Twenty-one
I went back inside and shared my suspicions with Holly. Then I followed DeeDee around the store for a while without any red-handed results and was about to call it a day when I heard commotion at the front door. Holly had busted DeeDee with a bag of potato chips in her purse and four packs of gum in her jeans’ back pockets.
My sister had tackled DeeDee right on the sidewalk, pinned her to the pavement, and still had a hand free to use her cell phone to report the crime. Talk about multitasking.
“Since when did you learn wrestling holds?” I asked my sister.
“Let me up,” DeeDee wailed. “I didn’t do anything.”
After a little more scuffling, Holly produced the evidence.
I couldn’t believe my eyes. “Gum and chips? How damn dumb can you get, DeeDee? I know you have enough money to pay for that!”
“I’ll never do it again,” DeeDee said, crying full-out. “I’ve learned my lesson.”
Yeah, sure. Owning a store had taught me a few things I wished I didn’t have to deal with. Shoplifting was the biggie. I’d learned a little bit about shoplifters:
? Most shoplifting crimes aren’t need-based.
? A lot of shoplifters get some kind of high out of it.
? It can be as addictive as drugs.
? Many of them keep doing it even after they are caught.
In my opinion, DeeDee was a classic case.
Holly still had her in some sort of professional power hold.
Sirens in the distance were coming our way. DeeDee looked at me like a trapped wild animal.
“Maybe we shouldn’t press charges,” I said to Holly. My sister, though, wasn’t about to catch and release this bottom-feeder. If it had been up to me, I would have let her go with a warning. “She feels bad enough,” I argued, “and she doesn’t need a criminal record. But I really do want to know where you learned those moves.”
“Self-defense class,” my sister said. “I modified just now, added a little offense.”
I asked Johnny Jay not to call any more attention to us than we’d already attracted by Holly’s sidewalk tackle, but he still left the lights flashing on his squad car while we all piled back into the store to find a private corner. All the while, DeeDee was denying any wrongdoing and begging to be released, but Johnny Jay kept a firm grip on her arm while he walked her to the back of the store.
I ended up working the cash register while Holly gave her report from the storage room. I tried to listen in, but it was hopeless. The squad lights had the locals all coming in for “forgotten” items, and I was stuck up front. It appeared that DeeDee had rounded up a little extra business for me while she worked on ruining her own life.
“The police chief locked himself out of his squad car with the lights going,” I replied to everyone’s inquiries, although they’d have the facts straight soon enough. Nothing was a secret around here for long. “He went looking for someone to bring a spare key. No big deal.”
After a while, the three of them came out of the back. DeeDee wasn’t wearing handcuffs, which was a good thing. Chatter in the store ceased. You could have heard a single corn silk hit the polished wood floor.
“It’s your call,” Johnny Jay said to me. “You own the store. She stole from you. What do you want to do?”
I didn’t know what I wanted. Lori was my sworn enemy, and this was her sister. On the other hand, I couldn’t blame DeeDee for having a rotten sibling. Although she wasn’t much of a gem herself.
“I don’t have all day, Missy Fischer,” the police chief said.
“Let her go, but I don’t want her in my store anymore.”
“I can go along with that,” Holly, the female all-star, said, nodding in agreement.
A few customers applauded. I heard one boo.
DeeDee was out the door and gone before we realized that the packs of gum were still missing. I hate it when I’m outsmarted.
But I had bigger robberies to worry about.
“I want to report a theft,” I told the police chief after Holly went up front and I had pulled him into a corner. I explained how Manny’s bees had vanished. “You’re all over the county looking for trouble,” I finished. “I’m just giving you a heads-up in case you see beehives where there weren’t any before.” Then I remembered that I’d moved my bees to Grams’s back field, which would constitute a bee change of venue in the picture I was painting. “Except if you spot any near my Grams’s house.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Johnny Jay said. “You can’t file a report for something that doesn’t belong to you in the first place.”
“I’m just keeping you in the loop, then.”
“What makes you think I care about your loop?”
“Fine, forget it.”
Johnny Jay looked pleased, like he’d won a round, and I remembered what Sally the dispatcher had said about the consequences of turning down Johnny Jay’s prom invitation. I’d suffer for the rest of my life for that one.
Then he said, “Maybe you have something after all. Where could those bees have gone? And do they figure into the break-in?”
“What break-in?”
“Manny must have told you.”
“I didn’t hear anything about it.” Not too surprising. Manny wasn’t a man of many words. Unless it had to do with his bees. Then he could go on for hours.
“I thought you two were such good friends.” He said friends in a suggestive way that I didn’t like, but that’s Johnny Jay. Always nasty. “The robbery happened about a week ago,” he continued. “Somebody broke a window in his kitchen and crawled through. Stole a camera and a few dollars out of the bureau. I chalked it up to an inexperienced burglar, kids probably. Whoever it was left behind things that were more valuable than what they took. Amateurs for sure.”
“Maybe the robbery has something to do with the missing bees.” I said that last part out loud instead of thinking it, like I planned.
“Well, Missy Fischer, you gave me a reason to think I might have been wrong about it being kids who broke in. Now I think bees were involved. The bees could have been looking for something special inside the house. When they didn’t find it, they must have tortured Manny to get it out of him and finished him off. Then they took whatever it was and disappeared.”
“Very funny.”
When the police chief strutted out, I knew he wasn’t going to help at all.