“Oh. Of course not.”
As I lowered myself onto the brown couch—half-expecting a cloud of dust to emerge as my butt hit the cushions—Walter sat down in the rocking chair next to the fireplace.
“So how do you know Erin?” A pained expression crossed his face as he said, “Sorry. I mean, how did you know Erin?”
“We went to veterinary school together, at Cornell,” I replied.
Even though I’d been in Walter Weiner’s company for less than three minutes, I already had serious doubts about Amanda’s insinuation that this man and Erin had been linked romantically. And his physical appearance was only a small part of it.
“So you’re a vet, just like Erin,” Walter said, nodding. “Do you work with exotics too?”
“I’m afraid not. My practice mainly consists of the usual dogs, cats, and horses. Occasionally a reptile or bird comes my way. But never lions or tigers or elephants.”
“Too bad.”
“I understand that you’re a computer consultant,” I commented.
“That’s right. But I really love animals, including the ones you just mentioned. Which is one of the reasons I really admired what Erin did. I loved the fact that she was so smart and so accomplished. Her determination to get into primate research totally blew me away. And not only was she brilliant; she was also extremely dedicated. She had a real passion for what she did.”
I was slowly beginning to understand what Erin might have seen in Walter. For one thing, he had clearly worshipped her. And I got the impression she wasn’t someone he’d developed a crush on simply because of her physical beauty. He seemed to see her for what she really was. He truly appreciated her—perhaps more than her own husband did.
But I could also see how attractive he became when he was animated. As he talked about Erin, his gray eyes glowed. In fact, he took on an entirely different appearance, something that went far beyond what any stone-faced Calvin Klein model could pull off.
“I get the feeling you and Erin were pretty good friends,” I observed.
“I thought the world of her,” Walter replied ardently. “She and I became very close while I was doing a consulting project at the zoo.”
“I’m sure that’s bound to happen when two people work together regularly,” I commented. I studied his expression, trying to figure out whether his version of “closeness” meant what Amanda had implied.
“It was much more than that,” he insisted. “Erin was a very special person. She was one of those rare women who’s as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside.”
Frankly, Walter didn’t impress me as the type of man who’d had all that much experience with women, either beautiful ones or any other kind. Then again, I’d certainly misjudged people before.
“How long did you and Erin work together?” I asked. I was doing my best to sound as if I was making pleasant conversation instead of giving him the third degree.
“Just a few weeks,” he replied. “I was hired by the head of the primatology department to update the software used to track their research data. To be honest, I could have done a lot of it from home. But once Erin and I became friends, going into the place where she worked every chance I could became fun.”
“She felt that way too.” I hoped I didn’t sound as if I was making this up as I went along, which of course was exactly what I was doing. “In fact, that’s why I wanted to meet you. I’d heard so much about you—”
“Erin talked about me?” he interrupted. I couldn’t tell if he was pleased or panicked.
“Of course she did,” I replied evenly. “She talked about all the people she worked with. You and Dr. Zacarias . . .”
At the mention of Dr. Zacarias’s name, the muscles of his face tightened.
“I can’t imagine that Erin had anything good to say about that battle-ax.”
“She didn’t, as a matter of fact.” I chose my words carefully, since by this point I was really winging it. “The two of them didn’t seem to get along very well.”
“Oh, Erin got along fine with everybody,” Walter insisted. “She was too nice, if that’s possible. She certainly was where Zacarias was concerned.” His bitter tone told me that it was his strong dislike for the woman that prevented him from honoring her with the title “Dr.” “That old witch is so egocentric that it was inevitable that she would feel threatened by someone as smart and capable as Erin.”
“You know, I got the same impression when I spoke with her earlier today.” Doing some quick thinking, I added, “I dropped by the zoo to pick up some of Erin’s things. Personal items. Ben was too distraught to do it, so I volunteered.”
I searched his face again, this time to see if he reacted to me mentioning Erin’s husband. But he still seemed to be wallowing in his hatred of Dr. Zacarias.
“Walter,” I continued, anxious to find out more about Erin’s boss, “when I was talking to Dr. Zacarias, she made a strange comment about Erin being ambitious. But I got the feeling she meant it in a bad way. Did you ever see that side of Erin?”
Walter snorted. “As if she’s one to talk.”
“What do you mean?”
“Annalise Zacarias is one of the most ambitious people I’ve ever met. And I’m not talking about her having a true passion for animals or an undying devotion to advancing the field, the way most scientists do. I’m talking about someone who’d do anything to get ahead. Someone who’d run over her own mother if it would help get her name in some scientific journal—or even something as insignificant as a hometown newspaper. Anything at all that would make her look good. Believe me, that woman gives new meaning to the term cutthroat.”
I swallowed hard, no doubt because of his use of the word. Was Dr. Zacarias cutthroat enough that Erin’s ambitions might have driven her to murder?
“Walter, do you have any actual evidence that Dr. Zacarias has done things that other scientists might consider . . . unethical?” I asked.
