Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  “What about Mrs. Harris?” I asked since he was in a talkative mood. “Is she still wearing a ring?”

  “Who knows? If we can’t pin down the time of death, she may claim she’s a widow and not an ex. She’s scheduled to come in tomorrow morning.” He told me about the tumble she supposedly took in a mud puddle the Monday after Harris was last seen. “Only nobody actually saw her do it and the housekeeper says she bundled her clothes up in a garbage bag and borrowed some of his things to wear back to New Bern.”

  “Whoa!” I said. “She came in the house and took a shower and no one saw if it really was mud on her clothes?”

  “Mrs. Samuelson says there was no blood on her sneakers, just a little mud. If she was going to lie for the bosslady, why stop at sneakers?”

  “Unless . . .” I said slowly.

  “Unless what?”

  “I keep a second pair of old shoes in the trunk of my car,” I reminded him. “To save my good ones if it’s mucky or I have to walk on soft dirt.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind when I talk to her tomorrow.”

  “Speaking of talks, how did it go with Cal tonight?”

  He shook his head. “It didn’t. First Haywood was here to drop off a load of firewood to get us through April. Then Mr. Kezzie came by for a few minutes with some extra cabbage plants for our garden—”

  “We have a garden?” I teased.

  “We do now. I mentioned to Seth that it’d be nice to grow tomatoes, so he plowed us a few short rows beside the blueberry bushes and somebody must’ve told Doris you were out tonight because she called up and insisted that Cal and I had to go over there and eat with her and Robert. That woman never takes no for an answer, does she?”

  He sounded so exasperated, I had to laugh.

  “Then coming home in the truck, I was just fixing to start and damned if McLamb didn’t pick that time to call and report his conversation with Mitchiner’s daughter and grandson. By the time we got back to the house, it was bedtime and when I went in to say good night, he had his head under his pillow, trying not to let me hear him crying.”

  “Over Jonna?” I said sympathetically.

  Dwight nodded. “I just didn’t have the heart to lay anything else on him right then.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t.” I ached for Cal. For Dwight, too, who has to watch his son grieve for something that can never be made right.

  He drained his glass and carried it over to the dishwasher, along with my now-empty coffee cup. I switched off the kitchen light and followed him to our bedroom.

  “I don’t suppose McLamb got much out of the Mitchiner family?”

  “Not really,” he said as we undressed and got ready for bed. “One interesting thing though. He said that the daughter and the grandson sort of got into it for a minute about the lawsuit. The boy wants her to drop it.”

  “Really?”

  “McLamb said he all but accused her of wanting to profit by his grandfather’s death and that she got pretty defensive.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah, he’s going to check out her alibi tomorrow. She was supposed to be working and the kid had her car until it was time to pick her up after work, but since we don’t know precisely when Mitchiner went missing, it’s possible that she dropped the boy off somewhere and went on to the nursing home. Here, need some help with that?”

  I had pulled my sweater over my head and a lock of hair was caught in the back zipper.

  He gently worked it free and then one thing led to another.

  As it usually does.

  (Ping!)

  CHAPTER 28

  For us, it has truly seemed that each day dawned upon a change.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  Cal’s emotional meltdown the night before must have cleared his system because he was in a cheerful mood the next morning and no longer seemed to be resentful about missing Monday night’s game. He let Bandit out for his morning run without being asked and only had to be reminded once to take off his Canes cap at the table. He laid a pad and pencil beside his cereal bowl and asked me to tell him the names of all my brothers, beginning with Robert—“He said I could call them Uncle Robert and Aunt Doris”—so that he could write them down and start getting them straight.

  “They could be a whole baseball team with two relief pitchers,” he marveled and was intrigued to hear that one of the little twins—Adam—lived in California. “Is he near Disneyland? Could we go visit him sometime?”

  It was sunshine after rain.

