The Koala of Death

by Betty Webb

  “God only knows, but if you come in, we can start working on the problem.”

  The house’s brightly lit interior wasn’t too bad. Decorated much like the zoo’s employees’ lounge with a collection of mismatched furniture and animal posters, it made its own original design statement with the small reptile aquariums that lined the walls, the largest of which was the size of a casket and contained a green iguana easily two feet long.

  At my quizzical look, she said, “I found her in a San Sebastian Dumpster, cage and all. Some people have no conscience.”

  No, they didn’t. For all their reptileness, iguanas were friendly animals that grew deeply attached to their keepers. Not being literate, they couldn’t write or speak about the heartbreak they experienced when discarded like trash, but there was little doubt they suffered.

  I set the cat carriers down by the sofa, then plopped myself into its own pillowy softness. Within seconds, a small Pekingese mix jumped onto the sofa to keep me company. He turned a few times, then rested his head on my thigh.

  Patting him, I said to Josie, “Green iguanas can grow to more than four feet in length. What are you going to do then?”

  She carefully lowered herself and the black cat onto a recliner. “I have a call out to several zoos, the Gunn included.”

  “Good luck with that.” People were always trying to foist their animals on zoos, unaware that the zoos were already full up.

  “If I can’t find a zoo to take her—I’ve named her Eve, by the way—I’ll soon have to move her out back. Alyse is building several more pens, and it won’t be too much trouble to outfit one for her.” She smiled. “For Eve, not Alyse.”

  I smiled back. “Where is your daughter, by the way?”

  “At the library. She’s a volunteer and helps them shelve books twice a week. The rest of the time, when she’s not working with me, she’s running around trying to raise money for the San Sebastian No-Kill Animal Shelter. She’s even going to take part in that television marathon next week, answering the phones, I think. So am I, for that matter.”

  Not knowing how much or how little her daughter knew, it was a relief to be able to speak freely.

  By now, every one of the room’s felines had approached the cat carriers to inspect Kennedy and Rockefeller. Other than a hiss or two, the introductions were peaceful. After all, every cat in the room was used to being part of a menagerie.

  “Looks like it’s going to work out,” I said.

  Another smile. “It always does.”

  With the light from a corner lamp shining her full on the face, I could see that she was older than she’d appeared at her dimly-lit shop, as much as forty, even forty-five.

  Old enough.

  “What are your plans?” I asked.

  She feigned puzzlement. “Plans for the cats?”

  I shook my head.

  “My, aren’t you being the Sphinx.”

  The Peke-mix in my lap stood up, wagged his tail, and gnawed gently at my hand in an invitation to play. When I told him no, he settled himself back down. I patted him and told him what a good dog he was. He wagged his tail again, but this time kept his teeth to himself.

  “You have a way with animals,” Josie said, admiration in her voice.

  “I like to think so.”

  “You were asking about plans?” She looked rather Sphinx-like, herself.

  “Right. Now, let’s see. To take possession of this property, you had to present a birth certificate proving that you were a DiGiorno by birth, which means your father would have been one of the DiGiorno boys. I’m guessing Giannino. From what I hear, he was a handsome devil. Very popular with the ladies.”

  “Yes, Uncle Giannino was quite the Romeo. He’s married now and has a large brood of children, none of whom wanted to be bothered with this run-down place. I’m Delmazio’s daughter. And before you ask, he and his wife are getting up there in age, so he didn’t want to go through the trouble of moving back here. Especially not to this hovel.”

  She said “his wife,” not “my mother.”

  “He didn’t want to move back here from where?”

  “Mt. Pleasant, New York. He owns a restaurant there. Italian, of course. My two younger brothers manage it, but food’s never been my thing. Animals are.”

  A township forty miles north of Manhattan, Mt. Pleasant was the seat of Pocantico Hills, the family home of the Rockefellers. I’d once spent a weekend on the estate as a guest of one of the Rockefeller girls, a friend of mine from Miss Pridewell’s Academy for Young Ladies. No wonder Josie had laughed when I told her the cats’ names.

  “How did a DiGiorno wind up that far east?” As if I hadn’t already figured it out.

