Steven Havill - Red, Green, or Murder

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.

One challenge of living in a rural, quiet little niche of the world such as Posadas, New Mexico, is that it’s easy to lose track of life on the world stage. Maggie’s first assumption was that we all would accept her father’s passing as the expected monstrous heart attack that George had been working on for years.

I knew now that when I’d first arrived at the scene and found Maggie staring out the living room window of her father’s house that it wasn’t the shock of grief that had flummoxed her. It was that damn yellow police line tape across the kitchen door and Undersheriff Estelle Reyes-Guzmans methodical harkening to her intuitions.

Sitting in her swank living room in the house on Posadas’ East Fairview Lane, long before she called me at dawn, Maggie had planned all the right moves-at least they must have seemed right to her. That’s what her cryptic, final “Good bye, Bill” had told me.

The undersheriff had to wait only a couple minutes until I emerged from my badger hole clean and neat, showered and shaved. Deputy Jackie Taber and Sgt. Tom Mears had already scoured Posadas, looking for a new Cadillac bearing the vanity plate P osadas R eal E state 1. It wasn’t in the village. It wasn’t waiting to pass through the border crossing.

Poor Phil Borman had no clue where his wife might be, and he walked in circles in the conference room of the sheriff’s department, refusing to go home, looking as if he wanted to vomit.

That’s when the electronic tendrils reached out and tapped Maggie Payton Borman on the shoulder. Folks who live in small, quiet, out-of-the-way niches forget how easy that is. No matter how clever you might be, radio or phone signals move at the speed of light.

Because Homeland Security had made obsolete the notion of traveling incognito on anything but a stinky bus, Maggie had been required to produce a photo I.D. to obtain her plane ticket. Thus, in only moments we knew that she had boarded a flight out of El Paso International Airport that hit the clear purple skies promptly at 11:50 p.m. the day before, bound for Houston. Airport security confirmed that the Cadillac had been left in a back row of long-term parking. Phil had been snoring loudly and never knew that she’d gone.

Tracking her that far wasn’t a difficult chore. Both Estelle and I had talked face-to-face with Maggie Borman just a few hours before. If she wanted to fly out of the country, the choices of metro airports near at hand were limited-Tucson to the west, Albuquerque to the north, El Paso to the east. El Paso was the closest, and with a number of telephones and computers checking manifests, it didn’t take long.

And Estelle had called it exactly right- if she can run, she will. Maybe with her own edition of women’s intuition, Maggie had read the undersheriff correctly. The door was closing, and if she was to run, then best that she run quickly.