The Anteater of Death (9 page)

I related the details. “Ranee was crawling around the enclosure on her belly with her tail in the air, yowling and howling.”

Zorah managed a smile. “She’s in heat. Did Maharaja look interested?”

“Just confused.”

“Typical young male.” Her face fell. “I’m in bad trouble, aren’t I?”

I kept my tone light, which considering the circumstances, was difficult. Especially when the white woman started raving again. “Only if you killed Grayson, which I’m certain you didn’t.”

“I never touched him.”

“Then why does the sheriff think you did?”

After a quick look around, she answered in a voice so low I had trouble hearing her over the other woman’s curses. “For starters, he must have found out that I disappeared for about an hour during the fund-raiser. Right around the time someone offed the guy.”

“Where were you?”

Her ears turned red. “I’d been sneaking drinks and wound up getting sick behind the monkey’s night quarters. And before you ask why I didn’t use the restroom, I didn’t want any of our well-heeled guests to see the head keeper barfing up her insides. Fat lot of good it did me, though. I ripped my stupid anteater costume while I was thrashing around in the underbrush.”

Light dawned. “You had a hangover when I discovered the body, didn’t you? That’s why you weren’t there to see about the anteater.” Knowing she had strong reasons for being unhappy, I couldn’t judge her.

A shame-faced nod. “I never could hold my liquor.”

“But there has to be another reason. The sheriff wouldn’t arrest you just because you disappeared during the fund-raiser.”

Her eyes darted away from mine and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I, um, wrote some letters.”

“What kind of letters?”

She hunched her big shoulders forward and stared at the floor again. “To Grayson. I hoped that if I told him how badly he’d screwed up when he’d hired Barry Fields, he’d rethink his decision.”

Animal smart, people dumb; that was Zorah all over.

I waited for more, but she just continued staring at the floor. I looked down, expecting from her intense concentration to see a cockroach crawling along its gray-painted surface, and saw nothing other than scuff marks.

When she looked up, the glint in her eyes made me glad I wasn’t in the cell with her. “Grayson
told
me I had the job. Next thing I knew, he turned around and gave it to Barry. Where’s the sense in that?”

It amazed me that Grayson, a man I’d always thought was honest, had not only made such a bad decision but had lied to her about it. Knowing how timid he could be at times, though, perhaps he couldn’t face telling her the truth. After thinking over the job requirements, he might have decided that familiarity with fund-raising was more important than familiarity with animals. The zoo was a private facility, and without considerable grants and generous donations from wealthy widows, it couldn’t survive. Even though the Gunns paid most of the bills, at least thirty percent of the zoo’s operating costs had to come from other sources.

I tried my best to explain. “Fields is good at getting money out of people. I’ve seen him in action.”

She sneered. “It always comes down to money, doesn’t it?”

“It usually does.”

Now, instead of shouting vague curses, the white woman started muttering something about her neighbor’s cat. I didn’t want to hear the details.

“The hiring committee should have voided the appointment as soon as they found out,” Zorah said.

“They wouldn’t dare. Since Aster Edwina stopped being active at the zoo a few years ago, Jeanette and Grayson represent the family interests, so when he picked someone else over you, the hiring committee felt they had no choice but to rubber-stamp the appointment.” I’d have to revise my opinion of Grayson, though. It was beginning to appear that he wasn’t the wishy-washy little man I’d always believed him to be.

She looked back down at the floor. “It’s not fair.”

I thought about Michael and the animated Barbie doll he’d divorced me for. “Life seldom is.”

Now we both stared at the floor.

After a few moments, I asked, “Do you have an attorney?”

She shook her head. “You’ve seen that junker I drive. Does it look like I can afford a lawyer? I’ll have to take what the county can scrounge up for me.”

Meaning a court-appointed attorney, most of whom were too overworked to give their clients the attention they deserved. “When’s your arraignment?”

“Monday. That’s when I’ll find out how much bail’s going to be. Not that it matters. My family couldn’t raise fifty cents.”

