One Perfect Shot

by Steven F Havill

  “She has a minute?”

  “’Course she does.”

  Tody Decker looked like the nurse that she’d been for thirty years, neat and cool in shorts and polo shirt, fighting the battle of the waistline with a moderate paunch, legs a little heavy from years spent working on both the hospital and the high school’s unyielding concrete floors.

  “This is just the most awful thing,” she announced after pumping our hands. “I mean in our little neighborhood. I told Sheriff Salcido the same thing. I just can’t believe it.” She leaned forward and stared at Estelle Reyes as if maybe she’d missed her at the handshake. “My word, you’re a gorgeous young lady,” she blurted. “And we know each other somehow.”

  “Mrs. Decker, you were our school nurse when I was at the high school.” Estelle offered a warm smile.

  “Well, that hasn’t been so long. My word, my old memory is so full of holes.”

  “Tody,” I said, not wanting to settle into a round of reminiscence, “after you heard the shot, you looked outside?”

  She pointed back at the kitchen. “I heard the shot and then Hugh got up and I heard him say, ‘Now what the…are they shooting at?” She smiled demurely and glanced affectionately at her husband. “I won’t tell you what he actually said. And then I looked out across the field. I remember that there was a road grader out there. That’s all I saw.”

  “No car, no one walking?”

  “Sheriff, I’m not saying there wasn’t someone. It’s just that the screen over the window makes it hard. I think that I saw the car, but it was a little thing.”

  “A compact, maybe?”

  “No, I mean at that distance, it’s just too far to see clearly.”

  “Well, I saw the Goddamn car and the guy walking back toward it.”

  I gazed off to the north, trying to form the image. “So…and this is important, Hugh.” With one arm, I pointed at the spot where the car would have been parked. With the other, I made an angle back toward the road grader. “I want to know how far the man was from the car at the very first instant you saw him. How far did he have to walk to make it back to the car?”

  Hugh frowned, the expression producing a rumple of his massive forehead. He turned, and held up his own arms, mimicking my geometry. “My guess…my guess is that he was maybe a hundred feet from the car when I caught sight of him. And he was already walking back toward it.” He swept one arm to the east and sighted along it. “So right about there. Yeah, that would be about right.”

  I wondered what he could see through his thick and not entirely clean glasses.

  “See there’s a good-sized group of tumble weeds just past the little dip there?”

  The “tumble weeds” could have been long horn steers as far as Hugh was concerned. “So he actually had to walk a little bit to reach the car. I mean, as much as twenty or thirty paces.”

  “That’s a fact. I had time, thinkin’ about it now, to watch him walk for a little bit. I was wondering if he was the one who had fired the shot, and at what. See, the road grader was way the hell over there,” and he nodded eastward.

  “And you couldn’t hear it or see the operator.”

  “That’s right. You know, sheriff, it don’t sit just real good with me knowing that Larry Zipoli was just lying out there, shot dead, while I sat here drinking iced tea.” He shook his head. “What time was he found?”

  “He’d been there a while,” I offered. “But that’s the way these things go. Someone might have driven by and never noticed him.”

  “Could have, I suppose.” He slid one huge arm around his wife’s shoulders, waiting for the next question. But I didn’t have any. The Decker’s portrait of events did nothing to alter the chilling image of the scenario that I imagined. Step out of the car, maybe walk as much as a hundred feet or so, take aim and fire at a defenseless man. And then stroll away.

  Chapter Nineteen

  “You see the problem?” I asked Estelle Reyes. She’d been taking a slew of notes in a small spiral notebook. I didn’t wait for her to read my mind. “On the one hand, Hugh Decker hears one shot, and then sees a man…a person…walking back to a parked car.” I held up an index finger. “If we take him to be the shooter, then he’s as cold and calculating as they come. No rush, no fuss. He shoots once, doesn’t check his target, and saunters away. Once he’s back in the car, he doesn’t even drive down Highland to see what damage he’s done.” I shrugged. “Now tell me how that jibes with Bobby Torrez’s experiments.”

