Part 6 (2/2)
”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 ash.o.r.e.
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 trespa.s.sed 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 p.a.w.nshop. 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.
a a a 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 b.u.t.ton 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 gla.s.s 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 fis.h.i.+ng 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 munic.i.p.al 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 ca.n.a.ls into the wetlands so every condo in every retirement village can have its own boat landing and-ah! Here it is.”
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