by Betty Webb
Ten minutes later I was on the air with an iguana in my lap.
Before leaving the zoo, I had changed into fresh zoo khakis, but as usual, Good Morning, San Sebastian anchor Ariel Gonzales outshone me. A former Marine helicopter pilot, she now reveled in civilian clothes. Today she wore a particularly stunning lavender Chanel-ish suit and dangly amethyst earrings. She had swept up her dark-brown hair, revealing not only those stunning cheekbones, but also the two-inch scar she’d received in Afghanistan while rescuing several other Marines pinned down by a sniper. There were times I suspected she valued the scar more than the Bronze Star she had received for it, which was why she refused to let the show’s cosmetician make it completely disappear.
As I droned on and on about the pros and cons of iguana ownership, Ariel leaned forward to stroke Lilliana’s silky skin.
“She feels so smooth!” Ariel exclaimed.
“Yes, iguanas have lovely skin, although people who don’t know anything about them think they have scales, which they don’t. They are technically reptiles, like snakes, which also have smooth skin. Iguanas can be quite affectionate and love to cuddle. However, they aren’t for everyone because they can grow to more than six feet long. That’s something many people who’ve bought a teensy six-monther for a pet don’t understand. One day you have a cute little green thing running around the house and snuggling up next to you, and the next day you’ve got a six-foot-long behemoth scaring the bejesus out of your neighbors.”
Lilliana gave Ariel a loving look. Ariel gave her a loving look back.
“She’s a sweetie,” Ariel said.
“Yes, and so is El Capitan—Cappy, for short—the Gunn Zoo’s ocelot.” I waved to Tim and Janet, who were waiting in the wings with the ocelot. Tim rushed forward and snatched up Lilliana, while Janet led Cappy in on his leash.
“Oh, my, what a beauty!” the anchorwoman enthused. “Just like a big ol’ kitty cat.” She was hamming it up, but I didn’t mind. It made for good TV, and that’s why we were all here.
As expected, Cappy behaved well and sat at my feet as I began my spiel. “Ocelots such as El Capitan here used to be found all through the southern states of the U.S., but because their coats are so beautiful they were hunted to extinction. To find a wild ocelot these days you have to travel to Central and South America, where they still range all the way down to northern Argentina, although deforestation is threatening their habitat in those countries, too. For a big cat, ocelots are relatively small, just about twice the size of a large house cat, but they’re ferocious hunters, and eat anything from frogs to iguanas—sorry, Lilliana—or small deer.”
At this, Cappy made a noise that sounded like a purr but was actually a subtle growl. It occurred to me then that we hadn’t yet had an animal kill and eat another on the show. I guess my concern showed, because Janet said, “Don’t worry. I put the iguana where he can’t get at her.”
Hammed horror from Ariel. The anchorwoman was having a good time.
So were the other people in the television studio. Outside of the brightly lit set, the camera and sound people appeared mostly as shadows, but when Cappy had entered on his leash, those shadows moved forward to get a better look. A couple of them even went “Awww!”
After nodding in agreement, I faced the camera’s red light and continued. “You know, I said there were no wild ocelots in the U.S., but I’ve heard there’s a small colony of them living in the swamps of Florida. Escaped pets, or pets that were dumped when they grew too troublesome for their owners.”
Time for my standard public service announcement.
I put on my “stern” face and waggled my finger at the red light. “Which reminds me. If you’re thinking about getting an ocelot for a pet, please don’t. Most do not tame well, and they simply won’t turn into the cuddly lap cat you want. Another problem is that their health can be iffy in captivity, and it’s not at all unusual for them to mount up thousands of dollars in vet bills within just a couple of months. Yes, I know they are beautiful animals, but like so many of Mother Nature’s creatures, ocelots are best worshipped from afar.”
His time in the spotlight over, Cappy favored Ariel with a quick lick on the ankle before Janet led him off.
All good so far.
Unfortunately, one of the reasons Anteaters to Zebras had earned such a large viewership was that the animals I brought on didn’t always behave as well as Lilliana and Cappy. In the two years the Gunn Zoo segment had aired, I’d been crapped on by a lemur with diarrhea, nipped on the earlobe by a cranky squirrel monkey, and once even had to chase a rampaging honey badger through the studio. Animals don’t follow scripts, and they have no respect for those who do.
