Death and the Gentle Bull

by Frances Lockridge

  “As a matter of fact,” Florrie said, “I think she was seeing things, or feeling them. Bull looked all right to me. Felt all right, too. But, anyway, she told Arnold she was going to challenge.”

  Heimrich waited, his eyes closed. “Seems like I’m boring you,” Florrie Haskins said. “Or were you up all night?”

  Heimrich opened his eyes. He said, “Now Miss Haskins, go on please. How would she have challenged?”

  It was a method provided by the rules. Any member of the association—the American Aberdeen-Angus Breeders’ Association—who suspected such chicanery could challenge publicly, and demand that the suspected animal be killed and examined. If no evidence of tampering was discovered, the challenger was required to pay the value of the animal destroyed. “I’ve never known a bull challenged,” Florrie Haskins said. “They run into a lot of money if you’re wrong. But—it could be done, if you wanted to take the chance. At least, by the rules it could. I’ve known steers challenged.”

  “If the animal has been fixed?” Heimrich said.

  “The breeder gets thrown out of the association,” Miss Haskins said. “And that pretty much puts him out of business, of course. Can’t show. Can’t have a sale under association rules. Can’t register his new stock. So, where is he?”

  In Limbo, from her tone.

  “You think Mrs. Landcraft would have challenged?”

  “No, I don’t. I think she was sore at Arnold, and wanted to scare him. Not that she didn’t think there’d been a fix, or probably had. But I doubt whether she would have gone through with it.”

  “A bluff, then?”

  “Um-m-m—probably. But, if she had gone through with it and had been right—well, Arnold’s one of the biggest Angus men in the country. Acts as a judge. Margaret thought—well, that he could be reached as a judge. Had been. That’s why she was sore.”

  “Bribed?”

  “Look, man,” Florrie said. “I don’t think any of this. Arnold’s all right, for my money. No prize as a man, but an all right breeder. And judge, so far as I’ve ever heard, except from Margaret. And she didn’t think it was a bribe, exactly.”

  “What, exactly?”

  Florrie Haskins appeared to consider this.

  “An inducement,” she said. “Naming no names,” she added, with a somewhat unexpected nod to discretion. “There’re these people have a big herd and are showing a lot. Suppose a man who might be likely to judge at some shows gets a chance to buy a few good animals dirt cheap? By private treaty sale, you understand. Nobody has to know how much he paid—that maybe he got a ten thousand dollar bull for three or four. See what I mean?”

  “Now Miss Haskins,” Heimrich said. “Naturally. Mrs. Landcraft suspected that Mr. Thayer had accepted such an—opportunity?”

  “Said he had. Said she could prove it. But—” She broke off, and shook her head. “I don’t know how she could have,” she said. “Also, she didn’t do as well in the particular show she was thinking about as she expected to. Not that that would have made any difference to Margaret, according to her—”

  Heimrich waited.

  “The principle of the thing,” Florrie Haskins said. “Margaret was a great one for the principle of the thing. Particularly when it came to doddies. Not that you don’t have to be. You see that.”

  Heimrich thought it over. He shook his head.

  “The whole thing rests on people’s being honest,” Miss Haskins said. “Integrity—Margaret talked a lot about integrity. A bore about it, sometimes. Take Prince, now—his get is worth plenty, of course. Twice as much—more than twice as much maybe—as that of a good run-of-the-herd bull. So, how do I know, if I’m buying, that this yearling is Prince’s get? I wasn’t there. Artificial insemination anyway, nine chances in ten. I’ve got to take the word of the Landcrafts. Got to be sure they’re honest. Don’t juggle their records. Mostly, we take it for granted. But Margaret used to make a point of it.” She paused. “Made a point of lots of things,” she said. “I don’t mind saying she could make you pretty damn mad.”

  She paused, and looked at Heimrich intently.

  “Let people talk a lot, don’t you?” she asked. “All right, she made me mad a few times. Not enough to set a bull on her, if you’re thinking that.”

  “Now Miss Haskins. I’m not thinking anything in particular—yet. Is falsification of records much of a problem?”

