoying the heck out of me. No skin off my nose if the assessment goes up. Only person I know had the guts to face up to the old bat was Brian.” Frank sucked his teeth reflectively. “Had a lot of guts, Brian did.”

  Simon shook his head in disgust. The two of us went back into his office and sat in our usual spots: Simon behind his desk, and I in the one comfortable chair.

  “Good heavens,” I said. “Do you suppose we’ve discovered the murderer that easily?”

  “Wouldn’t that be nice and tidy. But no, Celestine’s alibi for the Folk murder is airtight.”

  “Surely not.”

  “Surely is. Last night, he was at the golf club bar until one, when it closed. He was soused to the gills, so the bartender dropped him off at Doucetta’s house about one thirty. The old lady came to the door herself. She got Celestine onto the couch in the living room and he passed right out. If Jim Airy’s right about how much booze the guy had, there’s no way he could have snuck out of the house and clocked Folk over the head. Just as a precaution, I got Liz Snyder over at the clinic to draw a blood sample to check Celestine’s resting alcohol rate. It’s been less than twenty-four hours since he started boozing. He’s probably still drunk, which explains maybe why he found dumping the body in the bulk tank to be such a laugh riot.”

  Alcohol remains in the system for up to thirty days. While not definitive, the resting rate would probably prove high enough to substantiate Celestine’s defense even without the witnesses at the golf club.

  “I suppose you’re going to let him go?”

  “Of course I have to let him go. I’ll charge him with moving the dead body—he admitted it, after all. But if he’s going to spend any time in jail, it’ll have to be the judge’s decision.”

  I smoothed my mustache. “This is proving to be a very interesting case, Provost.”

  “I could do with a lot less interesting and a few more suspects. Where the heck do we go from here?”

  “The sabotage,” I said. “That’s where we go. Folk wanted the dairy to stay in business. Someone else wanted to shut it down.”

  “What about this alleged connection between Folk and Staples?”

  “That is quite easily explained, now that we know the kind of malicious mischief Celestine has been fomenting. Do you have the forensics report?”

  “Right here.”

  I opened the file and pointed to the data listing the contents of Staples’s vehicle. “You see the uncontaminated milk sample that was taken from the front seat. There are two sets of fingerprints on it, Mel’s and someone who isn’t in the system. I’ll bet you a Friday night fish fry that those prints will be Folk’s. Doucetta is set on grieving that assessment. If the dairy’s not functioning, she’d have a fairly good stab at lowering the fair market value of the buildings. How much is a contaminated dairy worth commercially? Folk wanted Staples to send in clean samples.”

  “I’ll be dipped,” Simon said. “So. Let me get this straight. Somehow bozo over there”—he jerked his thumb in the direction of the cell—“falls in with Folk and sets him on his mother-in-law out of sheer malice.”

  “You’ve met the man. You know his reputation. Do you doubt that as a motive?”

  “No. I don’t doubt Celestine’s motive. But you’ve got to convince me that Folk wanted to play for some reason.” He stared up at the ceiling and, as was his habit, began to ruminate. “Let’s say you do. Let’s say we find out why Folk took this one step further and hooked up with Staples so that the so…so…”

  “Milk somatic cell count.”

  “Thanks. So that it would come back normal. So this little plan to aggravate Doucetta turns out to be a little more trouble than it’s worth. I dunno,” Simon said suddenly. This was a pattern I had noted in him before; he tended to argue with himself out loud. “I guess it makes sense if you l
ook at the characters involved. Folk was a single-minded little so-and-so. Took a lot of pride in sticking to his guns as an assessor. What’d Gordy say? You couldn’t bribe him for love or money. And not because he was honest, but because he had to be right? I can see that he’d go that extra step to try and get Mel to fake good results.” He slapped his knees with both hands. “Okay. If I have to buy this, I will.” He looked at me. “So I can see the malicious mischief angle. It doesn’t account for the murders. Does Folk kill Staples because he’s not playing along? That makes no sense to me. That’s a motive for a psycho and these guys are your garden-variety creeps, not psycho. And who killed Folk? And how come?”

  “There is the second, very curious element to this case that we have heretofore ignored.”

  “Heretofore, huh.” Provost sighed. “And that would be?”

