Down went the head again, his voice muffled against the table’s mahogany veneer. “I didn’t see him.”
“You’ve said that. Why shoot at his road grader?”
Shrug.
“What did he ever do to you that prompted that kind of vandalism, Mo?” Vandalism. That word sounded goddamn odd in the context of that room at that moment. “You wanted to scare him?”
Shrug.
“I think we should take a short break,” Ruth Wayand observed. She was tired? She should have come with us to spend an interminable night and a worse morning in Arizona, fussing with paperwork and phone calls.
“Do you know Jason Packard, Mo?” I asked, ignoring Ruth’s suggestion.
“Yes, sir.”
“A friend of yours?”
Shrug.
“Did Mr. Zipoli encourage the two of you to fight at one point? On a bet?”
After a long hesitation during which Ruth played various tattoos with her pencil eraser until I shot an annoyed look at her, Mo murmured something.
“Say again, son?”
“Yes.”
“Yes, what?”
“He did that. Mr. Zipoli did. He loved the fights, and he thought it was a great joke, trying to get me and Jason to go around.”
“And you two guys fought for him?”
“No.”
“What did you do?”
“I left. I…I ran away.”
“And you were angry with Mr. Zipoli for that? Enough to punch holes in his road grader?”
Shrug, then Mo added, “That wasn’t the only time. He was always on my case.”
“In what way?”
“Just stuff.”
“Stuff like what?”
Shrug. Mo had that reply down pat.
“Was Jason willing to fight?”
“Sure. He’d get a dollar.”
“A dollar. That was the purse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re older than Jason, Mo. Bigger, too. But you wouldn’t do it?”
“No.” Probably a wise choice, I thought. Wiry, tough Jason would jangle Mo’s chains.
“Were you two friends before that? You and Jason?”
Shrug. “Sort of.”
“And after?”
That earned a shake of the head.
“Let’s take a short one,” I said. “Then we’ll go through this again.”
Joints cracked as five of us got to our feet. I beckoned to Ruth, and she, Sheriff Salcido, District Attorney Dan Schroeder, and Estelle Reyes followed me from the room, down the short hall and to my office. I made sure the door closed tightly behind us.
“Ruth, this is Estelle Reyes, a new hire,” I said, and didn’t bother explaining why a new hire would be stuck to this case like a burdock. A hell of a ride-along the girl was taking, and as far as I was concerned, she might as well stick to the end.
Mrs. Wayand was fiftyish, stout, and what euphemistically might be called plain. I knew her to be a powerful advocate of children without going all gooey on us, and I hadn’t seen any great wash of sympathy on her face during Mo’s initial interview. The young man deserved every consideration that the law would allow, but there was nothing the least bit cuddly about this kid. That he’d seen nothing wrong with fetching a rifle to use against someone because of some vague personal slight indicated to me that we were damn lucky to have Mo Arnett in custody after a single fatality. I wondered who the other four cartridges had been meant for. I didn’t believe for a moment that he had taken the rifle for a practice session.
“I see no chance that Judge Smith is going to let this go through as a juvenile case,” she said without preamble. “I mean, you folks might unearth something that might change my mind, but at this point? I don’t think so. He’ll be eighteen in just days. I think he’ll take the full ride.”
“He’ll be tried as an adult,” the district attorney said flatly, even though we all knew that decision wasn’t his to make. “I want one piece of information before I proceed, though. I want a perfect photograph of that road grader’s windshield, taken in situ, at the time of day in question. I want to see the reflection.” He smiled without humor. “You’ll get that for me?”
I nodded. “You bet. We have it photographed already from every direction, up, down, and sideways.”
“But at that precise moment when Mo fired? Do we know what the light conditions were?”
“Bright sunshine all day. But we don’t know the precise time yet.”
“But we will. Best guess, anyway. Maybe a sequence, taken every fifteen minutes starting at noon and continuing through the afternoon. That would be the way to do it.”
“We can do that.”
“I’ll bet dollars to donuts that this is going to go through as murder two, with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution thrown in as a kicker. But if it turns out there’s any chance at all that the kid could see the victim before pulling the trigger, then it’s a different ball game.”
We spent another two hours running Mo Arnett through the grinder, with Sheriff Salcido and the D.A. each taking a turn. If we expected a clear explanation, we were disappointed. I’m not convinced that Mo actually understood his own motives. He clearly hadn’t liked Larry Zipoli much, but joined in on some of the trips because that’s what the kids were doing. And after each trip, I guessed, Mo arrived home feeling just a touch humiliated…teased beyond friendship, the butt of jokes, an easy target.