  “The Gunn family wanted him as far away from here as possible.”

  I decided to go for it. “They wanted you as far away as possible, am I correct?”

  No smile now. With her thinned lips and straight spine, she was the twin of the portrait I’d just viewed in the library at Gunn Castle. “Oh, yes. The Gunns definitely wanted me out of sight.”

  “So they paid your father off.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did your mother feel about that?”

  “My mother?”

  I softened my voice. “Yes, Josie. Aster Edwina. Your mother.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  If you drive fast enough you can reach Oakland, a neighboring city of San Francisco, in little over an hour, but with the engine in my Nissan pickup being little better than the Merilee’s engine, we crept along the slow lane for the entire distance. It gave me plenty of time to think about last night’s conversation with Aster Edwina’s long-lost daughter.

  All Josie/Speaks-to-Souls knew was what her father had told her. When he and Aster Edwina were both in their forties, they’d had a brief affair that ended when Aster Edwina had left to visit relatives in England.

  “But she wasn’t in England,” Josie had said. “She went somewhere to have the baby. My father, who was married to his first wife at the time, didn’t know anything about it. He thought Aster Edwina had grown tired of fooling around with the peons, so when old Edwin showed up on his doorstep one night with a big check and a baby, he was shocked. Dad didn’t want the money, but his wife talked him into using it to buy his uncle’s restaurant in New York, so we became New Yorkers and we all lived happily ever after. End of story.”

  But it hadn’t been the end of the story. After repeated questioning, she explained that as a rider to the check, Josie’s father had to promise Edwin that he would never contact Aster Edwin again. She wanted nothing more to do with him, Edwin said.

  Josie gave me a bitter smile. “To set Aster Edwina’s mind at ease, and also to placate his wife, Dad promised. Not that it did much good. Not long after we arrived in New York, his wife left him for another man, and he raised me alone.”

  When I’d asked her about her plans, she refused to answer.

  ***

  The Golden Rule Rest Home was on the western edge of town in an industrial area that hadn’t yet seen gentrification, but from the FOR SALE sign in front of the shabby building, its time would soon be up. Just like its residents’.

  As the stoutly built manager, whose name tag announced her as MRS. MORTHLAND, ushered me down a dark hallway toward Tyler Everts’ room, I banished Aster Edwina and her daughter from my mind to concentrate on another parent and child. Judging from the shabbiness of Golden Rule Rest Home, Kate’s father must have lived a hand-to-mouth existence. At least he’d loved his daughter and she’d loved him. It was too bad neither of them had been able to afford a nicer place for him to end his days.

  Not that the Golden Rule was a bad place; it wasn’t. The staff appeared compassionate, but the hallway carpet was threadbare, the ceiling water-stained, and the air musty with the smell of boiled vegetables and decaying flesh. When we reached Tyler’s room, I saw two narrow beds. In the far bed, an old man lay staring sightlessly at the ceiling. The other bed was empty.

 
“Looks like Mr. Everts is in the rec room watching TV,” Mrs. Morthland said.

  Before we headed to the rec room, I noted that the wall on Kate’s father’s side of the room was plastered with snapshots of boats. Some I recognized from Gunn Landing Harbor, others I didn’t. The largest photograph was of the Nomad. Standing in front of it, arms around each other, were Tyler Everts and the child who grew up to be Koala Kate. They looked happy.

  The television in the rec room was turned to the Nickelodeon cartoon, The Penguins of Madagascar. Several elderly men and women sat facing it, their aged faces almost indistinguishable from each other. One man appeared at least two decades younger than the rest. He was holding something in his arms. A doll?

  Mrs. Morthland pointed to him. “That’s Tyler. The fellow with the plush koala. It was a gift from his daughter.”

  In a way, Kate’s father was still a handsome man, leaving aside the vacant look in his eyes and the thin vein of drool that escaped from his mouth. He had a straight nose, a well shaped, if slack, mouth, and broad shoulders, and he was wearing a blue Canaan Harbor tee shirt with a picture of a sailboat on it. He cradled the stuffed koala as if it were a child.

