“Anything at all. Any infraction that you noticed. Any unexplained absence from work. Drinking on the job. Money problems. Anything.”
“That’s all his business, don’t you think?”
I took a long, deep breath. “Tony, Larry was a county employee. He was killed while on the job, in the most cold-blooded way I can imagine. We’re going to find out who did this thing, believe it. And I’ll do whatever that takes, Tony. One of the first things I want to establish is a victim profile. Like anybody, I’m sure Larry Zipoli had his share of secrets.” I paused, then decided to hell with it. “In a homicide investigation, we’ll look for links where ever we can, including all the demons in the closet.”
Now that the word was out, floating around the office while Tony Pino tried to cope with it, I pushed him just a little. “We need to see his personnel records, Tony.”
“Marilyn don’t deserve any of this,” he said quietly.
“No, she doesn’t. And neither did Larry, for that matter. But some son-of-a-bitch doesn’t get to pull the trigger on him, and then just walk away. That isn’t going to happen.”
“Jesus.”
“If you want, we’ll go through the records here in the office, but it would be a whole lot better if we could take them over to our casa for a thorough review.”
“I just don’t think I have the authority to do that.”
“Well, you do, Tony. You’re the boss.”
“If I don’t give you the records, you’ll get a warrant?”
“Yes.”
“Then I guess that’s what should happen, Bill. You know, I hate to play hard-nosed about this, but we should probably follow all the rules.” He shrugged. “Maybe by tomorrow, then?”
I smiled good-naturedly, as if that was all just fine with me. “May I use your phone for just a moment?”
Tony reached out and shoved the multi-buttoned console toward me. “Any line that isn’t lit,” he said, and I nodded my thanks. T.C. Barnes in dispatch answered promptly.
“T.C.,” I said, “ask Sheriff Salcido to give me a call ASAP.” I gave him the Highway Department’s number. “If he’s out in the car, have him either call me, or stop by. If he’s out of reach somehow, have one of the deputies track him down.”
“I think he’s over off Hutton talking with folks,” Barnes said. “I’ll reach him somehow.”
“ASAP,” I reminded Barnes. “Send someone over there if you have to. I’ll be at the Highway Department until I hear from you.” I replaced the receiver gently.
“I hate to be a prick,” Tony said with a regretful shake of the head. “But I’d tell Eduardo the same thing. The personnel records are confidential…”
I held up a placating hand. “Not to worry, Tony. The sheriff is not going to argue with you. Either he or I will go for the warrant, and we’ll get all this moving on down the road.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Well, we do. We need to look at the records, the sooner the better. You’re absolutely correct, Tony. A warrant is the proper way to make sure all the i’s are crossed and the t’s dotted. That lets all of you off the hook.” He didn’t look amused or mollified.
“We can get all that stuff together for you,” he said again. “Whatever you want.” Somehow, Tony Pino didn’t understand that tomorrow wasn’t good enough.
“That’s okay. I’ll wait.” I didn’t bother to explain that I wanted the records untainted by helpful, editing hands. I’m sure he was smart enough to figure that out.
Chapter Twelve
I’d never earn that sunny smile from Bea Summers again. She struck me as one of those fine women who was a jewel until crossed, and then your name was forever engraved on her shit list. The eyes went glacial, the glances toward Estelle Reyes and me were fleeting and cold. Apparently the issue wasn’t so much an urgency to explore every avenue in the life of Larry Zipolil, even if that was what was necessary to find out who killed him. But nobody likes to be strong-armed. The gray filing cabinet that held the personnel records was their turf, not mine. Bea Summers wanted me to know that.
My hand-held radio squawked, and I pulled it off my belt. “I’ll take it outside,” I said to Estelle, and she understood and settled into one of the gray metal chairs just inside the office counter. I didn’t mind her overhearing my conversation, but I also wanted her eyes glued to those filing cabinets during my absence. Not that I didn’t trust Bea or Tony, of course. But turf is turf.
“Go ahead,” I said into the radio as soon as I cleared the door and switched to channel three, our most restricted, car-to-car frequency.
