by Mary Walker
Katherine had never listened so intently in her life. She found she was actually leaning forward and turning one ear toward him.
He stopped his recital, but continued to hold the four fingers aloft. Katherine heard the heavy sound of her own breathing as she began to spin the story in her head.
“Now,” he said, “can you make something of all that? Assume it was murder, just to humor me, and tell me how it could be done. You’re an animal trainer. Must know something about animals, I suppose. Give me a scenario.”
She nodded slowly and spoke as if in a trance. “The murderer picks a day when the cats had been fasting and are really hungry,” she began.
“Good, good!” He smiled at her. “Go on.”
“He or she somehow gets in early without being seen or stays all night. That wouldn’t be hard for an employee, I think. He brings a piece of rotten meat to excite the tiger. He … rubs it on the door to keep the tiger right there. He brings wire-cutters.” She paused, visualizing the tiger house, the tiny concrete room.
“Let’s see. When my father gets there at six-fifteen, he … oh, hits him on the head or chokes him, or, if he’s very strong, breaks his neck. Then, oh God, then he rubs the meat all over him and pushes him out into the exhibit. He breaks the window, using I don’t know what, something heavy, but some of the wire won’t give way. He’s anticipated that, though, and he has his wire-cutters.”
Sharb looked at her, nodding, his black eyes shining. “Just the way I see it.” Then he lifted his notebook a few inches and slapped it sharply against his knee. “But why go to all that trouble? Why not just knock him off?”
“Well, in my father’s case, he almost pulled it off, getting everyone to think the tiger did it.”
“Yeah. But this deer thing—who would believe a man was gored by a deer? C’mon. Why go to all the trouble to make it look that way? Think about it: the nut’d have to go out, shoot the deer—it was shot with an arrow—then shoot the lawyer, looks like he was arrow-shot, too, right in the chest, then drag the deer to the lawyer or the lawyer to the deer, and then hoist the lawyer up onto the antler and stick one of the prongs, whatever you call them—I’m no hunter—into the wound of the arrow. Looks like that’s what he did. Jesus.”
Katherine was silent, absorbing it. Then she said, “You seem certain the same killer did both these.”
He lifted his open palms and rolled his eyes up. “Hell, yes. Aren’t you? Travis Hammond’s granddaughter can’t duplicate the threat note exactly, but when we showed her the one from Lester Renfro’s pocket, she confirmed that the handwriting, the paper, and the sentiments were almost exactly the same on the one that came in the mail addressed to Hammond. Sure, the same man did these murders.
“And you know something, Miss Driscoll? He’s a real evil son of a bitch. I know it. I have a foolproof technique for detecting them. You know how I do it? The hair on the back of my fingers stands straight up. Here. Look at that.” He held out the back of his stubby hand for Katherine to examine. The thick black hairs on his fingers were standing erect.
“Causes a prickly feeling when I get into something like this.” He looked down at his notebook for the first time, flipped the page and read for a minute, moving his lips slightly. “Let me ask you something else. What is the connection between your father and Travis Hammond? I know Hammond drew up your father’s will and was handling his estate, but what else do you know about their relationship?”
“Nothing but what I’ve already told you. Mr. Hammond was the attorney for the Driscolls. He told me yesterday that he met my father when he married my mother, but he didn’t really get to know him well until they worked together a few years ago on the committee for planning the new Phase Two cat exhibits.”
“But if he’s been receiving money for twenty-nine years, he was lying. There must be more to it,” Sharb said.
Katherine nodded. “Yes. There must have been.”
“We’ll get on that right away. You can count on it.”
“Oh,” Katherine said, “this probably doesn’t have anything to do with it, but my mother always felt very friendly toward Travis Hammond, really the only person in Austin she felt that way about. She kept in touch with him, until she got sick a few years ago.”
Sharb nodded.
“Really I think my uncle, Cooper Driscoll, might know more about the relationship between Mr. Hammond and my father.”
