“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?”
“Routinely.” That one word was soaked in bitterness, whether at the behavior itself, or her inability to do anything about it, I couldn’t tell.
“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.