  I showed Mrs. Morthland the picture I’d brought. “Will he recognize her?”

  “It’s hard to say. Sometimes he’s with us, sometimes he’s somewhere else. This morning he was alert enough to remember the names of some of the food he was having for breakfast. Eggs. Toast. But he believed the sausage patty was a cookie and complained that it wasn’t sweet enough. That’s how it is with these Alzheimer’s patients.”

  She gave me a kindly smile. “If you need me, I’ll be in the office filing medical records. But be sure and stop in to see me before you go. I have an envelope I meant to give Kate. She put it down on his night stand the last time she was here, then forgot to take it with her when she left. Since she’s passed over, you might as well have it. When the police told me what had happened to her, I looked through it and saw several receipts, including one from a funeral home and another for a double cemetery plot not that far from here. So you see, someone has to…” She trailed off.

  “I understand. Let me know when Mr. Everts, ah, passes over. The zoo will take care of the arrangements.”

  Mrs. Morthland thanked me and started to leave, then paused at the door. “When you talk to Tyler, don’t bring up what happened to Kate, okay? When the police first told him, he cried and cried, but now he’s forgotten all about it. Reminding him will just break his heart all over again.” Then she left me on my own.

  Summoning up the skills I had learned when dealing with the elderly aunt who’d suffered from the disease, I approached him slowly. Stopping in front of his chair, I stooped down so as not too loom over him. “Hello, Mr. Everts. My name is Teddy, and I used to work with your daughter.”

  He gave me a vague smile. “Are you my daughter?”

  “No. Her name is Kate.”

  His brow creased for a moment, then he shook his head. “I don’t think I know anyone by that name.”

  It’s never a good idea to argue with an Alzheimer’s patient, so I simply said, “That’s a very nice koala you have there. What’s his name?”

  “Wanchu.”

  “Isn’t that the name of the koala your daughter takes care of?”

  He beamed. “Yes! My daughter gave it to me, but I keep forgetting her name. Do you know her?” Just like that, his memory had snapped back.

  “Oh, yes, we’re very good friends.” A stretch there, but a well-meaning one.

  “Is she coming to see me today?”

  Remembering Mrs. Morthland’s warning, I said, “She couldn’t get away from work, but she gave me this to bring to you.” I slid the framed photograph out of its manila envelope and held it in front of him.

  “Wanchu,” he said. “And Koala Kate.”

  “Yes, Wanchu. And Kate, your daughter.”

  He beamed at the photograph for a few seconds, then the blank look slid across his face again. “Who did you say you are?”

  “Teddy. I’m a friend of Kate’s.”

  He turned to the television, where one of the penguins was upchucking a partially-digested fish. “I don’t know any Kate.”

  A few minutes later, I realized he wasn’t coming back, so I left him to watch television with the other residents.

  “How’d it go?” Mrs. Morthland said, looking up from her filing as I entered the office.

  “As well as expected, I guess.” I handed her the photograph of Kate and Wanchu. “Can I put this up on his wall?”

  “It’s against regulations to let visitors nail anything to the walls, but I’ll put it up myself as soon as I’m through here. Which reminds me, here’s that envelope I told you about. The one Kate forgot.”

  She handed me an envelope. It felt thick enough to contain funeral arrangements for a hundred dying men.

  ***

  I was in such a somber mood when I drove into the parking lot at Gunn Landing Harbor that I almost slammed into the big Mercedes taking up my reserved parking space. But there was no way I could miss the whirlwind of anger and recrimination that headed for me in the form of Caroline Piper Bentley Hufgraff O’Brien Petersen, otherwise known as Mother.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t see this?” she screeched, shaking a newspaper in front of my face so violently that several seagulls flapped away in alarm.

  SERIAL KILLER LOOSE IN SS COUNTY? The San Sebastian Gazette bawled, in big red type. SECOND VICTIM FOUND IN GUNN LANDING HARBOR sobbed the lead.

  “That paper’s two days old, Caro. And here I thought you kept up on current events.”

  “I’ve been busy putting your party together!”

  “It’s not my party, it’s yours,” I muttered, trying to sidle past her.

