Red, Green, or Murder

by Steven F Havill

  “Probably not,” I said, and realized I might be stepping on my own tongue. I didn’t know what Estelle wanted. I did know that it hadn’t been long since I’d finished eating my afternoon snack, but already my stomach rumbled in anticipation of further samples.

  Fernando was patient and pre-dinner traffic slow, and Aileen adept at covering the orders that trickled in. He took us through the construction of a Burrito Grande step by step.

  “And you know,” he said at one point in the tour, “some people think that the chile is the heart of Mexican cooking, but it is not. It is not. You cannot save bad food with good chile. That’s what most people forget. Use chile that is hot enough, and you might conceal some mistakes. But that’s all.” He held up an admonishing finger again. “The roast, whether it is pork, or chicken, or beef, must be the best. Some will prepare the dish with these enormous chunks of meat, you know, full of gristle and fat,” and he grimaced. “Like something dipped out of an old stew. And to make matters worse, they soak everything in some kind of soup until the meat is unrecognizable.” He shivered in mock horror. “That is not the way. The meat must be the best. Even if it’s but lowly ground beef, it should be the best.”

  “Makes sense,” I said, marveling at how wonderfully detached and disciplined Estelle Reyes-Guzman could remain through this gustatory seminar right at dinner time, jotting her clinical notes without drooling.

  “Now, the tortillas need to be as only my wonderful wife can make them—not like some of those things that stick to the roof of your mouth, they are so thick and gummy.”

  He walked over to another cooler and opened the door to reveal shelves full of small, neatly wrapped packages. He slipped one out and opened it for inspection. The flour tortillas were generous in size, remarkably uniform in thickness and texture. Again he ticked off the ingredients for Estelle. He shrugged expressively. “Nothing has changed in the recipe for two hundred years.”

  He watched Estelle jot notes and then slid the package back in the cooler, selecting a smaller one in its place. “If you use cheap, bulk cheese,” he said, “that’s what your dish tastes like.” He peeled off a label, handing it to Estelle. “This is made by the Costillo dairy in Mesilla. It is a sharp cheddar that has some life. I have been buying my cheese from them for twenty years. Never a change. Never.”

  He tossed the block of cheese into the cooler, then maneuvering around Aileen, advanced on the sink where she had been working. “If you use tired, frost-burned lettuce, or tomatoes that are hard and tasteless, then, well, you know…then the chile can’t save them. But,” and he shrugged, holding his shoulders up for a long moment. “If everything is good, and the chile is fresh and the best…then you have something worth eating, ¿verdad?”

  “Verdad,” I said, risking just about the full extent of my knowledge of Spanish.

  Estelle rested against the sink, eyebrows locked together, examining her notes. “When you prepped either yesterday or this morning, did you do anything differently, Fernando?”

  “No, nothing. Maybe this morning a little more care than usual in the presentation for him. I know…we know…that George is, how do you say it, delicado?”

  “Frail,” Estelle added.

  “That’s it. He has not been so good, you know. That’s why the meal comes to him, not him to the meal.”

  “Was there any ingredient that came from a fresh batch of something?” I asked. “Something that was just delivered, maybe?”

  “It is always fresh,” Fernando said, trying not to sound hurt.

  “But you know what I mean,” I said. “In the ebb and flow of all this, there must sometimes be a little glitch, or a new batch of something that is maybe just a little different. Not of lesser quality, but just different in some way.”

  Fernando’s face scrunched up in thought. “I can not imagine what that would be,” he said. “You know, there are some…places,” and he said it as if he were deliberately sidestepping naming names, “who accept what vendors try to deliver.” He held up a hand that halted the process. “They just take what the truck delivers, without question. I will not do that. I accept what I want to accept, and the vendors all know that.”

  “What about the chile itself?” Estelle asked.

  Fernando frowned and returned to one of the coolers. He selected a plastic bag, perhaps two or three pounds, of green chile. I could see the pods were nicely cleaned, split in half or thirds lengthwise, with very few seeds. “This is today,” he said. “And yesterday, it was another small bag, but from the same batch.”

