“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?”
“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?”
“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 articulate, 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.”
“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, swe
etheart. 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.
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