A Steak in Murder (5 page)

It was tacitly—not overtly as CarolAnn's spy network
was efficient, omnipresent, and practically invisible—un
derstood that come next election, CarolAnn's impressively sculptured behind was to be booted out of office. Until that time, she held the village in an iron grip.

Mindful of CarolAnn's power, Quill was careful to park in a metered spot, and stick in several quarters. She
entered the courtroom just as Harland Peterson and Fred
die Bellini took their seats at the long oak table in front of the judge's stand. She barely glanced at the high ceil
ings, the carved paneling, and the old-fashioned oak pews
of the cavernous room. She'd been in this courtroom before, defending a traffic ticket, and the memory wasn't a happy one.

" 'Lo, Quill," Freddie said. Quill always felt guilty that she was a little wary of Freddie Bellini. He was a very nice man and came from a long line of morticians.

"Hi, Freddie." Quill sat next to Harland. He smelled of cows, in a nicely homey way, and she patted his arm. "How are you, Harland?"

"Good." Which meant he was. Harland was a man of few words, unless roused to a pitch of emotion.

"Isn't that a new tie? And a new shirt?" Harland's wife had died three years ago of what Quill darkly suspected was overwork. Farmers' wives in Tompkins County had a hard life of it, almost as hard as their husbands. In the time since then, Harland had stuck to his John Deere coveralls, laundered twice a week by his youngest daughter, Susan. The shirt and tie were quite a departure.

"Yeh."

"Going somewhere after the meeting?"

"Yeh."

"That's nice."

"The Ladies' Auxiliary's meeting at the Croh Bar about eight o'clock," Freddie offered. "The bowling banquet." He winked.

"Oh," Marge was president of the Ladies' Auxiliary. Quill hoped Marge didn't really have her eye on Royal Rossiter. She'd make Harland an excellent wife. "That's even nicer." Quill looked around the courtroom and dropped her voice. "Does CarolAnn know we're having an emergency meeting?"

"She demanded it," Freddie said glumly. "Called up the mayor and got on his case about those cows in your garden, Quill. He called me. Or rather, Adela did. Same thing."

"Nothin' wrong with a few cows," Harland said.

"I agree," Quill said, who, much as she wanted to whack Marge over the head with Doreen's broom on occasion, was not about to betray her to the terrible CarolAnn. "Did anyone get hold of Howie? He ought to have the ordinances on this sort of thing."

"Adela called," Howie said, appearing from the hall, which led to the judge's chambers, to sit with them. "And here I am." He looked annoyed, which was unusual for Howie. He was a nice silvery sort of fifty, with a comfortable stomach and lines in his pleasant face, ex
actly the sort of lawyer old-line Hemlockians trusted with
probating their estates. He sat down next to Quill, pulled a stack of Xerox copies out of his briefcase and distributed them. The top paper was titled "Zoning Ordinance
7.1: The Keeping of Farm Animals on Commercial Prop
erty."

"What is it that's so urgent?" Quill asked. "I mean I
hadn't really thought that emergency sessions of the Zon
ing Board would be a part of this job."

No one answered this. It didn't need an answer. When CarolAnn called an emergency meeting of any kind, property owners snapped to.

Howie looked at his watch and sighed. "We'll wait fifteen minutes," he said, "and if no one shows up, I think we can discuss the violation of ordinance 7.1—the keeping of farm animals in an area zoned commercial— and pass a temporary variance. The damn cows aren't going to be in your rose garden for more than a week, Quill. I checked with Marge. Ordinance 7.21 deals with
fairs, exhibits, and festivals, and allows for the temporary
pasturing of—"

"I'm
so
sorry I'm a little late," CarolAnn said, jogging down the aisle to the front of the courtroom. She was wearing her usual attire: jogging suit, two-hundred-dollar Michael Jordan athletic shoes, and a sweatband holding back her aggressively dyed blond hair. The sweatband was blue. As usual, she was scrubbed squeaky-clean.

CarolAnn had an entourage of two. One was a round little woman in a bright caftan with dangling wood earrings and unbound gray hair to her waist. The second was a tall thin man with a wispy brown beard and a pained expression. Something about him reminded Quill of Hudson Zabriskie, former manager of the Paramount Paint Factory. CarolAnn tossed her hair. Quill caught a
whiff of shampoo. "Is the mayor here yet? This concerns
him, as well."

