Red, Green, or Murder

by Steven F Havill

  The question caught Phil by surprise, and for a second or two he looked at me as if I were a stranger. “His property,” Phil muttered as he pulled his thoughts together. “What a mess that is going to be. But yes, he does. Little stuff, I think. A few acres here, a few there. But we haven’t pursued it with the county. You know, he even owns that little nuisance lot behind the county building itself.” He waved a hand in dismissal. I had never thought of property worth seventy or eighty grand as a nuisance, but then again, I wasn’t in real estate.

  “But no,” Phil continued, “we never talked about that. I mean George and I didn’t. Now, Maggie mentioned his land holdings now and then,” and he smiled. “With some frustration, too, I might add. You might talk to her about that if you need more information.”

  “Probably not,” I said easily. We still knew nothing about a possible will. Among her other challenges in cleaning up after her father, Maggie Payton Borman would have something to look for over at George’s house.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Maggie’s Cadillac was parked at the curb of 1228 Ridgemont, and we pulled in behind the fancy little hotrod. The front door stood open, the storm door propped wide by a ceramic flower pot. If Maggie heard our approach, she didn’t acknowledge it.

  I stepped up on the little concrete entry step and rapped on the door jamb.

  “In the living room,” Maggie greeted, but her voice sounded flat, even dejected, and I felt a pang of sympathy. I stood to one side to let Estelle pass. To my surprise, George’s daughter was sitting on the center cushion of the old sofa in the tiny living room, her hands clasped together between her knees, looking like a little kid who had run out of toys or joys. She didn’t rise to greet us. The Maggie Payton Borman who bubbled effusively to customers all day long, who appeared to revel in the upside of life, whose glass was always half full rather than half empty—that Maggie had ticked to a stop.

  The undersheriff took two steps through the door and halted, a habit so predictable that I was prepared for it and didn’t run her down from behind. She surveyed the room for a few seconds, inventorying. The only changes I could see, beyond a general tidying and dusting, was that the sad bouquet of plastic flowers had been removed from the piano top, and the wool blanket that had adorned the sofa was gone.

  Maggie rose wearily. She had reason to be exhausted, beyond the demands of housecleaning, which eventually would be done by someone else anyway.

  “Bill and Estelle,” she said, and held out both hands toward me. “I confess I’m not feeling like much of a hostess.”

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I understand how it goes.”

  “And how are you?” Maggie said, holding out a hand to Estelle, but she didn’t wait for the undersheriff to answer. “I’m hearing some disturbing things,” Maggie added. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Disturbing in what way, Mrs. Borman?” Estelle asked. Of course Guy Trombley would have talked with his assistant, Harriet Tomlinson. That didn’t surprise me, nor that Harriet had chatted at the first opportunity with Maggie Borman.

  “I’m hearing that there was some sort of complication with dad’s death,” Maggie said. “Some kind of reaction?” Her eyes hardened a bit. “I’m not sure why I should have to hear this from a friend.”

  “Nor I,” Estelle said. “Mrs. Borman, did your father ask you to purchase some wine for him yesterday morning?”

  Maggie Borman’s lips started to part, but then clamped shut for just an instant as she took the time to engage brain before mouth. I had never thought of her as calculating before this—maybe I had been kidding myself. Now there was caution, a certain wariness in her eyes.

  “The wine? That’s what it was? The wine?”

  “It appears that your father had just finished one bottle, then opened a second and poured a glassful. That was the one that was spilled on the kitchen table and floor.”

  “Oh, my word,” Maggie Borman murmured. She backed up an awkward step or two and sat down abruptly on the sofa. “Do you think…”

  Estelle allowed her a moment, then prompted, “Do we think what, Mrs. Borman?”

  “The wine, I mean. Dad just won’t do without it, but when he drinks it by the tumbler, for heaven’s sakes, he gets so breathy.” Interesting, I thought, how long it took us to switch habits, in this case from present tense to past. Maggie waved a hand in front of her mouth as if trying to force more air down the pipes. “And on top of his meds…”

  “Did you purchase the wine for him?” Estelle asked again.