  “Do you trust what Mr. Decker claims to have seen, sir?”

  “Now that’s a question.” I swung the car onto Hutton, and we approached the intersection with Highland at a sedate ten miles an hour. For a moment, neither of us said anything, both of us looking off to the east along Highland, trying to imagine circumstances on that quiet day. To the south, I could see the back of the Deckers’ house, squat and secure among a half dozen other homes, the big cottonwood dominating their double lot.

  “Let me put it this way. Were I a defense attorney, I’d be ecstatic to see Hugh Decker as a prosecution witness.”

  I stopped the car, hunching forward over the steering wheel, linking the fingers of both hands. “Most of the time, something breaks for us. Some insignificant little thing pops its head up. If we stay receptive, maybe we see it.” I shrugged philosophically. “We’re coming at this thing from several directions. We keep at it, and something will break.”

  The young lady was an easy passenger to talk with—well, to. She didn’t blab pointless theories, or push an opinion based on nothing. She appeared to absorb, but who knew when she would factor everything out.

  “I tell you what,” I said, looking for a rise of some sort—a comment, an impression, something from behind those inscrutable black eyes that had been watching us all day. “Tell me what happened, and you’ll make detective sergeant by tomorrow morning.”

  She smiled, a delightful expression that I’d learned she held in deep reserve. The smile didn’t stay long enough, but faded as her eyebrows lowered in a frown. “I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  I laughed. “Well, hell. I can come up with that much, Deputy Reyes. In case you hadn’t noticed, you’re going to end up clocking a dozen hours today if we don’t knock off. That happens once in a great while—normally, our days are full of astounding boredom, and you’ll have to develop your own system for not going insane.” I pulled the car into reverse. “But in a case like this, we make hay when we can. The longer we dawdle around, the greater the odds that the killer will walk.”

  The LTD idled down Hutton…all right, dawdled. As far as I was concerned, the day was yet young. “I have a stop or two I want to make, but I’ll be happy to drop you off at the office. “It’s your call.”

  “You had mentioned coming up with a schedule for me…”

  “Ah. I did. And of course, I haven’t gotten around to it. Mañana isn’t our motto for nothing, my friend.” I watched Hutton creep by. “I’d like you to start out working dispatch days for a couple of shifts. You need to see how the organization works—or doesn’t, as the case may be. Meet people, learn were the copier is, how the files work, how we manage the lock-up…just the whole ball of wax. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not a huge department.” I shrugged. “So in about twenty minutes, you’ll know all there is to know. Then we’ll swing you around to four to midnight, and then midnight to eight. And then you’ll dispatch, probably midnight to eight, with Ernie Wheeler looking over your shoulder. Fair enough?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “So what are your druthers for the rest of the afternoon? I plan to keep slugging along, and you’re welcome to stick it out to the bitter end. I want to talk with the widow again, and then I’ll need to refuel. That’s the schedule.”

  “I’m fine, sir. I have a couple of things I need to get done before f
ive, but otherwise, I’d like to see where all this is heading.”

  I grinned. “So would I. Let’s sit down with Marilyn Zipoli for a few minutes.” I rested my hand on the personnel folder. “She’s not going to be thrilled with any of this.”

  “It’s hard to imagine that she wouldn’t know about the drinking.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Marilyn Zipoli did not want to talk with us. We were a hundred yards away when she saw our county car approaching, and she wrapped up her sidewalk conversation with another woman abruptly. I saw her reach out a hand and touch her companion on the elbow, turning at the same time toward the house as if she’d heard the telephone imperative. The other woman said something, and morphed Marilyn’s touch into a hug. They separated, and the woman crossed the street, heading for the house where the old yellow dog guarded the patch of shade by the garage. With an economy of motion, the woman stooped to pick up something on the sidewalk that offended her sense of tidiness, and entered the house.