"I'm here." Elmer Henry clumped resignedly down the aisle and sat down at the far end of the front row, a seat that would allow him the fastest exit from the building. "Don't have much time, though, CarolAnn. Got a lot of village business to attend to this evening."

"If by that you mean the party at the Croh Bar for the Ladies' Auxiliary, that can wait," CarolAnn said. "Besides, I think Marge is entertaining another man tonight, Harland. Too bad about your nice new shirt and tie." She twinkled. Harland blushed a painful red. Quill bit her lip to keep from being rude. You never got anywhere being rude to CarolAnn. "Gentlemen, and Quill, of course, I want to reassure you that I am not here in my capacity as a public servant."

"You mean this isn't a tax issue," Harland said.

"Not directly, no. But indirectly it could be. It could well be. As I told you all when I was elevated to this office, the financial well-being of the village
is
my responsibility. The assessment arena covers far more than establishing the value of our homes and businesses . . ."

This would be easier to listen to if CarolAnn's voice weren't so sweet. Icky syrupy-sweet with little upward inflections at the end of her sentences. She blabbered on for a bit about her fiscal integrity. Quill scribbled on the margins of the Xerox copy Howie'd left in front of her:
CarolAnn in the jaws of a Godzilla-like reptile; CarolAnn squashed under the wheels of a huge semi-tractor trailer;
CarolAnn upended in a tar barrel.

"Let's get to the point, CarolAnn," Howie said calmly.

"The point is this. The property owner at One Hemlock Drive . . ."

"Marge Schmidt, yes," Howie said.

"Is currently in custody of a herd of Texas longhorn cattle, which is, in and of itself, a clear violation of ordinance 7.1 the keeping of—"

"I'm familiar with it," Howie said shortly. "But it's my opinion as town attorney, CarolAnn, that the herd constitutes an exhibit. Under ordinance 7.21, it's legal."

"Of
course
it is," CarolAnn said. "I'm perfectly aware of that ordinance." Quill would have bet her best camel hair artist's brush that CarolAnn didn't know beans about the ordinance 7.21 covering fairs, festivals, and exhibits. She was stupid as well as mean as a snake. "But that's not the problem, Mr. Murchison." Trust CarolAnn to have a back pocket strategy when the first one wouldn't work.

"What
is
the problem?"

"The welfare of those poor, penned-up beasts," the little round woman blurted. "The ultimate fate of God's blessed creatures." The tall thin man with the wispy beard set his jaw.

Harland bristled. "Who are these folks, CarolAnn?"

CarolAnn inspected her spotlessly clean fingernails. She smirked. "This is Sky and her colleague Normal Norman Smith."

Quill thought she heard Howie mutter "Oh, shit," but she couldn't be sure. Harland Peterson said, "Oh, for God's sake."

"I'm sorry," she said politely to Normal Norman and Sky. "Should I know you?"

Quill had the general impression CarolAnn had no eyelids, like a snake. So she was surprised when she blinked.
"Sky and Norman are the moving spirit behind Q.U.A.C.K. That's Quell Unfair Animal Cruelty and
Killing. A very influential animal rights movement based
in Syracuse. They support the right of all beings to a free existence, unen . . . unen . . ."

"Unencumbered by the imprisoning hand of man." Normal Norman Smith had a very resonant voice. "Do you realize how many of our animal brethren live under the threat of execution day by day, week by week? Do you have any feeling for the fear, the terror, the despair of a chicken facing the ax? A cow facing the slaughter of its fellows?"

Quill sketched a duck in a caftan carrying a saucepan labeled "QUACK POT."

"How large is the Q.U.A.C.K. membership?" Howie asked.

"Hundreds," CarolAnn said complacently. "They have a couple of buses."

"And your point?"

