Whisker of Evil (25 page)

“I hope you will forgive me for being direct.”

He leaned forward, his sensitive eyes welcoming. “You know I think it saves time.” Saving time is quite a virtue among Northerners.

“That it does. As you know, this is the old Jones place, and you've done a beautiful job restoring the cemetery. Herb can't keep up with that and his duties, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Actually, I should tell you that he and I have spoken and he's asked me to broach this subject.” She took a deep breath. “Blair, should you sell this place for any reason, Herbie and I would like to buy it together. We'd work with you any way we can because, as you know, neither one of us is exactly cash heavy.”

A broad smile crossed Blair's face, a face instantly recognizable to anyone who read magazines or looked through clothing catalogs. “No kidding.”

“We celebrate his thirty years at St. Luke's next month on the seventeenth. I reckon he'll retire sometime in the next ten years, maybe even the next five. He'd like to live in the farmhouse. And I'd like to farm the bottomland.”

“I see. Is the next question about my intentions regarding Little Mim?” Blair, in his sweet way, tried to be Southern by saying intentions.

“Actually, no.” Harry exhaled, relieved that she had spoken about the land. “I don't think that's my business.”

“Harry, you really are different, you know that?”

“No.”

“Trust me. You are. You are the strangest combination of curiosity and rectitude. You can't resist being a detective, but you don't want to pry into someone's personal life.”

She flashed her crooked smile. “If I thought you were a murderer, I'd pry.”

“Oh, Harry.” He tapped the table with his knife. “I didn't want to fall in love with Little Mim. I thought she was just another spoiled, empty, rich snob, but I was wrong. She's not. And becoming vice-mayor has brought her out of herself and out from under her mother's shadow. She's a remarkable lady.”

“She is.” Harry, while not feeling especially close to Little Mim, could appreciate her good qualities.

“Aunt Tally is for me. Jim and I get along great, but the mother—oh, she's not thrilled about my line of work, and she thinks I'll fall prey to temptation. All those female models. Since most of them are anorexic or bulimic, I'm not attracted one bit!” He laughed.

“Big Mim's much better about you than she used to be.”

“I guess. I do wonder how much longer I can model. I think I'm about due for a big life change.”

“Me, too.”

“Well, you've already started on yours. It's weird to go into the post office and not see you.”

“Weird for me, too. I don't know what comes next. I have to sift through dreams and reality.”

“Your dream?”

“To farm.”

“The reality?” His eyebrows raised.

“You can't make a thin dime.”

“Bet if you found the right crop or crops you could.”

“That's one of the things I have to think about. Like ginseng—it's a good cash crop. Soybeans can be, too. All kinds of things are going through my head, although I'm caught up in what's been happening around here.”

“I guess we all are in one way or another.” He laid his knife across his plate. “Harry, I promise you I will give you and Herb first option, should I sell. And I will be as fair as I can.”

“Thank you.”

“Do you want to tell Herb or should I?”

“I will, since he spoke to me in confidence. Which means we should keep this between ourselves,” she said warmly. “If you do sell this wonderful old place, I hope you don't leave Crozet. I've grown to like you very much. We all have.”

“Thank you. I feel the same way about you. If I move from here it will be to Dalmally or—and this is my hope—over to Rose Hill. Aunt Tally could use us over there, and Little Mim would be a tiny bit farther away from her mother.”

“I hope you don't expect Aunt Tally not to meddle.” Harry laughed.

“No, but she's not as bad.”

As Harry walked out the back door to leave, she and Blair shook hands on the first-option deal. A piece of paper was only as good as the person who signed it. A handshake staked your reputation on it.

46

U
sing the Jockey Club software, Fair spent all night checking every registered offspring of Ziggy Flame, those horses born between 1971 and 1974. Then he checked their offspring. He did the same for Ziggy's full brother standing in Maryland. Ziggy Dark Star had a great career at stud. The printout of his offspring was almost book-length.

This only covered horses registered with the Jockey Club. During Ziggy Flame's brief career, he'd also produced hunters and foxhunters from non-black-type mares. Mary Pat generously allowed good horsemen who were not in the race game to breed to her rising star. Big Mim benefited from this generosity and was riding a third-generation hunter with Ziggy Flame blood, as was Harry. Her Tomahawk had Ziggy blood, since his grandfather, Flaming Tomahawk, came from one of Big Mim's best mares.

As hunters and foxhunters have no central registry such as the Jockey Club, there was no way Fair could get statistics on those horses. While Ziggy's brother may have been bred to non-black-type mares in the beginning of his stud career, he proved a powerful sire so early that the chances of him covering a less than stellar mare were thin. His stud fee had been seventy-five thousand dollars, payable when the foal stood and nursed, as is the custom. Show-ring people and foxhunters were shut off from that blood.

