The Koala of Death

by Betty Webb

  “We agreed that you need protection from yourself.”

  “Oh, ha.”

  “Oh, ha back, Theodora! You could have been killed last night.”

  “Random violence is just part of modern life.”

  “Joe thinks you were targeted.”

  “Cops tend to be paranoid.” After a moment’s reflection, I added, “Except when it comes to this family, of course. They’re right on, there. The Bentleys and the Pipers have been thieving around San Sebastian County since the early 1800s.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Theodora. Someone tried to shoot you last night.”

  “All he bagged was my poor Nissan.” I blinked. “Hey, where is it? I know I didn’t drive it home.”

  “Joe had it towed to the county impound lot. As soon as the automobile showrooms open today, I’ll buy you a new vehicle.”

  “Save your money. I like that truck.”

  Caro’s face assumed the dreamy expression it always did when contemplating major purchases. “I’m thinking an armored Mercedes with a computer system that will alert the authorities if you run into trouble. Maybe a gun rack for the rear window and a gun, one of those long things you prop against your shoulder to shoot.”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  “Of course not. I’m not losing my daughter, either.”

  We argued until she backed down on the idea of an armored Mercedes with a gun rack, but we stalemated over the idea of another pickup truck. Only lawn crews and rednecks drove them, she said, while I insisted that zookeepers drove them, too. Anyway, the entire subject was moot, since I didn’t have enough money for a replacement.

  Burnt toast breakfast completed, I returned to my room and dressed in a pair of old jeans and a green tee shirt that advertised bird-watching tours of Gunn Landing Marsh. With Sunday my new day off, I wasn’t expected anywhere, so I could just relax. After writing a thank you note to the San Sebastian Community College women’s soccer team, and a separate, more personal note to Red, I went up to my room and watched Meerkat Manor reruns with my dog and cats for company.

  The good thing about reruns is that they give you space to think. Despite what I’d said to Caro earlier, I didn’t think the attack on me was random. But why in San Sebastian, and why now? While the meerkats went about their meerkatty business, I sat cross-legged on my bed and mulled over the possible answers. Kate had been murdered twelve days earlier, but no one had tried to kill me then. Nine days later Heck had also been killed, yet still there had been no attack on me. Then last night…

  What had changed?

  Determined to keep my promise to Heck to find out who had killed Kate, I ticked off the week’s timeline on my fingers.

  Tuesday, Heck had been killed.

  Wednesday, little of significance happened, other than my visit to Aster Edwina.

  Thursday, nothing happened.

  Friday, ditto.

  Satur…. Wait a minute. Friday, Caro had held her Let’s-Find-Teddy-a-Husband party. Many of Old Town’s residents and other moneyed people around the county were in attendance, along with friends from the zoo and the harbor. Conversations had encompassed everything from Bowling for Rhinos, to rising slip fees to the murders, with Caro acting her usual hostessy self. Zorah had been almost as chatty; she even discussed my visit to Tyler’s nursing home, and my finding out about the prepaid cemetery plots.

  The party had ended in that slugfest between Robin and Myra.

  Yesterday…Wait. I had forgotten all about Thursday, when I’d dropped off the tuxedo cats to Speaks-to-Souls and she’d come clean about her relationship to Aster Edwina. After that came the trip to the nursing home in Oakland, then the party, and…

  The trip to Oakland? Could that have been the reason the killer had targeted me last night?

  Possibly. But…

  The trip, other than being sad, was uneventful, and surely the killer wasn’t worried about an Alzheimer’s patient’s scrambled memories. Most of the time Tyler couldn’t remember his own daughter’s name, let alone feed me information that identified Kate’s killer. Then I had a sudden thought: could one of his former neighbors at Canaan Harbor know something?

  While I was trying to figure out how I could get to Canaan Harbor without transportation, my restless mind developed another itch. I was forgetting something. I thought and thought, but could find nothing that had any connection to Kate and Tyler other than their old harbor. Yet if I’d never been up there, how could I forget something I’d never learned in the first place?

  This conundrum made me frown so deeply that Bonz, ever sensitive to my moods, raised his head and gave me a searching look.

