The Anteater of Death

by Betty Webb

  “You’re talking about those awful houses up on Bentley Ridge?”

  “That’s right. Penny-ante stuff but he saw himself as a minor-league Donald Trump. He believed that all he needed to make his own private fortune was the fat nest egg a cash-out would give him. Jeanette never had any business sense—no sense of any kind, actually—so she would have given him free rein. If he’d been able to get his hands on Jeanette’s share of the Trust, he would have set a new speed record for bankruptcy filings.”

  “If y don’t mind telling me, what was her share? I can’t remember reading that anywhere.”

  He looked over to where a pelican had come to roost on the end of the boom. “It’s hard to estimate but I do know that shortly before the murder she and Grayson turned down an individual buy-out offer worth fifteen mill. Grayson’s attorneys countered with twenty-five but I think he was probably willing to settle for twenty.”

  Twenty million could buy a lot of migraine medication. “What do you mean, ‘individual buy-out?’ They were part of the anti-Trust voting block.”

  “You mean, ‘all for one and one for all,’ like the Three Musketeers? Hardly. Like I said, when Grayson was so conveniently murdered, he was in negotiations to abandon the other anti-Trust voters in order to feather his and Jeanette’s own nest. As to where the money for the buy-out would come from, Aster Edwina and several of the more well-fixed hold-outs, which includes myself and my Uncle Henry—the one who split to San Francisco with his new wife—we pooled our private resources to make the offer. Sure, we’d suffer a short-term loss, but we’d recoup in a few years. But in the meantime, our lovely monthly dividend check would keep rolling in.”

  If he was telling the truth, and I had no reason to believe he wasn’t, not only the pro-Trust Gunns had a motive for killing Grayson, but also the anti-Trust Gunns, because they were about to be betrayed. I was mulling over this intriguing development when the pelican, as pelicans are wont to do, took a big dump on the Tequila Sunrise’s deck. Roarke merely shrugged but Frieda screamed a curse at the bird, which flapped away, unconcerned.

  The pelican had summed up the situation perfectly.

  Chapter Nine

  At Zorah’s arraignment on Monday, which I attended to give her moral support, her attorney was able to knock her bail down to two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. When I walked across the street to the bail bondsman’s office, I discovered that I would need to front slightly more than twenty-five thousand cash, and put the rest in an escrow account for collateral. By the time I finished arranging for a wire transfer from the Grand Caymans bank to San Sebastian, I was four hours late for work and Zorah was still in jail.

  As I picked up my duties, I saw Kim Markowski, the zoo’s education director, headed for Friendly Farm with several puppets cuddled next to a pair of crutches in the cart bin behind her. I slowed my own cart and waved her down.

  “How’s the ankle?”

  She gave me a perky smile. “It’s fine, fine. No problem at all. Honestly.”

  I knew Kim enough to know that if she’d suffered a double amputation she’d answer in the same way. Although only five years younger than me, she retained the bounding optimism of a puppy. Today, though, the dark circles under her eyes belied her smile and her blond ponytail no longer gleamed. I knew that broken ankles hurt like the devil, having sustained one myself when a horse fell on me.

  I gestured toward the puppets in the back of her cart. “Putting on a show?”

  The smile broadened. “Goldilocks and the Spectacled Bears, for some third-graders from San Sebastian Elementary School.”

  The puppets looked more like raccoons to me, but I wasn’t about to say so since she spent hours making them. “Why not the show about the anteater? You were supposed to debut it at the fund-raiser, I heard.”

  Her smile faltered and her lower lip began to tremble. “Barry Fields said to shelve it, that it might remind people too much of that night, that night ... when Grayson ... when Mr. Harrill, died.” She gulped, then added, “It’s hard to believe anyone would hurt such a nice man.”

  A nice man with a duplicitous side. A nice man who’d been about to sell out his wife’s family. “Has Sheriff Rejas interviewed you yet?”

  She sniffed. “Why would he want to interview me? I don’t know anything.”

  In the aviary next to us, a Western meadowlark began to sing. Not a flashy bird, with its dull brown-and-yellow coloring, but oh, that voice. Within seconds a mockingbird across the way began to copy him. Soon the air was filled with the sounds of dueling songbirds. I was so entranced that it took a moment for me to turn my attention back to Kim.

  “You were out the day he and his deputies talked to the rest of the staff, so I thought...”

  Frowning, she cut me off. “Is it true you used to go out with the sheriff?”

  “We’re ancient history. Besides, he wasn’t the sheriff back at the time, just a high school senior. I was a sophomore. We’re different people now.”

  “People can sure change a lot over the years, can’t they?”

  Suddenly I felt as depressed as she looked. “It’s been nice talking to you but I need to take care of the capybaras. Have fun with the puppet show.”

  As she waved goodbye, she tried another smile, but on a scale of one to ten, the most I could give it was a three.

