Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  “Besides taking a younger mistress?” I asked.

  “You’re the one with the woman’s intuition,” he said. “But Richards and I both got the impression that she’s using the mistress as a smoke screen to keep from talking about what really happened.”

  While I settled up with Jimmy, Dwight went on and picked up Cal so that the three of us got home at the same time. I called Daddy to see if he wanted to meet us later, then changed into jeans and sneakers. By the time I got outside, Dwight and Cal had cut the seed potatoes into chunks, making sure that each chunk had one or two eyes that would sprout into a plant. Seth had opened a furrow about eight inches deep when he was here with the plows, and Cal and I dropped the potatoes in the furrow, cut side down, about a foot apart. Dwight followed along behind with the hoe and covered them with three or four inches of dirt. In a week or so, after they’d sprouted, he would come back and pull another few inches of dirt over the stems until eventually they would be hilled up at least a foot deep in the sandy loam.

  “Why so deep?” Cal asked when the process was described to him.

  “Because the new potatoes form between the chunk we’re planting and the surface of the soil,” I explained.

  “We have to give them enough room to grow or else they’ll pop through the ground,” said Dwight. “If they’re exposed to light, they’ll turn green and green potatoes are poison.”

  With less than five pounds of potatoes to plant, it didn’t take us long to get them in the ground.

  Then we washed up and I put my guitar in the back of the truck.

  On the drive over, while telling Cal who he could expect to see, I said, “Steve Paulie owns the place, but I can never remember if he’s my third cousin or a second cousin once removed.”

  Cal was puzzled. “How do you remove a cousin?”

  “Removed just means a degree of separation,” I said. “Look, R.W.’s your first cousin because his dad and your dad are brothers, okay?”

  He nodded.

  “Now if R.W. had a child, he would be your first cousin, once removed. But if he had a child and you had a child, they would be second cousins. Got it?”

  “And if they had children, they would be third cousins?”

  “By George, ’e’s got it!” I said with an exaggerated English accent.

  “So what are Mary Pat and Jake to me?”

  “Just good friends, I’m afraid, honey.”

  No way was I going to try to untangle Kate’s relationship to her young ward. Enough to know they were cousins even though Mary Pat now called her Mom. Just as it was enough to know that the owner of Paulie’s Barbecue House was related to me through one of Daddy’s aunts.

  Every Wednesday night, friends and relatives gather there to eat supper and then do a little picking and singing for an hour or so. It’s very informal. Some Wednesdays, there aren’t enough to bother. Other times, there’ll be twelve or fourteen of us. Before I married Dwight, I would join them at least once a month for some good fellowshipping as Haywood calls it, but this would be the first time since New Year’s.

  We ordered plates of barbecue—that wonderful eastern Carolina smoked pork, coarsely chopped and seasoned with vinegar and hot sauce. It’s always served with coleslaw and spiced apples and a bottomless basket of crispy hushpuppies, and everything gets washed down with pitchers of sweet iced tea.

  “Want to split a side order of chicken livers?” I asked Dwight and Cal.

  You’d’ve thought I had offered them anchovies the way they both turned up their noses, but Aunt Sister was seated at the end of the long table and she called down to say, “I could eat one or two if you’re getting them.”

  Dwight always wants to tell me how unhealthy they are, but I just point to Aunt Sister, who’s over eighty and still going strong. Daddy was there next to her and allowed as how he wouldn’t mind a taste either, so I moved on down the table to be closer to them.

  After supper, the instruments came out. Daddy and Haywood both play the fiddle, Isabel has a banjo and Aunt Sister plays a dulcimer. Zach’s Emma and Andrew’s Ruth spell each other on the piano and Herman’s son Reese is good with the harmonica. The rest of us, including Steve Paulie, play guitar and those that don’t play tap their toes and sing.

