The Anteater of Death (8 page)

For some time now I had been expecting Caro to pull a stunt like this so I was prepared. “How are things going with Cyril Keslar, of the Montecito Keslars?” Her prospective Husband Number Five.

“What’s Cyril got to do with anything?”

Too bad she couldn’t see my smirk. “If you tell the zoo director to fire me, I’ll tell the sheriff where you hid Dad’s money. That’ll screw you with your boyfriend, who’s as upright as he is rich.” One good blackmail attempt deserves another.

A gasp. “How…how did you know about the money?”

I didn’t answer.

My discovery of the whereabouts of Dad’s big haul had come about entirely by accident. Before being shipped off to Miss Pridewell’s Academy, I had wandered into Caro’s bedroom one day as teens are prone to do, and hunted through her dresser drawers for her silk camisole. I didn’t plan on wearing it
under
my clothing. Instead, I had a Madonna-style outfit in mind that was certain to shock my teachers and elicit the envy of my classmates, sort of a teenage two-fer.

Imagine my own shock when, hiding under the camisole, I found a letter from my disgraced father, postmarked five years earlier from Costa Rica, where he’d fled to avoid prosecution. After several paragraphs apologizing for the shame he’d brought upon his family, he told Caro how to access a Swiss account where he’d stashed part of the money he’d embezzled from Bentley, Bentley, Haight, and Busby. Paper-clipped to the letter was a statement from a bank in the Bahamas, where my mother had shifted some of the money for her own purposes.

Appalled by my threat, she shrieked, “I’d go to jail!”

This was working better than I’d hoped, not that I’d ever follow through on my threat. “Don’t worry. The Feds will probably put you in one of those country club prisons, the kind Martha Stewart was in. Or should I call the lady by her jailhouse name, ‘M-Diddy.’ Big Bertha, your cellmate, might dub you C-Diddy. Wouldn’t that be cute? I promise to visit every Sunday, that is, if I don’t have to move out of state to find a job at another zoo. Maybe Miami’s Metrozoo, although that is a long way off, and I’d only be able to visit you a couple times a year.”

Dark mutterings from the other end of the line. “All right, all right. I’ll cancel my appointment with Barry Fields.”

“How considerate.” Before I stabbed the OFF button, one final word from Caro leaked through. Because the phone was several inches away from my ear by then, the word was faint, but I think what she said was…

“Brat!”

***

I arrived at the zoo early the next day to take my regular Thursday pleasure walk through Down Under, but halfway there saw several keepers running full tilt toward Africa Trail. One slowed for a moment to yell, “It’s Makeba!” then sped up again.

With a whoop, I chased after them.

Half a mile and four twisty turns later, I rounded the thick stand of banana trees at the side of the large pasture we’d dubbed the Veldt to see that the tip of a tiny hoof had emerged from the birth canal of Makeba, our Masai Giraffe. In the manner of giraffes in the wild, she remained standing up. Trying not to breathe too loudly, I joined the hushed crowd of keepers gathered to watch the birth.

“She’s two weeks early,” Zorah whispered, her blunt-featured face pale with anxiety. “I radioed Dr. Kate the second I noticed what was going on.”

The zoo’s veterinarian lived in a house at the far eastern end of the zoo with her family, and for all intents and purposes was on call twenty-four hours a day every day. When a possibly difficult birth was imminent she sometimes camped out on the sofa in her office, or in a sleeping bag near the animal’s night quarters.

Nature, having its own timetable, ignored the vet’s plans. Makeba was giving birth on hard dirt instead of in the hay-cushioned birthing stall where we’d planned to move her. Instead of blissful privacy, she was surrounded by keepers and other giraffes. Nearby stood her mate, all eighteen-feet-eight-inches of him, and next to him, Makeba’s closest female friend, who would—if everything went according to plan—serve as nanny to the newborn. In contrast to the giddy keepers, Makeba stood quietly.

As another tiny hoof pushed out of Makeba’s birth canal, I heard the sound of a zoo cart. Dr. Kate.

She hadn’t combed her wild black hair, and had thrown a lab coat over her pajamas. Like everyone else, she kept her voice low. “Anyone know when this started?”

Zorah shook her head. “One foot was already out when I arrived, and that was about five minutes ago. Now I see shins.”

