Hard Row

by Margaret Maron

  “Want me to translate for you?” asked Diaz with a slight smile.

  “No thanks,” Dwight said. “We brought our own translator.”

  It took less than an hour. Each man was separately questioned, then allowed to go back to work.

  Dwight did not wait to hear the predictable results. Instead, he got in his truck and drove over to the old Buckley place, Harris Farm #1, where Richards and Jamison were bearing down on Felicia Sanaugustin and Mercedes Santos, who swore separately and together that they knew nothing about the Palmeiros or their baby.

  “I don’t understand why they keep saying that,” a frustrated Richards told Dwight. “They know we know that the baby was born here in the camp and that the EMS truck responded to an emergency call here in January. Why won’t they admit that the baby was stillborn and had serious birth defects?”

  “Maybe for the same reason they didn’t tell you about Mrs. Harris falling in the mud puddle till they knew she had told you,” Dwight said. “Let me go see if she’s here.”

  He drove up to the house and found Mrs. Harris and her daughter having coffee in the bright sunny kitchen with Mrs. Samuelson. Even though the housekeeper immediately stood and busied herself over at the sink the moment he entered, it was clear from the plates and cups on the table that neither woman stood on ceremony with the other. No bosslady/servant protocol here.

  More than ever, the Harris daughter looked like someone who had come straight from a soup kitchen. She wore loose-fitting black warm-up pants and an oversized Duke sweatshirt that hung on her thin frame.

  “We know who killed your father, Mrs. Hochmann,” he said when the formalities were done.

  She looked at him, startled. “Who?”

  “One of the migrant workers here, an Ernesto Palmeiro.”

  The name clearly meant nothing to her. Even Mrs. Samuelson looked blank. But not Mrs. Harris.

  “He and his wife María worked in the tomato crop here,” he said. “She got pregnant last spring and had a baby here in January. Either stillborn or it died soon after. We’ve heard conflicting stories.”

  Mrs. Hochmann looked concerned and murmured sympathetically. Her mother sat silently.

  “It was born without arms or legs. It was only a torso with a head,” he said.

  “Oh my God!” said Susan Hochmann. “That’s why he—? But why, Major?”

  “Ask your mother,” Dwight said harshly.

  “My mother?” She turned in her chair. “Mother?”

  “Has she told you what she and your father really fought about last spring when María Palmeiro was less than one month pregnant? When that baby was still forming in her womb?”

  “Mother?”

  “Be still, Susan! He doesn’t know,” her mother said. “He’s only guessing.”

  “Am I? We’ll subpoena the records for this farm. They’ll show who was where when the tomatoes were sprayed that week. Too many people know.”

  “Records are sometimes spotty.” She gave a dismissive shrug. “And these are my people. They won’t talk.”

  Dwight looked at her, genuinely puzzled. “Why are you still protecting him?”

  “He made the workers go into the field before it was safe?” asked her daughter.

  “Sid Lomax described your father as somebody who couldn’t bear to see workers standing around idly while the clock was running,” Dwight said. “You yourself described the trailers he used to house them in, trailers that had no running water where they could wash off the pesticides. Why did they need to wash off the pesticides, Mrs. Harris? They would have been safe if they’d waited forty-eight hours to go back in the fields.”

  Susan Hochmann looked sick.

  “Oh, Mother,” she whispered.

  At that moment the light finally broke for Dwight as he looked at the older woman’s weathered face. “You’re afraid of another fine, aren’t you? Another OSHA investigation. Maybe a huge lawsuit. You don’t want another scandal for Harris Farms. Did you give María Palmeiro money to go back to Mexico, Mrs. Harris?”

  “She wanted to go home,” Mrs. Harris said angrily. “She’d lost her baby. The marriage was a mess. She just wanted to leave and forget it all. So yes, I gave her money. But that doesn’t mean Harris Farms caused the baby’s birth defects.”

  Susan Hochmann’s shoulders slumped as if weighted down by a ton of guilt and she shook her head in disbelief.

