“Just a glass of wine, thank you.” She was looking at Celestine with a kind of horrified fascination.
“And we’ll have another round,” Frank said. “Just ask old Jim for Frank’s usual.”
Victor jerked me toward the bar. There were several patrons ahead of us, so we joined the queue. “Who is that guy?” Victor hissed furiously. “Thelma’s about ready to slug him, and for once I don’t blame her. I’d like to slug him myself.”
“I told you this afternoon when I requested your assistance. He figures in my current case.”
“Your curr—you mean that damn fool detective agency?” Victor snorted. “I thought you were talking about some clinical problem you’re having with a patient.” He breathed heavily through his nose. “You’re going to owe me big-time after this, McKenzie.” His face was red with suppressed annoyance.
“You already owe me big-time,” I retorted. “And if you don’t calm down, you’re going to give yourself a stroke.”
“I’ll worry about my own arteries, thank you very much. And how do you figure I owe you the price of a piece of bubble gum, much less a couple of hours with the biggest turkey it’s ever been my misfortune to meet? The man’s totally put me off my feed.”
“You could stand to lose a few pounds,” I said somewhat unfeelingly. “As to your obligation—I have three words for you: Thelma. Inheritance. Cheese.”
Some of the high color left Victor’s face. “You mean Madeline putting Thelma on to that retail business.”
“I do.”
He looked thoughtful. We placed our order at the bar. As we wended our way back to the tables, drinks in hand, he muttered, “Fine. But we’re even now, right?”
“You were gone so long I thought you died and fell in!” Frank chortled.
We settled down to endure the meal. Between the shrimp starter and the salad, Frank boasted of cheating those customers befuddled enough to hire Celestine Builders for their building projects. Between the salad and the entrée, he told us Doucetta had an offer to buy the dairy from some big company out west, but that Doucetta had turned them down flat. In the course of noisily consuming the dessert, we learned that Doucetta refused to make a will, which was the only thing that kept him, Frank, from whacking the old lady upside the head. Madeline made valiant attempts to change the subject. Caterina was touchingly eloquent about the return of her sons, for example, but Frank kept dragging the conversation to his mother-in-law. The poor woman appeared to be his bête noire.
“The old bat’s just a superstitious peasant,” he said. “’Fraid if she makes her will, it’ll catch death’s eye or some kind of crap like that. So who gets the Capretti millions? The wife, here, and her stuck-up sister. I know the law. I checked it all out. The old lady goes toes up intestate, that’s what they call it, intestate, the money’s split between Cater-eeen-ah and that bat-brained Anna Luisa. The way I figure it, I stick around long enough, some of it’s bound to fall into my wallet.” He giggled and slurped the rest of his vodka.
“Frank,” Caterina said desperately, “maybe you’d like some coffee?”
“Shut up,” he said. He didn’t look at her, but leered at my wife, who was looking especially beautiful in the candlelight. “I’d like some of what Madeline’s having.”
Thelma and Victor stood it all the way through dessert. But as soon as the coffee had been served, they rose as one, flinging excuses at us with an air of throwing themselves from a sinking ship. Needless to say, Madeline remained gracious and smiling throughout.
“Okay, so it was worth it,” Madeline admitted as we made our way home. “Did you see the look Caterina gave him when he let it slip about the big offer for the dairy? But I swear I don’t know why Caterina puts up with him. I mean, she’s nice enough, but honestly, Austin, the man is just about intolerable.”
The torrent of rain had lessened to a drizzle. Somewhere in the distance, the fire alarms sounded; a consequence, I was sure, of the violent display of lightning from the storm. The roads were slick with rain, and I slowed to accommodate the poor conditions.
“I suppose Caterina’s faith has something to do with it,” I observed. “But having dinner with them was a horrible experience. I apologize for putting you through it.”
“The worst.” Madeline glanced at me and put her hand over mine. “What are you looking so pleased about, sweetie?”
I covered her hand with my own. “The very beautiful Marietta seems to be in the clear.”
“My goodness,” Madeline said, “you suspected her?”
