Death and the Gentle Bull

by Frances Lockridge

  Nugent laughed briefly. He shook his head.

  “No grudge against anybody I know of,” he said. “Except me, of course.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. He waited a second. He said, “Now doctor. Against you?”

  “They all hate me,” Nugent said. “The calves do, pretty early. The cows do. The bulls do. But so do horses and cats. Now and then you get a dog’s different, but not often. Stands to reason—but still—” He emitted further smoke. “Funny thing is,” he said, “I rather like animals. How I got into this.” He indicated his office.

  Heimrich opened his eyes, looked at Nugent.

  “Oh,” Nugent said, “nothing against me personally, far as I know. They hate all veterinarians. It stands to reason, as I said. We hurt them, so they hate us. Can’t tell a cow it’s all for her own good. Can’t help hurting them. For one thing, they all get shots. At a place like the Landcrafts’, anyway. Now and then we have to operate, and we don’t give anesthetics to cattle. I don’t, anyway. Nobody knows exactly how much to give, so it’s chancy and—” He stopped.

  “You don’t want all that,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Heimrich said. “However—does this bull hate you enough to—go for you?”

  “If he thought he could get away with it,” Nugent said. “We see he doesn’t, of course. Even if he is too big to hoist.”

  Heimrich merely shook his head.

  “Smaller animals we put in stocks,’’ Nugent said. “Put a belly band under them. Hoist up. When we want to trim their feet, say. The champ’s too big. We can put him in a squeeze, if we have to. Never have, but we could.” He looked at Heimrich. “Just a gadget to keep ’em from jumping around,” he said.

  “Look, doctor,” Heimrich said. “He gets this way—wants to go for you—only when you’re doing something he doesn’t like? Like giving him a shot? Other times—”

  “Other times he keeps right on hating me,” Nugent said.

  “He know you by sight, you mean?”

  Nugent hesitated. He relighted his pipe. He said, “I don’t know why I keep on smoking these damn things.” He said, “It amounts to that, but probably’s not that. They make associations. All animals do. Friend of mine in New York. Small-animal man. Cat man, primarily. He used to have a mannerism—whenever he called at a house, or an apartment, he’d ring the doorbell twice, fast. Like a mail carrier. So—they’d let him in and he’d go to the apartment and—no cats. Take them an hour to find one cat. One place he went had three cats. Used to take three hours. He quit ringing that way, and they quit hiding. Association.” He emitted smoke. “Of course,” he said, “they kept on hiding whenever anybody else rang that way. Association persisted.”

  Heimrich had closed his eyes again. He kept them closed. When he spoke, it seemed to be with care.

  “Now doctor,” he said, “I want to get this straight. Something about you sets up an association in the minds of—well, cattle, which is what we’re talking about. Specifically, this big bull of the Landcrafts’. So—he goes for you. With these cats in the city, and your friend, it was a sequence of sounds. With you—what? Your voice?”

  “No,” Nugent said. “It’s the same whether I speak or not. It’s the way I smell.”

  Heimrich opened his eyes. Involuntarily, he sniffed. He smelled pipe smoke. And James Nugent, doctor of veterinary surgery, laughed.

  “No,” he said. “Not the pipe. I don’t work in these clothes. The clothes I do work in smell of medicine, of course. Of antiseptics. If I’ve been operating, or anything like that, often of blood. I smell like a hospital, animal or human. First time I inoculate a calf, it gets hurt. At the same time, it gets this hospital smell. Association. Even you and I have odor associations, and we’re hardly able to smell at all. Imagine what it is for a cat or dog.”

  “Or—a bull,” Heimrich said.

  Nugent’s pipe had gone out again. He looked at it; he shook his head; he put his pipe in a tray. He nodded his head. “Or a bull,” he said. Then, looking at Heimrich, the veterinarian’s eyes suddenly narrowed. “Or a bull,” he repeated.

  “These cats you mentioned,” Heimrich said. “You say the association persisted even when it didn’t apply? Even when the person who rang twice was—oh, a delivery boy? The mail carrier?”

  “Yes,” Nugent said. “It was all the same to the cats, of course. A certain sound meant this vet—this veterinarian—they hated. They hid.”

