Telling the Bees Page 17

  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.

  Miss Perez had claimed on the witness stand that she was not a violent person but that she could not in all good conscience say the same of her companion. While this might be considered damaging testimony on the face of it, she also claimed to love this young man and to believe he was a good person at heart—that it was the drugs he took that made him unpredictable and violent. She swore that neither of them had gone to the Straussman house intending to harm anyone.

  “If I’d even thought Armando would have gone crazy like that, I swear to God I never would have brung him with me in the first place,” she claimed most sincerely it seemed to me as I sat in the courtroom listening to her testimony. It both saddened and surprised me to learn that the germ of the idea to break into the Straussmans’ house came from this young woman and not from her young man, who appeared, at least on the surface, the more hardened criminal of the two.

  She explained how, living in one of the small, deteriorating Spanish-style bungalows that dotted our neighborhood at that time, she had often seen the two Bee Ladies working for hours in their small vegetable garden or around and about the handful of beehives that were located to the rear of their property. She said she noticed that they usually spent the entire morning working out of doors and that they seldom finished their chores before midafternoon. More significant, she observed the Bee Ladies selling honey and candles from their front porch every Thursday afternoon, and she noticed that they never left the house the following day. It was Mr. Garcia, she said, who speculated that the proceeds of the Bee Ladies’ sales were likely kept at the house and not deposited in a bank account.

  “And so this is why you decided to rob them?” Mr. Billings prodded.

  “Yes,” the young woman said softly, casting her eyes downward. I followed her eyes to her hands, which were coppery smooth and clasped as if in prayer. “Armando said it would be easy. They’re like all the old people round here. They live alone, they have money, and they always do the same thing at the same time.”

  As I sat in the courtroom listening to this young woman’s account of the events leading up to Claire’s and Hilda’s deaths, I found myself unwillingly impressed by the minute level of observation she had accorded to the Straussman sisters’ daily habits in preparation for her craven act.

  “Then the skinny old lady got stung, and she came back to the house to put something on it,” Miss Perez told Mr. Billings, attempting to explain how it was that despite their careful planning Claire had diverged from her routine just as she and Mr. Garcia were attempting to pry the Straussmans’ back door open.

  “Elsewise, none of this other stuff would have happened,” she said. This other stuff being, of course, Claire’s and Hilda’s brutal murders.

  This was Claire who had died. In my head and in my heart I understood this. But as I listened to Miss Perez continue her story, I found myself almost feeling sorry for her for all she’d gone through because of Mr. Garcia. He seemed a very frightening man, and she seemed so small, so fragile. In her physical delicacy, and the confident manner in which she articulated herself, she reminded me of Claire. But that was as far as the resemblance went. I found it hard to imagine Claire being cowed by any man.

  “Go on,” Mr. Billings urged.

  Miss Perez explained that when they were surprised by Claire’s sudden approach, she had yanked Mr. Garcia’s arm back from the door and told him to put the credit card back in his pocket.

  “The old lady was holding her hand like it hurt,” Miss Perez testified, “so I asked her if she was okay.”

  “And what did Miss Straussman say?”

  “She said something like, ‘Of course I’m okay, it’s just a bee sting,’” Miss Perez replied. “She seemed kinda mad. She said she just needed to put something on it and was looking at us like she was trying to figure out what we were doing on her back porch, so I made up this story about how it was my mom’s birthday and that she loved handmade things. I said I’d seen her and the other lady selling honey and stuff on their porch the night before and I was hoping they still had some stuff left.”

  “What happened next?”

  “I told her that we’d knocked on their front door but nobody answered, so we came round back to see if anybody was home,” Miss Perez testified.

  “And what about Mr. Garcia?” Mr. Billings prodded. She said he went along with her story at first.

  According to Miss Perez’s account, Claire’s initial suspicion had ultimately been allayed by the young couple’s apparent interest in her wares. Claire told them she needed to put some bluing on the bee sting she’d just suffered but that if they cared to wait in the kitchen she’d take care of the sting and then go fetch a sampling of honey and candles from which they could choose a gift.

  Miss Perez said that the other Bee Lady, who had grown concerned by the first one’s extended absence, arrived just as they sat down at the kitchen table.

