Read Death By A HoneyBee Online
Authors: Abigail Keam
I put down my bottle and gave Goetz my best look of annoyance.
“Of course I do.
I am a beekeeper.
Mr. Goetz, why are you here?”
“Detective,” he insisted as he rubbed his chin.
Just as Goetz started to speak again, Matt popped up from behind my booth.
“Hello,” he said looking between Detective Goetz and me.
“If it isn’t the esteemed Detective Goetz.”
Goetz gathered his tomatoes. “Nice to see you both again.”
He shambled off.
Matt watched him intently as the detective disappeared into the crowd.
“What was that about?”
“I really don’t know.”
“Ooooh, Josiah, maybe he thinks he can win your trust and make you confess over some rum cocktails,” Matt teased.
“Confess what?”
I replied in a voice that was a little too loud.
Matt laughed heartily as he leaned over and pinched my arm.
His black hair shimmered in the sunlight.
“The murder, old girl, the murder.
I put my money on you knocking off the old buzzard out of pure spite.”
“Well, aren’t you very cheeky today.”
I lowered my voice as I leaned closer to Matt.
“I know that I am supposed to be sad, but the truth is I am glad Pidgeon is dead.”
Matt’s handsome face suddenly crumbled as though he remembered that he had forgotten to turn off the stove.
Motioning me to be quiet, he went around the front of the table and felt under the yellow plastic tablecloth.
He yanked a small black plastic microphone from the bottom of the table and held it up.
We both looked at each other in astonishment.
I had just damned myself.
Snatching the device from Matt’s hand, I rushed into the crowd.
Frantically scanning for Goetz, I spotted him a block down tasting goat’s cheese samples.
I caught up with him, grabbed his massive arm and swung him around.
His craggy face registered surprise, then embarrassment as I brandished the microphone.
He pulled an earphone out of his ear.
I waved the device in his face.
“This is over the top, and you know it.
You better have a warrant for this.”
He reached out for the microphone, but I quickly thrust it between my ample bosoms.
“Oh no.
My lawyer gets this first.
So you want to know why I hated Pidgeon?”
Detective Goetz was quick to recover.
“Yeah, I would like to know why a respectable, hardworking woman would show so much emotion about a man she supposedly wasn’t involved with.”
“Involved with?”
I laughed bitterly.
“You guys are barking up the wrong tree.
Besides being a liar and a cheat, Pidgeon was a woman beater.
Check the local hospitals’ ER records and then talk to his wife.
If anyone had a motive to kill Pidgeon, it was Tellie, his wife.”
“You know this first hand? You’ve seen Mrs. Pidgeon being hit or she told you about it?”
“I know this from my own observation. Something you and your partner should try a little more of.
She often showed up at the Market with bruises.”
“Miss Josiah,” he said, “it has been my life experience that observation often means little or nothing without corroboration. Things are never quite what they seem from the outside looking in.
As far as you know, she could be just clumsy or be in the first stages of MS or have inner ear problems.
You just have a theory without proof.”
He looked away.
“Are you done?”
Goetz seemed offended and wanted to be shed of me.
“What do you think you have on me?
You have no physical evidence to tie me with Pidgeon’s death, yet you keep hounding me.
I had nothing to do with that man’s demise.”
We stood facing each other like wary catamounts.
Finally, fearing that I would be blamed for tampering with police equipment, I handed Goetz his listening device.
He at least had the good manners to blush.
The bug was really over the top and he knew it. This wasn’t the crime of the century.
I shifted my weight.
The arthritis was starting to burn in my legs.
“Yes we are done, I hope for good.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you believe me and will leave me alone?”
“Okay in meaning that I got your message.”
His features slackened.
“I’m not the enemy.”
I took a deep breath.
“Yes, you are,” I replied before I turned and melted into the street crowd. I had to walk seven blocks before I found a pay phone.
My legs were on fire from all the walking.
I dialed a number that my daughter had had me memorize.
I reached an old-fashioned answering service.
