Telling the Bees (15 page)

“Anything,” I said. I was then ushered into a small anteroom with a large glass window that looked directly into another, slightly larger room into which six sullen-looking young men, each carrying a numbered placard, were led single file.

“Any of these young men look familiar to you? Take your time, Mr. Honig.”

Brown-skinned, with close-cropped hair and insolent half grins, they all wore baggy calf-length dungarees, knee-high white socks, and either crisply pressed white T-shirts or short-sleeved plaid cotton sports shirts, also meticulously ironed so that the creases on the sleeves seemed sharp enough to cut through flesh.

“No, I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t recognize any of them.”

One of the scantily clad young women in the next queue did look vaguely familiar, however.

“Okay, Mr. Honig, that’s very good,” Detective Grayson said slowly as if to mask the resonance of urgency in his voice. “Which one?”

“Number two,” I said after some hesitation.

Detective Grayson pushed a button on the wall and leaned toward the speaker next to it.

“Number two, step forward.”

The young woman squinted her eyes and took one small step closer to the mirrored glass. I took a reflexive step back.

“Don’t worry. She can’t see you through this,” Detective Grayson said, nodding at the glass and slowing his words to a cadence I imagined he might use to prompt a six-year-old through a recitation of the alphabet. “Now, can you say for sure whether you saw this girl with either of the Straussman sisters or maybe even anywhere in the vicinity of their house?”

“I cannot say that I have a definitive recollection of her,” I replied. “It is just a feeling, really, that I might have seen her somewhere before.”

“Think hard, Mr. Honig.”

Which of course I had been trying to do all along, but this merely increased my agitation as the more I stared through the glass at the row of young women standing before my hidden eyes, the more they all began to look like so many of the dark new faces that had begun to populate my neighborhood, with their cinnamon-tinted hair. Their meticulously shaved and painted eyebrows and unnaturally lined and painted lips. Their garish tattoos. I do not wish to sound insensitive, but it is so difficult adjusting to the ways of these young people today.

“Mr. Honig.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, taking mental note again of the inordinate number of times I had uttered this very phrase to the detective. My sincere regret did not mitigate the fact that I could not do more to assist him. “I really cannot say for certain that I’ve seen her before.”

The detective thanked me. He assured me I had helped more than I thought. Silently, we walked back to the station’s security door, which he held open as he shook my hand and told me he would let me know if and when any further assistance on my part would be required. He called to a uniformed young officer behind the front desk.

“Could you please drive Mr. Honig home?” It was clear from his tone of voice this was an order and not a request.

“Whether I am needed or not, I hope you will do me the courtesy of keeping me apprised of the progress of these proceedings,” I said as the young man followed me through the door.

“Sure thing, Mr. Honig,” Detective Grayson said, stepping back from the door to let it swing shut. “I’ll keep you posted.”

Twenty-two

B
ALLING:
Worker bees form a small suffocating cluster around an unacceptable queen, pulling at her legs and wings in an attempt to kill her.

I
subsequently learned that the young woman who had seemed so familiar at the police lineup had been linked by other physical and circumstantial evidence to the crime, the most damning of which were several partial fingerprints found on the duct tape that had covered Claire’s mouth. On the advice of the public defender that had been assigned to her case, she agreed to reveal how she came to be in possession of Claire’s most intimate property and was persuaded to testify in court against her male accomplice in hopes of receiving some measure of leniency from the court. The young woman, whose name was Christina Perez, alluded to a sad history of emotional abuse and neglect in her childhood and admitted to Detective Grayson that since running away from her family several years previous she had fallen in with a bad crowd. She confessed that both she and her male companion, Mr. Garcia, were dependent on drugs and that they were not above breaking into houses in search of money and convertible contraband to pay for their illicit habits.

I learned some of Miss Perez’s history from Detective Grayson, who proved true to his word about keeping me informed about the case. I learned a bit more from Mr. Billings, the earnest young prosecuting attorney who met with me in preparation for my court appearance. Most of what I learned, however, came from the young woman’s own testimony at her companion’s trial, which took place a scant three months after the arrests.

