One Perfect Shot

by Steven F Havill

  Marilyn handed me the letter, the contract thoughtfully prepared by Salazar and Sons. “Now, this is what reminds me of the car dealer, Sheriff.”

  Cutting to the chase, I flipped to the last page. Total Services included an impressive figure well over twelve thousand dollars, including a 10C Sealtite coffin for more than four grand. A plot in Posadas Memorial Park took another chunk, with various other charges tacked on for this and that…even grave closure for $645.00. I was sure that Louis Trenton, who operated the backhoe at the cemetery, didn’t pocket that.

  “Now,” Marilyn said again. “You’re a detective. You tell me how we get from this,” and she shook the preplanning folder sharply, “to that.” She waited expectantly.

  “Did you discuss this with Salazars?” None of this was within my province as undersheriff of Posadas County, but if Marilyn churned up enough rage at Art Salazar to shoot him through the eyebrow, it would be.

  “Discuss? No, I didn’t discuss it.” This time, she sucked in a deep breath. “The body was taken to Salazar’s after the PM, sheriff. Directly from the hospital. They asked, and I said, of course. Salazar’s. Where else? They’re the only game in town. Now, I know that I have to pay for that transportation, and I’m sure I’ll be stuck for some outrageous figure that Larry’s insurance won’t pay. I called Salazar’s to make an appointment to talk about arrangements, but Mr. Salazar said it would be easier for him to put together a preliminary package—that’s what he called it—and bring it over to the house. I could look through it, and let him know. I mean, what’s he doing…testing the waters?”

  “Don’t people usually have to select a coffin and stuff like that?”

  “Oh,” and she turned to glare at the table. “There’s another brochure about them, too. Anyway, Mr. Salazar came to the house a little while ago and left this for me. Does he really think I’ll agree to this?”

  “I don’t know what he thinks,” I said. “As a businessman, I suppose it’s to his advantage to encourage some rethinking of the final process.”

  Marilyn glared at me—well, through me—for a moment. Her gaze shifted to regard the silent Estelle Reyes, and what that young lady thought was anyone’s guess.

  “I want what Larry wanted,” Marilyn said softly. “That’s all. It has nothing to do with money at this point. I don’t happen to have ten or twelve thousand dollars lying around the house, but I suppose I could get it. That’s not the point. I know what Larry wanted. You know, I don’t think anyone is ever prepared for this kind of earthquake, sheriff. None of us are going to die until we’re a hundred and two. But that preplanning thing was serious. What he put on that form is what he wanted. Only that.”

  “So that’s what he gets,” I said. “It’s as simple as Nicky Chavez here in Posadas trying his best to sell you a car. You want the basic model, but it’s to his advantage to show you the luxury model, making you think that you’ll feel better in the long run.”

  “Will I? Will I feel better?”

  “No. You’re not going to feel better for a very long time.”

  Her face softened, and she took a moment to mop up the tears. “I’ve always liked talking with you,” she said. “The unvarnished truth. You went through this with your wife, didn’t you.”

  “Yes.” Accident or crime, no matter how the loss occurs, the questions linger.

  She waited for a second or two to see if I’d elaborate, and when I stuck with unvarnished, she added, “They make me feel as if I’m somehow faulting my husband’s memory by following his wishes.” Marilyn laughed forlornly. “What the hell,” she whispered and turned her back to us, still mopping her eyes. “You didn’t stop by to listen to all my woes. What do you need to know?” She nodded at the envelope I held but didn’t ask or reach for it. “The neighbors all have questions that they’re afraid to ask. I can see it on their faces.”

  I needed to know who fired the bullet through Larry Zipoli’s skull, but that didn’t seem an appropriate question just then.

  Chapter Twenty

  “Would you like to sit down?” With a last disgusted look at the colorful and soothing brochures from Salazar and Sons, Marilyn Zipoli gestured toward the living room set—one of those matched things that sits empty most of the time waiting for a guest. I settled on the sofa and heard the wheeze of escaping air, I hoped from the cushion. Estelle settled like a graceful feather in one of the singles while Marilyn tried to make herself comfortable on the opposite end of the sofa, hands clasped in her lap.