“Yeah. I plan to ask him about it when I finish with you. He had two calls on Hammond’s answering machine, too. Big stick at the zoo, Cooper Driscoll, big stick all over town, huh? Though I hear he’s had some financial setbacks of a major kind.”
“So I hear. I just met him tonight for the first time. Well, the first time since I was five.”
“Izzat right? Why’s that?”
“There was a—well, I don’t know what you’d call it—a rift, I guess, in the family when my mother and I moved away, not just a rift with my father, but with her family, too. And we just never saw any of them again after that.”
“Yeah. But why not?”
“Oh, the usual. I’m sure you see it all the time. My parents got divorced. My mother felt alienated and rejected by her family.” Katherine squirmed in her chair. This was not something she liked talking about. And anyway, it was irrelevant.
“Yeah,” Sharb persisted, “I’ve seen some real humdingers of … what do you call it? Rifts. But usually people get back together eventually with their families, their parents and brothers and sisters. But not your family. So what happened?”
Katherine felt suddenly pressured, and warm. It was stuffy with the door closed. “Well, I’m not sure. There was a fight.” She lowered her eyelids and remembered: I woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night. There was screaming and running. I was shivering, terrified of … something. “My mother and I left my father,” she said. My mother, hysterical, weeping, grabbed me by the arm, dragged me out of the house, into the car. “It was pretty awful, even thinking about it now. Everyone was mad at everyone.” I ran back to say good-bye. The dog, the dog I had loved and who had loved me in return, sprawled on the bedroom floor, eyes and mouth wide open. “I don’t know exactly what it was about. I was only five and I just don’t remember.”
Katherine lifted her lids. “It can’t matter now.” That was more than she’d said about that time to anyone, ever.
When the phone on the table next to Sharb’s chair began to shrill, they both stared at it until it stopped. Then Sophie came thudding down the hall and knocked on the door. “Phone for you, Lieutenant Sharb,” she called, breathless, through the door.
“I got it,” he said, picking it up. “Sharb here.” He listened and said, “Good. A half hour more here. I need to talk to Mr. Driscoll, then I’ll need to pick up from Miss Katherine Driscoll some canceled checks we need to look into tomorrow, at a bank in Belton. Then I’ll be in. Okey dokey?”
He put down the phone and looked at Katherine. “Travis Hammond was killed with an arrow for sure. He’d gone out early to hunt, wanted to take advantage of the season, his wife said. Avid hunter. This will come out in the press tomorrow, Miss Driscoll. So will the new information about your father’s death. You should prepare for the publicity. What are your plans?”
“I’m going to stay in Austin awhile, get things settled. And I start working at the zoo tomorrow,” she said.
His mouth gaped open for a moment. “Why?”
“I need the money. You know about my financial problems in Boerne, and all my father left me was a couple of Lean Cuisines in the freezer, so I asked Sam McElroy for a job.”
He began snapping his pen furiously for a minute. Then he said, “I wish you wouldn’t.”
“Why?”
He stuck his arm out toward her and turned it over so she was looking down on the back of his hand. The hairs between the knuckles still stood erect and, in spite of herself, she felt the prickle on her own hairless fingers.
“I can’t explain it,” he sa
id. “I just wish you wouldn’t.”
12
WHY did it have to be snakes?
Katherine clicked the padlock shut and leaned over to scratch her ankle. Anything else she could at least tolerate. Anything in the entire world but these squirming, twisted, smelly vipers.
After thirteen days of working here, she still hadn’t gotten used to their proximity. She felt constantly edgy and her skin prickled as if she were about to break out in a rash.
And it had been almost two weeks with no progress on any front. The only thing she’d accomplished was losing ten pounds she hadn’t wanted to lose. Every morning she had awakened before dawn in her father’s house and done the grim countdown: the number of days left until the foreclosure. Now there were only seven.
