Telling the Bees (14 page)

“That’s what’s been puzzling me, Mr. Honig. How come you knew all about this young man who lived right next door to you for God knows how many years and yet you never bothered to mention word one about him until now? If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were trying to hide something. Heck, somebody less trusting than I might even think you were attempting to impede a murder investigation.”

The detective set his pen down and looked me straight in the eyes. “So what’s your take on David Gilbert?”

What I thought was what I had thought about many times over the years, but I had never spoken a word of it to anyone before. Except to Claire, and only that one disastrous time. At this particular moment, however, try as I might, I could see no way around the detective’s question but to answer it as truthfully as I could.

“David Gilbert was Claire’s son,” I replied.

And the detective uttered a low rumble of assent as he took up his pen again and underlined something he had previously written down.

Nineteen

H
OLLOW TREE THEORY:
Wild bees live in hollow trees. When wildflowers bloom, bees produce honey. When the space in the hollow is filled, wild bees begin to swarm.

I
cocked my head as inconspicuously as I dared, but I was unable to make out even the gist of Detective Grayson’s scrawl from my reversed vantage.

“Now, why do you suppose I’m not surprised to learn from you that Claire Straussman was David Gilbert’s mother?” he said, not bothering to look up as he wrote furiously in his notebook. I assumed the question was rhetorical and waited for him to make his own reply.

“Well, let me tell you, Mr. Honig,” the detective said, setting his pen down and looking up at last, “it doesn’t surprise me, because when I’d just about run out of leads I decided to play a hunch.”

As I sat across the table from this rumpled, worn-out man, it occurred to me that while doggedness was the bread and butter of Detective Grayson’s day-to-day talent, it was his willingness to play hunches that sparked his occasional brilliance. The detective took another one of his great bear sighs as if deciding whether to devour me whole or continue to toy with me.

“I have this old buddy in the D.A.’s office back in Detroit,” he said, “and he owes me a favor. So I got him to pull the birth records for babies with the last name of Straussman who were born in Wayne County within a year or two of the start of World War Two. That’s about the time Claire went off to live with her cousin in Detroit, as I recall.”

“I believe that’s what you said,” I said, reliving again the anguish I felt at her departure as if it were yesterday and wishing it was yesterday all over again just to say what I should have said then. I wondered at that moment whether there were fireflies in Detroit.

“So, Mr. Honig,” the detective said, drawing me back to the point at hand, “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that my buddy didn’t find any Straussmans named David Gilbert.”

Of course I was not surprised, though I was hesitant to say so aloud. I nodded for the detective to continue.

“Then I remembered something Margaret Lennox’s daughter said about the Straussmans having some family down South, in Alabama maybe. So I started calling in a few more favors—and it took a while—but one of my wife’s cousins is a social worker in Birmingham and she came up with adoption papers for a baby boy, first name David, middle name Gilbert. Born May 10, 1945. Adoptive parents Marvella and Phillip Straussman. The names of the birth parents were left blank, and the adoption records were sealed. That’s how most adoptions were done in those days, but then you probably know all about that.”

I drained the last of the tea from my cup as I took a moment to grasp the full implication of Detective Grayson’s insinuation. He was right of course, in that I was certain of far more than I had already told him. I knew as well as he did that David Gilbert hadn’t been born on that first trip to Detroit, as the detective had initially assumed, but several years later when Claire and Hilda and their mother had gone off together to Alabama, ostensibly to tend to an orphaned cousin who had gotten herself in trouble with the wrong sort of man—a man who’d filled her heart full of promises he had no intention of keeping—leaving the poor girl penniless and with child, or so Mrs. Straussman had uncharacteristically volunteered to my mother upon their return four months later with a month-old baby in tow.

“It was the only Christian thing to do,” my mother had agreed when she ran into Mrs. Straussman outside of church the Sunday after the baby arrived, along with a trunkful of luggage. “The poor girl has no husband, no prospects, and no way of taking care of the child, after all.”

My mother later confessed to my father that she was as surprised by the sight of Mrs. Straussman, hobbled as she was by her growing litany of infirmities, leaning on her cane next to the family’s automobile, a long-nosed Buick Special, parked at the curb in front of the church with Claire’s father sitting silently in the driver’s seat. My mother said she was even more dumfounded, however, by Mrs. Straussman’s ensuing revelation and the fact that she chose to reveal it to her, of all people, considering their chilly history. I recalled how my mother told my father that she somehow managed to find the words to commend the woman for her Christian charity. Even then, I suspected that my mother was no more fooled by Mrs. Straussman’s story than I was, though she never said so in public, and she never knew, as I did with empirical certainty, the child’s true parentage.

