by Mary Walker
She glanced up. Cooper was speaking, back to his hearty tone. “Well, Katherine—is that what you’re called now, or are you still Katie like when you were a little girl?”
“Katherine is fine.”
“And you call me Coop, like everyone does. Uncle Coop doesn’t sound right, does it, since we skipped knowing each other during your growing up?”
She nodded.
“Well, this must be real hard for you. I hear you came by the zoo yesterday to see Lester without knowing … what had happened. Did you have a chance to talk with him before that?” His deep-set eyes were totally encircled by skin so dark it looked charred.
“No. I didn’t,” she said, feeling the weight now of all those silent years. “I had gotten a letter from him inviting me to come, but when I got there he was dead.”
“A letter? Giving you family news and such?” he asked.
Katherine seemed to be caught constantly unprepared. If only she knew whether she could trust this man. Then she could ask for help in deciphering the photos and documents. But it was safer to trust no one.
“He just asked me to come talk,” she said.
“Sam says you hadn’t seen Lester at all since you and Leanne moved away.”
“Sam McElroy?”
“Yes, ma’am. He called last night, said you’d been in and might need some help taking care of things.”
“Oh. Nice of him,” she said, surprised.
“He said you haven’t seen Lester all this time,” he repeated.
“No,” she admitted, “I haven’t.”
He smiled, showing every one of his dazzling teeth. “Well, I’d like to catch up and know all about you. I know you graduated from Trinity and I know you’re a dog trainer with a successful business in Boerne, but that’s about all I know.”
“What Daddy means is you’ve done better than me,” Sophie said. “I flunked out of UT after one semester and have never been off the family payroll.”
Cooper protested in an injured tone that he didn’t mean anything of the sort.
Lucy appeared carrying a silver tray with four glasses on it. She set it down on the massive oak coffee table in front of her husband and handed out the drinks, each with a small hand-stitched napkin. Katherine was glad to get hers, a huge crystal wine goblet full of ice-cold Chablis. Lucy had also brought a plate of mushrooms stuffed with cheese and spinach. Katherine slipped one in her mouth. It was heaven and boded well for dinner, which she hoped would be soon. She was starving.
When Lucy left again to tend to dinner, Katherine told them that his information about her business being successful was out of date. She told them about how she had started the business in high school when she worked for a trainer and made extra money by raising and training golden retrievers. When she had finished her wine, she told them about her financial problems and the likelihood that she would lose it all in less than three weeks. She told them about Ra and admitted she had come to see her father because he had promised financial help.
“Well, damn. I sure know how that feels,” Coop said, leaning toward her and patting her knee. “We’re getting snake-bit by this economy, too. I’d help you out if I had a pot to pee in right now. May I ask if Lester left you enough to make a difference?”
“No. Travis Hammond tells me he died in debt. So I’m puzzled about what he was intending.”
“No life insurance or anything?” asked Coop.
“No.”
“Damned puzzling,” he muttered. “What are your plans?”
“I’m going to work at the zoo, starting tomorrow,” Katherine said. “I just talked about it with Sam McElroy.”
“Oh, that’s great!” Sophie squealed. “I’m there mornings, in the development office. We can have lunch. What are you going to do?”
“Menial stuff, I think. In the reptile house.”
Sophie rolled her eyes up and said, “Oy. Poor baby. Stokes is a Simon Legree. I’ve heard he has a fit if there’s so much as a fingerprint on the glass of one of the exhibits.”
Cooper leaned forward in his chair. “That’s what makes for a world-class reptile collection, little girl. We’ve got a second-class zoo here except for Alonzo Stokes’s area. Folks come from all over the world to see his collection. Only zoo in the world to breed bushmasters with any success. If you want to learn the zoo business, you can’t do any better than working for Alonzo Stokes, Katherine.”