  “I…I suppose I did. I had to open it for him. His hands are so arthritic. A corkscrew is just too much for him.”

  “What time was that? When you bought the wine and brought it over here?”

  “Oh,” Maggie said, and looked at her watch, as if she might have marked the time on the dial for future reference. “I stopped on my way to work this morning, so I suppose…” She cocked her head this way and that. “It would have been shortly after eight, I suppose.”

  “At Town and Country?”

  “Yes, but,” and Maggie clamped her hands together against her chest. “do you really think it was the wine? I mean, he liked the same old thing.”

  “After you purchased the wine, you brought it over here?”

  Maggie nodded immediately. “I did. Dad said that you were going to join him.” She smiled affectionately at me. “He was so looking forward to that.”

  “Wish I’d kept the date,” I said. “But you know how things go, Maggie.”

  “Oh, I do,” she said. “And then later, he called to say that you’d gotten tied up somehow but that the Don Juan was delivering for him. So that was all right.”

  “You asked Phil to run by and check on your dad?”

  “I told him he should if he got the chance. And I would, too, if things cleared up.” She heaved a great sigh. “It’s so sad, the elderly. That’s what I think. I see dad sitting at that table,” and she turned to gaze toward the kitchen, “eating all by himself.”

  “Your dad always enjoyed his own company,” I said, although I knew that’s a concept that many people find hard to accept.

  “I suppose so,” Maggie said, and pushed up out of the sofa. “The wine.” She shook her head. “There are blood tests for that sort of thing, I suppose.”

  “Sure,” I said. “They take a while. We won’t have a full panel of toxicology reports back for days—maybe weeks.”

  “Will you keep me posted?” She frowned one of those you won’t make that mistake again, will you? expressions at both of us.

  “Rest assured,” Estelle said, and the two words might have sounded comforting to Maggie but sure as hell didn’t to me.

  Maggie reached out a hand and rested it on my forearm. “And Bill, when you have time, I wanted to sit down with you and talk about all of Dad’s hardware.” She sighed. “I have no idea what those guns are all worth, or who would be interested. And if there’s anything you would want…”

  “That’s very kind of you, but I can’t think of a thing, Maggie. Got a lot of good memories, and that’s enough.”

  “Well, if there is something, I’m sure dad would have wanted you to have it. If you could help me with some of the appraising, I’d be grateful.”

  “Whatever I can do,” I said and glanced at Estelle to see if she had more on her mind. But she had flipped her notebook closed and checked her watch.

  “Did your father leave a will?” she asked. “That will make it so much easier.”

  “Oh, my,” Maggie said, shaking her head in exaggerated exasperation. “If I had a dollar for each time we talked about that.” She held up both hands in surrender. “Promises, promises.”

  “So he didn’t?”

  “Not to my knowledge. But then…” Maggie surveyed the living room. “Who knows? He would never talk about it. I don’t even know what lawyer he used…if any.”

  “Did he ever talk about the deal he had g
oing with Herb Torrance?”

  She waved a hand airily at my question.

  “Oh, dad and his land.” She sat down on the sofa again. “All of that’s going to have to wait until after probate, unless we find some paperwork. You know, I talked with Miles Waddell just last week. He’s been trying to get dad to sell him that little wedge of property on top of the mesa out that way, out where the BLM is toying around with the cave project.” She rolled her eyes. “We’ll all be old and feeble by the time that breaks ground, but Miles really wanted to move on it. You know, I’m not sure that Dad really liked him, that’s the trouble. He’d rather give land away to someone he likes than sell to someone he doesn’t…I don’t see what difference it all makes. A sale is a sale. And dad certainly had no use for any of it.”

  “Like stamp collecting,” I offered, and Maggie laughed agreement. She rose to see us to the door, and as we passed through, nudged the ceramic pot with the toe of a well-polished shoe.

  “It’s getting chilly these evenings,” she said. “I just had to start airing out the cigars. My, how that odor clings.”

