Zero at the Bone (8 page)

She took the opportunity of the rare silence to say, “Please call me Katherine.”

“Oh, good. We like being on a first-name basis around here. And I’m Sam, of course. I want you to know, Katherine—this is difficult to say—that we regret this accident terribly, but I think you’ll find the zoo safety procedures beyond reproach.”

He’s afraid I’ll sue him, Katherine realized.

“Here we are.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

They were approaching a large grassy enclosure, backed by what was supposed to look like a stone cliff but was clearly Gunite made to resemble rock. The rest of the exhibit was surrounded by a fourteen-foot-high green mesh fence with a one-foot lip at the top angled inward. A strip of grass separated that fence from a low barrier made of iron bars to keep observers away from the fence.

“This is the outdoor area shared by our two tigers. It was Brum’s turn to be out here last night and Imelda’s—the other tiger—to be in. Can’t leave two adult tigers together unless they are mating, and even then it’s risky, tigers being what they are.”

Katherine glanced around the enclosure. Very pretty and natural with its grass and clumps of bamboo, huge boulders, a trickle of water simulating a stream. Then she noticed the door and she was hit with the reality of what had happened here. It was an inconspicuous gray door in the cliff, with a small window boarded over with plywood. The grass just outside the door was stained dark.

She wondered how long it took to be killed by a tiger.

They walked around the fence to a door in the back of the cliff. The director knocked on the windowless steel door. “We’ve assigned members of the staff to be here round the clock for a while—just in case.” He looked at Katherine. “You going to be all right? We could do this another time.”

“No. I’m fine,” Katherine protested, wondering why her voice sounded so thin and far away.

Sam knocked again. In response came the clank of a big lock being opened. Then the door swung open.

A slight man in zoo coveralls stood aside deferentially to let them enter. A badge on the left side of his shirt identified him as “Danny, Cat Keeper.”

The second Katherine stepped through the door her nose twitched in reaction to the powerful stench of cats—urine and spray. Nothing like the odor of dogs, she thought. Far more aggressive and potent. She stifled the impulse to sneeze.

The director closed the door behind them and the keeper quickly locked it with his big key ring. “Thanks, Danny. This is Katherine Driscoll, Lester’s daughter. I’m going to show her where it happened. Katherine, this is Danny Gillespie. He’s been assigned to the big cats for the last several months, working for your father.”

Danny glanced at her, shuffled his feet inside the knee-high rubber boots he was wearing, and gave a sheepish half-smile, keeping his teeth covered.

“You were on the shooting team,” she said.

He lowered his eyes and ran a hand across the top of his wispy blond hair, trying to smooth it over the balding spot at the top of his head. “It was just too late to do anything for him, Miss Driscoll. I got there so fast, in just a couple of minutes, ’cause I was in the office when the call came in, but it was just too late.” He looked up at her. His pale-blue, lashless eyes were magnified behind the thick glasses that made them seem elongated. She wondered if the swelling around the rims was permanent or if he had been crying.

“What made you so sure it was too late?” she asked.

The question startled them both. Katherine hadn’t known she was going to ask it, and Danny blinked his eyes several times with the impact of it.

After a long silence, he said, “Well, he was all … oh, it was clear from the way he … you know, when tigers make a…” He stopped and looked at the director in desperation.

Sam stepped forward and put a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “Danny, I know this is difficult, but some reporters at the press conference kept asking about it.”

Danny sighed. “Oh.” He looked at Katherine. “Miss Driscoll, I wish I could’ve gotten here in time, but the way he was lying, his neck was clearly broke, and the blood … well, it was just everywhere. I admired Mr. Renfro so much. He did such a good job with the cats and taught me so much. I’ve only been in cats four months, but I felt I’d found a home here.” He shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

Katherine looked away. They were in a white-tiled room with a drain running down the center of the floor. At the far end was a cage. Inside, an immense bushy-coated tiger lay on his side watching them with luminous yellow eyes.

“Well, there he is,” said the director. “That’s Brum. Five years old. Born here at Austin Zoo. Aggressive as all get-out from day one. What’s he been like?” Sam asked the keeper.

