The Case of the Ill-Gotten Goat Read online

  Caterina discovered she was crying into the sink.

  And it was all the milk inspector’s fault.

  III

  “I can’t imagine living like this,” gushed the woman from New York. “It’s paradise.”

  Marietta kept her smile carefully in place. She’d been keeping the smile in place all morning long. Tuesdays were tour days at the Tre Sorelle Dairy and in August, the tours overflowed with skinny, condescending urban professionals in trendy Tod’s and shriekingly expensive little linen shifts. June tours meant a lot of schoolkids with sticky fingers and earsplitting shouts. July was young families with barfing toddlers. August was urban refugees like this particular woman; a stockbroker, she’d informed Marietta just once too often. September meant retirees, who at least got tired sooner rather than later.

  All of them got up her nose.

  Marietta flexed the left rein and Peter the Percheron obligingly hawed to the left, bumping the tour wagon over a large pothole. The stockbroker yelled, “Ow!” and looked daggers.

  “Those of you on a first visit to the Finger Lakes may want to know why this region carries the name.” Marietta pulled Peter to a halt. She gestured at the lake spreading its glories before them. “There are five large freshwater lakes here in upstate New York, and on the map, the lakes look like a hand.” She held up her hand, palm flat, fingers outspread. She wriggled her middle finger. “We’re overlooking Cayuga, which is between Keuka and Seneca. The water is that deep, lucid blue because of the glaciers that moved through this part of the continent millions of years ago.”

  There was an appreciative murmur from the fifteen people jammed into the farm wagon.

  “Most of you know that Tompkins County is wine country, of course. Our whites in particular have an international reputation. And we are gaining a reputation for our goat cheese, as well.” Marietta turned from the lake to the acres of Tre Sorelle behind them. The barns that housed the dairy herd formed a U at the top of a long, thickly grassed pasture surrounded by white fences. The dairy, the office, and the produce shop formed another U around a bricked courtyard with a fountain in the middle and a latticework roof draped with blooming wisteria. The ground rose on the opposite side of the driveway to a sprawling house. “And I am proud to say that Tre Sorelle cheeses are at the forefront of the industry.”

  “Tre Sorelle means ‘three sisters’ in English,” the man who accompanied the stockbroker said officiously. He wore flip-flops, designer jeans that Marietta knew started at five hundred dollars a pair, and sunglasses so expensive she had no idea who made them. He gestured at the Tre Sorelle logo emblazoned on the barn—three pretty brunettes with gold hoop earrings and head scarves tied jauntily around their curls. “I take it you’re one of the three? Do you milk the goats between tours?”

  “And when did you and your sisters come to this country?” the stockbroker asked.

  Marietta would have bet her quarterly share of the dairy proceeds that the guy was a lawyer. Probably from some white-shoe firm near Wall Street. Her second husband had been a lawyer. She’d hated the entire profession ever since the satisfyingly nasty divorce. Her first husband had been a stockbroker. She’d met him during her internship with Bear Stearns. She hated stockbrokers, too.

  She dimpled attractively at both of them and adjusted the Tre Sorelle head scarf her grandmother made them all wear when dealing with the public. “My grandmother first came to America as a sixteen-year-old in 1929,” she said. “And she had three daughters with Grandpapa Dominic. My mother was one of the three. Her name was Margarita. Mamma passed away four years ago. Her sisters are still alive of course. I have two aunties—Anna Luisa and Caterina. Grandmamma never really got over Mamma’s death so I took her place—or try to at least. So there are still tre sorelle. Me, Anna Luisa, and Caterina.”

  “And you all live together in that beautiful house?” someone in the back said incredulously.

  Marietta’s smile tightened. “Yes, we do.”

  “You told us at the outset of the tour that your grandmother still runs the dairy,” Stockbroker said with a dubious kind of sneer. “If she came here in 1929, she’s how old?”

  “Ninety-four.” Marietta settled her gold hoop earring more firmly into her earlobe.

  “And she’s not…?” Stockbroker whirled her finger expressively around her ear.

  “Sharp as a tack,” Marietta said cheerfully.

