Shooting at Loons Read online

  He pulled away from Smith and shambled toward the dock.

  “Aw now, Midge, you don’t want to go out there,” said Smith. “How ‘bout you let ol’ Simon here take you inside and get slicked up first? Linville wouldn’t want people to see you looking like this, now would she?”

  McGuire sprang up and Midge Pope allowed himself to be led away.

  Silence enveloped the terrace.

  “Now just a damn minute here,” said Lev. “You’re not going to believe an anti-Semitic alkie that hasn’t drawn a sober breath in two weeks, are you? Red?”

  Smith raised his eyebrows at that. Until then, he hadn’t realized that we knew each other, but he didn’t let that deter him. “No, sir, I’m not saying I do; but just because Midge is drunk don’t mean he can’t see. You admit that you followed him here to the house.”

  “No, I do not admit that. When I pulled in at the dock, I did not see anybody except Mrs. Pope lying there alone. I’m not saying he didn’t go out and touch her, not with all that blood on his clothes, but he sure as hell wasn’t there when I got here. How do you know he wasn’t the one who shot her and then went out to check that she was dead?”

  “Yes, that’s a possibility,” Smith admitted, “and that’s why I’m going to ask Judge Knott here if she’ll sign a probable cause warrant for me to search this house for a recently fired gun, even though it could be lying off the end of the dock out there in the mud somewhere for all I know.”

  I nodded mutely and he summoned one of the uniformed deputies to go out to the car and get him a couple of search warrant forms.

  “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, Mr. Schuster, but I’m gonna ask to search your boat, too.”

  “You don’t need a warrant, Detective Smith,” Lev said hotly. “I’ll waive my Fourth Amendment rights and you can go take a look right now.”

  “Lev,” I said warningly.

  “I’ve got nothing to hide, Red.”

  “Well, now, if it’s all the same to you and the Judge, I’d just as soon do it by the book,” said Smith.

  “I quite agree,” I said crisply.

  In the ensuing awkward silence, Lev suddenly seemed to notice the scratches beneath my makeup. “You hurt yourself.”

  “It’s nothing. I wasn’t watching where I was going,” I said, but my injuries reminded me that I’d wanted to tell Quig Smith about Andy Bynum’s papers. This wasn’t the time or place though.

  The officer returned with the forms and Smith filled them out in scrupulous detail, affirming that the only object he would search for would be a recently fired shoulder weapon. “‘Cause Midge does know guns,” he told me, “but at that distance, it could’ve been a single-barreled shotgun or a rifle.”

  He passed the forms over to me and I signed and dated them both.

  “You mind if one of my men uses your dinghy, Mr. Schuster?” Smith asked.

  “You sure you don’t want her to sign a form for that, too?”

  “Well, now—”

  “Oh, go ahead!” he said tightly.

  Smith instructed his officers, then told me I could leave if I wanted.

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  “Not on my account, I hope.” Lev’s voice was bitter.

  “If you like, I can call Catherine Llewellyn to come,” I offered.

  “You honestly think I’m going to need professional counsel?”

  “No, but you were the one who used to say anybody that represented himself had a fool for a client.” I tried to make my tone light and I got a ghost of a smile beneath his beard.

  “I didn’t shoot her, Red.”

  “I know you didn’t.”

  For the first time since Midge Pope had leveled that accusation, Lev seemed to relax. “For a minute there—”

  The rest of his words were drowned out as a helicopter suddenly appeared from nowhere and hovered over the pier where Linville’s body was being loaded onto a gurney. It bore the logo of a Raleigh television station and must have been filming another story in the area to have arrived so quickly. Smith’s men tried to wave it off, but it settled gently in a cleared space on the far side of the house and a cameraman quickly swept the whole area with his camcorder.

  Soon as I realized what he was doing, I turned my face. All I’d need at this point was for my family back in Colleton County to see that I was involved in two separate murders down here in Carteret and I’d have to take my phone off the hook if I wanted to sleep tonight.