  “And a certain odor?”

  “Yes,” Nugent said. He spoke slowly. “Yes, I’d think so, captain. I’d think that if, say, Mrs. Landcraft had smelled to Prince like a veterinarian—like me—he might have gone for her. I’d have thought she’d have a good chance of getting away, of course. She was an active woman for her age. The bull is a little—cumbersome. Particularly when he’s in a stall.”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “If she’d been conscious, naturally. Suppose she’d been knocked out first? With a club or a blackjack. Put in the stall.”

  Nugent picked up his pipe and looked at it, as if he were seeking to determine how it had been made, what its purpose was. He spoke without looking away from the pipe.

  “I’d have propped her up in a corner of the stall,” he said. “Look more natural to the bull, that way. Then, if it had been necessary, I’d have reached over and jabbed him with a needle.”

  “It would have worked?”

  Nugent looked at Heimrich now; looked at him very steadily.

  “I suppose something had been spilled on her clothes?” Nugent said. “Antiseptic? Something smelling of carbolic? And perhaps a little blood, too? After she’d been knocked out, I suppose?”

  “That would have been the time, naturally,” Heimrich said. “Would it have worked?”

  “Yes, captain,” Dr. Nugent said. “I don’t think there’s any doubt it would have worked.” He paused. “You think it did,” he said, and this was not a question.

  Heimrich nodded.

  “Who?” the doctor asked.

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know that—yet.”

  He stood up.

  “I don’t know enough about the people,” he said. “I’ll have to find out, naturally. Mrs. Landcraft was dangerous to somebody. Or had something somebody wanted. Can you help?”

  “No,” Nugent said. “I can’t help you there.”

  “Who might?”

  “You go roundabout,” Nugent said.

  “To start with,” Heimrich said. “You see, there isn’t any murder, doctor. No obvious murder. Were you there last night, doctor? At the Landcraft party?”

  “For a time,” Nugent said. He picked up his pipe and began to scrape it out into the ash tray. “I left before this happened. I didn’t hear until this morning.” He pushed the pipe into a jar of tobacco and began to cram with a thumb. “Florence Haskins knew Margaret better than most,” he said. “She’s a breeder too. Got a place up in Dutchess. You know it, don’t you, Ray?”

  Ray Crowley said, “Yes, doc. Sure.”

  “Florrie was there last night,” Nugent said. “She knows about everybody in the business. She and Margaret went to sales together, pretty often. Talked of going shares on a bull they came across last spring. Don’t know that they ever did.” He lighted the pipe. “Might be worth your while to talk to Florrie, captain,” he said and, with his pipe fuming again, stood up. “She likes to talk.”

  “About my dinner time,” he said. “Anything else, captain?”

  There was not. He was thanked.

  It was about everybody’s dinner time. Ray Crowley knew a place near Brewster, and they ate there. It was growing dark when they finished. Crowley looked at Heimrich in enquiry.

  “In the morning, Ray,” Heimrich said. “In the morning.” The younger man looked, Heimrich thought, disappointed. “Oh,” Heimrich said, “I’ll want you along, naturally. I’ll get you assigned.”

  VII

  Bonita Landcraft had said, “Well, I guess we do form a hollow squa
re, at that,’’ and there had been no lightness in her voice; her voice said that whatever jest there had once been in the phrase had been wrung out of it. She had said that three hours before and now—save that dinner had been eaten, lights turned on—they had got little further. It was Wade who summed it up for the four of them, sitting again in the library.

  “All we know is that it wasn’t the way we thought,” Wade said.

  But Harvey Landcraft shook his head. They knew, or could be almost certain, of one thing more than that—the police, also, did not think that loose ends were neatly tied. They could be sure, for one thing, that the police captain—he snapped his fingers and Bonny supplied the name—that Captain Heimrich had taken with him the flattened can which had held antiseptic solution. They could guess—had to guess—he had taken it in the hope he would find fingerprints on it. And what that meant was obvious.

