It all but confirmed her suspicions: Longview Farms had been improperly accused of a contamination for which it was not responsible.
Walter “Roy” Hammond lived in what Daphne’s friend Sharon called a “die-slow community.” Pontasset Point called itself a “progressive community” and consisted of double-wides with postage-stamp lawns that someone else mowed. There was a community center, a shuffleboard court, three tennis courts, and a pool—all next to the Hospice, a shabby-looking halfway house nursing home that probably struggled to meet the state minimums.
Hammond wore ceramic teeth, a pair of pink Miracle Ears, and carried a lifetime of french fries and short-order cooking like a backup parachute at his belt line. Apparently if he dropped something he left it there, indicated by the existence on his nut-brown carpet of a wide variety of pens, candy wrappers, and two spoons that would have to wait until his “girl” came to clean. The TV, which was the size of a refrigerator and which fully blocked one of the room’s only two windows, ran loudly, even after Daphne asked that they turn it off.
“You wouldn’t be carrying no tape recorder, would you?” The man had steely blue eyes the color of deep ice and big stubby hands with wrinkled, age-spotted skin, his fingernails chewed grotesquely short.
“No tape recorder,” she answered.
“Is this what you’d call ‘off the record?’”
“It can be,” she allowed, her heart beating more quickly. Why did he want that?
“I think that be best, lady,” he said.
“Fine. Off the record, then.”
“What exactly is it you want?”
Daphne sized up her opponent and played him against himself. “What is it you think I want, Mr. Hammond?”
“Call me Roy. Everyone else does.” He liked her looks—there was no missing that glint in his eyes, and it disgusted her. She wished she had worn a jacket. “No clue,” he answered.
“None?”
“You teasing me?”
“Up until four years ago, you worked as a field inspector for the State Health Department.”
“Matter of record.”
“Does the name Longview Farms mean anything to you?”
His swollen neck moved as he swallowed dryly, failing in his attempt to portray a man bored with her line of questioning. “Every place I inspected on a regular basis means something to me, lady. Part of my route, you understand. Part of what I did for a living. What exactly was it ’bout Longview you had a question ’bout?”
“Exactly this.” She handed him two photocopies—before and after.
Again the boa constrictor in his neck moved and he blinked repeatedly—both signs to her of an increasing anxiety. He switched off the television and adjusted both hearing aids, one of which screamed a high pitch while he toyed with it. His white, scaly tongue worked at his crusty lips, but his mouth remained bone-dry.
“Is there a question to go along with this?” he asked.
“Why the difference between the two?”
He considered this for a moment, his eyes darting between Daphne and the two documents. “Don’t know where you got this one,” he said of the document as it had existed before the changes. “But this one here,” he said, shaking the salmonella document, “is dated later and therefore’s the one the department would go by. But honestly, lady, I don’t work there no more, and I think you’re asking the wrong guy.”
“The original document,” she emphasized, “lists you as the field inspector.” She added, “In the later one, the name’s been changed.”
“You know,” he said, his face reddening and his nostrils flaring, “I do remember this one.”
“Terrific,” she said flatly, letting him sense her distrust.
“Once upon a time we had a good department, lady. Then they started making us hire all the different colors—the United States government did—and things went straight downhill.”
“And women,” Daphne pointed out.
“Girls, too. Yeah, that’s right. Not that I got anything against girls.”
“But you do when it comes to ‘different colors.’”
“Ain’t none of them smart is the thing. I got no tolerance for people with their hand in Uncle Sam’s pocket. You know? They’re just plain stupid. Take Jake Jefferson, okay? You’re asking about the Longview, okay? Well it was that Jefferson who got things wrong in the first place, and made the rest of us have to work to fix it.”
“A lab report?”
“Got everything wrong he did, and then refused to admit it. Nothing worse than a nigger who thinks he’s right.”
“I don’t care for your language, Mr. Hammond.”
