The Otter of Death

by Betty Webb

  The dull glaze on everyone’s eyes sparked into anger when I gave my summation.

  “So there you have it. Our beautiful Pacific is in trouble. Not only do we still have the cruel and continuing practice of shark-finning, but we’re seeing increased numbers of whale strandings, deaths of sea lions from eating fish poisoned by comoic acid, otters dying from toxoplasma gondii, and the kelp forests—upon which so many marine animals rely on for food and shelter—are being destroyed. Global warming? You betcha! The oceans are getting warmer, and that’s hastening the destruction. If those problems aren’t enough, the ecosystem of the Pacific is being further harmed by the oil platforms along the seacoast. Platforms such as Prime Pacific’s own Pacific Pride, right off Gunn Landing Harbor.”

  During this last I glared at Miles Stephenson Betancourt IV, CEO of Prime Pacific Oil. He glared back.

  Satisfied, I added the de rigueur, “Thank you for your kind attention. Now enjoy your brandy. Or port. Or whatever.”

  The only person who clapped was Caro.

  My attempt to coax Harper Betancourt-Booth into a conversation failed. She had instinctively loathed me before tonight, and now I’d gone and given her a reason. Oh, well.

  After bolting down the remains of my Pedro Ximenez Triana Hidalgo, I gathered my things to leave. I had almost made it to the door when Frasier approached, his red nose leading the way. “I didn’t know you felt that way about oil platforms.” He no longer seemed as taken by my charms as he had during the dinner we’d shared at Fork.

  “You never asked.”

  “Look, I can understand why some people are nervous because of that blowout in the Gulf, but there’s no need to be. Prime Pacific itself has a flawless safety record. And the need for oil and petroleum products is universal. Without it, you wouldn’t have gas for your pickup truck or lipstick for that pretty mouth of yours. And, uh, why haven’t you returned my calls?”

  It was time to bite the bullet, which frankly, was preferable to being drawn into another argument about off-shore drilling. “I’m sorry, Frasier, but we have nothing in common. Besides, I’m engaged. Didn’t my mother tell you?”

  He shook his head. “But then why would she…?”

  “Caro doesn’t like my fiancé.”

  “Could the lucky man be someone I know?”

  “Joe Rejas.”

  “You don’t mean Sheriff Joe Rejas!” His eyes widened. I hadn’t noticed before, but they were nice eyes.

  “Yeah, him.”

  Frasier stood there blinking for a few moments, then leaned forward and gave me a quick peck on the cheek. “Well, congratulations, then. But if something happens to change your mind, you have my phone number.”

  With that, he rejoined the Betancourts, who were still glaring at me.

  The next day—Saturday—was a whirlwind of activity at the zoo. Four church buses dropped off seventy-five young parishioners and their parents to attend our “Name That Animal!” show, where various zookeepers trotted out their less-lethal charges. The avian world was represented by a singing macaw (her favorite song was Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies”); big cats, by El Capitan, our leash-trained ocelot; marsupials, by Wanchu, the huggy koala; and various examples of other species, including a hedgehog, a tortoise, an iguana, and even a hand-raised penguin who, like the macaw, “sang” on cue.

  Much laughter and cheering all around.

  Saturday was a great day for weekday nine-to-fivers, too, and they formed long lines to see Magnus, our polar bear cub. Business was also booming on Tropics Trail, where anteater pup Little Ricky entertained his admirers by jumping on and off Lucy’s back.

  It was especially crowded over at the Japanese macaque enclosure, partially because of the rumors about our shit-slinging monkey. Those who wanted to see the action were disappointed, because Kabuki had been moved off-exhibit to a smaller habitat in hopes the semi-isolation would calm him down. In the meantime, Zorah had received an agreement from Aster Edwina to begin negotiations to procure Clarabelle from the National Zoo in D.C. Love, we hoped, would conquer all.

  Feeling sorry for the off-exhibit monkey, I visited him in his night house, where he gazed at me with sad eyes.

  “See what happens when you don’t behave?”

  Grunt.

  “But I do have some good news for you.”

  Grunt.

  “You may be getting a new girlfriend soon.”

  Grunt?

  “Her name’s Clarabelle.”

  Grunt!

  “Oh, quit bothering him, Teddy,” snapped Myra Sebrowski, who had entered the night house area while Kabuki and I were having our scintillating conversation.

  “He’s lonely.”

  Looking crankier than usual, she snapped, “Of course he’s lonely! Who wouldn’t be, sitting here alone all day? Zorah and I discussed the possibility of bringing one of the females over to keep him company, but in the end we decided not to because…”

  Her radio crackled. “Keeper One to Keeper Eight, come in.” Zorah.

  Myra snatched the radio off her belt. “Keeper Eight here. Over.”

  “Clarabelle’s a go. We’ll receive her Tuesday after next. I’ve already alerted Quarantine. Over.”

  “Thanks for letting me know. Over.” Myra sounded pleased, as well she should.

  “And just so you know, Myra, Jack Spence came in to talk about Magnus, so if you see Teddy, tell her…”

  Keeper Four—me—interrupted. “There’s nothing wrong with him, I hope! Over.”

