Cutter (Gail McCarthy Mystery series) (8 page)

"You didn't ride him, either." Martha Welch was still on some track of her own. "Just let him stand in the barn and charged me training fees."

"I rode your horse, just like I rode the others. I can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear." Casey was firm. "I've got to get ready to show; I'll talk to you later. Alone." And he kicked his horse up into a lope, leaving Martha staring after him.

"I'll sue you, you bastard." She said it plainly; thirty people must have heard her. Then she stalked back out the gate.

"The bitch," Melissa hissed.

"Who was that?" I asked. Bret's eyes looked amused.

"Martha Welch," Melissa repeated, unnecessarily. "She owned Reno. The horse you had to put down," she added, to me.

"Oh."

"That's not why she's mad, though, the lying old bitch." Melissa sounded furious. "Casey called her last night to tell her the horse had died, and he said he'd swear she sounded relieved. She had that colt insured up the ying yang, and she'll collect more for him that way than she could ever have sold him for. He was a real mediocre horse."

"Maybe she liked him," I said mildly.

"Not her," Melissa snorted. "She barely ever saw him. She paid a bunch of money for him as an unbroken two-year-old-a hot Futurity prospect, or so she thought. He didn't really pan out-he wasn't that talented-which is mostly how it goes. But Martha couldn't buy that. No way could the great Martha Welch have simply picked a dud. It had to be Casey's fault. She blamed him, said he didn't ride the horse enough. She's just a bitch."

Melissa gave Bret and me a small, angry smile. "She doesn't care that the horse is dead. I was the only one who liked that colt; he was real sweet, even if he wasn't a world-beater. She's just trying to make Casey look bad, because she's mad at him. I wouldn't be surprised if she collects the insurance money on that horse, makes a profit, and then sues Casey for more money."

With a toss of her fluffy golden curls, Melissa stomped off toward Casey, and we could see her talking animatedly up at him as he sat on Shiloh. Casey said little and shrugged a lot. After a minute, Melissa turned away, apparently in a huff.

"Old Martha. Haven't you run into her before? She's been involved with show horses in Santa Cruz County for years. She had a horse or two in training with Jay Holley when I worked for him." Bret chuckled. "She's a dandy. Scads and scads of money-she's the heiress to some kind of timber fortune-and she's tighter than a clam with it. She's been through four or five husbands; she doesn't keep them around any longer than she does horse trainers."

"I can see why. She looked fierce. But I'm pretty sure I've never seen her before."

Bret grinned. "She doesn't get along with vets much, either. She's probably had some kind of spat with Jim Leonard years ago, and won't use his office."

I shrugged. "Well, it's no loss; that I can see."

We reached the rail of the show ring and I leaned on the fence to watch the horses work, asking Bret occasional questions. A cutting, I discovered, was, generally speaking, remarkably slow watching. A herd of cattle were brought into the ring and "settled" by four horsemen-that is, the cattle were herded up against one fence and the horsemen rode around them and through them until the cattle got comfortable enough with this that they quit trying to break and run. The whole procedure took ten or fifteen minutes, after which the herd was pronounced ready to work.

Each competitor rode into this herd in turn with two and a half minutes to show what his or her horse could do. The horses were scored between 60 and 80 by a judge who sat in a small elevated booth in the center of the ring. Every horse, Bret explained to me, started out with a 70, to which the judge added and subtracted points as need be.

The rules for scoring were definite in some ways and ambiguous in others. If a horse let a cow get past him and back to the herd it was an automatic five points off-an easy-to-spot mistake, and lethal in terms of the score. But other things were more subtle-a "miss" meant that the horse had gotten slightly off position; a "hot quit" indicated that the rider had pulled his horse off a cow that was still trying to get by him, rather than waiting until the animal was defeated and turned away; "switching a cow" seemed to mean that while the rider was in the process of selecting one cow out of the herd for the horse to work, he first committed to one and then tried to work another. Most important, a horse could not be guided at all when he worked a cow, and the most common mistake appeared to be "bumping" the bit; a rider would stop his horse with the reins, afraid that the horse wouldn't stop with the cow on his own. All these things resulted in points being taken away from the 70 the horse started out with.

