One Perfect Shot

by Steven F Havill

  “That could be anyone.”

  “Let’s start with the usual gang, then. The youngsters who came and went, the kids who tagged along on trips to the Butte. You mentioned Tommy Pasquale…who else?”

  She ticked them off on her fingers. Matt Singer, Mo Arnett, Louie Zamora, Erik Zapia, Jason Packard. “Those are the ones who often go with us to the Butte,” she said. “Jason and Louie come over to work on the boat. And sometimes Mo Arnett. Mo’s folks are sort of hesitant to let him go to the lake with us, but he comes with us once in a while. Most of the time he seems to be with Jason. Maybe that’s who you saw…both Jason and Tommy Pasquale ride bikes all over hell’s half acre.” She waited until I’d finished jotting down the names.

  “They’re nice kids, sheriff.” She wiped her eyes. “If there’s anything left that I loved about my husband, it’s that. He spent time with them, more money than we could afford. I mean, you should see their faces when he allowed them behind the wheel of that boat. Just…” and she made a blossoming gesture with both hands. A drunk with a high-powered boat full of impressionable teenagers—just goddamn laudatory, I thought. Mo Arnett’s parents had good reason for their reservation.

  Marilyn obviously caught a fleeting expression that I wasn’t able to poker face.

  “Did your husband ever provide alcoholic beverages to any of these kids? During the trips to the Butte, or otherwise?”

  Marilyn hesitated, an answer in itself. If Marilyn knew that her husband dispensed alcohol on those lake outings, that made her an accessory.

  “That’s why the divorce,” she said flatly.

  “He did this on more than one occasion?”

  “Twice that I know of. He thought I didn’t notice. But believe me, sheriff, you can’t hide the smell. And the kids can’t hide the guilty look.”

  “You confronted Larry about that?”

  “Not in front of the kids. But when we got home, I tried to talk with him.” The pained smile returned. “It’s hard to compete with fifty-two inch projection TV and the interminable sports channels, sheriff.”

  “But you have a clear understanding of the risks that your husband was taking.” Park police would have had a ball with the Zipoli clan—operation of a watercraft while under the influence, contribution to delinquency, endangering the welfare of a child, even the catchall of child abuse when prosecutors ran out of other ideas. And one thing was certain—with all that and the attendant publicity, Tony Pino might bury his head in the sand, but Marilyn Zipoli’s boss at Posadas State Bank sure as hell wouldn’t. Life as they knew it would grind to a painful halt.

  “Of course, Sheriff. Of course I did. ‘Look, my record’s clean,’ he’d say, meaning no formal DWI charges from the cops.” She nodded at the envelope. “I don’t call that clean.”

  A single rifle bullet had put an end to that whole messy scenario. It put an end to the agony of divorce proceedings, of dividing up house and chattel, even the nuisance of new addresses, new checks, new phone numbers. Marilyn Zipoli was vulnerable to all kinds of charges, and knew it.

  That seemed to be a good time to let her stew for a while, and she let us go without ever satisfying her curiosity about her husband’s personnel records. My guess was that she was beyond caring. I left a business card with her, in case something bubbled to the surface that we needed to know.

  “I feel sorry for her,” Estelle Reyes said as we settled into the car. The comment, a rare, unprompted observation, earned a perfunctory grunt from me.

  “She could have stepped into the middle of this mess at any time,” I said. “She didn’t need to let the snowball roll for years.” With the door wide open and the air conditioning turned up high, I finished with my log entry and keyed the mike. “PCS, three ten is ten-eight, Hutton and Sixth.”

  Dispatch acknowledged and I turned to look at Estelle. “What else strikes you?”

  “You just sort of cruised through the interview, sir. I enjoyed listening to that.”

  “Cruise. Well, that’s better than stumble or plod, I suppose.”

  “Earlier, when you said that you were going to talk with her again, I made up a list of questions,” Estelle said, and turned her notebook so I could imagine seeing the tiny writing that filled the pages. “I would have started with the first one and gone from each to each.”