"The property values of our town could be severely affected by the adverse publicity resulting from a demonstration." CarolAnn's eyes took on a dreamy expression, making her look less like the cyborg in
Terminator 2,
but not much. "I'm afraid it'd be my civic duty as a private citizen—not in my official capacity, of course— to comment to any TV or newspaper people that would come to cover the protest. Do you know," her eyes got a little larger, "the protest Q.U.A.C.K. staged at the tur
key processing plant off the Thruway made the front page
of
U.S.A. TodayT

"That was because they let all the turkeys out of their pens," Freddie said. "And the turkeys ran onto the Thruway and that bus full of kids from the soccer game came to a sideways stop and the Thruway was closed for nine hours while they recaptured all the turkeys. And the eighth graders," he added after a moment's thought. "Remember, most of them hopped over the median and went over the culvert to the pinball arcade right there at exit 38. There was a bigger protest over that than the turkeys."

"What's the
point,
CarolAnn?" Howie said. "Those cows in Quill's rose garden—"

"Sarah Quilliam is NOT the mortgage holder at One Hemlock Drive," CarolAnn said menacingly.

"The cows are legal. If there's nothing else, this plenary session of the Zoning Board is over."

CarolAnn's eyes flashed. "You mean all that mess is legal?"

"All what mess?"

"The—" Her voice dropped. "You know. The poo."

"The poo?" Harland boomed. "You mean the cow manure? Nuthin' wrong with a little old cow manure."

"It's
disgusting."
There was true loathing in her voice. "The smell is
revolting.
I can smell it all the time." She shuddered.

Quill recalled suddenly that CarolAnn's neat little three-bedroom house was about a mile downwind from the Inn.

CarolAnn tipped her chin back, so that her icy blue eyes glittered like chips of mica in stone. "The E.P.A. certainly thinks there's a lot wrong with cow manure."

This struck a sensitive spot with Harland, who'd been involved in a series of skirmishes over the slurry for his dairy herd with the E.P.A. for more than three years. He bristled like a porcupine. To Quill's dismay, he lost his temper and shouted, "There's nuthin' I can do if you got some weird psycho thing about cow dung!"

"Weird psycho thing?" CarolAnn hissed. She drew herself up. She'd ironed her sweatshirt and there were perfect creases pressed down the front of her jogging pants. She was the cleanest person Quill had ever seen. "We'll see about that, mister. We'll just see about that." She placed a firm hand on Normal Norman's shoulder. "Mr. Smith, did you hear that? Those poor animals are going to remain penned up there until they're sent off to the slaughterhouse." Norman turned pale. Tears filled Sky's eyes.

"You're going to do nothing to avert the fate of those poor animals?" Sky appealed to Howie "You will not move?"

"I'm afraid, madam," Howie said stiffly, "that the fate of the cows is not within the purview of the village government. If you have a protest, I suggest you take it with Ms. Schmidt. Or the owners of the cattle." He stood up. "This meeting's adjourned."

"Oh, yeah?" CarolAnn said softly. "We'll goddamn see about that."

"And that," Quill said to Meg the next morning, when
Meg had time to talk, "was that. What do you suppose
CarolAnn's going to do now? I'm telling you, Meg, the
woman went psychotic over the cow manure. It's utterly
ridiculous."

"Jeez. What about Marge?"

"I've been waiting since yesterday to tell you about Marge." She listed the depredations to the gardens, the kitchen, and the Tavern Bar. Not to mention what the village grapevine had told her about Meg's kitchen.

"Marge renamed the Inn?" Meg's eyebrows rose.
"And she pulled out the Aga and installed a micro
wave?" Meg had the Welsh coloring of their father, gray
eyes and dark hair. In summer, her fair skin turned dark
gold. As a result, her summer temper tantrums were more
visually interesting than at other times of the year. Quill, hopeful of a spectacular display, pressed the advantage.
"The Dew Drop Inn. And I told you about the cattle in
the rose garden."

"What happened to the koi?"

Quill shrugged. "For all I know, Betty Hall turned them into frozen fish sticks and served them to conventioneers."

Meg shook her head decisively. "No. Betty's a better cook than that. I'm curious about the microwave, though. I can't believe Betty's going to precook entrees. She had the best diner food in the United States as far as I know. Going frozen's not like her at all." Meg remained maddeningly calm. "So the old place has changed a lot, huh?"