  I leaned against the table, regarding the bag of chile. “How do you prep this?”

  Now totally resigned to our probing, Fernando sighed with good-humored patience. “Now you are asking for secrets,” he chuckled. He selected a long knife from the block, wiped the blade on a clean towel, and nudged a couple of chile pods out of the bag. “It must be this way.” With amazingly rapid, expert chatterings of the knife, he reduced the chile into elegant little strips, like miniature French cut string beans. I looked at Estelle thoughtfully as she held a plastic bag to accept a sample.

  “Do some folks like it cubed?” she asked. “Or maybe diced is the word?”

  “The way Victor fixes it,” I added, and Fernando grunted something I didn’t catch. He didn’t bother feigning politeness by asking, ‘Victor who?’

  “’Fixes it’ directly from a can,” he said. No love lost there, but then again, Victor Sanchez brought it on himself with his continual imitation of an annoyed rattlesnake. “That is not the way I will do it.”

  “You’ve never run out of chile and had to resort to the can?” I knew I was on thin ice with that one. He didn’t grab a cleaver, though.

  “You only run out if you don’t plan ahead,” Fernando said flatly.

  I nodded at the shelves clearly visible in the roomy pantry beyond the coolers. The fat #10 cans marched in rows on the upper shelves, and the distinctive labels of the canned chile were easy to spot.

  “Ah,” Fernando said, and ducked his head just a touch, embarrassed at being caught out. “I use the canned chile when I make…what do you call it…the stock for the sauce.” He straightened his shoulders. “There are some who use soup, you know.”

  “Awful,” I added.

  “Yes. I pureé the canned chile as a stock, then add more of this,” and he touched the plastic bag of sliced pods. “Just this.” His eyes narrowed as he regarded first me and then Estelle, both hands resting flat on the butcher block, knife at the ready. “You’re not telling me everything,” he said. He jerked his chin at the envelope in Estelle’s hand. “What do you have there? You brought me something.”

  For whatever reason, Estelle wasn’t yet ready to share the photos with Fernando, and I didn’t run interference for him. The diced chile so obvious in the photograph indicated Fernando leaned on the canned goods a little more than he cared to admit. We didn’t want him slamming up his defenses.

  “Did you know that Mr. Payton usually drank a glass of red wine with his meal?” she side-stepped.

  “Now there,” Fernando said, wagging a finger, “is something to investigate,” and he leaned on each of the four syllables for emphasis. “If George could find a bottle of wine for three dollars, why pay four? You see?” He frowned again. “There’s a word for that poison that he favors.”

  “Rot gut?” I offered.

  “Exactly. It makes my mouth hurt just to think about it. Maybe the problem lies there.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Estelle said. “Tell me again what time you prepared his meal?”

  Fernando crossed his arms across his apron. “Aileen, what time did George call yesterday?”

  “Sometime after ten, maybe,” she said, not breaking rhythm with the meat slicer. The roast had been reduced to the size of a baseball.

  “So…sometime between eleven-thirty and twelve? That’s when it was delivered?” Estelle asked.

  He nodded. “You
have picked up the food from time to time, have you not?” he said to me. “This time, he asked if we would deliver. Sometimes, his daughter does the honors, but she was busy this day.”

  “Who drove the food over?”

  Fernando turned to look at Aileen. “It was Ricardo, no?” Aileen nodded. “Ricardo Mondragon,” Fernando said, and waved a hand toward the swinging door to the dining room.

  Ricardo was forty-five years old going on ten, but steady and dependable. He took great pride, it always seemed to me, in keeping the Don Juan polished and spiffy, despite a strip or two of duct tape on the booth cushions. The dishes in the waitress islands were always stacked just so. At the moment, I could see his stooped, pudgy figure out in the dining room, putting a final polish on table tops.

  “We packed it most carefully,” Fernando said. He pointed overhead to a broad shelf above the sink. A row of cheap Styrofoam coolers rested there, the kind stout enough for a single picnic or fishing trip, the mates of the one that we’d seen resting on George Payton’s kitchen counter. Estelle nodded absently, as if her thoughts were elsewhere. “First in the glass dish with the cover, then in a paper bag, then in the cooler. Do you need to talk with Ricardo?”

