Hard Row Page 12

  “When was it final?” he interrupted.

  “Sometime within the last two weeks or so. I’d have to check the files. I’m pretty sure it was a summary judgment, so neither of them came to court. Reid just handed me the judgment and I signed it, so it’s a done deal.”

  “Today’s March sixth. What with the cold weather and no insect damage, the best guesstimate we have for time of death is sometime between the morning of Sunday, February nineteenth, when Ms. Smith said she last spoke to him, and Wednesday the twenty-second, two days before we found the legs. You gonna eat the rest of that?”

  I shook my head and the last third of my hot dog followed his first two.

  “Tonight we stop somewhere for something healthy,” I warned.

  He gave me a blank look.

  “You haven’t forgotten have you? The Hurricanes? You and me?”

  “Is that tonight?”

  “It is. Jessie and Emma are going to pick Cal up after school and keep him till we get home, so no getting sidetracked, okay? You’ve got good people, darling. Trust them. What’s the point of being a boss if you’re going to roll out for every call?”

  I finished my drink and stood to go. He stood, too.

  “Wait, there’s a spot of chili on your tie.”

  I tipped the carafe on his desk to wet a napkin and sponged it off before it had a chance to stain.

  “I’ll be finished by five or five-thirty,” I said. “That gives you an extra ninety minutes. My car or your truck?”

  “You’ll come in early with me tomorrow?”

  “Sure.” I laced my hands behind his neck and pulled him down to my level. He smelled of mustard and chili and Old Spice. “I’d come to Madagascar with you.”

  “What’s in Madagascar?”

  “Who cares? You want to go, I’ll go with you. As long as you come with me to tonight’s game.”

  He laughed and kissed me. “My truck. Five-thirty. And don’t forget to find me that divorce date.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Horace argued both sides, and wound up by saying “the city is the best place for a rich man to live in; the country is the best place for a poor man to die in.”

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  MAYLEEN RICHARDS

  MONDAY AFTERNOON, MARCH 6

  On the drive out to the farmhouse that Buck Harris had inherited from his maternal grandfather, Jack Jamison was unusually silent. Normally, the chubby-faced detective would be throwing out a dozen theories, cheerfully speculating as to what they would find at the house, formulating possible motives. For the last few days though, he had seemed a million miles away and worry lines had begun to settle between his eyebrows.

  “Everything okay at home?” Mayleen Richards asked him.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  “Baby okay?”

  As a rule, the mere mention of Jack Junior, now called Jay, was enough to get her colleague talking non-stop. Today, all it got was an “Um.”

  “Guess Cindy’s got her hands full now that he’s starting to crawl.”

  “Yeah.”

  It was a sour response and Mayleen backed off. If Jack and Cindy were having marital problems, best she stay out of it. She turned the heater down a notch and concentrated on keeping up with Percy Denning, who was in the car ahead of them.

  “Her sister’s husband got a big raise back around Christmas,” Jamison burst out suddenly. “They bought a new house. New car. And now she’s told Cindy that they’re going to have an in-ground swimming pool put in this summer.”

  He did not have to say more. Cindy and Jack lived in a doublewide next door to his widowed mother. Although Jack had never specifically said so, Mayleen was fairly sure that he gave Mrs. Jamison some financial help with her utility bills and car repairs in return for using her well and septic tank.

  “She knew what the county pays when she married me.”

  Knowing it’s one thing, Mayleen thought. Living on it’s something else.

  “She ever think about going back to work?”

  “While Jay’s still nursing?” He sounded shocked at the idea.

  “I was just thinking that if she wants a bigger place or—?”

  “Not if it means leaving our son.”

  Mayleen glanced over at him. “Well, then?”

  “I could maybe get on with the Wake County sheriff’s department, but it wouldn’t pay that much more.”

  “Plus you’d lose any seniority,” she said. “Anyhow, you’re happy here, aren’t you? Money’s not everything.”

