Shooting at Loons

5

We are waiting by the river,

We are watching by the shore,

Only waiting for the boatman,

Soon he’ll come to bear us o’er.

Though the mist hang o’er the river,

And its billows loudly roar,

Yet we hear the song of angels,

Wafted from the other shore.

—Miss Mary P. Griffin

Tuesday’s court began slowly as we finished off the traffic violations and moved on to various misdemeanors (which I could hear) and some extra probable-cause felonies (which would have to be bucked up the next level to superior court).

Despite Mahlon’s optimistic talk, I wasn’t terribly surprised when a familiar figure came up to the defense table and signed the form waiving his rights to an attorney.

Mickey Mantle Davis.

According to the ADA, he sat accused of stealing a bicycle from the deck of the Rainmaker, a forty-footer out of Boston, currently berthed at the dock on Front Street. The state was hoping to prove probable cause to prosecute as a felony burglary.

“How do you plead?” I asked.

He stood up with a happy smile because he had just recognized me. “Not guilty, Judge, ma’am.”

Technically, I could have recused myself right then and there, but Mickey Mantle Davis would’ve had to go over to one of the piedmont or mountain districts to find a judge that hadn’t heard of him. From the time he was fourteen and buying beer with a stolen driver’s license, Guthrie’s father has been smashing up cars and smashing up boats and smashing up every second chance people still try to give him because shiftless as he is, he’s still a likeable cuss. He’d work hard for a week, then lay out drinking for two weeks; steal your portable TV on Friday night, then bring you a bushel of oysters on Saturday—a walking cliché of the good-hearted, good-timing wastrel who had so far managed to stay, if not out of trouble, at least out of a penitentiary.

Good luck to Mahlon keeping him on a trawler the whole of shrimping season.

“Call your first witness,” I told the ADA.

A Beaufort police officer took the stand and, after my recording clerk swore him in, testified how the dispatcher had radioed a description of both the bike and the thief. Within the hour, he’d seen the defendant pedaling such a bike toward the Grayden Paul drawbridge, heading for Morehead City. Upon being stopped and questioned, Mr. Davis had claimed that he’d found the bike by the side of the road and was taking it over to Morehead City to put a found ad in the Carteret County News-Times.

“No further questions,” the ADA said dryly.

“Me neither,” said Mickey Mantle.

“Call Claire Montgomery,” said the ADA.

On the bench behind him sat the three fashion plates I’d noticed at lunch the day before. Claire Montgomery was evidently the blonde ponytailed youngster. As she took the witness box, hand puppet and all, I was surprised to see that she wasn’t the eleven-or twelve-year-old I’d originally assumed, but at least nineteen or twenty. I was so busy shifting mental gears that the clerk had almost finished administering the oath before I registered that it wasn’t—strictly speaking—Claire Montgomery’s hand which lay on the Bible held up by the bailiff. Instead, her hand was inside the doll’s body and she manipulated it so that the puppet raised its right hand and touched the Bible with its left. Although the young woman’s lips moved, I assume it was the puppet’s voice that swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

“State your name and address,” said the ADA.

The puppet gave me a courteous nod and seemed to say, “Our name is Claire Montgomery and we live at Two-Oh-Seven—”

“Just a minute, Miss Montgomery,” I interrupted. “This is a serious court of law, not a vaudeville stage. I must ask you to put aside the doll.”

“But we saw him take our bicycle,” the puppet protested. Its long blonde ponytail flounced impatiently.

The girl looked only at the puppet, the puppet looked only at me. The girl was so still (except for her lips), the puppet so animated that for an instant, I almost started to argue with the small plastic face—the illusion was that good. Claire Montgomery might not be a ventriloquist, but she was a damn fine puppeteer.

“Nevertheless, a man is on trial here,” I said sternly. “The doll don’t bother me none,” said Mickey Mantle Davis from the defense table.

I beckoned to the ADA, who approached with studied nonchalance. When his head was close enough to mine, I whispered, “Am I the only one who sees something strange about a puppet giving testimony? What the hell’s going on?”

The ADA, Hollis Whitbread, was a nephew of “Big Ed” Whitbread back up in Widdington, and he didn’t seem to have much more smarts than his uncle. He gave a palms-up shrug and muttered. “That’s her sister and brother-in-law on the front row.”