“Bill, what do you have going on over there?” Eduardo Salcido’s tone was its usual sing-song, even over the radio waves.
“We’re going to need to look through Larry Zipoli’s personnel records, Eduardo. “ Despite the restricted radio channel, I didn’t want to go into details of our discovery in Larry’s truck. “Can you talk a warrant out of Judge Smith?”
“Tony won’t give you the records?”
“Reluctantly, at best. I don’t want to argue with him and make an enemy. He’ll feel better with paper. So will the DA when all is said and done.”
“You want that now?”
I chuckled. “Yes. I don’t want there to be an opportunity for anything to go missing, Eduardo.”
“Oh, they’re not going to do that.”
You gentle old soul, I thought. “When you drop the warrant off, I’ll show you something interesting,” I said, adding some additional bait so he didn’t sink into mañana land.
The sheriff had his thumb on the transmit button quickly enough that his sigh came through loud and clear. “Ten four, then. I’ll see what I can do.”
“Thanks. We’ll be waiting.”
Back inside, Bea Summers was trying to find something on her computer, and I leaned casually on the counter, watching. “Are most of the department’s records computerized now?” I asked, going for my most pleasant and innocuous tone.
“I wouldn’t trust these things with a birthday party invitation.” Bea’s tone was brittle, but she glanced my way and the corners of her mouth twitched. “We hard-copy everything, just like B.C.”
“Who’s B.C.?”
“Before Computers, sheriff.”
“Oh, well of course. We do too.”
“I should think so.”
Tony appeared from his office, hesitated, and then beckoned. “Let me talk to you for a minute, Bill,” he said, and his invitation was singular. Estelle heard it and stayed where she was.
Back in the office, Tony closed the door carefully and took his time settling back in his chair.
“You reached the sheriff?”
“I did. He’s on his way, so we’re all set.” Whether the lugubrious Judge Everett Smith would get his ass in gear was another issue.
Tony fell silent, and I let him think uninterrupted.
“Look, Bill, we’ve known each other a long time.”
“We have indeed.”
“This is just between you and me, now.”
I held up a hand. “I’m here in an official capacity, Tony. If something you tell me has a bearing on this particular case, that information will go into the hopper along with everything else. You need to understand that.”
“Shit, man, I know all that. I’m just asking that you keep this under your hat. That’s all.” Ask me once, no. Ask me twice, yes? My kids used to play that game, and it didn’t work then, either.
“I understand.” I smiled sympathetically. “What I’m telling you is that any information we gain will be used as we see fit. You’re just going to have to trust my judgment.”
He signed and regarded his desk blotter.
“Look, Larry had his share of troubles, you know? Now, I don’t know everything, but I know a little. Money’s tight for them.”
I nodded. On an equipment operator’s salary, even coupled with a bank cashier’s wages, a nice house, nice family, nice boat, nice truck and camper ate up a budget. An
d that was just if all those nice things sat unused. A weekend trip to Elephant Butte to enjoy fishing, camping, and water skiing took another big chunk.
“You know what I think?” Tony asked rhetorically. “I think Larry was maxed out.”
“You mean money-wise.”
Tony nodded. “You know, last week, he won five bucks in that scratch-off lottery? First thing he did was buy ten more tickets.” He smiled ruefully. “None of them were winners, so he’s further in the hole than before.”
Money troubles that can lead to depression can deepen to suicide, but Larry Zipoli hadn’t offed himself from eighty yards away. “He drinks a lot? Sometimes that can really screw things up.”
“I think so. No,” and he waved a hand impatiently. “I know so. He thinks those damn cigars of his hide it, you know. Well, they don’t.”
“He drank on the job?”
Tony reared back in his chair and hooked his hands behind his head. He gazed at the water stains on the ceiling tiles for a few seconds while he made up his mind. “Yeah, Bill. Couple of times.”
“A couple?” The cooler left in the pickup cab didn’t suggest a couple.