  “For one thing,” Bonita said, “that he’ll be back.” Then she put it flatly. “He thinks Mother Landcraft was murdered,” Bonita said, and light from a lamp made shadows on her young face, so that it seemed older, seemed almost haggard.

  “We don’t know that,” Evelyn heard herself saying. “Nobody knows that—we don’t know anything.”

  “That somebody tried to make them seem a certain way—an innocent way,” Harvey said. “That we know. The reason is obvious—what did happen wasn’t innocent.”

  “If we believe Smith,” Wade said. “If, in the end, everybody believes Smith.”

  There had been that one obvious path of escape from the ugly implication of the photograph. It, from the notation, had been taken twenty minutes before the bull killed his owner. If he had not been scratched in that twenty minutes, Mrs. Landcraft had not been killed while trying to treat the scratch—and someone, acting after the fact, had provided an explanation, and so proved the need of explanation. If the bull had been scratched between having his picture taken and killing, the possibility of accident remained—escape remained from the ugliness closing around them.

  That escape William Smith, the herdsman, blocked, or almost blocked. He had handled the bull when he was photographed; had guided the photographers, helped them with the animals, while they made many photographs of the barns, of the cattle; had quieted one or two young heifers which were startled by the flashes, (Prince had not been; he was used to photographers; he had nibbled hay.) Smith had led the big bull out into the open area between the rows of stalls, and posed him there, and watched him while he was photographed. When the photographers had finished, he had led Prince back into the stall. Smith had noticed no scratch on the bull’s leg when he was handling him, but he had not examined him with any care. He was certain that the bull had not been injured while he was out of his stall.

  Smith was a small man with sandy hair and a narrow face. He was very positive.

  “And there’s nothing in the stall he could hurt himself on,” Smith said. “You know that, Mr. Landcraft.”

  He had spoken to Wade, who had nodded. One does not leave protruding nails, sharp ends of wire, in the stall an international grand champion occupies.

  “All I know is,” Smith had said, “if this picture shows he wasn’t hurt twenty minutes before he went for the old—for Mrs. Landcraft, he wasn’t hurt when he did. Before he did, anyway. Because, how could he get hurt?”

  For that, no one had had an answer. No one had one now. Smith said he had left the barn, with the photographers, about five minutes before Prince started his bellowing. In those minutes it was conceivable he had been hurt. But, it was only conceivable. It was not really believable.

  “Well,” Wade said, “do we believe Smith? Because I can’t see what he has to gain by lying.”

  Nobody disagreed.

  “We talk as if somebody planned it,” Harvey said. “Or, now we do. And we’ve all been thinking about it. Well, how?” He spoke to his brother. “You know these animals,” he said. “Better than I do, anyway. What do you do to make a bull attack somebody? Ballard says he doesn’t know. Smith says he doesn’t know.”

  “I don’t know,” Wade said. “I’ve thought about it.”

  Harvey spoke slowly. “Maybe,” he said, “it would be a good thing if there wasn’t any answer. Because, if there is, it could be murder—as Bonny says. And—when the cops look at murder, they see money.” He stopped. Then he stood up and went to the drink tray and mixed himself a drink.

  “And we, we four, get the money,” Bonita said. “We are rather a hollow square, aren’t we? Does anybody want to confess?”

  Evelyn said, “Bonny!”

  “We’ll be asked,” Bonny said. “Don’t think we won’t. We stand to profit—and who else? Ballard loses a good job. So does Smith—so do the rest of the people around. We get money and—may as well tell them, Harv. In the lodge.”

  “Got cancelled last week,” Harvey said. “I suppose that’s what Bonny means. It’s not so serious as all that but—”

  “But if we stay cancelled, along about spring we’re going to need some money,” Bonita said. “And we were talking about holding a sale in the spring, weren’t we?” She paused. “We may as well look at things,” she said. “They’re going to be looked at—when Captain Heimrich sees that picture.”

  And, Evelyn thought—thought heavily—Wade wants to get away from this and I want him to get away, and there’ll be so many to guess that. And she was hard to get along with and—

  “All the same,” Wade said, “we don’t suspect one another. I see what you’re getting at, Bonny—hell, we all see it. But we don’t suspect one another.”