As Fair feverishly worked, he thought about the limitations of equine breeding. In America, it's every man (or woman) for himself. There is, as yet, no sense of genetic capital, no commitment to improving bloodstock nationwide. This translates into money and brains or both. Those with the big bucks have access to the best thoroughbred blood. Those without have to be highly intelligent and figure out a way to tap into those bloodlines through a sister, brother, or offspring of a great horse. These horses might never have raced or they retired early with an injury, therefore their get—the term for offspring—would bring little at the yearling sales. But it's the get of these horses that make the great eventers, jumpers, hunters, and foxhunters. The people who own them, if professional horsemen, have spent their lives combing the back pastures of the large breeding farms, haunting the smaller sales, traveling from Maryland to Oklahoma to Ocala to New York, always searching. Others would select a few well-made mares and start a small broodmare band, as Barry Monteith and Sugar Thierry had done. They would then find that half-brother to Lord At War or Pleasant Colony, breed their mare, and pray.

Fair had intended to have dinner with Harry but was so caught up in his research, he canceled. She understood, as he told her what he was looking for and why. Since he had been so attentive of late, she knew he had to be totally wrapped up in his research. Rather than be put out, she was excited he was working late. She wanted to see the results.

It was now nine o'clock, Monday morning, June 28. Fair carried a banker's box filled with printout sheets to Deputy Cynthia Cooper and Sheriff Rick Shaw.

“Can you condense this?” Rick lifted the white lid off the box.

“More or less.” The tall veterinarian appreciated how well organized and sparse the county sheriff's headquarters were. Rick ran a tight ship.

“Fair, sit down. Can I get you coffee or a Coke or anything? A doughnut. Rick's big on Krispy Kremes.”

Fair waved off Cooper's offer. “Caffeine to the max. I stayed up until four-thirty this morning.”

“It must be good.” Rick smiled as he dropped into his chair, which he pulled out to face Fair.

“I think it is. I wanted to see if there was consistency in the offspring of Ziggy Flame. The Jockey Club has his records concerning registered breedings. His first year he was bred to fifteen mares. This only counts horses registered with the Jockey Club; remember, no records for the others unless Mary Pat left them.”

“She did.” Cooper told him. “That's in the notebook we found in Barry Monteith's effects.”

“May I see them later? It'd be good if I could take them home.”

“We can do that.” Rick nodded, thankful that Fair, a specialist in equine reproduction, wanted to study the notebooks.

“Ziggy's second year he bred twenty-two mares, and the last year he bred thirty-one. Those are pretty good numbers for a stallion in central Virginia. Ten or fifteen would have been more usual. Granted, Mary Pat had fabulous connections, one being Paul Mellon, one of the best breeders America has seen. So she had a wider cast to her net than most people starting out with an unproven stallion but one who had a good racing career.”

“What were you looking for?” Rick's eyebrows knitted together.

“Sorry, I got off the point, didn't I?”

“That's all right.”

“I was looking for color. Ziggy was a flaming chestnut, hence his name. Color in horses is complicated. But I was looking for percentages. You see, a chestnut stallion bred to a chestnut mare means one hundred percent of the offspring will be chestnut. So all of Ziggy's offspring bred to chestnut mares must be chestnut. On the cover letter there, I've broken down the colors of his offspring according to the color of the mare he bred.”

“Great.” Cooper smiled.

“Okay, I'm a little dense here. All I know about horses is they eat while I sleep. Why is this important?” Rick reached for his cigarette pack.

“This is why.” Fair handed him the stats for Ziggy Dark Star, Flame's full brother, a bay—which is a dark brown horse with a black mane and tail—born in 1967. Ziggy Dark Star's lip tattoo started with a W. “This horse, a full brother to Flame, was a bay. But look at the number of chestnut offspring each time Dark Star was bred to a chestnut mare.”

“Same percent as Ziggy Flame,” Rick read the cover letter.

“Yes.” Fair was jubilant. “If he were bay, there would be more color variation in the offspring.”

“And you're sure a bay stallion wouldn't produce this same percent of chestnut fillies and colts?” Cooper was fascinated.

“That's why I've brought you the box. There's the printout of every mare bred to Ziggy Flame and Ziggy Dark Star. Her age, her breeding, her color, the color of her offspring, her own breeding, the color of her progenitors. And everything is broken down in the cover letter, but all the research is in that box.”

Rick handed the cover letter to Cooper, who scanned it. “Fair, what you're telling me is that Ziggy Dark Star is, or I should say was because he died in 1999 at the ripe old age of thirty-two—”

Fair interrupted. “Thirty-three. The papers for Ziggy Dark Star say he was born in 1967, but Flame was born in 1966. He was thirty-three.”

“Ziggy Dark Star was Ziggy Flame!” Cooper couldn't believe it.

“Wait a minute. How could the owner . . . uh”—Rick grabbed the paper back from Cooper—“Marshall Kressenberg . . . turn a chestnut horse into a bay?”

“By getting up in the middle of the night and periodically dying the horse.” Fair crossed his heavily muscled arms over his broad chest. Working with animals weighing over a thousand pounds made the strong vet even stronger.

“That's fantastic.” Rick shook his head.

“For seventy-five thousand a pop, you could do it. You would happily do it. That stallion was covering thirty-five to forty-five mares a year in his prime. Do the math. But also in the box are a few articles about Marshall that I thought might convince you.”

