Belly Up

by Stuart Gibbs

  She was so excited, it sounded as though she were talking about having gone swimming with sharks rather than merely visiting a theme park. All I could figure was, for all the glitz and glamour her life appeared to have, Summer had so few normal experiences that she found them incredible. Going a whole morning without being recognized seemed to be the greatest thing she could imagine.

  “How do you know they won’t think you’ve been kidnapped?” I asked.

  Summer shrugged nonchalantly. “I left a note.”

  “That makes two of us,” I said.

  “We ought to get going then. Pretty soon we’ll have the National Guard looking for us.”

  We slipped out of the Dumpster area and headed quickly through the park—although not so quickly as to draw attention to ourselves.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “To see Larry the Lizard,” she replied.

  “Uh . . . I hate to break this to you, but he’s not real.”

  “Not the cartoon character, doofus. The guy who plays him. He’s our lead.”

  “How?”

  “Remember yesterday at the Emporium? I said we could tell something about who killed Henry from how they’d killed him?”

  “Yeah. But you never got the chance to tell me what. . . .”

  “You didn’t figure it out? Dude, it’s obvious.”

  “I’ve had a lot going on. Someone did try to kill me last night.”

  Summer grinned and I realized that, once again, she was teasing me. “Okay, I’ll give you that. Here’s the deal: Whoever did it had to know something about hippos.”

  “Not necessarily. The way they killed Henry was awfully simple. . . .”

  “It wasn’t. Think about it: If you went up to just about anyone and said, ‘How would you kill a hippopotamus?’ how many of them would say ‘Give it peritonitis’? I’ll bet most people don’t even know what peritonitis is. A normal person would have shot Henry. Or poisoned him. Or stuck some live wires in his pool and electrocuted him. But to feed him a bunch of filed jacks to poke holes in his intestine? Would you have known that would kill a hippo?”

  I felt embarrassed again—although this time, instead of making me seem naive, Summer had made me look stupid. How could I have not thought of that? “No,” I admitted.

  “And you’re Tarzan Junior. You grew up with hippos in your swimming hole. Whoever killed Henry knew their hippos—and not many people do. So this was probably an inside job.”

  “You think one of the keepers did it?”

  Summer shrugged. “There’s a good chance, I guess.”

  “Then why are we talking to Larry the Lizard?”

  “Background. We need to . . .” Summer trailed off in mid-sentence and suddenly veered to the side, yanking me behind a topiary bush shaped like Eleanor Elephant. She signaled me to stay still, then cautiously peered out from behind it.

  “What’s wrong?” I whispered, worried. “Is it the killer?”

  “Worse,” she replied. “Paparazzi.”

  I peeked out beneath the topiary elephant’s armpit and saw a small cluster of heavyset men with multiple cameras strung around their necks stampede past. Luckily, they had another target in mind: A pitcher for the Houston Astros and his movie star girlfriend had just come through the front gate.

  “Leeches,” Summer growled. “They’ve probably been lying in wait all morning.” She made sure the cameras were all pointing away from her, then dragged me off in the opposite direction. We were now going back the way we’d come, which meant we had to circle all the way around Hippo River to get to where we’d been going in the first place—wherever that was. Summer was too annoyed to tell me. Instead, she stormed along, grousing about photographers.

  “People tip them off, you know. Random people. Someone at the park notices me, they call a magazine, the magazine gives them, like, a hundred bucks and sends the jackals down here. You try to do something normal, like go to dinner or a movie or even just get an ice cream—and next thing you know, there’s a thousand lights flashing in your face and all these greasy guys are shoving up against you, calling you names to make you angry, and within thirty minutes there’s the least flattering pictures of you possible all over the Internet and a million chat rooms are talking about whether or not you’re fat. It’s the worst thing ever.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Back when I was in the Congo, kids our age were dying of malaria and malnutrition and half their families had been killed in the war, but they’d always say, ‘Thank God no one’s taking pictures of us against our will.’”