Some of the concern left the vet’s face. “Good. She’s going fast. The feet are pointing down, which means the baby’s coming out head first. I want this exhibit cordoned off until the baby drops and we can herd them into the night house. The fewer gawkers the better.” With that, she radioed the head park ranger and told him what was needed.

By the time the rangers arrived with yellow tape and sawhorses, the calf’s shins had fully emerged and we could see a pair of knobby knees. Then…

The tip of a tiny snout.

“Head down! Head down!” Although Zorah kept her voice so low that it was little more than a rasp, her big body bounced up and down in excitement. “Good to go!”

So far. Sometimes a baby giraffe was born with its long neck bent backwards along its sides, which presented a problem for the mother. Makeba’s calf was doing it the right way, with its head out and down, protected between two long front legs. The critical moment would come when the calf dropped six feet to the ground and landed on its head and vulnerable neck. Unable to withstand the drop, some calves died at this stage, which was nature’s way of ensuring that only the strong survived.

While the clock ticked on and the birthing process continued, the noise level in the zoo increased. The baboons screamed their hunger. So did the lions.

Once or twice I saw an expression of guilt sweep across a keeper’s face when she heard her own charge complain about an empty belly, but no one moved. Sometimes an emergency with one animal screwed up schedules with the others, but it did them no harm. Meals in the wild weren’t served by the clock, either. My own Lucy would be angry, but after she ate her first helping of termite-sprinkled Monkey Chow topped off by a banana for dessert, she’d recover.

“Look at the neck! It’s so perfect!” Zorah, for whom the giraffe was a personal favorite, almost clapped her hands, but restrained herself in time.

Yes, the calf’s neck was perfect. So were the feet, which hung in the air below Makeba’s birth canal, as well as the head dangling between them. The calf’s eyes were still closed, which meant nothing. Sometimes the baby had to hit the ground before it awoke to the world. Its horns were nowhere to be seen, either, just two small nubs from which they would emerge in a few days.

“Here come the shoulders.” Dr. Kate’s whisper was so ragged that I took my eyes off the calf for a second and looked over just as she snapped open her emergency bag. From its shadows, I could see the silver gleam of something sharp.

Getting the calf’s two-feet wide shoulders out of its mother’s narrow vagina was the most difficult and dangerous part of a giraffe’s birth process, and if was going to be serious trouble, it would happen now.

If Makeba needed help, Dr. Kate vet would hop the fence and do whatever was necessary. Fortunately for the vet, giraffes were among the gentlest of animals and not even Makeba’s mate would attack without cause. If he ever did charge someone, a blow from his dinner plate-sized rear hoof—or worse, his eight-foot-long neck—could be fatal. The same gentleness wasn’t true of the ostriches, who pecked at the ground nearby. Big D, the alpha male of the small flock which lived in the big pasture with the giraffes, was vicious and had once almost killed a keeper with a kick from his clawed foot. It would be up to us keepers to ensure that Big D stayed away if Dr. Kate had to enter the enclosure, even if it put our own lives at risk. Zookeepers were members of a mutual protection society.

“Aaaaahhhh!” A collective sigh of relief from the keepers as the calf’s shoulders popped through. Now came the easy part, the narrow sides, the hindquarters, the rear legs…

The calf fell.

Six feet to the ground.

On its head.

No one breathed. Zorah grabbed me so hard on the forearm that I knew it would bloom with bruises tomorrow. I hung onto Dr. Kate in exactly the same way.

The calf raised its head and opened its eyes.

“Maaaaaah
,” it bleated.

Makeba turned around, blinked her long-lashed brown eyes, and stared at the calf as if trying to figure out what this strange thing was. Then she lowered her elegant head and began to clean her baby with a long, sticky tongue.

I wasn’t aware that I was holding my breath, or that everyone else was, until I expelled air with a sound that resembled the calf’s bleat.

Sounds of snuffling. I turned to see big Zorah, as muscular as a man, with tears of joy streaming down her face. Although too coarse-featured to be considered pretty, she looked radiant. I touched my own cheek and found it as wet as hers. Glancing around at my fellow keepers, I saw that they were all smiling and crying. So were the park rangers.

Just another day at the office.

I hugged Zorah. She hugged back. We both hugged Dr. Kate, who was trying her professional best not to weep along with the rest of us. Not being a good actress, she failed, and a tiny tear dribbled down her cheek.