I glanced over. Mr. and Mrs. Docksider were accompanied by a man in jeans and blue blazer who sported a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard.

“She says the girl had some sort of trauma in childhood and ever since, she’ll only talk to strangers through the puppet. If you take the puppet away, she’ll just shut down entirely, and since she’s the only one that saw Davis take the bicycle...”

I sighed. “The puppet talks or he walks?”

“You got it, Judge.”

The puppet was a perfect witness, respectful, charming, articulate, with an eye for details. I’ve been in court when molested children used dolls to help describe what had been done to them; this was the first time I’d heard a doll testify on its own. It was, to borrow Barbara Jean Winberry’s term, just precious; and the entire courtroom, Mickey Mantle included, hung on every word as the puppet described resting in Claire Montgomery’s bunk on the Rainmaker while her young nephew napped on the bunk below. They were alone on the boat. Her sister, Catherine Llewellyn, and the rest of their party had gone ashore.

The bike, a two-hundred-dollar all-terrain workhorse, was racked in its own locker on the starboard deck directly beneath Miss Montgomery’s gauze-curtained window and she had a perfect view when a man crept on board, jimmied the lock with his pocket knife, and stole the bike.

“Do you see the man who stole the bike in this courtroom?” asked the ADA dramatically.

Without hesitation, the puppet pointed to Mickey Mantle Davis.

“No further questions,” said Hollis Whitbread.

“Mr. Davis, you are not obliged to—”

Mickey Mantle was grinning ear to ear. “Oh, I want to, Judge.”

I bet he did.

Hugely enjoying himself, the sorry scoundrel tried to browbeat the puppet into admitting it’d seen someone else, not him.

The puppet tossed its ponytail and refused to back down.

After the second “Did, too,” “Did not!”, I’d heard enough.

Modern statutes have expanded the common law definition of burglary to include boats as a dwelling. By proving Davis had trespassed onto the Rainmaker, then broken into and “entered” the bike locker, Whitbread hoped to stretch a misdemeanor theft to a felony burglary and finally get Mickey Mantle put away for some real time.

“Sorry, Mr. Whitbread,” I had to say. “But I find no probable cause for remanding this case to superior court. Even with a credible witness, you’re on shaky ground with only a bike locker as your B and E, and I cannot in good conscience accept this witness. Without corroboration, it’s Davis’s word against the officer’s that he was heading for the paper and not a pawnshop. Case dismissed.”

“Hey,” said Mickey Mantle. “Do I get a reward for finding their bicycle?”

Claire Montgomery gave me a disgusted glare, the first direct meeting of our eyes; then she and her party left the courtroom.

Already, my attention was turning to the next case when something only peripherally seen abruptly jarred a nerve. I peered at the swinging doors. Too late. The Rainmaker crew were gone. Now why should their departure suddenly conjure up kaleidoscopic images of New York?

“Line twenty-seven on the add-on calendar, Your Honor. Taking migratory birds without a valid permit,” said Hollis Whitbread, and reluctantly I pushed down memories of pastrami sandwiches four inches thick. Cappuccino on the Upper West Side. Columbia’s gray stone buildings...

What—?

“The State calls—,” Hollis Whitbread droned, and I dragged my thoughts back five hundred miles to this Carteret County courtroom.

• • •

During the lunch recess (limited to forty-five minutes to make up for yesterday), I walked out the back door of the courthouse and down a rough plank walkway to the sheriff’s office, trying to avoid the mud and construction rubble. The taxpayers of Carteret County weren’t building their new jail house a minute too soon if this poorly lighted warren of tiny cramped offices reflected the condition of the old cells.

“The sheriff’s at lunch,” said the gray-haired uniformed officer on desk duty when I explained why I’d come. “Want me to see if Detective Smith’s in?”

I nodded and she punched a button on her outdated phone console. “Hey, sweetie, Quig still there? Judge Knott’s here to sign her statement. ‘Bout finding Andy Bynum? Okey-dokey.”

She smiled up at me. “You can go on across.”

“Across?”

Turning to follow her pointing finger, I looked through the glass of the outer door and saw a house trailer parked at the edge of the muddy yard. The aluminum door opened and Detective Quig Smith gave me a big come-on-over wave.