  “What have you found out?” There was no eagerness in her question, just resignation.

  “We’re closing in on a scenario,” I said. Marilyn’s eyebrows twitched. “We have a witness or two who heard the shot, and who might have seen something.”

  “Something.”

  “And that’s about as concretely vague as I can be just now.” I held both hands out palm to palm, forearm holding the envelope on my thigh. “I spoke with Jim Raught earlier.” She didn’t respond. “I have to tell you, Marilyn, nothing in his attitude, nothing he said, leads me to believe that he might have anything to do with your husband’s death. His version of the fence deal was that the whole thing was petty.”

  She drew in a long, slow breath.

  “And it is Virginia Creeper, by the way.”

  “Oh, I know it is,” she snapped. “For heaven’s sakes.”

  “What actually happened with the fence?”

  “What do you mean, what actually happened?”

  “You said they argued over it, that Raught pulled it out of the ground. That eventually he threw it in the dumpster out in the alley. That’s not what he said.”

  “The fence, the fence…” She looked heavenward.

  “So…what’s the deal?”

  There seemed to be something fascinating about the wadded up tissue in her hand, since that’s what she stared at for a long moment. “I would think it would be more important to find my husband’s killer than to worry about a stupid little fence.”

  “Amen to that. We spent a good chunk of time interviewing Jim Raught based on what you told us, Marilyn. And you know as well as I do that it isn’t the fence that concerns us. If the two gentlemen had called us to settle a property line dispute, we would have done so. A deputy would have talked with them both, and arbitrated a solution.” I smiled a little. “Well, in the best of all possible worlds, that’s what would happen. So the fence doesn’t worry me. I’m interested in arguments that your husband might have had that could have led to this tragedy. Whether it’s fences, or Virginia Creeper, or tiffs with the boss at work—whatever it might be, it’s arguments that escalate that interest us.”

  “You’ve talked with Tony Pino?” She jumped at that opening to change the subject.

  “Sure.”

  “And?”

  “That’s one of the reasons we dropped by, Marilyn.” I rested my hand on the envelope. “Were you aware that your husband had nearly a dozen written reprimands for drinking on the job?” The soft friction of Estelle’s pencil on her notepad seemed inordinately loud in the silence that followed.

  “I don’t understand how that’s at issue,” she said. “Are you saying that my husband argued with Tony?”

  “It isn’t at issue,” I replied. “It’s just an unpleasant fact, Marilyn. The evidence suggests that it was a common thing for your husband to take alcohol to work in his lunch cooler. Now, why his boss chose to do nothing about it over the years…well, that’s another question.”

  She glared at me then, and as she worked to formulate either question or retort, I added, “A dozen written reprimands in the past few years, Marilyn. Several property damage accidents with county equipment. No one injured, but…”

  “Mr. Gastner, do you seriously think…I mean seriously… that someone shot my husband because he’s an alcoholic?”

&
nbsp; “At this point, I’m not thinking anything.”

  That didn’t sound just right, and sure enough, Marilyn actually laughed. “Oh, brother. This is the best we can do?”

  “I’m open to suggestions, Marilyn. Was your husband involved in anything that might have led to…”

  “Look,” she interrupted, “my husband wasn’t a closet gambler or something like that. He didn’t associate with loan sharks. He didn’t fence stolen cars. He wasn’t into extortion, or blackmail, or whatever else.” She had started to wind down, and the tears started to flow again. “I mean, isn’t that the usual list? Isn’t that what Hollywood has us believe? He wasn’t having an affair, I wasn’t having one, it was just life as usual. He went to work every day, and so did I. The kids are all out of the nest, and fighting their own battles now. So here we are.”

  “He argued with the neighbor?”

