Ed McBain - Three Blind Mice

“Vietnamese interpreter, right. Easy to come by in old Calusa.”

“Do I detect a touch of sarcasm, Andrew?”

“No, no, Vietnamese interpreter, right.”

“Switch me over to Frank, will you?”

“Hold on.”

There was clicking on the line, and then Cynthia’s voice saying, “Hello?” and Andrew asking her to transfer the call to Mr. Summerville’s office, and then Cynthia saying, “Just a sec,” and then Frank’s voice saying, “Matthew, where are you?”

“I just came out of the S.A.’s office. Bannister’s assigned the case to someone named Patricia Demming. Ring a bell?”

“Never heard of her.”

“I’ve got Andrew running her down. I had to pry loose the witness list and statements…”

“I saw the Trib this morning.”

“Two witnesses, Frank. Both Vietnamese.”

“We’ll be fighting the goddamn war all over again.”

“Did the mail come in yet?”

“Hours ago.”

“Anything on my demand for discovery?”

“Little early for that, Matthew.”

“I just don’t want to read all about it in the paper again.”

“Want me to call Skye?”

“No, I’ll take care of that.”

“Where are you headed now?”

“To the farm,” Matthew said.

The farms out on Timucuan Point Road were rapidly succumbing to the developers’ bulldozers. Where once fruit and vegetables had grown in abundance, there were now artificial lakes surrounded by houses with their own swimming pools and tennis courts. Country estates, they were called. Once upon a time, you could drive three miles east out of Calusa and you’d be in real country. Now you had to drive out at least twenty miles toward Ananburg before you began seeing the ranches and the citrus groves and the farms.

Jessica Leeds had invited Matthew to a twelve o’clock lunch.

He got to the farm at ten minutes before the hour — in August, the roads in and around town were virtually deserted — drove through the wooden posts on either side of the main gate, and then parked his rented Ford alongside a red Maserati. The customized license plate on the car read JESSIE 1. He assumed there was a JESSIE 2, but it was nowhere in sight. Out on the fields, a tractor moved slowly against a vast blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. Not yet.

The farmhouse was a vast and sprawling one-story building, the sort of structure that had been added onto over the years, room by room, with connecting links and passageways that jigged and jogged this way and that to create an architectural labyrinth. There were several doors here and there on the rambling facade, but the front door was clearly identifiable, painted a bright red that announced itself as the entrance. Matthew went to it and pressed the bell button. Chimes sounded within. He waited in the noonday heat, hoping the closed door signaled air conditioning inside, hoping too that Jessica Leeds would ask him to take off his jacket and loosen his — the door opened.

She was a woman in her late thirties, he supposed, several years younger than her husband, tall and slender and tanned by the sun, casually dressed in sandals, skirt, and a white blouse that revealed one bare shoulder.

“Mr. Hope?” she said, and extended her hand. “Please come in.”

Wedge-cut auburn hair, green eyes, high cheekbones, a wide mouth, her grip firm and dry. They shook hands briefly, and she led him into the house, her sandals slapping on a cool lemon-colored tile floor. He had expected a wooden floor. Pegged. This was the country, this was a farmhouse. But now there was modern furniture, all leather and stainless steel, another surprise. And what looked like a genuine Miro was hanging on the living room wall over a leather sofa the color of milk chocolate.

“Something to drink?” she asked.

“No, thank you.”

“Lemonade?”

“Well, yes.”

“Allie?” she called, and a young woman came from what Matthew supposed was the kitchen. She was wearing jeans and a white blouse with red embroidery decorating its scalloped scoop neck. In her early twenties, Matthew guessed, “Could you bring in the lemonade, please?” Jessica said, and the girl smiled and said, “Yes, ma’am,” and went out into the kitchen again.

“You don’t know how happy you’ve made me,” Jessica said.

“Oh?”

“Taking on the case. Sit down, please. Take off your jacket, won’t you?”

“Thank you,” Matthew said, and took off the jacket and folded it and draped it over one of the leather easy chairs. Jessica sat at one end of the sofa, tucking her long legs under her. Matthew sat opposite her, in the other easy chair. The sliding glass doors behind her showed acres and acres of fields rolling away toward the horizon. He could no longer see the tractor. A sprinkling system watered rows and rows of plants growing in the sun. Allie came back with a tray bearing a pitcher of lemonade and two tall glasses brimming with ice. She set the tray down, said, “Lunch is ready when you are, ma’am,” and went back into the kitchen. Jessica poured. She handed the glass to him. He waited for her to pour her own glass full, and then they both drank.

“Good,” he said.

“We have more sugar, if you’d…”

“No, no, perfect this way.”

“I should have asked her to bring in the bowl. And some spoons.”

“Really, it’s fine.”

“We’ll eat whenever you like,” she said. “It’s a cold lunch, just some cucumber soup and chicken and our own tomatoes, of course.”

“Sounds lovely.”

“Whenever you like,” she said.

It occurred to him that she was extremely nervous.

“This is a tomato farm, you know,” she said.

“No, I didn’t know that.”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, we also plant squash and cucumbers, but tomatoes are our real crop. Fresh market tomatoes. We’ve got three thousand acres…”

“That I did know.”

“… of arable land, with thirty-six full-time people on salary. Including the migrant workers who do our picking, we employ some three to four thousand people a year. That’s a big operation.”

“Sounds like it,” Matthew said.

“Yes,” she said.

Behind her, way off in the distance, the tractor came into sight again, plodding its way across the fields. And now, far out on the horizon, Matthew could see the first faint beginning of the rain that would come later in the day, the sky darkening to the north.

“We’ve got twenty-three of those tractors,” she said, nodding toward the fields, “and almost as many trucks, including four ten-wheelers. There are bigger farms, of course, but not many out here on Timucuan Point. And not many of them have their own greenhouses and packing house, the way we do, out near Ananburg. That’s where our sales office is, too, Ananburg. We grow good tomatoes — prune them, stake them, and tie them, same as they do in Arkansas. We don’t let them ripen on the vine the way they do up there, we harvest them green. But ours are better, if you ask me. Well, maybe I’m biased. We do a sixty-million-dollar annual gross, though, and we net something like thirty million, so those have got to be pretty good tomatoes, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would guess so.”

“Not many people in Calusa like us making so much money — well, nobody really likes rich people, do they? Especially if the wealth was inherited. That’s why the newspaper’s after us,” she said, and fell silent.

They sipped at their lemonades.

The horizon seemed suddenly darker, the storm moving in more swiftly than Matthew had anticipated.

“Have you seen today’s paper?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“They say they have witnesses.”

“I know. I already have their names.”