I stared for a moment more into my empty teacup, choosing my words as carefully as any I ever had.

“Detective, if I understand your intimation, you are laboring under the mistaken impression that I am David Gilbert’s father,” I said, reaching for the teapot to refill my cup. “Please, let me assure you nothing could be further from the truth.”

“So what exactly is the truth, Mr. Honig?” the detective pressed.

“The truth is often quite different from the facts,” I replied. “Which do you prefer?”

“I prefer my truth to be based on facts,” he said, clearly implying in the tilt of his head that an element of distrust had once again crept into his interpretation of anything I might say.

“The fact is, Detective Grayson, Claire had a brief, sordid encounter with a man,” I said after some consideration. I saw the detective raise one of his unruly eyebrows. “The truth, however, is that she never truly loved the man, nor, I suspect, the son who came of that unfortunate union, and I will regret to my dying day that in all the years I knew this harsh truth I never once uttered a single word of comfort to ease the pain.”

With deliberate slowness, it seemed to me, the detective clicked the tip of his ballpoint pen and then flipped the cover closed on his notebook and placed both in his jacket pocket.

“Whose pain are we talking about now, Mr. Honig,” he said, “theirs or yours?”

Twenty

Q
UEEN EXCLUDER:
A device made of wire, wood, or zinc with openings that are large enough to allow worker bees to freely pass between the upper and lower hive components but confine the larger queen and drones to the brood chamber.

E
ven in retrospect, there is no way now to measure the relative depth of pain suffered by any and all who were touched by the tragic life and death of Claire Straussman, including Claire herself. I am only more certain than ever that Goethe knew whereof he spoke when he wrote that nothing is more damaging to a new truth than an old error.

Shortly after our visit, Detective Grayson was able to locate the boy through his military records. Of course he was hardly a boy by this time. He was still in the military, however, and he had been serving in the Middle East when Claire and Hilda were killed, an alibi that was easily corroborated by his superiors. In fact, he was serving overseas when the detective reached him by telephone and informed him of Claire’s and Hilda’s tragic deaths. Though he was hardly overcome by grief, David Gilbert did express some small regret over the manner of their demise.

“I always figured they’d just dry up and blow away some day,” he had said, according to Detective Grayson. In the course of their brief conversation, David Gilbert also told the detective that he and his wife had split up six years earlier and that she had taken their daughter back to Texas to be near their extended family.

“Apparently the split was pretty nasty,” the detective told me when I inquired after David Gilbert’s wife and daughter. “The wife had a restraining order put out on him before she and the girl moved back to Texas.”

“I am sorry to hear that,” I said. Evidently David Gilbert had become no less reticent in expressing his anger than his forebears had been. I had somehow hoped that his early exit from the family fold might have spared him this curse. But it appeared this was the least of his problems.

“Does this mean he no longer speaks to his wife or child?” I inquired. The thought of living out most of my adult life estranged from those nearest and dearest to me saddened me in ways I couldn’t begin to express.

“You could say that,” the detective replied. “David Gilbert told me his wife died in a car accident a little over two years after the divorce.”

“But what happened to the child?”

“Well, according to him, his daughter’s grandparents took custody of the girl and brought her back to Mexico to live with them.”

I couldn’t help wondering aloud whether such an unconventional guardianship would have been sanctioned by the courts.

“Surely David Gilbert must have contested this situation,” I said.

“Well, Mr. Honig, even he admitted there were problems in the home long before the breakup.”

I don’t know why Detective Grayson’s tone softened, but I was grateful that he took the time to explain to me that while David Gilbert clearly hadn’t been pleased with the custody arrangement, there was little he felt he could do about it. Because he was stationed out of the country at the time, and based on some particularly damaging testimony regarding a domestic disturbance call that had come out during the divorce proceedings, the grandparents were granted full and permanent custody of the girl after her mother’s death.

“Like I said, it was a pretty messy situation all round,” Detective Grayson said.

I was reminded of the last time that I’d seen them all together: David Gilbert, his wife, and their young daughter. Despite the contentious circumstances of their visit with Claire and Hilda, the three of them had seemed happy enough. In fact, they had shown all the signs of loving mates and doting parents. It was Claire who had drawn David Gilbert’s considerable ire—and justifiably so, I might add—as in the heat of her own anger she had been most insulting to them.

