Night Kill (23 page)

I winced. “Strongbad is okay?”

“He’s fine.”

“Seven o’clock, my place. And don’t say anything.”

“Just Marcie. I’ll tell Marcie and she can meet us at your place,” he said and disappeared into Reptiles.

I looked at the closed door, wondering. He hadn’t asked me for her phone number. So maybe he already had it. Last night, I’d left them alone together twice, once at her place and once at his. Marcie and Denny? Unimaginable.

I left to sample the latest culinary biohazard from the café.

I was late and found only two visitors, middle-aged women with ice cream bars. I ordered the hamburger to go—no mayo, double tomato—and started back to Birds. I spotted Jackie leaning against the outside of the Administration building having her post-lunch smoke. She hailed me and I walked over, peeling the wrap off the burger and bracing for another emotional assault.

But she wanted to make peace.

“I’m sorry for what I said about Rick,” she said. “I forgot you’re kind of fragile right now. It’s my allergy pills. Something comes over me when I take them three or four days running.”

“Is that so?”

“You got all the bad news anybody can handle. Rick was crazy about you. We all knew that. If anybody would have played around, it would have been you, I suppose, not him.”

“Jackie…” I started.

“Now I didn’t mean a thing by that. Don’t you take me so seriously. I’m trying to apologize, for Pete’s sake.”

My mother taught me it was petty to refuse an apology and that feuding ruined the complexion. “Whatever, Jackie. Let it go.”

She inhaled with satisfaction. “Good.” That out of the way, she launched into her current grievance. “What’s the world coming to, anyway?” she said. “I am up to my eyeballs in monthly reports and Mr. Crandall wants me to stop everything and research this complaint from some moronic third-grade teacher about the presentation the Education volunteers did for her class. It was this thing about frogs, and they had the kids croak at each other and hop around.”

She paused to take a drag and exhale. I shifted to the upwind side and stuffed maverick tomatoes back into the bun.

“The teacher wants to know if we understand what croaking really means—it’s like, hey, baby, I wanna do you. And it’s like we’re pressuring these kids to have sex. Can you believe it? Frog sex. She thinks the kids will be doing frog sex in the gym showers.”

“Uhhh,” I said with my mouth full, trying to picture immature humans in amplexus in a shower stall. “I don’t think elementary schools have gym showers.”

“Whatever. It’s as goofy as anything Denny’s come up with. Hey, did you know Wallace put him on probation?” This seemed to take the sting out of frog research.

Denny had mentioned Wallace having it in for him. “What happened?”

“He mouthed off at visitors again.” Jackie smiled. “You remember when he found those kids poking a peacock with a stick? Had it trapped in a corner with an overhang where it couldn’t fly. Now that was an educational experience for those little criminals.”

“And this time?”

“Yesterday morning. A mom and her four boys throwing marshmallows at the black bears, in front of the No Feeding sign.” She paused to let me picture the scene.

“What’d he do?”

“He told her to quit it. She says the bears love marshmallows. He says, ‘If I shoot your kids up with heroin, they’ll love it too, same as bears with sugar.’ They yelled at each other until Wallace showed up. Put him on probation. Arnie said he’d get Denny a six-pack as a thank-you.”

“Denny will survive. He does his job.”

“He won’t survive if he pisses Wallace off any more. He’s always late and he’s always keeping things stirred up. That boy has the cutest butt and the squirreliest ideas of anybody here.” She stubbed out her cigarette on the side of the building and tossed it into a trash can. “I gotta get back.”

I tried the door of the education outreach office. Locked.

“No one around today,” Jackie said. “That huge woman who giggles might be in about ten o’clock tomorrow. She’s the volunteer who’s been doing the schools. Can’t you picture her hopping? Good grief.”

Calvin brought out penguin pictures a half hour before quitting time. I realized, a little late, that he was a shy man and glad to have something to share. We sat at the kitchen table. He handed me a color photo of four people facing the camera in a line. Mr. Crandall had his arm around a smiling dark-haired woman, who in turn had her arm around another man. With a little imagination, he could be Wallace minus the belly, plus a full head of hair. A lean Dr. Dawson smiled to their left, not touching anyone. This amiable group was standing in front of an animal crate. I could see what might be a penguin peering through the wire front.