  We settled into the car and the doors thudded shut. Estelle finished her meticulous notations in her log, her head shaking from side to side the whole time as if she disapproved of each word and number that she wrote.

  “She lied,” I said, although Estelle wouldn’t have missed the obvious. “God damn it, she lied.”

  “And she’s a flight risk.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” I responded, but I knew the undersheriff was right and that anything else was wishful thinking. In fact, I’d been guilty of wishful thinking about Maggie’s innocence all day.

  Estelle snapped her log closed. “She’s middle-aged, used to the pretty good life, and facing the certainty of prison,” she said. “If she can run, she will.”

  “I can predict all kinds of problems, though,” I said. “For one thing, you don’t have a single print of Maggie’s…not on the wine bottle, not on the histamine bottle, not on the glasses. Other than a lapse of memory about when she bought the wine and took it to her father’s house…”

  “That’s all true.”

  “You have testimony that Maggie was in the pharmacy, along with a fair collection of other people, but not that she was caught out in the back, in the compounding room where the histamine was kept. No one saw her at her father’s place, before, during, or after. You know the mess a good defense attorney is going to make of this case?”

  “But,” Estelle said, and started the car.

  “But what? Yes, I agree she has motive as much anyone. Maybe more. It makes my gut ache, but I see that. It looks like George was giving away property hand over fist, and obviously she gains if she can stop the flow.” I thumped the dash with the heel of my hand. “Nickel, dime, nickel dime. A few hundred grand maybe, at the most.”

  The undersheriff lifted her shoulders, and I knew what that meant. “Yes,” I said, “We both have seen folks murdered for a good deal less.” I huffed a sigh. “We have the means. I’m not sure we have the opportunity. And without something firm there, a defense attorney will make hash.”

  “If Maggie stopped by her father’s place at noon, just as he was sitting down to eat, that’s opportunity.”

  “Ah, but,” I said. “She would need to have the histamine in her possession well before yesterday…she’d have no way to know for sure when this supposed opportunity would present itself.”

  “Exactly so, padrino. Exactly so. Guy Trombley said that the last time he compounded histolatum was in May, for Phil’s sister. Then she died. Let’s suppose that somehow, Maggie found the opportunity to take the chemical. Guy wouldn’t even know it was gone. Sir, he didn’t know it was gone when we first checked with him. It came as a complete surprise.”

  “You’re saying that Maggie might have been wandering around for who knows how many goddamn months, the stuff in her purse, waiting for an opportunity?”

  “So to speak. Or working up courage, hoping something would change her mind. Maybe she did argue with her father against giving away the property. Maybe she did. And maybe her father stone-walled her. Yesterday, the opportunity presented itself. Her dad calls asking her to pick up some wine, and with the news that you’ve canceled out on lunch. She goes over to Ridgemont, and sure enough, the old man sees a fresh bottle of wine, chugs the remains of the old bottle, and then heads for the bathroom. She opens the new one, pours, and spikes. Even time to wipe the bottle.”

  “Could have, maybe, maybe,” I said. “I’d still bet on the defense attorney.”

  “She’s a sales professional,” she said, enunciating each syllable. “And that’s why I think she’ll run, given the chance, sir. She cuts deals. That’s what she does for a living. But right now, she doesn’t know how little we have. As soon as it’s clear that we’re not just chasing a red wine allergy, as soon as she knows that we have her trapped in a lie, she’ll be ready to cut a deal.”

  “You think so.”

  “Yes, I do. I’m certain that we have enough for a grand jury indictment. That gives us all the time we need to find something more concrete than a cash register receipt that calls her a liar.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “We have Ricardo Mondragon,” Estelle added. She pulled out her little notebook and ruffled pages, finally holding one out for me to see. “’It was on the table. I asked him if I could throw it away…I didn’t see no new bottle.” She closed the notebook. “If Maggie had taken the fresh bottle to her father’s house earlier in the morning, why wouldn’t it be there? She said that she opened it for him. Who would put an open bottle away in a cupboard somewhere? It would be standing on the table…which is exactly where we found it.”