  The capybaras were glad to see me. Two feet high at the shoulder and looking like a one-hundred-pound cross between a Guinea pig and a hippo, they were the world’s largest rodents. Gus, the big male, emerged from his slimy pond to greet me and I had to do a quick shuffle-and-slide to keep him from shaking algae all over my uniform.

  “Ick, ick, ick!” Gus called, in that distinctive capybara voice. The females—Agnes, Gladys, and Myrtle—followed him out of the water. I threw them all some hay and a few melons, then tidied up their enclosure as best as I could. Since capybaras prefer to defecate in the water, there weren’t a lot of droppings to attend to. Like a maid who doesn’t do windows, I don’t dredge ponds.

  A couple of hours later, while I took a break in the staff lounge with some other keepers, the zoo director dropped by and began dolling out Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. At first I was baffled by this rare show of amiability—Barry Fields seldom socialized with lowly keepers, let alone gave us treats—but then I remembered. With Grayson dead, he needed all the supporters he could bribe.

  The mass desertion suited me perfectly. I gave the director a smile almost as big as Kim’s and patted the vacant chair next to me. “It’s sad about Grayson, isn’t it, sir?”

  With a sigh of relief, he sat down. “Call me Barry.”

  I batted my eyelashes. “Then remember to call me Teddy, Barry.” Welcome to my web, Mr. Fly.

  His face brightened. “Teddy, then. Yes, so sad. He was a nice man.”

  Nice. There was that word again. I waited to see if he’d add anything new.

  He didn’t disappoint. “Grayson was a great loss, a great, great loss. Between you and me, he was a better businessman than most people realized. Perhaps he wasn’t a Gunn himself, just married to one, but he definitely shared that family’s financial acumen.”

  As if to emphasize the point, he nodded so furiously I thought his head would fall off, but his dingo-colored hair remained frozen in place. Hair spray? Or, as rumored, Hair Club for Men? His hair (or toupee) was light brown, his eyes were light brown, and although he was Caucasian, his overly tanned skin was light brown. At least his expensive Joseph Abboud sports jacket was blue.

  His claim that Grayson shared the Gunn’s “financial acumen” intrigued me since I’d heard the opposite from Roarke. “Tell me more about his business dealings.”

  When the zoo director smoothed his already-perfect hair, I realized he just missed being handsome. But his oily manner negated his-almost perfect physical features. “Grayson understood the amount of funding it requires to keep a place like this running. Our daily outlay would astound you. All these damned animals eating their he
ads off.”

  Instead of slapping him like he deserved, I kept smiling. “Yes, the animals are a problem. That independent vet study, for instance, turned the zoo upside down for weeks. Oh, by the way, his wife told me he’d received an advance copy of their report.”

  He gave me a blank look. “Oh?”

  “So how’d we do?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Could he really be that dense? “Let me rephrase the question. Did the veterinarians from the National Academy of Sciences find any problems here? Or did we ace it?”

  He shrugged.

  My irritation increased. “It’s been a week since Grayson was murdered—the very night he said he wanted to talk to you about the report. He stayed late at the funder to do just that, remember?”

  He studied his professionally-manicured nails. “Hmm. I’m not sure if I do. Where’d you get that information, anyway?”

  “Jeanette.”

  “Oh. Well. It was nothing more than a preliminary draft, not the final, so why get all hot and bothered? Whatever detail Grayson wanted to discuss couldn’t have been that important because he didn’t say anything before he handed the report over to me earlier in the day. I passed it along to the veterinarian, who knows more about that animal stuff than I do, since that’s her job.”

  Technically, Barry was correct. Dr. Kate would be the person most affected by the report, but passing the prelim along to her without so much as a cursory glance underlined what a poor choice he had been for the position of zoo director. What had Grayson been thinking?

  More curious than ever, I asked, “What exactly are your duties at the zoo? Besides the fund-raising stuff.”

  He flicked away a tiny feather from his cuff, possibly from an Asian fairy bluebird. “I establish policies. Provide leadership. You know, the usual.”

  While I’d seen evidence of his skill at rasing money from rich widows, I’d seen precious little else, his management style being best described as one of benign neglect. Sometimes not so benign, as in the case of the still-imprisoned Lucy.

  “Not to change the subject or anything, Barry, but don’t you think we should let the anteater out of the holding pen? I’m worried about her.”

  “I’m more worried about lawsuits if that thing gets loose. Don’t you remember what she did to poor Grayson?”

  Who could forget? “It wasn’t her fault.”

  He gave me a condescending smile. “You keepers are all the same. All you think about are your animal friends. Here in the real world there are larger issues.”

  Not as far as I was concerned. Disgusted, I rose to leave.

  “Say, Teddy?”

  “Hmm?”

  “Let’s you and me go out some time.”

  ***

  After extricating myself from Barry’s romantic overtures as politely as possible, I made a beeline for the zoo’s Animal Care Center, where I found Dr. Kate bandaging a tranquilized squirrel monkey. Marlon. I’d brought him over earlier after noticing a couple of nasty-looking bites on his leg. The females had been whipping him into line again.