“’Look,’ I told Larry, ‘look, man, you can’t be doin’ this. You can’t be takin’ the booze with you on the job.’” Tony’s hands waved in frustration. “He’d say, ‘Yeah, yeah. I not doin’ that.’ But he was, Bill. He was. And you know, I got to protect the department. So that’s what you’re going to find in the files.
“I wrote him up a bunch of times. The last time was just a week ago. Something like that. I said, ‘One more time, Larry. One more, and we got to let you go.’ And I meant it, too.”
I didn’t believe that for a second.
Tony shook his head sadly. “Last week, over on Nineteen, he hooked the blade on the end of a culvert. He never would a done that before. Took us the rest of the morning to fix what he done. And yeah. I wrote him up.”
I hadn’t taken any notes, hadn’t had a tape recorder running, and apparently Tony Pino took some comfort in that. “So what now?”
“Just what I said before, Tony. We see what comes out of all this. There’s three routes this can take.” I held up two fingers. “One, his death is an unfortunate, unthinking, careless accident. Somebody let fly from across the way, and Larry was sitting in the wrong place at the wrong time. Two, it was a deliberate act of vandalism, and maybe the shooter didn‘t know Larry was sitting in the machine. The angle of the sun, all that.” I took a deep breath and held up the third finger. “And three, someone shot Larry Zipoli deliberately. One shot.”
“Who would do a thing like that?”
“I have no idea. If I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here, enjoying your hospitality.”
“All this drinking business…that comes out, it’s going to be hard on Marilyn, you know.”
“Of course. Right now, it’s anyone’s guess whether anything about Larry’s personal life is connected to his death.”
Tony shook his head and expelled a long, heart-felt sigh. “I sure wouldn’t want your job right now.”
“Sometimes I don’t want it either.”
His philosophical expression brightened. “The young lady you got riding with you…she’s a looker. She living out there with old Reuben?”
“Actually, I don’t know where she’s living.” I realized as I said that just how little I actually did know about Estelle Reyes. What was supposed to be a simple across-the-desk interview with a new hire had turned into something else, but I was okay with that. I was finding out far more about the young lady than any conversation would offer.
Despite the logistical problems of finding a judge and talking him into executing a warrant with short notice, Eduardo Salcido managed the challenge in less than an hour.
He didn’t exactly say, “I don’t want to know” when he delivered the warrant, but he didn’t get out of the car or offer to come inside and commiserate with Tony and Bea. “I got some things on the burner,” he said, and let it go at that. “What are you diggin’ up?”
“Larry was into the sauce, Eduardo. To the point he was carrying both beer and whiskey in his county truck.” I nodded across the bone yard at the orange Dodge.
The sheriff’s face scrunched up in genuine sadness. “What makes you think…” He hesitated and looked up at me with one eye comically closed. “So what’s the connection?”
“Damned if I know. But it’s something to follow up on. I want to see his files. Tony tells me that he wrote Larry up a time or two for drinking on the job. I want to see just how many times.”
“Why didn’t Tony just fire him?” Salcido asked in wonder. “What’s so hard about that? Well, don’t answer that…I know how hard it is.”
I straightened up. “It’s just somewhere we need to go, Eduardo. You never know.”
“No, you never do.” He nodded. “You do what you think is best, jefito. I got somebody over on Hutton who heard the shots, by the way.”
“Shots? Plural?”
“That’s the story. We got one neighbor who heard one shot, another who heard more.” He shrugged and pulled the car into gear. “We ask ten people, we’ll have ten stories. You know how that goes. Let me know when you’re back at the office.” A slow grin lit his heavy, dark features. “How’s our young lady doing?”
“Just fine. I’m impressed so far.”
Eduardo laughed gently. “Tongues are going to wag, the two of you driving around town.” He looked up at me. “But that’s good, no? Good exercise for those tongues. Maybe they’ll tell us something we need to know.”
“Thanks for this,” I said, rapping the warrant on the window sill.
The car started to drift backward, and then he spiked the brakes. “Bobby is up to something. I don’t know what. Something with a rifle.”