  “Don’t get the wrong idea, captain,” she said. “Cattle people are an honest crowd. Best people in the world. Maybe now and then somebody makes a mistake. Gets records balled up and maybe somebody could come along and—”

  She stopped, shook her head.

  “Never had any reason to doubt anybody I’ve traded with,” she said. “Not any real reason.”

  The cat had come back. She raised herself on hind legs and looked with interest into a waste-paper basket. She decided to get into the basket. She tipped it over. Diligently, then, the little cat, brown ears laid back, began to distribute the contents of the basket. She appeared convinced that, concealed in the bottom, there was a mouse, at least.

  “Ethel!” Miss Haskins said. “Get out of there!”

  The cat backed out, looked at Florrie Haskins with interest, went back in again. Miss Haskins pulled the cat named Ethel out by her tail. She righted the basket. It seemed to Heimrich that she made a good deal of doing a good many things. Miss Florence Haskins was a woman of obvious vitality.

  She finished with the cat by putting her back on broad, strong shoulders. The cat seemed pleased. Miss Haskins reached up and took the cat down and held her out. “You’re not Ethel,” she said, accusingly. “You’re Lynn.” She put the cat back. “Look a lot alike,” she said. “Well? Help you any?”

  It was, Heimrich decided, dismissal. The cat had interrupted; Miss Haskins had accepted the interruption with—was it really with alacrity? He did not enquire; he thanked the white-haired woman with the bright blue eyes and, with Crowley, went. The three dogs were asleep in the shade; one raised his head, regarded them dreamily, and put his head down again.

  The car radio was talking, in a tired voice. “Car one-twenty-nine call in,” the radio said. “Car one-twenty-nine call in.”

  “That’s us,” Ray Crowley said, and Heimrich picked up the handset, threw the switch. He identified himself. The voice grew less weary.

  There was an item presumably of interest to Captain Heimrich. Joseph Merritt, of Old Road, reported that his daughter, Evelyn, had been followed the night before, or thought she had—been followed home from near the Landcraft farm.

  The voice was thanked. The car was headed back to Route 22, through Brewster, onto U.S. 6. At Old Road, Crowley turned right. He passed the entrance to Deep Meadow Farm. It was a little over three miles farther to the Merritt place—a white house in the morning sun, amid neat grounds. They drove up to it, and parked in the drive. A tanned man in tennis shorts and white shirt watched them park from the door of the house. They walked toward him. He had dark red hair; he appeared to be about forty. He said, a little sharply, “Morning, Crowley.” He looked at Captain Heimrich.

  “Good morning, sir,” Crowley said. “This is Captain Heimrich.”

  “All right,” the man said. “What’s the idea of following my daughter?”

  Obviously, Heimrich thought, not forty. Probably ten years older.

  “Now Mr. Merritt,” Heimrich said, “we haven’t been. Why should we?”

  “Precisely,” Merritt said. “Why should you? She’s a private citizen and—”

  “Quit barking, Joe,” a much softer voice said, and a pretty woman in shorts and shirt, in a wide gardening hat, came out of the house and looked at them. “Ray,” she said. “How nice. But you shouldn’t upset the old man, Ray.”

  “No, Mrs. Merritt,” Ray Crowley said. “We didn’t mean to. He—”

  The red-haired man laughed, then, and his laughter was as young as his appearance. Heimrich looked from him to the woman who was evidently his wife, presumably
Evelyn Merritt’s mother. The obvious solution was that Evelyn, instead of being, as he had supposed, in her early twenties, was about ten.

  “All right,” Joseph Merritt said. “All right. Sorry, captain. Ray. Figured you’d been—” But he broke off. “All right,” he said, “who was it, then?”

  “He never explains anything,” Mrs. Merritt said, and her voice turned the accusation into an expression of approval. “How are they supposed to know what you’re talking about, darling? And don’t keep them standing there.”

  They were not kept standing there. Inside, in the room of morning sun, yet cool, they sat. After a time, they talked to Evelyn Merritt. They heard of the men seen in the fog at—Evelyn thought—a little after eleven the night before.

  “I thought they followed me,” Evelyn said. “But—now I don’t know. I was all—tightened up. Driving in the fog and—”

  “Damn fool thing to do, Evvie,” Merritt said. “When you don’t have to.”

