The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat

by Claudia Bishop

  He rubbed his chin. He’d been in a rush shaving that morning, for his chin was patchy with stubble. “Uh-huh. The gas bombs were made with wine bottles stuffed with T-shirts soaked with gasoline.”

  “That narrows the field considerably.”

  He grinned reluctantly. “Yep. I don’t suppose there’s a household in the United States of America that doesn’t have two out of three on hand at any moment of the day.”

  “Any prints? Any torn labels? I don’t suppose the arsonist left a driver’s license tucked in a convenient spot?”

  “Might as well have.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “There was a print on a glass shard?”

  “Shard,” Provost mused. “Where do you get these words, Doc?”

  “There was a print on the glass shard and you already have a result.”

  “That team’s amazing,” Provost said with sincere admiration. “They have a scanner dingus attached to the computer, and as long as the prints are in the system, you get the answer right there at the site.”

  “Well?” I said impatiently. Suddenly, I knew. “Brandstetter.”

  Provost nodded, a short, abrupt nod that somehow conveyed how sorry he was.

  “You realize that Neville is a Hoffmann Fellow, a PhD graduate of UC Davis, a tenured professor of repute at our veterinary school, which is the finest in the country, and he is not so stupid as to leave a fingerprint at the scene of a crime!”

  “Don’t shout, Doc. I can hear you just fine.”

  I hadn’t realized I had risen out of my chair. I sat back down again. “This is nonsense.”

  “Mrs. Brandstetter…”

  “She is a fool and a hysteric,” I said rudely.

  “Mrs. Brandstetter confessed…”

  “She cannot confess to something someone else did.”

  “Right you are. Mrs. Brandstetter told me that they got into a big argument over her messing around with Staples. She told him she was going back home to Mamma. She says he yelled at her if she did that, he’d burn the place down….”

  “Hyperbole.”

  “…And it did. Burn down, I mean.” He looked up as Kevin came in the door, two large submarine sandwiches in one hand and a pair of covered cups in the other. Kevin set them down on Provost’s credenza and eyed me a little nervously. “We still on to go out to the suspect’s house, Lieutenant?”

  “There’s no need to mince words, young man,” I snapped. “I can tell you right now that Dr. Brandstetter is innocent.”

  “In a minute, Kevin. You go and start the report on the fire.” Provost handed the sandwich over to me. “Eat this. Maybe your blood sugar’s low or something. You can’t tell me Brandstetter hasn’t crossed your mind. What’s the statistic on murder?”

  “Most of the time it’s a family member,” I admitted. “Just not this time.”

  “Why are you so sure?”

  I bit into the sub while I considered the question. “It seems to me that two types of people commit arson. Pyromaniacs. Habitual criminals. Brandstetter’s neither. It’s a horrific act, Provost. I admit, I can see Neville—any of us, as a matter of fact—pushed to the limit and killing someone on a furious impulse, as may have been the case with Staples. I can even see a desperate man nerving himself to kill again, to save himself, which could explain Folk’s death. But to set a fire in a barn full of animals, with a ninety-four-year-old woman at risk, not to mention a number of other innocents? No. That’s the act of a madman or a sadist.”

  Provost finished the last of his sandwich, balled up the paper wrapping, and threw it toward the wastebasket. It missed. “I’ve got to go where the evidence takes me, Austin. We can place him at the scene. He made the threat. His fingerprints were on the busted glass.”

  “Did you get the report back on Doucetta’s cane?” I asked abruptly.

  “Yeah, I did, as a matter of fact. It wasn’t the murder weapon.”

  “Hm,” I said.

  “You’re disappointed?”

  “Yes. It would be almost impossible for Neville to get his hands on it long enough to commit either murder. It would have helped his defense. She had it with her almost constantly. And will again if you get it back to her.”

  “It’s not evidence anymore.” He pointed at the top of his filing cabinet. The cane lay across it, no longer encased in plastic. “You can take it back to her if you’d like.”

  I rose and picked it up. “I’ll do that. Do you have any idea what was used?”