  Summer wheeled on me. For a moment, I thought I’d really screwed up and ruined our friendship before it even got started. But then Summer broke into a big smile, as though she appreciated my giving her crap. “Okay, you’re right. I’m a pampered snob. But if you think the paparazzi’s no big deal, let’s see what you think when you have to deal with them.”

  “How’s that supposed to happen?”

  “Y’know the big shindig for Carnivore Canyon tomorrow night?”

  “Uh, yeah. It’s only, like, the biggest party there’s ever been around here.”

  “Want to be my date?”

  I didn’t answer right away. I wanted to. The moment she asked, my immediate impulse was to scream “yes!” But it all seemed wrong somehow. Summer McCracken couldn’t have been inviting me . It had to be a joke. She was teasing me again. . . .

  Summer suddenly burst into laughter, and I realized I was blushing. “Whoa,” she said. “It’s not a date date, okay? My dad’s coming back to town for it and I thought you’d want to meet him.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to feel too deflated. “Of course. That’d be great.”

  “We’ll try to get Daddy away from everyone and tell him about Henry being murdered,” Summer explained.

  “You haven’t told him yet?”

  “He’s halfway around the world and he’s busy. Plus, I figure, if I tell him solo, he might think I’ve been drinking my cough syrup. But if you’re there to back me up, maybe he’ll buy it. So what do you say? Want to come?”

  “Yeah. Of course,” I said, though it seemed to me that someone as invested in his daughter’s life as J.J. McCracken would give her the benefit of the doubt if she told him his mascot had been killed. I wondered if Summer was keeping our investigation a secret so she could play detective—but then got upset at myself for doubting her. After all, she was offering to tell her father the truth—and getting me into a swanky party to boot. Looking for ulterior motives to explain her behavior wasn’t cool; I guess I was still having trouble believing someone like Summer really wanted to be friends with me.

  “I’m not kidding about the paparazzi,” she told me. “We’ll try to avoid them, but they’ll be everywhere. Like mosquitoes. You’ll end up on the Internet.”

  I shrugged, trying to make it seem like I didn’t think this was such a big deal, but down inside, I have to admit, I was a little excited by the prospect. “I can handle it.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Why are we going to talk to Larry the Lizard?” I asked.

  Summer smacked her forehead. “Right! Totally forgot. Okay, the way I found him was, I was trying to get some info on all the hippo keepers. You know, to see if anyone had a grudge against Henry. I’d heard he’d attacked one of them, right? So my father’s got this whole database on his computer with everyone at FunJungle’s info. . . .”

  “That’s how you got my cell number?”

  “Exactly.”

  “And your dad lets you use it?”

  “Of course not. He has no idea I use it. But then, that’s his fault for using my birthday as his access code. Anyhow, I found out there’s four keepers who work with the hippos, but they all seem cool. Each has, like, fifteen years experience with hippos. The guy who got bit, he did hippo research for two years in Botswana. . . .”

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t kill Henry.”

  “I know. But they’ve all been doin
g this a long time. Sooner or later, a keeper’s got to expect to get bitten by something , right? That’s the name of the game. If you want a safe job, you become a secretary or something; you don’t work with hippos. It doesn’t make sense that one of them would have killed him for revenge.”

  “They could have had another reason. . . .”

  “Possibly, but get this: While I was going through the database, I came across this other guy, Charlie Conner. Did you ever hear that Henry was in a circus before he came here?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And that when he was there, he bit a clown?”

  “I heard he bit three.”

  “Well, Charlie’s one of them. So I figured maybe I should talk to him. The guy not only knows Henry’s background, but he’s got a motive.”

  “You think a clown would kill for revenge, but not a zookeeper?”

  “Absolutely. Clowns are freaks. Plus, this guy didn’t choose to work with animals. He just got attacked by one. That, my friend, is a recipe for revenge.”

  “So you just called him up?”

  “Sure. He answered right away. Of course, the caller ID told him J.J. McCracken was calling, and everyone answers when my father calls.”

  “Was he disappointed when he found out it was you?”