Suddenly someone pulled Zorah away from me and a deep male voice interrupted our celebration of life.

“Zorah Vega, I’m arresting you for the murder of Grayson Harrill. You have the right to remain silent…” The rest of the words were lost among the loud protests of the keepers as Sheriff Joe Rejas, flanked by two deputies, snapped a pair of handcuffs around Zorah’s wrists and led her away.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

“There’s no way she killed Grayson!” Dr. Kate stormed, as we watched the sheriff stuff Zorah into his patrol car. “She’s one of the gentlest human beings I know.”

“With animals, maybe,” said Jack Spence, the zoo’s bear keeper, a tall, string bean of a man with light brown hair and gray eyes so pale he looked half blind. Yet his vision was sharp and he missed nothing. “Remember what she did to the guy she caught trying to feed a razor-laced apple to the orangutans? Even after he went down she kept kicking him. His teeth were scattered all over the place.”

“Are you saying you think she’s a murderer?” asked Miranda DiBartolo, a darkly pretty keeper who cared for the marsupials in Down Under. “Because if you are…” She moved toward Jack, her delicate hands balled into fists.

The vet stepped between them. “Miranda, I want you to bring that new wallaby down to the Animal Care Center for a checkup. And Jack, I’m not sure the spectacled bears’ play platform will hold up under their weight, so look at it again. As for me, I’m going to lure Makeba and her baby into their night house for an examination. Now let’s calm down and get back to work. We all know the sheriff’s made a mistake, but there’s nothing any of us can do about it now.”

Grumbling, we dispersed to our various areas, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Zorah. Instead of my standard long chat with Lucy, I merely left her to her breakfast. I repeated my hurried performance at Monkey Mania, where Marlon, who normally was so self-absorbed that keepers didn’t exist for him, noticed something was wrong and bared his teeth at me.

For the next few hours, I rushed from one animal to another, not interacting with my charges in any meaningful way. I even brushed away the approaches of the other keepers when they wanted to discuss the arrest. Time was wasting, and I had places to go, prisoners to see.

***

After stopping briefly at the
Merilee
, I drove to the county seat of San Sebastian, a small city founded in the late-eighteen hundreds by my great-great-great grandfather, cattle rancher Ezekiel Bentley. Fortunately for Zorah, loyalty to the Bentleys remained strong in the town. The sheriff was nowhere around, but Emilio Guiterrez, the deputy in charge of the lockup and a descendant of one of Ezekiel’s vaqueros, agreed to let me see Zorah even though visiting hours were over.

“I’m pretty sure the sheriff’s gone for the day, but just in case, don’t let him find out about this,” Emilio cautioned.

He unlocked the big metal door separating the jail’s business area from the netherworld beyond. After a short walk between cells filled with male drunks and thieves, we entered the smaller women’s section where Zorah sat slumped on a cot. At least she wasn’t alone. In the cell on her left was a raving white woman, on the right, a morose Hispanic. Clad in a bright orange jumpsuit which did nothing for her complexion, Zorah ignored them both and stared grimly at the painted cement floor.

When she lifted her head and saw the deputy pulling up a chair for me outside her cell, the first words out of her mouth were, “How’s the baby giraffe? Is it walking around yet? Nursing?”

Not
Get me out of here,
or
I swear I’m innocent
. She never worried about herself, only her animals.

Happy to give her good news, I assured her the calf walked within thirty minutes of birth, nursed in forty.

“It’s perfectly healthy, then? No problems at all?”

The shrieks of the white woman in the next cell grew louder, so I had to shout. “It looks that way, but to make sure, Dr. Kate had moved mom and baby to the night quarters and plans to keep them under observation for awhile.” I scooted my chair closer until it almost touched the bars.

Although the jail itself was almost a century old, the blanket on Zorah’s cot didn’t look it. Neither did her aluminum toilet and sink. In fact, both looked brand new. Apparently the sheriff had kept his campaign promise to modernize.

“How about the Bengals? And the frilled lizards?”

The white woman’s voice dropped a few decibels so I was able to assure Zorah in a more normal voice that those animals were fine, too. Because the rest of us had taken over a portion of her schedule, not one had missed a meal or a cleanup. I myself had helped feed Maharaja and Ranee, the young Bengal tigers we’d bought from the St. Louis Zoo. The feeding process had been a complicated one, involving two other keepers and various maneuvers through an intricate series of gates.