Hard Row Part 21

"Not right now, but she will be. I'm not going to say she didn't really love him, but I'm sure his bank account helped, so I doubt if her heart's completely broken. Besides, Flame's always known when to cut her losses."

"Not a total loss, though, is it?" I said as I dimmed my lights for an oncoming car.

"Reid told her she was in the will. She didn't say for how much though."

"Dwight kicked me out of his office before I could get Reid to tell me, but remember when he took your umbrella this morning?"

"And did not leave it at the office, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"Well, just before you got there, when he was trying to borrow one from me, he said she was down for half a million."

"Interesting. We had lunch last week and she was worried about the mortgage on her B-and-B. A half-million sure makes a nice consolation prize."

"Also makes a motive for murder."

"No way!" Portland protested. But she mulled it over as I pulled out to pa.s.s a slow-moving pickup. "Dwight got her in his range finder?"

"Probably. Along with Mrs. Harris and everybody on the farm, I should think. Not that he tells me everything."

"Yeah, right," she jeered. "I don't suppose he's said anything about Karen Braswell's place getting shot up?"

"Nope. But I haven't really talked to him since this morning and that only happened last night, right?"

"Well, when you do, would you please stress that this guy's gone over the edge? Bo promised to tell his people to be on the lookout in her neighborhood and so did Lonnie Revell, for what that's worth."

Lonnie Revell is Dobbs's chief of police. Nice guy but not the brightest star in the town's constellation.

I repeated what Dwight had said about hurricanes and the need to head for high ground when you know one's on the way.

"Moving in with her mother's not really high ground, but with a little luck, he'll do something to get himself arrested again before he finds out that's where she is. I just hope you'll give him a couple of years next time."

"Hey, no ex parte talk here, okay?"

"What's ex parte? You've already heard his case and if there is a next time, there's not a judge in the district who could possibly be unaware of the situation unless it's Harrison Hobart and isn't that old dinosaur ever going to turn seventy-two?"

Seventy-two's the mandatory retirement age and it looked like he was going to hang on till the end. Hobart's a throwback to an earlier age when men were men and their women kept silent. Not only in church but everywhere else if he'd had his way. He had tried to keep female attorneys from wearing slacks in his courtroom, and whenever I had to argue a case before him, he never failed to lecture me that skirts were the only attire proper for the courtroom.

"If that's true," I had said sweetly, gesturing to our district attorney who sat at the prosecution's table and tried not to grin, "then the day Mr. Woodall comes to court in a skirt, I'll wear one, too."

Hobart had threatened me with contempt, but the next day every woman in the courthouse showed up in pants, even the clerks who didn't particularly like me but who liked being lectured on dress and decorum even less. He had been censured more than once and his last one came when he informed the jury that the defendant might not be sitting there if her husband had taken a strap to her backside once in a while.

"I think his birthday's this spring," Portland said as I parked in front of the restaurant on the north edge of Makely.

Because of our late start, most of the tables were filled by the time we paid our money and looked for seats. And wouldn't you know it? The only table with two empty chairs had Harrison Hobart at it. It was a no-brainer.

We split up.

Portland caught a ride back to Dobbs with Reid, so I headed straight home after the dinner and got there a little before ten. Both my guys were in bed, but only Cal was asleep. Dwight was watching the early news, but he turned it off and came out to the kitchen for a gla.s.s of milk and the last of the chocolate chip cookies while I reheated a cup of coffee left over from the morning.

I told him about the dinner and Portland's comments about Flame Smith. "Is she a suspect?"

"Probably not. She gave me the names of people who saw her down in Wilmington during the three days after Harris was last seen. I've got a query in with the sheriff down there. He said he'd check her statement for me."

"I hear you finally found the head?"

"Yeah. Stuck on a fence post at the back of one of the fields out there, so it's definitely someone familiar with the place."

"Get anything out of that migrant who knew Harris was dead?" I asked.

"He says he stumbled into that empty shed by mistake, and seeing all that blood and gore's what made him go looking for a quick high on Sat.u.r.day."

"But?" I asked, hearing something more in his voice.

"Oh h.e.l.l, Deb'rah. I don't know. I got the feeling that he was holding something back, but if he ever had any real dealings with Harris, no one seems to know about it. The only other worker still there that had much to do with him is Sanaugustin's buddy Juan Santos. Both of 'em are married. Both have kids. The farm manager, Sid Lomax, thinks Santos and Harris might have had a run-in last spring when he had to fly out to California and Harris came in to run things. But that was almost a year ago. Besides, it sounds like Harris's real run-in was with his wife."