  I settled deeper into the seat and stared out through the windshield at nothing much. “Now what?” I asked, although I knew the answer as well as the undersheriff.

  “I’ll talk with Schroeder and see what he says.”

  “I know what he’ll say.”

  “And then an arrest warrant. She’ll be held pending grand jury action.”

  The process sounded so cut and dried. Maggie Payton Borman’s life would come to a halt, the legal process more drawn out and painful than what she’d inflicted on her unsuspecting father.

  I hoped that Estelle was wrong about one thing. Maggie could run and spend the rest of her life running, leaving the law behind. Whether that would be a worse fate, only she could decide, since all the memories would go with her.

  There was nothing further I could accomplish that night. To the north, the state laboratory clanked its test tubes and watched the drip down the chromatography strips…that’s all I could remember from my own college chemistry class, but I had no doubt that the eager young chemists would find whatever could be found. At the same time, surgeons did their best to patch Pat Gabaldon back together again. We had no idea when he’d be able to tell us his version of events, but the news of nailing his assailants might speed his recuperation.

  I didn’t take much satisfaction that the wheels of justice were still turning in George Payton’s case, however slowly. For the first time in probably too long, I wasn’t even hungry. Instead of to the Don Juan de Oñate restaurant, or to the Guzman’s for something homey in good company, I went home, deep into my dark, quiet burrow.

  In a moment of silliness, I even contemplated calling my oldest daughter, Camille. I wouldn’t discuss the Payton case with her, of course—she’d make the connection in a flash and call me worse than silly. No, Camille wasn’t going to poison me so that she could heist the family wealth.

  Instead, I took my time making the perfect mug of coffee, enjoying the aroma of freshly ground Sumatran beans. Leaning comfortably against the kitchen counter, I waited for the drip gadget to finish its work, then took the mug down into my sunken living room/library. One of the joys of being both an insomniac and a reader is that the clock never mattered. I perused the shelves, looking for just the
right break from reality. Eventually, I pulled Trulock’s In the Hands of Providence from one of the upper shelves, a book I’d read half a dozen times and unearthed some new tidbit each time. Settling into the massive leather recliner, I buried myself in Joshua Chamberlain’s Civil War.

  Three mugs of Sumatran later, as troops tried to find a way to storm up through the eastern woodlands without being cut to pieces by cannon and musket fire, the battle lost its focus for me. I ended up reading the same paragraph three times, then surrendered, letting my head sag back into the leather.

  I awakened once when the furnace came on, closed the book and placed it on the slate table. With hands folded over my belly, I relaxed back again. What the hell. Bed was where I made it, like the old tejón that Estelle affectionately nicknamed me—an old badger who likes things his way.

  With a jolt that twanged the arthritic spurs here and there throughout my skeleton, I awakened to the telephone. It was the landline, that black thing that hung on the wall in the kitchen. For several rings, I listened to it, holding up my wrist so that I could see the time. With a curse, I hauled my carcass out of the chair, barking my shin on the recliner mechanism. Whoever it was waited patiently, and I lifted the receiver after the eighth ring.

  “Gastner.” The clock over the stove agreed. It was just coming up on midnight.

  No one on the other end spoke, and for an instant I thought it was one of those robots that call, offering extended vehicle warranties or the command ‘don’t be alarmed,’ from account services, whoever they were, warning that my credit card was doomed if I didn’t subscribe to their service, whatever that might be. But the vocal robots didn’t work at midnight. In a moment I heard an exchange of distant voices.

  “Gastner,” I said again, and the circuit switched off. “Well hell,” I grumbled, and leaned back against the kitchen counter, regarding the coffee maker. But ten pound weights hung from my eyelids.

  The next day was going to be a whirlwind of activities, including conferences with District Attorney Schroeder, maybe even Judge Hobart. Estelle would map out a game plan to deal with Maggie Borman, and I wouldn’t want to sleep through that. Gambling that my eyelids would slam shut the rest of the way, I made my way to the bedroom and eased onto the down comforter, too tired to bother undressing. There’d be plenty of time come morning for a shower and all those ceremonies that begin a new day.