Death and the Gentle Bull Read online

  Heimrich tapped the newspaper. “The bull bellowed,” he said. “They found Mrs. Landcraft in the stall. Somewhat—battered, I gather.”

  “He’d—well, it looked as if he’d walked on her, captain. She was—all crushed. Broken. She was a big woman. Big and strong. And—she knew animals too. Prince especially.”

  “I don’t know animals,” Heimrich said. “It seems to me I’ve heard bulls are not to be trusted. That they’ll be gentle one minute and berserk the next.”

  Crowley nodded. “That’s what they say.”

  “But?”

  “Well,” Crowley said, and hesitated. “I suppose that was it. Only—well, Dad knows a lot about cattle, captain. If he says Prince is gentle—well—”

  “Apparently he killed this woman.”

  Crowley nodded.

  “The doctor’s satisfied?”

  Crowley nodded again.

  “The bull killed her,” he said. “I guess there’s no doubt about that. I suppose it’s just the way it looks. All right, sir. I’ll—”

  But Captain Heimrich had closed his eyes. He made a slight movement of one hand, and Crowley waited. Heimrich opened his eyes.

  “I suppose somebody could stir up the most gentle animal,” he said. “Goad him. That’s what your father thinks?”

  “Yes,” Crowley said. “That is—he’s got no way of knowing.”

  “The county people are satisfied, I take it?”

  “Yes sir. Seem to be, anyway.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Aside from your father’s conviction the bull’s gentle, is there something else, Crowley? You know these people, naturally. You know what I mean.”

  “Well,” Crowley said, “I can’t say I know them, captain. Just met them. Somebody banged up their mailbox—went along for a couple of miles banging up all the mailboxes. You know how it is. I met Mrs. Landcraft then. She was pretty sore.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “You find out who did it, Crowley?”

  Crowley shook his head.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “I didn’t suppose you had. You know the sons?” He checked with the Times. “Wade and Harvey? They live there?”

  Wade did; Harvey lived in New York. Crowley thought that Harvey—the elder of the two—visited the farm only occasionally. “Got a wife doesn’t like the country much, from what I hear,” Crowley said. “Show girl they say she is. On television.”

  Heimrich smiled faintly, for the most part inwardly. Things got around in the country. A good trooper absorbed, hardly knowing he did so. Crowley was on his way, apparently, to becoming a good trooper. Heimrich nodded.

  “Wade’s planning to marry the Merritt girl,” Crowley said. “Nice people, the Merritts. Been in the county a long time. Almost as long as the Wades.”

  “Wades?”

  “Mrs. Landcraft was a Wade.”

  The bull was not alone in having pedigree, Heimrich thought, and did not say. Instead, he said he gathered there was no older male Landcraft. Mrs. Landcraft had been a widow? Or divorced?

  She had been a widow; the widow of John Hamilton Landcraft, and at the name Heimrich nodded. It was little more than a name to him, but it was to some degree a name to almost everyone. Landcraft had been a corporation lawyer of renown and, presumably, of high fees. Crowley told what he knew, starting with that.

  John—John Hamilton—Landcraft had bought Deep Meadow Farm some forty years before and taken up the breeding of Aberdeen Angus, more or less as a hobby. He must have had a good deal of money; as a hobby the breeding of pedigreed cattle can come high. Shortly after buying the farm, he had married Margaret Wade, the daughter of a neighbor, and then in her early twenties. Landcraft himself must have been forty.

  “This was all before my time,” Crowley said. “But you pick things up. You know how it is, sir.”

  Heimrich nodded to that.

  Landcraft and his wife had lived on the farm, expanding the herd slowly, for some twenty-five years. A great deal of money had gone into the farm, but Landcraft apparently was making plenty. They had produced, in addition to prize cattle, two sons. Then, in his late sixties, when Mrs. Landcraft was around fifty, Landcraft had died. That would be—“oh, about a dozen years ago. I was a kid and I remember watching the funeral. Biggest one we’d ever had around there.”

  Mrs. Landcraft had continued to run the farm. Wade had gone to Cornell, taking the agricultural course. Harvey, the elder, had gone to Dartmouth.

