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

28 Steven F. Havill
four minutes before the paramedics were here. There wasn’t any
point in trying resuscitation.”
“Had you called him before you dropped by? Did you talk
with him this morning at all?” And what did that matter to me,
I thought as the words came out of my mouth. Old habits were
sticky things.
“No. I just came over. Maggie said you two had linked up to
have lunch, so I knew he’d be here. I wanted to see if he wanted to
take a day trip for fishing over to the Butte. I mean, this weather
we’ve been having, you know? Maybe give us a chance to talk
some more about the hunt.” Borman hunched his shoulders
helplessly. “Sure as hell didn’t expect something like this. You
know,” he said, and stopped. I waited patiently. “He felt like
shit most of the time, Bill. He absolutely hated taking all those
meds. You saw that pill organizer by the kitchen sink?”
“Sure.”
“God, what a load of stuff. Here a few weeks ago, he just
stopped taking most of it, except maybe a little Prednisone for
his arthritis.”
“Well, I’ve been known to do the same thing,” I said.
Borman went for cigarette number three. “I saw him a couple
days ago, when Maggie and I took him out to dinner at the
Legion. He was just fine.
“Well…just fine by his standards. Chipper as all hell. He was
excited about me going after antelope.”
Chipper wasn’t a word I would have associated with George
Payton, even twenty years before. Lugubrious, cranky, grumpy…
not chipper.
Borman snapped his fingers. “That’s the way it happens a
lot of times, I guess.”
“If we’re lucky,” I turned at the sound of another vehicle
and saw Dr. Alan Perrone’s dark green BMW glide to a stop at
the curb.
“I don’t understand the procedure for all this, I guess,” Phil
Borman said.
“What procedure is that?”