The Bee Balm Murders

by Cynthia Riggs

  “How did you hurt your back?” Victoria asked.

  “I lifted something I shouldn’t have.”

  Victoria eased herself out of her chair and went into the kitchen. “Green tea?” she asked.

  “Please, Mrs. Trumbull. I’ll get it.” He started to get up, but realized he’d better not.

  “Sit,” she commanded. “By the way, Casey calls me by my first name. You’re welcome to, if you’d like.”

  She brought him a mug of his favorite tea with a plate of graham crackers, and sat again at the head of the table with her own mug. “I know you drink it black, but I’ve dosed it with honey from Sean’s bees. A restorative.”

  Now that he was inside and warm, the rain was no longer a threat. In fact, when the rain was kept outside where it belonged, it made a pleasing susurration against the silvery-gray shingles of Victoria’s house.

  He sipped the sweet tea, debating with himself whether or not to tell her about Angelo Vulpone. Victoria sat quietly, drinking her own tea. Suddenly, he said, “Mrs. Trumbull, I knew the man in the trench.”

  Victoria said nothing.

  “Angelo Vulpone. I didn’t tell the officers at the scene that I knew him. He was about to become a major investor in my company.”

  “About to become?”

  “He had money, he understood the importance of fiber optics, and he claimed he wanted to invest. Eight million dollars.” Orion held his mug in both hands because of the comforting feeling it gave him. He was six years old again, wrapping his hands around a mug of cambric tea at his grandmother’s on a rainy afternoon.

  “Were you close to him?”

  Orion set down his mug. “Not really. I didn’t trust him entirely.” He helped himself to a graham cracker, snapped it down its perforations, and dipped a quarter piece into his tea. “I’m sure he didn’t trust me, either.”

  “What was he doing here, checking on you?”

  “I wish I knew, Mrs. Trum … Victoria.”

  CHAPTER 4

  “Rumors fly from one end of this Island to the other faster than your optical fibers will ever carry them.” Victoria stood and held the back of her chair. “You’ve got to go to Casey and explain what you just told me.”

  Orion shook his head. “I’m distancing myself from any possible connection with Angelo Vulpone and the police.”

  “I can assure you rumors are already on their way announcing that Orion Nanopoulos knows the identity of the body found on the ball field, and speculation on why you didn’t identify the victim.” Victoria leaned on her chair. “Why didn’t you, by the way?”

  Orion ran his hands over his head, smoothing his hair back to the elastic that held his ponytail in place.

  Victoria waited.

  “I’m sure Vulpone was connected to the mob,” Orion said. “Shot in the back of his head, a mob-type execution. I don’t want to be identified with this killing. I’ve got a job to do and a deadline. Do you understand, Victoria?”

  “Certainly,” said Victoria. “But here are the facts.” She moved the chair around and sat again. “Angelo Vulpone will be identified eventually. By dental records, missing persons reports, fingerprints, DNA. And when he is, every contact he’s ever had will be unearthed and investigated.” She rested her elbows on the table. “When it’s learned that you expected him to invest in the project, didn’t like him, failed to identify his body, and caused a delay in that identification that cost authorities time and money…”

  Orion sighed. “I’ve heard enough.”

  “Do you happen to be involved with the mob?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  “Then your delay in identifying Angelo Vulpone will cause someone in the mob to wonder why. You’ll have both the mob and the police annoyed with you.”

  “Is the police station open on Sunday?”

  “Casey will be there.”

  “You win.” Orion rose and offered her his hand. “Will you accompany me to the police station, Deputy Trumbull?”

  * * *

  Victoria shrugged into her frayed trench coat, tied a scarf over her head, retrieved her lilac-wood stick from behind the door, and waited in the entry out of the rain for Orion to fetch his car.

  When he came around to the passenger side to open the door for her, his entirely pleasant expression had returned along with what looked like a smile.