  “Still plenty of money,” Heimrich said.

  Crowley hesitated. He said, then, that he supposed so.

  “At a guess,” he said, “it’s mostly tied up in the place. You don’t get cattle like that for peanuts. The whole shebang costs plenty to run. They’ve got farm trucks and a couple of station wagons but Mrs. Landcraft drove around mostly in a 1950 Plymouth. Good car and all that but—well, most of the people around there—people with big places—go in for Cadillacs. You get the picture, sir?”

  Heimrich closed his eyes. This time he did not immediately reopen them, and when he spoke it was not in direct answer to Crowley’s question, which at the moment was, in any case, unanswerable.

  “When you come down to it,” he said, “all you’ve got’s a hunch. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  The good-looking young man flushed under his tan. He said, “O.K., sir. Sorry I took your time,” and started to stand up. Heimrich opened his eyes, then.

  “Now Crowley,” he said. “Sit down. What’s wrong with having a hunch?”

  Crowley sat down, but he shook his head.

  “A good deal of the job’s in having hunches,” Heimrich said. “Get a hunch, check up on hunch. You see some men in a car and something doesn’t look right. Just a hunch. So you check up. Most of the time, everything is right, naturally. Sometimes it isn’t. You work that way?”

  “Oh,” Crowley said, “sure.”

  “Sure,” Heimrich repeated. “So do I. You’ve got a hunch there’s something wrong with this Landcraft setup. The bull’s too gentle. But there’s something more. What is it?”

  Crowley shook his head again.

  “Now trooper,” Heimrich said. “Think.”

  Crowley appeared to. He spoke hesitantly.

  “Nearly as I can say it,” he said, “it’s the wrong thing to have happened to her—the wrong kind of thing. You—well, you just can’t figure her having an accident.”

  Heimrich waited.

  “She was a big woman,” Crowley said. “Bigger than most men. And—she seemed to sort of run things, if you know what I mean. Be in charge of them. You figure—oh, with some people a car’s going to get away from them, or a ladder’s going to break, or a knife slip. Some people—” He stopped. He shrugged. He looked at Heimrich, and Heimrich, his eyes wide open now, nodded. “Hell,” Crowley said, “you just wouldn’t figure an accident would have the nerve to happen to Mrs. Landcraft.”

  Heimrich nodded again. But he said, “Of course, a bull isn’t exactly an accident, in that sense. But I see what you mean. She sounds like a forceful woman.”

  “You can say that again.”

  Heimrich closed his eyes, in passive rejection of a locution he found trying.

  “Difficult to live with, probably,” he said.

  “About that, I don’t know, sir,” Trooper Crowley said. “Like I said, I only met her a couple of times. But maybe—well, they say she did have run-ins with some of the people around here. Nothing serious. You know the sort of thing. Nothing anybody would get really—well, sore about. Anyhow, not sore enough to—” He stopped.

  “Stir up the animals,” Heimrich said. “In this case, literally. But—you’ve a hunch someone did. Your father has. You’d—what? Been expecting something?”

  “If I was, I didn’t know it,” the trooper said. “Maybe. But—”

  “But not this,” Heimrich said. “Not an accident in a bull pen.” He paused. “I can’t recall,” he said, “ever having heard of murder by bull. Rather an interesting notion. Not that the
re’s anything to go on, naturally. The sheriff’s satisfied, you say? The D. A.?”

  “Yes,” Crowley said.

  “But,” Heimrich said, “you had to have a hunch. I’d have started a few days’ leave”—he looked at his watch—“half an hour ago. Sergeant Forniss, who works with me, has already started his.” He looked at Crowley, with slight reproach.

  Crowley started to say he was sorry, but Heimrich shook his head.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I’d rather like to see this bull that’s so damn gentle.”

  He got up. He was a very solid man.

  “You may as well come along with me, Crowley,” he said. “Maybe you’ll have another hunch.”