Uncomfortable with so much talk about herself, Katherine felt compelled to ask him about his collection. He launched into what sounded like a canned presentation—stories he had told exactly the same way countless times. Each head in his collection had a story attached to it. He had hunted everywhere—Kenya, Botswana, India, Nepal, the Arctic Circle—but it seemed to Katherine he had learned nothing of those places except what could be shot there.
He stopped talking when Lucy automatically brought them a fresh round of drinks.
Sophie, who had been sitting on a zebra-skin rug with her head resting against the sofa and her eyes closed, took advantage of the lull. “How are things going?” she asked, looking up at Katherine. “Is it pretty grim settling your father’s affairs?”
“Well, I’m not sure. The police are keeping the body for a while, so I don’t know about a funeral. I’ve been trying to call Mr. Hammond today to … get some things squared away, but—”
Coop interrupted. “You couldn’t get him. I’ve been trying, too. But it figures. Deer season, archery only, opened yesterday. The ol’ boy must be out at his ranch—he insists on no phone, so he can escape his clients, like me.”
During the silence that followed, Coop took a cigar from a box on the coffee table. He held it up to Katherine. “Do you mind?” he asked, already sticking it in his mouth. Katherine shook her head. She did mind, but it was his house. And she was trying to decide how to broach the next subject.
As he fired up a lighter and applied it to the cigar, she said, “I’d like to see my grandmother while I’m here. I was wondering when might be a good time for me to visit her.”
Coop made quick, wet sucking noises as he drew on his cigar. “This really isn’t a good time for it, Katherine. She’s not well at all now, and I don’t know what kind of reception you’d get. At this juncture she’s not up to any … upsets.”
“But Dad, she might like…” Sophie began.
“You really don’t know much about it, Sophie,” he said sharply. “You haven’t seen her this past week. She’s deteriorated.”
Sophie’s fair skin showed a dark-red flush of blood under the surface. She lowered her head to hide the signs of embarrassment.
Katherine felt a rush of empathy for her—being rebuked like that. And she did not want to give in so easily. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, aware of how harsh the question sounded.
Cooper puffed on his cigar. “Well, besides being eighty-one, she’s had a series of strokes. It’s left her with some paralysis on the left side. She’s been in and out of consciousness this week, mostly out.”
When Lucy’s voice crackled over an intercom to announce that Coop had a phone call, he got up from his chair. “I’ll take that in the office,” he said.
As soon as he was gone, Sophie scooted closer to Katherine’s feet. “He tends to take over a conversation,” she said softly, “but later we can talk about the real stuff. He zonks out after dinner.” She pointed at the empty glass sitting on the coffee table and rolled her eyes.
“I haven’t always lived at home,” Sophie said. “This is temporary. I’ve just had a messy divorce. But I lived in Dallas while I was married to this shithead for ten years. You ever been married? Or lived with anyone?”
“No,” Katherine said. “I was close once, but he objected to dogs in the bedroom.”
They both laughed.
“Well, I’m taking a vow of celibacy from now on,” Sophie said. “Celibacy and poverty—makes life simpler.”
Katherine was wondering if dinner would ever come. She looke
d surreptitiously at her watch. It was eight-thirty, and she was accustomed to eating at six.
The call finally came. Lucy appeared in the door ringing a little silver bell. Katherine and Sophie followed her to a small breakfast area off the kitchen, where she had set an elegant table. Mirrored place mats and lots of silver reflected the light from five tall glass oil lamps in the center of the table.
Coop came in looking flustered. “Sorry, ladies. Business,” he said.
They sat down at the table while Lucy brought in a platter with rosemary-scented beef tenderloin surrounded by little roasted potatoes and thin green beans. Katherine was ravenous.
“I hope you like it rare,” Lucy said, adding a basket of cinnamon rolls and an open bottle of Beaujolais to the table.
“Yes. Oh, yes. It looks so good,” Katherine said just as the doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it,” Sophie said, grabbing a potato and popping it whole into her mouth as she left the table.
Lucy began to cut succulent slices of the meat with a carving knife. Before she had a chance to serve it, Sophie returned breathless and flushed. “Katherine, a Lieutenant Sharb is here from the Austin Police. He says he needs to see you immediately on urgent business.”