  “Who knows, Doc? A blunt instrument like that could be almost anything.”

  “It is not ‘almost anything,’” I said testily. “The autopsy report was quite specific.” I waved it at him. “A long-handled instrument with a bulbous top. Probably made of metal. That doesn’t sound like the typical blunt instrument to me, Simon.”

  “You have a point. But it’s not necessary evidence in this kind of case.”

  “You have absolutely no reason to make that assumption.” I folded my arms and leaned back against the wall. Now was not the time to discuss my suspicions about the new direction the case had taken. I had one insurmountable problem. And because of it, Simon would dismiss my speculation as just that: conjecture. And it was the problem that had plagued the case from the beginning. No one could have done it. Everyone had an alibi.

  “You about through ranting?” Provost eased himself off the desk. “I’m going to pick him up now.” He held up his hand. “Don’t even think about asking to come with me. Thank God Mrs. Brandstetter’s over at her mother’s. I’ve never heard such a racket from any woman the last time I took Brandstetter in. You know I had to bring him down here for the first interview. I couldn’t hear myself think with all that shrieking going on.”

  I looked at my watch. “Hard luck, Provost. Doucetta threw her out this morning. If you hurry, you’ll catch her walking in the door.”

  Provost seriously considered taking a policewoman to aid in Brandstetter’s arrest. I left him mulling over tactics and walked across the street to the town hall. It was past time to look into Brian Folk’s affairs.

  Summersville grew up as an exurb around the universities in the late twenties and thirties. We have a few fine old cut-stone buildings. The Summersville Sentinel is housed in one and the town hall is in another. The high ceilings and the terrazzo flooring keep the building quite cool in the summer. Although a few offices were air-conditioned, the building as a whole was not.

  The tax assessor’s office is on the second floor. I found a harried young woman putting files into cardboard boxes. She jerked up with a shriek when I tapped on the open door to announce my presence. “Good grief! You scared the living daylights out of me.” She had a soft, pudgy face, lovely skin, and brown hair in a long, sloppy ponytail down her back.

  “My apologies,” I said. It was warm in the office. The window was open to the street outside. “I’m Austin McKenzie.” I tucked Doucetta’s cane under my arm and held out my hand.

  “Mary Ellen Lochmeyer.” She wiped her sweaty palm on her jeans and shook my hand. “I’m the assistant.”

  “Assistant what?”

  “Just assistant. Right now, it’s assistant to the tax assessor’s office because he’s dead. I sort of float, if you know what I mean. The council sends me all over the place. Like the Highway Department. I was assigned there for a couple of weeks because all these guys took vacation all at once. It was a nightmare. And I help out at the county clerk’s office when justice court’s in session.”

  She was a chatterer. In the years I’ve supervised students, I’ve had more than one. There is nothing for it but to rudely interrupt the flow. “I’ve just come from Lieutenant Provost.”

  “The police?” she said. “I was assigned to the dispatcher’s desk once for a couple of days. It was kind of fun. But the real dispatcher came back, worse luck.”

  “I’m here for Brian Folk’s Day-Timer, I believe it’s called.”

  “You mean his calendar? Nobody uses Day-Timers anymore.” />
  “Whatever he used to keep his appointments.”

  She sighed. “You’re from the police?”

  “I’ve just come from the police lieutenant’s office,” I said. I admit to being Jesuitical. But it was literally true. If necessary, I was prepared to pull out my honorary deputy ID.

  She set the box she held onto the desk with an irritated thump. She thumbed rapidly through a pile of papers and held out a John Deere wall calendar. “He used this. He probably had a BlackBerry, too, but I imagine that was on him when he was, you know, killed.” After a moment she added, “Poor guy.”

  I flipped through May, June, and July. As I thought, he was a methodical man. One cannot perform what is essentially an accounting function otherwise. The squares allocated to weekdays were divided in half. The word “county” was neatly printed in most of the spaces above the line. The lower half held afternoon appointments.

  “Find something weird?” Mary Ellen asked.

  “Something that should have occurred to me by now,” I said. “I will need to keep this.”