  III

  They had been polite at Carmel, the county seat. The district attorney had been polite; the medical examiner had been polite. There had been hardly anything in the attitude of either, or of the detectives of the district attorney’s office, to indicate a suspicion that Captain M. L. Heimrich, of the criminal identification division of the New York State Police, had taken leave of his senses. If he was not satisfied with the obvious facts, the fullest cooperation of everyone would, naturally, be offered—was offered, then and there. But, the facts were obvious.

  “She went into the stall—it’s really a pen—with this big bull,” the district attorney explained, and he was patient. “The bull was loose in the stall. You know what bulls are, captain. Anybody’s crazy who trusts a bull.”

  This particular bull, Heimrich pointed out, mildly, was supposed to be gentle. He didn’t, he added, know much about bulls. He could not remember that, in his experience, bulls had previously come up.

  “Everybody knows you can’t trust a bull,” the district attorney said. “Maybe they act gentle, sure. Maybe they’re gentle for a long time. Then they turn and gore you. While back, a farmer around here was damn near killed by a bull he’d raised from a calf. It used to follow him around. Hell, it used to try to follow him into the house and when it couldn’t it’d stand outside and cry. That’s what they say, anyhow. So, one day when the bull was three, four years old, it turned on the man and knocked him down and gored him. Put him in the hospital for months.” He regarded Heimrich; he spoke with finality. “That’s the way bulls are, captain,” he said. “You can’t trust them.”

  Heimrich nodded. He’d heard that, naturally. No doubt it was true. Was Mrs. Landcraft gored?

  “Well,” the district attorney said, “no, she wasn’t. She was just sort of—well, crushed. You know why that was, captain? The bull hasn’t got any horns. That’s the only reason. He did all right without them.”

  “You raise cattle yourself?” Heimrich asked, and was looked at with astonishment.

  “Good God no,” the district attorney said. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  Heimrich agreed that it had probably nothing to do with anything.

  “Young Crowley’s just proving what a smart cop he is,” the district attorney said. “But it’s up to you, captain. As I said, we’ll cooperate.” He paused. “Fully,” he said. “Just bring us something.” He smiled, faintly, at his own words. Heimrich went to talk to the doctor who had examined what remained of Mrs. Margaret Landcraft, recently so resolute.

  “Crushed,” the doctor said, succinctly. “A ton of bull leaned on her. Knocked her down and trampled her. From the looks, he might have rolled on her. She might as well have been pushed against a brick wall by a truck.”

  “The bull was supposed to be gentle,” Heimrich said.

  “I heard that story,” the doctor said. “Also, I saw what he did to the woman. Maybe he had been and—well, went bad. That happens, you know. Stallions. Bulls. As a matter of fact, even tomcats. Friend of mine had a cat for years. Nice, friendly cat. All at once, it turned savage and clawed my friend up. Had to have it killed. Just as they will this bull, probably. Remember, when they used to use work cattle, they turned them into oxen.”

  Probably he was right. Males did, sometimes, grow more deadly as they grew older. Did the doctor know whether this bull had been getting along in years?

  The doctor did not. All he knew about the bull was that he was black, and low-slung, and apparently had got his owner in a corner and killed her. That was what he had been told, anyway. The body had been removed from the stall when he saw it. He understood that somebody—he thought a photographer from some magazine or other—had taken a picture before the body was removed. Although what he planned to do with it, the doctor couldn’t guess. It wouldn’t have been pretty.

  “No,” Heimrich said. “You didn’t find anything that was out of line? No injuries the bull might not have caused?”

  “She wasn’t shot, or stabbed or poisoned,” the doctor said. “I take it that’s what you have in mind?”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said, and closed his eyes briefly. “I haven’t anything in mind. I’m told the bull was gentle. Always had been. Crowley’s father knows cattle, the boy tells me.”

  “Listen,” the doctor said, “there was a man around here—a man who knew cattle as well as Crowley does—who practically brought a bull calf up by hand. Then one day—”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “I heard. You didn’t notice anything out of the way?”

  “She was dead,” the doctor said. “She was alive when the bull started on her. She died, primarily any way, of a crushed chest. The bull killed her.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said. “Well.”

  He stood up.

  “What probably happened,” the doctor said, “was that she started to do something to the bull and he turned on her. Maybe he had a scratch, and she was putting disinfectant of some kind on it. Something with carbolic in it, probably. It stung and—well, the bull got mad.”