As she rose from the table, Katherine looked wistfully at the slices of beef tenderloin, her mouth still watering with hunger. That uneaten meal she would remember as the most desirable she had ever seen.
11
KATHERINE’s hunger simmered as she waited for the policeman to get down to it. Sharb sat forward on the edge of a large easy chair, his face unshaven or shaved so long ago it didn’t matter. One blunt thumb relentlessly ruffled the edges of the notebook resting on his knees while the other thumb snapped the button on the end of his ballpoint pen—in and out, in and out.
They were sitting in a dark-paneled room with the door shut. Sophie had called it the library when she ushered them in, but Katherine was still looking for the books. Other than a stack of old National Geographics, there was’t anything that even resembled a book.
Long after Sophie’s footsteps had faded away, Sharb remained silent, only his nervous thumbs showing any sign of life. If this was standard police procedure to make people talk, it was damned effective, Katherine thought. So uncomfortable was the silence, she had to hold her tongue between her teeth to keep from speaking. Did he somehow know about her trip to the self-storage place last night? Had he found out about the envelope her father had left? It was clear something new had come up.
Finally, as if he’d made some sort of decision, he gave the pen button one last big click and began. “Miss Driscoll, I need to know why you called Travis Hammond fifteen times today and left urgent messages on his machine.”
Katherine was nonplused by the question. Something had happened, something bad. “What’s happened?” she blurted out.
“Let me ask the questions. What was so urgent that you needed to talk to him about? And don’t tell me it was routine matters in connection with settling your father’s estate. I listened to your messages on the tape. You sounded angry and upset.” He sat totally still now, hands at rest, the concentrated force of his attention on her.
She had to answer the question. She didn’t want to because in the back of her mind lurked the fear that it might turn out to be somehow incriminating to her father. But the grim set of Sharb’s black-stubbled jaw left her no choice. He was the law, however unappealing.
“In my father’s checkbook registers,” she said slowly, “I noticed that every month for the past twenty-nine years, as far back as I found records, he paid almost half his income to Travis Hammond. For the past five years that amounted to thirteen hundred dollars a month. I wanted to know what it was for.”
Sharb allowed a sound, half-hiss, half-whistle to escape his lips.
“The canceled checks were stamped by the Bank of Belton, into an account there, endorsed by Travis Hammond,” she added. “I called him to ask what the payments were for.”
Sharb rested his pen on the notebook and ran a hand over his jaw, making a rasping noise. “We’ll look into that as soon as the banks open in the morning. You have any theories about it you might want to share with me?”
Katherine shook her head. “What’s happened, Lieutenant?” Sensing it was going to be unpleasant, she pulled her head in a little tighter to her shoulders, to get ready. She noticed that her hunger had vanished.
Sharb kept his hand cupping his jaw, partly covering his mouth as he spoke. “Mr. Travis Hammond was found four hours ago on his ranch in Kingsland by some deer hunters—legitimate ones, it’s archery season, and they’re licensed for it. He was impaled on the antler of a dead buck. Both him and the buck had been dead for many hours, probably since early morning. The hunters are being treated for shock. I’ve just come from there and I can’t say I blame them.” He shook his head. “Ugly scene.”
He rubbed hard at the reddened lower rim of one eye as he looked at Katherine. “What do you think of that? Another animal gone berserk. Maybe it’s the beginning of a general uprising, huh, where they’re going to revolt and take over the world. What do you think?”
Katherine felt very cold. All that time she had been calling him, angry and demanding, the old man had been lying dead. She folded her arms around herself and saw behind her eyelids the frail old attorney making an impassioned plea for her not to judge so harshly the mistakes that others made when they were young. “He certainly wasn’t killed by a deer,” she thought. She was surprised when Sharb answered because she didn’t know she’d spoken it aloud.
“No more than your father was killed by a tiger. I want a word-by-word description of your conversation with him yesterday. Everything. If he said it looked like rain, I want to hear about it.”