I could if I broke an old promise to myself and dipped into the offshore account my father had set up for me in the Cayman Islands after fleeing to Costa Rica. Shamed by my father’s behavior, I’d never touched it, so technically, I was flat broke. However, I held a different kind of currency—powerful friends, some of them attorneys. I decided to make some calls on Zorah’s behalf.

In the meantime, I needed to know something else. “I’ll do what I can but first you need to tell me
exactly
what was in those letters you wrote.”

“I can’t believe how stupid I was!”

“If stupid was against the law, we’d all be in jail. Tell me about the letters.”

When she summed them up as best she could, I felt sick. After Michael left me I’d written him a few letters, too. Unlike Zorah, I hadn’t come right out and said he deserved to die a painful, lingering death; I’d merely implied it.

Giving her a confident smile, I stood to leave. “If those letters are the only things the sheriff has on you, I don’t think you have much to worry about. He’s flirting with a false arrest lawsuit.”

She shifted around on her cot so I couldn’t see her face. “There is one other thing.”

I sat back down. “Tell me.”

“Last week I, uh, lost something.”

Before she could answer, the heavy door closing off the cell block opened. I turned to see the sheriff standing in the entryway. He didn’t look pleased.

“Hi, Joe!” I called.

“Hi, yourself. You’re not supposed to be in here.”

Zorah scuttled away from the bars as if they were on fire.

“I thought you were gone for the day.”

“You thought wrong.”

Thinking furiously, I said to Zorah’s back, “Yeah, Zorah, I promise to keep a special eye on that tiger.” To Joe, “We were going over some zoo stuff.”

He walked toward us, his shoes echoing across the cement. “Didn’t you hear me? You’re not supposed to be in here.”

I forced a laugh. “What did you think I was going to do? Slip her a file?”

He towered over me. “That’s not funny.”

Refusing to be intimidated by his six-foot, two-inch height, I stood up and met his eyes even though it gave me a crick in my neck. Oh, he was so heartbreakingly handsome. But that was the operative word, wasn’t it?
Heartbreaking.
And I’d had enough of that.

“You know my schedule, Joe. There’s no way I could leave the zoo and get here in time for regular visiting hours.”

“You could have waited for the weekend.”

“The animals couldn’t.”

His scowl slipped. “Don’t you people have a back-up plan?”

Of course we did, but I wasn’t about to admit it. “For sickness and vacations, not something like this. Look, I can sympathize with your security concerns, but we zookeepers have problems you’ll never understand. Beside the Bengals—
Panthera tigria
—there’s the snow leopards—
Panthera uncias—
which I’m sure you know also are endangered. Why, less than five thousand survive in the wild today! They have special needs, just like the…” I took a deep breath, then assaulted him with more Latin. “…the
Neofelis nebulosa
and the…”

He raised his hands and backed away. “All right, all right. I’ll give you five more minutes, but you stop by my office before you leave, okay?” With that, he fled.

I sat back down. “Let’s go back to what we were really talking about.”

No reply. Zorah stood against the cell’s far wall with her face in her hands. I heard a sniffle. My brave friend, a woman who’d faced down hungry lions and anacondas, reduced to this. The Hispanic woman in the cell next to hers reached through the bars and patted her on the shoulder, murmuring something in Spanish I couldn’t quite catch.

I raised my voice. “If I’m going to help you, you need to tell me everything.”

Zorah crept back to her cot. With a heavy thud, she sat down, but wouldn’t look at me. “Okay.”

Like her neighbor, I reached through the bars and gave her a pat of my own. Forcing a bright smile, I said, “Now, where were we? Oh, you were telling me you lost something. What was it?”

Nothing.

“C’mon, tell me. It can’t be that bad.”

Perhaps strengthened by all those pats, she turned to face me, her cheeks damp. “I lost a gun.”

The plastic chair I sat in was shaped to fit the human body and should have been comfortable but now it felt like a torture device. Nevertheless, I kept my voice steady. “A gun, did you say?”

“Yeah.”

“And you had a gun because…”

The Hispanic woman moved politely away. The white woman in the other cell muttered to herself about the cat again, oblivious to the world and its inhabitants.

Zorah whispered, “Lean closer, Teddy.”

I leaned forward until my forehead touched the bars.