  I was due for an oil change, so I left when he and Dwight went to meet the schoolbus and drove over to leave my car at Jimmy White’s. Jimmy’s been my mechanic ever since I took the curve in front of his garage too fast shortly after getting my driver’s license a million years ago. He pulled it out of the ditch, replaced the front fender, and let me pay him on time without telling my parents, although he did threaten to tell his uncle who was a state trooper if I didn’t take my foot off the gas pedal once in a while. Gray-haired now and starting to slow down a little, he’s turning more and more of the heavy work over to his son James. Back then, it was just Jimmy and one bay. Today it was Jimmy, James, and two employees and the one bay had become three. Instead of the old oil-stained denim coveralls they used to wear, all four of them sported crisp blue shirts that they put on fresh each morning and sent out to be laundered every week.

  After so much rain, the air was washed clean and fluffy white clouds drifted across a clear blue sky. A soft spring breeze ruffled my hair as we stood in the sunlit yard waiting for Dwight to pick me up. I accepted their offer of a cup of coffee and we talked about the changes in the neighborhood and of all the new people that had moved in and wanted him to service their cars without trying to build a relationship. “Like, just because they got the cash money, they think they’re gonna get moved to the front of the line ahead of people that’s been here all along.”

  James, who had graduated from high school a couple of years behind me, said, “What gets me hot though’s when they don’t trust us. They’ll want us to give the car a tune-up and if we say we had to replace one of the belts, they’ll want to see it and half the time they act like they think we cut it so we could charge ’em for a new one.”

  Jimmy snorted. “That’s when we tell them they need to go find theirselves a new mechanic.”

  I glanced at all the cars lined up around the yard and said, “Looks like you’ve got more work than you can handle anyhow.”

  He nodded with satisfaction. “I’m just glad I listened to you and bought them two acres next door and let you do all that paperwork about the zoning. We’re gonna break ground next month, finally build that fancy new garage James here’s been planning and we probably couldn’t do it if we were starting fresh today. Not with all the big money houses going in on this road.”

  I had handled some of their legal matters before I ran for judge. Seven years ago, Jimmy hadn’t seen the need to have his property legally zoned for business. He’d run a messy, sprawling garage out there in what used to be the middle of nowhere for twenty-five years and he’d expected to run it for twenty-five more. It was the typical rural land owner’s mind-set: “It’s my land and I can do what I want with it.” But when the planning commission started getting serious about zoning, I had encouraged Jimmy to get a proper business permit so that he could expand if he wanted to without the limitations often imposed on businesses that have been grandfathered in. I’m not saying the planning commission takes race into consideration, but a lot of black-owned shops like this one have either been denied the right to expand or have been zoned out of existence in the last three or four years.

  “We’ll put a berm in front, plant it with trees and evergreen bushes so you can’t see in from the road,” said James. “There’s a Mexican across the branch with a nursery that does landscaping. Diaz. We’re gonna trade work. Make it look pretty. Enough folks know we’re here that we don’t need to put up but just a little
teeny sign.”

  “Now don’t y’all get so upscale you can’t take care of my car,” I said as Dwight turned into their drive.

  Jimmy laughed. “Girl, anytime you need a new fender, I’ll fix you up. ’Course, now that you went and married Dwight, I reckon you don’t drive too fast no more.”

  “You think?” said Dwight who’d rolled down his window in time to hear Jimmy’s last remark. “I’m gonna have to write her up myself to slow her down.”

  James opened the passenger door for me and as I stepped up to get in, his comment about the nursery finally registered. “Diaz,” I said. “Miguel Diaz?”

  “Mike Diaz, yes,” James said. “You know him?”

  “We’ve met. I just didn’t realize his nursery was nearby.”

  “Just across the branch. They’ve made ’em a right nice place over there.”

  Jimmy promised that my car would be ready by mid-afternoon and as we headed for Dobbs, I said, “Mike Diaz, Dwight.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “Mayleen Richards’s new boyfriend, according to Faye Myers.”

  “Yeah? How do you know him?”