But Samuel, the bald eagle, appeared calm as he entered perched on Tim’s strong arm, which was covered up to the elbow with a leather raptor glove. Leather jesses dangled from Samuel’s legs, a necessary precaution to keep him from attempting to reach the studio’s rafters.
Ariel let out a gasp. “Oh, my!”
“Being an ex-Marine, I thought you’d appreciate this fine example of our national bird. Magnificent, isn’t he?”
And he was.
At approximately seven years old, Samuel was a full-grown male with a wingspan of eighty-two inches. His white neck feathers were ruffled and his pale yellow eyes—the size of a human’s—glared at the camera’s red light. He behaved so well that I dared hope this might be one of the rare occasions where no one got bit, pecked, or shat on.
Feeling optimistic, I launched into my speech.
“Although bald eagles are threatened these days by lead poisoning and, as in Samuel’s case, car accidents, they live longer than you’d think. A captive bald eagle in New York state lived to be forty-eight years old, but in the wild their life-span averages somewhere between twenty or thirty.” I paused to let that sink in, then smiled at the red light. “By the way, a lot of the things people think they know about bald eagles are wrong, such as the rumor that they can carry away children or full-grown sheep. There are a lot of Photoshopped pictures out there showing them doing that, but a bald eagle’s lifting power is only around four pounds, so your children are safe. But maybe not your Chihuahua.”
Ariel winced, but Tim, who was still holding Samuel on his arm, looked impressed. Unlike Ariel, he didn’t own a Chihuahua.
Enjoying the success of my spiel, I continued. “If Samuel hadn’t been permanently injured after being hit by a car, he could fly to an altitude of ten thousand feet at a speed up to thirty-five miles per hour. And speaking of numbers, here’s a wowser for you. Did you know that a bald eagle’s nest is around five feet in diameter and can weigh up to two tons? That’s four thousand pounds, folks! If an eagle’s nest ever falls on you, call the undertaker.”
Ariel’s eyes widened.
“Another thing. Eagles mate for life. There was no female around when Samuel had his accident, but if there had been, after a brief period of widowhood, she would have remarried.” Oh, wasn’t I the clever one?
For the climax of the segment, I pulled a freeze-dried mouse out of my pocket and tossed it onto the floor. Beaming at everyone out there in Television Land, I said, “Now, you folks watch this!”
Samuel’s big yellow eyes zeroed in on the mouse and in less than a second, he had swooped over Ariel’s head, grabbed the dead mouse in his talons and gobbled it down. With nary a burp, he lifted off again to return to Tim’s leather-sheathed arm.
Unfortunately, as he soared over Ariel, he let loose a foul-smelling stream of eagle poop all over her beautiful lavender suit.
But Ariel wasn’t to be out-hammed.
Although dripping, she ignored the mess, stood up, assumed the “attention” position, and snapped Samuel a perfect Marine salute.
“All things considered, that went pretty well,” I said afterwards, as we drove toward the zoo.
“Even though they turned to shit at the end,” Tim chortled.
“We’re just lucky Ariel has a strong stomach and a la
rge wardrobe allowance. And likes all sorts of animals. The anchor before her didn’t, and it showed.”
We drove along in communal silence for a while until we turned off Old Bentley Road onto the lane that led up the hill to the zoo.
That’s when Janet, who had been silent so far, said, “I hear you’re the person who found Professor Booth’s body.”
Irked that this misinformation was still being passed around, I said, “I did not find the body. A sheriff’s deputy did.”
She didn’t say anything else for a while, but as we rolled through the zoo’s rear gate, she said in a quaking voice, “I had Professor Booth for two classes—Marine Biology 101 and that new one on the Monterey Trench. What everybody’s been saying about him? That he bothers the female students? It’s just not true!”
Then she burst into tears.
Chapter Five
Janet quickly got a handle on her emotions and helped return our TV stars to the Animal Care Center where they would be checked over before being returned to their enclosures. Tim gave her a nervous look after he maneuvered the ocelot into a space far away from the iguana. He probably feared she would start crying again and he wouldn’t know what to do. Men are funny that way. They can talk down rampaging elephants and subdue charging tigers, but let a woman so much as sniffle, they panic.
