No Witnesses

“What exactly is it you want?”

Daphne sized up her opponent and played him against himself. “What is it you think I want, Mr. Hammond?”

“Call me Roy. Everyone else does.” He liked her looks-there was no missing that glint in his eyes, and it disgusted her. She wished she had worn a jacket. “No clue,” he answered.

“None?”

“You teasing me?”

“Up until four years ago, you worked as a field inspector for the State Health Department.”

“Matter of record.”

“Does the name Longview Farms mean anything to you?”

His swollen neck moved as he swallowed dryly, failing in his attempt to portray a man bored with her line of questioning. “Every place I inspected on a regular basis means something to me, lady. Part of my route, you understand. Part of what I did for a living. What exactly was it ’bout Longview you had a question ’bout?”

“Exactly this.” She handed him two photocopies-before and after.

Again the boa constrictor in his neck moved and he blinked repeatedly-both signs to her of an increasing anxiety. He switched off the television and adjusted both hearing aids, one of which screamed a high pitch while he toyed with it. His white, scaly tongue worked at his crusty lips, but his mouth remained bone-dry.

“Is there a question to go along with this?” he asked.

“Why the difference between the two?”

He considered this for a moment, his eyes darting between Daphne and the two documents. “Don’t know where you got this one,” he said of the document as it had existed before the changes. “But this one here,” he said, shaking the salmonella document, “is dated later and therefore’s the one the department would go by. But honestly, lady, I don’t work there no more, and I think you’re asking the wrong guy.”

“The original document,” she emphasized, “lists you as the field inspector.” She added, “In the later one, the name’s been changed.”

“You know,” he said, his face reddening and his nostrils flaring, “I do remember this one.”

“Terrific,” she said flatly, letting him sense her distrust.

“Once upon a time we had a good department, lady. Then they started making us hire all the different colors-the United States government did-and things went straight downhill.”

“And women,” Daphne pointed out.

“Girls, too. Yeah, that’s right. Not that I got anything against girls.”

“But you do when it comes to ‘different colors.’”

“Ain’t none of them smart is the thing. I got no tolerance for people with their hand in Uncle Sam’s pocket. You know? They’re just plain stupid. Take Jake Jefferson, okay? You’re asking about the Longview, okay? Well it was that Jefferson who got things wrong in the first place, and made the rest of us have to work to fix it.”

“A lab report?”

“Got everything wrong he did, and then refused to admit it. Nothing worse than a nigger who thinks he’s right.”

“I don’t care for your language, Mr. Hammond.”

“Well pardon fucking me,” he said angrily. “It’s a free country, lady, in case you was off smoking pot while the rest of us was defending it. Just my luck to get the Flying Nun. You know there’s a Mariners game on the TV that I’d rather be watching, if we’re all through here.” He heaved himself out of his soft throne with great difficulty and shuffled over to pour himself a double Wild Turkey with two cubes of ice. The cushion where he had been sitting remained dished in a deep crater. He mumbled a steady stream of unintelligible dialogue with himself.

Daphne looked toward the door to make sure it was close by, and she kept a very close eye on Roy Hammond as he opened and closed some kitchen drawers. “Why did your name get changed on that report?”

“Why?” he asked, his back turned, and she could sense him vamping for time. He returned to his La-Z-Boy swivel recliner and drank an enormous amount of the liquor without batting an eye. He toyed with it, clinking the rapidly melting ice cubes against the glass.

She added, “The man whose name replaced yours, a Mr. Patrick Shawnesea, does apparently not live in this state any longer. That makes it difficult for us to locate him for an interview.”

“Harder than you think, lady. Pat Shawnesea is long dead. Lung cancer, and he never smoked a single cigarette in his life. Radon, I heard it was. Living atop a hot spot. Makes sense: The wife died of woman problems two years and change before Pat. Cut everything off her and outta her and she still up and died on him.”

She thought that maybe Shawnesea’s death explained the change of date on the document, for it had been backdated eleven days, and that had been bothering her the whole way out here. Why backdate a document? Unless you need a window of time in which Pat Shawnesea was still working, so that the only person who could answer important questions was certain not to be available. She had a few nuggets of what she wanted, though the mother lode still avoided her. “Let me see if I have this right,” she said, slouching her shoulders forward involuntarily because of this man’s insistence on fixing his eyes on her chest. “Shawnesea took this case over from you eleven days before your initial investigation began. He decided the illnesses had been caused by salmonella, not staphylococcus, which was the finding of your investigation.”

“Let me explain something-”

“Please do,” she interrupted.

“They wasn’t my findings, the way you say-they was Jefferson’s. He’s the one done the tests, okay? And as for Pat, I don’t remember exactly what he had to do with any of this.”

“But it’s his name on this second document-the altered document.”

“I understand that, lady, but it don’t necessarily mean it makes sense, now does it?”

“But you knew Mark Meriweather.”

“Sure I did.”

“And Mr. Shawnesea?”

“What do you mean?”

“He knew Mr. Meriweather, too? He inspected Longview, too?”

“Well, he must have, now mustn’t he?”

“I thought you said Longview was part of your-”

“We picked up each other’s slack.”

“But did you investigate this New Leaf contamination or Mr. Shawnesea? I remind you that your signature is clearly visible on the original document.”

“I did.” The man looked confused. “How many years that been? There one of them statues of elimination on this thing or what?”

In another interview, Daphne might have cracked a smile, but Hammond disgusted her, and she immediately felt tempted to lie. What the general public failed to understand-to their loss, she thought-was that there existed no code of ethics or other formality instructing or limiting law enforcement officers to speak the truth, except while under oath. No place was this more evident than in the Box-the interrogation room, where police officers commonly invented any truth that helped their cause, and their cause was to put criminals away. The best liars were the best interrogators, and Daphne Matthews was considered close to the top. The only real difference she could see between an interrogation and an interview was the location of the discussion. What Hammond did not know was that she was out of her jurisdiction and had made no formal application to conduct this interview with King County police, meaning that everything either of them said was off the record from the moment she first opened her mouth to speak. Meaning also that she could tell as many lies as she wanted, and could act on anything Hammond told her, but could use none of the interview itself in a court of law. These thoughts circulated through her conscious mind before she answered untruthfully, “I believe the statute of limitations has expired on the Longview contamination. I don’t believe there’s any way we can prosecute anyone for what happened to this document. But to be honest, I don’t really care: It’s the truth I want, Mr. Hammond. A man may go to jail for a very, very long time if we can’t find the real truth about Longview.” There was a joke that lived on the fifth floor that she heard circulate year in and year out: What’s a Chinese court deputy say to those in the courtroom at the start of every trial? “All lies.”

“That boy, Harry,” he said.