  She held her hand out. “Then I’ll need a receipt.”

  “I don’t have my receipt book on me,” I confessed.

  “Policemen always carry a book of receipts. It’s so they can legally acquire evidence when necessary. I learned that when I was assisting at the county clerk’s office.” She squinted at me. “Hey. Aren’t you kind of old to be a policeman? No offense,” she added hastily.

  “I’ll make out a receipt,” I said. “Give me that pad of paper, please.” I took a pen and scribbled:

  Received from Mary Ellen Lochmeyer one calendar be-longing to Brian Folk. 7.8.07. And signed it Austin McKenzie, DVM (Deputy).

  She took the paper, read it, and shook her head. “It’s not July eighth. It’s August seventh.”

  “I know perfectly well what day it is,” I said testily. “That is the European method of writing dates. You put the day first and then the mo—” I stopped in midsentence and stared at her. “My God. Of course. That’s it.”

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s it!”

  “Hey!” she called after me as I exited the office and walked rapidly down the hall. “Aren’t you Dr. McKenzie? That vet that writes that column with all the gruesome stuff that can happen to your dog?”

  I waved the cane over my shoulder without turning around and exited the building to Main. I got into the Prius and sat there, considering my next move.

  Brian Folk had spent a lot time with Jonathan Swinford. I disliked the man—but I failed to see him as a member of the kind of organized crime that I suspected supported the dairy.

  It was time to have a serious talk with Doucetta Capretti.

  Fourteen

  EVENING was coming on as I drove into the courtyard of the Tre Sorelle Dairy. There was a soft murmur of goats in the air. A crew of workers cleared the stinking remnants of the milking parlor into huge Dumpsters. Tony and Pete were at the office door, at work replacing the fallen sconce.

  At the sound of my arrival, Caterina came out onto the step, a thermos of coffee in one hand and a plate of coffee cake in the other. It was a peaceful, busy scene, as unlike the chaos of the morning as could be imagined.

  I raised my hand in salute. Tony grinned and waved, and I made my way toward them.

  “Back again, Doc?” Pete asked. He put a final screw in the wall and tightened the sconce bracket with a grunt. It was made of iron, long, with a bulbous top.

  “That ought to stay up for a while,” I said approvingly. “You’ll make sure it does?”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry. My wife tells me I can be a bit overbearing. I like to see a job well done, however. And yes, I’m back again. I have a few questions for your grandmother. And of course, there’s this.” I rapped the flagstone with the goat-headed cane.

  “She’s going to be some kind of flipped out to see that,” Tony said. “So the lab guys cleared it, huh? That’s not what helped Mel and Folk out of this world and into the next?”

  My glance rested on the sconce. “No.”

  “Mamma’s up at the house,” Caterina said. She raised the tray of coffee cake with an inquiring lift of her eyebrows. I declined with a gesture. “Marietta’s keeping an eye on her.”

  “And how are the goats?”

  “Seem to be fine,” Caterina said. “Ashley didn’t make it in to work today, so I entered all the data about the stock myself.” She took a deep, prideful breath. “And we’re handling the second set of injections tomorrow all by ourselves, Dr. McKenzie. We aren’t going to need all those volunteers at all.”

  “Take it easy, Ma,” Pete said. Her put his arm around her shoulders and squeezed her close. “One step at a time, here.”

  She beamed up at him, her face bright with maternal feeling.

  I made my way up the flagstone steps to the house and rang the doorbell. Marietta opened it almost at once. “I saw you come in,” she said. “You got it back! She’s going to be so pleased. Follow me. We’re out on the terrace having a glass of wine.”

  She walked through the magnificent house to the terrace overlooking the lake. Doucetta sat in a rocking chair, her eyes on the horizon. The setting sun sent streaks of mauve and purple through the orangey sky.

  Doucetta seized her goat-headed cane like a ewe discovering a lost lamb. “Thank God. And the Virgin. The curse is lifted.”

  Marietta rolled her eyes. But she smiled and gave her grandmother a hug. “You bet the curse is lifted. It’s all uphill from here.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure about that,” I said gravely. “May I sit down?”

