Steven Havill: Red, Green, or Murder

I shook my head. “Nope. Don’t think so. Just as good a day as any. Actually, I think Thursday is soup day from the Senior Citizens. George said soup is for sissies.” I thrust my hands in my pockets. “Here lately, he was getting meals-on-wheels from them, but he complained about that.” I grinned at Estelle. “Gotta have something really worth living for once in a while.”

She nodded at that deep, philosophical thought as if she understood perfectly. Maybe she did. But Estelle had never eaten a burrito grande in her entire life-I’d bet the farm on it. Not with her waist line. She wouldn’t know the pure pleasure of having about a million calories settled comfortably behind the belt. When I finished one of those mammoth feeds, I felt like an old bruin who had disposed of an entire rich honey hive in one sitting, with a bushel of over-ripe, fragrant apples for dessert.

“That’s a fancy take-out dish,” she observed. True enough, the Pyrex casserole wasn’t the usual for the Don Juan.

“The restaurant started packing up George’s burrito like this a while ago,” I said. “When he couldn’t make it to the restaurant any more. That’s one of the perks of being a thirty-year customer.” I glanced around and saw George’s battered walker in the corner by the refrigerator, shoved there out of contempt, but still close at hand. “Fernando couldn’t bring himself to mash that work of art all together in one of those cheap take-out containers. At least not for George.” I held out my hands, drawing vaguely artistic shapes in the air. “Presentation, you know.”

“Not today for you, though.”

“Nope. Herb Torrance was ready to move a little gaggle of cattle, and then the kid got messed up. His horse spooked.”

“Dale is all right?”

“That’ll depend on who the orthopedic surgeon is. The damn horse planted a shod hoof right on the side of the kid’s knee and then pushed off. Crunch. The kid’s thigh is pointing this way, his lower leg that way. Nasty, nasty.”

“And you said that you had agreed with George earlier to pick up the food at the Don Juan?”

“Sure,” I said. “I sometimes do that. Did that, I should say. The restaurant will deliver, of course, but what the hell. It’s nothing formal…no big deal. We thought maybe we’d hit it today, but then I got busy. I rang George when we were on the way to meet the ambulance. Told him that I was likely going to be late.” I glanced over at the silent corpse, hoping he’d wake up and grump at me. “He didn’t like to throw off his schedule, though. He said he’d have someone from the restaurant do the honors.”

“This was right around noon?”

“Just a bit before. Maybe eleven-fifty or so when I actually called him.”

Her expressive eyebrows furrowed a bit. “So the restaurant delivered,” she said, adding, “The dish belongs to the restaurant, then.”

“Sure. George washes it-that’s a production if there ever was one-and then someone takes it back. I would have done that today.” I saw the fork on the floor, and moved back. A juice glass had been knocked off the table on the other side of his plate, splashing red wine across the linoleum.

Estelle watched me as I surveyed the little kitchen. “Just a bite or three,” I said. “That’s about what he managed, wouldn’t you guess?”

“Yes,” she said. “When you talked to him on the phone this morning…did he sound okay? His usual self?”

I shrugged. “He said he wasn’t feeling so hot,” I made a face. “But I didn’t get the impression that he thought this was his last meal, if that’s what you mean.”

She knelt beside George Payton’s body, her hands folded on her knee. “ This bag is from the restaurant,” Estelle said, thinking out loud, since we both knew that it was. She cocked her head, reading the inscription on the crumpled paper. I already knew what it said: From the Don Juan de Oñate-this ain’t for no doggy.

I backed up closer to the fridge for a panorama of the whole scene. It was easy enough to imagine what had happened. George had felt the first thunder of the seizure, dropped his fork, spasmed out and knocked over the full tumbler of wine. He had missed knocking over the nearly full bottle that stood near the center of the table. Rearing to his feet, he’d staggered away, headed for nowhere. Maybe he’d already spun into the gray void when his left hand reached out and grabbed, connecting with the restaurant’s delivery bag that had probably been on the kitchen counter. Then he’d slid down, coming to his final rest like an exhausted plumber working up energy to tackle the sink drain.

“Odd thing to grab,” Estelle said.

I sighed. “What ever is handy, sweetheart. He might have already been unconscious by then. Just a spasm.”

“I’m surprised that he didn’t reach out toward the telephone,” she said. The small cordless phone rested in its recharging cradle under the first cupboard beside the toaster…no more than four feet from George’s left hand.

“No time,” I said. “Just boom. He had time to get out of his chair, and that was just about it.” A few years before, I’d been on duty-in fact, in the middle of a homicide investigation-when a coronary had flattened me, too. There had been no time to grope for the speed dial on my phone, no time to key the hand-held radio on my belt. Not even enough time to reach out a hand to prevent my face from eating gravel.

Estelle nodded, rose, and stepped back from the body. She circled toward the table, glanced out through the door toward the living room, and when she was standing immediately beside my shoulder, murmured, “I’ll be interested to know what caused the heavy discharge of mucus, sir.”

I hadn’t knelt down to scrutinize George Payton’s face, but was ready to take the undersheriff’s word for it.

“Maybe the Don Juan’s chile was a little hotter than usual,” I said. I’d eaten my way through plenty of those servings, pausing occasionally to mop my forehead or blow my nose as the fumes from the select Hatch green chile blew out the sinuses and numbed the tongue.

I regarded Estelle, lifting my head a bit so I could bring her into bifocal focus. As usual, I was unable to read past those dark eyes. It was obvious that something was bothering her, though. When a very senior citizen with a long medical history dropped dead of circumstances that all screamed natural causes, we generally didn’t string a crime scene tape and take a thousand photographs.

But typically Estelle, the undersheriff wasn’t ready to voice her concerns, and I didn’t push it. I trusted her to tell me as much as I needed or wanted to know, and ask for help if there was something specific I could do for her.

“How ill was he?” she asked.

“I’m no doctor, sweetheart, but I’d describe him as old, frail, and unrepentant of bad habits. I would guess he was living on about a third of his heart, and you can add to that one failed kidney and a blown prostate.” I pointed out the door. “Your hubby can tell you more, but I know that George couldn’t walk from here to there without running out of air. I know that he had emphysema.” I turned and indicated the walker in the corner. “Those things weigh just a few ounces, but for old George, it was a chore. Everything an effort. No wind, no circulation. And you know, when he got to feeling down in the dumps, he’d have a cigar and a glass of brandy. ‘It was good enough for Churchill,’ he’d say. So…‘borrowed time’ is the appropriate expression in his case, I would think.”

I chuckled at myself. Over time, cops develop the habit of carrying on conversations in the presence of corpses as if the victims were still very much alive and ready to contribute their two cents. It wouldn’t have surprised me if George had stirred a bit, muttering a string of colorful expletives aimed at the us for standing in his kitchen, trying to pry into his very private death.