She stuck her key into the padlock on the next exhibit and sprang it open, then lifted it off the hasp so she could open the door a crack to peek inside. Beadlike dark scales glinting in the light, the two long bushmasters lay so intricately intertwined you couldn’t tell which head belonged to which snake. They lay under a silk fern near the front of the exhibit. Good. The farther away, the better.
She shut the door softly so as not to attract their attention since they might be sleeping, but who could tell with creatures whose eyes were eternally open in a glassy stare. She reached into the canvas shoulder bag with the huge cloth gauntlet that protected her left arm past the elbow and pulled out a quivering white mouse. With her right hand, she squeezed the scissorlike handle of the long feeding stick to open the clamp and, holding her breath, stuffed the mouse in and let the clamp close slowly on its squirming body.
Most of the snakes ate dead mice, freshly killed by “cervical dislocation,” as the disgusting Alonzo Stokes called it, grinning as he pronounced the words. But not these prized bushmasters. Hatched and raised personally by Alonzo Stokes’s own hands, they were so finicky, he maintained, they could eat only living mice, stuffed right into their horrendous gullets. God.
She opened the door again and inserted the feeding stick with its trembling offering toward the larger snake, which raised its flat head at the mouse’s approach and flicked its black forked tongue in the direction of the warm blood. She pressed the mouse right against the snake’s sinister slit of a mouth, which opened slightly in response to the pressure. The mouth appeared nowhere near large enough to receive this adult mouse, but she’d seen the impossible happen before, so she persisted and watched the unhinged jaw open and open, until finally it gaped wider than the snake’s own body. Inexorably, the jaws spread around the mouse. Suddenly the mouse stopped its shuddering and went limp. Probably shock, or the venom may have found its way to the small central nervous system.
She felt a ripple of repulsion start in her neck and undulate down her body. This was accompanied by the now familiar urge to scratch all over. It was almost instinctual, this fear and loathing she was powerless to control. She had thought it would wear off with exposure to the creatures, but it hadn’t diminished an iota in the almost two weeks she’d been working in the reptile house. Oh, God, give me a vicious Doberman anytime.
When the mouse was firmly wedged in the gaping maw, she squeezed the handle of the stick to open the clamp and release the mouse, just as she had been taught.
She watched to be certain that the snake had firm control and was using its backward-curving fangs to move the mouse toward its esophagus before she withdrew the stick. Reaching into the bag for another mouse, she found she had been holding her breath during the procedure and had to gasp for air as if she’d been underwater. Panting, she shut the door and leaned her shoulder against the protruding white fiberglass box which formed the back of the exhibit. A sign on the door announced the correct antivenin in case of a bite, and a neon-orange sticker proclaimed: HOT! As if she could forget that these were highly venomous snakes, fully capable of inflicting a lethal bite, not just on a mouse, but on a full-grown human being.
To reassure herself, she glanced toward the big red emergency button that was to be pushed in case of a snakebite. She flinched in surprise when she saw Alonzo Stokes slouched against the refrigerator watching her. He gave a jerky thumbs-up with a nicotine-stained thumb and grinned. Under the cold fluorescent lights, the pockmarks on his cheeks looked like moon craters. She didn’t smile back. God, the man must have had a world-class case of acne fifty years ago.
This was her first solo feeding after his intensive tutorial last week and, predictably, there he was watching, checking that everything was done perfectly for his darlings. Katherine thought she had known perfectionists before, but this man was fussy and demanding beyond anything she had seen. He oversaw every detail of what went on in the reptile house, even though he was a curator and most curators did not get into the day-to-day work of caring for the animals. But Alonzo Stokes personally trained all keepers, supervised the Tuesday feedings, checked the cage cleaning, even climbed in and scrubbed rocks to demonstrate how he wanted it done.
He had explained to her why the bushmasters merited this special feeding treatment. They were often fussy eaters, difficult to maintain in captivity. He said the day the first clutch of twelve eggs hatched in his office was one of the best days of his life.