  “Who? Jack, or the bear?” Zorah’s laugh told me that whatever Jack’s news, it wasn’t serious. “Both are fine. What I was going to tell Myra before you so rudely cut in, is that on the way to Admin, Jack ran across your mother. She’s looking for you, so consider yourself warned. Keeper One, over and out.”

  Crackle, hiss, silence.

  As Myra had listened to the news about Clarabelle, the crankiness left her face. Not caring a whit about the Caro situation, she turned to Kabuki, and said, “Hey, handsome, you hear that? A new love’s on her way to light up your life. And you, hers.”

  Putting the discomfort of Caro’s looming visit aside, I figured Myra’s lightened mood gave me the chance to dig for some information. “Speaking of love, Myra, I’ve been checking around and found out that you once took a class from Stuart Booth. Did you ever notice him display untoward behavior with his female students?”

  Some of the crankiness returned. “Didn’t I tell you to mind your own business?”

  “Oh, did you? Sorry, can’t remember.”

  She made a guttural sound similar to those I’d heard Kabuki make, but instead of stalking away, she stayed put. “You are just so…so…” Another guttural sound. “All right. Since it’s obvious you’re not going to stop hounding me about this, here’s my answer. No, I never noticed Professor Booth ‘display untoward behavior’ to his female students. And since you’re all set to follow up by asking, hell, no, I did not have an affair with him. But I’ll tell you this. I happen to think that in the past he got a raw deal, instigated by a bunch of whiners who couldn’t take being rejected and filed harassment complaints out of revenge. Now go piss off to your koalas and leave me alone!”

  On my way to Down Under, where I hoped Caro wouldn’t find me, I replayed what Myra had said. A “bunch” of whiners, meaning more than one.

  Lila, I already knew about. As for Amberlyn, there was no way she would have made a complaint about Booth; their relationship was too financially rewarding. Besides, Amberlyn had never been his student. Who else?

  After doing some quick math in my head, I came up with a name. Then, to confirm my suspicion, I reversed course and headed for the big cat enclosure. But I never made it. Before I reached the top of the hill, my luck ran out.

  Caro spotted me.

  And she was waving a newspaper.

  “Did you read this?” she demanded, when I reached her. She looked chic as usual, but the teal Fendi jumpsuit clashed terribly with her rage-r
ed face.

  “What is it now, Mo… Caro?”

  Instead of answering, she asked another question. “Why didn’t you tell me what that awful group was actually into?”

  A group of zoo visitors made a wide circle around her. For all they knew, she was just another nut on a rampage. Come to think of it, they may have been right.

  “Are you talking about the Keep Our Shoreline Clean people?” I asked Caro.

  “Of course I am!” She flapped the newspaper at me again. It was the San Sebastian Journal.

  To give myself a chance to think, I looked up at the sky. Clear blue. Not much happening there. Sighing, I returned my gaze to my mother’s furious face. “Thanks to Miriam Haight-Smitherton, you’d already joined, so what did you expect me to do? Demand you drop your membership? You know I don’t work that way. Now, is there something in that newspaper you want me to see, or are you going to paddle me with it?”

  Her face grew redder. “I never paddled you! Neither did your father.” She narrowed her eyes. “Maybe that’s where we went wrong.” She shoved the newspaper at me. “Read and weep!”

  Since it was already open to the Op Ed page, it didn’t take long to find the article that had upset my mother. Over an unflattering picture of me with my mouth open ran the headline:

  ZOOKEEPER BITES HAND THAT FEEDS HER

  An editorial by Angus McClusky,

  Publisher of the San Sebastian Journal

  While giving a talk at the monthly meeting of Keep Our Shoreline Clean, the zookeeping oil heiress Theodora Iona Esmeralda Bentley managed to insult every member of that illustrious board.

  I looked up. “Oil heiress? What the...?”

  “Shut up and keep reading.”

  Citing highly questionable figures from poorly researched studies, Ms. Bentley drew a parallel between oil platform production and the deaths of sea life in the Monterey Bay area.

  “Hey, I didn’t…”

  “Keep reading.”

  Cooler temperaments and better educated minds know that Ms. Bentley’s claims are faux science. Regardless of her pronouncements, sea life actually thrives beneath oil platforms like our beautiful platform, Prime Pride. As for global warming, that claim has also been proven to be utter nonsense. A one-degree Fahrenheit rise in ocean temperatures over the past one hundred years is hardly anything to panic about.

  Perhaps instead of spewing falsehoods, Ms. Bentley—whose wealthy father bankrupted his own company by absconding with several million dollars—should stick to matters she knows something about.

  I yelped a string of obscenities, making a couple of passersby frown.

  “My thoughts, too,” Caro said, primly. “How dare Angus write about you like that? I’m so sorry I no longer own any stock in that rag of his, because if I still did, I’d demand his resignation from the Journal’s board.”

  I gave her a look. “No longer? Do you mean we, uh, the Bentleys used to own stock in that newspaper?”

  “Yes, but that was before your father took off for Costa Rica.”

  I was almost afraid to ask the next question but I did anyway. “This ‘oil heiress’ thing. What’s that all about?”

