Shooting at Loons (24 page)

I saw Kidd straighten up and I screamed, “Stay back!”

Then Mahlon prodded me. “Walk on the other side of the boat,” he ordered.

Numbly, I went. Around on the seaward side, blocks and boxes formed rough steps that led up to the boat railing for easy access over the side. Prodded by the rifle barrel, I went up and over and Mahlon followed till we reached the unfinished cabin and looked out through glassless window holes.

We were six feet or more above the ground, almost parallel to the shoreline. To the left was the sea. To the right, houses and the road beyond. The man Mahlon had shot lay motionless in the weed-filled lot. Cars were stopping along the road edge beyond Clarence Willis’s trailer, and knots of people stared and pointed to us. I couldn’t see Kidd, but someone was crouched behind the patrol car’s open door and 1 heard the crackle of a two-way radio, so professional help was probably on the way if someone didn’t do something stupid first.

“Mahlon, listen to me,” I said. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

“Shut up!” he snarled. Then almost immediately, “All I ever did was mind my own business and try to make a living and they won’t let me.”

“But Andy lent you money,” I said softly. “He gave you an engine.”

“No, he didn’t!”

“But—”

“I seen him Saturday night and maybe I might’ve had a beer or two too many, but he talked to me like I was dirt. Said I was too sorry to finish a boat. Said if I did, I’d probably wreck it like the other one. Said his mind was full changed and he worn’t gonna throw good money after bad. Next day I’d been out and shot me a turtle and was coming in with some oysters, too, when I seen him over yonder clamming and I went out to talk to him reasonable-like to see if he’d change his mind back ‘cause I had to have that motor and
he
certainly worn’t using it. I even tried to give him some of my oysters and he started yelling about taking stuff out of season, when hell, season hadn’t even been closed a week. Besides, I didn’t get ‘em to sell, they was for us to eat. And he said men like me was what was holding back his shitty Alliance. Said he’d see me in hell ‘fore I’d get so much as a net sinker out of him so I grabbed out my gun and said well say hello to the devil for me.”

Carefully, I turned till I was facing him and the gun was only inches from my chest. “Mahlon, what you did was in the heat of the moment. I’m not saying you’ll get off scot-free, but it’s not half as bad as if you stand up here and think about it and then shoot somebody else.”

His unshaven chin clenched tightly and his glittering eyes darted wildly from my face to the men who’d gathered behind the patrol car.

“All I wanted was to be left alone so me and my boys could make a living like we always done. But they keep changing it, telling us we can’t do this, we can’t do that, and Andy worn’t gonna let me have the engine and that bitch over to Beaufort worn’t gonna let me finish building the boat. I told her just give me till the end of May and me and my boys’ll pick up every scrap of our stuff. It worn’t doing her no harm, but she just stood there on the end of her landing like she owned the world and everything in it and said she’d given me all the time I was going to get from her.”

“She shouldn’t have said that,” I soothed, “but think of Guthrie, Mahlon. How’s he going to feel if he comes home from school and hears you’ve killed innocent people that never did you any harm?”

“Turn around,” he said.

“Mahlon—”

He jammed the rifle barrel into my stomach. “Dammit, I said turn around!”

I turned and a dozen thoughts crowded through my head at once: how sad my daddy was going to be and my brothers, but at least it’d be quick and—”Kidd, no! Go back!”

Again that deafening explosion of the gun in my ear and an instant of bewilderment until the rifle crashed to the deck behind me.

When I looked back, Mahlon had slumped against the cabin ledge, a bloody hole beneath his chin.

O sinners, the heralds of mercy implore,
They cry like the patriarch, “Come.”
The Ark of salvation is moored to your shore,
Oh, enter while yet there is room!
The stormcloud of Justice rolls dark overhead,
and when by its fury you’re tossed,
Alas, of your perishing souls ‘twill be said,
“They heard—they refused—and were lost!”

—Kate Harrington

“You suspected Mahlon Davis all the time?” I asked.

“Well, him and three more,” said Quig Smith. “One of the neighbors saw him coming in from that direction around one o’clock.”