  “He came to court last week to speak for that guy that took a tractor and plowed up a stretch of yards, remember? Back in January?”

  Dwight shook his head. With all the violent crimes he had to deal with, he misses a lot of the lesser ones that make it to my courtroom.

  “I thought I told you about him. Palmez or Palmirez or something like that. One of my freaky Friday cases.”

  “You told me about the guy who tried to steal one of the old lampposts off the town commons and how Dr. Allred ticketed a man who parked at a handicap spot without a tag and then let a three-legged dog run free. I don’t remember a tractor.”

  I briefly recapped. “Diaz took him on at the nursery after he got fired from wherever he stole the tractor and he promised to see that the damages were repaired. I forget if I gave the guy a fine or a suspended sentence. I’d have to look it up. Anyhow, when Faye was telling me about Mayleen’s new boyfriend, she said I’d met him and that this Mike Diaz was the one.”

  “Diaz,” Dwight said reflectively. “Why’s that name seem familiar?”

  “Faye said Mayleen met him when she was working a case back in January.”

  “That’s right. I remember seeing his name on one of the reports she filed. He had some sort of connection to J.D. Rouse’s wife.” Rouse was a rounder whose freewheeling arrogance had gotten him shot. “So Richards is hooked up with him?”

  “According to Faye she is. Remember?” I said smugly. “I told you she was looking different.”

  “Is this where I have to listen to you brag about feminine intuition?” he groaned.

  I laughed.

  “So what does your day look like?” he asked. “You gonna be able to cut out before five?”

  “Unless something unexpected comes up, this could be a light day. Four of the cases I was supposed to hear today settled yesterday afternoon and I have good vibes about another one, so I may be ready to roll by four. You going to leave on time?”

  “I sure hope so. Robert had some seed potatoes left over. It’s getting a little late to plant them but—”

  “Potatoes? And cabbages yesterday? I thought you were just going to tend a few tomato plants.”

  “Yeah, but I forgot how little kids love to scratch around and find potatoes.”

  I patted his arm. “Big kids, too, right?”

  He gave a sheepish nod.

  Faye Myers was coming on duty when we entered the basement lobby, so I said I’d catch up with him later and stopped to chat. There had been a bad wreck last night, she told me. Two highschool girls killed outright and another in serious condition at Dobbs Memorial Hospital. Alcohol and no seatbelts were thought to be factors.

  They were from the eastern part of the county and unknown to me, but I could still imagine the grief their families were feeling today. That sort of news always gives me a catch in my throat until I hear the names and can breathe again, knowing it’s not any of my nieces or nephews. Thank God, it’ll be another eight years before we have to worry about Cal behind the wheel of a car. Dwight’s already told me that Cal’s first car’s going to be a big heavy clunker, an old Grand Marquis or a Crown Victoria. He keeps saying that he wants a lot of steel between his son and another car until he’s had four or five years of experience. “No way am I handing a sixteen-year-old the keys to a candy-red sports car,” he says.

  We’ll see. I remember the T-Bird I’d wheedled out of Mother and Daddy. The exhilaration of empowerment. Free to hang with my friends, to cruise the streets of Cotton Grove on the weekends, or sneak off to the lake with Portland. I guess my brothers had given them so much grief when they first got wheels that they didn’t realize girls would take just as many chances. As long as we met their curfews, we were considered responsible drivers.

  Faye leaned closer and I was suddenly awash with a feeling of déjà vu as she lowered her voice and said, “I might not ought to be telling this, but Flip said he almost got high himself from the smell of beer in that car when he pulled them out. He says all three could’ve blown a ten or twelve.”

