Shooting At Loons Part 19

I got through to Quig Smith almost immediately.

"Hey there!" he said jovially. "Our desk officer bet me I'd be gone 'fore you called again. You're just lucky my new ecology journal that came in today had an article on estuarine pollution and fish nurseries or I'd be-"

I cut through and he listened in silence to what I had to say. When I'd finished, he said, "How 'bout you make sure the door's unlocked so we can get in, then go on back out and keep a watch. I'll be there in ten minutes."

Out in the hallway, Midge Pope had blacked out and was lying curled in a fetal position around the cordless phone. No need to s.h.i.+ft him since he was no longer blocking the entrance. I left the door on the latch and hurried back down to the dock, where the young man stood with a sick expression on his face.

"Not much longer," I told him. "I'm Deborah Knott, and you're-"

"Simon McGuire. What happened here, ma'am?"

"Don't you know?"

"No, ma'am," he said, shaking a thatch of reddish-brown hair that was still rumpled from his stolen nap. "She said some judge was coming and for me to keep Midge-Mr. Pope-in his room. I finally got him to bed and I just lay down to rest a couple of minutes myself and the next thing I knew, there you were."

He had a p.r.o.nounced lantern jaw, square shoulders, and a dazed expression on his open face. In his jeans and sneakers, he looked no more than twenty or twenty-one and could be any student from East Carolina or Carteret Community College.

Before I could ask him when he'd last seen Linville alive, I saw that Lev was back in his dinghy and heading straight across the water toward us.

"Stay here," I told McGuire and went down to the end of the pier.

As Lev cut the motor of his dinghy and readied a line to tie up, I called, "Stay back. Linville Pope's been shot."

"I know." He looped the line around a post. "I found her."

"You might be destroying evidence."

"I told you-I tied up here ten minutes ago. This won't make any difference."

He secured the boat and stepped up onto the dock. "I called nine-one-one and they're sending someone."

"Called?"

"Cellular phone on the boat," he explained.

"Why didn't you call from the house?"

"The doors were locked and I thought it'd be quicker to call from the boat than try to hunt up the neighbors. G.o.d, this is awful! That poor woman." He moved restlessly from one side of the dock to the other.

I'd forgotten what a pacer Lev was. Whenever something upset him, whenever he was working out the elements of a complex case-it's as if his brain can't function under stress without his legs moving. He paced now, back and forth, with that old familiar urgency.

I drew back at the sight of a blood smear on his khakis and said, "Who shot her, Lev?"

He followed my eyes and brushed at the smear. "When I tried to get a pulse, I must have-" He gave me a sharp look, then in a level voice said, "I don't know, Red. She was like that when I got here just a few minutes ago."

I was puzzled as to why he'd even be here since Linville had invited me and she hadn't struck me as someone who invited confrontations. "Was she expecting you?"

"Not really. She marked some places on my chart along the straits back of Harkers Island for me to look at today." He gestured vaguely across the marshes toward the east. "I was on my way back to Beaufort, and thought I'd swing by here to ask if she could show me one of the properties tomorrow. When I first saw her-"

His eyes were snagged by movement behind me. I turned and saw Quig Smith striding across the terrace, accompanied by another detective and a couple of uniformed Carteret County sheriff's deputies.

"That was quick," said Lev.

I glanced at my watch. Smith had said ten minutes.

It had only been eight.

a a a The rescue squad, summoned by Lev's 911 call, arrived almost immediately after Smith and his men and had, at first, mistaken Midge Pope for the victim since they thought the blood on his s.h.i.+rt came from his body when they found him curled in the entry hall.

Now it was deja vu time.

Watching the two teams out on the dock was uncannily like last Sunday afternoon when I'd watched these same people go through the same motions around Andy Bynum's body. Only, instead of rocking in a boat to answer Quig Smith's questions, this time we sat around a table on Linville Pope's terrace as we each gave our accounts of the afternoon.

The base of the table was three bronze dolphins that had weathered to a soft green; the top was a thick round slab of gla.s.s with dozens of seash.e.l.ls embedded just below the surface. I recognized sand dollars, scotch bonnets, tulips, tritons, olives and snails. It seemed unreal that only an hour before I'd been happily racing hermit crabs in similar sh.e.l.ls and now I was back in the middle of another murder.