  “Just thinking, dog,” I told him. “Nothing bad is going on.”

  With a relieved sigh he closed his eyes.

  Now I was convinced that, despite appearances, the niggling thing I couldn’t quite remember must have had something to do with my visit to the Golden Rule nursing home. Besides my halting conversation with a confused man, what else happened there? Oh, yes. The home’s manager gave me an envelope that contained the name of the cemetery where Kate had planned to have her father buried. Try as I might, I couldn’t figure out why that kind of information would matter to a killer.

  It didn’t, I decided. The dead seldom pose any threat to the living, so the killer’s motive was probably something else. Could there be another item in the envelope that posed a danger to him? Or her, as the case might be. Women, I knew, could be just as murderous as men.

  I climbed off the bed and crossed the room to the small suitcase I’d brought with me when my mother had rousted me from the Merilee. I rummaged through my clothes until I saw the envelope. Rifling through it, I saw the receipt from the Ocean View Cemetery for two adjoining lots, as well as receipts for complete funeral arrangements, right down to the flowers. Ever the dutiful daughter, Kate had planned every detail.

  Searching through the rest of the papers, I came across the South Oakland You-Store-It receipt I had briefly glanced at. Examining it more closely, I saw at the bottom, typed in capital letters, 6 MONTHS RENTAL FOR C-127.

  C-127. The number stamped on the loose key I’d found in Kate’s file of newsletter ideas. Maybe something in that storage locker revealed the killer’s motive. Unfortunately, that file was still on the Merilee. I could walk to the harbor, which was less than a fifteen-minute hike downhill from Old Town, but what good would that do? Without a car, I wouldn’t be able to drive to Oakland to see if my hunch was right. Calling Joe to tell him what I suspected would simply elicit more dire warnings about involving myself in police business. Worse, now that Joe was on semi-speaking terms with Caro, he might tattle on me and she’d make my life a living hell. Neither would care about the promise I’d made to a dead man.

  Frustration at my helplessness made my head hurt again, so I went into the bathroom and swallowed two Excedrin Extra-Strength caplets. While waiting for them to kick in, I walked over to the window seat and watched the parade of Old Town dog-walkers going by. In the space of ten minutes, I counted two French bulldogs, a matched set of Affenpinschers, one Dandy Dinmont, three Papillons, four pugs, and six Shih Tzus. Not a pound puppy in sight. Glancing over at DJ Bonz, my three-legged Heinz 57, I saw him curled around his cat, bathing the tiny creature with a long pink tongue. What Bonz lacked in pedigree, he made up for in love.

  “Good dog,” I told him. To Miss Priss I said, “Why can’t you be more like that?”

  Because I’m a cat, she thought at me.

  When I resumed my perusal of Old Town’s blue-blood canine population, I saw Mrs. Wexford-Smythe’s silver Lexus creep down the driveway next door and turn into the street. For a brief moment, I considered running over to her house and hot-wiring her second car, an aged Jaguar, but decided against it. We Bentleys had never gone in for petty theft; if the haul wasn’t worth millions, we didn’t bother.

  Trying to rent one would prove difficult. The closest car rental place was in Monterey, but I had no way
of getting there. Roman, owner of Roamin’ Roman’s Rent-A-Wreck, was an old school friend of Caro’s and might be talked into driving a rental over to Old Town, but Caro would probably tackle me before I could reach it.

  Happily, a more workable plan to rectify my transportation-challenged state then popped full-blown into my mind. Choking back a giggle, I grabbed my cell phone and dialed Caro’s number, hoping that she wouldn’t check her caller ID. When she answered, I lowered my voice and did my best to mimic the thick accent of Mrs. Wexford-Smythe’s maid.

  “Allo, Mees Peterzen? Thees ees Yvette, and I eeese tired of working for Meez Weexford-Smyeeeth, she eeese terrible womans! I theenk zat you bee needing ’elp now, oui?” My fractured French wouldn’t have fooled a child.

