% 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 still-
birth 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 daugh-
ter, 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
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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 regula-
tions, 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 at-
torneys 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 atten-
tion 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.”
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I found her standing by a window in the nursery. Her
eyes were red and swollen when she turned to me. “She