  “Dr. Kate, when you’re done there, can I talk to you?”

  Marlon, spreadeagle on the examining table, looked over at me with a tipsy smile. The vet gave him a pat. “I’m done. What do you need? Is the anteater...?”

  “The anteater’s fine, except she hates that holding pen. Isn’t there anything you can do?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve talked to Barry ’til I’m blue in the face but he won’t budge. Frankly, I’m concerned about her, too. With her pregnancy so far advanced, we could be in for some serious trouble. Stressed animal, as you know all too well, sometimes kill their young.” She closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, I was shocked at the rage there. “Unfortunately, my hands are tied. Barry made it clear that if I keep pressing the issue he’ll find a more cooperative vet.”

  Damn him! I swallowed my own anger. “I talked to him a few minutes ago and he told me he’d given you the preliminary copy of the independent vet study. Is that true?”

  “He did, but we’re not ready to go public with the findings yet. We need to wait for the final report.”

  “I just thought...”

  “I’m not going to discuss it further.”

  “But...”

  Ignoring me, she picked up Marlon, and after cradling him like an infant for a moment, returned him to the holding cage to sleep it off. She looked pointedly at her watch. “Don’t you have work to do?”

  “The Mexican gray wolves, the...”

  “Then I suggest you return to your duties.”

  Stung, I turned on my heel and left.

  ***

  The wolves were happy to see me. Cisco, the alpha male, trotted toward me with a sharp-toothed grin when I arrived at their acre-sized enclosure with a cart full of flank steak. Godiva, his chocolate-colored mate, and their four pups followed close behind. Bringing up the rear were the other five wolves in the exhibit, a smaller male and four females. Among Mexican grays, the only pack members that regularly bred were the alpha male and female, so these five served as “helper” animals, regurgitating partially-digested food for the alpha pair’s pups.

  Lately, however, I had seen Hazel, one of the helper females, casting come-hither looks in Cisco’s direction. He remained true to his mate, but Zip, the small male, appeared eager to take up the slack. Given the rigid dictates of pack breeding practices, it would be interesting to see how this soap opera played out.

  For now, love was the furthest thing from the wolves’ minds. They wanted their dinner and they wanted it now. Although wolves rarely attacked humans, for safety’s sake I stayed inside the holding pen while I portioned out the meat. That accomplished, I tossed the steaks far into the enclosure. The wolves sparred briefly and bloodlessly over the selection, and with pecking order re-established, trotted off individually to eat in private.

  I watched as Cisco and Godiva waited patiently while their almost-weaned pups took a few practice bites of meat. After the pups grew bored and wandered off to play, the parents ate their own meal, finishing off their steaks in a manner of seconds. Satiated, they settled down with each other for some serious grooming time.

  My work with the wolves finished, I headed for Lucy’s enclosure, where I found a group of elementary school children gathered around the fence.

  “Why won’t the anteater come out to play?” asked a child of around six, his face long with disappointment as he stared into the empty enclosure.

  Since I couldn’t tell him that our ignorant zoo director had put her in anteater jail, I resorted to a white lie. “She didn’t get much sleep last night, and she’s tired.”

  “Did she have a nightmare?”

  Now there was a question. Discovering a dead human in her enclosure might have affected Lucy deeply, although personally, I doubted if anteaters dreamed. “When she wakes up I’ll ask her.”

  The teacher smiled, then led the group down the path toward the Andean spectacled bears. Once the children were out of sight I took the hidden trail used by keepers to the back of the anteater’s holding pen. I found her standing with her head pressed against the gate, rocking back and forth. A sure sign of stress.

  “Oh, Lucy. I’m so sorry.”

  When she didn’t even summon up a grunt to greet me, I felt stressed myself. She definitely needed larger quarters, but a reprieve from Barry Fields seemed unlikely. If only...

  Let’s you and me go out some time.

  Judging from the director’s behavior in the staff lounge, he was hot for me—or at least hot for the money he imagined I had. It would be easy to turn his greed to Lucy’s benefit. Realizing what I was about to do, I almost slapped myself.

  Almost.

  As soon as the last of my charges were taken care of, I hurried into the ladies’ room near the lounge and washed up. Fortunately, I hadn’t yet taken home the outfit I’d worn to Grayson’s funeral, so I retrieved my black dress and pumps from my locke
r and slipped them on. Somber, yes, but when I freed my curly red hair from its pony tail and combed it with my fingers, the effect was less funereal. I cadged a spritz of Essence of Lilac off a zoo volunteer, then headed for Barry’s office where I caught him as he was leaving for the day.

  He gave me his nasty dingo smile. “Teddy! You look...” His eyes narrowed in a calculating manner. “...lovely!”

  I put my hand on his arm. “I’m here to make amends. When you asked me out earlier, I was so taken aback I’m afraid I didn’t respond properly.” For emphasis, I fluttered my red eyelashes.

  He covered my hand with his own. It felt clammy. “You’ve changed your mind?”