Smith questioned me first, then Simon McGuire. I was not surprised to hear that the young man was indeed between semesters. After two years at Cullowhee up in the mountains, he was taking a year off at the beach to earn more tuition money while trying to figure out what he really wanted to be when he grew up. Linville had hired him only two weeks ago when Midge Pope checked himself out of a sanitarium up near Asheville and came back to Beaufort to start drinking again.

"My girlfriend's mother is office manager for Mrs. Pope and she knew I had experience working as a hospital orderly for a couple of summers, so when Mrs. Pope said she was looking for somebody right away, Mrs. Abbott told her about me."

On his first day there, he told us, Midge Pope was present when Linville Pope outlined his duties.

"She told him she wasn't going to try to keep him from drinking anymore. If he was determined to kill himself, she knew she couldn't stop it, but she couldn't watch and she couldn't be with him every minute. She said if he'd agree to let me help him so he didn't drive drunk or get out on a boat drunk or walk in the road where somebody might run over him, then she'd see that there was a case of bourbon in his sitting room from here on out."

She was half-crying when she said it, McGuire told us. And Midge had taken her hands and there were tears in his own eyes when he told her how very sorry he was that he was such a poor excuse for a husband. "She said she'd rather have him like he was than any other man in Beaufort and then they went off together to her rooms down at the other end of the house and I thought maybe they weren't going to need me after all," said McGuire. "But by that evening, Midge was blind out of his mind drunk and I swear I don't think he's been cold stone sober fifteen minutes since then."

Hardly more than a boy, Simon McGuire seemed thoroughly shaken by Linville's death, and as it all sank in, he was now ravaged by guilt. "If I wasn't asleep," he castigated himself, "I might have-"

"I doubt it," Smith said kindly. "It'd be nice if you'd been a witness so you could describe who shot her, but h.e.l.l, son, you might've been shot then, too. Who knows? Now when did you actually last see Miz Pope?"

"Between three-thirty and four," he hazarded. "She came into Midge's sitting room to say she'd asked some judge to come by for a drink about five-" He looked around as if expecting a black-robed figure to suddenly come strolling through the French doors.

"That was me," I told him.

"You're a judge?"

Under different circ.u.mstances, I might have been nettled by his excessive surprise. Now I let it pa.s.s with a nod.

"Anyhow," he continued, "she said she was going to go check on the boat-she just bought a new little runabout-and then freshen up. When she was expecting company, I was supposed to keep Midge in his wing of the house. That was another part of their bargain, but today he was sort of ornery about it and wouldn't settle down. I thought he'd finally pa.s.sed out but for some reason he must've got out while I was asleep and then Miss-the Judge woke me up."

His long square jaw tightened convulsively and Smith patted his shoulder.

As Smith turned in his chair, Lev sat back warily.

"And you, Mr. Schuster?"

Again, Lev explained about spending the afternoon cruising around back of Harkers Island looking at various pieces of property and then his decision to drop in on Linville.

"You happen to notice any other boats around as you turned into the channel?" asked Smith.

"I wasn't paying too much attention," Lev admitted. "According to the chart, when you swing around the point here, the channel goes from seventeen feet of water to seven quite rapidly and if you don't keep your eyes on the channel markers, you can run aground because it's only two or three feet deep on either side."

Quig Smith nodded. "All the same, Mr. Schuster, weren't there any other boats in the channel?"

Beneath the deep ledges of his brow, Lev's eyes narrowed as he tried to remember. "As I started my turn, there was a speedboat going straight in to Taylors Creek, back toward Beaufort. I guess I noticed because it's a no-wake zone and the guy hadn't cut his speed yet. Once I got around on this side though, the channel ends just a few hundred feet on and there was nothing as big as me there." Absently, he twisted a tuft of his short beard as he concentrated. "I think I might have pa.s.sed some small open boats when I skirted the marshes, but I was concentrating so hard on the channel I couldn't begin to say for sure."

"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 n.o.body 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 b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d! 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. b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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 d.a.m.n 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 d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l 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 pa.s.sed 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 s.p.a.ce 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.