Roughstock (A Gail McCarthy Mystery) (13 page)

I nodded. I'd heard this. "As to where it went," Lonny looked mildly disgusted, "I don't know this, but I've been told she uses drugs."

He said it as if it were a contaminated subject, which to a man of his age and stamp, it was. I felt less strongly about it, though those few people I'd known who were habitual users of cocaine or speed had not been likable characters. And, it struck me suddenly, the taut, high-strung, irritably nervous energy they'd sometimes displayed seemed to fit Tara's apparently irrational attack on Bronc. Could some sort of drug-induced frenzy have prompted her to murder Jack? That and the idea she'd inherit?

"Drugs can run through your money," I commented.

Lonny said nothing, but I knew he and I were both thinking of a well-to-do roper we both knew who had started indulging in cocaine several years ago. He'd managed to relieve himself of a successful tractor dealership, several hundred acres of inherited farm land and a paid-off family ranch in remarkably short order and was currently living in a battered travel trailer on an old friend's property without a nickel to his name. If he could manage it, so could Tara.

All right, I said to myself, she could have run through the money on fast living and wanted more, Bronc said she knew the terms of the will, drugs could have made her irrational enough to kill, but was she in Tahoe that night? Of course, that didn't necessarily mean anything. She could have promised to split her inheritance with whoever did the dirty work for her. But Bronc had called her a "murdering bitch." And he had been suddenly silent the other night when I had asked him if he thought Tara killed Jack. What did Bronc know?

And there was something else. I turned back to Lonny. "That whole fight she just had with Bronc was over Willy. Do you know anything about that?"

"Not really. I did hear her get into it with Bronc before about that horse. She seems to think she has some right to him."

Now how did that connect? I suddenly felt like laughing. Was I about to construct a scenario in which Tara murdered Jack in order to get Willy away from Bronc?

Sensing my change of mood, Lonny reached across the seat and took my hand. "What do you say we forget all this stuff and go have a nice dinner at the Harbor Inn?"

The Harbor Inn. I smiled at the thought. A spectacular view of the old boat harbor at Moss Landing, complete with ancient piers, sea otters, pelicans, and herons, not to mention equally spectacular fresh fish to eat. And I would, of course, be seeing Tara the next morning, like it or not. Time enough to think about her then.

"You're saying that if I quit worrying about this murder for tonight you'll take me to dinner at the Harbor Inn?"

"And show you a good time, too." Lonny's grin was full of promise.

"You're on."

TWELVE

At
nine o'clock the next morning I was pacing the cold halls of the county building, searching for small claims court. It
wasn't, fortunately, a place I was familiar with, and I was several minutes late as I slipped in the door and found a spot in a back pew. The room was fairly full of people, most of whom I didn't recognize, but a few were glaringly familiar.

Tara, of course, I spotted at once, looking incongruous in a boldly patterned, clingy rayon dress. She was flanked by a couple of young, rough-looking ropers that I recognized by face though not by name. They were fringe hangers-on in the roping world, usually too broke to own a horse or come up with the entry money, but often standing on the sidelines, beer in hand.

In another corner, with a scowl on his face, was a heavyset middle-aged man named Harvey Reynolds, the defendant. A sometime roper of limited capabilities, he had sold Tara the horse that had subsequently died. Harvey was surrounded by quite a group of people, several of them ropers who had been at Freddy's yesterday. This whole gang was chatting freely together, whispering loudly, and casting plenty of glares at Tara.

My own position here was somewhat ambiguous. I was the vet Harvey had used when he'd owned the horse in question, a long-necked sorrel gelding he'd called JD. I was also, sadly, the vet who had been on call the night the horse had tied up and eventually died. Tara would no doubt have preferred Jim, my boss, but what she'd gotten was me, to our mutual dissatisfaction. In terms of the horse it hadn't made any difference; poor JD would have died no matter who had been treating him.

I was only glad I hadn't been there to see what led up to his demise; the story-which I'd heard recounted by several people-was bad enough at second hand. Apparently Tara had been training on the gelding that night in her usual fashion, jerking and janging on the bit when he wouldn't stand perfectly still in the box, and eventually resorting to whipping him over and over with the rope. Predictably, this made the horse worse, and Tara had run steer after steer on him in a futile effort to tire him into submission, despite the fact that he was clearly already exhausted.

According to universal consensus, she'd competed in the last pot with the horse wringing wet and starting to tie up. Several people had mentioned this to her, to no effect. She'd shrugged them off with a "He can run one more steer." In actual fact, she'd run six more, or tried to. By then the horse wasn't able to run.

I'd arrived several hours later at her place on an emergency call to find JD going into shock. I had him hauled down to the clinic and pumped fluids into him all night long, to no avail. By the next day he was in renal failure, and Tara was told the horse needed to be put down. I'd been so reluctant to deal with her that I'd asked Jim to make the call, and he'd reported that, as I'd expected, she'd blustered on and on about it being possibly my fault the horse was dying-which was palpably untrue, but par for the course with Tara.

After sufficient reflection, it seemed, she'd decided she would be unlikely to win a suit against me, and so had elected to sue the former owner of the horse, on the grounds that JD had a chronic problem with tying up, and Reynolds had failed to reveal this to her. Unfortunately for her, I'd been Harvey's vet the whole time he'd had the horse, and this simply wasn't true. JD had colicked once, which Tara had heard about through the roper's grapevine, and she was ignorant enough to suppose that the two problems were interchangeable. In actual fact they were quite different, both medically and practically speaking, not to mention that a whole arena of people could attest to the fact that the horse had tied up because Tara had overridden him, and he had almost certainly died because she didn't quit riding him when his muscles started to stiffen.