  There were at least a dozen of us, and soon the place was rocking. From rousing gospel hymns to country ballads and back again. Mother used to say that she fell in love with Daddy for his fiddle-playing and he was in good form tonight, his fingers moving nimbly up and down the neck as he bowed the strings of his mellow old fiddle. Aunt Sister’s daughter Beverly was there and she, Annie Sue, Emma, and Ruth blended their voices into such sweet cousinly harmony on one of the hymns that I got chill bumps.

  Cal kept his eyes glued on Reese, fascinated by the way my nephew used his harmonica to counterpoint the melody line or make musical jokes. I glanced over at Dwight and he winked at me.

  The music lifted me up and for a time, washed away both the sadness I had felt for Fred Mitchiner’s grandson and the ugliness of Buck Harris’s death. Shortly after nine though, I noticed that Cal was yawning. “Time we were calling it a night,” I said.

  Aunt Sister looked at Daddy and without a word, both began to play an old familiar tune. Annie Sue’s clear soprano voice joined in softly before they’d played two bars and the rest of us picked it up until it floated over us in gentle benediction:

  God be with you till we meet again

  By his counsels guide, uphold you,

  With his sheep securely fold you;

  God be with you till we meet again.

  CHAPTER 33

  Success may be attained once by accident, but permanent results are found only attendant upon a practice based upon correct theory.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  I had just loaded the last breakfast plate in the dishwasher the next morning when the phone rang.

  “Oh good,” Dwight said. “You haven’t left yet. I’m halfway to Dobbs and I just realized that I left some papers I’ll need on the floor beside our bed. Could you bring them when you come?”

  “Sure,” I told him and immediately went to our room to find them. When I circled the bed to his side, I saw several sheets of paper on top of a manila file folder. I picked them up and straightened them, and saw that the top page was titled “Harris Farm #1: Workers on site as of 1 January.” One name leaped out at me and I smiled as I read it, then tucked the pages neatly into the folder and placed it with my purse so I’d remember to take it with me.

  On my drive in, though, that name began to gnaw at me. January? I thought about the blowup Mrs. Harris had with her husband last spring, almost a year ago.

  Why would someone wait nine or ten months to avenge a wrong if that’s when Buck Harris had done anything worth avenging? And why chop off his arms and legs in such a rage?

  Unless—?

  Unbidden came the memory of how Will’s wife, Amy, had vented last Saturday when I helped her write her grant proposal. Emma, too, when she and her cousins were arguing with Haywood. I coupled it with what Faye Myers had almost told me on Tuesday and a nebulous theory began to form.

  At Bethel Baptist Church on Ward Dairy Road, I pulled into the churchyard to call my favorite clerk in Ellis Glover’s office and ask her to pull a file for me.

  When I got to the courthouse, I stopped there first.

  It was as I thought. The original addresses were the same.

  Downstairs, Faye Myers was on duty at the dispatch desk. I waited till she was off the phone and then asked her to finish telling me what she’d started to on Tuesday. “About what Flip told you when you were telling me about Mike Diaz and Mayleen Richards,” I reminded her.

  “Well, I probably shouldn’t repeat it,” she said. And of course, she did.

  It was worse than I’d thought, but it clarified the whole situation and I walked on down to Dwight’s office. He saw my face and his smile turned to concern.

  “Deb’rah?
What’s wrong, shug?”

  I closed his door. “Did Mayleen Richards learn much from those migrants yesterday?”

  He shook his head. “She couldn’t pry a thing out of them except that the two women did see Mrs. Harris take that tumble into the mud. They didn’t tell before because they respect her and thought she would be humiliated if they did. Why?”

  “I think I know who butchered Buck Harris,” I told him bleakly. “Ernesto Palmeiro.”

  “Who?”

  “The tractor guy that I had in court Friday.” I opened his file and pointed to Palmeiro’s name on the list of workers living on Harris Farm #1 in January. It was followed by a María Palmeiro. Neither name was on the current list the farm manager had given them.

