“Oh yes indeed,” said Dwight with just a little more
enthusiasm than I might have preferred.
“Mrs. Harris is fifty-two and wears every year on her
face. Flame Smith doesn’t look much over forty, does
she? Buck Harris wouldn’t be the first man to trade in
an old wife for a new model and try to give the back of
his hand to the old one.”
“Was she mad enough to do something about it?”
“You mean kill him and then butcher him like a
hog?”
“More people are killed by their loved ones than by
total strangers,” he reminded me.
“I only saw him the one time he came to court, but
yeah, her anger was pretty obvious. He was big, but she
is too. They say that in the early years, she was out on
the tractors, plowing and spraying and hoisting boxes
of vegetables right alongside him till they were making
enough to hire migrant labor for all the physical stuff,
so I imagine there’s a lot of muscle underneath those
extra pounds of fat.”
142
HARD ROW
“Kill him and she would get the whole company,”
Dwight said.
“Kill him before the divorce is final and then take
a dismissal of her ED claim, she would,” I corrected.
“Assuming rights of survival. At this point, though, the
ED will proceed as if he were still alive.”
“Really?”
“I’ll have to look it up. There’s a similar case on ap-
peal to the state supreme court but I’m pretty sure that’s
how it would work. But since they’re divorced—”
“When was it final?” he interrupted.
“Sometime within the last two weeks or so. I’d have
to check the files. I’m pretty sure it was a summary
judgment, so neither of them came to court. Reid just
handed me the judgment and I signed it, so it’s a done
deal.”
“Today’s March sixth. What with the cold weather
and no insect damage, the best guesstimate we have
for time of death is sometime between the morning of
Sunday, February nineteenth, when Ms. Smith said she
last spoke to him, and Wednesday the twenty-second,
two days before we found the legs. You gonna eat the
rest of that?”
I shook my head and the last third of my hot dog fol-
lowed his first two.
“Tonight we stop somewhere for something healthy,”
I warned.
He gave me a blank look.