I should explain that while my own time on the witness stand was relatively short, I felt obliged to attend the trial in its entirety out of respect for Claire and Hilda Straussman, who had been reduced to our neighborhood’s impersonal sobriquet—the Bee Ladies—as they were almost exclusively referred to in the two or three brief newspaper accounts that covered the arrest of the suspects and the subsequent murder trial. Sadly, there was little discernable actual public interest in them, judging by the empty seats in the courtroom and the speed by which the trial proceeded.

Jury selection took most of the first day, with opening statements commencing the following morning. After an early lunch break, the first witness for the prosecution was called. This was Officer James Potts, who detailed the circumstances of the initial discovery of the metal strongbox containing Claire Straussman’s diary in the storage locker that he and his partner had searched in connection with a series of home burglaries he had been investigating.

As a witness, I was forbidden to observe any of the trial proceedings prior to my own testimony and so I waited outside the courtroom with Detective Grayson, who was scheduled to testify after Officer Potts. While we waited, Detective Grayson explained to me that as the primary officer assigned to investigate the burglary case, it was up to Officer Potts to explain how he had been made aware of the metal strongbox and the contents within and to establish how he had come to conclude the box and its contents belonged to Claire Straussman.

“Then it’ll be my turn, Mr. Honig,” he said. “I’ll explain how I made the connection between the evidence in his case and the Straussmans’ case, and then that’s where you come in.”

The detective tried to calm my nerves, which I feared were getting the best of me as we sat on the cushioned benches outside the courtroom. “Billings is going to ask you to identify the stuff in the box, just like I did before, and he’s going to ask you about finding the bodies. Are you going to be all right with that, Mr. Honig?”

Both he and Mr. Billings had gone over this several times already. I nodded my assent as the door to the courtroom swung out and the bailiff called the detective’s name.

“Just remember to keep your answers short and to the point,” he said, clapping me gently on the shoulder. “You’ll do fine.”

Twenty minutes later, the door swung open again and my own name was called. Despite Detective Grayson’s kind words of encouragement, I felt my knees grow weak as I followed the bailiff into the courtroom, which was smaller and much tawdrier than I imagined it would be. Not at all like the grand, richly paneled galleries with columns and floor-to-ceiling windows such as the ones in the movies I had watched as a boy. I noticed one of the fluorescent bulbs above the prosecutor’s table flickered sporadically, threatening to go out completely at any moment. I found myself holding tightly to the railing separating the gallery from the court proper as I made my way unsteadily across the scuffed linoleum floor to the witness stand, where the bailiff came forward to assist me to my seat. I smoothed down the gaps between the buttons in my cardigan sweater as much from nervousness as vanity. And then, as instructed, I placed my hand on the Holy Bible and swore to “tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God.”

I was asked next to state my name and occupation for the record, which elicited raised eyebrows from several of the younger jurors. They appeared surprised to hear that such a job title as beekeeper existed yet in their world. I started to explain that I had been a beekeeper my entire life, as my father had before me, and that a good living was still to be had selling honey through specialty stores, farmers’ markets, mail-order accounts, and personal acquaintences, but Mr. Billings, the young prosecutor, rose quickly from his table and assured the court that mine was an honorable profession, to which the judge agreed. Making reference to notes on his yellow legal pad, Mr. Billings then posed his first question:

“Can you state for the record your connection to the deceased?”

The judge saw the need to direct me to speak into the microphone as I attempted to explain what was, in fact, a rather long and complicated and some might go so far as to deem turbulent relationship. That my friendship with Claire had been forged and then broken over long years of shared intimacies and a common love of bees, however, was of little relevance to the proceedings. Mr. Billings attempted, through constant interruption, to convey to the jury that I had lived next door to the Straussmans for all of my life and so had had ample opportunity to gain a passing familiarity with Claire’s handwriting style. That my knowledge of her distinctive script had been gleaned from school compositions she’d shared with me and grocery lists we’d followed when we were younger was likewise deemed superfluous, a point to which the defense attorney concurred by rousing himself long enough to “stipulate” that the books found in the ammunition box belonged to “the deceased.”

But even this truncated explanation of how I should be able to identify each of the items took somewhat longer than Deputy District Attorney Billings had anticipated. At the judge’s discretion, the proceedings were adjourned just after four in the afternoon.