I made an umbrella in the air with both hands. “We’ll cover it all. Something will turn.”
“Talk to me later.” Eduardo nodded at the warrant. “Judge Smith said to be careful with that.”
A few minutes later, the heavy drawer of the security file glided open, and Bea Summers ran her hand over the tops of the folders. “Now exactly what did you want?” she asked pleasantly enough, but the implication was there: and nothing more.
“Larry Zipoli,” I said, but her hand had already stopped in the thin Z section. She pulled out his folder and laid it on top of the others. Her hand stayed there, flat and protective on top of the folder.
“I just don’t like this, sheriff,” she said.
“I don’t either.”
“Larry was a good man, Bill. A good man. And Marilyn is just a doll. They don’t deserve this.”
“I appreciate your sympathy, Bea.” I slipped the thick folder out from under her hand.
“That shouldn’t leave this office.”
I reached across to her desk and picked up the warrant and handed it to her. “You’ll find a paragraph in there that talks about taking into custody all pertinent materials and documents, blah, blah, blah. I’ll make sure it all comes back to you in one piece. Would you like a receipt?”
She took a few seconds to decide whether or not to huff. “No…I don’t think that’s necessary. I hope you have what you want now.”
“Me too. If not, we’ll be back. Thanks, Bea.” I turned to thank Tony, but he’d disappeared into his office and closed the door behind him.
Despite sounding like a soft-spined schmoo, Tony Pino had not been unaware that there was a problem with Larry Zipoli. He’d reprimanded Larry Zipoli formally five years before for the first time, including a letter in his file that forbade possession of open alcoholic containers at any time on or in county property or county vehicles. It appeared that incident had followed a citizen’s complaint that Larry had been slow to move his machine out of the way so the motorist could pass.
I had no intention of sitting in the car, pouring through the file while the hot sun baked us through the county car’s untinted glass, but a quick look was enough to sat
isfy my immediate curiosity.
“We go through this one word at a time at our leisure,” I explained to Estelle, who had made no comment after we left the Highway Department offices. “I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I don’t know if there’s anything in this file that might help. It’s a slow, plodding process.” I grinned. “Not like the movies. We spread it all out on the table and comb through. I’ll welcome any flashes of inspiration or intuition.”
She didn’t respond to that, and I glanced over at her as we left the county bone yard. “We’re going to do that eventually, but my next stop is over at Jim Raught’s. I want to see if there’s any mention of a complaint involving him in Larry’s folder.” She made no comment, but at least I earned a nod out of her.
“So tell me what you think,” I prompted. “You’ve hiked around in the hot sun, helped collect garbage, sat in the corner of an office for an hour and listened to some good folks worrying about protecting themselves…that’s about as good as it gets in this line of work.”
“People’s motives are interesting,” the young lady said carefully, but her smile was warm.
“Yes, they are.” I wondered if we would have had to bother with a warrant if I had let this new kid talk to Bea or Tony first.
Chapter Thirteen
I glanced without much interest at Jim Raught’s front yard as I walked by, then paused for a second look, taking in details that hadn’t been apparent during my earlier visit. The collection of cacti was impressive enough that no one would take shortcuts across his yard. The plants were content and well fed, the beavertails flush and fat, the spines on the cholla long and lethal. Near the door, Raught had several species that I’d never seen growing wild in Posadas County-surely visitors from much farther south.
The house itself was brick with window frames painted turquoise to high-light the red in the bricks. The off-white metal roof was a neat cap, avoiding the maintenance that the roasting sun demanded from composite shingles. A hail storm must have sounded interesting.
I had given Estelle Reyes a sketchy background briefing that included Marilyn Zipoli’s complaints, and the young lady was doing a good job inventorying the property as we approached. The general character of the street first, then eyes roaming over Jim Raught’s neat but spiny yard, assessing and absorbing. When she’d read her forensic text book, she’d paid attention to the paragraph that suggested general to specific as a modus operandi. Think the big picture, then go microscopic.
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