Steven Havill: One Perfect Shot

“I thought he was asleep,” Evie Truman whispered. She stood with her arms crossed over her ample chest, shoulders hunched so far forward that the outboard ends of her clavicles were in danger of touching. Her feet, shod in simple house slippers, shuffled in the red dust of Highland Avenue. Her lower lip quivered. No one is ever prepared to be a witness, to be the first to arrive on a nasty scene.

Evie didn’t need to whisper. There we stood in the hot sun of that late August Tuesday afternoon with no one within a hundred feet to overhear our conversation. The insects and songbirds continued their enterprises as if nothing humans did surprised them. Evie’s broad face crumpled a little more as she watched the bulky red EMT rig approach, its gruff diesel muttering.

Farther down Highland Avenue, Deputies Robert Torrez and Tom Mears discussed with Posadas Coroner Dr. Emerson Clark how the elderly medical examiner might clamber onboard the towering road grader without risking damage to his arthritic, creaky body. Dr. Clark had wasted no time responding to our call. He hadn’t been deep in some patient’s bowels, or off at Elephant Butte fishing. But the old man didn’t look eager.

For her part, Evie showed no inclination to trudge back and join in that discussion with the coroner. She didn’t want another look at the limp, bloody corpse. I didn’t think she had much more to tell us. Other than promoting community relations, I wasn’t accomplishing a whole lot by standing in the hot sun digging at sand chiggers who migrated up my socks and commiserating about how miserable it was to discover a corpse cooking and bloating in the hot sun.

As if sensing that I was about to walk off and leave her stranded, Evie sniffed and said, “I saw him earlier this afternoon, Bill. I did. I told you I did. He was working the bar ditch all along here, and everything was just fine. I can’t believe it. What a horrible, horrible thing.”

Sure enough, the fragrant soil had been graded up out of the ditches, deposited in a precise, laser-straight windrow on the unpaved street. To finish the job, the operator of the Posadas County Highway Department’s road grader would stroke lanes down the side of the dirt street, creating a smooth, perfectly crowned finish bordered by straight, open ditches. Larry Zipoli was deft with the grader. Hell, he was better than that. He was an artist with the blade. He’d had thirty years practice with the highway department, and I doubted that there was a foot of roadway anywhere in Posadas County that Larry didn’t know down to the last pebble.

But Larry hadn’t finished his artistic grading job on the primitive lane on the north border of the village of Posadas. Half of Highland Avenue was finished, half was untouched, hard, pot-hole pocked and washboarded. Before he could finish, someone had put a high-velocity rifle bullet through the cab of the county road grader and through Larry’s skull. There the big machine sat, diesel engine idling, for most of the afternoon until sixty-one year-old Evie Truman made her run into town and discovered that Larry Zipoli was well beyond snatching a quick nap.

“You went to the school shortly after noon?” I asked. One of the issues most fascinating to a cop is finding out precisely when a corpse became a corpse. Freshly graded though it was, Highland already showed a plethora of car tracks. Evie wasn’t the only person to have driven Highland while Larry’s blood leaked unreported.

She nodded vigorously, and the nodding morphed into a sad side-to-side shake. “I left my grade book at school, and thought I’d want it for later. We have that all-day faculty meeting tomorrow, you know. Now, he was just turning his grader around down there by the intersection with Hutton, and we both waved. He had to wait for me to go by.”

“And then you discovered what happened on the way home from that errand?”

“No, no.” Her response was immediate and snappy, a tone that would work with a recalcitrant eighth grader. “It was most likely around three o’clock. I needed to do a little shopping, and I thought, well, certainly, he would have finished grading that little street by now. And of course, there are any number of other ways to go into town. See, I had this nagging thought that there was just something that I had forgotten at school. Anyway, there he was, parked right along the side of the bar ditch.”

Her hands fussed. “I don’t know why I even noticed him, Sheriff. I mean, what business is it of mine? But what did they do to him? I mean, so much blood.” She gulped a breath. “I think I looked more closely because the machine was idling, you know. It’s so loud. But his head was back against the window, and I was sure he was asleep. Until I looked closer.” Her hand fluttered up to cover her mouth.

It was painfully obvious what had been done to Larry Zipoli. At a glance, he looked asleep, until you saw that blood had flowed down from his left eyebrow to the hollow of his eye, and then down the fatty cleft beside his nose, across his parted lips, and then down chin and neck to matt on the front of his grubby t-shirt. His heart had stopped and blood pressure had dropped before enough blood had been pumped to form a puddle on the floor. But there was plenty spread across his enormous belly. His head rested back against the cab’s rear window, jaw slack, eyes half-lidded.

Having no doubt heard her share of all the old, lame jokes about highway department employees slumbering on the job, I could imagine that Evie Truman might have thought Larry was catching himself an afternoon nap, all warm and toasty with the August sun streaming through the glass of the grader’s cabin. A little too toasty, maybe. The center portion of the windshield was canted open from the bottom a couple of inches, with the left-hand door wide open, latched back against the cab frame.

“We’ll need a deposition from you, Evie. As much detail as you can remember, starting with the first time you drove by. What you did, what Larry did. Who you saw.”

“I’m going to have nightmares about this, Sheriff. I mean, I didn’t see anyone in the area, no one at all. But if I had come along a little earlier…” Her face started to crumple again, and I patted her substantial shoulder.

“One of us will walk you through it. I can either swing by your house later this evening, or you can come down to the office at your convenience. If I’m not in the office when you stop by, the sheriff will be, or one of the deputies.”

Evie took a deep, shuddering breath. “May I bring Carl for moral support?” Before I could answer with more than a nod, she reached out a hand and touched me on the forearm. “Larry’s family…”

“We’ll be contacting them first.” Marilyn Zipoli worked at Posadas State Bank as a cashier, and her day was about to fall to pieces. “At this point, Evie, I’d rather that you didn’t talk to anyone else about the incident. Sometimes it’s hard to tell in the beginning what’s important and what isn’t. Carl understands that.” Her husband of decades had been a Game and Fish officer before ruining a spinal disk while unloading one of the department boats at Elephant Butte.

I watched Evie retrace her steps to her Mercury, and then rejoined the party. Bob Torrez had worked a pair of cotton gloves over his huge hands. On down the road, just beyond Evie’s car, the EMT unit had rumbled to a stop beside Deputy Mears’ Bronco, effectively blocking the street. They’d sit there until we waved them in. To the east, Highland was blocked by Torrez’s own patrol unit, pulled crosswise in the road beside mine.

An orange county truck had stopped behind the deputy’s car, and I recognized Tony Pino, the county’s Highway Superintendent, and his foreman, Buddy Clayton. They made their way along the bar ditch, in no hurry to see what they had to see.