  “So, you and your aunts and your ninety-four-year-old grandmother run the place?” The lawyer looked impressed.

  “We have a resident herd manager. And two full-time assistants. But my grandmother still makes a lot of the cheese herself.” She shook the reins and Pete the Percheron broke into an obliging amble. Could she drive them all into the lake and let then drown, screaming bloody murder? Nope. Grandmamma would have her guts for garters. And she couldn’t risk that. Not now. Not until Grandmamma coughed up enough money to take care of Marietta’s more pressing bills.

  Which shouldn’t be a problem as long as the taxes stayed down and the flippin’ somatic cell count came in under a million this time.

  Marietta cracked the whip viciously in the air. She just might have to have a little one-on-one with that milk inspector.

  IV

  Neville Brandstetter slouched back in his all-leather executive 5000 model easy chair and swung his feet onto the highest stack of paper on his desk. The topmost set of papers shifted. Leslie Chou winced, but the papers held under Neville’s worn Docksiders.

  “Anyhow,” she said, “I think we should send the quality team out to Tre Sorelle no matter what the MSCC is this time.”

  “Has the third sample from Tre Sorelle come back from the lab yet?”

  She shook her head. “Mel went out to draw it this morning at ten.” She checked her watch. “He’ll have FedEx’d it to Albany by now. We’ll get the results tomorrow afternoon. But this is a really interesting case, Dr. Brandstetter. Nobody knows why the count keeps coming back over a million. It’d be different if the place were a slum. But it’s not. I took one of the tours earlier this summer, you know. The place is as clean as a whistle. It’s gorgeous. Whatever’s sending the somatic cell count up, it’s not an everyday cleanliness issue.” She pushed her wire-rimmed spectacles up her nose and grinned hopefully at him.

  Neville sighed. He liked Leslie. She was one of the brighter second-years in Cornell’s vet program. And unlike a lot of his students, she wasn’t attracted to the glamourous side of the profession. Leslie liked horses, had an easy affection for cats and dogs and a grave appreciation for cows and swine—but she loved goats.

  “You’re thinking you can maybe get a paper out of this for the small ruminants class,” he guessed.

  She beamed. Leslie was thirty pounds overweight, her soft black hair refused to stay in her ponytail, and she had the appealing clumsiness of a puppy. Neville found her irresistible, in his heavily paternal way. “Getting a paper out of it would be the nuts,” she admitted. “But who’s to say? If nothing else, I can get a better grip on how a really fabulous dairy’s run. And Mrs. Capretti’s practically a legend! I mean, I’m just dying to meet her. You’ve known her for years, I bet.”

  Neville knew Doucetta Capretti, all right. Although anyone who had anything to do with goats within a five-hundred-mile radius of his very comfortable office knew Doucetta, he had a better reason. “She’s my mother-in-law,” he said dryly. “To be precise, soon to be my ex-mother-in-law.”

  Leslie blinked at him and skipped right over the reference to his marriage. “You mean Mrs. Brandstetter was brought up with goats? Is that totally cool, or what?”

  Anna Luisa hated goats. Almost as much as she hated Neville Brandstetter. But not quite.

  “Anna Luisa has as little to do with the dairy as possible.”

  Leslie’s disbelief was palpable. “Gosh. That’s like, so sad. Anyway. I’ve never been on a quality process call. I think it’ll be exciting, getting to know a dairy from the inside out.”


  Neville could think of a few things more exciting than Doucetta’s response to a bunch of academics poking their collective noses in her business. A third Gulf War, maybe. He swung his feet to the floor and leaned forward. “You’d need a mentor to go in with you, Leslie. The department’s stretched pretty thin at the moment. I don’t have a goat man…sorry, or woman…that can take the time to supervise.”

  Leslie’s big brown eyes looked appealingly into his. “Oh, Dr. Neville. There must be somebody.”

  There were, in fact, two professors who would be ideal mentors and who liked Leslie as much as everybody else did. On the other hand, both of them knew Doucetta all too well. Neville sighed with real regret. “I’m afraid this one’s not—”

  “And it doesn’t have to be a goat specialist, necessarily, does it?” Leslie interrupted eagerly. “I mean, as long as it’s a full professor, it’d be okay, wouldn’t it?” She sighed wistfully. “There must be somebody.”