  “I know, Dad,” Evelyn said. “—and everything,” she went on. “Perhaps I imagined it.”

  “Saw somebody,” Merritt said.

  That she did not deny. She had seen two men, one taller than the other, standing by a small car stopped partly on the roadway. “Near the old quarry, Dad,” she said. They had appeared to be talking. She thought one man had had his arm around the shoulders of the other—the taller of the two around the shorter’s shoulders. The taller man, perhaps both of them, had looked into the headlights of her car, and quickly away again. But she could identify neither.

  “It was pretty thick,” she said. “I was trying not to run into them.”

  They had made no signal of any kind. Afterward a car—she assumed the same car, or had then assumed so—followed along behind her, stopped at the juncture of the Merritt drive and the road, then went on, using fog lights after it started up again, and moving faster. She had then, certainly, felt that she had been followed. Now she was less sure.

  “I figured it was you people,” Merritt said. “Because she’s—tied up with the Landcrafts.” He nodded at Heimrich. “News gets around,” he said. “Didn’t see what business you had following Evvie. Scaring the girl.” He looked at his daughter. “Not that she scares much,” he added.

  “Probably all it was,” Mrs. Merritt said, “was that these people were trying to find someone—somebody’s house. They stopped at our drive and looked at the sign, and we weren’t the ones they wanted. Doesn’t that explain it?”

  She asked the question of everyone. She had removed her wide hat. He smooth hair was dark, save for a white streak near the center.

  “That would explain it, naturally,” Heimrich said. “One of the men was quite a bit taller than the other, Miss Merritt? And you’re sure you didn’t recognize either?”

  “Yes,” she said. “And—no, captain.”

  “Or the car?”

  “No, captain. It was a small car.”

  “What kind of car were you driving, yourself, Miss Merritt?”

  “A Ford convertible.”

  “You had the top up, naturally.”

  “Then. After the fog started.”

  “You’d had it down, earlier? When you were at the Landcrafts’?”

  “Yes.”

  Heimrich nodded. He stood up. He repeated that, if men had in fact followed Miss Merritt, they had not been policemen. He said that, quite probably, Mrs. Merritt’s explanation was the correct one. He said that they would, however, look into it further.

  Then Merritt asked a question which was obvious. If they accepted the simple explanation, why look further?

  “Now Mr. Merritt,” Heimrich began, and Evelyn Merritt did not wait.

  “Because,” she said, and her voice, low now as it had been before, held an odd note of precision—“because you think Mrs. Landcraft was murdered. Isn’t that it? That if I was followed, there might be some connection?”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Naturally, Miss Merritt. I am quite sure Mrs. Landcraft was murdered. But then—you already knew I was, didn’t you? Mr. Landcraft—all of you—found that out when he telephoned Dr. Nugent.”

  “You—” the girl began.

  “Oh,” Heimrich said. “Dr. Nugent told us, naturally.”

  “We had to know,” the girl said.

  “Of course,” Heimrich said. “Very understandable. Well—” He moved toward the door, “I wouldn’t worry too much about the men who followed you,” Heimrich said. “Or seemed to. Mrs. Merritt’s probably right—just people looking for a country place.”

  They went. In the car, Crowley said, “You really think that’s all it was, sir? About the men, I mean? Because—”

  “You don’t,” Heimrich said. “Neither do I. I think the two men, whoever they were, didn’t recognize Miss Merritt, or her car. There are a good many small convertibles around. I think they wanted to find out who had seen them. They don’t know, of course, that she didn’t recognize them. If she didn’t.”

  “If she said she didn’t—” Ray Crowley began, very rapidly, and then stopped speaking and swung the car around. Heimrich looked at him. After a moment, he said, “Go on, Ray.”

  He had, Ray Crowley said, spoken out of turn. But—he knew the girl. “I don’t think she could lie,” he said. Heimrich shook his head at that, said that anybody could lie.

  “You know her pretty well?” Heimrich asked.

  “Used to,” Crowley said. “Oh—pretty well. We went to high school together—anyway, she was there a couple of years when I was finishing. Then she went to a private school. I did have a couple of dates with her—long time ago, now. And—” he stopped. “That’s all,” he said. “I was out of turn.”