  “Hm-m,” Heimrich said. “Was there a scratch on the bull?”

  “My god, captain,” the doctor said. “You think I examined the bull, too?”

  “Now doctor,” Heimrich said. “No. I just wondered what made you think of that—that she was treating the bull.”

  For a moment, the physician looked slightly puzzled. Then he shook his head, said he didn’t know. Then he smiled, rather as the district attorney had.

  “You seemed to want an explanation,” he said. “That just came into my head. I don’t know why. Probably there’s nothing to it. Probably the bull just turned savage.”

  “Yes,” Heimrich said, “no doubt that’s all there is to it.”

  He thanked the physician; was promised any cooperation possible; thanked him again. He joined Trooper Crowley in the police car parked in front of the county court house. He told Crowley that everybody believed the bull had turned savage.

  “Dad says he was a gentle bull,” Crowley told him. “But—I suppose they’re right, captain. You want to go back to Hawthorne?”

  “Now Crowley,” Heimrich had said. “We haven’t had a look at this bull yet, have we?”

  They had driven toward Brewster on U.S. 6, but had turned off while still several miles north of the town and had followed a secondary road—“Old Road”—for perhaps a mile before they came to a sign which read: “Deep Meadow Farm” and which had, beneath the lettering, the pictured face of a black bull. They went up a climbing drive, then, and stopped in front of a rambling white house. As Crowley parked the car, a man came from behind the house and stopped and stood looking at them, waiting. The man was tall, heavy. His florid face was without particular expression.

  “Ballard,” Crowley said. “Farm manager.” Then, raising his voice, he said, “Back again, Mr. Ballard.”

  Ballard moved a few steps toward them.

  “Didn’t expect you,” he said. He looked at Heimrich. “Captain Heimrich,” Crowley said. Ballard took another step toward them. He said, “Captain, huh? Something come up?” Ballard asked.

  “Come up?” Heimrich repeated. “No, not that I know of. Just a formality, Mr.—Ballard, is it?”

  “Ballard,” the big man agreed. “What’s the formality?”
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br />   “Now Mr. Ballard,” Heimrich said. “We have to keep the record straight, naturally. Probably won’t have to bother you again. Just look over the scene of the accident, you know. Check up on a few things.”

  Ballard appeared to be puzzled. There was no reason, Heimrich thought, why he shouldn’t be. It sounded thin. It was thin. The whole business was thin as glass, and less substantial. Ballard said, “O.K. What things?”

  “Well,” Heimrich said, “I’d like a look at the stall. And the bull. Unless he’s been destroyed?”

  Ballard’s expression, then, was one of more than puzzlement. It was one of open and complete astonishment.

  “Destroyed?” he said. “Prince? The champ? Are you crazy, mister?”

  “Apparently,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know much about cattle, Mr. Ballard. It occurred to me that, if the animal’s turned savage, it might be necessary to destroy him. Apparently I was—”

  “Kill Prince?” Ballard said. “Mister, he’s the grand champion.” He looked at Heimrich; Heimrich felt himself inadequate to respond appropriately to this information. “The International Grand Champion,” Ballard said, and spoke in capital letters. “That means he’s the best Angus bull in the world. The—” Words appeared to fail him. He looked a man not given to emotion, but at the enormity of what had been suggested he spread large hands in a gesture of hopelessness. He looked toward the sky, as if seeking inspiration, and there, it appeared, he found it. “Deep Meadow Prince Twelfth, mister,” he said, “is worth a quarter of a million dollars. The old girl—I mean, Mrs. Landcraft—wouldn’t have sold him for that, and she’d have been a fool to. Where would she have been?”

  “Now Mr. Ballard,” Heimrich said. “I don’t know. You mean—literally a quarter of a million?”

  “Maybe more,” Ballard said. “How can you tell? Nobody ever sells an international grand champion.” He paused. “One was sold once,” he said. “Brought two hundred thousand. That was several years ago and the Blacks have been coming along since.” He looked at Heimrich again, and then he shook his head. “You don’t know much about cattle, do you, mister?”