  “We’re going indoors,” I called to Smith, but two seconds after we stepped inside I realized we’d avoided Scylla only to run afoul of Charybdis.

  Local news reporters had arrived, along with cameramen from Greenville and New Bern. (We later learned a general had called a news conference to discuss whether or not Cherry Point would be affected by this newest wave of congressional base closings.) They swarmed through the open door as Linville’s body was taken out to the ambulance, and strobe lights and microphones seemed to be everywhere. Fortunately, no one seemed to recognize me or to connect me with Andy Bynum’s death. They were too interested in trying to get to Midge Pope or to get a statement from Quig Smith.

  Simon McGuire had blocked access to Midge’s wing and Smith was promising he’d take questions just as soon as he knew a little more himself.

  The violent death of a woman this prominent was let’s-go-live news in this area, of course, and if they hurried, they might even slide in a bulletin before the six o’clock report ended, so the first wave of questions was quick and dirty; and by the time they were ready for greater in-depth “details-at-eleven” interviews, Quig Smith had sent someone to escort us behind the yellow tape barrier.

  The dinghy returned to the dock and the officer who’d searched the Rainmaker reported that he’d found no guns. Another had found Linville’s gun case, but all the slots were filled and none of the weapons seemed to have been fired that day.

  Smith announced we were both free to go and Lev said, “Come with me, Red? I can bring you back for your car after the feeding frenzy’s over.”

  “Thanks, Lev, but I really think I’d rather run the gauntlet and go on back to Harkers Island.”

  He studied my face a long moment, then his own face cleared. With an air of relief (and surprise at that relief?), Lev gently touched the scratch on my cheek. “Take care of yourself, Red.”

  “You, too, kid.”

  Then he was gone and I tackled Smith myself. “Are these two murders connected?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he told me candidly. “One thing though. No exit wound, so the bullet’s probably still inside her. We should know by tomorrow night if it’s the same gun or not.”

  While he was talking to the reporters, I managed to slip away with only minimum attention.

  Linville’s house was on the north side of the point, on North River; Chet and Barbara Jean were on the south side, on Taylors Creek; but their driveways were less than a quarter-mile apart, on opposite sides of Lennoxville Road.

  Impulsively, I pulled into the Winberry drive, wound through the tall shrubs and live oaks that shielded them from public view and circled up to the front door.

  “Deborah! What a nice surprise,” said Barbara Jean when she answered the bell. There were tired circles under her eyes, but her smile was warm. “Chet said you were going home today.”

  “I was, but then Roger Longmire told ‘em I could stay another week.”

  “Great. I just made a fresh pitcher of tea. Come on out to the porch and join me.”

  We went through the house to a sunny south-facing terrace that wasn’t much smaller than Linville Pope’s. Half of Barbara Jean’s was covered, though; and where the porch roof ended, trellises of weathered cypress continued across the bricked terrace to provide filtered shade in the summertime.

  “Oh, Lordy!” I breathed. The beauty was almost enough to ease the horror of finding Linville’s body.

  Barbara Jean’s face lit up. “Don’t you love this time
of year?” she said.

  Her azaleas had taken salty blasts from last month’s bad storm and the leaves still showed large patches of brown although the white, pink and lavender blossoms gamely tried to cover; but her wisteria was drop-dead gorgeous. The thick ropy vines that covered the trellises were in full bloom and dripped with huge heavy clusters of purple blossoms that mingled with the cool salt air and late afternoon sunshine to fill the porch with a bewitching fragrance. Off to one side, an eclectic mixture of Adirondack and wicker chairs circled a wide low table and I sank down into one of them and breathed in deeply.

  “How can you bear to go off to work every day and leave this?”

  “Sometimes I don’t,” she confided. “I’ve been playing hooky all afternoon. Chet’s off fishing somewhere so I borrowed a friend’s runabout and got out on the water myself for an hour or two. I just needed some time alone for a change.”

  “I’m sorry I disturbed you then.”