  “Don’t get smart with me, missy.” She grabbed my sleeve and gave a yank, almost making me drop Kate’s envelope. “You’re coming home with me whether you like it or not. Whoever that killer is, he’s either going after people connected to the zoo or to that Koala Kate person. It says right here in the article that Mr. Liddell was a friend of Kate’s. And you were, too.”

  Not really, but Caro had no way of knowing that. “Look, Mo…Caro, I can’t just move out of the Merilee and leave my animals behind. I have a new cat…”

  “Bring them. Wait, did you say a new cat, it’s now cats, plural? Don’t you have just the one, that Miss Priss or whatever the fluffball’s name is?”

  “My new cat’s name is Toby, and he belonged to Heck.”

  “The second victim?” Her eyes widened. “Don’t worry, I can handle an extra cat. The only question will be, can Feroz? Since I took him to see Speaks-to-Souls, he’s a different dog.”

  Change the environment, change the behavior. “If worst comes to worst, I’ll confine the animals to my room. I also need to bring some things, like my uniforms and my computer. I’m supposed to be working on the zoo newsletter.” The minute the words escaped my mouth, I realized that she was right. Despite my earlier defiance of Joe’s edict, I did need to leave the Merilee—if only to keep my mother from having a heart attack.

  With my acquiescence, the tension left my mother’s face. “I’ll help you pack, Theodora.”

  An hour later DJ Bonz, Miss Priss, Toby and I were ensconced in my old room at Caro’s house. For a woman addicted to serial marriage, she remained remarkably faithful to her memory of me as a teenager. The turquoise and lime green color scheme remained, as did the posters of Jon Bon Jovi, Gloria Estefan, and the Thompson Twins. Bonz and Miss Priss had holed up here before, but little Toby, having just started getting used to the Merilee, looked scared out of his wits. The Aztec warrior sniffing hungrily outside the door didn’t help, either.

  I picked Toby up and cuddled him. “Don’t worry, I won’t let mean old Feroz get you.” Eventually, he relaxed enough to purr. I continued holding him and talking to him until Caro rapped at the door.

  “Lunch time, Theodora! Grizelda’s made tuna sala
d.”

  Grizelda was her new maid. Due to temperament issues coupled with an odd perfectionism about household matters, my mother blew through an average of six maids a year. She never fired them; they just disappeared, sometimes turning up employed by one of Caro’s friends.

  I set Toby down, and without thinking, opened the door. A snarling Feroz headed straight for the little cat.

  He never made it.

  DJ Bonz, usually the most peaceful of dogs, placed himself between Feroz and Toby, teeth bared.

  The Chihuahua slid to a stop. Hackles high, he froze in place on the lime green carpet, mulling over the situation. Bonz was twice his size, with teeth two times as long. Moreover, the three-legged mongrel appeared willing to fight to the death for the safety of his cat.

  Even naked Aztec warriors know when a situation is hopeless, so with a face-saving growl, Feroz turned and walked out of the room with all the dignity he could muster.

  “If that mutt of yours hurts Feroz, I’ll kill him,” Caro huffed as we walked downstairs to the dining room.

  “Not if I kill you first,” I answered genially.

  Formal lunches aren’t my thing but they are Caro’s, so I sat at the long dining table as Grizelda fussed about with a lace tablecloth made by French nuns, monogrammed linen napkins, old Bentley silver, and an irreplaceable pattern of Royal Doulton china.

  For tuna frickin’ salad.

  “What’s the big hurry?” Caro asked, as I speared the last pea.

  “I’m late for work.”

  She sniffed. “Surely you’re not going in today, not after everything that’s happened.”

  “I’m as safe there as I am here, Mother.”

  “Caro, dear. If I remember correctly, you were almost killed at the zoo once. That awful anteater tried it, too.”

  After patting my lips with a napkin, I stood up. “Lucy is a perfectly reasonable animal, unlike a certain Chihuahua I could mention.”

  “I thought you liked Feroz.”

  “Not when he’s about to kill my cat.” Good deeds never go unpunished, do they?

  As I headed up to my room, Caro’s voice followed me. “Don’t forget the party tonight. All the right people will be here.”