  Well, there was, in fact, somebody.

  Neville shook his head. Nah. It’d be a disaster.

  On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a department disaster, and as long as nobody quit…He thought about it. Considering the personalities involved, nobody innocent was going to get hurt. He chuckled, and for a moment, his depression over the state of his marriage lifted. Then he said, “Maybe. Maybe there is. Tell you what, Leslie. I’ll talk to Victor Bergland and see what he can do.”

  Leslie’s smile would have made cherubs sing and angels cluck approvingly. Neville could see what she was thinking: Dr. Bergland was department chair. If anyone could find a kindly mentor, it was Dr. Bergland.

  V

  “The thing is, Mel, the county’s plain flat broke.” Brian Folk emphasized the “flat broke” with the flat of his hand on the dashboard of Melvin Staples’s car. “You got your basic good citizens like you and me paying taxes through the nose for the houses that we bust our butts to pay for, and then you got the fat-cat businesses that squirm out of paying their fair share and what d’ya got?”

  “My job’s on the line here,” Mel said. “The old bat’s after my job as it is.”

  “I say, what d’ya got?” Brian asked rhetorically. The Summersville Board of Supervisors had appointed him tax assessor for a dang good reason. Nobody pushed Brian Folk around. Not the least some ninety-year-old biddy with a mean mouth. “You got unfairness, that’s what you’ve got. You got inequity.” He held up a sample jar filled with bluish milk. “And here, you got goat’s milk with a guaranteed—what d’ya call it?”

  “Somatic cell count,” Melvin said. “It’s a reading of the number of white blood cells that have been sloughed off in raw milk.”

  “Whatever,” Brian Folk said. “That sample you took from Tre Sorelle comes back with, say, a zillion of those little babies…”

  “A million,” Melvin said. “That’s the standard for goats. And I’ll tell you something, Brian, it’s a dang stupid standard. Goats naturally shed more white blood cells than cows, or sheep, even. They have a naturally higher count, and when I don’t want to wring the old bat’s neck for her, I can see she’s got a point. There’s probably nothing basically wrong with the milk.”

  Brian didn’t need to hear anything more than Mel’s last sentence. “See? So what’s to hurt? The dang milk’s fine.”

  “But it might not be,” Melvin said. “The state sets that standard because it means something, see? I fake that result, somebody might end up sicker than a dog from drinking the stuff and like I said, my job’s on the line.”

  “So let’s say you send in that sample you just got and the count comes back a zillion…”

  “Over a million,” Melvin said.

  Brian sighed theatrically. Melvin didn’t seem to be getting the picture. “And then what? The dairy gets shut down, ’cause it’s three times and you’re out, right?”

  “Not necessarily. Like I told you, the state and the school send in a team to look stuff over.”

  “Whatever. It’s going to play holy hollyhocks with the fair market value, right? And I do my assessment of fair market value based on how much that place is worth, and if they got this problem, it ends up being worth a pile of dog doo-doo, don’t it?”

  Melvin shrugged.

  “And the old bat goes to plead this nice fat assessment I got for her.” Brian smoothed the folder in his lap with pleasure. “And she’s got, maybe a leg to stand on.”

  Melvin rubbed his hand across his forehead.

  “So her taxes go way down, and then, you end up losing your job anyhow, right? ’Cause the county’s broke and phhft!” He snapped his fingers. “They don’t have enough to pay your salary.”

  Melvin didn’t seem to be following this carefully thought-out logic. He stared through the windshield at the sunny August day outside, his face blank. His brain’s a blank, too, Brian thought, thanks very much. There was more than one dim bulb in Melvin Staples’s chandelier or he wouldn’t have listened to any of this crapola in the first place.

  “Looky here.” Brian set the flask of guaranteed legal SCC goat’s milk on the seat between them. “I’m just going to leave this little bottle here, just like that. You drive yourself on down to the FedEx office and you think about what I told you all the way.” He patted Melvin on the shoulder. “And I can count on you to do the right thing, Melvin.”