  “The skinny Bee Lady explained what was going on and the big Bee Lady said she’d go get the stuff. Everything was still going fine except they were old, you know? And really slow. I could see Armando starting to get . . .”

  “Impatient?” Mr. Billings prodded.

  “Yeah,” Miss Perez agreed. “All of a sudden, he just snapped.”

  “How so?”

  “Armando could just go off for no reason,” she said. Mr. Garcia, for the first time in the trial, straightened up in his chair, and Miss Perez took a deep, shuddering breath. Of course in retrospect her story seems quite contrived, ludicrous even, but as she sat there on the witness stand, her thick dark hair tied up in a girlish ponytail and her hands folded sweetly on her lap, the young woman exuded a surprising blend of sincerity and vulnerability that I am sure worked to her advantage with both the judge and jury. I believe this reaction could be attributed above all to her eyes, which were so large and unexpectedly turquoise that they positively overwhelmed her coppery face. As much as I tried to resist, I could not help feeling growing surges of sympathy for her.

  “So what happened next?” Mr. Billings softly urged. Miss Perez explained that it was hard to tell what had set Mr. Garcia off that morning, but she said that he was always especially unpredictable when he combined alcohol and narcotics, which apparently he had done before leaving their bungalow. She said she only found out afterward that his supply of drugs had run low and that he had been both more intoxicated and more desperate for money than she’d realized at the time. Whatever the cause, Mr. Garcia apparently soon grew tired of Miss Perez’s patient game of cat and mouse. Pulling from beneath his shirt a gun that she swore on the witness stand she hadn’t known he possessed, Mr. Garcia ordered the two women inside the parlor.

  “You know, Armando acts crazy sometimes, but I don’t think he meant to kill the old ladies,” Miss Perez said. “He was always threatening to kill me, you know? But he just slapped me round sometimes. He never even used his fists.”

  Miss Perez said that it was the big Bee Lady who agreed to show him how to work the catch on the false door in the sunroom wall where they kept all their valuables. Afterward Mr. Garcia had marched Hilda back into the parlor and tied her up with some duct tape he’d found on a shelf in their pantry and then he’d ordered Miss Perez to do the same with the skinny Bee Lady. This was after Miss Perez said she’d stuffed all the jars of coins they found in the cubbyhole into several canvas shopping bags they found in the pantry along with the duct tape. They also took a metal strongbox they found behind the jars. She said the last thing Mr. Garcia did was to take off the bandanna he was wearing on his head and hand it to her.

  Following Mr. Garcia’s orders, Miss Perez explained how she’d torn it in two and stuffed a strip in each woman’s mouth and then covered both of their mouths with more duct tape. A few stray hairs found on t
he strips were what eventually tied Mr. Garcia forensically to the murders.

  Miss Perez testified that she honestly believed Mr. Garcia when he told her not to worry. That the two ladies would work themselves loose in a little while and by that time he and she would be long gone. She said Mr. Garcia had family in Rosarito that they decided to go stay with “just until things died down.”

  Unfortunately, it appeared the pair misjudged Claire’s and Hilda’s physical condition as badly as they had the women’s meager savings. Both women had died before they were able to free themselves from their bonds. And the pair’s larcenous efforts had netted them precisely two hundred and seventy-three dollars in small bills and coins in all the jars they found stashed in the cubbyhole and the strongbox. Miss Perez said that she and Mr. Garcia had gone to his cousin’s house in Rosarito directly after the robbery and that they didn’t even know the Bee Ladies had died until they returned to California several weeks later. But by that time it seemed the police had stopped poking around the neighborhood and so they figured they were in the clear, she said.

  I suppose I should have felt satisfied. On the strength of Miss Perez’s testimony, Mr. Garcia was convicted of two counts each of first-degree murder, aggravated assault, and armed robbery. He received a mandatory sentence of twenty-five years to life. For her cooperation in his prosecution, Miss Perez had already plead guilty to the lesser crimes of manslaughter and robbery and had received a maximum term of twelve years in prison. But when I heard the guilty verdict, my heart sank even lower than I thought it already could. In the eyes of the law, justice had been done, but all I could think as I trudged out of the courtroom was that the dearest friends I had had in my life had died for less than three hundred dollars, a box of diaries, and a few worthless baubles.

  Twenty-four