Points were added more or less at the judge's discretion, it seemed, though Bret explained that a horse was supposed to be given credit for certain things-a high degree of difficulty in the cow, keeping the animal in the middle of the pen, separating it from the herd quietly, etc.

I watched the horses desultorily when nothing much was going on, intensely when a horse "locked on" to a cow, and took in the whole scene meanwhile. All around us, whenever it veered from the horse that was working, the conversation between cowboy-hatted men and women was of the West Coast Futurity next week-who was going, who wasn't, who had a good horse, who didn't. Will George seemed to be favored to win once again; I wondered if it would be on the horse named Gus that Casey had started.

When Casey and Shiloh were called, I tuned out the talk around me and concentrated on the scene in front of my eyes-a little blue roan mare walking quietly into a herd of cows. Casey guided her until they had a black brockle-face steer standing by itself, separated from the herd. Then Casey dropped the reins so they hung loosely on Shiloh's neck. It was up to the mare.

Driven by the herd instinct, the black steer made a tentative stab at getting back to the group; he ran to the right, then darted back to the left. Shiloh stayed with him, blocking him, stopping when the steer stopped, turning when he turned, running when he ran. The reins swung loose; every judgment was Shiloh's own. The steer paused in the middle of the pen-fenced right and left, right and left again, leaping back and forth, head down. Shiloh mirrored him perfectly, dancing back and forth with him, nose inches from the ground, ears pricked forward. Her eyes were filled with what I could only call delight. This mare, like many good cowhorses, loved to work. Little shivers ran up and down my spine.

The crowd started clapping. I clapped with them; even Bret gave a war whoop. Casey cut a second cow that was a runner, and Shiloh ran and stopped for all she was worth. Dirt clods rattled against the fence as she slid into the ground and jumped out again the other way. The cow kept driving hard, but the mare never weakened, and when the buzzer sounded to indicate the end of the two-and-a-half-minute cutting run, the whole crowd broke into loud applause and the judge marked a 74, easily the highest score all day. Casey was beaming as he rode out of the ring.

I turned to go offer congratulations, and found Casey in the warmup pen, sitting on Shiloh and talking to two men, one of whom I recognized as Ken Resavich. The other I'd never seen before. Casey's expression looked stiff to me.

I approached the group tentatively, not wanting to intrude, but Casey saw me and gave me a wide grin, waving me over.

"Congratulations," I told him. "That was wonderful; I'm sure you won the class."

"It's not over till the fat lady sings," Casey said, but he sounded confident. "Gail, you know Ken Resavich, right? Gail McCarthy; she's our vet."

Ken and I nodded politely at each other, and he smiled a small, formal smile. He looked every inch a businessman in slacks and a lightweight sport jacket; he certainly didn't look like a farmer. I imagined that farming, at his level, involved sitting at a desk and making decisions on which millions of dollars rested. His formality seemed slightly ridiculous here at the cutting, where the uniform was jeans.

The man next to Ken Resavich smiled widely and appraisingly at me, and I smiled politely back, but nobody made a move to introduce us.

Casey was talking to Ken again, and the other man's eyes swung back to the conversation. In his mid-fifties, with a worn-out-looking face, he had red hair that was fading to gray and fair skin deeply lined and blotched by age and weather. The expression in his eyes was somewhere between aggressively friendly and aggressively belligerent.

"Yeah, we need cattle," Casey was saying to Ken Resavich now. Casey's eyes were directed firmly away from the stranger.

Ken's eyes moved over to him, though, and he asked, "Can you bring them this week?"

"Sure, I can bring you cattle this week, buddy." The redheaded man spoke directly to Casey, with an underlying tone I couldn't place.

Casey's eyes flashed at him, but he still didn't say a word.

Ken Resavich, seeming to ignore or be oblivious to all of the undercurrents, said, "Fine. We'll expect twenty fresh head this week."

"Sure thing." The stranger gave Casey a short, almost taunting smile, and turned away. "I'd better be going. Got to get those cattle rounded up for Casey."

