“Gunshots? No, I think not. Fire crackers, yes.”
“Fireworks…you’re sure?”
“Oh, perfectly sure. One of the kids across the street-“ He pointed diagonally toward the north. “He had what sounded like M-80’s. Is that what they call ’em? Those firecrackers that are just a bit too big for the average kid? KaBOOM! He let fly about four of them, and I thought the Sandoval’s old dog was going to go into orbit. I don’t know what the lad was blowing up, but he seemed to be having a good time.”
“That was what time?”
Raught frowned and looked at the immaculate tile under his bare feet. His face suddenly brightened. “That had to be just around noon or so. Maybe a little before. I happened to glance out the window-I was curious about what gangster was practicing to blow up the bank, you know. Larry Zipoli’s truck came around the corner just about then, and the kid took off. Don’t know why Zipoli would care about fire crackers, but the kid evidently thought he would.”
I paused a moment, sifting through some mental files about who lived where before I came up with a name. “The Arnett youngster, no doubt.” Mo Arnett was one of the Posadas Jaguars benchsitters. I cruised the village often enough to have seen him trudging home from school, megaton backpack sagging his pudgy shoulders.
“Indeed. I certainly don’t want to get anyone in trouble for a few firecrackers.”
“Not likely. So…Larry Zipoli came home for lunch yesterday?”
Raught nodded. “Well, maybe not to eat lunch. I heard him drive off just a couple of minutes later. Marilyn wasn’t home, so maybe he just had to pick something up. He was only here for a couple of minutes.”
“You’re here all day most of the time?”
“Well, more or less. This is my own private Eden, you know. I’ve seen the rest of the world. Now I’m ready to be a hermit, Undersheriff.”
“Marilyn Zipoli often comes home for lunch?”
“I wouldn’t say often. Once in a while. Once in a while one of them, once in a while both. You know,” and he sipped his tea. “I really don’t make a point of monitoring their habits.” He frowned and played with the sprig of mint on the edge of his glass, then, as if the thought that had wandered into his mind was inappropriate, shook his head quickly.
“In the past few days, did you have occasion to talk with Mr. Zipoli?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“No neighborly chats, no property line disputes, nothing like that? No noisy children? No issues of any kind?”
Raught’s eyes narrowed a little with amusement. “You sound as if you’ve heard something, Undersheriff.” He set his glass on an end table with great care, then clasped his hands between his knees. “The last time I actually spoke to Larry Zipoli was…was.” He shrugged. “Was sometime. I would be making something up if I tried to pinpoint a time. This is one of those interesting neighborhoods where everybody keeps pretty much to themselves, Undersheriff. We don’t do community barbecues. I’ve never been in Zipoli’s home, or the Sandoval’s across the street, or in Mrs. Fernandez’s next door the other way, or the Arnetts’. And they haven’t been in here.” He sawed his hands back and forth. “Separate lives, so to speak.”
“I know exactly how that works,” I said. I would have been hard pressed to remember the last time someone had stepped across the threshold of my old adobe on the south side of town. “A quiet neighborhood where everybody minds his own business. Still, Mr. Raught, we hear things.” I slipped two fingers into my pocket and drew out the little business card wallet. “Do you remember what the discussion was about?”
“Actually, I do. Larry stuck one of those ugly little plastic fences in his front yard-a boundary marker, I suppose. In my usual tactless fashion, I told him it was the ugliest thing I could imagine, and that we could probably work out something more artistic.” He shrugged helplessly. “He didn’t like that.”
“And that’s as far as it went?”
“Well…I suppose not.”
“Which means what?”
“Not only was the fence ugly, he didn’t install it properly. The first wind gust grabbed it, and there you go. The next day, I found a piece in the middle of one of the cactus beds. I tossed it back in his yard.”
“You had words over that?”
“No. Apparently they got rid of it.”
“You didn’t throw it away?”
“Now why would I do that? I tossed the one piece-what, they’re about six feet long? I tossed it back into their yard.”
“This was recently?”
“No. Several days ago, I guess.”
I handed a business card to him. “If you happen to think of anything else, give me a call. I’d appreciate it.”
“I can’t imagine thinking of what, Undersheriff. Sure enough, sound carries easily. Last night was pretty grim. You know, I enjoy swimming. But I couldn’t last night. Marilyn Zipoli was in a way, let me tell you. My God, this must be hard for her. I crawled back into my cave so I didn’t have to listen…just heart wrenching.”
“And during those evening swims, when both Marilyn and Larry were home, you didn’t hear any ruckus of any kind in the past few days?”
“No.” He looked sideways, maybe a trifle embarrassed. “You know, I moved in here about seven years ago. I hadn’t been here for more than a month when Marilyn Zipoli made a forward pass. At me, if you can imagine. I sure as hell don’t want to encourage that sort of thing, so maybe I take to an extreme this keeping to myself business.”
He stood up and beckoned. “Let me show you something.” He included Estelle in the invitation. We followed Raught through the house, out into the back yard-a place to take the breath away. The yard, perhaps a hundred feet wide by eighty feet deep, was an incredible accomplishment, but this time, from the oriental corner of the world. Totally out of place in Posadas, New Mexico, the plantings heavily favored sculptured oriental evergreens, dense bushes the like of which I hadn’t seen since my brief military posting in Korea. And rocks, rocks everywhere, gorgeous sandstone things with more exotic plants tucked in crannies.
One long back wall was home to half a dozen grape vines, their tendrils winding and entwining, fruit already heavy by late summer.
The central feature of the yard was a redwood gazebo complete with high-end teak garden furniture, looking out across one of those narrow lap pools that jet a raging river so that you either exercise wildly to stay afloat or end up smashed against the downstream end, a drowned rat. Jim Raught’s physique said that he swam miles and miles upstream.
“An amazing place,” I said. “Congratulations.”
“I have photos of what it looked like when I first moved in,” he replied. “Lots and lots of desert weeds.”
“That’s what I specialize in,” I laughed. “You know, it’s amazing. I can drive up the street and never know this little paradise is here.”
“And that’s the whole point, I suppose,” Raught said. “I can enjoy old Mexico inside, and then duck outside for a touch of Japan.” He grinned “Visited there half a dozen times for Honda.” He nodded toward the east, toward Zipolis. “They took out a scruffy old elm that died a good number of years ago. I was using some of the dead limbs that spanned across the fence as part of the artwork, so I’ll have to work on that a bit now. It looks kind of bare.”
It didn’t to me, but then again, bare to me was clean gravel or sand. The wall separating the neighbors was a full six feet, concrete block plastered adobe color, supporting redwood lattice panels. There was so much vegetation on Raught’s side I could spot the wall only as a shadow in a few places. Interesting. I would have been able to stand in the Zipolis back yard and not be able to see anything of Jim Raught’s place…certainly not enough to be able to see a purported marijuana plant growing up his back porch.
I turned in place. Like everything else, the back porch was designed to blend with the entire motif. Very Architectural Digesty. Or Better Japanese Gardens. Lots of redwood, stout vertical lines that somehow managed to look airy and light, latticework that wasn’t just the cheap stapled together stuff from the home improvement center.