  “No, no, I was ready for company.”

  I was overflowing about Linville but waited till she had poured me a glass of tea and assured herself that I had everything in the way of lemon, sugar, napkins, or cookies that a guest could want before I told her.

  “Shot? On her own pier?”

  She listened in total silence until I finished, then slowly shook her head. “Oh, shit, Deborah!” The embarrassed expression on her face was that of someone caught in a lapse of good taste. “God forgive me, you know what my first thought was?”

  “That now that boat storage facility next to Jill won’t be built?”

  Barbara Jean gave a bleak smile. “I didn’t know I could be this unchristian, this callous.”

  “It’s not being callous. You guys weren’t exactly best friends, she wanted Neville Fishery and she was threatening the peace and quiet of your daughter’s home. It’s only human to be relieved that those things will go on hold now.”

  She sighed and started asking for more details: when exactly did Quig Smith think she’d been killed? Had there been any witness?

  “Midge? Midge was there?”

  “Evidently he’s been back a couple of weeks, holed up in his rooms, drinking steadily. He says he was standing in the sunroom and saw it happen. That someone out in a boat aimed a shoulder gun at Linville while she was down on the dock, but he was so drunk at the time, Smith’s not sure he’s a credible witness. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the rescue truck’s siren.”

  “No, I was—no, I didn’t.”

  She set down her glass of iced tea and headed for the wet bar just inside the door. “I need something stiffer. Fix one for you?”

  “No, thank you,” I said, but I did stir an extra spoon of sugar into my tea.

  When she returned, she carried an old-fashioned glass with two inches of something amber over a couple of ice cubes.

  “Is that Chet coming in?” I asked, as a boat slowly peeled off from the channel.

  We took our glasses and went down to meet him at the landing. As with most people who live on the water, he had cut his motor at the precise instant needed to lift it before the propeller blades scraped bottom, yet still had the momentum to carry him in to his dock.

  Before he could even throw her a line, Barbara Jean began to tell him about Linville Pope’s murder and made me finish.

  “What?” Chet stood in the boat to listen before handing out a bucket of fish and getting out himself with a couple of rods. He was still walking stiffly from his pulled muscle and he shook his head. “My God, Deb’rah. You really stepped in the middle of it this week, didn’t you, girl?”

  Back at the house, he dumped the three fish he’d caught into a chest of ice—“Not much to show for a whole afternoon”—rinsed off his hands and took the drink Barbara Jean had fixed him.

  “Poor Linville,” he said. “And poor Midge. Half his problem is that he could never give her what she wanted.”

  “She wanted to be Queen of Beaufort,” Barbara Jean said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”

  “De mortuis, honey.”

  “I’m not speaking ill of the dead,” she argued. “Only the truth. She wanted to close Neville Fishery. She never knew what it was like before. No sense of history, no—”

  She turned to me abruptly. “Did you ever hear them singing on the water, Deborah?”

  “The chanteymen? No. I have one of the tapes though, and I can imagine how it must have sounded.”

  “You can’t!” she said passionately, and I don’t think it was the bourbon speaking. “When I was a little girl, we still had one boat that didn’t have a power block, and my daddy used to let me go out with them once in a while. They’d let down the two little purse boats to circle a school of menhaden and the men had to pull the heavy nets by hand. That’s why they sang those long slow chanties, to synchronize the hardening of the fish against the main boat. And the sound of those black voices floating across the water from one boat to the other—the leader would sing out the first words and the men would heave away as they echoed the strong slow beats—I’ll never hear anything as beautiful again in my life.”

  Tears spilled from her eyes.

  “Ah, honey,” said Chet, taking her in his arms and patting her tenderly on the back.

  “And that’s what Linville Pope wanted to destroy.”

  “I thought the chanteymen were replaced by hydraulic net-pullers twenty years ago,” I said, remembering how Linville had taunted her on that point. “She didn’t have anything to do with that, did she?”