  “Sabotage. You realize it took a fairly clever, determined person to burrow into that wall and use the wine spigot to pour pus down the pipe.”

  “Maybe you could not talk about pus so much.”

  “I haven’t talked about pus at all,” I protested. “In any event, I have a conjecture.”

  I paused. After a bit, Provost drummed his fingers on his desk. “Well?”

  “I think Staples and Folk just got in the way of the saboteur.”

  “Got in the way,” Simon repeated reflectively.

  “They stumbled onto a larger plot, and they were eliminated.”

  Provost nodded to himself. “Okay. Okay. That I can buy. So. The sabotage. Where do we start? I don’t even have a logical suspect pool.”

  “Greed. Lust. Revenge. An unholy triumvirate. But the triumvirate holds the key to this case. And we’ll begin with the remaining players. Has Doucetta annoyed her suppliers to the point of murder? We’ll put them on the list.” I hesitated, and then said, “We need to interview Neville, just to clear things up. And there is the Folk-Staples business connection. I have a strong feeling there may be motives there.”

  We drew up a list of suspects and divided it between us.

  “THE police department has asked us to look into all possible suspects connected with the dairy,” I said to the assembled members of Cases Closed, Inc. “It is absolutely essential that we know the movements of every person at Tre Sorelle on each day of each murder.

  “The lieutenant and his people are digging into Folk’s and Staples’s backgrounds. They have the resources to do this far better than we do.” I paused, diverted by a brief vision of Cases Closed, Inc., International with a global reputation and the resoures of the CIA. “For the moment, at any rate.

  “Now, Folk’s body was found on the seventh, but the medical evidence suggests that he was killed on the sixth. And we know that Staples was murdered where he stood, on the fourth of August. So we need charts! Data! Graphs!”

  “Sort of a ‘who’s-where,’” Ally said.

  “An excellent name for it,” I said. “We’ll add that to the company’s permanent procedures process.”

  “The who’s-where includes the herd manager and the barn help, doesn’t it?” Joe asked.

  “It most certainly does.”

  I was quite happy. The entire staff of Cases Closed was assembled in our living room: Joe, Allegra, Madeline, Lincoln, and myself included. We had a client, in the form of the Summersville Police Department. We had a case. Most important, we had a billing number and a place to send the invoice.

  “I can handle the barn help,” Allegra said. “I’m schooling Tracker with Ashley again tomorrow. She can help verify where the people who work there were during the day. She gets to work at eight and works until five. I’ll stop by the dairy, first. I’ll interview everyone, set up a chart, and then we can cross-check everybody’s whereabouts.” She looked doubtful. “I hope my Spanish is up to talking to the barn staff.”

  “Pietro and Tony are at least bilingual,” I said. “And they may have a little Spanish, as well. Perhaps they could be of assistance. And since they’ve only been in the country less than twenty-four hours, they are not suspects. I suggest you enlist their support.”

  “And me, Austin?” Madeline said.

  “If you can accompany Thelma in her meetings with anyone from Tre Sorelle, it’s possible we’ll come up with more data. I hope so. We’re short on facts at the moment. I will interview Marietta. She seems to have a bone to pick with the whole lot of them. She was unusually forthcoming about Doucetta’s tax dodges. Perhaps she could be encouraged to reveal even more.”

  “What about Caterina and the horrible Frank?” Allegra asked.

  I exchanged glances with Madeline. “We are going to ask Victor for some help with that,” I said. “He is a member of the selfsame golf club that offers liquor Celestine is unable to refuse. Madeline and I will go to dinner at the club with the Berglands tomorrow night. It’s something called Ladies Night. I understand that the Wednesday night dinner is Caterina’s only night free from her kitchen.”

  “And what about me, Doc?” Joe asked.

  “According to Ashley, Doucetta irked all of her suppliers in one way or another. I have a list of those who live locally.” I pulled the sheet from the file and handed it over to him. “You and I will double-team. We’ll interview as many as will talk to us.”

  “Hm,” Joe said. “The Bests are on here.”

  “They supply meat kids for the pate and sausage. We can’t let affection affect our responsibility to the case.”

  “They’re in their eighties!”

  “Doucetta Capretti is ninety-four, and she’s Provost’s chief suspect at the moment. Besides,” I said, descending from the lofty, “Phyllis knows all the gossip. It’s an excellent place to pick up leads.”