  But it did fool my mother. “Why, yes, Yvette, I would love you to come work for me again, and I can assure you that despite what you may have heard from Grizelda, I’ve become very easy to work for. When you get your break, walk over here and we’ll…”

  “Non, non, Mees Peterzen. Zis terrible womans nevaire geeve poor Yvette breaks. You comes ovair ’ere now while sheeze at zee store and we talk, oui?”

  “Be right there!” Seconds later, the front door slammed.

  Hoping it would take several minutes for Caro to realize she’d been had, I raced down the stairs to the end table where she kept her purse, and fished out her car keys. Within seconds I was sitting in her Mercedes with the remote in hand, zapping open the garage door. As I sped down the street, I could see Caro in the rear view mirror.

  She was shaking her fist.

  After stopping by the Merilee to grab Kate’s files, I headed along Highway One to the 101 cutoff. Once I made it onto the freeway and hit the accelerator, the tank-like Mercedes cruised along like an eiderdown pillow on wheels. In what seemed like no time I was pulling onto the road that led to the South Oakland You-Store-It, but a check of my watch showed that I’d committed Grand Theft Auto almost two hours ago. As I hooked a right into the entrance, a possible problem disappeared when I saw a pickup truck loaded with household belongings approaching the closed gate. When the driver punched a code into the gate’s keypad and it swung back, I tailgated him through.

  Having stored my own belongings in a place similar to this after moving onto the Merilee, I found C-127 with little trouble. It was smaller than I’d anticipated, but I reminded myself that before contracting Alzheimer’s, Tyler had lived on a boat no larger than my own. There was no furniture among his meager belongings, just cardboard storage cartons filled with out-of-date clothing and papers, an old stereo system sitting alongside hundreds of vinyls, and shelves of computers so ancient they could have been used by Fred Flintstone. They seemed well cared for, though, wrapped in plastic and dust-free. Someone had treasured them.

  One of the cartons was filled to the brim with tax records, business communications, and receipts of various kinds. Rifling through them, I saw a few documents that looked promising, but decided it would take hours to study them properly. Before closing the box, I was brought up short by a photograph of two men smiling into the camera. One was a particularly scruffy teenager with bad acne and oily hair stood next to an older man: Tyler Everts.

  Another carton held a clear plastic box filled with old floppy discs and a series of dot-matrix printouts of numerical coding similar to those I had produced in my college programming class. Not that I remembered much of it. The hand-written notes on the printouts were almost indecipherable. Deferring further study until I was back at Caro’s, I loaded both boxes and several of the newer computers into the Mercedes. Rethinking the situation, I went back and grabbed the two oldest computers—a Tandy and a Commodore. Then I relocked the storage unit and headed for Canaan Harbor.

  Canaan is a small marina near Sausalito. Surrounded on three sides by the lush green hills of Marin County with the San Francisco Bay on the other, the harbor was similar to Gunn Landing’s, populated with fishing boats, houseboats, pleasure craft, and several fancy yachts. Most of the liveaboard vessels were located at the far north end, so after following a couple of Sunday sailors through the card-controlled gate, I headed in that direction.

  Now came the hard part: finding anyone who knew Tyler Everts and his daughter.

  That, too, turned out to be easier than anticipated. After talking to several people, one of them directed me to a middle-aged woman who was scrubbing the deck of a refitted twenty-seven foot Newport. From her hippie mama appearance—waist-length hair, tie-dyed caftan—it was easy to see why she might have been close to the owners of the Nomad. Her name was Louise Signorelli, and she had known both Tyler and Kate well enough to shed tears when I told her about Kate’s murder.

  As she wept, seagulls whirled and danced around her, appearing to mock her grief. Also oblivious was the pelican that flapped to a landing on a piling at the end of the dock. More in tune with the moment came the moan of a faraway foghorn.

  “Thank God Ty’s too far gone to realize what happened to her,” Louise said, once she had recovered enough to talk. “That kind of stuff, he just doesn’t take well. Never did. When Silver Dove got drunk and drowned—that’s Kate’s mother—we all thought he’d lose his mind with grief, so some of us women started ‘comforting’ him, if you get what I mean. I spent lots of nights on the Nomad, not that it was any chore. Ty was just the sweetest man. A bit weird, maybe, but hey, I always liked them weird. The weirdness, I guess, was why it took folks around here so long to notice that something had gone really wrong, that he was wearing the same clothing for days, was even forgetting to eat.”