  CHAPTER 29

  With ideas of false economy, some farmers employ only about one-half the hired help that is necessary to perform the work in the proper time and manner and by working this force to the utmost, early and late, they endeavor to accomplish all the work for the season at a much less expense than would ordinarily be involved in accomplishing it.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  DWIGHT BRYANT

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, MARCH 8

  Wearing one of his trademark bow ties—today’s had little American flags on a blue background—and a starched blue shirt, Pete Taylor appeared in Dwight’s doorway promptly at nine and held it open for his client and a younger woman. “Major Bryant? Detective Richards? This is Mrs. Harris and her daughter, Mrs. Hochmann.”

  Dwight and Mayleen Richards immediately stood to welcome them.

  Mrs. Harris was what kind-hearted people tactfully call a “right good-sized woman.” She was easily five-ten, solidly built, with a broad and weathered face and a handshake as strong as most men’s. She wore a maroon tailored suit that looked expensive but did little to flatter or hide the extra pounds on her frame. Her wavy hair was cut short and was jet black, except where the roots were showing a lot of salt and not much pepper. Her large hazel eyes were her best feature.

  Shrewd eyes, too, thought Dwight as he watched her glance around his office, taking in his awards and commendations, appraising his deputy. Eyes that didn’t miss a trick.

  Her daughter appeared to be in her late twenties. She was equally tall and big-boned, but so thin as to almost appear gaunt. Unlike her mother, her eyes were an indeterminate color, set deep in their sockets, and her cheekbones stood out in relief. Her dark hair was pulled straight back from her face in a single braid that fell halfway down her back. No jewelry except for a loose gold band on her left hand. Her black pantsuit looked like something that had been bought at a thrift store. Not exactly the picture of a New York heiress now worth at least three million, he thought. More like a nun who had taken a vow of poverty. He remembered what Mrs. Samuelson had said about her concern for the less fortunate since her husband’s death.

  “Thank you for coming,” Dwight said after they were all seated and had declined coffee or tea. He offered condolences to both women and set a mini-recorder on the desk.

  “This is strictly informal,” he told them, “and any time you want me to turn it off, just ask.”

  “Now,” said Mrs. Harris.

  The daughter started to say something, then shrugged and leaned back in her chair.

  “As you wish,” Dwight said. He switched it off and pulled out a legal pad instead. After noting the day’s date, he addressed the younger woman.

  “I don’t want to upset you, Mrs. Hochmann, but do you know what was done to yo
ur father?”

  “That he was dismembered and his parts dumped from one end of Ward Dairy Road to the other?” Her eyes filled, but her voice was steady. “Yes. Mr. Taylor says that everything’s been found now?”

  “All except one arm, I’m afraid.”

  “I’ve been in touch with the medical examiner’s office,” said Pete Taylor. “They’ll release his body for burial this afternoon.”

  “But they won’t tell us when he died,” Mrs. Harris said. Frustration smoldered in her tone. “All they’ll say is sometime between the afternoon of Sunday the nineteenth and Wednesday the twenty-second. That’s not good enough, Major Bryant.”

  “What Mrs. Harris means,” Pete Taylor interposed, “is that we don’t know whether or not he died before their divorce was final.”

  “I know,” Dwight said. “And I’m sorry you’ve been left hanging, ma’am. Despite all those forensic programs on television, unless we can find a witness or the killer confesses, there’s no way to say with pinpoint accuracy when it happened. I understand you were out on the farm that Monday morning? The twentieth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see him that day?”

  “No.”

  “When did you last see or speak to him?”

  “I have no idea. If we needed to communicate, it was either through our attorneys or by email. I don’t think we spoke directly to each other in almost a year.”

  “Yet you went out to the farm where he was staying?”

  “Until everything is divided, that farm is as much mine as his and it’s my right to see that our workers are properly housed and treated.”

  “Does that mean Mr. Harris mistreated them?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Didn’t you?”

  She glared at him and clamped her lips tight.

  “Who hated him enough to kill him like that?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Any mistreatment of the workers?”

  “Not that I heard anything about and I believe I would have. The crew chief, Juan Santos, knows their rights. Besides, we only keep a skeleton crew during the winter and they’re free to hire out as day laborers when things are slow.”