  Marilyn knew we were approaching—you can’t disguise the squat, light-bar-decorated profile of a police car, after all. And she could guess that we might want to talk with her. Perhaps she even had a question or two for me. But by the time we pulled to a stop at the curb, it seemed to me that the neighborhood had drawn in on itself.

  If Marilyn Zipoli was in no mood to deal with us, I can’t say that I blamed her. We’d chosen a good time—the curb was empty of visitors, with only the daughter’s little Honda in the driveway. Marilyn would be starting to feel the weight of the day, and the dreaded approach of another sleepless night. We wouldn’t help bringing in all the dirt.

  There were a myriad ways to offend her by being overly blunt or pushy—or even obsequious. We didn’t need a hostile widow on our hands.

  I fussed with junk that littered my rolling office, and Estelle Reyes waited patiently. Her hand had strayed to the door handle, though, so I knew that she waited.

  “I’d be willing to bet a week’s pay that Marilyn Zipoli is inside, watching us through the curtains,” I said. “We want her to think that there’s something specific that we’re after, something specific that you and I have to discuss before getting out of the car. If there’s some reason, however obscure, that our visit might put her on edge, we want to add to that tension.” I smiled at my companion. “However innocently. What we don’t want is for her to clam up. We don’t want to make an enemy of her. That doesn’t accomplish anything. All it does is force us to take the long way around.”

  “And if she’s completely innocent of any…” Estelle paused, searching for just the right word. “Any nefarious designs, then what?”

  I chuckled. “‘Nefarious designs.’ I like that. Estelle, I have every confidence that Marilyn Zipoli had nothing to do with her husband’s death. She didn’t hire a hit man. If we’d found him slumped in his truck, a bullet behind the ear, maybe I’d think differently. But not this way. So, that being the case…if everything in the Zipoli household is pure as the driven snow…then she isn’t watching us through the curtains at this very moment. She has no reason to avoid us.”

  With a vigorous pull on the steering wheel to help launch my mass upward off the soft seat and out of the car, I almost beat Ms. Reyes to the pavement. Almost. As I rounded the left front fender to join her on the sidewalk, I said, “You see?”

  “Yes, sir. She was at the south window.”

  “Unless their dog or cat stroked the curtain.”

  “A dog would be barking, and a cat wouldn’t bother.”

  I smiled at that. As I stepped up onto the first concrete riser leading to the front door, I glanced at Estelle again. “It’s nice to be as welcome as the plague.” I pushed the doorbell, and heard no response from inside. I pushed it again, and that time heard footsteps padding toward us.

  Marilyn opened the door wide, the way folks used to living in a small town do, rather than to the narrow little security slit favored by folks nervous about home invasions.

  “Oh, hi.” She didn’t add the it’s only you that her tone implied. She gave the screen door a push, enough for me to grab it easily. “Come on in. I’m right in the middle…” She waved a loose-wristed hand by way of explanation.

  “We’re sorry to intrude,” I said.

  “You do what you have to do, sheriff. I’m trying to deal with things that I just don’t understand. Even my know-it-all neighbor across the street isn’t of any help.” She left us in the foyer with that comment, and walked off toward the living room. We could follow or not—who the hell cared. I carried Larry Zipoli’s personnel folder, his records now encapsulated in one of our large manila envelopes—the legal kind with the string that winds around the closure doohickey. I hadn’t decided how much to show Marilyn, if any.

  Marilyn walked across to the impressive dining room table, a six place set now pressed into service as a cluttered office. She picked up a sheaf of papers and held them out to me. Even without my glasses, I could read the black, somber logo for Salazar and Sons—the oldest and now only funeral home in Posadas. The page included an unctuous paragraph or two about final parting, perfect ceremony, and lots of talk about “loved ones” and “memories.” Nowhere did it discuss the ramifications of having a hole blown through one’s skull while sitting in a county road grader. The rest of the document appeared to be a contract and listing of services—the cold, hard economics of death.

  “In the first place,” she said, and I could hear the anger in her tone, “I’ve known Art Salazar for years, sheriff. Just years. I’ve handled his accounts at the bank, I’ve…well, you know. This is a small town. Everybody knows everybody.”