“That’s when we got the first penguins,” Calvin said.

“Mr. Crandall looked exactly the same,” I observed.

“He don’t change, except his hair’s grayer. I s’pect he’s immortal and he’ll run this place forever.” It wasn’t a rousing endorsement.

“And the woman?”

Calvin took the picture back and peered at it. “That’d be Winona Dawson. That crate there’s got the Africans we named after the Dawsons. The names was Wallace’s idea, as I recall. Can’t remember what zoo we got them from, somewhere’s back East. They called them black foot penguins back then. Or jackass penguins. Same thing.”

Winona Dawson. She seemed pleased and excited in the photo, looking directly at the camera with shining eyes. Thrilled to be part of the new exhibit? Happy to be hobnobbing with the director, her husband’s boss? “What was she like?”

“Nice. A lot of fun.”

That wasn’t much use. I gave up.

“What’s this picture?” I asked.

“That’s the pair of them in the new exhibit. And our first chick.” I admired pictures of penguins in a bright new exhibit, none of the chipped paint and wear that showed now. There were several adult birds in the picture.

“You must have ordered penguins from all over the country.”

He nodded. “We got pairs from maybe three more zoos. I was going out to the airport a lot. Except for the last pair.” He shook his head.

“And?”

“That was bad. They came up by truck from California; one of their maintenance staff drove them.”

“Problems on the road?”

“No. Weather was fine. It was the crate. The guy who drove the truck was the idiot that knocked it together. Dr. Dawson helped me open it. Nails poking through the bottom, big —splinters sticking out of the boards. Those birds had their feet all tore up, blood and guano all over them. I thought Dr. Dawson was going to hurt that man in a big way. My heavenly days, he was mad when he saw those birds. If I hadn’t been with him, I don’t know what would have happened.” His shoulders moved. Remembering holding the vet back? “He worked on those birds for weeks, every antibiotic you could name. He saved one of them, the brown band male; the other two died.”

“I can’t imagine Dr. Dawson losing his temper. He’s always been Mr. Self-Control.”

“Imagine it,” he said flatly. He took another look at the group shot. “I think Dr. Dawson never got over her.” He stacked up the photos and slipped them back into their envelope.

He reached for his jacket. “Time to head for the barn.”

I pulled out the group photo for a final look. If you didn’t know him, young Wallace wasn’t that bad looking.

999

That evening, I sat in my minimally presentable living room with Marcie and Denny. Marcie was demure on the sofa; Denny was settled into the green recliner, foot twitching. I had dragged in a kitchen chair for myself. I had serious reservations about this Three Musketeers dynamic, but Marcie had brought a terrific chocolate cake with chocolate frosting. That helped considerably.

Marcie summed it up: “We have no evidence. The financial motive is weak. Anybody could have done it.”

Denny hung tough on the motive. “The kickbacks are enough. And I’ll get more information, now that I know what to look for.”

“We have nothing,” I said. “You want it to be Wallace because he’s threatening your job.”

“Because he’s worried that I’m on to him.”

“No, because you fight with visitors.”

“Will you two stop?” Marcie snapped.

The silence gave me a moment to note that I had my own reasons for wanting it to be Wallace—I didn’t want it to be Hap. “Listen, I haven’t told you that Hap was at the zoo the night Rick died.” I recapped what Linda had told me and Hap had denied.

Denny nodded, not surprised. “Arnie says Diego told him that Hap had been hanging around the zoo late at night.”

“Well, that’s a reliable chain of hearsay.”

Marcie gave me the look.

“It’s all blind alleys,” I said. “Our only hope is some sort of trap. But we have no bait.”

A trap. Now that I’d said it, it sounded like a decent idea. As Marcie had once pointed out, I often learned what I thought by listening to what I said.

Chocolate is a powerful stimulant. A couple more bites and my creativity spiked. “Look, we can lie. We tell Wallace—no, I tell Wallace that Rick left a package at Denny’s addressed to a university or agency. I took it home and opened it. There’s a letter Rick wrote—which is almost true—and some bones and arrowheads that he got from the construction site. Then I ask Wallace what I should do with them.”

“He’ll tell you to bring them to him,” Marcie said.