  “A dim recollection reminds me that the police science textbooks say something about ‘controlling the interview.’”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And they’re absolutely correct.” I pulled the car into gear. “And one of the most important considerations is what we want the target’s attitude to be the next time we have to talk with her. If we want cooperation, if we want information, then the bludgeon has never been my favorite tool. That’s where the “control” comes in.”

  “It really doesn’t matter how long it takes, does it.”

  I looked at the young lady with surprise. “No, it doesn’t. If the target thinks that we’ve got all day to talk with her, that’s a good thing. For a couple of reasons, but mainly because she knows she can’t just wait us out.” I reached across and tapped the edge of her notebook. “So, you listened to us yakking away. What did you learn?”

  “Marilyn Zipoli is a most unhappy woman. I mean even before her husband’s death.”

  “Indeed she is. With good reason. And that ain’t rocket science, sweetheart. I want to hear astounding revelations and observations…things that crack the case before our very eyes.”

  “No matter what I imagine—even something as farfetched as Marilyn Zipoli’s secret lover killing her husband—none of it squares with what Deputy Torrez has worked out about the murder weapon, or what we saw out at the crime scene.”

  “Her ‘secret lover’?”

  “Everyone has secrets, sir.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I might not have been able to wear out my passenger, but I’d done a fair number on myself. I’d talked with nervous, apprehensive folks long enough that if I kept it up, I’d be next. What I really wanted was a dark hidey-hole where the phone wouldn’t ring, where I could growl and prowl and ruminate, sheltered from the blistering, late afternoon sunshine. I could never guarantee the phone unless I unplugged the damn thing, but I could hope. A good green chile burrito grande at the Don Juan de Oñate would provide fuel for the rumination, gas for the prowling and growling.

  Dispatch accepted my out-of-service announcement without comment. I noticed no particular eagerness on Estelle Reyes’ part to finish her day, but I figured that she had her own thinking to do, including instructions to return in the morning for the dayshift with dispatcher T.C. Barnes. She’d had a hell of an introduction to Posadas County affairs, and dispatch would be a good change-up. Barnes was steady, happily married to Ethel, a young lady whose old-fashioned name had always tickled me. She was the only Ethel I knew. The two Barnes youngsters, Kit and Paul, enjoyed school to the point where I actually had an autographed Paul Barnes fingerpainting on my office wall, created nearly a decade ago. I’m sure the little kid had confused me for someone else—Santa Claus, maybe, but what the hell. The painting was a splash of color in an otherwise monotonous institutional scheme.

  T.C. could be counted on to give the new hire a thorough orientation during his shift. He might not be entirely immune to having someone who looked like a damn movie star sitting at his elbow all day, but it would be a good test of his concentration.

  By the time I finished my dinner and headed home, comfortably overfed and feeling sleepy, the village had settled into the evening.

  Cruising under the street lights, I let the car barely idle along, ten, fifteen miles an hour on a four lane street that headed east, then took the intersection south on Grande. A handful of youngsters, all ready to face their first day of school, lounged in the parking lot of Portillo’s Handi-Way. If they were bored b
efore the first day, it was destined to be a long year. One of them glanced my way—Luis Fernandez, whose father Benny owned the Burger Heaven on Bustos—but the kid was far too cool to raise a hand in greeting or even recognition. Somewhere in that group of five teenagers there might be an interesting crumb of information, but at that moment I was too tired to pursue the opportunity.

  I wasn’t a fan of night lights. They played hell with my bifocals. With some relief, I headed south away from the commercial glitz of what passed for a downtown in Posadas, crossed under the interstate and a block or two south turned left onto Escondido Lane, then an immediate right after the Ranchero Mobile Home Park to Guadalupe Terrace. My own old adobe huddled secluded on five acres, nestled under a spread of old cottonwoods that blanketed out moon and starlight. The nearest streetlight was a single unit a hundred yards away over the trailer park’s driveway.

  Before getting out of 310, I found the house key so I wouldn’t have to fumble in the dark. Closing the car door gently so as not to awaken all the spirits, I stood for a moment with one hand on the front fender and listened to the night. Traffic on the interstate was never light, but in this secluded spot it was far enough away that the noise blended into meaningless background that my tinnitus had no trouble covering.

