The Anteater of Death

by Betty Webb

  Getting the calf’s two-feet wide shoulders out of its mother’s narrow vagina was the most difficult and dangerous part of a giraffe’s birth process, and if was going to be serious trouble, it would happen now.

  If Makeba needed help, Dr. Kate vet would hop the fence and do whatever was necessary. Fortunately for the vet, giraffes were among the gentlest of animals and not even Makeba’s mate would attack without cause. If he ever did charge someone, a blow from his dinner plate-sized rear hoof—or worse, his eight-foot-long neck—could be fatal. The same gentleness wasn’t true of the ostriches, who pecked at the ground nearby. Big D, the alpha male of the small flock which lived in the big pasture with the giraffes, was vicious and had once almost killed a keeper with a kick from his clawed foot. It would be up to us keepers to ensure that Big D stayed away if Dr. Kate had to enter the enclosure, even if it put our own lives at risk. Zookeepers were members of a mutual protection society.

  “Aaaaahhhh!” A collective sigh of relief from the keepers as the calf’s shoulders popped through. Now came the easy part, the narrow sides, the hindquarters, the rear legs...

  The calf fell.

  Six feet to the ground.

  On its head.

  No one breathed. Zorah grabbed me so hard on the forearm that I knew it would bloom with bruises tomorrow. I hung onto Dr. Kate in exactly the same way.

  The calf raised its head and opened its eyes.

  “Maaaaaah,” it bleated.

  Makeba turned around, blinked her long-lashed brown eyes, and stared at the calf as if trying to figure out what this strange thing was. Then she lowered her elegant head and began to clean her baby with a long, sticky tongue.

  I wasn’t aware that I was holding my breath, or that everyone else was, until I expelled air with a sound that resembled the calf’s bleat.

  Sounds of snuffling. I turned to see big Zorah, as muscular as a man, with tears of joy streaming down her face. Although too coarse-featured to be considered pretty, she looked radiant. I touched my own cheek and found it as wet as hers. Glancing around at my fellow keepers, I saw that they were all smiling and crying. So were the park rangers.

  Just another day at the office.

  I hugged Zorah. She hugged back. We both hugged Dr. Kate, who was trying her professional best not to weep along with the rest of us. Not being a good actress, she failed, and a tiny tear dribbled down her cheek.

  Suddenly someone pulled Zorah away from me and a deep male voice interrupted our celebration of life.

  “Zorah Vega, I’m arresting you for the murder of Grayson Harrill. You have the right to remain silent...” The rest of the words were lost among the loud protests of the keepers as Sheriff Joe Rejas, flanked by two deputies, snapped a pair of handcuffs around Zorah’s wrists and led her away.

  Chapter Six

  “There’s no way she killed Grayson!” Dr. Kate stormed, as we watched the sheriff stuff Zorah into his patrol car. “She’s one of the gentlest human beings I know.”

  “With animals, maybe,” said Jack Spence, the zoo’s bear keeper, a tall, string bean of a man with light brown hair and gray eyes so pale he looked half blind. Yet his vision was sharp and he missed nothing. “Remember what she did to the guy she caught trying to feed a razor-laced apple to the orangutans? Even after he went down she kept kicking him. His teeth were scattered all over the place.”

  “Are you saying you think she’s a murderer?” asked Miranda DiBartolo, a darkly pretty keeper who cared for the marsupials in Down Under. “Because if you are...” She moved toward Jack, her delicate hands balled into fists.

  The vet stepped between them. “Miranda, I want you to bring that new wallaby down to the Animal Care Center for a checkup. And Jack, I’m not sure the spectacled bears’ play platform will hold up under their weight, so look at it again. As for me, I’m going to lure Makeba and her baby into their night house for an examination. Now let’s calm down and get back to work. We all know the sheriff’s made a mistake, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it now.”

  Grumbling, we dispersed to our various areas, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zorah. Instead of my standard long chat with Lucy, I merely left her to her breakfast. I repeated my hurried performance at Monkey Mania, where Marlon, who normally was so self-absorbed that keepers didn’t exist for him, noticed something was wrong and bared his teeth at me.

  For the next few hours, I rushed from one animal to another, not interacting with my charges in any meaningful way. I even brushed away the approaches of the other keepers when they wanted to discuss the arrest. Time was wasting, and I had places to go, prisoners to see.

  ***

  After stopping briefly at the Merilee, I drove to the county seat of San Sebastian, a small city founded in the late-eighteen hundreds by my great-great-great grandfather, cattle rancher Ezekiel Bentley. Fortunately for Zorah, loyalty to the Bentleys remained strong in the town. The sheriff was nowhere around, but Emilio Guiterrez, the deputy in charge of the lockup and a descendant of one of Ezekiel’s vaqueros, agreed to let me see Zorah even though visiting hours were over.

  He unlocked the big metal door separating the jail’s business area from the netherworld beyond. After a short walk between cells filled with male drunks and thieves, we entered the smaller women’s section where Zorah sat slumped on a cot. At least she wasn’t alone. In the cell on her left was a raving white woman, on the right, a morose Hispanic. Clad in a bright orange jumpsuit which did nothing for her complexion, Zorah ignored them both and stared grimly at the painted cement floor.

  When she lifted her head and saw the deputy pulling up a chair for me outside her cell, the first words out of her mouth were, “How’s the baby giraffe? Is it walking around yet? Nursing?”

  Not Get me out of here, or I swear I’m innocent. She never worried about herself, only her animals.

  Happy to give her good news, I assured her the calf walked within thirty minutes of birth, nursed in forty.

  “It’s perfectly healthy, then? No problems at all?”

  The shrieks of the white woman in the next cell grew louder, so I had to shout. “It looks that way, but to make sure, Dr. Kate had moved mom and baby to the night quarters and plans to keep them under observation for awhile.” I scooted my chair closer until it almost touched the bars.

  Although the jail itself was almost a century old, the blanket on Zorah’s cot didn’t look it. Neither did her aluminum toilet and sink. In fact, both looked brand new. Apparently the sheriff had kept his campaign promise to modernize.

  “How about the Bengals? And the frilled lizards?”

  The white woman’s voice dropped a few decibels so I was able to assure Zorah in a more normal voice that those animals were fine, too. Because the rest of us had taken over a portion of her schedule, not one had missed a meal or a cleanup. I myself had helped feed Maharaja and Ranee, the young Bengal tigers we’d bought from the St. Louis Zoo. The feeding process had been a complicated one, involving two other keepers and various maneuvers through an intricate series of gates.

  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 ts 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 ea
rs 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 fou 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. Y’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.