Red, Green, or Murder

Chapter Two

George Payton’s dilapidated International pickup dominated the driveway at 1228 Ridgemont. I recalled one of George’s pronouncements when I had suggested that he might consider something a bit smaller, agile, even lower to the ground than the mammoth green beast. Climbing into the truck was on a par with climbing the front of Cat Mesa. The suggestion was too sensible.

“Might want to carry something someday besides my walker,” he’d growled, and that was that. It was likely that the truck had not moved from that spot in the last month.

Cars marked and unmarked from both the Posadas County Sheriff’s Department and the dwindling Posadas Village P.D. were curbed in front, along with Linda Real’s little red Honda. That the Sheriff’s Department’s photographer would be at the scene wasn’t surprising. Any unattended death was just that-unattended. Until investigators decided otherwise, the case would stay open, and documentation was required.

On the other side of the street, where pavement blended into weeds and pasture, another jazzy SUV and a sleek Cadillac sedan added to the clot. An EMT first-responder unit dominated the street, lights pulsing.

The young deputy who’d blown by me a few moments before on State 56 stood by the curb with one of the village part-time officers, and when he saw me the deputy stepped out into the street and waved me forward. I rolled down my window.

“How about right in front of the undersheriff’s unit, sir,” Deputy Dennis Collins said. “We’re getting a bit of a snarl here.” I glanced around at the congregation of neighbors and gawkers. The scrubby front yards all showed compliance with the neighborhood policy of “let ’er grow, and when it blocks the view, set it on fire.” Adept as I was at counting livestock, a quick survey came up with nine folks who should have found something better to do.

Collins patted my SUV’s door sill as if reminding me where I was. He pointed ahead toward a vacant spot. “You bet,” I said, and as I pulled forward I saw the undersheriff of Posadas County step out onto the front stoop of George Payton’s house. Estelle Reyes-Guzman held the front door with one hand while she talked with someone inside. Estelle saw me, nodded, and started down the sidewalk to meet me.

My oldest daughter Camille was fond of referring to the undersheriff as my “fifth kid.” Camille was only half-joking when she said that, and it was said with as much affection as if it were genetically true. In fact, I’d first met Estelle when she was twelve years old. A particularly interesting escapade with her great-uncle Reuben had taken me south of the border to the tiny village of Tres Santos, where the tiny, dark, sober child lived with Teresa Reyes, Reuben’s niece. A fierce guardian, Teresa had arranged for Estelle to come to the United States a few years later to finish her high-school education. The child had lived with Reuben, which must have been a colorful experience.

I parked, locked the truck, and climbed out, taking time to survey the neighborhood and the gawkers before turning my attention to matters at hand. As I trudged up the sidewalk, I found myself thinking that Estelle Reyes-Guzman hadn’t changed much over the years-dark olive complexion, raven hair cropped a little closer now with the added hint of steel gray here and there, full eyebrows that knit over the bridge of her nose when she was thinking hard. Her fine features reminded me of the Aztecs, not that I knew anything about that tribe beyond the fanciful paintings of their heart-rending ceremonies that I’d seen in the National Geographic.

And who knew. Estelle’s stepmother, Teresa Reyes, had adopted the two year-old child from the local convent in Tres Santos. No records existed of who Estelle’s parents might have been. Perhaps they had descended from a long line of Aztec heart surgeons. And keeping up the tradition, Estelle had married Dr. Francis Guzman, who’d tinkered with a heart or two in his time.

The undersheriff caught my elbow and escorted me to the front step. “I’m glad you could come over, sir,” she said soberly. Sometime decades before, she had settled on “sir” as the appropriate all-purpose name for me, alternating that with padrino after I had agreed to be godfather to her two urchins. I could count on one hand the number of times that she’d called me “Bill,” or “Mr. Gastner,” or “Sheriff.”

“Has Alan been here?” I asked

“Not yet.”

I shook my head, muttered an expletive, and said, “I’m not ready for this.” Estelle gave my arm a sympathetic squeeze. “Who found him?”

“His son-in-law,” Estelle replied. I knew Phil Borman only casually, enough to greet him by name on the street.

I nodded in the direction of the Cadillac. “Maggie knows, then.”

“She’s inside.”

“You know,” I said, “George and I were all set to have lunch together today. I talked to him just…” and I looked at my watch. “An hour ago, or a little more. Right when I got tangled up with the Torrances.”

“Gayle told me,” the undersheriff said. “Did George call you earlier?”

“No. He might have tried,” I replied, remembering the ringing phone. “I called him to tell him I’d be late, and he wasn’t in the mood to wait. He said that he didn’t feel all that hot.”