  Marilyn’s grimace was immediate. “Just forget about that,” she said. “Just forget about it. I’m sorry I ever mentioned it.”

  “That’s hard to do, Marilyn. If there was friction there…”

  “There wasn’t.”

  I looked at her in silence for a few seconds.

  “So, you made that up? Is that the deal? Why would you do that?” I could guess some reasons, but Marilyn Zipoli just blushed, a nice, deep, guilty crimson, and that was answer enough. “Did you ever have occasion…” I hesitated, realizing that I sounded like a goddamn lawyer launching into his cross examination. What the hell. “Did you have occasion to talk with Jim Raught during the past few weeks? You know, neighbor to neighbor sort of thing?”

  “No.”

  “Not just in passing, maybe out on the sidewalk?”

  “No. “

  I hesitated for a fraction of a second. “You know, Jim Raught said that a number of years ago, you showed some interest in him…at least what he interpreted as interest.” I saw her eyes go steely and guarded at my return to what was obviously a sore subject, but she said nothing, and that intrigued me. That doorway was still firmly closed and locked.

  “Did you folks ever share backyard barbecues? Pool parties? Evenings in front of the hibachi?”

  “It’s not that kind of neighborhood, sheriff.” She dabbed at her eyes. “At least, not those kinds of neighbors.”

  “So you really didn’t know Jim Raught all that well…or any of the neighbors, for that matter.”

  “Well, as in quiet evenings with a glass of wine in front of the fire? No. Not even getting together for a weekend barbecue. Certainly not a nighttime tryst at the swimming pool under the hibiscus, if that’s what you’re thinking.” Her smile was thin, and entirely without humor.

  If there ever had been interest between Marilyn Zipoli and Jim Raught, I wondered who had done the refusing. At least she admitted to knowing about the pool.

  “We see a lot of the neighbor kids,” she added. “There’s always an eager gang to go skiing or fishing, that sort of thing.”

  “You do that fairly often?”

  “We spent a lot of time over at the Butte, sheriff. Like I said, that was Larry’s favorite place, other than in front of the television, watching professional wrestling or boxing. Or golf. Or NASCAR. Or football.”

  “And yours?”

  That drew her up short. “Elephant Butte is not my choice of paradise. Let me just put it that way. No matter what I do, I end up with a sunburn. I could spend the entire weekend in a sleeping bag, zipped toe to head. I’d still come home burned.”

  “But Larry loved it.”

  “Oh, certainly. That big ski boat out in the driveway? That was his passion. He’d be the first to tell you that it’s got a 375 horsepower Corvette engine in it. He could pull four skiers at once.”

  “Kids would like that.”

  “Or one kid at a time, so fast that it brought out the worried mom in me. One of my nightmares was going to the Butte with five kids and coming home with four. Larry didn’t worry about it. I mean, the Pasquale youngster was going to try barefoot next time we went out, if you can imagine.”

  “You’re kidding. Barefoot water skiing?”

  “He was almost there.” Marilyn got up and walked to the bookshelf by the gas fireplace—a bookshelf that included just about everything but books. She retrieved one of those plastic flip-albums, and passed quickly through the pages until she found the photo she wanted.

  Taken from the boat, it was crisply focused, like something out of a sporting magazine. The yellow ski rope drew the eye back to the skier, padded in his bright vest-preserver, balanced on the slalom ski while his bare left foot cut a narrow wake of its own.

  I whistled softly and passed the photo across to Estelle Reyes.

  “Who’s the youngster?” I asked, even though I knew damn well who it was.

  “That’s the Pasquale boy. Tommy? His mom works at the dry cleaners? They live just up the street.”

  I drew out my notebook and found a blank page. “The kids who hang around most of the time. I’d like to have their names.”

  “They would have nothing to do with any of this…this horror. They couldn’t.”

  “I don’t doubt that, Marilyn. But one of them might give us a doorway. One of them might have seen something, or heard talk. You never know.”

  “A doorway? To what? I don’t understand where any of this is going.”

