Hard Row Part 24

CHAPTER 32.

A farmer's life is a pretty hard one in some respects, especially if he has a sorry farm and he is a sorry farmer, but the average farmer can be about as happy as anybody.

-Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890 DEBORAH KNOTT.

WEDNESDAY EVENING, MARCH 8.

We were a couple of miles out of Dobbs, each of us immersed in our own thoughts, when I suddenly remembered that I'd meant to pick up something for supper.

"Tonight's Wednesday," Dwight said. "How 'bout we go for barbecue?"

"Really?" As soon as he'd said it, my gloom started to lift. A Wednesday night at Paulie's Barbecue House was exactly what I needed. "You won't be bored?"

Dwight doesn't play an instrument although he has a good singing voice.

"Nope. You haven't been since Cal came and I bet he'd like it, too. Give him some more names to add to that list he started this morning."

I had to laugh. It was bad enough that I had eleven brothers. Wait till he realized exactly how many aunts and uncles and cousins there were, too.

"We have to plant the potatoes first," he warned.

"Deal," I said happily.

By the time we got to Jimmy's, I had heard about Dwight's interview with Mrs. Harris and her daughter, who seemed to disdain the money her parents had made.

"Not so disdainful that she's not going to take it," I said. "Reid told me she wants to turn the house into a migrant center or something. If Amy doesn't get her grant for the hospital, I'm thinking somebody ought to introduce them to each other."

"While Reid was talking, he happen to say what Buck Harris did to so seriously p.i.s.s off his ex-wife last spring? a.s.suming she is his ex-wife and not his widow."

"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 relations.h.i.+p 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 fellows.h.i.+pping 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, coa.r.s.ely 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 b.u.mps.

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: G.o.d be with you till we meet again By his counsels guide, uphold you, With his sheep securely fold you; G.o.d 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 t.i.tled "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 Sat.u.r.day 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 Maria 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 flas.h.i.+ng 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 b.l.o.o.d.y axe.