The Anteater of Death (24 page)

“The more ammunition, the better. And I still think we should call the police.”

“I said
no!
” The very idea of Joe finding out what I’d been up to made me ill.

“Okay,” she grudged. “But if that creep comes around again, make sure there’s another keeper nearby. If there’s not, get on the radio and start moving until someone finds you. I don’t want you left alone with him for one minute, understand?”

“That means I’m not fired?”

“Of course not. Anyway, I have a plan.”

“Care to share?” I handed the signed grievance forms back to her.

“You’ll find out soon enough.” With a mysterious smile, she walked away.

***

Regardless of the vet’s ministrations with an ice pack, when I looked at myself at the end of the day in the ladies’ room mirror, a ghastly face stared back at me. The area around my eye sported a purple crescent, and my cheek had swollen to twice its normal size. Hardly anyone’s idea of a
femme fatale
. As I stood there bemoaning my appearance, the door opened and Zorah walked in carrying a camera. Even with a murder trial hanging over her head, she looked happier than I did.

“Smile for the birdy,” she said, following through on her promise to document my injury.

“I don’t feel like smiling.”

She took one close-up full face, then a profile shot that showcased my inflamed cheek. “Too bad he didn’t knock out a tooth.”

“Zorah, are you serious?”

“Bigger damage settlement.”

As it turned out, she never filed those grievance forms because that night Barry Fields ceased to be a problem.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

Although my swollen face made me look lopsided, I arrived at work on time the next morning, thus ignoring Barry’s verbal pink slip. To my relief, the day started as normally as any day at a zoo can, which isn’t very. A check of the squirrel monkey’s night house revealed we were one female short. She’d picked the lock.

I called a Code Blue on my radio, and soon the grounds around Monkey Mania swarmed with keepers and volunteers looking up into the trees.

“Who escaped?” Zorah asked, as she scanned an overhanging eucalyptus.

“Lana, one of the younger females. She hasn’t been herself since Barry slammed into her.”

She transferred her attentions from the eucalyptus to me. “You said then that none of the monkeys was hurt.” From her tone, I knew she wouldn’t have cared if one of the monkeys had bit the zoo director’s head off during the attack as long as the animal didn’t chip a tooth doing it.

“They were scared, Lana most of all. She’s always been shy.”

Zorah studied the tree again. “Barry’s a menace, all right, but our problems with him may soon be over. I have a nine o’clock appointment with Aster Edwina. She may not like to dirty her hands with the everyday business of running the zoo, but she won’t put up with violence against animal or staff.”

“She’s coming
here
?” It was like Moses descending from Mount Sinai.

“Nah, I have to drive over to the castle.” She gave a shudder. “Place gives me the creeps.” This from a woman who suffered no qualms working with lions and rhinos.

“Want me to come with you?”

“Not necessary. As Dr. Kate said, you’re not the only woman who’s been having trouble with our exalted director. All I had to do was talk them into making formal complaints against him. And that was easy.”

“Who else, then?”

“You’d be surprised.” She refused to say more.

A few minutes later, Lana returned to the night house on her own, apparently deciding freedom wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. After inspecting her for injuries and finding none, I fed her a half teaspoon of peanut butter, her favorite treat, and released her to her friends.

We decided to keep the exhibit closed for the day to give the animals a chance to calm down. Before Zorah left for her appointment with Aster Edwina, she promised to order a combination lock, like the one on the gate in the anteater’s holding pen. In the meantime, I would triple-lock the night quarters and hope that was enough.

***

The first indication something was amiss came while I was enjoying a late-morning latte at the Congo Cafe, right inside the zoo’s entrance. As I watched the antics of the various visitors—almost as entertaining as watching the animals—I noticed three park rangers running toward the administration building. At first I didn’t think too much of the commotion because trouble and zoos aren’t strangers. The fact that no radio alert had been issued proved that whatever was going on had nothing to do with an animal’s transgression, so I kept sipping my latte and watching the human parade.

I had just directed a bus load of sun-hatted senior citizens to the anteater enclosure when Zorah ran past the cafe, saw me, and yelled, “Be in the auditorium in ten minutes! I’m calling a full-staff assembly.”