Smith was about four inches taller than my five six. Mid-fifties. If he had any gray in that thatch of hair, it was disguised by sun-bleached blond. His eyes were a deep blue, the shade of weathered Levis. And he seemed to be one of the more talkative Down Easters, greeting me like an old friend after our one meeting out in the sound over Andy Bynum’s body.

I was ushered into the modular cubicle that functioned as his temporary office till they could move into new quarters, “Though Lord knows if it’ll happen before I retire.”

I politely murmured that he didn’t look old enough to retire, and in truth he didn’t.

“Thirty years the fifth of November and then I’m outta here,” he said cheerfully as he riffled through files looking for my statement. “Gonna become the biggest, meanest, peskiest mosquito the state of North Carolina ever had whining around their ears.”

“Oh?”

“Yep. Gonna be another full-time watchdog for the Clean Water Act. I’ve already loaded my computer with the name and address of every elected official in this voting district, everybody on relevant congressional committees, and every newspaper in the state with a circulation over five thousand.”

He lifted a stack of marine conservation magazines from his desk and added them to a heap growing on the floor beside his file cabinet.

“Every time we find a violation of federal rules, they’re gonna get a letter giving time, date, location, and nature of the violation. Gonna keep score of how they respond, too. Got a nephew taking computer courses over at Carteret Community College and he’s writing me up my own special program. Now where did I put—”

It looked to be a lengthy search. From the only half-empty chair available, I removed a printout labeled North Carolina Fishery Products and sat down.

“Guess you’re for regulating the fishing industry, too, then,” I said, wondering how he ever managed to find anything in this overflowing wastebasket that masqueraded as an office.

“Not particularly.” He opened a folder, frowned at its contents, and stuck it back in the heap. “Fishermen are a lot more realistic about managing resources than landsmen and what they take out of the sound doesn’t begin to touch what more people inland do to the estuarine nurseries where so much of marine life begins. Some municipal sewage systems are so outdated that they dump twice as much untreated waste in the rivers as they do treated. Then there’s the phosphate factories, the pesticides and fertilizers from farms, the runoff from parking lots, developers cutting finger canals into the wetlands so every condo in every retirement village can have its own boat landing and—ah! Here it is.”

He handed over a one-page statement which I read and signed.

“Any progress on finding Andy’s killer?” I asked, using the prerogative of position to interrupt his environmental monologue. “Or why he was killed?”

Quig Smith shook his head. “We keep asking around, of course, trying to piece together who else was out there around midday.”

“That’s when he was killed?”

“Between twelve and one, looks like, according to stomach contents. He had a Coke and Nabs at Cab’s around ten-thirty or eleven. They say he made a phone call and kept checking his watch before he left. We reckon if he went straight from the store, he was probably out on the shoal by noon. Jay Hadley saw him there around twelve-thirty. After that—” He shrugged.

“Trouble is, it was Sunday. Lot of fishermen go to church, lot of sportsmen—strangers—head out through the channel that nobody ever saw before. And most people that live down here and have a boat, they’d have their own landing to go and come from.”

“What about motive?”

“Most people don’t get to be sixty without making a few enemies,” Smith said vaguely.

“Was it something to do with his fish house, or because of the Alliance? Or was it personal?” I persisted.

Smith rubbed his chin. “Well, you know, Judge, down here, messing with a man’s living’s about as personal as messing with his wife.”

“And you don’t plan to tell me a damn thing, do you?”

I smiled to show I wasn’t taking it personally and he rubbed his chin some more, then said, “We got somebody to come out with a underwater metal detector after you and Jay Hadley left.”

“Oh?”

“Well, I got to thinking how you said you and the Davis boy turned the body straight over without shifting it. So, figuring he fell straight forward, we did some measuring and some angle projections and we got lucky. ‘Long with some old rusty nails and a real nice little anchor, we found a new-looking slug. Sent it up to Raleigh to see what the SBI lab can tell us about it. Looked like a .22 to me, which won’t be a lot of help ‘cause half the county’s bought a .22 at one point or another and the other half’s stolen one or two.”

“Jay Hadley had a .22 in her boat,” I reminded him.

“Yeah. And somebody said they saw her shoot a gun while y’all were out there.”

Lots of binoculars had probably swept the area once she’d radioed for help, so it didn’t surprise me to hear that we’d been observed. Nor to realize that Smith wanted to hear about the incident.

