Shooting at Loons

by Margaret Maron

  “You’re working late,” I observed.

  “Just caulking. Don’t need daylight for that.” He turned back with the caulk gun. A bare low-wattage light bulb hung next to the side where he was carefully waterproofing each nail head.

  I followed, unable to resist the lure of watching something so beautiful and so practical take shape under his rough hands. No blueprints hung from the back wall of the shelter, not even any photographs. He didn’t need a drawing to look at; it was all in his head. If I scrabbled around through the scraps of juniper, I might find a board with two columns of numbers scribbled on it, one for the dead rise and the other for the center, each figure accurate to the thirty-second of an inch so that she’d ride centered and true as long as she was cared for.

  “Who you building this one for?” I asked.

  “Me. Me’n my boys.” He dotted a row of nail heads with the yellow caulk, then smoothed each dot with his fingers. “I hear tell you’re a judge now.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me this, if you would. Say somebody didn’t like my mess on their property. Can they have it all hauled off and make me pay for it?”

  “Somebody doing that to you?”

  “Yeah, some bitch over to Beaufort that bought that field.” He nodded toward the overgrown, debris-littered field. His debris. Behind the chicken cages, there was a broken-down pickup full of junk that’d been there at least eight years. Sticking up from the scrubby bushes were piles of building scraps, aluminum siding, and old pipes and barrels. Further out, a yaupon tree grew straight up through a cast-off stove.

  “She says if I don’t get my mess off, she’ll pay somebody twenty-five hundred dollars and put the law on me if I don’t pay it. I ain’t got twenty-five hundred dollars. This boat’s taking every penny and I still got to get the diesel engine for her. Andy was going to let me have one off a old truck of his, but now, I don’t know if his boys’ll still do it or not.”

  “Well, she can’t have you hauled off to jail like a criminal,” I assured him, “but she could file in civil court and get a judgment against you.”

  “What would that mean?”

  “It might mean a forced sale of your house if you didn’t pay up after a certain length of time.”

  “I knew it!” he said angrily. “That’s what she’s after. She’s already got title to two or three pieces along here. If she’n get mine and maybe Carl’s—”

  “Carl and Sue would never sell,” I said.

  “It ain’t been in his family a hundred years,” Mahlon said shortly. “Wave enough money under people’s noses and you can’t tell what they’d do.”

  He smoothed on some more caulk dots. “Well, it don’t signify. With this boat, me’n my boys’re gonna get ourselves out’n the hole for good and all this time.”

  “How is Mickey Mantle?” None of us ever knew whether or not to ask, but since Mahlon had mentioned him first...

  His sun-leathered face crinkled with a gap-toothed grin. “Doing a lot of walking these days.”

  “Oh?”

  He smoothed another row of nail heads. “Yeah. Got his license pulled again. For a year this time. If he can’t get there by boat or thumb, he has to foot it.”

  “So you figure that’ll keep his mind on fishing for a while?” I laughed.

  “Should do,” he answered dryly. “If I’n get her done by the time shrimping season starts, the money’ll keep ‘em both in line.”

  I hesitated. “I hope I didn’t get Guthrie in trouble yesterday, asking him to take me out for clams?”

  Mahlon scowled. “Worn’t your fault. He knowed better’n to take my skiff ‘thout asking.”

  “That was pretty awful about Andy Bynum getting shot.”

  “Yeah.” He laid aside the caulk gun and began to peel the gummy stuff from his fingers.

  “I guess you’re in that Alliance he started?”

  “Hell, no!” He saw my puzzlement. “Oh, they tried to sign us all up, but I ain’t never joined nothing yet and I’m sure not going to start with something that don’t give a damn about me.”

  “But I thought it was to help the independent fishermen.”

  He snorted. “Yeah, that’s what was said, but I ain’t never seen nothing started by the man that don’t end up with money in their pockets.”

  Startled, I tried to remember if I’d ever seen Andy linger under Mahlon’s boat shed or seen Mahlon over at Andy’s. “You and Andy weren’t friends?” I asked.

  “He was the man,” he said, as if that explained it all.

  Well, if Andy was, I guess it did, diesel engine or no diesel engine.

  Mahlon wrapped a piece of plastic around the tip of the caulk gun, secured it with a rubber band, then reached over and turned off the light bulb.

  “Reckon I’d better get on in to eat,” he said, reminding me of the chowder I’d left simmering on the stove.

  It was full dark but there were enough scattered lights from nearby houses to guide me the few feet down the shoreline to the main path once my eyes adjusted. I went slowly, thinking about “the man.” Not a purely local concept, of course. There was that old Ernie Ford coal miner song about owing one’s soul to the company store. And sharecroppers certainly knew about never getting out of debt to the man who bankrolled you to the tools or supplies you needed if you were going to work for him.

  Andy Bynum had owned a fish house. Barbara Jean could probably tell me exactly how that made him the man.

  As I headed up the path to the cottage, the maniacal cry of a migrant loon rang across the sound.

  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.”