I said only one word before I hung up – “Rosebud.”
9
I needed to push this investigation away from me.
Though I was sure I would never be convicted, a murder trial would ruin me financially, costing me everything I had managed to squirrel away.
I needed to determine who wanted Pidgeon dead.
Still fuming over Goetz’s little trick that morning, I decided to visit Otto Brown.
He was Pidgeon’s booth neighbor at the Farmers’ Market.
Maybe he would know something.
The foot traffic at the Market was slowing, so I decided to take a break as it was getting close to the end of the selling day.
Some farmers were currently packing up and dismantling their tents.
Hiding my cash box in the van, I put a fifty in my pocket and strolled down the median to Otto Brown’s booth.
While waiting for his customers to finish their transactions, I picked out some Cherokee Purple tomatoes.
After patiently waiting my turn, I offered my selections to Otto to weigh.
“How’s the day been?”
“Fair to middlin’,” Otto said, putting the tomatoes carefully in a bag.
He scratched his unshaven cheek as he eyed the scale.
I didn’t know how he could see the scales from the large eyebrows fingering across his forehead and others caught in his long eyelashes.
He would have had pretty eyes except for the hair jungle above his eyeballs.
“It’s been slow my way too,” I replied trying to establish eye contact with him.
He didn’t look up from his tasks.
“I suppose you know that your next door buddy was found dead on my property.”
“Talk is he died from heart failure.”
“That’s right.”
I could tell Otto wanted me to leave.
He kept turning his back to me.
I leaned forward.
“Otto, did Richard ever tell you that he was gonna mess with my hives?
Anything like that?”
“Can’t rightly say.”
Losing my patience, I blurted out, “Oh, for gaawwd sakes, Otto, he trashed your tomatoes every chance he got.
Said you bought them from a terminal in Lincoln County.
You are not going to lose any brownie points by telling me the truth.
Now – did he ever say anything about me?”
I slid the fifty towards him.
Otto bristled at the accusation that his tomatoes were not grown by him and stopped arranging them on the table. “Well, now, he didn’t like you, Josiah.
Nope, not a’tall.
Said you had no business bein’ here as you was rich. That you was takin’ business from real beekeepers.”
I laughed bitterly.
“Go on.”
“Never said nuthin’ exactly ’bout what he might do but that you best be aware.”
“Be aware of what?”
“Well, of him, I ’spect.”
Otto pulled a tobacco pouch from his pocket and shoved a big wad in his mouth.
He had a paper cup that he used as a spittoon.
Yuck.
“When did he say that?”
“Couple weeks ago.”
“Why didn’t you tell me he was gunning for me?”
“’Tis none of my business.
Besides I’d be tellin’ ya somethin’ you probably knew,” said Otto.
“Geez, Otto, you good old boys sure stick together,” I said.
Otto pursed his lips and spat in his cup.
“Richard was no good ol’ boy.
He was city.
Lived in town.
Used other folks’ land to farm his bees. No, Richard was a townie.
Not one of us.”
When I decided I wasn’t going to get any more out of Otto, I left him my fifty and carried a large box of beautiful Cherokee Purple tomatoes to my booth.
Otto may be a throwback to the nineteenth century, but he sure knew how to grow heirloom tomatoes.
I had no idea what I was going to do with all those tomatoes.
Guess I could make a huge batch of salsa.
Matt loved salsa.
But at least I had discovered that there was smoldering resentment from one older farmer against landless members in the Market.
Interesting.
As I walked back to my booth, I spied Pidgeon’s daughter, Taffy, going from booth to booth, apparently wringing out the last bit of sympathy she could.
I wondered if she was talking about me.
Or was I just being paranoid?
By the aversion of vendors’ eyes as I passed by, I guess being paranoid was correct in this instance.
I had gotten used to being the center of people’s attention for a long time, ever since my husband became a nationally known architect.
I had learned to deal with the curious, the well-intended and the envious who were determined to
be hurtful.
I stiffened when Taffy approached my booth.
Which would she be?