  “It all fits, doesn’t it?” Dwight said wearily. “Buck Harris was killed in that empty shed, but it was a shed that held spraying equipment. He was dismembered to look like the baby. Then his head and his”—he hesitated over leaving that second grisly image in the daughter’s mind—“his head was left in the field where his wife was contaminated. It was that back field, wasn’t it?”

  Mrs. Harris nodded. “She didn’t go in too soon,” she said dully. “She was there while they were spraying. When I got down there that day and saw what was happening, I screamed at them to come out of the field and I sent them back to the camp to take showers. They were all green with it. But it was the second day of spraying and she was at the most vulnerable stage of pregnancy. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I don’t think she even knew for sure at that point. Buck and I got into it hot and heavy then. Sid Lomax wouldn’t have let it happen, but Sid was in California. His father had died. So Buck was in charge and by God he wasn’t going to coddle anybody or pay a dime for people to stand around and wait till it was safe. ‘You made me put in fancy hot and cold showers,’ he said. ‘Let ’em go wash off. Where’s the harm?’ After that, I stayed in New Bern and I didn’t know about María till Mercedes Santos called me. I came immediately. And yes, I gave her the money to bury her baby and yes, I gave her money to fly home. Enough to buy a little house and a sewing machine and start a new life for herself. All her husband wanted to do was stay drunk. She’s better off without him.”

  “He didn’t think so,” Dwight said and turned on his heel and walked out. He needed air. Long deep drafts of clean spring air.

  Mayleen Richards was waiting beside his truck. “No luck, Major?”

  He gave her a quick synopsis of what had passed in the kitchen but before they could confer on their next actions, Susan Hochmann called from the back porch and crossed the yard to them.

  “You were right,” she said, nodding to Richards. “Mother’s terrified of a lawsuit. I’m not though. What can I do to help?”

  “Do you speak Spanish?” Richards asked.

  The woman nodded.

  “Mrs. Sanaugustin let slip something that makes me think her husband might know more than he’s told, but she’s clammed up altogether now and won’t say a word.”

  “Sanaugustin?”

  Dwight told her about the worker who said he had seen the bloody slaughter scene in the shed on Saturday, two days before they discovered it.

  “Sanaugustin,” Mrs. Hochmann said again. “Felicia?”

  “Sí,” said Richards and immediately turned as red as the shoulder-length red hair that gleamed in the sunlight. “I mean, yes.”

  “Let me talk to her. I think she trusts me almost as much as she trusts Mother.”

  She got in the prowl car with Richards and Dwight led the way back down to the camp. It took a few minutes, but at last Felicia Sanaugustin threw up her hands and told them everything. Yes, the baby was as they had said. Yes, María Palmeiro had been covered with pesticide. No, she did not know the name. Only that it was green and it made them break out in a rash even though they washed it off every day. And yes, she admitted, she and Rafael knew that Ernesto had killed el patrón. Early Monday morning, before it was really light, Rafael had walked up to the sheds to get a dolly to move the old refrigerator out in preparation for the new one la señora had promised to bring. As he approached the empty shed, he had felt a great need to relieve himself and so had stepped into the bushes there. A moment before he finished, he heard the rusty hinge squeak and saw the door open. Then Ernesto Palmeiro had put out his head and look
ed all around.

  Rafael had stood motionless. Something about the man’s stealthy movements frightened him so that he could not even pull up his zipper. The light was still so poor that it was hard to be sure that it even was Ernesto. Especially since he was not supposed to be there. He had been fired the month before.

  Sanaugustin waited until he was sure the other was gone, then curiosity compelled him to look inside the shed.

  “She says we know what he saw,” said Mrs. Hochmann.

  “Your father’s remains?”

  She put the question to Felicia Sanaugustin and the woman shook her head.

  “Sangre solamente,” she whispered.

  Only blood.

