Steven Havill - Red, Green, or Murder

“Sir, did George Payton come in sometime during the last day or two to buy a bottle of this?”

“Oh,” Pierson groaned, and when he exhaled I could smell the afterlife of something robust, with lots of fruit. He touched the date on the receipt as if assuming we hadn’t noticed its presence. “Damn, I was so sorry to hear of Georgie.” He frowned and shook his head. “What a guy, you know?”

“Yes, sir,” Estelle said. “He was in?”

“Oh, gosh, no.” Pierson bent down and rested stout forearms on the glass counter, pushing the receipt back toward Estelle. “I haven’t actually seen Georgie in a couple of months. I asked Maggie the other day how he was doing, and she said he was real frail. Just real frail.”

“When was that?”

He tapped the receipt. “Guess it was yesterday. Yesterday morning.” He squinted one eye at the receipt again. “This says 11:47 a.m.”

“So, yesterday morning,” Estelle repeated.

“The one bottle, right there,” Pierson said, and straightened up. “Probably for Georgie. ’Course, I don’t know that for sure. She strikes me as a martini type, you know.” He held thumb and forefinger together as if pinching the slender stem of a glass. “So I’m guessing it was for Georgie. Phil…you know Phil comes in and buys that from time to time for his father-in-law, too. But he’s a beer man. Phil, I mean.” He puffed out his cheeks. “I could be nosy,” he added, and looked quizzically at the undersheriff.

“Whenever there’s an unattended death,” Estelle said easily, giving him the stock answer. “We like to tie up all the loose ends.”

“Well, sure you do. What else? Mornin’, Evie,” he called to the woman who had entered and was angling off toward the single section of grocery items.

Estelle picked up the receipt. “This was Maggie Payton, though,” she repeated. “You’re sure of that?”

“Well, as sure as I am of anything these days,” Pierson laughed. “That’s a cash sale, so we don’t have a card receipt with a signature. But she was here yesterday morning, and I remember her buying the Aussie.” He grinned, showing a diminishing supply of teeth. “You could ask her, right? Don’t go tattling on me, now. I’d hate to have her as an enemy.”

“Not to worry,” Estelle said pleasantly. “Thanks, sir.” She held the receipt so he could see it. “This time is accurate?”

“Right on the dot,” he laughed. “Lookit,” he said, and held out the tail end of the register tape. He twisted around and eyed the Coors clock behind him. “Right on the money. To the minute.” Estelle nodded appreciatively.

The walk back outside to the car seemed like about fifteen miles, all of it uphill.

The neat brick ranch house on East Fairview Lane was manicured to the hilt, ready for a magazine photo-shoot. Neither Phil nor Maggie Borman would call their place a “house,” of course. That word was taboo in their circle. The Bormans’ home cried out to me that the owners would rather be somewhere else…nothing about the place said Posadas County to me.

Only heavy, diligent watering could produce such a verdant yard, coupled with endless mowing, aerating, fertilizing, and fussing. The lawn would make a golf course envious. I had no doubt that the Bormans had a water treatment system, since Posadas water was hard enough to break with a hammer. On top of that, the soil held enough alkali that the upward leaching deposited white ghosts on the surface when the water evaporated.

I knew the Bormans’ aging yardman, a sober guy who rarely spoke and even more rarely smiled. His customer list included several similar owners, and I guess he had the touch that assured business. The busy Bormans’ perfect lawn, perfect cosmos and chrysanthemums, perfect token cacti, perfect everything-all flourished.

It made my yard seem like a bramble pile…but then again, I considered my yard an authentic bramble pile, and that saved me a lot of time and energy. I had no desire to be reminded by a perfect green lawn that I had at one time lived somewhere else, or that I wanted Posadas to somehow morph into something it wasn’t. The thought occurred to me that if I had hired Maggie Payton Borman to handle my real estate deal with the Guzmans, she would doubtless have had a fit about my brambles, perhaps even arguing me into doing something about them. Well, by and large, the bulldozers had taken care of that.

The Bormans’ driveway was empty, the front drapes pulled against the afternoon sun. Estelle slowed the county car, but drove past without stopping. “Nice place,” I said. “So southwesterny.” Estelle didn’t reply, not acknowledging my cynicism. “You know, it nags at me,” I added.

“What does, sir?”

“Gweneth Barnes said that Phil Borman came into the pharmacy with Guy Trombley first thing this morning.”

“Yes, she said that.”

“Phil could have palmed that little bottle easily enough. Suppose he went back to the restroom, way in the back of the store, past the prescription counter, out behind Trombley’s office. If the door to the compounding room was open, or even just unlocked, he could have just reached around and put the bottle back on the shelf. It would only take an instant. Clumsy as I am, I could even do that.”

“Yes, he could have done that, sir.”

I regarded her with interest. “And that’s just part of it.”

“An interesting part, though.”

“Why did Phil come to the pharmacy in the first place? He just had coffee and donuts with Guy and the town fathers. Why not just head back to the realty office and go to work?”

“He needed to buy something…a bottle of aspirin, a tube of lip balm-who knows.”

“The cash register knows,” I said. “But Gwen didn’t say that he did buy anything. She said he used antacids all the time, but she didn’t actually say that he bought any. He came back with Guy because he knew that he’d be able to find the opportunity to return the histamine bottle. He either somehow heard on the grapevine that we’re looking for something related to George’s death, or he put two and two together all by himself. Somebody assumed that you’d never figure out that George’s death was anything other than a natural event, but when they heard that you had suspicions, there was no time to waste getting rid of that little bottle.”

“That’s possible, padrino .”

“You don’t think that he did? That would explain why the bottle ended up out of place, at the end of the shelf. It was a spot easy to reach in a hurry. Just reach around the corner. You wouldn’t even have to look.”

“Assuming he’d spent time back there and knew the layout of the room.”

“A single casual visit would have accomplished that part of it,” I insisted.

“It’s interesting that it would be so easy for him to do that,” Estelle said. “For anyone to do it. Mr. Trombley does not run a tight ship.”

“Bet that the ship will tighten just a bit?” I laughed. “And there’s this. With his sister’s illness, Phil would have known about histamine diphosphate.”

Estelle tipped her head sideways at that notion. “That’s not necessarily true, sir. It may be likely, if he was close enough to his sister to discuss her treatment with her. But…”

“But?”

Estelle glanced at the dash clock. “He didn’t purchase the wine, sir. Unless Mr. Pierson is imagining things, but I don’t think that even he could confuse Maggie with Phil.”

“Well, maybe she did buy it,” I insisted. “Pierson wouldn’t be wrong about that. But then, she might have given the wine to Phil to deliver. Maybe she got busy. Remember, Phil was the one who found George after lunch. He might have actually gone over there a few minutes earlier. There would have been opportunity. In fact,” and I held up a hand. We were galloping too fast toward an indictment with all this painful stuff. “In fact, yes, Phil could have brought the wine over to the house. And then left. And then someone else came into that kitchen and helped George Payton with his histamine tonic.”