  “Right,” he said with more sarcasm than she had ever heard from him. “It’s just new houses, new cars, and fancy swimming pools.” He sighed. “Police work’s all I ever wanted to do. But if it won’t pay enough here, then maybe I should—”

  He broke off as they saw Denning flip on his turn signal upon approaching two dignified stone columns that marked a long driveway up to a much-remodeled farmhouse.

  The housekeeper was expecting them and opened the door before they rang. Short and sturdy with dark brown skin, wiry salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a bun, and intelligent brown eyes, Jincy Samuelson wore a spotless white bib apron over a long-sleeved blue denim dress. She brushed aside the search warrant they tried to give her and led them immediately to her employer’s home office. Paneled in dark wood, the room looked more like a decorator’s idea of a gentleman farmer’s office than a place where real work was done by a roughneck, up-from-the-soil, self-made millionaire. The only authentic signs that he actually used the room were a rump-sprung leather executive chair behind the polished walnut desk, a couple of mounted deer heads, a desktop littered with papers, and a framed snapshot of a child who sat on a man’s lap as he drove a huge tractor.

  “That him?” Richards asked.

  The housekeeper nodded. “And his daughter when she was a little girl.”

  It was their first look at the victim’s face and the two deputies stared long and hard at it. He was dressed in sweaty work clothes, and only one hand was on the steering wheel. The other arm was curved protectively around the child who smiled up at him.

  “He doesn’t want anybody to do anything in here except run a dust cloth over the surfaces, vacuum the rug, and wash the windows twice a year,” said Mrs. Samuelson. “Once in a while his secretary from over in New Bern might come by, but for the most part, he’s the only one who uses this room. If you want to be sure it’s just his fingerprints . . .”

  “Not his bedroom or his bathroom?” Mayleen wondered aloud.

  “Those rooms the maid or I clean regularly. Besides,” she added with a small tight frown, “he occasionally takes—took—company up there.”

  Percy Denning had brought a small field kit and was soon lifting prints from the desk items.

  Dwight Bryant arrived while they were questioning Mrs. Samuelson about Buck Harris’s usual routine. He found them in the kitchen, a kitchen so immaculate that it might never have cooked a meal or had grease pop from a pan even though he could smell vanilla and the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee. Heavy-duty stainless steel appliances and cherry cabinets lined the walls and the floor was paved with terra cotta tiles. Only the long walnut table that sat in the middle of the room looked old, so old that its edges had been rounded smooth over the years and there were deep scratches in the polished top. He would later learn that it was, as he suspected, the same kitchen table that had belonged to Buck Harris’s great-grandparents and that it had stood in this same spot for over a hundred years.

  While Denning labored in Harris’s office, Richards and Jamison were enjoying coffee and homemade cinnamon rolls at that table.

  Dwight joined them in time to hear Mrs. Samuelson tell how Mrs. Harris had originally hired her some six or eight years earlier to live in an apartment over the garage out back and act as both housekeeper and general caretaker.

  “Sid Lomax manages this farm and the migrant camp. Whenever I need someone to do the grounds or help with the heavy w
ork here in the house, he’ll lend me a couple of Mexicans.”

  She told them that the Harrises lived together in New Bern before the separation and divorce. “But this house is the one he loves best—it was his grandfather’s—and he wanted it kept so that he could walk right in out of the fields if he felt like staying over. She always called if they were both coming, but a lot of times he’d just show up by himself and expect fresh sheets on the bed, the rooms aired, and for me to have a meal ready to eat pretty quick, just like his grandmother did for him. I always keep something in the freezer that I can stick in the microwave. I don’t look anything like his old granny, but he loved my stuffed peppers and they freeze up good. Meatloaf, too.”

  “So he was a demanding employer?” Mayleen asked.

  Mrs. Samuelson smoothed the bib of her crisp white apron. “That’s what he was paying me for. I’ve worked for worse.”

  “And you went on working for him after he and Mrs. Harris separated?”

  “She asked me to come with her to New Bern, but we both knew that was because she wanted to mess it up here for him.” A bit of gold gleamed in her smile. “Both my sons are just down the road and so are my grandbabies. Nothing in New Bern worth moving there for. Besides, when I told him she wanted me to go, he raised me a hundred a month if I’d stay.”

