Red, Green, or Murder

Chapter Thirty-four

“What’s going to happen?”

I lay motionless, letting the words sink in, giving my foggy brain time to spool up. There was no point in sputtering a bunch of noise. I knew the voice, and I could guess the mix of emotions behind it.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes, I’m awake,” I replied.

“I need to talk to you,” Maggie Payton Borman said. “Can I do that?”

“Here we are.”

The line was quiet for so long that I could have gotten up, put on the coffee, and returned to bed. But I remained quiet in the companionable silence, concentrating on listening for background noises, wondering where Maggie was, what she was doing.

“She’s not going to give up, is she.”

I could have asked for an explanation, for a repetition, but that wasn’t necessary. I knew exactly what-and who-Maggie meant.

“No, she’s not,” I said. I didn’t add that Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzman would be conferring with the district attorney later this morning. The phone went silent as Maggie gave me plenty of time to be forthcoming, but I outwaited her.

“Did you know just how ill Dad was?” she asked.

“I think I did.”

“His prostate cancer had metastasized, Bill. More than we had thought. Dr. Perrone said that he should be on morphine, but dad refused. Did you know that?”

“No.” I could not imagine crusty, garrulous old George doubled over, whimpering with agony. I heard a long, shuddering sigh from his daughter.

“You know, that wasn’t his greatest fear, Bill. Not the pain.”

“I don’t think your father was afraid of anything,” I said.

“Oh, he was. He was.” Maggie laughed, but it was a sad sound, a hopeless little chuckle. She lowered her voice and the growled imitation of George Payton was pretty accurate. “’I’m going to end up in goddamn diapers,’ he’d say.”

“It’s not easy,” I said.

“The past two weeks have been really hard, Bill. Just awful.”

I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I would have understood if George had selected a favorite gun from his diminishing collection and put an end to the agony. But that would have been his choice, a choice that he was free to make. Evidence didn’t suggest that George had dosed his own wine with histamine diphosphate, and he never would have chosen that route anyway.

“Will you tell me what you think?”

“What I think doesn’t matter at this point.”

“I need to know, Bill. I want to know what you think.”

“What I think. Well, on several occasions, your father said what mattered to him most was cleaning up his mess. Not leaving a tangle behind that someone else-no doubt you-would have to clean up.”

“He talked with you about that sort of thing?”

“Oh, yes. Two old geezers, gumming away. He might not have been especially demonstrative about it, but he cared about you, Maggie. He was proud of you. He didn’t want to leave something behind that someone else would have to unsnarl.”

“That’s dad,” Maggie agreed. “Very neat, very organized in some ways.”

“Yep. He had a lot of different properties, as you are well aware. He was in the process of giving them all away…well, I don’t know that. He was in the process of giving some of them away. To Herb Torrance, to the county, maybe others.”

“And you think…”

“Yes. I do.” Hell, why not. We’d jumped into the deep water. “You’re used to making a profit, Maggie. That’s what you do. If your father left a will behind, I have no doubt that he left his estate to you, not that it’s any of my business.”

“He didn’t leave a will. That’s one of the things he kept saying that he was going to do.”

“Well, regardless. What do I think? I think that you convinced yourself that if bringing on the inevitable would stop the loss of property from his estate, even if you had to wait for probate, then there you go.”

“You agree with her, then.” Her.

“You’re referring to the undersheriff, I suppose.”

“You know I am.”

“Using her name is difficult for you?”

Silence greeted that remark. “No,” Maggie said, sounding like a little kid. “I feel hunted. I can’t sleep, I can’t tend to business, I can’t imagine what’s going to happen now. Everything I worked for…”

“A bunch of choices,” I said. “Where are you now?”

“I’m…” and she hesitated. “Are you going to call in? Do you have one of those pager things that alerts the department?”

“I’m retired,” I said. “You’ve got the edge. Where are you, Maggie?”

“I can’t do this,” she said, as if talking to someone else.

“Is Phil there with you?”