  “I didn’t tell him it was me. I said I was from my father’s office and we were looking into Henry’s death. And the first thing he says to me is, ‘I didn’t do it. But I know who did.’”

  I was so surprised, I almost tripped over my own feet. “He does? Who?!”

  “I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me on the phone. He was all paranoid, like maybe he’s afraid the killer’s gonna come after him next. That’s why we’re going to see him.”

  “How do you know it isn’t another trap?”

  Summer’s step faltered, ever so slightly. She’d been so proud of herself for getting the lead, it apparently hadn’t occurred to her that it might have been a setup. But then, she shrugged it off, as she seemed to do with so many things. “If it is, then I guess we’ll know something important.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That Charlie’s the real killer.” She grinned, thinking this was funny.

  I didn’t. After all, no one had tried to kill her yet. But before I could point this out, she yanked me down a small alley between two exhibits. There, a tunnel plunged into the side of a building, the entrance to the mascot dressing rooms. There weren’t any doors, because most of the costumes were too bulky to fit through them. Zelda Zebra was sauntering in ahead of us.

  “Here goes nothing,” Summer said, and slipped inside.

  The mascot dressing room was an architectural afterthought. FunJungle’s designers had originally envisioned an underground staging area connected to various points in the park via a network of tunnels—like Disney World had. Actors would have entered it near the employee parking lot and emerged at various points in the park as adorable animated characters. That way, they wouldn’t have to walk all the way to their posts in the hot sun, a task that could take up to fifteen minutes in a big, bulky suit. However, that was all before J.J. McCracken got the estimate for what the tunnels would cost: Five million dollars. “Screw that,” J.J. had said, and just paid for some extra dressing rooms.

  If J.J. had ever entered one of those dressing rooms, however, he might have decided the tunnels weren’t such a bad idea: They would have kept the frightening assortment of people who played the mascots where guests couldn’t see them.

  I’d heard that at theme parks in Florida and California, the people who played the mascots were usually young aspiring actors so desperate to break into show business that they considered dressing as a giant mouse to be a good career move. Central Texas had a dearth of such people. Our mascots had apparently been hired for two reasons: their body sizes roughly conformed to those of the animals they were playing—and they had to be inept enough at most jobs to take one that basically required them to stand still all day.

  It was a group of people you’d expect to see in a police lineup, rather than a family theme park: a massive man with arms so tattooed they looked like the Sunday comics wore the bottom half of Eleanor Elephant while reading an old Guns & Ammo magazine; a lanky teenager who reeked of marijuana struggled to climb into her Gina Giraffe outfit; the scraggly man who played Uncle O-Rang had contorted wildly inside his costume so he could scratch his private parts. All of them probably should have been outside, amusing small children, but an impromptu cigarette break had been called. They all inhaled deeply, savoring their smokes, keeping an eye on the entrance in case a supervisor walked in.

  Charlie Connor was smoking too. He held a huge cigar in his little green hands. “I wasn’t expecting a couple of kids,” he grunted, looking us up and down with annoyance.

  We looked him up and down as well. It didn’t take too long, because he was a midget.

  He was a few inches shorter than me, even though he was around forty. But his short stature wasn’t what made him look strange. It was the fact that, save for the head, he was dressed as a lizard.

  “You said you know who killed Henry?” Summer asked, ignoring the crack about us being kids.

  Charlie fixed her with a hard stare—until recognition suddenly dawned on him. Then he broke into a wide smile. “Wait a minute!” he said. “You’re that girl. The famous one. McCracken’s daughter.”

  Before Summer could reply, everyone else turned toward her and gasped with excitement. Within seconds, they were all crowded around her, begging for autographs. Even the tattooed giant who played Eleanor seemed giddy.

  “Hey!” Charlie snapped, trying to shove them all back. “She’s here to talk to me . Not you yahoos.”