“Ah,” Estelle said, without explanation about what she was thinking. But I was used to that. I took another deep breath to fortify myself for the meeting with Maggie Payton Borman, George’s daughter and only child-and one of those type AAA personalities who always made me feel tired. Now in her forties, Maggie hadn’t lost any of her spunk. She ran the Posadas Realty with her new husband, Phil. I knew they enjoyed an enviable track record of convincing potential home or business buyers that the village of Posadas was poised to grow like kudzu, rather than being the dried-out desert runt that it really was.

Linda Real, the Sheriff’s Department photographer, met us at the door. An inch shorter than Estelle and tending toward chubby, Linda’s passion, besides Deputy Thomas Pasquale, with whom she lived, was shooting enough hard film and using enough digital bits and bytes that stock prices rose every time Posadas County reported a serious incident.

She greeted me with an affectionate half hug, the huge digital camera that hung around her neck banging against my belly. “Hi, Sheriff,” she said, one of about half the county who had kept the title attached to me as an honorarium. She lowered her voice to a whisper as she said to Estelle, “I’m finished until Dr. Perrone gets here. You want me to stick around?”

“Yes,” Estelle nodded. I didn’t know how many pictures anyone really needed of a heart attack victim, but I’d learn long ago not to question Estelle’s judgment.

I looked beyond Linda into the house. George Payton had lived simply in this little two bedroom, cinder-block bungalow. In the past decades, I’d been inside dozens of times. With my eyes closed, I could draw the floor plan-in part because nothing was out of the ordinary. The ambiance was neo-utilitarian. I knew that, when I looked inside, I’d see only one thing that would remind me of George’s wife, Clara-a bright, cheerful woman. Her hand-me-down, battered upright piano would still be sitting against the east wall, a bright orange vase filled with a bouquet of plastic flowers on top.

Clara had died on daughter Maggie’s eighteenth birthday. With his wife gone and Maggie headed off to college, George had sold their fancy home behind Pershing Park and pulled into himself, making do in this tiny, 950-square-foot place. He’d brought the piano and flower vase with him, even though he didn’t know middle-C from Adam and never replaced the dusty, fading flowers.

The old man had always lived simply, but with a fondness for anything related to the firearms industry. His Sportsmen’s Emporium had been a fixture in Posadas for almost forty years. He had an amazing inventory of stuff packed into that store, both new and historic, mass market or unique. That’s where I’d first met him, and over the years we’d become good friends.

Wearying of the day-to-day grind and the bureaucracy of the Treasury Department’s paperwork, George sold the business when the millennium turned. The young man who bought it streamlined the operation, cleared out a lot of the old junk, ran inventory control through a nifty new computer system, raised prices to current levels, lost two-thirds of his customers, and went out of business within the year.

An enormous cartridge collection hung on the south living room wall, its heavy walnut frame thick with dust. Each cartridge, from the tiny Kolibri cartridges designed to dispatch rabid houseflies to gargantuan shells developed to batter elephants, was labeled and mounted on a painted background depicting Cat Mesa, the mesa north of Posadas. It was an impressive collection and probably worth some money to the right buyer. Posters advertising firearms ringed the room, with paintings reminiscent of Russell or Remington painted on sheet metal-except these were all period originals, not stamped replicas.

Maggie Payton Borman was standing beside the piano, gazing out the window at the tiny side yard that grew an abundant collection of goat-heads and tumbleweeds. There wasn’t much of a view, just the neighbor’s unkempt car-port and a tarp-covered boat on a small trailer with flat tires. The neighbors hadn’t lived there for more than a year, and the boat hadn’t been in the water for twice that.

I doubt that Maggie saw any of it. Her mind was elsewhere. Off to her left, a yellow sheriff’s ribbon stretched across the narrow doorway into the kitchen, the bright color a jarring intrusion on this dismal scene.

Maggie turned, saw me, and held out both arms. We met in the center of the room and she held me hard enough to make me flinch. She hung on for a long time, not saying a word. Eventually she drew back and looked me straight in the eye without saying a word.

“Maggie,” I said, “what can I say.” She squeezed my shoulder. A good-looking woman, tending to be stocky like her father and with the same honest, open face, Maggie was the kind of person who bustled. She bustled to arrange things, to control things, to take charge of things, even when she didn’t have to. Now, she had been hauled up short, with nothing to bustle about. She had nothing to do but stay out of the way. She couldn’t even go into the kitchen to fix us a sandwich.

“I was supposed to have lunch with your dad today,” I said. “Herb Torrance’s boy managed to break a leg, and we got hung up with that.”

She shook her head sadly. “Dad told me yesterday that you two were getting together. But isn’t that’s the way of it,” she said. “It was Dale who was hurt?”

“Yes. He’ll be all right.”