"Was he maybe trying to exercise his droit de seigneur with one of the migrant women?"

"What's that?"

"The privilege of ownership."

"Like a plantation owner with his female slaves?"

"Something like that."

"Well, his housekeeper did say he slept with the wife of a different worker, but they moved to the farm below Kinston months ago. I suppose he could have tried it with one of the other women, although the housekeeper says he was pretty much saving it for Flame Smith these last few months." He broke a cookie in half, dunked it in his milk, then savored the soft sweetness. "You make a mean cookie, Mrs. Bryant."

"Why thank you, Major." Then, just to make sure, I said, "You really don't mind that I haven't changed my name professionally, do you?"

He smiled and glanced at my left hand. "Not as long as that ring stays on your finger."

"What about Mrs. Harris?" I asked since he was in a talkative mood. "Is she still wearing a ring?"

"Who knows? If we can't pin down the time of death, she may claim she's a widow and not an ex. She's scheduled to come in tomorrow morning." He told me about the tumble she supposedly took in a mud puddle the Monday after Harris was last seen. "Only n.o.body actually saw her do it and the housekeeper says she bundled her clothes up in a garbage bag and borrowed some of his things to wear back to New Bern."

"Whoa!" I said. "She came in the house and took a shower and no one saw if it really was mud on her clothes?"

"Mrs. Samuelson says there was no blood on her sneakers, just a little mud. If she was going to lie for the bosslady, why stop at sneakers?"

"Unless ..." I said slowly.

"Unless what?"

"I keep a second pair of old shoes in the trunk of my car," I reminded him. "To save my good ones if it's mucky or I have to walk on soft dirt."

"I'll keep that in mind when I talk to her tomorrow."

"Speaking of talks, how did it go with Cal tonight?"

He shook his head. "It didn't. First Haywood was here to drop off a load of firewood to get us through April. Then Mr. Kezzie came by for a few minutes with some extra cabbage plants for our garden-"

"We have a garden?" I teased.

"We do now. I mentioned to Seth that it'd be nice to grow tomatoes, so he plowed us a few short rows beside the blueberry bushes and somebody must've told Doris you were out tonight because she called up and insisted that Cal and I had to go over there and eat with her and Robert. That woman never takes no for an answer, does she?"

He sounded so exasperated, I had to laugh.

"Then coming home in the truck, I was just fixing to start and d.a.m.ned if McLamb didn't pick that time to call and report his conversation with Mitchiner's daughter and grandson. By the time we got back to the house, it was bedtime and when I went in to say good night, he had his head under his pillow, trying not to let me hear him crying."

"Over Jonna?" I said sympathetically.

Dwight nodded. "I just didn't have the heart to lay anything else on him right then."

"I'm glad you didn't." I ached for Cal. For Dwight, too, who has to watch his son grieve for something that can never be made right.

He drained his gla.s.s and carried it over to the dishwasher, along with my now-empty coffee cup. I switched off the kitchen light and followed him to our bedroom.

"I don't suppose McLamb got much out of the Mitchiner family?"

"Not really," he said as we undressed and got ready for bed. "One interesting thing though. He said that the daughter and the grandson sort of got into it for a minute about the lawsuit. The boy wants her to drop it."

"Really?"

"McLamb said he all but accused her of wanting to profit by his grandfather's death and that she got pretty defensive."

"Oh?"

"Yeah, he's going to check out her alibi tomorrow. She was supposed to be working and the kid had her car until it was time to pick her up after work, but since we don't know precisely when Mitchiner went missing, it's possible that she dropped the boy off somewhere and went on to the nursing home. Here, need some help with that?"

I had pulled my sweater over my head and a lock of hair was caught in the back zipper.

He gently worked it free and then one thing led to another.

As it usually does.

(Ping!)

CHAPTER 28.

For us, it has truly seemed that each day dawned upon a change.

-Profitable Farming in the Southern States, 1890 Cal's emotional meltdown the night before must have cleared his system because he was in a cheerful mood the next morning and no longer seemed to be resentful about missing Monday night's game. He let Bandit out for his morning run without being asked and only had to be reminded once to take off his Canes cap at the table. He laid a pad and pencil beside his cereal bowl and asked me to tell him the names of all my brothers, beginning with Robert-"He said I could call them Uncle Robert and Aunt Doris"-so that he could write them down and start getting them straight.