  * * *

  Orion pulled up in the parking area in front of the tiny West Tisbury police station and held the passenger door for Victoria. The ducks that usually flocked around new arrivals made a few desultory quacks from their shelter under the rosebush. The rain had slackened a bit. Victoria and Orion hurried up the station house steps before the threatening clouds let go again.

  When they entered, Casey was on the telephone. She beckoned for them to sit. Victoria took her usual seat, the wooden armchair in front of Casey’s desk, and Orion wheeled over the chair from the desk next to the chief’s. A nameplate on the tidy desk read SERGEANT JUNIOR NORTON.

  Casey hung up the phone. “I have a feeling that call had to do with something you already know, Victoria. Are you here because of the unidentified body…?”

  “Yes.” Victoria gave Orion a significant look. “This is Orion Nanopoulos.”

  Casey and Orion nodded to one another. “Aren’t you the fiber-optics guy?”

  “That’s right,” said Orion.

  “You’re installing cable in the trench where the body was found this morning, aren’t you?”

  Orion nodded.

  “Then you know more about the circumstances than I do.” Casey picked up her beach-stone paperweight and rubbed its smooth surface absently. “How can I help you?”

  Orion leaned forward. “I failed to tell the responding officers at the scene that I knew the victim.” He straightened his back amd nodded toward Victoria. “Mrs. Trumbull urged me to talk to you.”

  Casey flipped the stone from one hand to the other. “Not the state police, Victoria?”

  “I’m going through channels,” Victoria said primly.

  Casey smiled and turned back to Orion. “After I’ve heard what you have to say I’ll call Sergeant Smalley at the state police barracks.” She set the stone back on her papers and pulled a yellow legal pad toward her.

  “His name is Angelo Vulpone,” said Orion. “He owned a construction company in Brooklyn.”

  “We’ll need to notify his family.”

  “All I know about him is that he has two grown sons in business with him. I don’t know their names.”

  Casey looked up. “How did you meet him?”

  “One of my partners, Casper Martin, approached Vulpone about investing in the project, and Vulpone agreed to put in eight million.”

  Casey whistled softly. “A lot of money. Had he turned any of it over to you?”

  “Not yet. We had some negotiating to do first.”

  “I suppose that’s why he was here on the Island?”

  “I have no idea,” said Orion.

  Casey reached for the phone. “I’ll let Smalley know we have an ID. You’ll need to go to the barracks tomorrow to answer questions, then the funeral home to make an ID.”

  * * *

  The rain started up again while they were meeting with Casey and now it was coming down in torrents. Victoria and Orion hurried to the car.

  “Well, Victoria,” said Orion, easing his back against the driver’s seat, “you were right. If we could figure out how the Island grapevine works, we wouldn’t need a fiber-optics system.”

  * * *

  Later that afternoon, Orion stopped at his office in Vineyard Haven and called Casper Martin, his partner in New York. The rain poured down steadily.

  “Casper, it’s Orion.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Bad news, I’m afraid.”

  “Let’s have it.”

  “Vulpone’s dead.”

  “What?”

  “Vulpone. He’s dead.” Orion spent the silence that followed l
ooking down onto the driveway of the house next door. An ordinary two-story frame house, shingled. Tufts of uncut grass ran down the center of the unpaved drive. Puddles in the ruts were pockmarked with rain.

  Casper breathed heavily at the other end of the line. “Jee-sus,” he said at last. “What the hell? Damn!”

  A maroon SUV splashed up the drive and stopped at the side door of the house.

  After a long pause Martin said, “What happened?”

  As he replied, Orion watched a man get out of the SUV and go into the house, the Sunday paper protecting his head. Orion had never paid much attention to the house next door. Looking from his second-floor aerie, he started to lift his feet onto his desk. His back twinged, and he set his feet down. From the way the man below walked, he was young. Thirties, maybe. That was about all Orion could tell, looking down on him.

