Shooting at Loons (21 page)

“So you moored out there in the channel about when, would you say?”

“About a quarter to five,” Lev answered promptly. “I remember thinking it wasn’t quite time to splice the mainbrace but that maybe Mrs. Pope would offer me a beer anyhow. I got the dinghy into the water and as I motored over, I saw something white and black lying on the pier, but it wasn’t till I got out of the dinghy that I realized it was her. I thought maybe she’d fallen or something and then I saw all the blood and couldn’t get a pulse. I ran up to the house, but the doors were locked and nobody came when I pounded on them, so I ran back down and took the dinghy back to my boat because I had a cellular—”

His voice faltered and we all became aware that Midge Pope had appeared in the doorway. His bloody shirt was half off, he now wore thonged sandals on his sockless feet, his hair was damp as if he’d held it under a stream of cold water and he looked ghastly. But though his hand held a half-empty bottle of Early Times and though his hand shook as he pointed it at Lev, his voice was strong when he roared, “You Jew bastard! You killed my wife!”

“Hey, now, Midge,” said Smith, grabbing Pope before he could swing that bottle at Lev.

“He did, Quig. I saw him. I was standing right at those windows and I saw him. Bastard sat right out there in his boat and took aim at Linvie with his rifle and dropped her like a beautiful loon. You know how beautiful they are, Quig?”

“I know, Midge. I know.”

“I told Linvie, I said, ‘Honey, you look cuter’n a loon today in your black-and-white checked feathers,’ and she laughed and time I got to her, she was gone, Quig. Gone.”

Rage dissipated into grief.

“What’d you do then, Midge?” Smith asked gently.

“Tried to call you, but the damn phone wouldn’t work,” he sobbed. “And he followed me up to the house, but I saw him coming,” he said with drunken craftiness, “and I locked the doors so he couldn’t get in, but the phone...“

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.”