Shooting at Loons

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