  Dwight’s phone buzzed and as soon as he’d checked the small screen, he excused himself to take Deborah’s call. “I checked the records, Dwight. The Harris divorce became final on the twentieth of February.”

  Twentieth of February. The day after Flame Smith said she last spoke to him.

  He turned back to Mrs. Samuelson and said, “When did you see him last?”

  “Saturday morning, three weeks ago,” she answered promptly as she set a mug of coffee in front of him. It was so robust that he had to reach for the milk pitcher. “Saturday the eighteenth. Reason I remember is that’s my sister’s birthday. On weekends, I only work a half day on Saturday. I gave him his breakfast as usual and I left vegetable soup and a turkey sandwich for his lunch. When I came in on Monday morning, I saw by the mess he’d left in the kitchen that he’d fixed himself breakfast on Sunday morning, but that was the last meal he ate here.”

  “Did he sleep here Sunday night?”

  She thought a moment, then frowned. “I don’t know. I made the bed while he was eating breakfast and it had been slept in when I got here that Monday morning, but whether he slept here one night or two, I just can’t say.”

  “But you’re positive you didn’t see him again after you left at noon on Saturday?”

  “No sir, I didn’t.”

  “What about children? The Harrises have any?”

  “Just one girl. Susan. She was grown and gone before I started working here, but she’s been here with them for Christmas a time or two. You could tell that she was his eyeballs, he was that foolish about her, but she was breaking his heart. Her husband was killed in Nine-Eleven and it changed her. Mrs. Harris says she used to love pretty dresses and parties and flying off to Europe. First time I saw her, though, she was skinny as a broomstick and she was wearing stuff that looked like it came from the Goodwill. Turned her away from God. She sat right here at this table and told them both that if God made the world, he wasn’t taking very good care of it and it was up to people like them—people who had money—to do the work God should’ve been doing. I believe she still lives in New York. No children though. I think he used to take off and go see her two or three times a year.”

  “And you didn’t see the need to notify her or Mrs. Harris that he was missing?”

  “I didn’t know that he was. He could have been at his place in the mountains or he might’ve been working over in the New Bern office. Like I say, he never lets me know where he was going or when he was coming back. He’d take a notion and he’d be gone and the only way I’d know was if I happened to be out there in the hall when he was leaving. ‘Back in a few days.’ That’s all he ever told me. But you can ask Sid—Mr. Lomax.”

  She passed the plate of cinnamon rolls down the table and Jamison took another. Dwight and Richards passed.

  “Do you know Ms. Smith?” Dwight asked. “Flame Smith?”

  Mrs. Samuelson was too disciplined to sniff, but the expression that crossed her face was one that reminded him of Bessie Stewart, his mother’s housekeeper who had helped raise him. He would not have been surprised to hear a muttered, “Common as dirt.”

  “I’ve met her,” she admitted.

  “And?”

  “And nothing. If she was here in the mornings, I fixed her some breakfast, too. Wasn’t any of my business what went on upstairs, although I have to say that she was always polite to me. Not like some of them he brought home.”

  Dwight paused at that. “He had other women?”

  “He used to. When he and Mrs. Harris were still living together. This last year though, it’s only been her. That Smith woman.”

  “Do you know their names?”

  Mrs. Samuelson cupped her mug in her workworn hands as if to hold in the warmth and her brown eyes met Dwight’s in a steady look. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’d just as soon not say.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but if Mr. Harris has been murdered, we need to know who might have hated him enough to do it.”

  The housekeeper nodded to the two detectives. “They say those hands and legs y’all’ve been finding might be him?”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  She shook her graying head. “I don’t see how any woman could do that. That takes a hateful and hating man.”

  “Like a husband who finds out his wife’s been cheating on him?”

