“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. God, 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.
• • •
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 shirt came from his body when they found him curled in the entry hall.
Now it was déjà 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 glass with dozens of seashells 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 shells 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 hell, 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 circumstances, I might have been nettled by his excessive surprise. Now I let it pass 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 passed 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 passed 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 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—”