“Well pardon fucking me,” he said angrily. “It’s a free country, lady, in case you was off smoking pot while the rest of us was defending it. Just my luck to get the Flying Nun. You know there’s a Mariners game on the TV that I’d rather be watching, if we’re all through here.” He heaved himself out of his soft throne with great difficulty and shuffled over to pour himself a double Wild Turkey with two cubes of ice. The cushion where he had been sitting remained dished in a deep crater. He mumbled a steady stream of unintelligible dialogue with himself.
Daphne looked toward the door to make sure it was close by, and she kept a very close eye on Roy Hammond as he opened and closed some kitchen drawers. “Why did your name get changed on that report?”
“Why?” he asked, his back turned, and she could sense him vamping for time. He returned to his La-Z-Boy swivel recliner and drank an enormous amount of the liquor without batting an eye. He toyed with it, clinking the rapidly melting ice cubes against the glass.
She added, “The man whose name replaced yours, a Mr. Patrick Shawnesea, does apparently not live in this state any longer. That makes it difficult for us to locate him for an interview.”
“Harder than you think, lady. Pat Shawnesea is long dead. Lung cancer, and he never smoked a single cigarette in his life. Radon, I heard it was. Living atop a hot spot. Makes sense: The wife died of woman problems two years and change before Pat. Cut everything off her and outta her and she still up and died on him.”
She thought that maybe Shawnesea’s death explained the change of date on the document, for it had been backdated eleven days, and that had been bothering her the whole way out here. Why backdate a document? Unless you need a window of time in which Pat Shawnesea was still working, so that the only person who could answer important questions was certain not to be available. She had a few nuggets of what she wanted, though the mother lode still avoided her. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said, slouching her shoulders forward involuntarily because of this man’s insistence on fixing his eyes on her chest. “Shawnesea took this case over from you eleven days before your initial investigation began. He decided the illnesses had been caused by salmonella, not staphylococcus, which was the finding of your investigation.”
“Let me explain something—”
“Please do,” she interrupted.
“They wasn’t my findings, the way you say—they was Jefferson’s. He’s the one done the tests, okay? And as for Pat, I don’t remember exactly what he had to do with any of this.”
“But it’s his name on this second document—the altered document.”
“I understand that, lady, but it don’t necessarily mean it makes sense, now does it?”
“But you knew Mark Meriweather.”
“Sure I did.”
“And Mr. Shawnesea?”
“What do you mean?”
“He knew Mr. Meriweather, too? He inspected Longview, too?”
“Well, he must have, now mustn’t he?”
“I thought you said Longview was part of your—”
“We picked up each other’s slack.”
“But did you investigate this New Leaf contamination or Mr. Shawnesea? I remind you that your signature is clearly visible on the original document.”
“I did.” The man looked confused. “How many years that been? There one of them statue
s of elimination on this thing or what?”
In another interview, Daphne might have cracked a smile, but Hammond disgusted her, and she immediately felt tempted to lie. What the general public failed to understand—to their loss, she thought—was that there existed no code of ethics or other formality instructing or limiting law enforcement officers to speak the truth, except while under oath. No place was this more evident than in the Box—the interrogation room, where police officers commonly invented any truth that helped their cause, and their cause was to put criminals away. The best liars were the best interrogators, and Daphne Matthews was considered close to the top. The only real difference she could see between an interrogation and an interview was the location of the discussion. What Hammond did not know was that she was out of her jurisdiction and had made no formal application to conduct this interview with King County police, meaning that everything either of them said was off the record from the moment she first opened her mouth to speak. Meaning also that she could tell as many lies as she wanted, and could act on anything Hammond told her, but could use none of the interview itself in a court of law. These thoughts circulated through her conscious mind before she answered untruthfully, “I believe the statute of limitations has expired on the Longview contamination. I don’t believe there’s any way we can prosecute anyone for what happened to this document. But to be honest, I don’t really care: It’s the truth I want, Mr. Hammond. A man may go to jail for a very, very long time if we can’t find the real truth about Longview.” There was a joke that lived on the fifth floor that she heard circulate year in and year out: What’s a Chinese court deputy say to those in the courtroom at the start of every trial? “All lies.”
