Privileged to Kill by Steven F. Havill Page A

The critique was not always good. When my brush touched the glass for the third time, I set down the coffee cup and dug my glasses out of my pocket, then spent some more irritation trying to decide which panel of the bifocals would work best.
    By the time I finished a quarter of the window, I had decided that a person could spend a lifetime painting a house. My old adobe, plastered as it was with genuine, hundred-year-old brown mud, saved me that trouble, but it still had an acre of window and door trim. The trick was not to look too closely at the other windows as I walked around the building.
    With the window half done, I made another pot of coffee and brought out one of my folding chairs. I sat under the cottonwood and looked at the house, deciding that I liked what I saw.
    The second half of the window was tedious. The light was bad, my neck cricked, and the paint was thick and uncooperative on the brush. But I persisted and avoided painting the glass blue.
    With six inches of the center mullion to go, I heard footsteps in the house. My hand froze, the brush poised just above the wood, a bead of paint ready to run.
    “Sir?”
    “I’m out back,” I shouted when I recognized Estelle Reyes-Guzman’s voice.
    She appeared in the doorway but didn’t open it. Instead she stood quietly, regarding me. Her eyebrows pulled together in the beginnings of a frown.
    “I made fresh coffee,” I said, and pointed toward the kitchen with the brush.
    “No thanks.” She pushed the door open and stepped out. Her deep brown eyes traveled first to the paintbrush, then to the can of paint, and then to the window. She was taking long enough to critique the work.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    She looked back at me, and one eyebrow lifted a bit. “Why are you doing that, sir?”
    I chuckled. “Because it needed doing. I got tired of not being able to see out the window.” I gestured with the brush at the vine. “It wasn’t hard. Kind of relaxing, actually.” I bent over and laid the brush across the top of the paint can. “What’s up?”
    Estelle took a deep breath and reached out with one hand toward my sleeve. “You got some blue paint on your revolver.” I lifted my arm up and peered down at the gun, not an easy task considering my girth. I frowned. It was the first time all day that I was conscious of being in uniform.
    I pulled the flannel paint rag I’d been using out of my back pocket and wiped the drip off the walnut grips and then daubed at another fleck near the buckle of the Sam Browne belt. “I can’t believe I did this without changing my clothes,” I muttered.
    “I tried to call you earlier,” Estelle said.
    “Yeah, I know. I heard it.”
    “Five times.”
    “You need to let it ring more than five times, sweetheart.”
    “No…I mean I tried calling five times. Once not long after I dropped you off, and then around noon, and then afterward. I figured you were asleep.”
    I stared at her blankly. “What do you mean ‘once around noon’? What time is it?” I said, and looked at my watch. The hands made no sense, stuck at five after four. The sweep second hand swept methodically around the face.
    “It’s after four.”
    “What time did you drop me off?”
    “About ten…maybe ten-thirty, sir.”
    “You’ve got to be kidding.”
    “No, sir.”
    I backed up and sat down slowly in the lawn chair, my heart hammering in my ears. Estelle looked back at the window. She stepped up close and examined the glass. “Nice job.” She turned and looked at me. “Are you going to do all the trim?”
    My hand groped at my shirt pocket, a tick left over from half a century of smoking. “Estelle…” I started and then stopped.
    “Do you want me to come back later, sir?”
    I shook my head with irritation. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.” I got to my feet and waved a hand at the window. “It just seemed important at the time. I don’t know why.”
    “Sometimes you need a break.”
    I