“Such an attractive young man,” Maggie said, and then heaved an enormous sigh. “Bill, I’m just not ready for this.”

“No one ever is,” I said. “Had you talked to your dad this morning?”

She shook her head again, a quick little twitch. “I meant to look in on him this morning.” She squeezed her eyes shut, forcing the tears back. “Meant to. And isn’t that the way. Like I said, he told me yesterday that he was having lunch with you.” She tried a brave smile. “More of that health food from the Don Juan.”

One of the things I liked about Maggie, regardless of her power-brokering in the professional world, was that she tried hard to let her dad be himself. She hadn’t tried to force George’s habits, or clean a house he didn’t want cleaned, or manicure a yard that pleased him just the way it was. “What happened, do you know?” I asked.

Maggie sighed deeply again, and I saw her eyes flick toward the yellow ribbon “As nearly as we can tell, dad sat down to lunch and then had a seizure, right there at the table.” This time, her sigh had a little shake to it, the misery close to the surface. “I wish I had been there, Bill. But,” and she shrugged helplessly, the kind of gesture that prompted me to rest a paternal hand on her shoulder. “The world turns, you know. I had to show a house, and that dragged on and on. I guess…I guess that I didn’t even think about it. I didn’t worry about dad. I mean, he said you were coming over and all. And then another call came in. I had folks waiting for me in the office-a family from Maryland, of all places.” She reached out and held my right wrist. “Phil was going to talk to dad about maybe going over to Elephant Butte for an outing this weekend. He came by here after lunch and…and found him.”

“I’m sorry that had to happen.”

“I just can’t believe this,” Maggie continued, and she smiled wistfully at Estelle, who had crossed the living room like a dark shadow and now waited patiently, and obviously for me, by the kitchen door. Maggie dabbed at her eyes with a tiny hanky. “He’s been so frail the past few weeks, and we check on him often, you know. He won’t wear that alert gadget I got for him.”

That was easy to imagine-on both their parts…Maggie wanting to do something protective, George refusing. Estelle ducked under the yellow tape, but went no farther into the kitchen.

“Where’s Phil now?” I asked.

“He’s outside,” she replied. “I think he’s out by the garage, if you want to talk with him.”

“No, no,” I said quickly. I wasn’t sheriff of Posadas County. I didn’t need to talk with anyone, unless George had secreted a herd of cattle somewhere out behind the house. I would pay brief respects to Phil Borman eventually, but there was nothing that either he or Maggie could tell me about George Payton that I didn’t already know. I’d spend a lot of time in the next few days and weeks missing old George and his dour, often profane comments about life. The world would march on now, a little poorer for his absence.

“Let me talk with Estelle for a minute,” I said, and Maggie nodded.

“Sure,” she said. A hint of a smile touched her pleasant face. “She’s so thoughtful, isn’t she. So professional, but with such a sympathetic touch. We’re so lucky to have her.”

“Yes, she is,” I replied. I always felt better when I was in Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s presence. It was only logical that others would feel the same way.

“You go ahead,” Maggie said, and turned away.

The undersheriff didn’t move as I approached. I didn’t need to be prepared for what was in the kitchen, she had to know that. After twenty years in the military and almost thirty-five in civilian law enforcement, I’d seen enough final moments that I was adequately armored, even when the departed was one of my oldest friends.

“I’m a little puzzled,” Estelle said in that husky whisper that traveled no farther than the ears for which it was intended. She lifted the yellow tape for me.

It would have been nice if George Payton had just drifted away in his sleep-at least I think it would have been. After seeing too many of them, I still had reservations about final moments. I wasn’t convinced that there was a good way, or a good day, to die.

George was seated on the floor, his back leaning against the cabinet door that concealed the kitchen sink’s innards. His left leg was stretched out straight, his right flexed at the knee. His right hand lay on the linoleum beside his right thigh. His left hand clutched a brown paper bag to his chest, resting on his ample midriff. His head nestled in his various wrinkled chins, eyes and mouth open.

The position was one that he might have sagged into had the seizure struck just as he bent over to toss the bag into the under-sink trash. One chair was pushed away from the table. On the placemat rested a familiar glass serving dish, its plastic snap-on top placed carefully toward the center of the table. I recognized an inexpensive Styrofoam cooler over on the counter beside George’s enormous pill organizer, the cooler’s top askew.

I knew exactly where the serving dish and cooler came from, and knew exactly what savory aroma had wafted up when George popped off the lid-a green chile burrito grande from the Don Juan. “And that’s not really fair,” I said.

“Sir?”

“He didn’t get to finish.” In fact, George had barely begun. Most of the wonderful burrito remained in the dish, and of the portion that George had spooned out on his plate, all but a few bites remained.