  “Oh,” Heimrich said, “probably she told the truth, Ray. Probably it isn’t important, anyway. It’s just—a little odd.” They were in Old Road again, driving back toward Route 6, toward the Landcrafts’. “I wish she had recognized the men, naturally. Just to—clear up the point. Now, they don’t know whether she did or not.”

  They reached the Landcraft driveway and Crowley slowed the car, looked at Heimrich.

  “Yes, Ray,” Heimrich said. “It’s about time now, I think.”

  They turned up the drive, parked in front of the house. Ballard did not meet them, this time. They went to the door. Wade Landcraft opened the door before Crowley could press the button beside it.

  “Well,” Wade Landcraft said, “you got here quick enough.”

  “Did we?” Heimrich said, mildly. “Well, that’s good, Mr. Landcraft.”

  They went into the house.

  IX

  Wade Landcraft led them along the hall, into the library where Heimrich had met them all the day before. There were three men in the room this time; they had been talking, and stopped and looked up. “Oh,” Harvey Landcraft said, “hello, captain. Didn’t, take you long.” Ballard stood up, nodded, looked enquiringly at Wade Landcraft. “Better stick around, Alec,” Wade said, and Ballard sat down again. The small man, whose face appeared to have shriveled in many suns, merely regarded Heimrich and Crowley, his gray eyes impassive.

  “Arnold Thayer,” Wade said. “Captain Heimrich. Ray Crowley.”

  “The attending policemen,” Harvey said. Thayer said, “Good morning,” in the accents of Missouri.

  “You seem,” Heimrich said, “to have been expecting us.”

  “Sure,” Wade said. “I just—” He stopped. “I thought it was pretty quick,” he said. “I just telephoned. Smith’s disappeared.”

  “Smith?” Heimrich repeated. “Oh—the herdsman? No, I hadn’t got any message about Smith. Go on, Mr. Landcraft.”

  But it was Alec Ballard’s story. He had come to the house with it half an hour before.

  Smith lived in a small house down the road. “Mile or so beyond the Merritt place.” The night before he had not come home for dinner. His wife (Heimrich gathered) had sighed and put the dinner in an oven to stay warm. When he had not come home by ten or so she had (and this, too, was
implicit in Ballard’s story) sighed again, more resignedly, and taken the dried-up food out of the oven. “Sometimes takes a night off, Smitty does,” Ballard said. “Goes over to the Roundhouse. Has himself a few beers. Only takes a few with Smitty.”

  Mrs. Smith had gone to bed a little after ten. She had slept lightly for some time, expecting her husband. “Waiting to tell him off, you know,” Ballard said. But he had not arrived to be told off; his wife had finally gone more deeply to sleep. When she wakened at about six, Smith still was missing. Then she began to worry. At eight, she called on the telephone in the Landcraft barn, and got Ballard, and found that Smith had not showed up for work.

  “Supposed to turn up about seven,” Ballard said.

  Ballard had called “a man he knew” and discovered that the night before had not been one of William Smith’s nights at the Roundhouse. He had called elsewhere and made no progress. And when, after several hours, Smith had not appeared, either for work or at home, Ballard had come to the house to report. “Figured Mr. Landcraft would want to know,” Ballard said. “With things the way they are. Specially since—” He stopped.

  “I tried to get in touch with you,” Wade told Heimrich. “Left a message.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Especially since what, Mr. Ballard?”

  “Well,” Ballard said, “I don’t like to give you any ideas about Smitty, captain. Nice little guy. But—” He looked at Wade, who nodded. “Well,” Ballard said, “the old lady—Mrs. Landcraft, I mean—she was going to fire Smitty. Claimed he was stealing. She mention it to you, Mr. Landcraft?”

  Wade shook his head.

  “Well,” Ballard said. “That’s what she told me. Nothing much—couple bags of calf starter.” He looked at Heimrich. “That’s feed for calves. Got a couple of cows on his place, Smitty has, and maybe he was—well, that’s what she thought.” He paused again. “Smitty was pretty sore,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to pass on what he said. He’s got a temper. You know that, Mr. Landcraft. Nice guy, but he flies off the handle easy.”