Cooper reached down and pulled out copies of articles appearing in
The Blood-Horse
and
Thoroughbred Times
, the grand publications of the thoroughbred industry. “There are a lot of them.”

“All of them mention how fanatical Marshall was in his care of the stallion. How only he would handle him and so on. I expect he used dye. But I'm telling you, I stake my reputation on it, Ziggy Dark Star was Ziggy Flame. Apart from color, consider the lip tattoo. The Jockey Club in 1945 began requiring all racehorses to be tattooed on the inner lip. So the first letter in 1945 was A, followed by a series of numbers. Every twenty-six years the letters repeat. The letter for 1966—Ziggy Flame's birth—was V. The letter of Ziggy Dark Star, supposedly born in 1967, was W. That would be so easy, changing V to W.”

For a moment all three sat and stared at one another, then Rick struck a match on his thumb, lighting up his unfiltered Camel. “Wonder how close Jerome came to knowing this? He read Mary Pat's notes, which might have gotten him to thinking about more than rabies. My guess is he was pretty close to figuring out that this murder, Barry's murder, had something to do with money, real money, and breeding.”

“I don't know if he approached it from the color standpoint, but he knew enough, he was getting hot. In a million years I would have never credited Jerome Stoltfus with that kind of”—Fair didn't want to be unkind, so he didn't say “intelligence”—“research ability.”

Cooper, mind in high gear, rubbed her forehead with her finger. “Barry? Does Carmen know? She's kept a tight lip, which is highly unusual for her.”

Fair's eyebrows turned upward. “I thought Carmen had disappeared, sort of.”

“Sort of.” Rick's tone of voice indicated no more information would be forthcoming on that subject.

Fair, uncharacteristically, pushed. “Is she all right?”

Rick, voice low, said, “I can't talk to you about Carmen, but she's healthy and she's safe.”

“Okay.” Fair sheepishly grinned. “She's such a character, you know, I really don't want harm to come to her.”

“If she'd pick her boyfriends with a little more care, I don't think it will,” Cooper deadpanned.

“Makes me wonder if that notebook is all Mary Pat left. What if there was something . . . incriminating—to the killer, I mean,” Rick changed the subject.

“What's staggering about this is the profit. The horse was an active breeder almost up until the end. Take an average of forty mares a year and seventy-five thousand dollars a pop, and you come out with seventy-five million dollars over Ziggy's breeding career. And what did it cost to keep him in high style? For his twenty-five years in Maryland, let's say that Marshall Kressenberg spared no expense. Obviously, the last years would be more expensive. Let's say he averaged twenty thousand a year keeping Ziggy in the pink and a few thousand a year in glossy ads in the thoroughbred publications. Marshall, at best, spent about five hundred thousand dollars on the stallion over a twenty-five-year period. Think of the phenomenal profit. Seventy-five million! I'd say that's a major motive for murder.” Fair's deep voice rose upward.

“When you hit it, you hit it big.” Cooper whistled.

“And Ziggy's sons are doing well at stud. Marshall has Ziggy Bright Star, Ziggy Silent Star. The guy is raking in more money than we can count. No wonder he has horses running and we see his silks on the televised races. This is just amazing,” Fair said.

Rick drew a deep drag. “Okay, the money is big, but who knew that this stallion would have such a great career?”

“By his third year at St. James, his first crop were on the track. They were doing pretty good. An experienced horseman would start looking at this guy. Obviously, no one could have foreseen what an incredible sire he would become, but even assuming he would be, say, a B– sire as opposed to an A+, the owner could ask about ten or fifteen thousand per mare. Enough to pay off the farm over time.” Fair rested his case. “And we all know that Marshall Kressenberg worked as an exercise rider and groom for Mary Pat. He, even then, was enough of a horseman to see that Ziggy was special, very special.”

“He took a hell of a chance killing her for a horse.” Rick stubbed out his cigarette.

“People have killed for less,” Cooper wisely said.

Rick stood up to stretch. His back ached. “All right, Fair, I'm interested. I can't arrest Mr. Kressenberg, but I can pay him a call. The first thing I want to know is, who have you told?”

“Harry.”

“God.” Rick sat back down.

“She won't tell.” Rick defended his ex-wife.

“She may not tell, but I bet she's halfway to Carroll County, Maryland, by now.”

“No, she's not. I made her swear to stay here.”

“Her nosiness will lead her somewhere. That woman has an unerring instinct for trouble.” Rick fumed. “Well, Fair, she's your problem. The first thing I want to do is to talk to the sheriff up there in Carroll County. The second thing I want to do is batten down the hatches for tomorrow. The feeding frenzy will be worse than it has been.”

Cooper noticed Fair's quizzical expression, so she told him, “The news about Carmen's disappearance will be in the papers and on TV, too. There will be all manner of speculation and bull. And we all know rabies will come up. Is Carmen dead in a ditch of rabies? Jeez.” She rolled her eyes.

“If you two go up to Westminster”—Fair named the town in Carroll County where Marshall Kressenberg had his farm—“I'd like to go. I think I can be helpful.”