He walked off and got into a flashy, two-toned red dual-wheel pickup, one of the fanciest rigs in the field. Melissa strolled up to our little group just as he jockeyed it out of its parking place and drove away.

"Who was that?" I asked her curiously, drawing her aside.

She glanced at the departing pickup and frowned. "That's Dave Allison." Glancing quickly at Casey she whispered, "Casey doesn't like him."

"So I gathered."

"He works for Will George a lot. He's the one that came to pick up Gus that day; he and Casey got in a fight. Ken's been buying cattle from him."

She focused on the conversation between Ken and Casey, which appeared to be about a horse Ken was thinking of buying. I noticed Ken hardly looked at Shiloh, never stroked her shoulder or rubbed her forehead. Wondering what drove him to be in the horse business-he certainly didn't appear to love horses-I wandered off in Bret's direction.

He ambled over to meet me; he'd been chatting with his ex-employer, Jay Holley. "Jay thinks that Shiloh mare is the best novice horse he's seen in years," Bret said as he walked up.

"She sure looked great to me," I agreed, "though I don't know much about it. Who's Dave Allison?" I asked him curiously.

Bret laughed. "Oh, old Dave. Dave's your classic failed horse trainer. He used to be a big name in the business, so they say. That'd be before my time. The boys tell me he'd let all the horses stand in the barn for weeks and never ride one. Too busy drinking and chasing girls." Bret grinned. Drinking and chasing girls were his normal occupations. "Then, when a show would come along, Dave'd get the horses out and try to tune them up the day before. Eventually people quit sending him horses. He more or less works for Will George these days, I think."

"He works for him?"

"Will gets so many horses he sends the ones he isn't crazy about to other trainers to ride-for half the training fees. That's what Dave is these days-a hired boy for Will. He raises cattle, too. But he did used to be a big name."

"He sure drives a fancy truck."

"The bank probably owns it." Bret grinned his impish grin. "All these trainers are big on keeping up with the Joneses. Every single one of them has to have just as big and fancy of a dually pickup as the next guy, even if they're about to go broke."

I smiled at Bret's irreverence and looked back at the little group surrounding Casey. They were moving in our direction, Casey riding Shiloh and talking to Ken, Melissa following them. Jay Holley rode by and called a comment I didn't catch; Casey responded with a wild "Hoo-aw" and a wide grin.

As I watched, the sound of cheering from the show ring caught my attention. It caught the attention of Casey's group, too, and they all looked in that direction.

The loudspeaker crackled and blared, "Gold Coin, ridden by Will George, marks a 75. As that was our last horse to work, ladies and gentlemen, Will wins the Novice class."

The voice had scarcely finished when Will George rode by us, flanked with chattering acolytes. His handsome face was serene, and he gave me a pleasant, meaningless smile as his eyes moved on to Casey. He smiled again and there was no mistaking it; this time his eyes held a triumphant, gloating expression. He rode on without a word.

I looked at Casey. He was staring after Will George, his emotions plainly readable for once.

"What've you got to do, kill the bastard to beat him?" Casey said it savagely, loud enough for all of us to hear, before wheeling Shiloh and trotting off, ignoring the second place that was being announced as his.

I watched his departing back and felt misgivings. Casey, volatile as a Roman candle, looked as if he might suddenly start showering sparks in all directions, regardless of the consequences.

Chapter EIGHT

Monday morning dawned with a more or less routine set of veterinary problems on the schedule. Horseshows and feuding trainers behind me, I forgot Casey Brooks and his troubles except for a brief moment when I mailed the blood samples from his horses off to the lab.

I had plenty else to occupy my mind. A first-class jumping horse with what looked like a bone chip in his knee had to be referred to the veterinary surgery center at Davis, a polo pony with a hind-leg lameness that turned out to be bone spavin-a type of arthritis-required that I reassure his owner for the better part of an hour, then two mild colic cases, and a recheck on a horse with a bowed tendon that hadn't improved as it should ... by the time I was done, it was well past dinner time.