“She said she saw a stingray.”

“Yeah?”

“Guess it’d make as good a reason as any if you were scared some hotshot lawman might notice you had a recently fired rifle on your boat,” I said blandly.

He laughed. “Maybe I ought to sign you up to be a mosquito, too.”

• • •

Afternoon court was more wildlife violations (the hunting season for tundra swans was long over and loons haven’t been in season since 1919). Worthless checks, minor drug possessions and an obscene phone caller carried us up to adjournment. At the recess, Chet Winberry knocked on my door while I was signing a show cause order for one of the attorneys.

“Don’t let me interrupt,” he said. “Linville’s invited us to her party, too, and Barbara Jean said if you want to come by after court and freshen up at our place, we could go on over together.”

It was a welcome invitation. I’d stuck a garment bag with party clothes in my car that morning, and this would save me having to change in chambers and then figure out exactly where Linville Pope lived.

Chet adjourned his court earlier than mine, but he’d sketched a map and sent it down with his clerk. The directions looked simple enough: straight east on Front Street till you almost ran out of land at Lennox Point, which was less than two miles across North River Channel from Harkers Island as the gull flies.

I’d been to parties at the Winberrys’ house in North Raleigh when he was still an attorney with the state and they were alternating weekends back and forth from Beaufort, but this was a first for down here.

After passing Liveoak Street, a main artery back to Highway 70, Front Street meanders on down along Taylors Creek, so close to Carrot Island that you can see the famous wild ponies grazing its sparse vegetation. At the town limit, Front makes a sharp left turn and dead ends into Lennoxville Road right at Beaufort Fishery, a collection of tin-sided buildings inside a chain-link fence. Moored out front was a large trawler, the Coastal Mariner. Somewhat further on down, but less than half the size, was Neville Fishery, the only other menhaden factory still left on the coast of North Carolina. The trawler anchored there was much smaller. Rustier, too.

I drove slowly, enjoying the views that opened between ancient moss-draped live oaks. As a kid, I’d often taken Spanish moss home from the coast and draped it on our own trees, but our inland air is too dry and it never wintered over. To my left, azaleas flamed around the foundations of spacious houses set back from the road. To my right, Carrot Island stood out crisply in the April sunlight, and I rolled down my windows so I could enjoy the cool salty air.

Eventually I passed a landmark on Chet’s map and started counting mailboxes till I came to one that serviced a nearly unnoticeable lane that curved off through yaupon, myrtle and scrub pines. Once through the wall of shrubbery, I saw an attractive low white brick house that spread itself modestly in its own grove of shady live oaks. Beds of red, pink and white azaleas interplanted with tulips and white ageratum wound extravagantly through the grounds. All in all, except for the boat dock out back and the water beyond that, it wasn’t so very different from their North Raleigh house.

Barbara Jean met me at the door, still in jeans and sweatshirt, with a familiar smell of fish in her hair. She handed me a light-on-the-bourbon and Pepsi, just the way I like it, and insisted on taking my garment bag. We went straight down a wide hall and into a spare bedroom, Barbara Jean talking the whole way.

“Have you talked to Quig Smith? Are they any closer to finding who killed Andy?”

“Not that he’s saying,” I told her. “He was killed with a .22 and Smith says everybody down here has one.”

“Not us,” said Chet from the doorway of their bedroom. “Not anymore.” He gestured toward an empty gun case at the other end of the hall. “Somebody jimmied the lock last week and took all four of our guns, including the .22 my dad gave me when I was twelve.”

“And we need to file an insurance claim on them, too, hon,” said Barbara Jean as she laid my bag across a comforter patterned in bright daffodils. “I should have told you to spend the night, Deborah, instead of making that drive back to Harkers Island. Why don’t you? Then you won’t have to worry about how many drinks you have. I can lend you a toothbrush and nightgown. No trouble.”

“Just how late do cocktail parties last down here?” I asked curiously.

“Anywhere from two hours to two days,” said Chet.

He’d already showered and dressed and looked exceedingly handsome in his navy blazer and pale gray slacks. Barbara Jean told him so and he leered back at her.

Barbara Jean was taller than me, with good facial bone structure, nice legs and a figure well worth a spare leer or two, even in her work clothes.

