Shooting at Loons (8 page)

“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.