  Brian slid out of Melvin’s van and closed the passenger-side door softly. He’d arranged a pretty good meeting spot. The parking lot behind the Summersville High School was totally dead in August. He got into his Chevy Caprice, waited until Melvin pulled out of the parking lot, and turned right onto Main Street. Well, that was one iron in the fire that might work out to his advantage. He was a patient man. A man who took his time about things. The assessment was only one nail in the old biddy’s coffin. He’d make dang sure there were a couple more.

  One

  MY wife bumped open the French door to our terrace and backed onto the porch. She held a bottle of Scotch in one hand and a tea tray in the other. It was a vision that inspired me to recite aloud the words of that most sensuous of poets, Omar Khayyam:

  “A loaf of bread

  a jug of wine and thou

  beside me in the wilderness.

  Ah! This were paradise enow!”

  The collie at my feet gave an approving woof.

  “It’s just me and a bit of a snack, Austin.” Madeline gave me a kiss. Then she beamed at an envelope propped between the plate of Parmesan-dusted cheese puffs and a plate of grape tomatoes from our garden. “And the check from the police department!”

  She set the loaded tray on the table at my elbow, sank gracefully into the chair opposite mine, and seized the envelope with every appearance of satisfaction.

  It was my favorite time of day at the offices of McKenzie Veterinary Practice, Inc. (Practice limited to large animals). After a successful afternoon castrating bull calves, we were more than ready for our usual four o’clock respite. The sun was setting in a blaze of color not too far removed from the glory of my wife’s auburn hair. My collie Lincoln was at my feet. My beloved was at my side. We were meeting our old friends the Berglands in a few hours for a Friday night fish fry. Peace buzzed like a bee around the green acres of our farm.

  I poured a large glass of Scotch and took a satisfying sip. “Ah!” I said. “This is indeed the life!”

  Few would have guessed that not more than a year ago, I had been in a state of gloom over the state of our finances. After a long and happy career as the chair of Bovine Sciences at the nearby veterinary school, I had retired to a life of ease and comfort with my wife, my dog, and my horses. But a careless foray into the world of high finance had made a hash of our retirement income. I had, perforce, opened a veterinary practice to keep the wolf from the door and food on the table. While not precisely prospering, our clinic did well enough that we recruited two assistants along the way. But, to the amazement of those who know me well, it is not my clinic practice that keeps New York State E
lectric and Gas a happy provider to the McKenzie household; it is our newly hatched detective agency, Cases Closed.

  “Hm,” Madeline said, after a close perusal of the check. “Simon warned me that it might take a while for the village council to approve the check, but this is speedy, Austin. I sent the invoice for the O’Leary case in just last week.”

  “Simon was undoubtedly grateful for the dispatch with which we cornered the murderer,” I said with no small sense of satisfaction. Simon Provost, Summersville’s chief of detectives, is a good man to have on one’s side in the detection business.

  “It’s more likely he wants the whole thing over and done with and you…I mean us…out of his hair.” Madeline tucked the check in the pocket of her denim skirt, leaned over the end table, and kissed me again. “Rita said the sales of the Sentinel doubled the weeks she was covering the case. And Becky Provost said Simon’s acid reflux was so bad the whole month of July that she was going to send the bill for those stomach tablets to the CNN news desk in Syracuse. The reporters just didn’t let up on him. I don’t know why everyone finds murder so fascinatin’, but they surely seemed to in this case.”

  In moments of slight stress, my wife’s southern origins can be found in the number of dropped g’s in her speech.

  “I suppose it’s just good old human nature.” She reached over and helped herself to a substantial number of cheese puffs. “And it’s surely satisfyin’ to see a murderer collared and sent off to the pokey. Not to mention that the detective business has added a good bit to our bottom line.” She sat back, her sapphire eyes reflective. “On the other hand, it’s a sorry state of affairs, Austin, when the bills get paid because some poor soul’s bought the farm. But the checking account’s low. We need another murder.” She dispatched the cheese puffs with a sigh.