“It belonged to my nephew, Alejandro,” she whispered. “I took it away from him.”

She seldom talked about her family, but I knew it was large and that they lived in Castroville, a few miles away. “How did your nephew get a gun?”

“Stole it, probably.”

I’d heard rumors about her nephew, none of them good. “Don’t tell me he handed the gun over peacefully.”

“Hardly. A couple of weeks ago I dropped by my sister’s house and she was out, but Alejandro let me in to wait. He’d been in his room, I guess, because the door was open and I could hear music. That rap stuff’s rank, you wouldn’t believe what they say about women. They actually call them…”

“I know all about the ho’s. Get on with it.”

“Sorry. Anyway, at some point he excused himself to go to the john and I decided to turn the damned CD player off. When I went into his bedroom, there was the gun on the bed, half-covered by a sheet. Alejandro didn’t need any more trouble, especially not gun kind of trouble, so I grabbed the thing and took off. I intended to throw it of the end of the harbor breakwater, but when I got there, a busload of tourists were tromping around looking at the elephant seals. So I drove home and stashed it under my mattress. Last week, when I figured the beach would be deserted, I transferred the gun to my truck, intending to dump it on my way home from work. But…” Her voice faded away.

“Are you telling me that you kept that gun in your truck all day? In the employee parking lot?”

She shook her head furiously. “I’m not stupid. You know how hot cars get when the windows are closed and they’re sitting in the sun all day. I don’t know much about guns, but I know there’s gunpowder in them, and I was afraid if the truck got too hot, the gunpowder might explode. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t keep the truck’s window open. So I took the gun inside with me.”

“You brought a gun into the zoo?!” That was a firing offense.

“Not near the animals! For safety’s sake, I put it in my desk drawer and covered it with papers so no one could see it.”

Open-mouthed, I stared at her. Zorah’s desk, which had no locking drawers, was situated in the administration building near the time clock used by hourly employees. Worse, everyone knew she kept her desk filled with office supplies, so zookeepers—even though they weren’t supposed to—always were rifling it. She couldn’t have found a more public place to “hide” the gun if she’d tried.

“Don’t look at me like that, Teddy! It didn’t seem dumb at the time.”

Nothing ever does. “Okay, I think I can figure out the rest. By the end of the day, the gun was gone.”

She gave me a weak smile. “Gee, how’d you guess?”

“And you didn’t tell anyone.” It was a statement, not a question.

“How could I? Could you see me telling that stupid new director that the gun I’d brought illegally into the zoo, the gun that I’d stolen from my nephew who’d probably stolen the gun himself, had just been stolen by somebody else? Oh, ha. I went home and worried, that’s what I did.”

The white woman in the cell next to Zorah’s stopped mumbling and sat staring into space. The quiet was so loud I almost wished she would start yelling again.

“I hate to ask you this, but at any point did you think to wipe your fingerprints off the gun?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “Why would I do that?”

Why? In case someone took the gun out of your desk, used it to murder a man, then tossed it in a spot where the police might find it, that’s why.

Having learned everything from her I could, I stood up. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’ll make those calls as soon as I get home and try to fix you up with a good attorney. In the meantime, is there anyone you want me to call?”

“My family already knows where I am. And thanks to your damn boyfriend, the whole zoo does, too.”

“Ex-boyfriend. Emphasis on ex.”

“Whatever.” She resumed staring at the floor.

With nothing more to be gained, I left. On the other side of the cell block door, Deputy Guiterrez gave me a shame-faced look. “Busted. I don’t think the sheriff’s mad, but he does want to talk to you.”

Forcing myself to act as nonchalant as if I visited my friends in county lockup every day, I headed for Joe’s office.

Before I could sit down he said, “I noticed that you’ve wearing
your
uniform, too.”

I looked down at my khakis and boots, realizing for the first time that we were dressed alike. The only difference was that his breast pocket sported a badge, and mine an embroidered zebra.

“I didn’t have time to change.”

“Doesn’t matter. Khaki looks great with that red hair of yours. Listen, don’t think I bought all that stuff about the tigers. You always were a lousy liar. What did Ms. Vega have to say?”

“C’mon. You know better than that.”