  At the trailer court, someone was being needlessly loud, and the voice drifted across, thankfully incomprehensible. I navigated the stone walkway around the garage by feel. The front door loomed in front of me, and I snapped on the tiny key-ring flashlight just long enough to find the keyhole.

  The heavy, hundred year old hand-carved door—once gracing the entrance of a now crumbled Mexican mission—yawned open on noiseless hinges, and as my left boot touched the saltillo tile of the foyer, the damn telephone welcomed me home.

  I didn’t have an answering machine, having long ago decided that talking to a detached, electronic, soulless voice was an affront. Eight rings later, it was still ruining the silence, and I made it to the kitchen without breaking my neck over obstructions.

  “Gastner.”

  A chuckle greeted that. “You always sound like you want to punch someone,” Sheriff Salcido said.

  “Not so, Eduardo. I just had a sumptuous dinner, the day wasn’t an entire waste, and I’m drowsy enough to imagine that, if not interrupted, I might manage some sleep. What’s up?”

  He laughed gently again. “Us old guys march to a different drummer, no?”

  “I’m too tired to march at all.”

  “It’s been a long day. What’s your impression of Reuben’s niece after this? Grandniece,” he corrected.

  “Sharp kid. Not blabby, which is a blessing. She has some good ideas, but I damn near had to pry ten words out of her. I’d still like to know the real reason that she wants to work for us. With her background, her grades, one of the big metro departments would snap her up. Maybe even the FBI. Certainly the INS or the Border Patrol.”

  “Not everybody wants grande,” Eduardo mused. “What you just said…I could ask the same thing of you, and look at where we are. Or me. Did I ever tell you that I was once offered the chief’s job in Veracruz?”

  “Is that a fact.”

  “Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had accepted.”

  “They’d have a chief who talked like a gringo.”

  “Ay, caramba,” he whispered. “I have to work on that.” In point of fact, Eduardo Salcido never had to worry about being mistaken for a gringo, even in downtown Mexico. “So…what’s tomorrow?”

  “I have Ms. Reyes spending the day with Barnes in dispatch. She needs to familiarize herself with the home turf—records, communications, the lockup, the whole ball of wax.”

  The sheriff made a little humming noise as if something in all that didn’t sound just right to him, but changed the subject without pursuing it.

  “What did you think about the Deckers’ story?”

  I leaned my rump against the counter and closed my eyes. “Hugh heard a single gun shot at three minutes after two. Seconds later, he saw someone, a single person, walking west along Highland toward a parked vehicle. Hugh thinks the person was carrying something, but can’t say what. He certainly couldn’t say that it was a rifle. Maybe a walking stick. He didn’t see Larry Zipoli, but saw the road grader.”

  “Three minutes after two,” Eduardo whispered. “That’s what he told me, too. Nice that he can be so exact.” He sounded skeptical. “Tony Pino called me, by the way.”

  “And?”

  “He wonders what’s going to happen to Zipoli’s personnel records.”

  “He does, does he?”

  Eduardo’s quiet chuckle followed that. “Our boy had trouble with the bottle, no?” Of course the sheriff knew.

  “That’s the understatement of the year, Eduardo. Larry Zipoli was a goddamn lush. Tony Pino should have fired his ass after the first incident ten years ago. Instead, Zipoli got a letter in his file. And more letters. And still more. What’s with that? You know Pino better than I do.”

  “He’s a soft touch, Jefito. Sometimes it’s hard.”

  “Pretty simple, I would think. ‘Take a hike.’ And then it’s over and done with.”

  “Nothing is ever that simple.”

  “So tell me what I’m missing, Sheriff. What makes it complicated.”

  Silence greeted that. I could hear the Salcidos’ television set faintly in the background. After a moment, rapid-fire Spanish followed as Eduardo only half covered the receiver. Juanita—I assume it was the sheriff’s wife who cuddled in his lap—replied with a burst of her own. That went back and forth for a few minutes, and I made my way to one of the kitchen stools, propping my elbows on the counter.