Another snort. “Erin told me that when she started working for her and saw what she was like, she looked into her background to see if anyone else had had the same experience she was having. Once she started asking around, she got quite an earful. Before Zacarias came to the zoo, she was a university professor. Apparently she was famous for making her graduate students put in ridiculously long hours. I understand she wouldn’t even let them go home over Christmas break, not even for a couple of days.
“Erin also found out that a few years ago, one of Zacarias’s students wrote up the research he’d spent two years doing, then gave her the manuscript to review before submitting it to a scientific journal for consideration. The next thing he knew, she had published it under her own name—without even mentioning his. And at scientific meetings, she was in the habit of publicly humiliating people in her field. She had a way of phrasing the questions she asked about their research in a way that made it sound as if they’d done something wrong—or even downright sleazy.”
His tone more bitter than ever, he concluded, “That woman has been nothing but unscrupulous throughout her entire career, all in the name of self-aggrandizement. The idea of her even implying that Erin was anything but ethical makes me want to put my fist through a wall.”
The vehemence of his reaction took me aback. He was certainly doing an effective job of discrediting Dr. Zacarias, as well as the primatologist’s assessment of Erin’s character. Then again, if Walter and Erin really had been lovers, it made perfect sense that he would become so defensive of her in the face of even an implied criticism.
On top of that, Walter must realize that at some point the police would find out about their relationship—and that he could well become a suspect in her murder. That was another reason that he might be trying to move the spotlight onto Dr. Zacarias, accusing Erin’s boss of all manner of unscrupulous tactics.
But before I had a chance to pursue the topic of Dr. Zacarias and her relationship with Erin any further, Walter said, “I’m sorry about going on like this. I’m af
raid that just hearing that woman’s name sets me off.”
“I understand completely,” I assured him. I took advantage of the awkward silence that followed to glance around the living room. “If you don’t mind me asking, what’s in all these tanks?”
He brightened. “That’s right; you’re a veterinarian. So you’d probably be interested in seeing my own personal zoo.”
Gesturing toward the glass tank sitting on a low table just a few feet away, he said, “I don’t think of them as pets. More like . . . collectibles. Or curiosities. Wonderful beings that I like to keep around because I find them so fascinating. Let me show you.”
I had just assumed that the tanks contained hamsters or guinea pigs or some other cute furry creatures. But when I followed Walter halfway across the room to one of the tanks and glanced into it, I instinctively jerked backward.
“What on earth . . . ?” I cried.
“That’s a black widow spider,” Walter said, sounding awestruck as he leaned over and peered at the eight-legged creature inside.
“I know what it is,” I replied, thinking, What I don’t know is why anyone would consider the most venomous spider in North America a collectible—even though contrary to popular belief, its bite rarely kills humans. After all, a rare coin or a ceramic figurine isn’t likely to send you to the hospital if you handle it incorrectly—or if it manages to escape from the china closet.
“She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” he said, sounding awestruck.
When I glanced over at him, he was beaming like a proud father. “It’s a female?”
“That’s right.”
“If I’m not mistaken,” I commented, taking another step farther away, “it’s only the female that’s poisonous to humans.”
“I’m impressed by your knowledge of arachnids.” His eyes still fixed on the inch-long, shiny black spider crawling across the bottom of the tank, he added, “They’re nonaggressive, of course. Unless something disturbs their web or if one gets trapped inside someone’s clothes. In that case, they inject a neurotoxin. Their bite is rarely fatal, of course, but it does cause some nasty symptoms like muscle spasms, vomiting and diarrhea, and numbness. There are two species in the United States, the northern and the southern. This one’s the northern black widow. See? She has a row of red spots running along her abdomen and two bars underneath. The southern black widow has a red marking shaped like an hourglass on its underside.”
“Interesting,” I said, edging away a little farther. The only thing I hate more than spiders is snakes. Scorpions, maybe, but I don’t encounter many of those. Fortunately. “I seem to recall that the only other spider in the United States that’s poisonous to humans is the brown recluse.”
“That’s exactly right!” Once again, Walter sounded pleased that someone had at least some interest in an area that was clearly his passion. “And I happen to have a beautiful specimen right over here.”
I could practically feel spiders crawling all over my skin as I politely followed him to another glass tank. This one was sitting on a spindly round table that looked better suited to displaying hand-painted ceramic poodles. But inside there was a brown recluse, all right. The light brown arachnid had six eyes of equal size, arranged in pairs. Maybe they were an optometrist’s dream, but I could barely stand to make eye contact with the creepy little fellow.
Walter, meanwhile, looked as if he was in spider heaven. He had the same look on his face that most men get when they’re looking at pictures of Angelina Jolie.
“Like the black widow, this guy only bites when somebody’s disturbed him.” Once again, Walter’s feelings of admiration were reflected in his voice. In fact, he was talking about a creature that gave most of us the willies as if it was some charming maverick, the rakish bad boy of the spider world. “It usually takes a few hours for signs of the bite to show. Then it becomes a red lesion with black in the center. It’s also itchy and really painful. The symptoms that go with it are pretty nasty too: fever, vomiting, headache, muscle pain. The bite is rarely fatal in humans, but children have been known to die from it. The cause of death is generally kidney failure, seizures, shock, or hemolysis. That’s—”
“I know what that is,” I interrupted with a shudder. “The breaking open of red blood cells.”