And so I spent a restless night, sitting up in my mother’s old rocker, regretting what I had been forced to leave unsaid that day and dreading even more what I would be asked to reveal about Claire in the morning. I had meant to change out of my good clothes when I got home, but somehow the hours just slipped away as I watched a singular shaft of moonlight creep through my bedroom window, across the floor, and up onto my lap, where I noticed with detached interest that in the cold, reflected light of the moon my hands seemed nearly skeletal as they gripped my pant legs every bit as tightly as they had clung to the courtroom railing earlier that day. “How had it come to this?” I wondered aloud, and I found myself arguing with a tall wisp of a shadow that stood just beyond the reach of the moonlight.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I insisted to the shadow that rippled like waves of heat off asphalt. And I heard the trees rustle outside, and the leaves seemed to whisper, “It wasn’t hers.”

Twenty-three

C
OURSING OR LINING A BEE:
The method by which honey hunters observe the foraging patterns of wild bees to follow them back to their hives in order to harvest the honey within.

Y
ou did good yesterday,” Mr. Billings assured me when he saw me pacing the hallway as I waited for the courtroom doors to open the following morning. I may not be schooled in the vagaries of the law, but even I caught the false note in the young prosecutor’s tone.

“Short and sweet,” Mr. Billings whispered as he entered the courtroom. “Short and sweet.”

“Mr. Honig,” the bailiff called as he swung the courtroom door open at nine a.m. sharp. I took a deep breath and promised myself I would do better, though I feared that in the glare of the public eye my mind might flicker once again like the courtroom’s faulty overhead fluorescent bulb.

Thankfully, I began my testimony by simply confirming that Claire and Hilda had indeed stored the proceeds from their honey sales in mason jars like the evidentiary one found in the ammunition box. This seemed to satisfy young Mr. Billings, and he hastened to move on to the last item that had been found in the box.

“Do you recognize this bolo tie, Mr. Honig?” he said, holding up what he called Exhibit 5.

I said I did. I was asked if the tie belonged to Miss Straussman and I replied that, to my knowledge, it did not. Mr. Billings then asked me if I had ever seen it in Miss Straussman’s possession. I admitted after a moment’s hesitation that I had.

“Can you explain?”

Picking my words carefully, I told the court that I had seen Claire in possession of this leather tie late one evening while in the company of a gentleman whose name I did not know.

“But what became of the tie after that evening, I cannot say,” I quickly added. The prosecuting attorney seemed both startled and pleased by the brevity of my reply. After a moment’s pause, he smiled broadly.

“Well, it’s quite obvious where it ended up,” he said. Turning dramatically toward the jury, he pointed to the metal box on the evidence table. “It ended up right here with the rest of Miss Straussman’s personal possessions.”

Mr. Billings paused again to rifle though his yellow legal pad. He knitted his brow with a look of concern that I sensed was as much for the jury’s benefit as it was for mine.

“Now, Mr. Honig,” he said, “I know this may be difficult, but I’d like to take you back to the day you discovered your neighbors’ bodies.”

Mr. Billings had been quite adamant during our preparatory session that I not distract the jury from the point of my testimony by mentioning the sound of the swarming bees that had first drawn me to my neighbors’ home. His next question, it seemed to me, was designed to lead me past the humming wires into the Straussmans’ house proper.

“What made you think something might be wrong when you knocked on your neighbors’ door that day?” His back to the jury, the young prosecutor locked eyes with me and leaned slightly forward.

“I heard their radio playing very loudly,” I replied just as we’d rehearsed.

“And this was unusual?”

“Yes. I thought at first they might have gone somewhere and left it on, except their car was still in the garage.”

“And this concerned you?”

“The radio was so loud, I thought perhaps they couldn’t hear me knocking,” I said. I stared down at my hands, which reminded me of bird talons as they clenched the railing in front of me. “That’s when I checked the door and found it wasn’t locked.”

I was about to explain that I wasn’t in the habit of barging into my neighbors’ house uninvited, especially considering our current rift, but the prosecutor cut me short.

“And so you went inside?”

“Yes,” I said. My voice must have faltered here as the judge asked me once again to speak up so the jury could hear.

“Yes,” I repeated, leaning into the microphone. “I was worried.”

“And what did you find, Mr. Honig?” Again Mr. Billings angled forward, willing me with his eyes to skip past the abandoned tea service to describe my discovery of the bodies in the parlor. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, but my lungs felt as if they were deflating rather than filling with air.