“No one is excluded until the truth is uncovered,” I said, rather grandly. “The odious Frank is right; New York state law mandates the estate of the deceased to the next of kin. Spouse, sons and daughters, brothers, sisters. The law of inheritance goes straight down, stopping at the first line of family, so to speak. With a living aunt and mother, Marietta wouldn’t get a thing. If her motive was to shut the dairy down to force a sale and reap the benefit of the profits, we now know that it is a motive no longer.”
“So the list of suspects is narrowing,” Madeline said. “Thank goodness for that.”
We arrived home at about nine thirty, to find Joe and Allegra at the kitchen table, surrounded by sheets of paper and consumed with gloom.
“It looks like nobody did it,” Allegra said with exasperation as we walked in. “Look. Here’s the Staples’s murder. I made a time line down the x-axis of the chart, and the y-axis is the people at the dairy. The barn help went straight from the milking parlor to the cheesery. They have a bunch of stuff to do there every day and the routine doesn’t seem to vary much.
“You were right about Pietro and Tony.” She blushed a little. It was clear the boys had found it a delight to aid Allegra in her part of the investigation. “They helped me talk to them, and it’s pretty clear none of them were anywhere near the milk room between nine and nine thirty. The alibis for the Folk murder aren’t as tight, of course, because we aren’t sure what time he was killed the night before he was discovered, but they all sleep in the same three-bedroom house on the farm, and they swear they were together eating dinner, watching TV, like that.” She scowled at the papers. “So that leaves Mrs. Capretti, Marietta, Caterina and Frank, and Ashley herself. Mrs. Capretti was yelling at the rest of her family the morning of the Staples murder, and Ashley says she saw them all pouring out of the house once she ran outside and started screaming. She’s very sure about that.”
“And the night before the discovery of Folk’s body?” I asked.
“Caterina went to pick Pietro and Tony up at the airport. They got back around two. The flight was late. I checked, by the way, and it was. Marietta and Mrs. Capretti watched TV, they said, and they were there when the bartender from the club brought Mr. Celestine home.”
I sat next to Ally and perused the sheets myself. “According to the forensics report, the clumps of soil under Folk’s fingernails place him at the high school parking lot,” I said. “That’s twelve miles from the dairy. The murderer had to kill him there, and then transport him all the way to the compost pile in back of the goat barn. Whoever did it had to have at least an hour to make that trip.” I resisted the impulse to crumple to sheets into a ball and put them into the garbage disposal. Lincoln, sensing my frustration, pawed at me and barked.
“We’ll take a walk in a few moments, old fellow.”
“So, like I said, nobody did it.” Ally threw her hands up in the air in a theatrical gesture. “There weren’t any bodies, nope. It’s all an illusion.”
I leaned back in my chair. “There are two possibilities here. The first is that the two murders are totally unconnected. This is possible, but in my view, not probable. My initial theory was that the two men got in the way of the saboteur, and the saboteur eliminated them. If the sabotage and the murders are not related, the same theory holds. Folk knew who killed Staples and blackmailed him. Or her,” I added, to forestall protests from my wife and our young protégé. “In short, I believe there
is only one murderer.
“Now we do have three possible suspects in the Staples murder who are unconnected to the dairy. Jonathan Swinford has a possible motive if he discovered a relationship between his just-barely-of-age daughter and Staples.”
“Ashley and Staples?” Joe said. “That’s disgusting. He was what—thirty-five, thirty-six?”
I went on. ““Which brings us to the other motive. Jealousy.”
“Ashley said her father beat Melvin Staples up,” Ally said. “Now, she didn’t see it happen, but Mel said something to her about her father’s temper. And then the autopsy report showed those old bruises on his face.”
“Parental rage. Not precisely jealous, but close enough. We would consider Mrs. Staples, if she hadn’t been in Syracuse with her mother-in-law. And of course, there are the Brandstetters. The testimony of Anna Luisa’s downstairs neighbor is clear. Luisa was in that rented apartment twenty miles away all morning. The one without a verifiable alibi is Neville.”
Nobody looked at me. Then Ally said, in rather a small voice, “But he’s the client.”