  As he told Martin about recognizing Angelo, carrying the body on the wheeled stretcher through the mud, and his encounter with Donald Minnowfish, he thought about Angelo Vulpone’s sons. Did Vulpone have daughters? A wife? Orion knew as much about the man next door as he knew about Vulpone, namely, nothing. He told Martin that his ancient landlady had forced him to go to the police.

  “She’s right, you know.”

  “Yeah, Casper. I know.”

  Martin wondered why Vulpone was on the Island, puzzled over who killed him, then added, “There goes a third of our funding,” which was what had concerned them both from the moment they knew Angelo Vulpone was dead.

  “You knew him better than I did,” said Orion. “Know anything about his sons?”

  “You mean, will they carry out their old man’s intention to invest?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Even if they do, it’ll take time,” said Martin. “Funeral, grieving, probate. Might take a couple of years.”

  “We don’t have that kind of time,” said Orion. “Do they have money of their own?”

  “This isn’t the best time to ask.” Casper Martin stopped talking and Orion said nothing.

  Martin broke the silence. “Who killed him, the mob?”

  “I haven’t a clue,” said Orion.

  The man next door came out of the house holding an umbrella over a Cronig’s grocery bag he was carrying, the kind with paper handles. The bag bulged with something heavy and the handles seemed ready to tear off. He slung the bag into the back seat, closed the umbrella, got into the front seat, and backed out of the drive.

  “Vulpone was a stubborn son of a bitch,” said Martin. “He wouldn’t listen to anyone except those two kids of his. Nobody liked the guy, but nobody hated him, either.”

  “Someone did. Enough to kill him. How closely was he connected to the mob?”

  “Hard to know,” Martin replied. “He probably was since just about everyone in the Jersey–New York construction business has dealings with the mob at some time or other.”

  “I assume his killing is mob related,” said Orion.

  “If so, we’ll never know. The question I’m asking is why was Vulpone on the Island? Checking up on the project? The company? You?”

  “The head of Public Works told me that Vulpone was asking for me by name last night.”

  “Probably paying a surprise visit,” said Martin, “check up for himself. That would be like him.”

  “Who told him where we were working? The ball field is not a place you’d think to look for someone installing optical cable. Had you mentioned it to him?”

  “I haven’t talked to him for a couple of weeks. The ball field operation’s come up since then.”

  “We’ve got two years to complete a job that should take eighteen months,” said Orion. “But I’m learning that with six governments in six towns on this Island and not a single engineer among the lot…” He took a breath. “Every meeting I go to has two or three activists in attendance convinced that communicating by fiber optics is going to produce two-headed babies—”

  “Okay, okay,” Martin interrupted. “We’re talking about adding an extra two years to educate the populace. We don’t have that kind of time.”

  Orion sighed. “We can complete the project in two, even with town politics. But only with enough capital. You want to see what you can do about that?”

  “Yeah,” said Martin.

  “Vulpone didn’t sign anything, did he?”

  “Nope. He was too canny.”

  Orion said, “It shouldn’t be difficult to find the money, even now. The communications business is pretty much untouched by recession.”

  “Yeah,” said Martin.

  “My best estimate of the total project cost was twenty-four million,” said Orion. “You found potential backers for about two-thirds. That leaves a shortfall of the eight million Vulpone had promised.”

  Looking down from his window, holding the phone against his ear, wishing he could lift his feet up on his desk, Orion imagined what it would be like to lead a normal life. Coming home with the Sunday paper and sharing sections. The kids reading the comics, he and the wife working on the crossword puzzle together …

  “I’ll see what I can do,” said Martin. “There’s money out there, only a question of finding it.”

  After they’d hung up, Orion thought about the man next door and wondered why he’d brought his Sunday paper home and left almost immediately with that Cronig’s bag.

  CHAPTER 5

  That afternoon, contrary to Victoria’s prediction of a three-day rain, the sky cleared and the sun appeared. Victoria went out to the garden with her secateurs to snip bouquets of bee balm to put in the two glass vases on the parlor mantel. The elaborately painted vases had been a wedding present to her mother from a rejected suitor. She wondered, briefly, if something more formal than bee balm might be more appropriate, then decided she liked the carefree look of the gaudy, unkempt flowers.

