RED, GREEN, OR MURDER - Poisoned Pen Press (UK)

26 Steven F. Havill
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.
Estelle mulled that over, gazing down at the table setting. I
knew better than to ask what she was thinking.
“Let me know what I can do to help,” I said. “I was going
to take a minute and pay my respects to Phil.” She nodded and
accompanied me as far as the yellow tape, holding it up for me
again like a gate. I exchanged a few more words of consolation
with Maggie and then headed outside, more to suck in some
fresh air than to talk to anyone.
I hadn’t seen Phil Borman when I arrived, but now he was
facing the closed garage door, leaning against the front of
George’s old pickup. He was off somewhere in his own musings
and didn’t hear me until I was just a step or two behind him.
He turned then, left arm across his striped golf shirt, right arm
propped on left like Jack Benny about to deliver a punch line,
his cigarette a couple of inches from his mouth.
I knew that George had thought highly of his son-in-law, and
that was enough of an endorsement. “Maybe Maggie will stop
now and smell the goddamn roses once in a while,” George had
grumbled to me at the couple’s wedding two years before. No