“Exactly.” Walter beamed. “Not a pretty sight. Which is a good reason to stay away from these guys.”
My strategy exactly. “But you don’t,” I pointed out. “Stay away from them, I mean.”
He shrugged. “I realize they don’t exactly make warm and furry pets. It’s not as if they come running over to you when you walk in the door, and you certainly can’t play Frisbee with them. But I still find them endlessly intriguing.”
I had a feeling there was an unspoken don’t you? tacked onto the end of that sentence, but I wasn’t about to extol the wonders of a pet that could kill you. Or at least cause vomiting, seizures, and diarrhea. Puppies, kittens, and gerbils were looking better and better every minute.
“There are still a few specimens I’d love to add to my collection,” Walter went on. “Mainly a Helo-derma horridum—a Mexican beaded lizard. They’re venomous, of course, one of only two types of lizards that are. The other is the Gila monster. But of course I’d never keep either of them, since CITES lists them both as endangered. CITES is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.”
I was only half-listening, since another thought had just occurred to me. “You don’t have any snakes, do you?”
“Unfortunately not,” Walter replied. “I used to have a terrific boa named Feather, but he kept escaping. I had no choice but to find him another place to live.”
I glanced around nervously, hoping that Feather hadn’t found his way home the way dogs that have been given away sometimes do.
“But I have a few other interesting roommates,” he continued. “A tarantula and a few scorpions . . . Hey, have you ever seen a death stalker?”
“No, I haven’t,” I told him, thinking, Nor do I have the slightest bit of interest in adding it to my life list. “I’m sure they’re fascinating creatures, but I’m afraid I have to get going.” To drive home my point, I glanced at my wristwatch. “Goodness! I’m really running late.”
“Too bad. Maybe next time.”
By that point, I was more than ready to get out of there. Before I left, however, I had one more question.
“By the way,” I asked casually as I eased toward the door, “there’s something I wanted to ask you about. I remember Erin mentioning a fund-raiser the zoo held a few weeks ago.”
Walter looked startled. “She told you about that?”
“Only that she went to it. For some reason, the way she spoke about it gave me the impression that it was . . .” I fumbled for the right word. “Significant.”
“I don’t know anything about it,” he replied, his face blank. “I mean, I didn’t actually work at the zoo, so there was no reason for me to get involved in something like that.”
“I see.” With a shrug, I said, “I just thought I’d mention it since Erin acted as if it was pretty important to her.”
“Like I said,” he repeated, “I wasn’t there. And she never said a word to me about it.”
His response was a little too vehement, and I would have loved to press him harder. There were other questions I would have liked to ask as well, mainly if he was able to decipher any of the strange combinations of letters Erin had written on her cocktail napkin.
But I wasn’t quite ready to be that forthcoming. Not when I had yet to figure out if Walter shared a common trait with the animals in his possession: that when provoked, he was capable of delivering a fatal bite.
Chapter 8
“These can never be true friends: hope, dice, a prostitute, a robber, a cheat, a goldsmith, a monkey, a doctor, a distiller.”
—Indian proverb
While I’d thought about little besides Erin’s murder in the days that followed the
tragic event, on Friday morning I had no choice but to focus on what was probably my most demanding obligation of the week: doing a weekly television spot.
As I raced into the parking lot of Sunshine Multimedia’s headquarters, I checked my watch and saw that I was running late. I climbed out of my car and charged across the asphalt, knowing I’d need a minute or two to collect myself before I went on the air to do my weekly television spot. I’d need at least another ten to make my hair look like something besides a lion’s mane.
I’d started doing the show back in the fall. Turning me into a media star had been Forrester’s idea. Actually, it was more like he was the one who roped me into it. He told the show’s producer about me, and before you could say, “We’ll be right back after this commercial break,” she hounded me until I finally agreed to come into Channel 14’s studio.
I thought I was just meeting her to prove that I possessed absolutely no charisma. But the next thing I knew, I was the star of the station’s new fifteen-minute TV show about pet care, Pet People.
Once I got the hang of it, however, I kind of enjoyed it. It was fun to share what I knew about taking care of animals. Besides, I took the show seriously. I felt responsible for providing viewers with worthwhile information that would benefit both them and their pets.
The only hard part was coming up with a different topic each week, especially since Patti Ardsley, the producer, loved demonstrations. Apparently the shows’ ratings were highest when they featured real, live animals. My theory was that it was because putting Fido or Fluffy in front of a camera—on live television, no less—practically guaranteed disaster. But she insisted it was the cuteness factor that made the difference.
In the past, my experiences as a stage mother pushing my offspring into the spotlight hadn’t exactly gone smoothly. In fact, I’d sworn that the days of bringing members of my own menagerie to the studio were over.
But because desperation is so often the mother of invention, I’d recruited representatives of both the canine and feline categories for today’s show. The feline came in the form of Tinkerbell, who I was lugging toward the entrance of the building in a cat carrier. She had yet to make her television debut, and I was hoping for the best.
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