As for me, Janet’s tears made me curious. Although sorry she had been upset about Booth’s death, I wondered why she had taken it so hard. Granted, the man once had a less-than-savory reputation when it came to female undergrads, but word had gone out that he cleaned up his act after marrying Harper Betancourt. And, anyway, Janet would have been a mere child when the harassment rumors began in earnest, too young even for him.
Unless he’d started up again?
No. I was fairly certain Booth hadn’t been messing around with his female students. Hardly out of any sense of decency, but because doing so would have jeopardized his access to all that lovely Betancourt money—not to mention his position at the college the Betancourts’ gazillions had founded. He might have been a bad man, but never a stupid one. Hoping to find out what the relationship had been between Janet and Booth, I approached her as soon as Tim went back to the Reptile House. I struck out. Not meeting my eyes, Janet told me she’d love to talk, but was due to help out at the big cats’ enclosure as soon as the TV animals were stowed away. Then she scurried off.
Oh, well. It wasn’t my business, anyway. After my last involvement in a murder case and almost getting killed, I had vowed to keep my curiosity under better control. So after filling out the necessary paperwork for the animals’ return, I walked to the Admin Building, picked up one of the radios we zookeepers rely on for communication with each other, and clipped it onto my belt. Then I went down to the garage, climbed into a zebra-striped electric cart, and headed out on my rounds.
The Gunn Zoo is part of the twenty-five-hundred-acre Gunn Estate, which also includes a one-thousand-acre vineyard and a five-hundred-acre elephant sanctuary. The entire estate is ringed by full-growth eucalyptus trees which give it a sealed-off, Eden-esque quality. Although I have lived in Gunn Landing most of my life—with the exception of my short marriage to Michael when we lived in San Francisco—the joy I feel walking the zoo grounds never diminishes. Laid out in animal “neighborhoods,” the zoo offers California Habitat with coyotes, condors and river otters; Tropics Trail with the giant anteater, Andean bears, and parrots; Africa Trail with rhinos and big cats; Verdant Veldt with giraffes, ostriches, and elands; Colder Climes with the polar bear cub, puffins, and Icelandic foxes; Down Under with koalas and wallabies; and Friendly Farm, where less exotic animals like llamas, chickens, and goats reign supreme.
The zoo also has several giant aviaries which boast more than one thousand species, ranging alphabetically all the way from albatross to Zenaida doves. A great fuss is being made these days by the puffin pair we recently acquired, but my favorite bird (zookeepers aren’t supposed to have favorites, but we do) remains Carlos, the Collie’s magpie jay. Over the years Carlos has wooed me with numerous gifts, a stick here, a bug there, in an attempt to mate with me. Although I repeatedly turn down the honor—the physical difficulties are insurmountable—he has still won my heart.
Stopping at his aviary, I climbed out of the cart and walked over to receive his latest gift: a dead dung beetle he deposited gently into my hand.
“Oh, Carlos, you shouldn’t have!” I cooed, holding the dead beetle close to my unfortunately flat bosom.
Pleased I had accepted his gift, he serenaded me with his mocking-bird repertoire.
“Whit wheet!” Curved bill thrasher.
“Bzzz-zzzz-zzzz!” Bluebird of paradise.
“Sweet-sweet-sweet!” Yellow warbler.
“I love you, too, Carlos, baby.” Waving good-bye, I climbed into my cart. I had places to go, other animals to see.
As I drove away, Carlos shrieked in despair—“Reedleeee! Reedleeee!” Boat-tailed grackle.
My next stop was to see Lucy, the giant anteater in Tropics Trail. She had already been fed and her enclosure cleaned, so my visit with her wasn’t as lengthy as on other days. She made for great watching, though, being in the middle of a game of Chase with Little Ricky, her pup. He was growing rapidly, and had almost stopped nursing. He was still very much a mama’s boy, though, and five minutes later, he grew tired of their game, clambered onto Lucy’s back, and promptly fell asleep.
“You’re a good mama, Lucy,” I told her. “A very, very good mama.”
Lucy didn’t reply, not that I’d expected her to, but I like to think there was a certain amount of warmth in her eyes when she looked at me.