  The bee balm was humming with bees, and she felt mildly selfish taking part of their livelihood away. She was snipping carefully, avoiding the busiest flowers, when Sean McBride’s pickup truck pulled into the pasture.

  She hastily filled a watering can from the garden faucet, set the long-stemmed flowers in it, and hustled over to her front-row seat.

  He backed his truck a safe distance from the hives and went around to the rear where he kept his beekeeping gear.

  “Morning, Mrs. T. You hear about the body in the playing field?” Sean shook out his white suit. The slight breeze billowed out the legs and arms so the suit looked, for a moment, like his shed skin. Ecdysis, Victoria thought. A snake slipping out of his skin. A crab leaving its hard shell. She envisioned, for an instant, Sean as a nightclub stripper, an ecdysiast, and smiled at the thought. He paused, waiting for her response.

  “I’m sorry, I was distracted,” said Victoria from her front-row seat.

  “They found a body in the playing field this morning.” He leaned against the lowered tailgate of his truck and slipped first one foot, then the other into his new skin.

  “Yes, I heard. Orion Nanopoulos got a call early.”

  “Staying with you, is he? How’s that working out?” Sean thrust his arms into the sleeves of the white suit and pulled it over his shoulders.

  “He seems agreeable. I told him it was to be only a temporary stay.”

  “I understand Nanopoulos is laying his cable in the trench where they found the body.”

  Victoria nodded.

  “Seems like he knew the guy. Didn’t tell the cops.”

  Victoria felt a wash of pride at the efficiency of the Island grapevine. “He’s spoken to Casey, and will be talking to the state police tomorrow.”

  Victoria shifted on the hard bench. “When you saw him at the Farmer’s Market, was that when you first met him?”

  “Never seen him before. Heard about him, though. Someone you don’t want to mess with.” Sean reached into the back of the truck for the next prop.

  “He’s a perfect gentleman,” said Victoria. “Courteous, considerate.”

 
; “Figured he would be to you, Mrs. T.” He started up the smoker and pumped the handle a few times. Before slipping his hood over his head he gazed at her, light blue eyes focused, not on her, but through her on some distant horizon. Once his hood was in place, Victoria had trouble understanding what he said next, and wasn’t sure she heard correctly. It sounded like, “Wouldn’t surprise me if he knew more than the identity of the corpse.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  But Sean had turned his attention to the bees and didn’t reply.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, Victoria walked to the police station. Casey was standing at the top of the stairs, scooping out feed for the ducks and geese.

  “I don’t know why I feed them. All they do is make a mess and get in the way.” She dropped the scoop back into the galvanized container and snapped the lid into place. “What’s on your mind?”

  “The investigation into the murder.” Victoria climbed the steps and she and Casey went inside. Casey sat behind her desk; Victoria took her usual seat.

  “State police problem, Victoria.”

  “Surely they can use our help.” Victoria crossed her hands over the top of her stick.

  “We’ve got our own problems,” said Casey.

  “Mrs. Sommerville’s complaint about the rooster?”

  “That’s important to her. We’ve got to deal with it.”

  “But a man has been shot to death.”

  “Not our job,” said Casey.

  “We can contribute a great deal.”

  Casey stood up. “Victoria, the selectmen asked me to check up on a complaint about kids drinking on the Lambert’s Cove beach. That’s top priority for me right now. Want to come with me?”

  Victoria, too, stood. “I don’t think so.”

  “If you’re going to freelance this murder, I’d advise against it, Victoria.”

  “Thank you for the advice.”

  “I’ll give you a ride home, if you’d like.”

  “I’d prefer to walk.”

  “Come off it, Victoria. You know policing. The state cops are in charge. We stay out of their way. I could use your company, checking out the drinking complaint.”