  Louise had been the person who alerted Kate about Tyler’s deteriorating condition. Dabbing at her eyes, she said, “We’d been friendly enough that I had Kate’s cell phone number, so one day, when Ty started raving about enemies stealing his things and other paranoid stuff like that, I called her. Hell, that man never had anything worth stealing. Kate had just come back from Australia, but when I told her what was going on, she flew right up here. Next thing you knew, she moved Ty into that nursing home. I went over there once to see him, but it was so depressing I never went back. I’d rather remember him the way he used to be.”

  Estrangement was a common reaction among the friends and relatives of Alzheimer’s patients, so I didn’t judge her. A visit with someone who no longer recognized you provided little incentive to return. “You said that even before Ty got sick he was ‘weird,’” I said. “What did you mean by that?”

  “He was always talking about things nobody understood, always tinkering with things over there at that workshop he rented.”

  “What kind of workshop? Carpentry? Or…”

  She shrugged. “Some kind of electronic rigmarole. He tried to explain it to me once, but I just spazzed out. Never did have a head for that kind of thing and never will. Hell, I don’t even have a TV, let alone a computer. Owning a cell phone is my only bow to technology, and even there, I’ve got one of those super-easy Crickets. But Ty? He could have made those NASA people look like they were driving buckboards.”

  “Do you think the workshop might still be there?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. It was years ago, and could be a mall’s gone up in its place. Anything’s possible these days. Ty used to take Kate over there when she was just a little kid, but I never went with them, so I don’t even know exactly where it was. Some place in Novato, he told me. Wait. Come to think of it, he said that the workshop was in a garage.”

  “Like an auto mechanic’s garage?”

  “Nah, the kind attached to a house. I remember that part, because he told me that one of the teenagers who lived in the house was always hanging around, watching him work. Ty said he used to let the boy handle some of the easier jobs.”

  The hairs on my neck began to prickle. “Did he say what kind of jobs?”

  She turned her hands out in a helpless gesture. “Beats me. But that’s what he called them, ‘jobs.’”

  “Do you remember the boy’s name?”

  “
Honey, these days I do well to remember my own. Ty did bring him around every now and then to take him out for a sail in the Nomad, but that’s all I remember. Certainly not the kid’s name.”

  Fortunately, I’d had the foresight to bring the photograph I’d discovered at the storage locker with me, and I showed it to her. “Would this be the kid you’re talking about?”

  “Sure looks like him,” she said. “And that’s Ty he’s with. Cute, wasn’t he? Ty, I mean. Not the teenager. Jesus, look at the poor kid’s skin.”

  I acknowledged that Ty had been cute and that the teen certainly had a bad case of acne. “Anything else you can tell me?”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. I’m surprised I remembered as much as I did.”

  The conversation having reached its natural conclusion, I thanked Louise for her help. Before I left, we exchanged phone numbers, and she promised to call me if she remembered anything else. Then I headed back to Gunn Landing Harbor to face the music. Instead of making the turnoff to the harbor, I continued south on Highway One to Monterey and Roamin’ Roman’s Rent-A-Wreck. Roman agreed to follow me back to Caro’s in my rental—a chartreuse Kia with a crumpled fender—as long as I drove him back to Rent-A-Wreck afterwards.

  When the Mercedes and the Kia pulled into Caro’s driveway, she ran out the door, primed for a fight. “The very idea that my own daughter would steal from me!” she screamed, not caring if the neighbors heard her.

  Since Roman had gone to school with Mother, her histrionics didn’t faze him. He just leaned against the Kia and watched the dog walkers pass by.

  While transferring Tyler’s belongings from the Mercedes to the Kia, I explained, “I did not steal your car, I just borrowed it. I even filled up the fuel tank for you. Furthermore, I don’t know what you believed you’d accomplish by keeping me prisoner.”

  “Prisoner!” Her eyes bugged.

  Roman cleared his throat. “Um, Teddy, can I get that lift back to my lot any time this century?”