“Where were the Straussmans?” he prodded gently. “Can you describe what you saw?”

“They were lying on the parlor rug,” I said, my voice sounding unnaturally flat. “Their hands and feet were bound with duct tape. There was more duct tape across their mouths. I saw a scrap of red bandanna protruding from beneath the tape across Claire’s mouth.”

“And what did you do next, Mr. Honig? Did you try to resuscitate them?”

I shook my head slowly. “I could see they had been dead for quite some time. I went back to the kitchen and called the police.”

“And how long before they arrived?”

“No more than ten minutes,” I said. “We live just down the street from the station house.”

Mr. Billings smiled and nodded to me as if I were a small child who’d just recited his multiplication tables successfully for the first time.

“Thank you, Mr. Honig,” he said. Turning to the judge, he announced that he had no further questions, and mercifully, the defendant’s attorney chose not to belabor my ordeal with any further questions of his own. Stepping down from the witness stand, I shuffled to the back of the courtroom, where I was about to take a seat in the gallery when I felt Detective Grayson’s thick hand grasp me by the shoulder. I hadn’t noticed him rise from his seat near the door.

“You don’t have to stay for this,” he said, leaning in so that only I might hear. “It might be kinda rough for you to hear.”

“I know,” I said. I wasn’t sure I could explain, even to myself, why I felt the need to be there. Perhaps it was because there was no one else beside me who did. For the first time since I’d known him, I deliberately lied to Detective Grayson. “I’ll be fine.”

I eased myself into a chair by the aisle, Detective Grayson retook his seat directly behind mine, and we waited for the prosecutor to call his next witness, a representative from the coroner’s office. He was a young man of Middle Eastern descent, and his task was to establish, in clinical detail, the manner and time of death of the Straussman sisters. It was during his graphic testimony that I first learned that Hilda had most likely died before Claire and that she had choked to death on her own regurgitated breakfast probably, according to the coroner’s estimation, within minutes after being bound and gagged and abandoned by her attackers.

“What about the younger Miss Straussman?” the prosecutor inquired. The coroner shook his head sadly before he replied, “She took much longer to die.”

At this point, the prosecutor produced what he called a postmortem color enlargement of Claire Straussman lying on a steel table. I was unprepared, to say the least, to see Claire pictured practically naked in the photograph save for a small green sheet draped across her torso. I turned my head away, and it was at least a minute or more before I could bear to look again at the photograph, which Mr. Billings had by this time placed on a wooden easel next to the witness stand.

Claire’s eyes were closed, and her taut, finely lined face had taken on the pallid sheen of Hades’ paramour. Through the haze of rekindled grief, I heard the prosecutor ask the coroner how he had made the determination as to the order of death between the two sisters.

“Notice these abrasions on the victim’s right knee and elbow,” he replied. Using a collapsible metal pointer that he had extracted from his suit pocket, he extended it with a ceremonious series of metallic clicks and leaned across the rail. He pointed to what looked like large rug burns on the sides of Claire’s right arm and leg. “Here and here.”

He leaned forward again and pointed to additional angry red lines encircling Claire’s wrists and ankles.

“Notice these ligature marks here and here,” he said. He then pointed to the right side of her face, just below her permanently closed lid. “And these bruises on her right cheekbone. We thought at first someone had struck her, but combined with these bruises on her right shoulder and thigh here and here, and these bruises and scrapes on her right elbow and knee, we think she inflicted the damage herself.”

“Could you explain?” Mr. Billings prompted.

“Given the severity of the abrasions—notice how the skin is torn and broken around her wrists and the skin on her elbow’s been rubbed raw—we believe this indicates the victim struggled for quite some time, and quite ferociously at that, especially for a woman her age.”

As I suspected, Claire’s indomitable spirit had not been easily extinguished, despite her self-imposed isolation. Hilda had always seemed to me far the more passive of the two sisters.

Mr. Billings proceeded to confirm this suspicion when he next introduced another postmortem photograph, this one of Hilda Straussman, her larger, more amorphous torso just barely contained beneath the standard green autopsy sheet. He asked the coroner to compare the condition of the body in this photograph to the previous one.