  “We may need to, but not right now,” Estelle said. We took another five minutes, poking into this and that, but the undersheriff had closed her notebook. I knew that any moment, Fernando would offer us something to take the edge off, and sure enough, he slid a oval plate off the rack and held it toward me.

  “Let me…” he started to say, but I held up a hand abruptly, an amazing show of self-restraint.

  “Fernando, thanks, but we need to be on our way,” I said. “We’ve taken enough of your time.”

  “You come back,” he said, and then extended his hand to Estelle. “I hope you find out,” he added. “You know I will help any way I can.”

  On the way out through the dining room, I saw that JanaLynn was discussing something with Ricardo Mondragon, who nodded soberly. He reached out and straightened the stack of roll baskets. Estelle came up behind the older man and placed a light hand on his shoulder. He startled as if she’d used a cattle prod.

  “Ricardo, may I talk with you for a few minutes?” the undersheriff asked. I think that JanaLynn could guess the subject matter, since the expression on her face was sympathetic. “Maybe we can go outside for a few minutes.”

  Mondragon’s big, wide face turned toward the kitchen, as if he needed permission from Fernando for such a venture. JanaLynn came to the rescue. “I’ll take care of this,” she said, one hand on the counter. She didn’t explain what the ‘this’ was, but Ricardo appeared satisfied. He followed Estelle toward the door.

  “Thanks, sweetheart,” I said. JanaLynn reached out and gave me a brief hug, one arm around my shoulders.

  Chapter Twelve

  Outside, I saw that Estelle and Ricardo Mondragon had skirted the corner of the building and were standing behind the bulk of my SUV. I joined them, and Ricardo was too worried by this strange change of pace in his day to manage a greeting. He eyed Socks, who was slobbering all over the door and window, trying to force his tough little body through the narrow opening. I’d broken my promise to the heeler, bringing nothing from the kitchen but aromas.

  “Ricardo,” Estelle said, “Fernando tells me that earlier today, you took a meal over to Mr. Payton’s house on Ridgemont.” He nodded and thrust his hands in his pockets. A burly guy with unruly curly hair that lined his forehead in neat ringlets, Ricardo would have looked right at home in one of those commercials for an Italian restaurant where the chef punches, pats, and flings the pizza dough with an expression of contented pride—except Ricardo Mondragon’s face was empty of anything except apprehension.

  “Was Mr. Payton all by himself when you saw him?” Estelle asked.

  “He was all by himself,” Ricardo replied. His speech was without accent, but cadenced with a great deal of care, as if the words were slippery and elusive. “Is that your dog?”

  “Sort of,” I said, and let it go at that.

  “You spoke with Mr. Payton?” Estelle prompted.

  “Him and me talked a little. I took the cooler out to the kitchen for him.” He pulled out a large handkerchief and massaged his broad nose. “They said that he died.”

  “Yes, he did. Sometime after you left, Ricardo.”

  “He was a good guy. Everybody gets old and sick.” Ricardo Mondragon still lived with aging parents, and although he might not ponder his future when they passed on, everyone else who knew him probably did.

  “Yes, he was a good guy. Did he take the casserole out of the cooler, or did you?”

  “I guess he did, ’cause I didn’t. I put the cooler on the counter.”

  “When you left, he was all by himself?”

  “Yes, ma’am. He said he didn’t need no help.”

  “Did you open the wine bottle for him?” That question out of left field startled me but didn’t jolt Ricardo’s passive expression. He gazed at Estelle, then at my truck, then at the sidewalk.

  “I saw that.”

  “You saw the wine bottle?”

  “I saw that, yeah. It was on the table. He had a big glass of wine all poured. He had some, ’cause I could smell it.” Ricardo frowned and shook his head. “I asked him if I could throw it away for him.”

  “Throw the wine away?”

  “The empty bottle,” Ricardo corrected. An empty container on the dinner table would prompt that response from the fastidious busboy, I supposed.

  “Did you offer to open the new bottle then?”

