“Do you remember the time?”
“Oh, maybe two o’clock or so.”
“As early as one-thirty?”
“Not that early. Maybe even two thirty. Louis had to make one up real quick, and that took him a few minutes, then to run it over.” She nodded. “No, I’d say closer to two-thirty.”
“This is Louis Duenas?”
“Yes…but now wait. Louis made up the hose, but he’s busy working on the truck. I think Mike ran it out.” She nodded. “I’m sure he did.”
“Mike Zamora?”
She nodded.
“We’ll need to talk with him, Bea.”
“Oh, my,” she sighed, and turned to scrutinize the large white board on the wall behind her desk. “He and Dougy Burgess went to Deming to pick up a whole raft of parts from Pitts Diesel. They’ll be back this afternoon. I gotta tell you, none of us are real excited about working today. This whole thing has been such a shock. I mean, Larry? My gosh, I’ve known him and Marilyn for Lord only knows how long. I don’t know what she’ll do now.”
“Bad times,” I said sympathetically. “We’ll all do what we can. I’ll catch up with Mike later, when he gets back. You have the keys to Larry’s truck?” There had been a set of keys that went into the evidence envelope along with the rest of the items on the victim’s person, and I assumed they included one for the Dodge.
“I’ll have to find the dupes.” But Bea made no move toward where the duplicates might be kept.
“If you’d do that, I’d appreciate it. We’d like to take a look inside the truck while you’re finding the personnel files.” That stirred her into motion, and in a moment she returned from one of those walk-in vault closets with a single key and tag on a chrome ring. “I believe this is to his vehicle,” she said, handing it to me. “Now listen…I’m going to have to talk to Tony about those records.”
“Whatever it takes, Bea. Thank you. We’ll be back with these in a few minutes.”
She nodded and offered Estelle the ghost of a smile. “Nice to see you again, young lady. I hope you enjoy your stay.”
Enjoy her stay? However brief? Not, “Welcome aboard, we look forward to working with you?”
If Estelle caught the nuances, which I’m sure she did, she replied graciously, “Thank you, ma’am. I’m sure I will.”
Outside, the sun was brilliant, the earth of the bone yard fragrant with oil, diesel, and a dozen other nifty chemicals. Larry Zipoli’s white Dodge three-quarter ton was backed tight against the fence, nose out, ready to go. I took my time crossing the parking lot, watching where I put my feet. Estelle kept stride, and I wondered what thoughts were occupying her, at the same time thanking my good fortune that she wasn’t a compulsive chatterbox.
“Most of the time, they trail the truck behind the grader out to the job site,” I said. “But for little jobs around the perimeter of the village, he’s just going to drive the grader.”
I tried the door handle, and was surprised to find it locked. In a secure bone yard, fenced with razor wire and lighted with sodium vapor lights to noontime brightness all night, what was the point of locking a work truck? Habit, perhaps.
The key turned easily. This old monster, government low-bid specs anyway, didn’t feature niceties like electric door locks or electric windows. As it opened, the door squalled against slightly bent and dry hinges. An effluvia of odors flooded out, mostly stale tobacco in a variety of forms. Smoke residue blued the glass, and a nifty little cup holder hung from the driver’s side door, nestled in which was a coke can with the top sliced off. It was half full of tobacco juice. The ash tray was pulled out, stuffed with butts. Larry’s tobacco habit spanned the gamut from generic cigarettes to chaw to stogies. The cab’s aroma, exacerbated by the sun through the glass, was ripe.
A thick log book rested on the seat, and I flipped it open to the last page of notations. Larry had pumped 22.1 gallons of diesel into the Dodge two days before, noting the mileage as 177,671.9. I inserted the ignition key and turned it until the dash lit up.
“So he’s driven eighteen miles in two days, more or less.” I turned and grinned at Estelle. She was standing at junction of cab and bed, watching my performance. “And that tells us…only that. If it read that he’d covered two hundred miles in a county this small, we’d wonder, wouldn‘t we.”
Another aroma had interested me from the moment I opened the door, and I turned my attention to the modest lunch cooler that rested on the passenger side floor. I couldn’t reach it by stretching across, so I slid out and trudged around to open the passenger door.
“Interesting that he didn’t take his lunch with him on the grader,” I mused. Estelle’s left eyebrow raised about a sixteenth of an inch. “Or not,” I added, and opened the cooler. “Well, hello there.”
Chapter Eleven
Larry Zipoli’s lunch was well balanced: four empty bottles of dark beer, two empty micro bottles of good bourbon. The cooler still contained two full beers and one unopened whiskey sampler. The blue freezer cube was still cool to the touch.
“Well, now,” I said. “That’s quite a diet.” I didn’t touch any of the bottles, but could read the labels well enough, and saw a price tag on one of the samplers. “He liked the good stuff.”
“Do you suppose he had a sack lunch with him?” It was her first question of the morning, and until that moment, her reticence had been striking.
“He might have, but we didn’t find anything on the grader, and he didn’t toss the remains out the window along Highland. He was back here at the barns over the lunch hour, we’re told. If he was brown-bagging it, then he had ample time to eat here. And these puppies?” I reached out and tapped one of the whiskey bottles with the tip of a pencil. “Motorists toss these out the window all the time. Take a mile walk along any highway, and you’ll find ’em.”
“But he kept the empties in the cooler.”
“And why would he do that, I wonder? I mean, the county doesn’t condone employees drinking their lunch, especially in a county vehicle. He didn’t want to risk being seen dumping cans and bottles in the dumpsters here?”
“Did Mr. Zipoli have a record of DWI?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t recall that I’ve never stopped him, and usually if deputies stop one of the town fathers, or a village or county employee, they talk about it among themselves, generally with some self-righteous delight. I don’t recall any of the deputies talking about Larry Zipoli.”
The young lady was standing beside Zipoli’s truck, gazing across the bone yard. “If he sat in his truck way over here out of the way, he’d be safe enough to enjoy his lunch,” she said. “If somebody starts to walk toward him, he’s got time to slip the bottle back in the cooler.”
“If that’s what he did.” I snapped the lid on the cooler shut and lifted it out of the truck. Other than the log entries and the booze, the Dodge offered nothing that jumped out at me and cried, “Look at this!”
I stashed the cooler in the trunk of 310, and then settled in the driver’s seat, turning the air conditioner up to high for a few minutes.
“So, now we know something else. Our man has a significant drinking problem if he downed four bottles and two samplers in just one day. Of course,” and I shrugged, “that might be a week’s supply. A bottle of dark beer one day, a whiskey the next-or any combination of the above.”
“Reuben is an alcoholic,” Estelle said quietly.
I looked at her. “I know he is,” I said. “And he has been for years, at least ever since I’ve known him.”
“When I was little and he’d visit Tres Santos, I used to think it was his cologne,” she mused. “I could tell when he had been in my mother’s house. The smell lingered for a long, long time. If Mr. Zipoli had consumed all that alcohol for lunch, I would think that the cab of the road grader would have smelled like a brewery.”