I scraped up traces of frosting and licked the fork. “I’ll do it as a voice message. I say I’m going out of town Friday. I can’t deal with it until I get back, but I want to know if I should mail the package to the university or not.”

“And then you hide and watch,” Denny said.

“Right. I do the preparation tomorrow, get my dogs out of the house. Then we see if Wallace takes the bait. He knows where I live—it’s on my personnel records. He comes to lift the stuff and we know we’re guessing right. Or he doesn’t and we know that’s not it.”

“Or he brings a gun and shoots you dead,” Marcie contributed.

Denny gave that a thought. “If he killed Rick, he’ll kill you,” he agreed.

“Maybe I take his picture ransacking the house. Maybe I disable his car and call the cops. I don’t know; I’ll figure it out.”

“Better let me handle it. I can borrow a video camera and tape him,” Denny said. “I can call tonight—I’m off tomorrow. I’ll tell him Rick left the stuff at my place.”

“Yes, let Denny do it at his house,” Marcie said.

“If Wallace spots him, is he more bullet-proof than I am?” I asked.

“I’ve got a .22 rifle, but if there’s serious ordnance around, I’m gone and he’ll never catch me,” Denny said.

“The shoot-out at the Comic Corral.” I sucked a chocolate molecule off my fork and could see it: Wallace blazing away with a pistol, Denny dodging behind a doorjamb, peeking out to snap off a shot with his little rifle, stacks of collectable comics riddled with bullets, falling over in a cloud of dust.

“No,” I told them. “Rick was my husband. It’s my risk to take. Denny is not one bit more qualified than I am. I’d like to borrow that video camera, but I’ll go buy one if I have to.” I set my empty plate decisively on the coffee table.

“I think it’s time we gave it a rest and went home to bed.” Marcie’s voice was calm, but her hands were knots in her lap. “We can think it over in the morning.”

It was a safe bet she would call tomorrow and try to talk me out of it.

“Right.” I gave Denny a hard look. “I’ll call Wallace tomorrow after work, like I just found the package. Don’t go shooting your mouth off or charging around wrecking everything.”

“I forget. Who was it that died and made you Captain Picard of the Starship Enterprise?”

“My husband is the one who was murdered, remember?”

“My job is the one in free fall, remember?”

“Puh-leeze!” Marcie said.

“Relax,” I told her. “This is what passes for conversation with us.”

When she left, she took the cake leftovers with her.

Chapter Nineteen

After I’d slept on it, the plan to trap Wallace looked shaky. Either it wouldn’t work and I’d look like a fool, or it would work and I’d be dead. I couldn’t decide which was more probable.

No alternatives surfaced. Maybe if I had more of that cake…One thing that did occur was that if the plan failed and Wallace didn’t show up, I could try it with Hap. I’d test everyone at the zoo until someone fell for it. No, that was wishful thinking.

Thursday, work was uneventful except for a little kid who fell in the waterfowl pond and was fished out by one of the gardeners. I arrived on the run, summoned by a hysterical teenage girl, as the mom was telling everyone that her little boy did that all the time. She and her sopping child wandered off to finish their zoo visit, leaving the rest of us worried about hypothermia and hoping for swimming lessons soon.

I was flying solo the coming weekend, but Calvin seemed unconcerned that I might kill off his charges through clumsiness or stupidity. He told me what to do if I had extra time after the basic routine, and that was about it.

“I’m off tomorrow. If anything comes up, you’ll leave me a note?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Nothing will.”

No lists of reminders, no home phone number. I recalled all the instructions and suggestions I gave Linda when I left Felines to her, most of which were unnecessary, all of which were probably annoying.

At home that night, I fed the dogs and iguana, then sat down and wrote a little script for my call to Wallace. I’d have only one shot, and I wanted to get it right and get it over. Marcie called before I finished, full of the same worries about The Plan that had been troubling me. I spent a long time describing all the safeguards I’d thought of, starting with pepper spray. She added another—borrowing her new cell phone. Nothing I said seemed to reassure her, and nothing she said persuaded me not to go ahead.

We signed off in mutual frustration. I finished the script, rehearsed it twice to two polite but uninterested dogs, and picked up the phone to make the call. The receiver beep-beeped in my ear. Denny had called while I was talking to Marcie. He wanted me to call back as soon as possible. Being Denny, he didn’t say where he was. I called his house.