What had struck me then was that David Gilbert had exhibited a physical restraint rare among the Straussman clan in the face of all he’d endured that day. Indeed, the more Claire railed against him, the calmer he’d become, although in hindsight I suppose that what I took for composure may have been much closer to the sear of an ember that burns from within, more likely to flare up unexpectedly than to die out altogether.

However, David Gilbert eventually inquired about whether any formal burial arrangements had been made for Claire and Hilda, and Detective Grayson had informed him they would have been disposed of rather unceremoniously by the state once the collection of evidence and other such investigative formalities had been completed, had I not offered to pay for a decent Christian burial for the two of them. Though he was under no legal obligation to do so, David Gilbert insisted on reimbursing me for the modest costs I had incurred. That is, in fact, how I came to learn of his whereabouts, as Detective Grayson had been kind enough to contact me to relay his offer. When I tried to decline, the detective assured me that David Gilbert had both the financial wherewithal, and the ethical inclination to “set things straight,” as he put it, and so eventually I relented.

David Gilbert did not, however, ask me or Detective Grayson where Claire and Hilda had been laid to rest. I assume he never went to visit them either, as I know for certain that I have never seen any flowers placed on their graves other than those that I have brought from my own garden.

Twenty-one

A
FTERSWARM:
A small swarm, usually led by a virgin queen, which may leave the hive after the prime swarm has departed.

C
laire’s and Hilda’s murders likely would have remained unsolved until this day had it not been for the chance discovery of Claire’s diary among an odd cache of keepsakes found in the possession of a pair of young burglary suspects nearly a year after the bees had led me to the Straussman sisters’ lifeless bodies.

I had not thought Claire to be the sentimental type and so I was surprised to learn that any personal items such as diaries and vacation souvenirs existed in the first place, just as I was in the dark about the secret cubbyhole in which the Straussmans had kept their valuables.

The evidentiary connection between these items, a routine inventory of stolen goods, and the Straussmans’ untimely deaths might not have been made at all had it not been for an offhand remark made by a fellow officer to Detective Grayson regarding a puzzling loose end to an otherwise straightforward string of burglary cases to which he had been assigned. The officer mentioned that he had recovered a rather large trove of stolen goods in a public storage unit situated near a celebrated amusement park in our area. The officer had been able to trace nearly everything he’d found in the unit back to a rash of unsolved burglaries that had taken place over the previous several months and this in turn had led to the arrest of a young man and woman living in a crime-ridden apartment complex adjacent to the parking lot on the park’s east side. Most of the contraband Detective Grayson’s colleague had recovered from the storage unit was typical of such burglaries: television sets, stereo equipment, computers, video recorders, cameras, handguns, jewelry, and other easily salable items.

What had puzzled Detective Grayson’s colleague was a dusty military-issue strongbox dating back to World War II. Even odder was that it held nothing more valuable than a mason jar filled with old pennies and nickels, a dried-up leather bolo tie with tarnished silver clasp and tips, a faded autograph book, and a diary written by a woman named Clarinda J. Straussman. The officer said the various ink and pencil inscriptions were so faded in both books as to be barely legible.

Detective Grayson, who was by this time less than six months from retiring, asked his colleague if he might examine the anomalous strongbox’s contents. The officer responded by fetching it directly from the evidence storage locker and depositing box and all on the detective’s desk later that same day.

I learned all of this late one afternoon in August of 1993 when much to my surprise I opened my front door and found Detective Grayson standing on my porch. His eyes looked grayer in the dying afternoon light than I’d recalled them being.

“Detective Grayson,” I stammered through the crack in the door. I had become much more cautious in my habits over the previous year since my neighbors had been murdered in their own home. “I thought surely you’d retired by now.”

“No, not quite,” he replied in his usual brusque manner. “May I come in?”

“Of course,” I said, swinging my door wide open. Remembering my manners, I offered him a cup of tea, but he declined, saying he was in a bit of a hurry. He told me that there might be a new development in the Straussman murder case. He said it had something to do with the arrest of a pair of burglary suspects the previous evening and he asked if I might be able to accompany him to the police station, where he had some recovered property that he wanted me to take a look at.

“Right now?”

“If you don’t mind.”