We were seated at the kitchen table sharing a six-pack and a big bag of corn chips. It was a little before twelve and the rescue wagon had been and gone twice; the first time with the seriously wounded waste disposal man, the second time with Mahlon’s body. Except for a steady stream of island neighbors bringing food and comfort to Mahlon’s family, the crowds had dispersed and there was little to show for what had taken place that morning.

At last things had quieted down enough for Quig to take our statements and to satisfy my unanswered questions.

I rooted around in the refrigerator and found pimento cheese and some stuffed olives, which I set on the table. “Who were the others?”

“Remember how Jay Hadley tried to make us think the whole family went to church Sunday morning?”

“Yeah?”

“Her son Josh was seen out near the lighthouse around eleven and then again at one. He’s sixteen and a hothead and we heard he didn’t like Andy flirting with his mom. Then there was Scratch Kinlow. You know him?”

I shook my head.

“Lives on the north side of the island. He tried to punch Andy out over the weight of his catch last month, and he made some serious threats. Nobody actually saw him out near Shackleford, but his buddy was there and you don’t usually see the one without the other.”

“What about Chet Winberry?”

“The judge?” He rubbed his chin and gave me a quizzical look. “You thought maybe him?”

“Well you were the one asking me at Andy’s funeral how good a friend he was, and it
was
awfully convenient that his guns got stolen when they did.”

“Oh, they turned up yesterday evening. Pawnshop over in Havelock.”

I was too embarrassed to tell him my theories. That first day in his office, he’d reminded me that some men took messing with their livelihoods more serious than somebody messing with their wives, but had I listened? No, I’d gone looking for fancy upstate motives instead of basic bedrock.

And Kidd sat there through the whole exchange, eating corn chips and pimiento cheese with a bland expression on his face, and never said a word about fiduciary trusts, the Ritchie House or forged signatures. Who can find a virtuous man who doesn’t blab everything he knows? His price is above rubies.

“Sure would have helped if you’d thought to mention about Davis bringing in oysters last Sunday,” Quig said as he popped a final olive in his mouth and rose to go.

“If you’d told
me
about oysters being out of season and not growing on tidal sandbars,” I reminded him, “maybe I would’ve.”

“We gotta get her a schedule and teach her some rudiments of marine biology,” Quig told Kidd. “And that reminds me. You gonna be at the clean water hearing tonight?”

“No, I don’t think so,” said Kidd.

Quig grinned. “Naw, I didn’t think you would.”

While Kidd walked out to the car with him, I called Chet’s number.

“Deborah!” he said. “You just missed Barbara Jean. She’s gone antiquing with a friend over near Goldsboro.”

Was his tone a little too hearty?

“That’s good,” I said evenly, “because it’s you I’m coming to see.”

Kidd rode over with me.

The light on the Earl C. Davis Memorial Bridge went from green to yellow and I accelerated across before it could draw up to let a tall-masted boat through.

“Who was Earl C. Davis anyhow?” I wondered aloud when I was safely on the other side.

“Owen and Earl/Own the world./Watch out! Soon/They’ll own the moon.”

“Huh?”

“That’s what they used to say down here when I was a boy. Right after the moon landing. I guess Owen Fulcher and Earl Davis were supposed to be sharp traders.”

“Like Linville Pope?”

“Don’t know, shug.”

We rode in silent thought through Bettie, then across North River, and south on Highway 70. When we neared the outskirts of Beaufort, Kidd said, “What are you going to do with those papers?”

“What should I do with them?”

“Not for me to say, Ms. Judge.”

I left Andy’s papers locked in the trunk.

Chet seemed not to have heard of the morning’s events and I was too edgy to tell him. He was surprised to see Kidd with me, but made a smooth recovery as he showed us out to the sunlit terrace and said, “Get anybody a drink?”

I refused and Kidd allowed as how maybe he’d walk down to Chet’s landing. “Give y’all a chance to talk.”

“He knows, doesn’t he?” Chet asked, sitting heavily in one of the Adirondack chairs beneath the purple wisteria.

“Yes, but no one will ever hear it from him.”

“What about you?”

“Chet—”

“Look, I’m not going to beg. Just try to understand, okay? Between Jill starting to date and the fishery, too, Barbara Jean had her hands so full that she didn’t have any time left over for me.”

“And Linville did?”