I'd been called into this ridiculous affair by both the principals. Tara seemed to expect that I would testify to the fact that the horse had died of tying up and that I had had to treat the horse for Harvey for the same condition. And Harvey, who knew good and well that the horse had colicked with him, not tied up, was expecting me to say so. Which I would. Tara wasn't going to like it. I just hoped she wouldn't resort to clawing my eyes out.

By the time the courtroom was called to order it was nine-thirty and I was already tapping my foot impatiently. I was virtually drumming my fingers and toes an hour later; every party had been called except ours. When the place was empty but for the little contingent of ropers, the bailiff finally called Tara Hollister versus Harvey Reynolds and we all trooped up to stand in front of the judge's bench. As plaintiff, it was left to Tara to begin.

She made a statement full of histrionics and pathos about how she had bought the horse in good faith, was devastated when it died, and aghast when she had heard from other ropers that the horse had tied up when Harvey owned him. She felt that Harvey should have disclosed this when he sold her the horse. There was lots more along these lines, all in a whiny pseudo-feminine tone that contrasted oddly with her gravelly cigarette smoker's voice.

I watched her as she talked, trying to see what Jack might have seen in her, trying to decide if she could be a murderer. Put boldly like that it was hard to believe. Tara looked too tacky in her ugly dress, too dumb, too insubstantial somehow, to have planned and executed a murder. The idea that she had arranged for someone else to do it seemed to carry more weight.

As for what Jack had seen in her, I simply couldn't imagine. You're not a man, I reminded myself. But I had eyes. I noted the fit curves beneath the clingy rayon, the harsh country-western bar singer's sex appeal on her overly made-up face. What I couldn't understand is why the self-centered, low-IQ, no-heart expression in her eyes hadn't glared out at him as loudly as it did at me.

I was jerked away from my thoughts by the sound of my name, spoken in Tara's rough voice. "Dr. McCarthy treated my horse. She'll tell you what it died of."

Tara was addressing the judge, who looked inquiringly at the group of us. Obediently I stepped forward, identified myself, and began to describe the condition in which I'd found JD, and his subsequent deterioration. This took a while, as the judge was clearly unfamiliar with horses. A middle-aged Latino man with glasses and a bright expression, he asked several careful questions about the nature of azoturia, as tying up is technically called.

I explained that some horses did have a chronic problem with this, and that I did not know if this was true of JD. I mentally added that I was fairly sure it was not, and that the horse had simply been ridden to death, but I kept this to myself, no one having asked for my opinion.

Tara didn't ask me any questions; in fact, she wouldn't look at me, and the judge seemed to be done, so I backed up a step and merged into the group, half listening to the two rough-looking roping kids as Tara elicited from them a favorable description of her horse handling in general and the way she had treated JD on the night in question in particular. Nobody seemed inclined to speak up and tell the judge that neither of these guys would know proper treatment of a horse if they saw it. When, occasionally, they were not too broke to own a horse, both of them treated the unfortunate animal as an inexhaustible machine.

At long last Tara seemed to be done, and Harvey stepped forward to announce himself as the defendant; I breathed an inward sigh of relief. It was difficult to listen to so much bullshit and keep my mouth shut.

Harvey was obviously pissed as hell. He wasted no time on preliminary explanations, but simply said, "I would like to call Dr. Gail McCarthy."

Once again
I
stepped forward out of the group and faced the judge.

"Did you perform a vet check on JD when
I
bought him?" Harvey's tone was belligerent, but I
knew the anger wasn't directed against me.

"Yes."

"At the time did you find anything wrong with the horse?"

"Nothing major. He had a few signs of arthritic changes."

"No sign he'd ever tied up before."

"Well no, but
I
don't think there's any way of determining that."

Harvey was like a bulldog with a hunk of German shepherd in his mouth. Tenacious. "But as far as you knew, or I
knew, there was nothing of that sort wrong with the horse when I
bought him."

"That's right."

"Did
I
ever call on you to treat the horse for being tied up while I
had him?"

"No."

"Did I call on you to treat him at all?"

"Yes. Once. For colic."

"Not for tying up, for colic, right?"

"Right."

Here Harvey turned from me to the judge. "Your Honor, Dr. McCarthy, here, has been my vet the whole time I owned JD, which was about two years. The horse colicked once and I had him treated and he was fine. He never tied up in his life, as far as I know."

The judge looked at me and asked for an explanation of the difference between tying up and colic.

I tried not to be too technical. "Tying up, or azoturia, is a condition where the muscles produce an overabundance of lactic acid, which they can't absorb. The symptoms include pain and stiffness, a reluctance to move, and brown urine, as the kidneys try to dispose of the excess acid. The cause is often too much grain. A horse that is tying up should immediately be rested. On no account should he be asked to move until his muscles relax."

I stopped for a breath. "Colic, on the other hand, is a term covering any sort of upset in the digestive system. Colics can be very mild and pass unnoticed, or they can be serious enough to be fatal. A horse with colic will also show pain; however, that is about the only real similarity. A colicky horse can often be helped by light exercise, while a horse who has tied up should remain still. People sometimes get confused about this; there's a tendency to think you should walk a tied-up horse, but that's wrong."

I stopped again. Shit. This judge didn't want to know what to do when a horse tied up. I felt like I was rambling on to no point in my efforts to make azoturia and colic plain to a non-horseman.

"So there is no connection between the two conditions?" The judge had obviously grasped the main idea.

"No
,
none at all."

"You may go on, Mr. Reynolds."

Harvey went on. And on and on. He called several people to describe the way in which Tara had overridden the horse that night, after which I was recalled to pronounce on whether such overriding could produce a fatal case of azoturia. Naturally I had to admit that it could. I could feel Tara's eyes slicing into the back of my neck as I spoke.