“That boy, Harry,” he said.
“Yes, Harry,” she repeated, her heart backfiring.
“A real troublemaker, Harry was. Got it in his head all wrong and wouldn’t have it any other way. Disappeared as fast as he arrived. Called me a liar to my face. Stood there looking me in the eye and called me a liar.”
“What did you say his last name was?” she asked quickly, hoping to trick it out of him.
“I didn’t say. I got no idea. Seeing people around a place and knowing them is two different things, lady. I regularly inspected seven dairies, five bird operations, a rabbit farm, a goat cheese outfit, and eleven food manufacturers. More, some years. People like Mark Meriweather, I had a business knowing. But his hired hands? Some drifter who thought he was God’s gift to chickens? Hang it up!”
And yet by this very statement, Hammond revealed he knew more about Harry than he had first let on.
“I understood that he was college educated,” she tested.
“Was going to take over for Hank Russell when Hank stepped aside. Sure—that was the story anyway. Mark spent too much time and too much money on that boy, you ask me, treating him the way he did. Just a no-good drifter, and Mark goes treating him like a son. He mixed the boy up is what he done. Went to jail or something, I heard.”
She carefully wrote down: Jail?
“Mr. Russell was part-time, was he?”
“Hank Russell? He ran that place, lady. Was foreman for half a dozen years. Damn fine operation, too.”
She pretended to check some papers. “I don’t show any record of a Henry Russell.”
“What kind of record? Taxes, I’ll bet.” He laughed and had to wipe his chin afterward. “Pay Uncle Sam? Not Hank Russell. My guess is that he worked it out with Meriweather, just like when he was over to Dover’s Butter-Breast before that. Roof over his head, some food, some cash under the table—that’s Hank for you. Part of the family.”
“I’m confused about something.” She held up one document, then the other. “Was it a staph or salmonella outbreak?”
Hammond’s eyes were glassy from the booze, of which he took another long swallow as he stewed on this. Boiled was more like it, she thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed as if food were going through the boa. His left hand gripped the arm of the chair in a choke hold. She felt him on the verge of opening up to her. When his throat cleared he said, “I got nothing to say to you, lady. Take it somewhere else, why don’t you?”
“It’s just that—”
He interrupted her with a bone-numbing delivery that drove his face scarlet and overfilled a blue vein in his long, pale forehead to where it jumped right off his face. “I said take it somewhere else! Get outta here. You get outta here now, ’fore I make you pay for that comment!” She was up and out of her chair, struggling with her briefcase.
“I don’t want to talk no more,” he said. He turned his back on her, snatched his nearly empty drink from the side table, and headed back for the tall bottle that awaited him.
She was out of there in a matter of seconds, in her car, and down the road. Exhausted, and still tense from the encounter, she drove until the phone cooperated and placed three calls—one of them downtown, one to the owner of Dover’s ButterBreast turkey farm, and the third to a tiny farm up the road toward Sammamish. After telling the farm’s owner that she worked for Publishers Clearing House, he claimed that Hank Russell was out in his trailer “watching the game, I think.”
She disconnected the phone, placing it on the seat beside her, and drew in a deep breath. She shifted gears, took a curve suicidally fast, and whispered under her breath the punch line to that joke—“All lies”—a wry smile twisting up the edges of her lips, where her color had finally returned.
“Where’s your jacket?”
“Pardon me?”
Hank Russell was short and solid. He looked like a fifty-five-year-old rodeo rider—jeans, dusty cowboy boots, and an azure blue work shirt with a western yoke and snap pockets. He had a silver belt buckle the size of a salad plate, and when he turned around to silence the television with a remote, she saw that on the back of his brown leather belt it read simply HANK, in big embossed letters. His twangy voice sounded like tires on gravel: “Them Publishing House Clearance folks got them blazers like I seen on the tube. You ain’t one of ’em, are you?”