  “But it was fresh blood. And it dripped from the back of the car,” said Susan Hochmann, desperately trying not to let the horror of the woman’s tale become personal. “He closed the door and immediately went back to the camp and said nothing of what he’d seen to anyone. Everyone said that Palmeiro was crazy and he was fearful for his own life if he accused him. He told himself that he didn’t really know anything for certain at that point. He did not know for sure what man or animal it was that had been killed there.”

  The migrant woman continued and Mrs. Hochmann translated. Rafael had brooded all week as the body parts began to appear along the road, yet no one else connected them with their boss, even when word drifted down to the camp that people were starting to ask for him.

  So last Saturday, Rafael had sneaked back to the shed. The smell! The flies! Ai-yi-yi!

  This time he had taken some of the money that they were saving to get a place of their own and he had gone into town and bought drugs and got arrested. And what, she wailed, was to happen to them now?

  Susan Hochmann spoke in soothing tones and when the woman had quieted, she said to Dwight, “I told her nothing was going to happen to them, Major. They’ve done nothing wrong. Have they?”

  “Nothing illegal maybe,” said Dwight, “but they may have just cut your inheritance pretty drastically. If he’s willing to testify that he saw Palmeiro leave that bloody scene early that Monday morning, then your parents’ divorce is invalid. The summary judgment wasn’t signed until that afternoon. Depending on what your mother does, it could mean that you won’t get half the business now.”

  A wry smile flickered across her broad plain face. “Want to bet?”

  Dwight left the mopping up to Jamison and the other detectives and told Richards to ride back to Dobbs with him to start the reports and put out an APB on Ernesto Palmeiro, who had a five-day lead on them and was probably already back in Mexico by now.

  Their talk was of the case and the ramifications of what they’d learned and the very real likelihood that they’d never get him extradited back to Colleton County. All very professional until they were about five miles from town and Dwight said, “Anything you need to tell me, Richards?”

  “Sir?”

  “You heard me.”

  “About what, Major?”

  “About Miguel Diaz.”

  “On a personal level? Or about him speaking for Palmeiro and giving him work while he repaired the damage he’d done?”

  “Your personal life’s your own as long as it doesn’t compromise your handling of the job.” He kept his tone neutral.

  Her eyes flashed indignantly. “You think I let our relationship get in the way of the investigation?”

  “That’s what I’m asking. Did you?”

  She shook her head. “No, sir. I really don’t think I did. I didn’t know Mike had gone to court for Palmeiro till Friday. McLamb mentioned that he’d seen him at the courthouse and when I asked Mike, he was absolutely up front about it. He said he felt sorry for the guy because his baby had died and his wife had left him. He didn’t describe the baby’s condition, just that it was stillborn. We didn’t know the body parts were Harris’s yet and I certainly didn’t know till this morning when your—when Judge Knott told us that Palmeiro had worked for Harris. That was the first time I’d heard it.”

  “It wasn’t the first time Diaz had heard it, though,” Dwight said.

  Richards let the implications of his words sink in. “Did he know Palmeiro killed Harris?” she asked hesitantly.

  “He says not.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  Dwight shrugged. “Know is one of those slippery words. Did Palmeiro confess to him? Did he see the guy swing the axe? Probably not.”

  “But you think he knew,” Richards said.

  “Don’t you?”

  They rode in silence another mile or two, then Richards said, “My family. My dad and my brothers and my sister? They say that they’ll never speak to me again if I marry him.”

  “What about your mother?”

  “She’ll go along with them, but she’d probably sneak and call me once in a while.”

  “Family’s important,” he observed as they reached the Dobbs city limits.

  She sighed. “Yes.”

  Dwight pulled into the parking lot beside the courthouse and cut the engine. As she reached for the door handle, he said, “Look, Richards. Your personal life is none of my business as long as you can keep it separate from the job. But I’m going to say this even though I probably shouldn’t. If you’re going to break up with him because you don’t love him, that’s one thing. But don’t use the job or what he knew or didn’t know as an excuse if it’s really because of your family. You owe it to yourself to tell him the truth.”