“Pretty quiet, sir. We fed them both when the police finally left. And he ate pretty good. I’ve just finished hosing down the cage.”

Katherine approached the cage slowly and stared at the cat, who stared right back at her. She’d never looked really closely at a tiger before. The bramble of black stripes framing his orange-and-white face looked like an inkblot, the same on both sides. If a psychiatrist asked her what the blot resembled, she would say the roots of some enormous plant. A man-eating plant, perhaps. The abundant quill-like white whiskers sprouted aggressively beside the pink nose. It was a beautiful face. Undeniably.

Sam approached quietly and took a firm grip on her elbow. “Do you want to see the rest?”

Katherine pulled her eyes away from the tiger and nodded.

Danny had unlocked the next door and was standing aside to let them enter. Sam preceded her in into a tiny closetlike room and stood with his back against the wall so she would have more room. The second she entered, she felt the horror it of. It was a gray concrete sarcophagus with a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. She flinched as she looked at the boarded window. It was impossible not to imagine what had happened here this morning: the sudden crash of glass breaking, the huge striped head punching through the window, the lightning-fast claws hooking into soft flesh. God.

When Danny entered the room too, the claustrophobia became too much. She pushed her way out. Until she saw this place, Lester’s death had been a distant accident. Now it had come home. And she hated it.

She stood outside the door breathing hard, while the two men talked in low voices. “The police swept up all the glass,” Danny was saying, “and took it away. Very thorough. They stayed for more than three hours.”

He lowered his voice and spoke in reverent tones as if they were in some tiny roadside shrine. “But I don’t understand it. He always said that ninety-five percent of safety on the job was locks. He wouldn’t even be in here while Brum was still outside. He taught us always to secure the outside tiger into its holding cage before doing anything else. Always. A rule of his.”

The director said, “It’s hard to see. He was the most regular of men.”

While the men talked, Katherine watched the tiger. He was on his feet now, pacing the cage, his lean hips undulating, his huge orange testicles swaying. He filled the cage with his color and vitality. Suddenly he reared up on his hind legs and rested his forepaws on the bars, brushing his head against the top of the cage. He towered over Katherine, glaring down at her. She stumbled a few steps backward to get out of his range of power.

She was embarrassed to note that Sam McElroy had left the anteroom and was watching her. She said, “Sam, I’ve got to go. I left my dog in the car for more than an hour. I need to rescue him and get to the lawyer’s office.”

As they left, Danny locked the door behind them. Sam walked her out to the car, giving her careful directions to Travis Hammond’s office.

“And, Katherine,” he said, “I want to repeat that anything I can do to help you, I want to do. Just let me know what it is and it will be done. Promise you’ll let me know?”

She started the car, thinking of estates and wills. She was desperate to know if she could get what her father had for her in time to prevent the foreclosure. Would it be enough? Ninety-one thousand dollars? She took a deep breath. Well, she was about to find out.

As she pulled away from the zoo parking lot she looked in the rearview mirror at Ra, his ears blowing in the breeze from her open window.
It had to be enough.

6

KATHERINE had been surprised to hear that Travis Hammond was Lester’s lawyer. He was the only person from her old life in Austin that Leanne Driscoll had kept in touch with. He had been a close family friend and attorney to three generations of Driscolls, and given the rancorous split between her parents, it was mystifying that her father would choose Hammond to handle his estate.

The office of Hammond and Crowley was in a tiny, low stone house on Guadaloupe Street. A historic landmark medallion with the profile of Texas glittering in stainless steel was affixed to the left of the door.

Katherine liked the interior instantly. It was sparsely furnished and cool, with white walls roughly plastered, and wide-planked pine floors, bare except for some Navaho rugs tossed at random angles. On the walls hung three black-and-white photographs—originals by Ansel Adams, she thought.

A very young receptionist wearing blue jeans and a faded workshirt was busy typing with two fingers at the keyboard of a Macintosh computer. When Katherine identified herself, she stood up and started to smile, but stopped herself, and instead said, “Yes, ma’am. Sorry to hear about your father. Please sit down for just a sec.” She hurried from the room and slammed a door in the back. Before Katherine could sit down she had returned, with the old attorney limping at her side.

