Killer Confections8 Delectable Mysteries(565)

For a few seconds Billy Dee’s upper lip quivered. “Leave Jennifer Mae out of this, Miss Yoder! I didn’t know Linda was pregnant until just a week or so ago. By then it was too late, of course.”

“How was it too late?”

“The wheels of justice had already begun to turn, Miss Yoder.” He laughed. “You see, justice must be served, Miss Yoder, at all costs.”

“Even at the cost of your ownflesh and blood?”

Billy Dee responded by plunging the knife into my kitchen table. The blade seemed to penetrate about an inch into the hard, aged wood. For a split second I considered bolting for the door, but in that split second Billy Dee pulled the blade out again. It gleamed, just as wicked and sharp-looking as ever.

“Any more questions, Miss Yoder?”

I swallowed the cantaloupe in my throat. My prognosis did not look very good. If I was going to check out, I might as well go with all my questions answered.

“Yes, actually, I do have another question. What did Miss Brown have to do with all this? Why did you kill her? You did kill her, didn’t you, Billy Dee?”

A big smile crept across his face, the kind of smile that signals smug satisfaction. “Ah, Miss Brown. Yeah, I killed Miss Brown, or whatever her name was. Only it sure as hell wasn’t Brown. That bitch was a Fed.”

“What is a Fed?” Look, there isn’t any point in worrying about appearing stupid when you are about to die.

Billy Dee’s smile softened and appeared almost benevolent. Perhaps the man had a knack for teaching, particularly slow learners. “A Fed is a Federal Drug Enforcement Officer. Miss Brown, or whoever the hell she was, was one busy woman. She had a line on my buddy’s connections back in Morocco. One of them was an American who liked to ship stuff back home.” His smile slipped into a laugh. “It’s a small world, ain’t it, Miss Yoder?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen too little of it to tell.”

“Then that’s a shame,” said Billy, and it sounded like he really meant it. “But take my word for it, it’s a real small world. Real small. Turns out Miss Brown, or whoever, also had a line on the Congressman. And guess what? Them two lines was tangled. Seems that good old Garrett was buying from my Moroccan supplier on a regular basis. Not too dumb a move on his part, either, because them South American sources are too closely watched these days.

“Anyway, this woman comes here to see if she can catch the Congressman with his fingers in the sugar bowl, before he can check into that clinic—uh—”

“Grossinger-Beechman.”

“Yeah, that’s the place. Y’see, if she coulda done that, she’da had leverage. Might have been able to pull in a whole handful of lines; most of them with one end tied to Morocco.”

“And one of them yours?”

He looked surprised, and then amused. “Hell, no! I don’t do drugs.”

“You just buy deadly poison?”

“Yeah, you might say that. Real deadly poison. The best. Anyway, I wasn’t afraid that Miss Brown would arrest me—it’d take a lot more than her to put me in the slammer again. What I didn’t want, though, was her mining it all by reeling in the Congressman before I had a chance to pin Linda’s death on him. So, I took me a vote and decided that Miss Brown would take a nice trip down them stairs, after she had a taste of gouza.”

“I’m sure you’d make a good cruise director, but I’m also sure Miss Brown didn’t swallow your gouza willingly.” He laughed surprisingly loud. Surely someone had heard him. “She was a feisty little woman, for her age, I’ll give her that. Course, I set me up a diversion, just in case there was any noise, by putting that spider on Linda’s bed. Anybody who knew Linda, knew how she felt about bugs, specially spiders. And finding one here was a piece of cake. Face it, Miss Yoder, you ain’t much of a housekeeper.”

Even while sitting in the lap of death, I felt my face sting at such an accusation. “It was Susannah’s room!”

His eyes twinkled cruelly. “This one I found in the dining room, on one of them corncobs you got there. Stuck him in that jar you let me have for them night crawlers. Honestly, Miss Yoder, I don’t mean no disrespect, but a farm woman like you oughta know don’t nobody go fishing in November with worms.”

“But Papa...” Then I remembered that February was the off-season month Papa fished in, only it was ice-fishing, and he used smoked bacon for bait.

“Yes siree Bob! This here spider was a nice, plump little critter. And I wouldn’t have had no place to keep him if it hadn’t been for that jar you so kindly gave me.”