She laughed. “Dear Phil. No, he’s not. He’s home, sound asleep. I don’t know how he does it. Are you recording this now?”

“No.”

“You’ll testify, though.”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me how these things work?”

“These things take time,” I said. “If the district attorney wants to go the grand jury route, you’ll be notified. The target of the investigation always is. You have the opportunity to testify on your own behalf during a grand jury hearing if you wish. You aren’t required to. You aren’t even required to attend. If the grand jury indicts you, you’ll be taken into custody, the judge will set bail, and a trial date will be set. That could be early next year. These things don’t exactly move at the goddamn speed of light.”

“My God,” she whispered. “They really think I did this?”

“They don’t have to think anything, Maggie. All a grand jury does is determine that sufficient question, sufficient evidence, exists to warrant a trial. They decide whether or not a petit jury will hear the case to decide innocence or guilt. That’s my version of Justice System 101.” I reached out, turned on the bedside light, and found my glasses. The little cell phone, with all its nifty features that Estelle had programmed for me, that I’d learned to carry most of the time, rested out on the kitchen counter. The undersheriff was one click away.

“What if they don’t think that?”

“Don’t think what?” I pulled the blanket up around my shoulders.

“That I killed my father. What if the evidence…”

“Then you’re free to continue your life.”

“But she’ll make sure there’s evidence, won’t she,” Maggie whispered.

“That’s her job, Maggie.”

“And she’s very, very good at it,” Maggie added, and I heard more resignation than bitterness. “What do you think, Bill?”

I sighed. “Are we going into rewind here? I told you what I think.”

“You think I killed my father so he wouldn’t give away his properties? So I could make a profit on them?”

“What I think at this point doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me, Bill.”

I took a deep breath and pulled the blanket a little more snuggly around my neck. “All right. Yes, that’s what I think happened.” She started to say something, but interrupted herself. “I think you got too clever, Maggie. That’s what I think. Now, why? Well, we humans have this goddamn wonderful capacity not to recognize slippery slopes when we’re standing on the brink. We don’t remember how momentum works once we stumble over the edge, once we take that one step too far. You thought that we all would just accept on face value that your father had the expected seizure. You didn’t give us much credit.” Not us, I thought. Her.

“I can’t…” and she stopped again.

“You can’t what?”

“This is going to ruin me,” she whispered. “Even if…even if they can’t prove it. It’s going to be in the papers and on television. No matter what the jury says, all the tongues will wag…”

“That goes with the turf, Maggie. But that’s why grand juries operate in secret.”

“In this town? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“What can I say.”

“That’s not very helpful,” she snapped, sounding for the first time like the hustle-bustle Maggie Borman Payton of old.

“You asked what I think,” I said.

“I’m trying to decide what to do,” she said, as if I hadn’t spoken.

“I hope you’ll decide the right thing.” In the past hours, I’d had a bellyful of people deciding the wrong things.

“And what is the right thing? What am I supposed to do now?”

“You’re at the office?”

“It doesn’t matter where I am.”

“Well, wherever you are, go out to your car and drive over to the sheriff’s department. Deputy Ernie Wheeler is on graveyard over there, and he’s a good guy. Just tell him to call the undersheriff. Tell him that you’ll wait in the conference room. It’s just across the hall from dispatch.”

“Oh, please, Bill,” Maggie said, with exaggerated condescension. “I’m not going to turn myself in. I don’t care what she thinks she’s found.”

“So be it. Maybe the first phone call you make after you hang up with me should be to a good lawyer. A very good lawyer.”

“Well, obviously.” Her short-tempered umbrage turned into a long, painful groan. “I just can’t do this.”

I didn’t know what the this was. Maybe she was sitting with one of her dad’s shotguns between her knees, staring down the chokes. Maybe she was trying to remove the child-proof top from a jumbo-sized bottle of tranquilizers. Maybe she had a travel brochure about life in Puerto Vallarta or Buenos Aires. No matter what route she chose, it was going to leave a mess behind, and that would have made old George Payton flush with anger.