“That’s a weird-looking animal,” said a preteen boy who was with a group of similarly aged kids. Summer camp? Despite his words, he sounded impressed.
“All the better to suck up ants and termites,” I told him.
They all liked that.
When I arrived in Down Under, Wanchu the koala and Nyee, her mate, were sound asleep in their fake eucalyptus tree, which they usually are since koalas sleep most of the time. Wanchu’s as-yet-unnamed joey had grown so large that I could see an ear sticking out of her pouch. It was asleep, too.
I cleaned the koala enclosure quietly, taking care not to wake the sleeping beauties. Shit-shoveling takes up at least half of a zookeeper’s day, but it’s easy with koalas. You sweep it up, put it in the dumpster, then drive it away to the recycling dump. Koala dung is popular with the area’s gardeners; apparently it is as mild as the animals themselves.
I was stowing my shovel in the cart when I spied Lex Yarnell, one of the zoo’s park rangers, hurrying along the path. He had a worried expression on his face, but when he saw me, he turned on a smile. A spectacularly handsome man—even better-looking than the new river otter keeper—Lex fit the old description of tall, dark, and handsome. Black hair, mahogany-colored eyes, olive skin, and broad shoulders that seemed to go on forever. With his looks he should have been able to get any woman he wanted, but his track record didn’t bear that out. Several months ago he had been dumped and he still hadn’t recovered.
“Nice show today, Teddy. Some of us watched it in the employee lounge and got a big laugh out of Samuel’s stunt. Ariel Gonzales is sure something, isn’t she? Big improvement on the wuss last year who screamed every time an animal looked at her cross-eyed.”
I was about to defend the ex-anchor’s honor when Lex’s smile faded. “That Booth guy, can’t say I’m sorry about what happened to him.” He paused, then added, “Oh, ah, gee… you’re engaged to Sheriff Rejas, right? What did he tell you?”
Sidestepping the question with a semi-fib, I said, “Joe never discusses his cases with me, Lex.” True, up to a point; not true in that Joe was always telling me to leave the detecting to the San Sebastian Sheriff’s Department.
“The newspaper said you’re the one who found the body.”
For what had to be the tenth time today—even Ariel had quizzed me about “findin
g” Booth’s body while I was packing up at the TV station—I set Lex straight. In doing so, I unfortunately let slip the part about the water-resistant Zeno-7, which Joe had expressly forbidden me to mention.
“You’re telling me you knew there had been a…a murder just because you saw an otter swimming around with a cell phone? Give me a little more credit than that, Teddy. I may not be a college grad, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know which way the wind is blowing.” The usually even-tempered Lex sounded irritated.
“What do you mean, ‘which way the wind is blowing’?”
“A few minutes ago I got a call from Amberlyn, and she told me Sheriff Rejas was at her apartment door, trying to get her to accompany him to the station. The only reason she’s not down there now is because she had enough sense to call me first. I told her to stay the hell away from him.”
Amberlyn Lofland was the college student who had dumped Lex earlier this year. She was every bit as gorgeous a young woman as Lex a man. I had met her briefly at a Fourth of July barbeque he threw at the trailer court he lived in with his extended family, and had marveled at the sight of the two “Tens” together.
“Why in the world would Joe want to talk to your ex-girlfriend?”
Lex pretended to study the sleeping koalas, but it didn’t work. His eyes kept shifting back to me. “She, um, knew Booth. And, uh, there were nude photos of her on Booth’s phone.”
Pictures of Amberlyn on that Zeno-7? Maybe they’d been taken clandestinely. “Was she one of his students?”
“Nah, she goes to UC Santa Cruz. It was more of a…um…personal thing.”
“Personal? Like how?”
“That’s kind of the reason I came up here. Amberlyn wants to talk to you.”
“Whatever for? I only met her once, Lex, and if memory serves, we only talked about the weather. Besides, Sheriff Rejas told me to stay out of the Booth business and that’s what I intend to do. If Amberlyn is in any kind of trouble, she needs a lawyer, not me. One of the best attorneys I know of just happens to be married to my mother, and I’ll be happy to give you his number if you wish.” I reeled off the number but he didn’t write it down. “Now, sorry, but I’m due at the polar bear enclosure and I’m running late.”