Judging from her expression as she raced by, the meeting with Aster Edwin must have been uncomfortable in the extreme. “Am I…?” Then I realized where I was, the number of zoo staffers nearby. I shut my mouth before it released the word “
fired
.”

She didn’t notice my near-lack of discretion, just continued down the trail toward the administration building.

I gulped down the rest of my latte, and as I tossed the empty container in the trash can, my radio squawked, “Zookeeper One to all zoo personnel. Assemble in the auditorium immediately after following standard safety procedures. Repeat. All zoo personnel, with the exception of concessions staff and volunteers, assemble in the auditorium immediately.”

“That’s weird,” Jack Spence said, making me jump. He’d approached without my noticing him. For such a tall man, he could be surprisingly quiet. “We’ve got, what, over two hundred people on staff? Granted, not all of them are here today, but still, this must be something really big. I mean, we’re using the auditorium, for Pete’s sake!”

Energy bills being what they were, the auditorium, which sat behind the administration building, was used only for special events. Firing a wayward keeper such as myself wouldn’t rate the room.

“Zorah had a meeting with Aster Edwina this morning,” I told him. “Maybe that’s what she’s going to talk about.”

“Let’s hope the old bat hasn’t decided to dump the zoo.”

I stopped. “What made you say that?”

When he kept walking, I ran to catch up. “A hunch,” he said. “But I could be wrong.”

“The zoo’s part of the Gunn Trust. No matter what happens, she can’t dump it.”

“Like the Trust can’t be broken? For all we know, she’s had it up to here with the zoo’s problems, and now with your and Barry Fields’ little brawl, has found a way to cut it loose.”

“Are you blaming me for what happened?”

He shook his head. “What else could you do when the creep grabbed you? But it’s too bad you couldn’t figure out another way to spring the anteater from that holding pen.” His big hand slapped my back. “Buck up, kid. For all we know, Zorah’s going to announce that China’s shipping us a couple of pandas.”

But the announcement had nothing to do with pandas.

Once everyone assembled in the auditorium, Zorah, flanked by two park rangers, stepped to the podium. She wasn’t used to speaking in public, and sweat trickled from her broad brow. After flicking her index finger at the microphone to make certain it was on, she began.

“Um, this morning I had a meeting about an internal issue with Aster Edwina Gunn. After she heard…after we discussed the issue for a while, she placed a phone call to the zoo director’s office.”

I tensed. Maybe I
was
the problem.

Her next words eased my concern. “Helen Gifford, Mr. Fields’ secretary, informed Ms. Gunn that he hadn’t come in to work yet, but once Ms. Gunn told her that…mmm, that the matter was important and he’d better get his ass…uh, that he’d better come up to the castle immediately, Helen jumped in a cart and drove over to his house. So.” More perspiration rolled down Zorah’s forehead. “Look, I, er, I’m sorry to…” She stopped to wipe the sweat away.

After clearing her throat, she continued. “I’m sorry to inform you that sometime during the night, Mr. Fields, uh…” She raised her eyes and stared at the auditorium’s fluorescent lights. One was blinking on and off. She gulped, shut her eyes, and spit out the rest of the sentence.

“Oh, hell, I’m just gonna go ahead and say it. Barry’s dead.”

Once the cries of shock died down, she continued. “We’re all grown-ups here, right? So I’ll be straight with you. Helen says it looks like he was mu…uh, she said it looked like, mmm, foul play was involved. The police are on their way here to talk to me and…and…and some other people. If they want to question you, cooperate, okay? And, uh, if any of you have information about what happened to him, please come forward.”

She shielded her eyes from the lights with a shaking hand. “That’s it for the announcement, but I need to see the following people in my office right away. Dr. Kate Long. Kim Markowski. Jack Spence. Teddy Bentley.” With a sigh of relief, she finished, “Everybody else, go back to work. Just do me a favor and don’t mention this to the zoo’s visitors. What with the media and all, the news will get out fast enough. And let’s make sure our animals don’t bear the brunt of this, okay? As always, their welfare comes first.”