Big deal. Snakes fucking. Disgusting. Just the sort of thing to excite the senses of an Alonzo Stokes. They even had their own special room in the back for breeding so they would have more space and privacy. A snake brothel.
She took a deep breath and reached into the sack for another mouse to feed to the smaller bushmaster. She opened the door and repeated the process, relieved that the snake opened its mouth and received the mouse readily and that the other one seemed totally involved in the slow and horrible digestion of a whole live mouse. That was the one good thing about feeding these creatures: at least you could be sure that a mouth stuffed with mouse could not attack.
As soon as she had withdrawn the feeding stick, she closed the door firmly, put the padlock back, and snapped it shut—a beautiful sound.
She turned to see if the curator was still watching. He was. No doubt to be sure she recorded on each snake’s record card what she had just done—one of the many cardinal rules. She removed the gauntlet and held it in her teeth while she pulled a pen from her pocket and filled in the two large index cards on top of the exhibit box. Underneath the last entry she wrote the date and “1 A,” indicating she had successfully crammed one adult mouse into each of the bushmasters. The classification of mice used on these cards made her ill: “F” was for “fuzzy”—a newborn mouse; “P” stood for “pinky”—a baby; “J” was for “juvenile”; and “A,” for “adult.” Somehow she was sure that Alonzo Stokes had come up with these classifications. It was the sort of thing that would amuse him.
She put the glove back on and looked up to see Alonzo’s mouth twisted in what might be a smile in a normal person; but after a two weeks’ exposure to his idiosyncrasies, she knew it to be a grimace of scorn. Wearing gloves was not recommended for working with snakes, he had told her. None of the other four reptile keepers wore them.
“They just make you careless and reduce your dexterity,” Alonzo explained. “And they really don’t give you much protection. Most of the snakes have fangs long enough to bite right through if they get the chance. And what about the rest of your body? Are you going to wear body armor?” Still, she felt the need to wear the one glove. It provided a layer, albeit an inadequate one, between the reptiles and herself. It kept her skin from crawling right off her body.
When she saw Alonzo turn and head toward his office at the back of the building, she exhaled and got on with the work.
The Gaboon vipers were the next charges in her new area of responsibility. She unlocked and opened the door to peer in at them. One was curled up in its hiding box; she saw the blunt tip of its tail protruding. But where was the other, the bigger one, the female? Her eye scanned the exhibit in panic. Sometimes it was hard to find even these big snakes because the exhibits were filled with rocks and artifici
al plants to replicate the snake’s natural habitat. Ah! She drew back with a jerk when she saw the big one right under the door.
She knew that because the exhibit floor was a foot lower than the door, it was unlikely a snake could escape while the door was opened briefly, but still, when she saw the viper’s broad flat head rising toward the opening, she panicked and slammed the door shut, holding it closed. God. Would she ever get over this fear? It was wearing her to a frazzle. Hundreds of times a day she caught sight of a snake and her body involuntarily tensed, ready to run for her life. Each time she’d hold her ground, grit her teeth and carry on. But where was it going, all that adrenaline that got released? It seemed to be accumulating as a sour bile in her stomach that had made eating almost impossible.
She pulled the list out of her shirt pocket and confirmed that the Gaboon vipers were to have one live mouse each, not force-fed. Well, that was something. At least it gave the mice a sporting chance.
She reached in her bag and pulled out two squirming mice. Quickly, she cracked the door open, just wide enough, and pushed them through the narrow opening. The first one tumbled into the cage obligingly, but the second one, a handsome, nervous-faced piebald, had hooked its long incisors into the glove’s empty tip above her index finger. She inserted the finger with the mouse hanging from it through the door and tried to shake it off, but when it let go, it lurched backward and fell to the floor just under the cage, hitting the ground running. She knelt quickly to retrieve it, but the mouse had scampered under the baseboard beneath the cages before she could make a grab at it.