  “Look, Marilyn,” I sighed. “It’s this painfully simple. Someone shot Larry while he was sitting in his road grader, engine idling. If there was an argument, there was no sign of it. Larry never had a chance to duck, to dive for cover, to swerve out of the way. I want the son-of-a-bitch who fired that shot. Larry might have had some faults, but he sure as hell didn’t deserve that. And right now, I’m frustrated as hell, because we have nothing that’s pointing the way. So we’re going to flounder around, talk with every soul in Posadas if we have to, until something breaks. That’s just what we do.”

  I held up a hand as she took a breath. “Let me tell you what I don’t think happened, Marilyn. I don’t think that some stranger from Lansing or Memphis or Dallas pulled off the interstate long enough to find a defenseless target to murder. I think the person who shot Larry Zipoli knew him. That’s my gut feeling.”

  She regarded the floor for a long time, idly touching the edge of the carpet with the toe of her white trainer. After a moment, her eyes shifted up to the envelope on my lap. “And that?”

  “Those are Larry’s personnel records from the county.”

  “You brought them to show me? Is there some purpose to all that?”

  “Actually,” and I lifted the envelope a little, “I didn’t want them out of my custody, Marilyn. I didn’t want to leave them in the car.”

  Her sidelong glance at that was skeptical.

  “How much did your husband drink at home?”

  “Altogether too much, sheriff. The most common image I have of my husband is him in his bermuda shorts and flip-flops, an old T-shirt, and a can or bottle in his hand.” It wasn’t an affectionate image, nor said that way.

  “Is this a recent thing?”

  “No.” She nodded at the folder of records. “And you know the answer to that.”

  “He took alcohol to work with him?”

  “Routinely.” That one word was soaked in bitterness, whether at the behavior itself, or her inability to do anything about it, I couldn’t tell.

  “You discussed the risks with him?”

  “Not successfully, obviously.”

  “No ultimatums?”

  “What’s that mean, sheriff?”

  “A decade-long problem never came to a head between the two of you? That’s hard to believe.”

  Although swimming through a steady flow of tears, Marilyn’s gaze was steady. She was really an attractive woman—as a
rticulate, neat, controlled and polished as her late husband had been a drunken slob. Perhaps Larry Zipoli had been neat and polished at one time, but for the past decade it had been an attraction of opposites, if any attraction still existed.

  “You talk with everyone,” she said quietly, and nodded at the envelope of records. “I’m sure you’ll eventually find out that I’ve filed for divorce. So yes—that’s the ultimatum. That’s where it all ends. Or so I supposed.”

  I’ve never been quite sure what to say to someone who announces that they’ve filed for divorce. “Congratulations. You’ve dumped the bastard!” Or, “Gosh, I’m so sorry…” Instead, I settled for the obvious. “You had informed Larry that you filed?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you explained why.”

  “Of course.”

  “How did he take it?”

  “He shrugged.” I saw a flash of pain cross her face as if she had been clinging to some small hope that the announcement of her intended action would sink through her husband’s fog.

  “No big fight?”

  “Larry likes to watch fights on television, sheriff. That’s the extent of that.” She had been watching Estelle Reyes as my young associate busied herself with talking notes. “You remind me of a court steno,” Marilyn said as the pen paused. It wasn’t a question, and Estelle didn’t rise to the prompt.

  “You’ve discussed the divorce with your daughter? With the other children?” I asked.

  “Maybe they’ll learn something from all this,” Marilyn nodded. “That’s the best we can hope for.”

  “The youngest…she’s how old now?”

  “Twenty-two. She’s into her first year with one of the big banks in Albuquerque.”

  “I wish her all the best.” I gave myself a few seconds to think, tapping my own notebook. “The neighborhood youngsters who knew your husband—we’ll talk with them.” A memory synapse popped somewhere in my head. “One witness recalls seeing your husband talking with a couple of kids over on one of the county roads yesterday morning. A couple of kids on bikes.”