  Then I showed him the file I’d had the clerk pull for me. “When Palmeiro was arrested in January, his address was Ward Dairy Road. See? But that was before you knew it was Harris’s body so it didn’t really register. Everyone said he was loco for taking the tractor because his wife had left him after they lost their baby. But he was heading east, not south. I think he was trying to get to New Bern to find Buck Harris. If he had, Harris would have been chopped up at least a month and a half sooner.”

  “But why?”

  “You said the blowup between the Harrises was last spring. That’s when the tomato fields would have been sprayed with a pesticide. Eight or nine months later—in January—the Palmeiro baby was born. Stillborn. With no arms or legs.” I couldn’t keep my voice from shaking. “No arms and no legs, Dwight. Just like that torso you found.”

  “Jesus H!” he murmured as he began to connect the dots. He opened his door and shouted, “All detectives! In my office. Now!”

  Five or six deputies came hurrying in, including Mayleen Richards.

  “Tell them,” Dwight said.

  While I repeated my conjectures, Dwight took Percy Denning aside and sent him to pull the fingerprint card on Palmeiro. A copy of the prints had been sent to the state’s central crime lab, but like most crime labs around the country, ours is so underfunded and understaffed that the fingerprints connected to a misdemeanor theft would not have been entered into their computers yet.

  As I went back upstairs to a courtroom where I was expected to dispense a little justice, an old rhyme that John Claude used to quote pounded through my head.

  For want of a nail, a shoe was lost.

  For want of a shoe, a horse was lost.

  For want of a horse, a rider was lost.

  For want of a rider, a battle was lost.

  Or, as my no-nonsense mother used to say more succinctly, “Penny-wise, pound foolish.”

  With better funding, more crimes could be solved more quickly. In England, I hear they’re using DNA to solve ordinary burglaries. Here in America we can’t even afford to test for all the rapes and murders, much less enter the fingerprints of every convicted felon into a national database in a timely way.

  . . . All for the want of a nail.

  CHAPTER 34

  Search ever after the truth—not the truth which justifies you or your pet theories to yourself, but seek truth for truth’s sake, and when you have found it, follow its lead.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  MAYLEEN RICHARDS

  THURSDAY MORNING, MARCH 9

  While two squad cars headed for the old Buckley place, three others peeled out for the Diaz nursery, blue lights flashing and sirens wailing, with Dwight Bryant bringing up the rear in his own truck.

  Mayleen Richards was keenly aware of not being in on the kill.

  “I think not,” was all Major Bryant had said when she asked to go with them to arrest Ernesto Palmeiro instead of confronting the women of Harris Farm #1 again.

  A cold lump still lodged in her chest from hearing Judge Knott say, “Miguel Diaz of Diaz y Garcia Landscaping came to court with him last Friday and spoke for him. It’s my understanding that he works there now.”

  The judge had not once glanced in Mayleen’s direction, but coupled with the long level look she got from Major Bryant when he denied her request, she was sure they were both aware of her relationship with Mike.

  And what about Mike? He knew of Palmeiro’s stillborn baby. Did he also know that Palmeiro had killed Buck Harris?

  There was no doubt in anyone’s mind now that he was the killer, and his desperate drive with the tractor had gone from being a funny story to something of grim seriousness in the brief minutes it had taken Percy Denning to look at Palmeiro’s fingerprints and find the significant markers he had noted from the prints on the bloody axe.

  Her own fingers itched to call Diaz, but she kept both hands on the steering wheel. Beside her, Jack Jamison seemed to be on an adrenaline high, a combination of wrapping up this homicide and the anticipation of leaving for Texas next week.

  “If I pass the selection and training process, they’ll ship me out immediately, so this could be my last weekend with Cindy and Jay for a year.”

  “I’m not going to say break a leg,” she said tartly.

  “How do you mean that?”

  “Oh hell, Jack. I don’t really know. Both ways, I guess. I still think you’re crazy to put yourself in harm’s way like this, but if it’s what you want, then I really do hope you pass and that it works out for you.”

  It was after nine before the second team reached the nursery. The woman who came to the door seemed frightened by so many police cars. Dwight recognized her from a murder investigation back in January and the sight of him seemed to reassure her. In halting English, she told them that her cousin Miguel Diaz and his crew had left for a job nearly two hours ago.