  “And so is the Swinford Vineyard?” Joe said. “I can’t believe anything they supply the dairy would lead to a blood feud.”

  “Jonathan supplies them with five cases of wine a month. And Doucetta in full spate would drive the pope to murder.”

  “And Dr. Tallant from the Pastures Green Clinic?” Joe’s eyebrows rose.

  “She must be eliminated as a suspect. We can’t play favorites, even though she is a fellow veterinarian. If Doucetta hasn’t paid the bill, that could be the beginning of some very poor relations indeed.” I sat back and drew breath. “It’s more than likely that one or all of these suppliers will be found to have reasonable alibis for the fourth and the night of the sixth. But as you know, one must approach the solution to a murder investigation in the same way that one approaches the diagnosis of a pathological condition. Collect all relevant data, assess—”

  “Doc?’ Ally said. “I don’t mean to interrupt you, but I’ve to get back to the barn and take another look at Tracker’s stifle. He seemed a little tender going to the left.”

  “And I need to get those canning jars from the cellar, sweetie,” Madeline said. “I’ll be into the tomatoes pretty soon, and I’m going to need them.”

  Joe got up from the leather couch where he had been taking notes. “Sorry, Doc, but I’m on duty tonight and I might as well get on to the barn check.”

  The room began to empty. “You are all sure that you all understand the basic process of our investigatory technique?” I called after them.

  There was a chorus of “yes!” as though they spoke as one.

  Lincoln put his paw on my knee and cocked his head inquiringly. “It is a unique approach to detection,” I said to him. “I’m thinking of submitting a paper to the Detective Quarterly.”

  Odie settled on my other knee, and they prepared to listen.

  Ten

  WITH the other members of the Cases Closed team galloping off in all directions, Joe and I set off the next morning to interview the suppliers to Doucetta’s dairy. It was Wednesday, the eighth of August. Tomorrow, Melvin Staples would have been dead close to a week. We were no closer to solving the mystery of his murder. Justice demanded that we apprehend the killer, and soon.

  More important, I wanted Cases Closed to get credit for bringing in
the perp. I had a feeling in my bones that the murders were linked to the dairy and not to any extracurricular criminal activities by the team of Folk and Staples. Provost, I knew, was convinced that he had successfully nudged me off the track of the real killer—and out of his hair. Our team would prove him wrong!

  The first potential suspects on our interview list were George and Phyllis Best, the owners and operators of Best’s Boers. The farm occupies one hundred acres overlooking the lake. They live in an old double-wide trailer. The barns are held together by spit and baling twine. But the Bests have been farmers for more than fifty years and have the healthiest, happiest goats I’ve ever seen. They were a happy, contented couple with happy, contented goats.

  “I find it really hard to believe that either one of the Bests is involved in murder,” Joe said as we drove up the winding hill to their tiny farm. “First of all, they’re really old. Second, they play Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus in the Christmas parade every year, and if they ever did do anything wrong, no Summersville jury would convict them. And I can’t see either one of them getting mad enough to murder anyone.”

  “You may be right,” I said amiably.

  When we pulled into the driveway of the farm, George Best was waving a twelve-gauge shotgun at a slick-looking couple in a Buick Park Avenue with New Jersey plates. We came to a stop next to the large shed that served the Bests as a kidding barn.

  “Good heavens!” I said and prepared to get out of the car.

  Joe grabbed my shoulder and held me back. “Let George know we’re here, first. He’s a little deaf, remember? We don’t want to startle him. And for God’s sake, stay out of the way of that shotgun!”

  Sensible advice. I rolled down the window and called out, “George! It’s Austin McKenzie.”

  George swung the twelve-gauge around in a circle that directed the muzzle at us. Joe and I ducked below the dash.

  “Dr. McKenzie!” That light, elderly voice belonged to Phyllis Best. Cautiously, I peered through the windshield. “George says he didn’t know it was you.” Her voice was drowned by the roar of the Park Avenue’s engine. The shotgun roared. The Buick whizzed by us in a cloud of dust and gravel. Joe leaned out of the passenger window and squinted at the rear license plate. The bumper sticker read “Lakeside Real Estate.” “Got it,” he said and scribbled the number on the receipt book.