At four o’clock, Maurice ‘Mo’ Arnett was arraigned before District Judge Everett Smith. His father attended the arraignment, his mother did not. Mark sat stony-faced through the whole thing, shaking his head in disgust each time his son answered one of the judge’s questions in that quiet, snuffling voice.
Mark Arnett obviously felt the public defender was entirely adequate, and the elderly fellow, Lucius Salazar, did his best. He didn’t have a lot to work with. The plea for the boy’s release into the custody of his parents fell on deaf ears. Judge Smith refused bail, leaving Mo as the county’s guest until after the Grand Jury deliberations. I wouldn’t have left Mo with his parents either.
The ball was now in the District Attorney’s court as he prepared his case, and our job was simple enough-provide Schroeder with whatever he asked for.
As we left Smith’s chambers, Estelle surprised the hell out of me by touching me on the elbow, obviously intent on initiating a conversation.
“I’ll be happy to shoot the photos for you, sir. We can get that done tomorrow.”
I smiled at her serious enthusiasm. “That would be wonderful, except for one thing,” I said, and saw one of those black eyebrows lift a fraction. “You can’t testify about the photos. Well, you can, but even old Lu Salazar for the defense would shoot us out of the water if you did. You aren’t certified, you haven’t any established expertise-no matter how talented you might be. In point of fact, you haven’t even been officially hired yet, as far as county paperwork is concerned.” I lifted my shoulders in a helpless shrug.
“What I want you to do is take some time to get yourself some rest, then meet me tomorrow at high noon on Highland Avenue. I’ll shoot the photos.” I smiled. “It’ll be your finger on the shutter, all right, but with me at your elbow, there’s no chain of evidence problems. Will that work?”
For the first time since she’d walked into my office, Estelle Reyes smiled broadly, a heartwarming burst of sunshine.
Chapter Forty-one
Late the next morning, Deputy Howard Bishop drove the county road grader from the Quonset hut in the corner of the maintenance yard the several blocks out to Highland Avenue. He parked facing west, the cleats on the machine’s massive tires settling into the exact spot where it had originally rested with the dead Larry Zipoli slumped at the controls.
Mo Arnett, seeing cooperation as his best defense, marked a site photo for us, the little ‘x’ indicating where he remembered standing when he pulled the trigger. Using that and Deputy Robert Torrez’s best guestimate of yardage, we
set the heavy camera tripod so that the camera lens would match Mo’s eye level, five feet three and one half inches off the ground.
The department owned a fleet of junky little cameras, one aging but high quality reflex, and a Polaroid. I settled for Estelle’s elegant new Nikon F, and I was impressed when she chose a 70mm lens because it was the closest to matching the image seen by the human eye. I hadn’t thought of that, and it made me feel like a Neanderthal. That, I reflected, is why we hired young people. I felt an uncoplike, parental stab of pride from the git-go.
The grader’s windshield, sporting a messy bullet hole beside the wiper blade, was heavily veiled with red dust and years of grime from diesel smoke and oil fumes. How Larry Zipoli could have seen clearly enough to blade the damn road was a mystery. With the sun slanting on it, it was impossible to see through the dull silver slab of glass.
As the afternoon wore on well past any likely time for Mo to have fired the shot, right up to when I first spoke with the shaken Evie Truman, matters only got worse. Mo Arnett had been telling the truth. It was unlikely that he could have seen even the vague outline of the victim inside the cab. Nervous, apprehensive, probably about ready to piss his pants, Mo had not looked closely enough. The grader was parked, the door open, and no one evidently around. So he took the shot. Bookmakers might have said the odds were against him, having grabbed the wrong ammo, the bullet wandering down the barrel to wobble and wander, finding its lethal way. But despite the odds, Mo had managed one perfect shot.
“I think that’s all Schroeder will need,” I said to Estelle at three o’clock. Conditions hadn’t changed except for a pesky breeze.
She dismantled the camera from tripod, rewound the film and dropped the thirty-six exposure canister into my hand. “Schroeder will be disappointed?” she asked. “He’s hoping for murder one?”