  “No,” Bonny said. “Oh no. We don’t.”

  “There were a hundred and fifty people around here,” Harvey said. “Anyone of them might—hell, we don’t know what somebody did do, if anything.”

  “No,” Wade said.

  “This man Thayer,” Harvey said. “The one who stayed last night—”

  “Was going to stay,” Wade said. “He left after—after it happened. Why Thayer?”

  “I don’t know,” Harvey said. “Was he a great friend of mother’s?”

  “Well—” Wade hesitated. “Actually, she didn’t like him much. Didn’t seem to, anyway. I don’t know why she asked him to stay overnight. Probably just being nice to him in the hope he’d buy a lot. Good man to sell to. Got a reputation of buying tops. But—why Arnold Thayer, Harv?”

  “He was here. One of the few whose name I got.”

  Harvey shrugged.

  “Any port in a storm,” Bonny said, and Harvey said he supposed it came pretty much to that.

  “This woman who thought something was the matter with Prince,” Harvey said. He still stood by the tray of drinks, but had only sipped from the glass he held. “Is there, by the way?”

  “No,” Wade told him. “Ballard and the vet agreed he was overweight. Brought him down a little. You mean Florrie Haskins.”

  “If that was her name,” Harvey said. “She a great friend of mother’s?”

  “So far as I know,” Wade said. “They seemed to be. Went to sales together.”

  “No—animus?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  There was a momentary silence.

  “Look,” Wade said. “When we come down to it, mother didn’t tell me much about—about a lot of things. She thought I wasn’t a lot interested and—well, she was right. That’s going to come out too, incidentally—if things begin to come out. The way things are, Evvie and I can get away. But what I’m saying is—she probably knew most of the hundred and sixty—it was about that—people who were here last night. Had dealings with a good many of them. Maybe some of them didn’t like her. You all know she managed to get her own way when she could and—didn’t mind stepping on toes.”

  “It could be a good deal of trouble for the police,” Bonny said. “Maybe—they don’t like to go to too much trouble.”

  “Perhaps they won’t go to any,” Evelyn said. “Perhaps all this is just because we’re worn out, not looki
ng at things straight. Because—look at it—what have we got to go on? We can’t—well, to begin with—we can’t seem even to guess what we think somebody did. That’s the first thing. Bonny talks about—about murder. But—how? Even Alec can’t guess, or Smitty.” She paused. “Perhaps we’re just scaring ourselves,” she said.

  “I whistle a little tune,” Bonny said. “Not that you haven’t got something, darling.” She sat up, suddenly. “You know, maybe she has,” Bonny said.

  “Maybe,” Harvey said, and looked at his brother. Wade was looking at nothing; for some time did not speak.

  “If there’s a way, the doc would know,” he said. “The vet. Doc Nugent. I suppose I could—” He stopped. “We’ve got to know, haven’t we?” he said then, and stood up. He seemed, in silence, to ask the approval of the others.

  “It—we’ll be the ones to make the point,” Harvey said. “We have to realize that.”

  “It’s better to make it,” Evelyn said. “Can’t you all see? Perhaps we’re only seeing ghosts.”

  “And,” Bonny said, “if we’re not—we’re still the ones ought to make the point, aren’t we, Harv?”

  So Wade Landcraft went out of the room to the telephone in the office. He was not gone briefly. When he finally returned, Evelyn saw in his face all that she did not want to see, had desperately hoped she would not see.

  “Heimrich’s guessed a way,” Wade said, his voice heavy. “He and Doc Nugent have guessed a way.”

  Still slowly, his voice still heavy, he told them what the way was.

  It meant, Bonita said, in a still voice after a long pause, that if it had been done, it had been done by someone who knew cattle. …

  When Evelyn left Deep Meadow Farm, drove her light convertible down the long drive to the secondary road, it had been to drive home. The Merritt house was a few miles up the same little-frequented road, and ten minutes would have taken her there. But at the foot of the Landcraft drive she had turned right instead of left on Old Road, and so toward U.S. 6 and a choice between Brewster and Carmel—or, for that matter, Cape Cod and California. It had been as if other hands had turned the wheel.