“He is indeed.” I cleared my throat. Brandstetter was a friend and colleague. “This line of inquiry must be followed up. It’s essential that we discover more about Folk before we jump to any conclusions. Presumably, he has a wife, whom we shall interview, and the use of a part-time secretary courtesy of the village. I’ll start with the village.”
“I thought Lieutenant Provost was handling that end of the investigation,” Allegra said.
“He may have overlooked something.” I had an uncomfortable thought. What if Simon was right? What if the murders were connected to whatever nefarious hijinks the two had been up to?
“And what about the sabotage?” Joe asked.
Now, that was worse yet. I had a theory about the sabotage. “We had dinner tonight with the Celestines,” I began.
Ally looked at Joe. Solemnly, they both began to applaud. “We figured you deserve it after sitting through dinner with that jerk,” Joe said with a grin.
“Thank you. What I deserve, in fact, is another inch of Victor’s excellent Scotch.” I excused myself from the table, went to the small cabinet that serves us as a wine cupboard, and poured myself a healthy measure. I came back to the table and resumed my postulations.
“I was struck with Pietro and Tony’s loyalty to their mother when I first met them yesterday,” I said. “They are quick to defend her from their skunk of a father. Tonight we heard how loving a mother Caterina is to her sons. I believe, in short, that Caterina is the saboteur. She wants her sons back. She wants her mother to accept them into the business. And she played on the superstitions of the old lady with the contamination of the high somatic cell count.” I paused and took a breath. It is at such times that I wished I smoked a pipe. “It was a curse, she told her mother, and the curse would be lifted when her boys came home and they did and it was.”
“So Caterina’s the saboteur?” Madeline said. “Austin, you are a genius!”
“Thank you, my dear.”
“No offense, Doc,” Ally said. “But we don’t really have proof.”
“I have little doubt that the poor woman will confess, if pressed,” I said. “Madeline seems to be in her confidence; it would be a good thing if you verified it, if possible, my dear. Ally is quite right. There is no proof. And perhaps now that her boys are home, Caterina won’t need to plague the dairy anymore. If the sabotage stops, we can infer a great deal from that.”
The phone rang. I frowned in its direction. A call this late at night meant an animal emergency. “I’ll get it,” Joe said. He rose and took the receiver into the living room.
“I hope it’s not the Swinfords with another foundered horse,” Ally said wryly. “Ashley and her mother just can’t seem to stop thinking of the horses as big house pets with the digestion systems of pigs.”
Our idle conversation came to a halt when Joe came back into the room. The expression on his face was serious. “That was Rita.”
“My column,” I said. “Good heavens. I completely forgot to send it in. The topic this week is sarcoptic mange, and I’ve been unable to find a suitable photograph to accompany it.”
“She didn’t mention the article. She said there’s been a fire at the Tre Sorelle Dairy. Half of the buildings are gone.”
We were shocked into silence.
Madeline’s first impulse was to rush to the scene of the fire to see if we could help. “I don’t care how tough Mrs. Capretti is, Austin. She’s ninety-four years old!” She rubbed her forehead tiredly, “No, no. We’d probably just be in the way. But I know what we can do. I can call Trudy Schlegleman at the Ladies Auxiliary and tell her we can put up anyone who needs putting up.”
“Including the goats?” Ally said. “Thank God they were all out at pasture.” Ally looked at me in alarm. “They were, weren’t they?”
“It’s more than likely.” And if the animals had gone up in flames with the buildings, we would know about it soon enough. There was no need to torment the child with bad dreams.
“Did Rita say anyone was hurt?” Madeline asked Joe.
“She said there weren’t any casualties.” He glanced Ally’s way. “I’m assuming she meant animals as well as people, but she wasn’t specific. I can call her back.”
“I’ll call Trudy,” Madeline said firmly. “Her husband’s chief of the volunteers and she’ll know what’s what.” She took the phone away.
“Rita said it was arson?” I asked Joe.
“Rita said there was a fire. She didn’t say anything more.” He looked as grim as I felt. “We might have been wrong about that curse.”