“May I ask you a question?” I said.

“I know what it is,” Maggie Payton Borman said.

“Maybe you do. All right, suppose that I believe that you didn’t lace your father’s wine with histamine diphosphate. Suppose, despite everything that the evidence shows, that I believe that. There are two people that our MMO mumbo-jumbo fits. Both you and Phil had the means, the motive, and the opportunity, Maggie.” I knew that I shouldn’t have mentioned the drug, but there it was. If Maggie hadn’t known the connection before, she did then.

Silence. As I waited for her to decide what to say, the thought occurred to me that this might have been Maggie’s grand scheme in the first place. Poor Phil would never have seen it coming.

“Are you telling me that Phil did this to your father?”

Once again, her voice drifted into the small and forlorn. “Oh, Bill,” she whispered.

“Oh, Bill, what?”

“Do you think that Phil…”

“No, actually, I don’t think that Phil anything, Maggie. I think he did just what he says he did. He went over to your dad’s place in the early afternoon to check on him, and maybe clean up some dirty dishes. He found his father-in-law dead. That’s what I think.”

“His sister used that drug, Bill.”

“I know she did. And you know, Maggie, I think we’ve taken this about as far as I want to take it just now.”

“I thought I could count on you, Bill.” Now, her tone was soft and accusing, and that sent my blood pressure up into the red zone. She had depended on my friendship with George and my affection for his daughter.

“You can, Maggie.” I shrugged off the blanket and let my feet touch the wooden floor. “I’m advising you to call a good lawyer, then go over to the Sheriff’s Department and turn yourself in. I can be there in ten minutes. You do that and I’ll help you any way I can.” Silence. “On the other hand, you go off and do something stupid, well…then you’re on your own.”

The silence continued for a full minute. I could hear nothing in the background to tell me where Maggie might be.

“These things are so simple to you, aren’t they?” she said finally.

“Simple? No. None of it is simple, Maggie.”

“Good night, Bill.”

“You still haven’t told me where you are, Maggie,” I said, but I was talking to a dial tone.

I took the luxury of getting up and shrugging a bathrobe over my rumpled clothes before dialing. The undersheriff’s voice was muffled and distant. I don’t know why there’s something sacred about sleep-waking someone up always seems to prompt those I’m sorry to disturb you excuses, with lots of valuable time wasted with apologies.

“Hey there,” I said, sounding as cheerful as possible. “You ready for breakfast?” I twisted around and glanced at the clock. Hell, at 5:27 a.m., half the day was gone.

“Good morning, padrino,” Estelle said, now fully awake. The absence of background noise told me that the rest of the household wasn’t.

“And good morning to you. Look, I was just on the phone for half a day with Maggie Borman. I suggested that she make her way over to the sheriff’s department and turn herself in.”

“She confessed to you?”

“Ah, no. Not in so many words. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s toying with blaming Phil for the whole thing. I could be wrong.”

“She actually said that?”

“No. She sounded like she was ready to imply it.”

“Ah…that’s good stuff for court,” Estelle said, and I could hear the amusement in her tone.

“Well, what can I say. Anyway, she wanted to know what I thought, and I tried to tell her without tramping my size elevens all over your investigation.”

“Where was she, sir?”

“That’s the interesting thing. She wouldn’t tell me. I asked, but no dice. I couldn’t hear anything in the background, either. Maybe she’s sitting there in her Cadillac, ready to head out. That worries me a little.” I glanced over at the clock. “The Regál crossing opens at six a.m., but that doesn’t seem like her style, somehow. And she doesn’t have any family to run to.”

“Let me call dispatch,” Estelle said. “Shall I pick you up?”

“I’d appreciate it. You talked with Schroeder?”

“I did. He’s coming over from Deming, and we’re meeting this morning at eight. But he said that we were free to make a move before then, if we have to.”

“We’re going to have to,” I said.