  Eventually Eduardo came back on the line, in English.

  “You know Tony’s sister?”

  “His sister?”

  “Well, he’s got seven of ’em, I think. But Efita?” Another string of Spanish conversation with Juanita followed that. “My wife says it’s not Efita.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  The gentle laugh was either aimed at me or maybe he was tickling Juanita. I felt like a goddamn voyeur.

  “Crystalita,” Eduardo said finally. “That’s who it was. Remember her?”

  “Not a clue.” Every once in a while I was surprised to discover that there were limits to what I knew about the folks of Posadas, New Mexico.

  “She almost drowned in the arroyo down behind María. Let’s see, I don’t know. It would have been maybe fifteen years ago. Maybe longer.”

  “Was I here then?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then it was more like eighteen years, Eduardo. Or longer.” I admit that I was racking my brains for that memory. I took a good deal of pleasure in knowing history, and even something as common as an arroyo flood in rural New Mexico should have rung a bell. I could lead a tour for arroyo fans. I could show them cuts in the prairie a dozen feet deep and four times wider that had been cut in one night by one of our characteristic frog stranglers.

  “Crystalita and her daughter.” I heard more Spanish in the background. “The daughter. That was Efita, and I remember that she was only four at the time. You know, Crystalita was just nineteen, too. She was engaged to marry Hernán Muñoz.”

  “Him, I remember,” I said. The Muñoz name was one of the ones engraved on the new veterans’ memorial in Pershing Park, one of the Posadas contributions to Vietnam. I’d attended the dedication of the new memorial, and spent a few minutes reading every name. That’s all it took to put some of the names into my selectively porous memory file. I could remember a name heard in passing a decade before, but not where I put my goddamn eye glasses.

  “You knew him?” Eduardo asked incredulously.

  “Just his name on the Pershing Memorial.” By this time, I was regretting not
turning on the coffee maker. Between Eduardo’s storytelling pace and my own sympathy for history, this narrative could go on for hours. There was a fresh pack of cigarettes up in the cabinet above the fridge, but I wasn’t that desperate yet.

  “So,” I prompted.

  “You know that big arroyo just east of the power line down that way? It runs down behind María, and takes that turn to go under the highway. That’s where Crystalita got caught. Dark, por dios it was dark that night, raining and thunder and lightning like I’ve never seen. Crystalita, she missed the little curve in the highway right there, then hit the bridge. That truck just catapulted, Bill. Down she went, and the water in the arroyo was already running high. Hijo, what a night.”

  “So she and the child drowned?”

  “No, but so close. That truck was wedged by the water, cab nosed down, the water comin’ up, the flood crushing that truck against the abutment. She couldn’t get the little girl out of the child seat, you know. The way the cab was tipped, with all the water…and dark,” Eduardo’s voice fell to a whisper. I could imagine his wife lying there on the sofa, eyes huge as she listened to the memory. “With the truck lights out, the only illumination,” and he damn made a melody out of those five syllables, “could have been the lightning, Jefito. Ay.” His sigh was huge.

  “The first driver to stop was Larry Zipoli, Bill. Just seconds later, on his way back home from I don’t remember where. And I don’t remember if he saw the truck’s lights go off the road, or what, but he stopped. First thing he does is slide down to the back of the truck. He sees it isn’t going to be long before maybe the water is going to dislodge it. He can’t reach either window, so he goes through the back. It’s one of those sliding deals, you know.”

  “So he gets ’em out,” I supplied.

  “He does. You know, Crystalita wasn’t very big. More child than a big woman. And the little girl, well, you know. She’s like a little rag doll. So Larry’s got one under each arm and there it goes. The water rips that truck right off the abutment, and they go under the bridge. How he saved them, nobody knows. A state trooper comes along and stops, and he finds Larry crouched on the concrete abutment just under the roadway, the water right at his knees. He’s still got the two girls, one under each arm, trying to move against the water. They found the truck a quarter mile downstream the next day. Just a ball of useless metal.”