She turned off the mike and left the stage with the two park rangers. They were guarding her, I realized, probably on orders from the sheriff. Did he think she was about to make a run for it?

For a moment the auditorium was strangely silent except for the bear keeper’s voice, which climbed so high it could have shattered glass. “Foul play? Did she say foul play? As in
murder
?”

That did it. As the auditorium erupted into chaos, I headed for the exit, Jack hard on my heels.

“Teddy?”

“What?”

“Didn’t you hear what I asked?”

“Yeah. She said ‘foul play.’ And before that, she started to say ‘murdered.’”

His craggy face creased with worry. “Are you in trouble?”

I slowed, letting the other keepers stream around us. Of all the people filing past us, not one was crying. The zoo director would not be missed. “Why should I be in trouble?”

He bit his lip so hard I feared it would bleed. “The names she called. You. Me. And everyone else present when Barry, ah, did what he did to you.”

And when I’d bloodied his nose. “The police have to start somewhere.” Like with people who had motives.

“You’re lucky you used to have a thing with the sheriff. This might be time to rekindle the old flame.”

I grabbed his arm. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

He jerked his arm away. “You know what I mean.”

“You think the sheriff would let a suspect go just because he has a thing for her?”

“It worked with Barry, didn’t it?”

I was so furious I stopped talking to him. When we reached the administration building, a small crowd of keepers was milling around Zorah’s desk pumping her for more information. While the park rangers hovered in the background, she batted at the keepers as if shooing away gnats. “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she kept repeating. “I promise I’ll share whatever news I get, but all I know now is that Helen said there was blood all over the place.”

That silenced the swarm for a moment, but they soon started up again.

“Where was the blood? Chest? Stomach? Head?”

“Was the furniture overturned, like there’d been a big fight or a robbery? I saw on a
Law & Order
rerun the other night…”

Zorah caught my eye and stood up, her big bulk towering over the others. “You guys need to leave, because I have to talk to Teddy. Go on now. Get out.”

As the keepers filed out grumbling, Dr. Kate battled past them into the office. “Can things possibly get worse around here?”

Zorah nodded. “They’re about to.” She looked over at me again. “Teddy, I hate to say this, but you know how fast gossip travels around this place. What happened between you and Barry yesterday is already common knowledge. I think that’s why the sheriff wants to see you. And the others who witnessed the, uh, argument.”

At this, I glared at Jack. The gossip monger had the grace to blush.

Her voice bitter, Zorah said, “I’ve had some experience with the sheriff lately, and I can tell you that no matter how crazy things sound, you’d better tell him the truth. He’s not dumb, and he…”

A deputy picked that moment to enter. “The sheriff wants to see you people up at the zoo director’s house.”

“Why doesn’t he come down here?” Zorah asked. “We can use the director’s office now that he’s, um, not going to be using it any more.”

The deputy frowned. “The sheriff needs to stay on the scene until the crime techs finish up.”

After he bundled us into his squad car, no one spoke on the way to Barry’s house, located on the zoo’s far northeastern boundary. Separated from the public areas by a thick stand of Monterey pine, it was almost invisible from the public area of the zoo. The lush vegetation rendered the house a perfect murder site.

The squad car pulled past a sign declaring ZOO STAFF ONLY, through the sumac-lined lane, and into the gravel parking area. Four other squad cars and a county crime tech van were parked in the yard, along with an ambulance. Deputies and EMTs stood around chatting. No one seemed particularly disturbed except for Helen Gifford, slumped on a chaise lounge. After warning us not to talk to her, the deputy let us out.

The door to the house opened and Joe came out, flanked by three more deputies. He beckoned me over to a picnic table under the shade of an elderly oak. Giving my battered face a careful look, he winced, then recovered himself. Sitting down, he took a small tape recorder out of his shirt pocket and placed it on the redwood table.

“What’s that?” I asked, stupidly.

“A tape recorder.”

“You’re going to record me?”

“You are so astute.” When he pressed a button, a tiny red light came on.

I looked over at Zorah and Dr. Kate, who were being interviewed separately, no tape recorders in evidence. “Why are you doing this?”