  “I didn’t see no new bottle.”

  “Ah.” Estelle opened her small notebook and rustled through several pages. “Do you happen to know what time it was when you left Mr. Payton’s house, Ricardo?”

  “It was eleven fifty-two.” The precision of the response amused me, but not a trace of humor touched Ricardo’s face.

  “Did Mr. Payton say anything about bringing the dish back to the restaurant when he was finished?”

  “He always does that. Somebody does.”

  “And you didn’t see anyone else at Mr. Payton’s house? No one called, no one came by? You didn’t see anyone coming down the street as you drove away?”

  He shook his head slowly. “How come you gots to know all this stuff?”

  “That’s just what we do, Ricardo. We appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.”

  “You got to know anything else?”

  “I may have to talk with you again, if that’s okay.” Estelle made it sound as if Ricardo Mondragon actually had a choice.

  “That’s okay.” He looked for a long moment at his watch, and I could see his lips moving. “You should come in for dinner.”

  “We’d like to, but it’s going to have to be some other time,” the undersheriff said. “Thanks for talking to us, Ricardo.”

  “Dr. Gray and his wife are coming for dinner,” he said, and nodded off toward the parking lot. I hadn’t seen the county commissioner’s gray Lincoln slide into the lot, but Ricardo Mondragon had. “I’d better go.”

  “Thanks again,” Estelle said. We watched him hustle off, and Estelle sighed. “Would that all witnesses were like that,” she said, and reached out to touch my arm. “Let me show you.” I ambled over to her car, and that prompted a flurry of pathetic yips from my captive. By the time I’d grunted into the passenger seat of the undersheriff’s Crown Vic, she’d selected several eight-by-ten digital photos from the envelope that she had never offered to Fernando Aragon.

  Linda Real must have scrunched into the corner by the fridge to take the portrait of George’s kitchen caught in the first photo. I examined it for a long moment, then accepted the second one she offered, this time a close-up of the glass casserole dish. It was the same photo I’d looked at on the computer screen.

  “I don’t like this,” I muttered.

  Linda’s photos were in flawless focus, once I’d fig
ured out which portion of my trifocals to use. In the photo of the casserole, the garnish of tomatoes and lettuce couldn’t hide the little pieces of diced green chile. After a long moment of scrutiny, I looked up at Estelle. “Diced, not sliced,” I said. “Fernando said he uses the canned chile for sauce base. He got a little carried away this time. Or Aileen.”

  I looked in the rearview mirror and watched my little spotted prisoner in the SUV behind us. His tongue dangled so far out of his mouth that I thought it might have become unhooked at the back. “So,” I said, and Estelle tapped the photos on the steering wheel.

  “I need to go to Albuquerque,” she said quietly.

  “And what can you do up there that Tony Abeyta can’t?” I said. “One question’s been answered,” and I nodded toward the office. “We know who delivered lunch. If there was a question about the chile, I think we have our answer. Pride is a powerful motivator here. Chefs, you know.” I turned to rest my hip. “He says he never uses canned chile, but obviously he does. Are we hung up on that because there’s nothing else?” I asked. My cell phone buzzed and I fished it out of my pocket. “Hold on a minute,” I said into it without bothering to find out who it might be, then pressed it against my thigh to give us some privacy as I waited for Estelle’s reply.

  “Do you think it was a heart attack?”

  “I do, but then again, I’m no doctor, sweetheart. Now, maybe it wasn’t your usual garden variety coronary that warns a guy to change his lifestyle. It obviously was one of those massive infarcts that drops a person in his tracks. If you remember my performance a few years ago, you’ll recall that I managed what, a step and a half before I fell on my face? Now, I admit there are a few things here that need to be explained. You start talking about allergies and reactions, and it’s a whole new game.”

  “And that’s what’s bothering me,” Estelle sighed. “I’m not saying that I think something is wrong, padrino. I’m just saying that something happened that I don’t understand. If Alan Perrone says that George suffered an allergic reaction to something fierce enough to trigger a heart attack, then I want to know what the cause of that reaction was. That’s all.”