“Let me just get my sweater,” I said. “The evening chill affects my old bones more and more these days.”

He invited me to ride with him in the front seat of his unmarked police car as we drove the mile or so through what was left of the old part of town to the newly renovated police station, which now abutted the city’s main library.

“It’s funny how things work out sometimes,” Detective Grayson observed rather mirthlessly, reminding me then and there of the true definition of irony as I sensed that there was nothing humorous in what the good detective wished to show me. At least, that is what I thought as he escorted me through the station’s security door and led me down a long hallway that opened into a warren of cubicles, which I assumed were the police detectives’ new quarters judging from the aroma of fresh paint emanating from the barren beige walls. Barren, that is, save for the line of portraits of previous police chiefs hung in chronological order of service.

Detective Grayson’s cubicle, one of six in a cluster in the east corner of the room, was dominated by a large gunmetal desk and a matching institutionally functional gray metal bookcase bolted to the beige padded wall opposite the desk in case of earthquake. I noticed that the shelves were half filled with books on penal codes and other official-looking law enforcement codices.

Detective Grayson settled himself into a rolling chair upon entering his realm and directed me with a stiff sweep of his arm to a stationary wooden chair next to his desk.

“Make yourself comfortable,” he said, and as I scooted the straight-backed chair closer to him he pointed to a dull metal box on his desk. It was slightly taller than a shoe box and painted a muddy greenish-brown common to military equipment. I noticed on closer inspection that it had a handle that flattened into its top by two loose metal rings and a watertight side latch. Die-stamped into the metal beneath the latch was
AMMO. BOX CAL .50 M2
, and on the side
ACME U.S
.

“Ever see this ammo box before?” the detective inquired. Puzzled, I shook my head. He slid the box nearer to him as if to examine it closer.

“Looks to be World War Two vintage. Still in pretty good shape,” he persisted. “Might even be worth something to a collector.”

“I’ve never seen it before, Detective,” I said. “I am quite sure of it.”

He responded with what seemed to me an indifferent shrug as though he rather expected my response despite his prodding. The detective then released the latch, lifted the lid, and reached into the strongbox. I noticed that
GOV’T REJECT
was stamped on the underside of the lid in faded black ink. Keeping his eyes on me, the detective pulled out a worn leather-bound book.

“Do you recognize this, Mr. Honig?” he asked as he placed the book on the desk in front of me.

Picking it up, I turned it over several times before leafing gingerly through the yellowed pages, trying not to look too closely at what was written on any one page. I shook my head and handed the book back to the detective.

“Do you recognize it?” the detective repeated.

“No,” I said honestly. “I’ve never seen this before.”

“Are you sure? Could you look at it again?”

The detective picked the book back up and fanned the pages slowly under my nose. The musty scent of aged leather and paper—and something else . . . lavender, or jasmine perhaps—assaulted my senses as a word here and there tugged at the edge of my vision. I closed my eyes. It was clear these were the confessions of someone’s very private and innermost thoughts. The detective stopped on a page midway through the diary.

“Mr. Honig,” he said, and my eyes opened, almost against my will, and fixed on a familiar name midway down the page: Hilda.

Hilda told me today that she wished it were her leg instead of Mother’s that had to be cut off. When I asked her why she would want to do such a thing for Mother, she said it wasn’t Mother that she wanted to do it for . . .

I felt ill. Sick to my soul. I shook my head.

“Please, Mr. Honig,” Detective Grayson said, handing the book back to me. “Please. This is important.”

I closed the diary and opened it again, this time to another random entry, penned, according to the date at the head of the page, on June 14, 1934. It was only a paragraph long, and even now I can remember what it said, if not exactly word for word then certainly close enough to the gist and tone of it to render an accurate evocation.

Albert said the strangest thing the other night. He said my name should have been Diana because I reminded him of the moon. I asked him if he’d ever listened to Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” and he said he wasn’t allowed to listen to secular music. But then he said a funny thing. He asked me if I ever wondered about what went on inside the Harmony Ballroom. I said of course I did. And do you know what that silly goose did? He looked at me as if I was some sort of floozy. And then he said he just shut his window when the music got too loud. I told him he couldn’t shut the world out forever, but Lord knows he’s giving it the old college try.

Silently recalling the full conversation as if it were yesterday, I could hear in my head the lilt of the playful taunt she had issued. “Don’t be such a silly goose, Albert. Be a gander.” And then she had laughed, lightly and without malice, amused by the cleverness of her wordplay. I sighed deeply, and thankfully Detective Grayson allowed me the privacy of my memories.