“Notice that there is only faint bruising on her ankles and wrists,” the coroner said, drawing the pointer back and forth across first Hilda’s ankles and then her wrists. “And unlike the previous victim, there are no marks at all on this victim’s arms or legs or face.”

He punctuated this statement with a series of quick taps on each of the indicated body parts. He reminded the jurors that Hilda had been found with regurgitated food and stomach acid in her mouth and lungs. Again noting the lack of self-inflicted damage to Hilda’s body, he concluded that she had obviously struggled very little, if at all, before succumbing to asphyxiation. “She may even have been unconscious at the time, though there is no direct evidence of that.”

Mr. Billings then switched back to the photograph of Claire and pointed manually to the distinct bruising on the right side of her face.

“You testified that you originally assumed this bruising was the result of her being struck. But you also said you no longer think this is the case.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Would you mind demonstrating how you think this bruising occurred?”

The young coroner looked to the judge, who nodded his assent, before stepping out of the witness box and into the narrow swath of unobstructed space between the judge’s bench and the prosecutor’s table. Kneeling on the scuffed flooring, he clasped his hands tightly behind his back and awkwardly lowered himself onto his side. Then squeezing his ankles together, he kicked his legs out like a fishtail and raised himself onto his right elbow in almost the same motion, throwing himself forward and smacking his right cheek on the floor. The sound was painfully audible even from where I sat in the back of the courtroom.

The jurors started as one. A few looked uneasily at one another as the coroner raised himself up, preparing to throw himself at the floor again.

“I think we’ve seen enough,” the judge said. The coroner stood up then with a relieved look on his face, brushed his pants off, and again took his seat on the witness stand. At Mr. Billings’s urging, he then explicated in clinical detail how Claire had likely attempted to half crawl, half fling herself across the parlor floor, as we had all just witnessed, in a vain attempt to reach her sister who, the young coroner theorized, was choking to death.

The coroner explained that the harder Claire had struggled, the more heavily she would have had to breathe, and it was this repeated heavy gasping for air that most likely had drawn the cloth that had been roughly stuffed inside her mouth ever farther down into her windpipe, where it had ultimately lodged. I could feel my own breath become as labored as I imagined Claire’s must have been in the moments before she died.

“Burst blood vessels, or reticulation, in the eyes, and this blue tint to her lips confirms asphyxiation as the cause of death,” the coroner said. He shook his head, seemingly moved by his own conclusion. “If she’d have just lain still, she might have survived for quite some time.”

Mr. Garcia’s attorney’s slumped shoulders and ill-fitting suit made him appear from behind every bit as indifferent to his client’s defense as his drooping eyelids had seemed when I’d stared at him from the witness stand. Once again, he offered no rebuttal questions to mitigate the horror frozen on the faces of several jurors, and so the judge dismissed the coroner and the prosecutor called his final witness.

“Miss Christina Perez.”

Dressed in a modest light blue dress and beige leather pumps, the young lady entered the courtroom, smoothed an errant strand of dark brown hair back into the thick ponytail from which it had escaped, and walked slowly down the center aisle to the witness stand. I barely suppressed a gasp as I was struck by the transformation that had taken place in her since the last time our eyes had seemed to meet through the mirrored glass of the police station’s observation room. Gone was the brassy cinnamon-tinted hair and exaggerated eyebrow and lip paint she had worn. This day she seemed smaller, and if not precisely innocent, then certainly much less defiant.

Her testimony lasted through the rest of the morning and on into the afternoon. Miss Perez’s former companion, Armando Garcia, did not testify on his own behalf. Indeed, there was only one witness for the defense and he was a medical expert specializing in drug dependency. When his turn came at the end of the day, Mr. Garcia’s public defender, whose attention continued to drift from time to time during Miss Perez’s recounting of the events of the crime, presented mental incapacity as the only defense for Mr. Garcia’s actions. It was a questionable tactic, in my opinion, that was based on the hired doctor’s contention that the effects of the young man’s purported drug intoxication somehow mitigated his actions at the time the crime was committed.

Looking back now, I am reminded of the words of the Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius, who observed: “As virtue and vice consist in action, and not in the impressions of the senses, so it is not what they feel, but what they do, that makes mankind happy or miserable.” Blaming the greater crime on the deleterious effects of an illegal substance would not have been the defensive strategy I would have chosen had I been charged with plotting the young man’s defense.