“No, sir.” She liked his smile immediately.
“You lied to me, young lady.”
“Yes, sir, I did.”
“You’re too damn pretty to be a tax lady, and it’s too damn late at night. Tell me you’re not a tax lady. God help me!”
“I’m not a tax lady.”
His relief was genuine. “Some unknown relative of mine died? You look more like an attorney than a tax lady.”
“I’m not an attorney either,” she told him. “I’m a policewoman, Mr. Russell. I think Harry may be in trouble.”
“Harry Caulfield? Again? Well, Jez-us!” he swung the screen door open wide. “Come in. Come in!” He zapped the TV this time killing the picture as well. She thought of cowboys and six-guns; and now they used remotes. “How about some lemon pie?” he asked with a twinkle in his green eyes. “Made it myself. It’s the best damn pie you’ve ever ate.”
She and Boldt wandered his small backyard, side by side, the sergeant stopping every now and then to pick up one of the brightly colored plastic toys that were scattered about everywhere.
“Last name of Caulfield,” she said. “Harry Caulfield. Wandered onto the farm at seventeen. Wouldn’t talk about his past. Not to anyone. Worked hard, learned fast. Everyone treated him like family. The owner, Meriweather, made him earn his high school equivalency if he wanted to stay on at Longview. Sent him on to college after that. Paid for everything for the boy.”
“Here?” Boldt asked, briefly pausing in their slow stroll.
She nodded. “That’s how the foreman remembers it. The university. Studied sciences, he said.”
“Like microbiology?”
“Could be,” she agreed. “It would help him with the poultry business—the diseases, the doctoring.”
“It’s him.”
“Worked back at the farm summers and on breaks. Evidently loved the work. Named a bunch of the hens. Really took to it.”
“And came down
hard.”
“Russell says someone got paid. Said there was a break-in about a week before State Health shut them down, but that nothing was taken, and they blamed it on some kids and paid no attention. Never reported it.”
“Someone doctored their birds,” Boldt speculated.
She nodded. “Set them up. They never saw it coming. About the time the infection spread, the State Health inspector, Hammond, shows up and shuts them down that very day. It happened real fast. Too fast for Hank Russell; that’s how he claims he knew it was rigged. The farm was ordered to destroy the birds, and the boy was there, back from college. Meriweather wasn’t himself. His wife got into the booze. The people who got sick threatened lawsuits. He was going to lose it all, and worse: He and the boy both knew it. Russell says Meriweather wasn’t sleeping, couldn’t think clearly. He refused to poison the birds, so instead they butchered them—all of them. All in one day. Over a thousand birds. By hand. The boy, too—Harry. Russell says he’s never had a day like that in his life. Ankle-deep in blood, covered in it. ‘A mountain of headless birds,’ he said. And another pile of just the heads. And Mark Meriweather and Harry Caulfield crying the whole time, crying for sixteen hours while they slaughtered those birds and put an end to the farm.” The psychologist in her said, “They should have never involved the boy.”
Boldt stopped and rocked his head back toward the moon, and his voice cracked as he tried to say something to her but stopped himself. When he did manage to speak, he said, “I don’t know that I can go on being a parent.” He picked up another piece of plastic—it looked like a bridge—and stacked it with the others. Maybe they combined to make a fort or a house, she could not tell which.
“The lawsuits did come, and on an icy fall night Mer-iweather drove himself off Snoqualmie Pass for the insurance money. The wife ended up committed; the way Russell described it, it sounded like wet brain. Ownership of the farm was never worked out. Meriweather owned it outright, and the wife was still living. So it just rotted away, according to Russell.”
“And our friend Harry?”
“Wouldn’t speak after Meriweather died. Nearly starved himself to death by not eating. Russell said he was hospitalized for a while, and that when he got out, he came to Russell with a plan to prove they had been framed.”
Boldt 03 - No Witnesses Page 20