  “But some of their sons still work for me. They link back into that heritage and continue the work their fathers did and she would have destroyed that link. And taken something precious from me as well.”

  She laid her head on Chet’s shoulder. “I didn’t wish Linville Pope dead, Deborah, but I can’t say I’m sorry that I don’t have to keep fighting her off.”

  I had to admit that given Linville’s persistent techniques, there might well be a lot of similar feelings all around this part of Carteret County when the news got out.

  Chet and Barbara Jean invited me to stay for supper, but it was getting too heavy for me.

  “Sorry,” I told them, “but I’ve got a bunch of reading to do and I’d better get to it.”

  “Andy’s papers?” asked Barbara Jean.

  “Papers?” said Chet.

  “I told you about them this morning,” she said. “That research Andy was doing on Pope Properties.”

  “Oh yeah. Find anything yet, Deborah?”

  “Haven’t had a chance. And I probably won’t recognize it if it’s there.”

  “Maybe you should let me take a look. I know most of the players. By name, anyhow, if not by person.”

  “If I don’t spot anything tonight, maybe I will,” I said.

  “Why waste your time?” asked Barbara Jean. “Linville’s dead now, remember? Nobody needs that ammunition anymore.”

  • • •

  It was heading for twilight when I stopped at a store on the outskirts of town and picked up several sets of cheap underwear and two packages of panty-hose. If I was going to stay over another week, I’d have to find a laundromat, but not tomorrow, thank you. I planned to sleep in and then spend the day skimming through Andy Bynum’s papers.

  • • •

  The smell of steamed shrimp hit my nose the instant I walked into the cottage. Indeed, I walked in through a door that was not only unlocked, but which could no longer be secured at all except by a padlock that I hadn’t bothered with since I got to the island. Someone seemed to have put a foot against the door and shoved hard enough to tear the dead bolt right off the old brittle door casing.

  “Good,” said Kidd Chapin from somewhere in the dim interior. “You’re back. I was beginning to think I’d have to spend the whole evening in darkness.”

  “So now the Wildlife Commission’s into breaking and entering?”

  “Believe it or not, it was like that when I got here about forty-five minutes ago. Everyth
ing was tossed, but you’ll have to check it out to see what’s missing. The TV’s still here and the lock’s intact on the pump house. This got anything to do with those files in your newspapers?”

  “How the heck did you find them?” I asked, yanking down the shades so I could turn on the lights and see his expression when I threw him out.

  He did have an embarrassed look on his thin homely face. “Well, when I came past and saw the lock was smashed, there was a bucket with some shrimp in it right by the door and you know you can’t leave shrimp out too long. I couldn’t head and shell them outside, so I grabbed up some of those newspapers and spread ‘em over the table and out dropped a bunch of Xeroxes. You ever read The Purloined Letter?”

  I had to laugh. “What did you do with the shrimp after you cleaned them?”

  “I saved you some,” he said virtuously. Then, in an abrupt change, he said, “I was in Quig’s office when you called about the Pope woman. You okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Hey,” he said gently. “Your face seems to be healing nicely.” Then he took a closer look. “Better take the makeup off though and let it breathe.”

  Shaking my head, I went and changed into jeans, washed my face, put peroxide on my scratches, then called Telford Hudpeth and thanked him for the shrimp. “You didn’t happen to notice anything about the front door here, did you?” I asked.

  “No, ma’am. Why? Something wrong with it?”

  “Someone broke in while I was gone. They didn’t take anything, but I was just wondering if you saw them.”

  “Sure didn’t, but all I did was set the bucket down and leave. If you don’t have a way to lock your door, I can bring some tools and maybe scare up a new lock and—”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “Thanks anyhow, but there’s a padlock and a hasp I can still use.”

  “You’re sure now?”

  “I’m positive,” I said firmly.

  Kidd had blatantly eavesdropped on the whole conversation and he was smiling broadly. “More cavalry to the rescue, Ms. Judge?”

  “Don’t you have a home?” I asked.