  CHAPTER 35

  The retention of the old family homestead and farm by a long line of ancestry for successive generations is, in many respects a desideratum, whether we regard it in the practical light of an investment or of a pardonable pride, as the basis of the sentiment of family honor and respectability that is to be associated with the name and the inheritance.

  —Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890

  DEBORAH KNOTT

  THURSDAY EVENING, MARCH 9

  By the time I adjourned for the day, the news had gone all around the courthouse that Buck Harris had been murdered by one of his field hands because his wanton carelessness with pesticides had caused the stillbirth of that field hand’s baby.

  The news media had swarmed around the courthouse and out to the Buckley place as well, not that they got much joy there. None of the workers wanted to talk, and Mrs. Harris refused to meet with them; but her daughter, while sidestepping any statements that would admit culpability, was ready to use the situation as a soapbox to propose a more socially responsible program for “guest workers.” Reporters came away with an earful of statistics about the appalling conditions most growers imposed on their laborers, all for the saving of a few pennies a pound on the fruits and vegetables they harvested. While it was interesting that the “tomato heiress,” as they were calling her, planned to move down from New York and turn the family homeplace into a center for bettering the lives of migrants, Susan Hochmann was not photogenic enough to hold their attention for long.

  Here in the courthouse, sympathies seemed to take a slight shift from the dead man to his killer as more and more details came out about the baby and about Harris’s deliberate violations of OSHA and EPA regulations, not to mention simple human decency.

  “You hate to blame the victim,” said a records clerk who had just come back from maternity leave with a CD full of baby pictures as her new screen saver, “but damned if he wasn’t asking for it.”

  “I’m not saying it’s ever right to kill,” one of the attorneys told me, “but I’d take his case in a heartbeat. Bet I could get him off with a suspended sentence, too.”

  All cameras focused on the sensational gory murder. It would be the lead story of the day. Not much attention would be paid to the shooting death of a young woman by her abusive ex-husband who then turned the gun on himself. Nothing particularly newsworthy about that. Happens all the time, doesn’t it?

  As soon as I heard, I adjourned court an hour early and went around to Portland’s house
.

  “She’s upstairs,”Avery said when he let me in. “Dwight was here before. It was good of him to come tell her himself.”

  I found her standing by a window in the nursery. Her eyes were red and swollen when she turned to me. “She couldn’t make it to high ground, Deborah.”

  “I know, honey,” I said and opened my arms to her as she burst into tears.

  The baby awoke as we were talking and she sat down with little Carolyn and opened her shirt to nurse her. “If it weren’t for you,” she told her daughter, “I’d be killing a bottle of bourbon about now.”

  Her eyes filled up with tears again. “I guess I’ll call Linda Allred tonight. Tell her to add another statistic to her list.”

  When I got home that evening, Daddy was sitting on the porch to watch Dwight and Cal finish cleaning out the interior of the truck before carefully smoothing a Hurricanes sticker to the back bumper. Cal wanted to clamp our flag on the window, but Dwight vetoed that idea.

  “Save it for Deborah’s car,” he said. “My truck’s not a moving billboard.”

  Bandit was frisking around the yard in an unsuccessful attempt to get Blue and Ladybell to romp with him, but those two hounds were too old and dignified for such frivolity.

  Dwight followed me into our bedroom while I changed out of heels and panty hose into jeans and sneakers. “You hear about Karen Braswell?”

  I nodded. “Thanks for going over there yourself.”

  “She gonna be okay?”

  “The baby helps.”

  “God, Deb’rah. What’s it gonna take? This is the second one in three months. We took his damn guns. Where’d he get that one?”

  “Don’t beat up on yourself, Dwight. You said it yourself. There’s no stopping somebody who’s determined to kill and doesn’t care about the consequences. If it hadn’t been a gun, it would have been a knife or even his bare hands.”

  We went back outdoors and the blessed mundane flowed back over us. Cal was antsy to leave because they planned to pick up a new pair of sneakers for him on the way in. The lower the sun sank, the cooler the air became and my sweater was suddenly not thick enough.