He was very thin and exquisitely tailored in a charcoal-gray suit. Above the snowy shirt collar and yellow paisley tie, his tanned, leathery face looked like a mask of tragedy. His mouth turned down at the corners, and his skin was a mass of brown wrinkles, like a peeled apple left out in the sun to dry. As he greeted her, a tic in his right eye convulsed all the muscles in that side of his face.

But his courtly Texas charm shone through. “Katherine Driscoll.” He drawled the name out as he took her right hand into both his own. “Thank you for coming to see me. I can’t tell you how devastated I am to hear about your father’s accident. I would have called you right away, but I was in Lubbock and just got back to Austin at noon to hear about it. Sam McElroy tells me you found out by accident. I’m so, so sorry about that. Forgive me.”

Katherine thought he really did look devastated. She wondered if that meant he had been close to Lester.

“Oh,” he said, turning to his young receptionist, “this is my granddaughter, Susan Hammond, helping me out in the office while she decides whether to go to college or not. Hold my calls, please, Susie Q, so I can talk with Miss Driscoll.”

“Okay, Grampa,” she said, already back at her slow typing.

Travis Hammond took Katherine’s arm and ushered her through the door of his office, taking care of her as if she were the frail one with a bad knee and a case of the shakes. He settled her on a beige camelback sofa and turned to close the door. The office, like the entry, was cool and simple, but she was jarred by the glassy eye of a huge deer head hanging on the opposite wall. It looked out of place in this civilized environment.

The lawyer turned and caught her staring. “Are you a hunter, Miss Driscoll? It’s one of my great vices.”

“Well, I train retrievers,” Katherine said, “and I take them bird hunting as part of the training—duck and quail mostly, but no, I’m not really a hunter.”

“That’s a twenty-inch buck,” he said proudly, his face relaxing for a moment, the mouth losing its arc of tragedy. “Got it last season when I went with your uncle, Coop, and that ol’ boy fancies himself quite a hunter, but he didn’t even get a shot off. Best trophy I’ve gotten in sixty-three years of deer hunting.” He lowered himself into an elegant wing chair, crossed one thin knee over the other, and ran a trembling hand along the prefect crease in his pant leg.

“Miss Driscoll—” He stopped speaking when his eyes settled on her face, as if caught mid-thought by a recollection that dammed up the normal flow of words. The eye began to twitch furiously again.

Then he shook his head very slightly as if to dislodge an idea he didn’t want to take root. Katherine wanted him to say it—what her face had made him think of. But he switched back to his smooth, courtly mode.

“Katherine,” he said, “how difficult for you to lose both your parents in such a short time, less than two years.”

Katherine hadn’t thought of it that way. “I never really had a father,” she said, “so it doesn’t feel as if I’ve lost anything.”

He flinched as if she had slapped him. Then he studied her face again and said, “I would have recognized you anywhere. I can see both your mother and grandmother in you. Have you been in touch with the Driscolls yet?”

“No. I haven’t. I don’t know if they’d want to hear from me,” Katherine said, watching his face closely for a reaction.

He paused, gliding a shaky hand back over his fringe of silver hair. “Oh, I think it’s time to let bygones be bygones. I believe Coop and Lucy, and especially Sophie, will want to see you. Your grandmother, I don’t know about. I hear she’s in a bad way. I usually go to see her, talk a little business, once a week, but Coop told me last week she wasn’t up to my visit. She had a small stroke back in March, you know, and has been confined to bed. Coop says she’s taken a sudden turn for the worse, another stroke, I believe, and she doesn’t want anyone to see her like that. Such a proud woman.”

“Does she still live in the house on Woodlawn?” Katherine asked.

“Yes. She’d been living alone there with just a daily housekeeper to do for her, but Coop says he had to step in and insist on a live-in nurse, given the deterioration of her condition.” He gave one small chuckle. “She must be in bad shape if she’s letting Coop have his way. Anne Driscoll is not a woman you insist to.”

Katherine was surprised by the profound rush of disappointment she felt sweep over her. Too late. The saddest words in the language, and they seemed to be the story of her life. She was six hours too late for her father, and perhaps a week too late for her grandmother.