Katherine repeated everything she could remember about the interview. Then she added, “He seemed very nervous, worried, anxious, but I don’t know what he’s usually like.”
“Well, I should think he would be nervous after getting that note.”
“Note?”
“Just like the one your father had in his hip pocket when he was murdered.”
Katherine sat forward in her chair, her heart racing. “What note?”
“A warning note. It said”—he closed his eyes and recited—“‘Lester, Put your house in order. Justice is nigh. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Pointman.’”
“And Mr. Hammond had a note like that, too?”
He gave a nod. “Came in the mail about a week ago. His secretary, the little granddaughter, saw it when she opened the mail. She said he was indeed very nervous the last week. He may have destroyed the note because we haven’t been able to find it.”
He started to lean back in the chair, but discovered it was so deep, he couldn’t do it and keep his feet on the floor, so he perched uncomfortably back on the edge. “Now, Miss Driscoll, if you got a note like that, wouldn’t you go to the police with it?”
Katherine didn’t answer. She was thinking of her father’s asking her to come soon and wondering if the note had had anything to do with his haste.
Sharb prodded. “Unless you were up to something, huh? Is that what you’re thinking?”
“Was there a date on the note?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“I was wondering if the note had anything to do with my father writing me to come to Austin. He stressed urgency.” Again she was astonished that she had spoken aloud. Something about Sharb got her talking. Whatever technique he was using seemed to be working.
Sharb, for the first time, smiled at her, showing tiny, crowded teeth. “I was wondering that, too. And you know what else? I’m wondering if your coming has something to do with these events. After all, you arrive to see Lester Renfro, he’s just been killed. You have a meeting with Travis Hammond, you call him on the phone, and he’s killed. Is this just a coincidence? Are you bad luck—some sort of catalyst?”
Katherine instantly saw an image of herself arriving in town
yesterday, brimming with anger and bitterness, so wrapped up in her own concerns she couldn’t see past her nose. In spite of all her efforts to stop them, tears filled her eyes and spilled out. “I’m wondering, too,” she said.
“Hey,” he said. “Don’t do that. I didn’t mean to—just don’t do that.” He jumped to his feet and stood looking down at her. He pulled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket, looked at it and stuffed it back in quickly.
Katherine didn’t know what was happening to her. She never used to cry, hadn’t cried for years, and here she was dissolving into tears at any provocation. In front of strangers. She used the back of her hand to wipe her face.
He held a palm up to her. “Now, okay. Don’t be so sensitive. I really didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I meant I wonder why this is happening now, if your coming could have anything to do with it. But please don’t do that.”
Katherine looked up at him with wet eyes. It was surprising to see the effect her tears had on him. He didn’t seem to be a man who would be bothered, but since it had caught his attention, she might as well get something out of it. She lowered her eyes and sniffed. “Please tell me the other things, about my father’s … murder. You feel certain it was murder.”
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes. It was.” He held up a stubby forefinger. “Number one is the note. Someone—this pointman—has been threatening him.” He raised his middle finger. “Number two is the wire. You know that the glass in the window was reinforced with wire. The window could have been broken from outside by a tiger, but the wire is another matter. It was cut absolutely clean. My man in the lab tells me even a tiger from Hell couldn’t do that. Only a very sharp pair of wire-cutters.”
He held up three fingers now and shook them for emphasis. “Number three is the traces of rotten meat on the inside of the door and on the threshold. This one I’m real proud of ’cause not many of my colleagues would’ve been thorough enough to analyze the back of the door. Now McElroy and Dieterlen tell me the tigers are always fed in their cages. The food comes from the kitchen, they cart it in through the main door. It never goes into that little room. It would just never be there, so it wasn’t the remains of zoo food. And four…” He looked up at her shyly, as if reluctant to tell her what four was, but then continued. “Four is that on your father’s skin and clothes, even in his hair and eyebrows, we found traces of rotten meat, the same as on the door—beef, they think.”