"They could be a whole baseball team with two relief pitchers," he marveled and was intrigued to hear that one of the little twins-Adam-lived in California. "Is he near Disneyland? Could we go visit him sometime?"

It was sunshine after rain.

I was due for an oil change, so I left when he and Dwight went to meet the schoolbus and drove over to leave my car at Jimmy White's. Jimmy's been my mechanic ever since I took the curve in front of his garage too fast shortly after getting my driver's license a million years ago. He pulled it out of the ditch, replaced the front fender, and let me pay him on time without telling my parents, although he did threaten to tell his uncle who was a state trooper if I didn't take my foot off the gas pedal once in a while. Gray-haired now and starting to slow down a little, he's turning more and more of the heavy work over to his son James. Back then, it was just Jimmy and one bay. Today it was Jimmy, James, and two employees and the one bay had become three. Instead of the old oil-stained denim coveralls they used to wear, all four of them sported crisp blue shirts that they put on fresh each morning and sent out to be laundered every week.

After so much rain, the air was washed clean and fluffy white clouds drifted across a clear blue sky. A soft spring breeze ruffled my hair as we stood in the sunlit yard waiting for Dwight to pick me up. I accepted their offer of a cup of coffee and we talked about the changes in the neighborhood and of all the new people that had moved in and wanted him to service their cars without trying to build a relationship. "Like, just because they got the cash money, they think they're gonna get moved to the front of the line ahead of people that's been here all along."

James, who had graduated from high school a couple of years behind me, said, "What gets me hot though's when they don't trust us. They'll want us to give the car a tune-up and if we say we had to replace one of the belts, they'll want to see it and half the time they act like they think we cut it so we could charge 'em for a new one."

Jimmy snorted. "That's when we tell them they need to go find theirselves a new mechanic."

I glanced at all the cars lined up around the yard and said, "Looks like you've got more work than you can handle anyhow."

He nodded with satisfaction. "I'm just glad I listened to you and bought them two acres next door and let you do all that paperwork about the zoning. We're gonna break ground next month, finally build that fancy new garage James here's been planning and we probably couldn't do it if we were starting fresh today. Not with all the big money houses going in on this road."

I had handled some of their legal matters before I ran for judge. Seven years ago, Jimmy hadn't seen the need to have his property legally zoned for business. He'd run a messy, sprawling garage out there in what used to be the middle of nowhere for twenty-five years and he'd expected to run it for twenty-five more. It was the typical rural land owner's mind-set: "It's my land and I can do what I want with it." But when the planning commission started getting serious about zoning, I had encouraged Jimmy to get a proper business permit so that he could expand if he wanted to without the limitations often imposed on businesses that have been grandfathered in. I'm not saying the planning commission takes race into consideration, but a lot of black-owned shops like this one have either been denied the right to expand or have been zoned out of existence in the last three or four years.

"We'll put a berm in front, plant it with trees and evergreen bushes so you can't see in from the road," said James. "There's a Mexican across the branch with a nursery that does landscaping. Diaz. We're gonna trade work. Make it look pretty. Enough folks know we're here that we don't need to put up but just a little teeny sign."

"Now don't y'all get so upscale you can't take care of my car," I said as Dwight turned into their drive.

Jimmy laughed. "Girl, anytime you need a new fender, I'll fix you up. 'Course, now that you went and married Dwight, I reckon you don't drive too fast no more."

"You think?" said Dwight who'd rolled down his window in time to hear Jimmy's last remark. "I'm gonna have to write her up myself to slow her down."

James opened the pa.s.senger door for me and as I stepped up to get in, his comment about the nursery finally registered. "Diaz," I said. "Miguel Diaz?"

"Mike Diaz, yes," James said. "You know him?"

"We've met. I just didn't realize his nursery was nearby."

"Just across the branch. They've made 'em a right nice place over there."

Jimmy promised that my car would be ready by mid-afternoon and as we headed for Dobbs, I said, "Mike Diaz, Dwight."

"Who's he?"

"Mayleen Richards's new boyfriend, according to Faye Myers."

"Yeah? How do you know him?"

"He came to court last week to speak for that guy that took a tractor and plowed up a stretch of yards, remember? Back in January?"

Dwight shook his head. With all the violent crimes he had to deal with, he misses a lot of the lesser ones that make it to my courtroom.

"I thought I told you about him. Palmez or Palmirez or something like that. One of my freaky Friday cases."