  “Of course! Please!” Marietta pulled a wrought-iron chair forward. “We love to sit out here in the evenings. The setting sun makes the sky so beautiful. Times like this, I don’t miss the city so much.”

  “The color comes from pollution,” I observed. “But it is spectacular.”

  “Hm.” Marietta took a sip from a glass of the wine that had gotten me into trouble with my wife. She waved the glass at me. “Sure I can’t get you some?”

  “I’m certain, thank you.” I was to need all my wits about me. “Marietta, Lieutenant Provost is in the process of arresting Neville for the murders.”

  She set the glass down and looked at me, wide-eyed. “No! Neville did it?”

  “There is quite a bit of evidence against him. But no, Neville didn’t do it.”

  “You seem awfully sure about that. I mean, Summersville’s a bit of a backwater, but I always thought Simon Provost was one smart cop.”

  Doucetta sat with both feet firmly planted on the flagstone, her cane between her knees, and her hands folded over the brass goat’s head on the top. She looked at me for a long time, her gaze direct, unwinking, and cold. “My son-in-law didn’t do it,” she said flatly.

  “No, Mrs. Capretti.”

  Marietta looked from one of us to the other. “You both sound as if you know who did.”

  This was the tricky part. Simon had read the passport entry date wrong. It wasn’t August sixth that the young assassins had entered the country, but June eighth. The European style of writing calendar dates is the reverse of the American method. They had been in the United States for two full months before emerging into the public eye. They had no alibi for murder. And Doucetta knew it.

  “They are my family,” she said to me.

  “In more ways than one, I expect, Donna Doucetta.” I placed a great deal of emphasis on the honorific. She blinked once. Then a reluctant smile spread over her face, and she made a rumbling, choking sound that came from deep inside her chest. I looked at Marietta in alarm. She in turn gazed at her grandmother with exasperation.

  “What’s so funny, Grandmamma?”

  She jerked her thumb at me. “Him. He thinks I am of the Black Hand. He thinks I am a female don. Hahahahahaha.” The laugh stopped as abruptly as it started. “No, arsehole. I am not.” She sighed heavily and repeated. “I am not. But my poor grandsons. That m
ay be another story.” She passed her hand over her face, as if erasing any feeling that might show there. “Ah. It’s a good thing your poor grandfather isn’t alive.”

  “I am totally confused here,” Marietta said sharply.

  “It’s probably best that you remain that way, cousin.” Tony stepped onto the terrace. His teeth were very white in his suntanned face. His brother followed him onto the terrace. The two of them went to the balustrade and leaned against it, facing us.

  Caterina came from the depths of the house. She carried a tray filled with cheese, olives, and salami. She bumped the doors open with her hip, brought the tray through, and set it on the round table. The wind picked up her graying hair and she moved her bangs off her forehead with one hand. She handed me a small plate and a cocktail napkin. “The boys said you found out about the sconce.”

  “Pure happenstance,” I said. “It’s quite logical as a weapon. I was remiss in overlooking it. It was at hand. And, like the Purloined Letter, you were able to hide it in plain sight.”

  Tony mimed swinging a baseball bat.

  “Arrete!” Doucetta said.

  “Sorry,” Tony said.

  “So what’s next, donna?” Pete said.

  “What’s this?” Marietta demanded. “What’s going on here?” She put her hands on her hips and glared at her aunt. “Caterina! What’s this all about? Are you saying…” She faltered. “Tony and Pete. Did they…” She took a huge breath and sat down as though her legs had been knocked out from under her.

  Doucetta stood up, stamped over to her daughter, and spat on the ground at her feet. “You tried to kill the dairy. You tried to kill me!”

  “Oh, stuff it, Mamma. You just can’t accept the fact that it’s over. When you turned down the offer from Swinford’s firm, that was the last straw.” She pushed impatiently at her hair. “Five million dollars for this place. You were a fool not to take it. Well, all I can say is, you’re going to have to take it now. You can’t survive five months. It’s done. Finished. Over.” She smiled. “Now that’s an inheritance.”