I shook my head. “We don’t hope for one thing or another, Estelle. What is, is. Our job is to find out just that, and Schroeder’s job is to make the punishment fit the crime.” I chuckled at that little bit of sanctimonious wisdom. “That sounds pat, doesn’t it? But that’s the way it should work.”
“I can’t imagine Mo in prison,” Estelle said, and I grimaced.
“Let me tell you, by the time they’re finished with all the psychobabble about the influence of a thoughtless, domineering father, a numb mother, and all of Mo’s other troubles with every relationship he’s ever had since birth? I’ll be surprised if the kid lands anything beyond three or four years in some rehab center.”
“Are you okay with that, sir?”
I looked at her in surprise. “I’m okay with that. There are a lot of things I could wish for, but wishing isn’t going to make them so. So I do what I do and don’t stew about it. Mo Arnett made his choices, we catch him, and now it’ll be interesting to see how he turns out. We can hope that we don’t end up chasing him again.”
“I suppose that happens,” the young lady mused.
“We hope to get there before he pulls the trigger next time. That’s something to wish for, I guess…that we could get there before that happens, whether with Mo Arnett or someone else.” I shot the legs of the tripod in and folded it to fit the black bag. “That’s a rare thing. And that’s job security, I suppose.”
We settled back in the car and watched the grader trundle away, bouncing rhythmically on those big donuts as Deputy Bishop guided it back to the county barns. Despite years of being operated with a windshield full of cracks, it would be changed out now, removed with great care and entered into evidence, bullet hole included.
“Tomorrow I’ll have a dispatch schedule for you.” I made an entry in my log. “And that will be a challenge for you. Sitting dispatch for eight hours when nothing much is happening? That’ll be a challenge.”
I looked across at her just as she frowned, her expression telling me that for the first time she might be ready to question the scheme of things. “And you understand that nothing about this case is to be discussed with anyone other than the sheriff, me, or the district attorney. Nothing.” Her nod was impatient. “You did extraordinarily well these past two days. I want you to know that.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“There’s a lot of work now, keeping Schroeder happy with the evidence. But part of the heat is off. We got the bad guy off the street. And that always makes me really hungry.” I held up the canister of film. “I’ll give this to Deputy Baker so he can make a set of prints for the D.A. In the meantime, may I buy you something at the Don Juan?”
Estelle made a face that I couldn’t translate. Disappointment, distaste, impatience, maybe a potpourri. “How will we pursue the Orosco, sir?”
“The what?”
“The tres retablos, sir. The more I examine the photographs from Veracruz…”
Despite what the young woman might have thought, I hadn’t forgotten Jim Raught’s treasure, and the various possibilities they offered. Stolen art? A cunning copy? A lucky-and legal-purchase, or the tip of an iceberg that might lead to who knew what depths of international art theft. And I knew what Estelle Reyes wanted just then.
“The best thing to do,” I said judiciously, and hesitated as I frowned at the steering wheel, “is to hand this over to Tom Mears to handle. He’s careful, thoughtful, thorough…” I stopped there, amused at the expression on Estelle’s dark face. Deputy Mears could handle the art case thoroughly and efficiently, and, I was willing to bet, the young lady would bite her tongue and go with it. But she didn’t know me well enough yet to realize my suggestion was in jest.
“You really don’t want to sit dispatch, do you,” I laughed. “Any excuse at all.”
“I’m looking forward to it, sir. It’s just that…”
“All right, then, what do you want to do? What do you think your next step should be?”
Her relief was palpable. “At least we might talk with Mr. Raught again, sir. I want to know how he acquired that artwork.”
“And if he chooses not to tell us?”
“I think he will, sir. He’s too proud of it not to.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “And if it’s an innocent fake, acquired legally?”
“I’ll apologize to him for wasting his time, sir.”
“And if it is, in fact, the original Orosco?”
“Then it needs to be returned to its home in Veracruz.”
“If you’re tied up with dispatch tomorrow,” and I glanced at my watch, “that means we should go after this today.”
“Yes, sir.” She managed not to sound too eager.
I sighed. “There’s always something else on the horizon in this job,” I said. “All right, we’ll go see Jim Raught. After some dinner, we’ll pay the gentleman a visit.” Estelle Reyes looked down and smoothed the leather cover of her soft brief case, forcing patience. “That’s one thing you’ll learn as you go along, sweetheart. When a few minutes present themselves to enjoy a green chile burrito, you take ’em.”
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One Perfect Shot pc-18 Page 33