“I thought so,” Detective Grayson said simply, anticipating the answer to his implied question.

“Yes, it’s Claire’s,” I confirmed, closing the diary and setting it down on the desk next to the strongbox.

“What about this?” he asked me next, placing a smaller string-bound booklet in my hands. I opened it to the first page and read:

My Memories of My Visit to Detroit, Michigan. June 24, 1942, to November 30, 1942. To Keep my friends / Is my delight / So in this book / I pray you’ll write.

I leafed through the pages and read a sampling of entries, penned in an array of different hands and inks. Most were short rhyming couplets that were easily committed to memory. Impersonal little ditties, really. The sort I assume young people used to sign high school yearbooks with. Someone named Gerald A., for instance, had written:

Roses are red / Violets are blue / Your voice is entrancing / And that goes for all of you.

I found myself growing uncomfortable, irritated even, by the recorded implication of intimacy in this unknown Gerald’s short rhyme. But I kept my voice steady as I read softly aloud from the following page:

When you are old / And drinking tea / Lay down your cup / And think of me ~ Blanche

Other entries, however cleverly worded, seemed to be based on more specific experiences. Soccer games, fish fries, late-night parties down by an unnamed river. There were several messages of this type scattered throughout the booklet. Many were written by the same person: Heddy Sweet.

Her last entry read:
I’m in love with a few / I’ve been in love with many / But compared to the love for you / It wasn’t worth a penny. Yours till the doorsteps . . . ~ Heddy

I had never heard of Heddy Sweet.

Nor could I positively identify any of the other signatures, although I suspected that the final entry signed by “Your Cousin Margie” was written by the same Margaret Louise Lennox who I had met years earlier at the Straussmans’ home on the day of Mr. Straussman’s funeral. I said as much to the detective.

“Clearly this booklet was a keepsake from Claire’s extended visit to Detroit that we spoke of previously,” I said, fingering the faded script on the page. There was an eerie prescience to Claire’s cousin’s words that brought a twinge to my throat all these many years after the fact:

Though now you are free / From sorrow and care / There is many a hardship / In this world so beware.

“Yes, I do believe this is Claire’s as well,” I said, closing the book gently and returning it to the detective.

“Could you swear to it?” he pressed, and when I appeared taken aback at the prospect of swearing he added: “In a court of law, I mean. We need you to be absolutely sure.”

“I’m as sure as I can be about items that until this very moment I had no idea existed,” I said. I told him I could confirm with reasonable certainty only that the handwriting on the title page of the autograph book matched my recollection of Claire’s script and that the dates inscribed therein corresponded with her previously unexplained absence. I told him also that the diary appeared to have been penned by Claire’s hand and, in my brief examination of its contents, some of the entries reflected my recollections of common events and conversations we’d shared.

“Okay, Mr. Honig,” the detective said, laying the autograph book next to the diary on his desk. He reached once again into the strongbox and withdrew a black, tightly braided strip of leather tipped on both ends by tarnished silver aglets and gathered in the middle by a silver sunburst backed by silver flanges through which the leather strip was looped.

I’m not sure I was able to completely mask the sharp intake of breath that escaped. I cleared my throat and ascribed my cough to the dust from the old books. The detective narrowed his eyes, and I acknowledged that I’d seen this distinctive western-style tie only once.

“How so?” the detective said, his voice sharpening in much the same way it had the last time he’d upbraided me for my reticence.

“I saw Claire one evening in the company of a man wearing this tie.”

“How long ago?”

“Oh, fifty years ago at least.”

“Did you know the man?”

“I did not.”

The detective tilted his head slightly and raised his eyebrows.

“I assure you I only saw him once, and from afar.”

“One of Miss Straussman’s gentlemen callers, I take it?”

I nodded, and the detective relaxed his brow as he set the tie next to the books and withdrew a coin-filled mason jar from the munitions box. I picked this up and turned it over in my hands several times. I told Detective Grayson that the jar appeared to be the same sort of container Claire and Hilda generally used to bottle their honey, although I allowed that these were common enough among beekeepers as to be individually indistinguishable.

Although the detective remained close-lipped for the most part, I had long since begun to suspect the nature of the situation and was eager to do all I could to be of assistance.

“Okay, then,” Detective Grayson said, “I need you to do one last thing for me.”