For a moment, they reminded me of my brother Seth and his wife Minnie. Must be nice to be a grandmother and still have a husband look at you that way.

She showed me towels and hair dryer, then went off to bathe while Chet trailed along. “To help,” he explained.

The Winberrys were not what you’d call wealthy—the bulk of Chet’s practice had been Neville Fishery before his appointment to that state commission, and Barbara Jean’s little fish meal factory probably didn’t net her much more than Chet’s salary these days. I gathered it had been quite profitable all during her childhood, however, and family investments allowed her and Chet to raise their only daughter in comfortable luxury.

This had been her bedroom and the adjoining shower had pale yellow tiles, each hand-painted with a single spring flower and no two alike, so that it took me longer to look at each tile than it did to wash my hair and bathe.

Another five minutes with towels and blow dryer, then I slipped into a cream-colored silk jumpsuit that did good things for my hair and skin. Body lotion, makeup, chains of crystals and pearls to soften the tailored shirt top, more crystals for my ears; finally a flat Mexican purse woven of turquoise and red and gold to add a touch of color.

“Very nice,” Chet said appreciatively, but it was clearly Barbara Jean who delighted him more. Her short navy-blue dress had long skintight sleeves. Cut high in front to accent a string of antique pearls, its low back revealed skin that was still smooth and supple.

Chet was tall, yet Barbara Jean topped his shoulders in her high heels as they led the way down to their boat landing. He pulled her close and I heard him murmur, “That the perfume I bought you last week?”

When she nodded, he smiled back at me. “Old lady looks pretty good to’ve cooked up a half-million fish today, doesn’t she?”

“Is that what she did?” As we walked along their dock, I was trying not to catch a spike heel in the cracks between the wide, salt-treated planks.

“Well, not in my kitchen,” she said dryly. “But yeah, the Washington Neville brought in its largest haul of the season today. Let’s just hope the wind doesn’t shift till after Linville Pope’s party. The smell of cooking menhaden smells like jobs and income to most of us, but it stinks to her. She’d rather see our black workers on welfare or fetching and carrying for the white tourists.”

“Now, honey,” said Chet as he handed us into the stern of their rakish little inboard speedboat. “You promised to be nice tonight.”

“I promised not to spit in Linville’s face,” she grinned. “Nothing was said about being nice.”

“Fireworks?” I said hopefully, leaning forward from my seat behind them. “Drinks tossed? Fistfights? Hair-pulling?”

“Not by me.” Barbara Jean parodied ladylike virtue. “My factory is sitting in the middle of some choice waterfront property that Linville’s dying to develop, but you won’t hear me bring up the subject.”

Chet started the motor with a moderate roar that immediately leveled off to a quietly expensive purr as we slid gently away from the landing dock. The low sun shafted beams of gold up through bands of mauve and blue-gray clouds. The wind was so light it barely ruffled our hair and Chet kept our speed just above a fast walk as we rounded the point and headed northwest.

“So brief me about Linville Pope,” I said. “Other than the fact that you don’t like her, what else should I know to keep me from putting my foot in my mouth?”

“You want the chamber of commerce gloss or to back of Rose’s dirt?”

“Oh, the catty version, by all means.”

“Trailer trash from Cherry Point,” she said flatly.

Seated behind the wheel, Chet laughed and reached out a hand to tousle her blonde curls. “Deb’rah said catty, honey, not bitchy.”

She considered. “Okay, maybe not trailer trash, but her father was career military—some say a staff sergeant; she says a light colonel—and when he was reassigned, she was a junior at East Carolina, so she stayed behind. She’d already got her hooks into Midge Pope by then. He inherited a broken-down old motel over at Atlantic Beach and after they married, she got a broker’s license and used the motel to leverage the Ritchie House. Now she’s got about six agents working for her and Pope Properties handles some of the priciest real estate in the area.”

“I’m impressed. The Ritchie House must have a license to mint money.”

“Yeah, well Chet tried to talk old Mr. Janson out of selling it so cheaply, but she sweet-talked her way past him.

She looked at Chet. “What else?”

“Hinges on her heels?” he suggested, as a string of brown pelicans crossed our bow.

“Oh God, yes! All a man has to do is touch her and over she goes. I’ll say one thing for her though. At least she’s not dumb enough to shit up her own landing.”