  “Ernesto Palmeiro,” said Dwight. “Is he here or with your cousin?”

  She shook her head. “No here. He leave sábado—Saturday. Go Mexico. You ask Miguel.”

  “Tell me about him,” Dwight said. But she immediately lapsed into Spanish and claimed not to understand.

  Fortunately, they had brought along a translator.

  “She says he was from the village next to theirs back in Mexico, but they did not really know him until his wife gave birth to a badly deformed baby in January. A baby that died. After that, the wife left and Ernesto went crazy. He was arrested and from jail he sent word to her brother and her cousin that they must help him, as compatriots of the same valley. They didn’t want to, but felt it was their duty. They gave him work, gave him blankets and let him sleep in the shed. They also helped him repair the damage he had done. Saturday, her cousin Miguel gave him his wages and told him to leave. More than that, she says she doesn’t know.”

  She did give them the number for her cousin’s cell phone though; and when Dwight called it, Miguel Diaz told them where they were working. The site was a new development off Ward Dairy Road near Bethel Baptist, less than fifteen minutes away.

  He was waiting for them at the entrance of the new subdivision, and Dwight tried to take his measure as Diaz got out of his truck to meet them. A clean-shaven man with light brown skin and straight black hair. Without that black Stetson and the workboots, he’d probably stand five-nine or five-ten, just a shade taller than Mayleen Richards. Regular features. Slim hips and a slender build that conveyed strength and confidence. Hard to read his face because he wore mirrored sunglasses this bright sunny morning.

  Dwight introduced himself and they shook hands. In lightly accented English, Diaz asked how he might be of service.

  “We’re looking for Ernesto Palmeiro,” Dwight said. “We’re told you went to court for him last week and that he works for you now.”

  “Did work,” Diaz said easily. “No more. He left for Mexico on Saturday. At least that’s where he said he was going. Is there more trouble, Major Bryant?”

  “Didn’t you guarantee he’d repair the yards he plowed up?”

  “They’re finished. We put the last yard back with new bushes Friday night. I let him work for me during the day, then work on the damages in the evening, and I kept his pay till
it was finished, just like I promised the judge.”

  He seemed puzzled by the three cars that still flashed their emergency lights. “All this for some flowers and bushes? I can show you, Major. It’s all fixed.”

  “Not flowers and bushes,” Dwight said. “You’ve heard about Buck Harris? Palmeiro’s boss? Owner of the farm where he used to live and work, and where he stole that tractor?”

  “He was killed, yes?” He shook his head. “A bad business. Very bad.”

  “Ernesto Palmeiro did it.”

  Impossible to gauge his reaction behind those reflective glasses. Diaz did not exclaim or protest, but he did let out the long indrawn breath he had taken.

  “You don’t seem surprised,” Dwight said grimly.

  “Did I know he was the butcher? No, Major. But you’re right. I think I am not surprised. You heard about his son? His first child? Who died the same hour he was born, thanks be to God?” He crossed himself.

  Dwight nodded. “Why did he blame Harris?”

  “It was his farm. María was working there. Beyond that I don’t know. I didn’t want to know. I gave him work and a place to stay. I spoke for him in court and as soon as I had done all that I pledged, I paid him his money and told him to leave. He said he was going home. The honor of my village required me to help him when he asked for it. It did not require me to like him or take him to my bosom.”

  No, thought Dwight. Just my deputy. And how much did she know? She had flushed bright red when Deborah mentioned Diaz’s name.

  “How much money did he leave with?”

  “Fifteen hundred dollars. I gave him the flowers and shrubs at our cost.”

  “We’ll want to speak to your men who worked with him.”

  “Of course, Major, but they’ll only tell you the same.”

  “I bet they will,” Dwight said. He motioned to Raeford McLamb, who had stood nearby listening. “Separate those men and get a statement from each of them as to what they knew about Palmeiro.”