  She thought about it, then nodded slowly. “Only one of them was married, but yes, her husband might could do it. A gal from El Salvador. Said her name was Strella. I think her husband’s name is Ramon. Mr. Lomax can tell you. They live in the migrant camp on the other side of the field. She was here twice last summer. First time was to help me turn all the mattresses and he came in and saw her. Second time, I guess she was stretched out on one of the mattresses.”

  “Who else, Mrs. Samuelson?”

  Reluctantly, she gave up two more names. “Both of ’em white, but I haven’t seen either of them in this house in over a year. Mrs. Smith pretty much had a lock on him.”

  They all looked up as Denning came to the kitchen door. There was a smudge of fingerprint powder on his chin, more on his fingers. He crossed to the sink to wash his hands and Mrs. Samuelson immediately rose and tore off some paper towels.

  “Thanks,” he said, drying his hands.

  “Any luck?” Dwight asked.

  “It’s a match. No question about it. The state lab can take a look if you want, Major, but it’s Harris.”

  While Mrs. Samuelson showed Richards and Denning over the house and the nearer outbuildings, Dwight called Reid Stephenson as he had promised and asked him to notify the Harris daughter before it hit the news media. “And you might as well tell Pete Taylor so he can pass the word on to Mrs. Harris.”

  Then he and Jamison drove along a lane that was a shortcut over to the farm manager’s home. Trim and tidy, the white clapboard house appeared to date from the late thirties and sat in a grove of pecan trees whose buds were beginning to swell in the mild spring air. No one appeared when Dwight tapped the horn, but through the open window of the truck, they could hear the sound of tractors in the distance and they followed another lane past a line of scrubby trees and out into a forty- or fifty-acre field. Two tractors were preparing the ground for planting. A third tractor seemed to be in trouble. It was surrounded by a mechanic’s truck, two pickups with a Harris Farms logo on the doors, and several Latino and Anglo men.

  As the two deputies drew near, a tall Anglo detached himself from the group.

  “Mr. Lomax?” Dwight asked. “Sid Lomax?”

  The man nodded in wary acknowledgment. He wore a billed cap that did not hide the flecks of gray at his temples and his face was weathered l
ike the leather of a baseball glove, but if the muscles of his body had begun to soften, it was not evident in the way he moved with such easy grace.

  “Lomax,” Dwight said again. “Didn’t you use to play shortstop for Fuquay High School?”

  Lomax looked at Dwight more carefully and a rueful grin spread across his face. “I oughta bust you one in the jaw, bo. You played third for West Colleton, didn’t you? Can’t call your name right now, but damned if you weren’t the one got an unassisted triple play off my line drive in the semifinals with the bases loaded, right?”

  “Dwight Bryant,” Dwight said, putting out his hand. “Colleton County Sheriff’s Department.”

  “Yeah?” Lomax took his hand in a strong clasp. “Reckon I’d better not punch you out then.”

  “Might make it a little hard for my deputy here,” Dwight agreed as Jamison smiled.

  “Man, we were supposed to go all the way that year,” he said, shaking his head. “Oh well. What can I do for you?”

  “You’ve heard about the body parts been scattered along this road?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m afraid it’s your boss.”

  “The hell you say!” His surprise seemed genuine. “Buck Harris? You sure?”

  “We’ve just compared the fingerprints with those in Harris’s study here. They match.”

  “Well, damn!”

  “When’s the last time you saw him?”

  Lomax pulled out a Palm Pilot and consulted his calendar. “Sunday the nineteenth at the Cracker Barrel out on the Interstate. I was having dinner with my son and his wife after church and he stopped by our table on his way out. I walked out to the car with him because he wanted to firm it up about moving most of the crew on this place to one of our camps down east. We’ve had tomatoes here the last two years, so this year we’re planting these fields in soybeans. Beans don’t take a lot of labor.”

  “So did you move them yet?” Dwight asked.

  “All but these guys you see here. Why?”

  “Any women or children left in the camp?”

  “A couple to cook for the men. Three or four kids and they all go to school. We encourage that. We don’t let ’em quit or work during the school year. Mrs. Harris is pretty strict about that.”