“That means she doesn’t mess around with any local married men,” Chet translated. He gave an exaggerated sigh. “Lord knows I’ve tried to change her mind often enough.”

We laughed.

“Where’s her husband in all this?”

“Midge? Drying out again near Asheville last I heard. She’s after some Jew-boy right now. A Boston lawyer, is it, hon?”

Chet caught my expression and Barbara Jean caught his.

She twisted around in her seat. “Deborah knows I don’t mean anything ugly by that, don’t you, Deborah? If Midge Pope never cared who or what his wife screwed, why should I? But this new guy is Jewish and he is from Boston, so what’s wrong with saying it?”

“Long as some of your best friends are black,” I said wryly.

I don’t think she got it because she started talking about someone named Shirl Kushner.

Even so, it was lovely to slip along the shoreline like this. The slap of water against our hull, the snap of the ensign in the stern, and the cry of gulls all around exaggerated the differences, but for a moment I was reminded of being on a train, slicing through backyards and alleyways usually hidden from view. Had we been driving through the street along this same stretch of land, we’d have glimpsed only the public facade masked by live oaks and yaupon, not these wide terraces, lush flower gardens, and sturdy docks with some sort of water craft tied up at each.

For some reason, I’d assumed that Linville Pope lived over in Morehead. Instead, it seemed we’d barely gotten onto the water good until Chet was putting in at a long private pier with white plank railings. Other boats were there before us and several hands reached out to take the line Chet threw and to help us step onto the dock when the line was secured.

More people spilled across the broad flagstoned terrace that began at the end of the planked walk. Everyone greeted Chet and Barbara Jean, and names and faces blurred as my friends rattled off introductions.

One elderly white-haired lady—“Miss Louisa Ferncliff, this is Judge Knott”—grasped my arm dramatically. “My dear, how on earth could you manage to sit in court after such a horrible, horrible experience?”

She made it sound like a breach of good taste that I hadn’t gotten the vapors from finding Andy Bynum’s body. I smiled vaguely and trundled after Barbara Jean.

Two white-jacketed black men were passing trays of white wine or taking drink orders and the older one spoke warmly to Barbara Jean. She seemed genuinely pleased to see him, too.

“Deborah, meet Micah Smith,” she said. “He was one of the chanteymen when my daddy first took over. Helped pull the nets before everything went hydraulic, then helped with the cooking till he retired last year. He said he was going to sit on a dock and fish the rest of his life.”

“Pleasure to meet you, ma’am,” he told me. “And I found out fishing every day quits being fun when you can fish every day. Now I he’p Miz Pope when she gives parties. And what can I fetch you two pretty ladies tonight?”

I opted for a Bloody Mary since I hadn’t eaten anything except an English muffin for breakfast and a cone of frozen yogurt at lunchtime. Barbara Jean wanted a margarita. “And where’s our hostess, Micah? Judge Knott hasn’t met her yet.”

He pointed toward a set of open French doors that led into the house. “She’s in yonder.”

“Come on, Deborah. We’ll go make nice and then I’ll introduce you to one of the richest and hunkiest bachelors here. You like to marlin fish? You should see some of those million-dollar boats up close.”

Without waiting for an answer, she hauled me through the crowd and only laughed when I muttered, “If this is just a few friends over for drinks, what constitutes a real party?”

• • •

Drink in hand, Linville Pope stood facing us as we entered the long living room, but her attention seemed totally focused on the man to whom she was speaking. I remembered how still she’d sat in the restaurant yesterday when accosted by that angry shouter. An unusual ability, this knack she had of centering a pool of stillness and silence around her small body.

“How nice you could come,” she said when Barbara Jean had introduced us. “I didn’t realize when we spoke Sunday night that you’d been involved with Andy Bynum’s death. How awful for you.”

I barely heard because her companion turned and it was the same man who’d sat in court this morning with the Llewellyns, the couple who were related to the puppeteer. Not much taller than me, he had short wiry hair which was flecked with gray, as was his neatly clipped beard.

I suddenly felt as if someone had knocked the wind out of me as Linville Pope said, “And this is Levi Schuster. I believe you two have met before?”

Lev smiled and said, “Hello, Red. So. Don’t I get a kiss for old times’ sake?”