Suddenly, I felt very tired. I took my dog and went out to say good night to my horse.
Twelve
“NO people were hurt, thank goodness,” Rita said when I put in a call to her in the morning. “But some of the goats died of smoke inhalation. At least I hope it was smoke inhalation. They always tell you that and I never believe a word of it.”
“You’re being unnecessarily glum,” I said. “Statistically…”
“Don’t give me statistically. You didn’t see those poor little bodies. I went out with Nigel to cover the fire. Sometimes I hate this business. I don’t suppose you’d want to do a serious column on how to protect your animals from fire.”
“Of course,” I said. “But I didn’t call you to discuss the column.”
“And speaking of the column, Austin, the sarcoptic mange thing was perfectly revolting. I did as you asked. I Googled for photos and I’m telling you right here and now I am not running a photo of that stuff in a family-oriented newspaper.”
“Rita, you are displacing.”
“What?”
“It’s engaging in an activity or behavior to avoid another activity or behavior. Horses weave to avoid anxiety, or that’s the theory, anyway.”
“I know what displacement is, Austin,” she said sharply. Then, more mildly, she added, “And you’re right. I don’t want to talk about the fire. You know they took poor old Doucetta to the hospital.”
“I thought you said there were no human casualties.”
“She pitched a fit over the damage, I guess, and couldn’t catch her breath. So they took her in for observation. I called over there just now. They said she’s resting comfortably, whatever that means. I believe that as much as I believe everybody in a fire dies of smoke inhalation and not third-degree burns.” Rita ran out of breath, so she stopped talking.
“Has the cause of the fire been established?”
“I was hoping you could tell me. I couldn’t get a word out of Trudy Schlegleman’s husband. And I can’t reach Simon.”
“He’s probably not answering his cell phone.”
“He’ll answer his cell phone if you call him,” Rita said. “Do you realize what an impediment to investigative journalism cell phones are? The person I’m trying to reach can always tell it’s me so they don’t even answer.” She sighed. “I suppose
I’d better go out there again. If I come and pick you up, will you come with me?”
I cast a glance at the clinic appointments on the refrigerator. There was a routine animal health check scheduled for the Longacre’s Longhorn cattle. Joe and Allegra could handle that with ease. Most important was the meeting in Hemlock Falls with the dairy’s accountant. “Yes, I’ll come with you. But I’ll meet you there. Madeline and I have an appointment later in the afternoon.”
“She’s already out there with the volunteers, isn’t she? She can drive you back.” She hung up before I could protest.
Rita was at the door in twenty minutes. Madeline was with the Ladies Auxiliary, planning support for the victims of the fire, both animals and human. Joe and Ally were in the barn attending to the animals. I left a note on the refrigerator door, with instructions on the interstate health certificate, and we left for the site of the fire.
Fire. If there is one word that can panic the most phlegmatic of farmers, that’s it.
Practicing veterinarians are no strangers to barn fires. Old barns have old wiring. Vermin gnaw through new wiring. When anxious farmers store new hay in tightly packed bales too soon after cutting, it can be highly combustible, and more than one hay barn has spontaneously ignited and burned to the ground. And it is always quite dreadful to see the results.
The thunderstorm had left hot, muggy weather in its wake, and the air seemed to hug the ground. The smell hung in the air at least two miles out. The odor of a barn fire is distinctive. It is mainly damp wood, ash, melted plastic, and often, tragically, roasted flesh.
Rita let out a sigh of relief as we came up the slight rise that led to the dairy. “It looks like it was the creamery, mostly, and the milking barns. Thank God it didn’t get to the goat barns. And the house looks okay. Bit singed around the lawn.”
In addition to the fifteen or so automobiles parked every which way on the lawn, a Summersville Fire Department truck sat parked in front of the ruined creamery. Two figures in the long rubber coats, high rubber boots, and protective helmets of the fireman’s uniform tramped heavily through the ashes. A number of volunteers were at work in the goat barns. The bleats and cheery shouts coming from that direction suggested that the does were being milked by hand.
The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat Page 16