  She picked up another folded document and handed it to me. Estate Planning and You was printed on top. The glossy folder was a handy guide for preplanning the disposition of a body when its owner had no further use for it. Inside were several photos meant, I suppose, to be soothing. I was just too cynical to understand why photos of wooded glades with muted sunlight should make me feel better about shuffling off my mortal coil, or the coils of those nearest and dearest to me. Would my relatives head for the forest to chat with my ghost?

  “Maybe you can explain this to me,” the widow said. “If you looked at that, what would you think?”

  I skimmed the preplanning folder. Simple questions with blanks thoughtfully provided for the answers outlined the mortal one’s wishes, and in this case, it appeared that Larry Zipoli himself had filled in the answers. “None,” his blocky printing declared under preferred religious services. Cremation was checked, with ashes returned to family. Perhaps Larry wanted to rest on the mantle, his ashes participating in family gatherings. After preferred memorial service, he’d printed, a bit impatiently, “Whatever they want to do. Won’t matter to me.” What a touching sentiment.

  The third page of the folder nailed the nitty-gritty of this process. Total cost estimated for services had prompted a flurry of printing, the ball-point pen pressed hard into the heavy stock paper. “Cremation services, $679.95.” He’d checked the cost somewhere, or been offered a bid. Below that, he’d added, just in case there might be some shade of misunderstanding in the grief of the moment, “No other services. No embalming. No good wood to be wasted. No broke ground. No memorial stone no where.”

  No, no, no. Larry Zipoli made it clear—when it’s over, it’s over. He had signed and dated it two years previously. End of argument.

  “He knew his mind,” I said gently. That didn’t assuage Marilyn much. The anger still flamed her cheeks, at the same time simmering the tears that gathered. “You were okay with this?”

  “We talked about it back when Larry was facing his gall-bladder surgery, sheriff. We both knew how dangerous that can be, especially with someone whose weight is over the top like Larry’s was. I got the forms from Mr. Salazar, and managed to corral Larry long enough so he would jot down some answers.”
She held up a hand. “I know, I know. It’s hard to take something like this seriously. And I can tell you right up front, Larry didn’t take it very seriously. But the whole process gave him the willies. I know that. The last thing he wanted was to be embalmed, Sheriff. He thought that was one of the most repulsive, pointless things.”

  “Most of us don’t,” I said. “Take it seriously, I mean. We leave relatives to clean up after us.”

  “And what a mess.” She waved the document. “And none of this makes it any easier. Look, I know that he didn’t want anything to do with a church service, or with any of that stuff. That’s what he called it. ‘Any of that stuff.’ Larry wanted his ashes scattered,” she said. “You know what all this reminds me of?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Remember that article about the car dealership up north? They’d take the customer’s car keys—the keys for the trade in? They’d take them and not return them until the sale was made. Make the customer a captive audience. That’s what this reminds me of. They have my husband’s…” she paused and shook out a ragged sigh. “They have my husband’s body because that’s where the hospital sent it.”

  “I’m sure Art will work with you.”

  “Yes, he will.” The determination in Marilyn’s voice was hard. “And that’s what I’ll do. Larry loved the Butte, so that’s where he’ll go.” She referred to Elephant Butte, the enormous lake that puddled the Rio Grande over by Truth or Consequences.

  “Fair enough.” I handed the preplan back to her. I noticed that it had been signed by her husband in November two years previous. I’ve always thought of November as a dark month—an appropriate time of the year for such sober thoughts. Things have to be damn sober to sit down and preplan the end of days.

  Marilyn didn’t bother wiping away the tears that coursed down her face. I could remember my own grandmother, a spare, hard-limbed old lady, saying to me after my childish blubbering was over and I had subsided into silent, persistent tears, “Billy, your eyes be leakin’.” That was the case with Marilyn this time. No heaved sighs, no shaking voice, no huffing as she tried to catch her breath. Just leaking eyes.