  He’d obviously been hired as Larry because of his size. Larry the Lizard was the shortest of Henry’s pals. He was supposed to be some sort of chameleon, but the costume looked more like a frog with a tail. (In fact, a few people in PR had suggested removing the tail and simply calling him Freddie the Frog.) Charlie seemed to have no great affection for his job; there were two obvious cigar burns on the costume, and the head, which lay by his feet on the floor, was slightly crushed, as though someone had sat on it.

  Eventually, Summer signed everyone’s autographs, answered a few questions, and then graciously asked if she might have a little time alone with Charlie. The other mascots reluctantly backed off, wondering what made the Lizard so special.

  We sat down with him, trying to stay upwind of his cheap cigar, which smelled like burnt hair.

  “Who killed Henry?” Summer asked again.

  “Why are you asking questions about the hippo?” Charlie asked suspiciously. “You’re what? Fourteen?”

  “I want to know what happened to him,” Summer replied.

  “And who’s this guy?” Charlie looked at me, but still spoke to Summer, even though I was only a few feet away.

  “He’s my friend. You can trust him.”

  Charlie looked us over again. While he was certainly excited to have an audience with Summer McCracken, it was obvious he wasn’t keen on sharing any information with us. “First things first,” he said eventually. “I didn’t kill the hippo. This isn’t me trying to avert the blame. I didn’t like him, seeing as he nearly killed me —but I wasn’t in this for revenge or anything.”

  “Of course not,” Summer said diplomatically.

  Charlie rolled up the leg of his lizard suit and pointed to a deep scar on his calf. “See that? That’s what the jerk did to me. I’m minding my own business, working on a routine with some of the other clowns, and the fat jerk runs up and attacks me.”

  “For no reason?” It was the first thing I’d said in Charlie’s presence, other than “Hello.” I knew he was far more interested in talking to Summer than me, but I hadn’t been able to keep that in.

  Charlie turned to me, annoyed. “You think I was dumb enough to provoke that bag of pus? Everyone at the circus knew Henry was bad news. Truth be told, the owners didn’t he
lp the situation. They treated him like dirt. But then, they pretty much treated everyone like dirt, man and animal alike. Point is, I gave Henry a really wide berth, seeing as he didn’t like little people.”

  “You’re kidding.” This time it was Summer who couldn’t hold her words in.

  Charlie pointed to his scar again. “Does this look like I’m kidding? First thing they told me when I joined the circus: ‘Steer clear of the hippo. He don’t like little people.’ There was another little person in the clown troupe before I got there—Frankie. Henry had a go at him, too. This was his first week there. Frankie was only trying to be nice. Brought Henry a carrot or something like that. They tell me the hippo acted real nice at first, even wagged his tail all friendly, like a two-ton cocker spaniel. . . . And then boom! Next thing anyone knows, he’s got Frankie’s head in his mouth. Nearly put the guy in the hospital.”

  “Was he okay?” I asked.

  “Luckily, yes. Frankie came within an inch of losing an eye, though. And the hippo ate his toupee.”

  I had to bite my lower lip to keep from laughing. It was wrong, but I couldn’t help it. The idea of a little person sticking out of Henry’s mouth was funny. The fact that we were being told the story by a man dressed as a lizard didn’t exactly help it sound serious.

  I looked at Summer. She was biting her lip too. In fact, she was having so much trouble trying not to laugh, I had to ask the next question.

  “So what happened when Henry attacked you?”

  “He just got loose. I don’t know what the handlers were doing with him. Moving him, feeding him, whatever you do with hippos. All I know is, one moment I’m minding my own business and the next, four thousand pounds of pissed-off hippopotamus is bearing down on me. Must’ve been thirty guys around, but he comes right after me, cause I’m a little person. Sank his teeth right into my leg. Thank God Bettina was around. . . .”

  “Bettina?” I asked.

  “The bearded lady. She took about a pound of testosterone pills a day to make her hair come in, so she was ripped. Strongest woman you ever met. She could bend a steel bar into a pretzel without breaking a sweat. Anyhow, when Henry had me in his teeth, she punched the jerk in the nose until he dropped me. Then the other clowns beat him back while Bettina got me to the medic.”