“She was the one who encouraged me to get into politics. My career was going nowhere till then. I was just a small-town attorney, tending to the legal needs of my father-in-law’s business. Hell, Deborah, half my outside clients were court-appointed.”

He got up and freshened his drink. “Sure I can’t—?”

“No.”

“You don’t make it easy, girl.”

“News flash, Chet: not every ‘girl’ is in your world to smooth things over for you.”

He sighed. “I don’t see what the big deal is. Nobody got hurt. The Janson estate got every penny it had coming. If I hadn’t let Mr. Janson sell it to Linville—”

I arched my eyebrows. “Let him sell? A man in a coma?”

“Then you do know everything,” he said, with a sick look on his face.

“I think so. Yes.”

“All the same,” he argued, “the old inn was falling down. It couldn’t stand to wait another year while the heirs finished bickering. By that time, the roof would have fallen in and they’d have gotten a lot less than Linville paid.”

“A preservationist
and
a humanitarian,” I gibed.

Chet flushed. “You think I haven’t kicked myself a hundred times since then? Especially when Linville started after Neville Fishery. She’d never put the screws to me. That wasn’t her style. But just knowing that I was the one who gave her the start that she built on has been pure hell these last six months.”

“I can believe that,” I said.

Encouraged, he leaned forward. “What I did was wrong. I admit it. But don’t think it hasn’t eaten at me all these years. I know people say I go too easy on white-collar defendants sometimes, but whenever some poor slob comes up before me embezzling a few thousand, or cheating on his taxes, I have to think that there but for the grace of God. Everybody’s done things they’re ashamed of, Deborah. Haven’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Not that it’s an excuse. But when you know how much some people are getting away with and what you’ve done hasn’t really hurt anybody—” He sighed, set his drink on the wide arm of his chair, stretched his long legs straight out till he was nearly horizontal, and in a tone so low I almost couldn’t hear, he muttered, “Shared shabbiness.”

“What?”

“That’s what I call it. When we tell ourselves everybody’s doing it and most are doing worse. The small shabby things we do that make us not point the finger at someone else. A shared complicity. But every time we do it, a little more decency leaks away from us, a little more glory gone from our world. Take Andy Bynum. He actually apologized to me, but he said he couldn’t figure any other way to get Linville to keep her mouth shut about commercial fishing in close. Said blackmailing me like that wasn’t half as bad as signing Ritchie Janson’s signature.”

I stood and as if I’d jerked a string, Kidd started up from the landing.

“What are you going to do?” Chet asked.

“You don’t bring down a fellow judge,” the pragmatist reminded me. “Not if you want to be known as a team player.”

“Right is right,” said the preacher inexorably.

Shared shabbiness or holier than thou? I didn’t like either choice.

He read the decision in my eyes and leaned back in his chair with his own eyes closed.

“I’m sorry, Chet,” I told him.

And I was.

“Why don’t you head straight on down Front Street?” said Kidd. “I’ll buy you a beer at the Dock House and we’ll look at all the rich people in their boats and I’ll tell you about the time I found a fish trap at a creek off Kerr Lake.”

“Okay.” I didn’t trust my voice to say more.

“Hey, you’re not crying because you’re going to unseat that sorry bastard, are you?”

“No.” We both knew I was lying.

“Okay,” he said. “So what happened was I had to sit on that fish trap for three solid days before anybody came to check on it.”

He spotted the tissue holder over the sun visor on his side and handed me a couple without breaking his narration. It was very long and very complicated. Something to do with a six five, three-hundred-pound gorilla of a man who brought along three little young’uns when he came to empty his illegal fish trap. The story lasted all the way till we were seated at a small table on an upstairs porch overlooking the marina, and by that time I was resigned to doing the right thing and was ready to, if not laugh, at least relax.

To my bemusement, I spotted Lev on the deck of the
Rainmaker
with Catherine Llewellyn’s young son in his arms. Claire Montgomery’s hand puppet seemed to be entertaining them both as the Llewellyns themselves arrived with a couple of large suitcases. I realized they must be getting ready to leave.

Poor Lev, I thought, picturing the rest of a life co-opted by Catherine Llewellyn. No doubt she’ll allow him one-night stands, but I also have no doubt that she’ll make very, very sure (ever so solicitously, and for his own good, of course) that he never again gets entangled by someone who could disengage him from her orbit.