  “I’ve always believed in a well-rounded portfolio.”

  “Please don’t tell me you’re one of Prime Pacific’s stockholders!”

  She looked down at the trail, across which a dung beetle was busily rolling its latest treasure. She put out a protective, Jimmy Choo-shod foot to keep one of the passersby from stepping on it. “Then I won’t.”

  As soon as the dung beetle had made it across the trail unsquashed, Caro cleared her throat and added, “I dumped my shares this morning. At a loss, I might add. That was even before I cancelled my membership in Keep Our Shoreline Clean. As for Miriam Haight-Smitherton, I don’t know what I ever saw in that snob in the first place.”

  Caro might have been many things—irritating, vain, greedy—but she had always been a fiercely protective mother. Moved, I gave her a hug.

  “Phew, Teddy, you stink,” she protested, once I released her.

  Zoos are popular places for weddings, and by noon, two marriage ceremonies had been completed—one near Monkey Mania, the other in the middle of Friendly Farm, with Alejandro acting as best man, and a carnation-festooned goat as flower girl. A third was scheduled for three p.m. on the stone platform that jutted over the lake surrounding Lemur Island, our new red-ruffed lemur exhibit.

  Animals just being animals had forced the lemurs’ move from their old home, which had once been situated directly across from the howler monkeys. For some reason Chairman Mao, the alpha male howler, had taken a dislike to Gumbo, the alpha lemur. Mao was vocal about his dislike, and either by design or accident had trained his family of four females and three adolescents to help him complain. If you’ve ever heard howlers—they sound something like poorly tuned jet engines—you can imagine the misery this chorus of bellows caused everyone. It irked the lemurs enough that they had screeched back. A red-ruffed lemur’s alarm call isn’t pretty, either, and in their own way, their decibel levels almost reach the howlers’ volume.

  Noisy or not, the stone overlook, just down the hill from the giant anteater enclosure, has become an increasingly popular venue for weddings. Twenty feet in diameter, the overlook can accommodate the major stars of the wedding party—bride, groom, minister, best man, flower girl, etc.—and the long cement apron in front of it can handle approximately fifty guests. Perfect for small weddings. Safe, too. There was a three-foot-high rock wall around the edge of the overlook, and the lake itself was fenced off, discouraging tipsy guests from taking a refreshing plunge.

  But safety measures can only go so far, because in any environment popular with children, accidents will happen. I had just let myself into the giant anteaters’ enclosure after stowing Lucy and her baby safely in the small adjoining pen, when a boy of about eight fell while running down the hill. His own shriek almost matched the howler monkeys’, who were sounding off in the distance. It looked like a nasty fall—the boy had pretty much shredded the skin across his knees—so I left the enclosure and hurried to his side. By the time I reached him, his parents had appeared. The father was telling him to “man up,” while the mother held her son’s hand and murmured encouraging words.

  “We need to get him to First Aid,” I told them. “Let me bring my cart around and I’ll take you there.” I hurried behind the anteaters’ enclosure, jumped into the cart, and ferried the family to the First Aid Station near the zoo’s entrance. By the time we reached it, the boy had indeed manned up.

  “It’s nothing,” he told his weeping mother. “Just a little blood.”

  While waiting for the ambulance to arrive—several stitches were needed—I chatted with Bradley Morris, our on-staff EMT. By one o’clock, he told me, the tally at the gate had been nine thousand, three hundred and fifty-two visitors, three-quarters of them children. By two o’clock, two other children had visited the First Aid Station with skinned knees, the standard injury, and an adult male had needed a two-inch gauze compress after banging his head against a rock ledge near the cougar enclosure; he had been too busy talking on his cell phone to notice he’d veered off the well-marked trail.

  “Crowded like we are today,” Bradley said, “we’re lucky the casualty count hasn’t been higher.”

  “The day’s not over yet,” I said.

  I returned to the anteater enclosure just in time to see the wedding party for the scheduled three o’clock troop by.

  Like most modern weddings, the party included a videographer, and I noticed that Lucy had caught not only his discerning eye, but the flower girl’s, too. The five-or-something-year-old dug in her pink patent leather heels and refused to go any further unless she was given a ride on the “long-nosed horsie.”

  Despite her cherubic looks—sky-blue eyes, blond ringlets, the whole nine yards—I could recognize a hellion when I saw one, so I patiently explained that an anteater’s temperament was more akin to a tiger�
�s than a horsie’s, but if she wanted, after the wedding I might be able to give her a ride on a llama. If it was okay with her mother, of course.

  “Alejandro especially loves young ladies in pink dresses,” I told her.

  Turning to a heavyset woman of around fifty, who was stuffed into an expensive but unflattering paisley print dress, the child said, “You better let me, Mommy. Or else.”

  Mommy murmured, “Whatever you want, darling.”

  Ah. A “surprise” baby, and obviously spoiled.

  “Got ’em!” announced the Hollywood-handsome videographer. He had taken advantage of the wedding party’s brief stop to film Lucy and Little Ricky. “Got that noisy group of monkeys, too.”

  “They’re howlers,” I said.

  “And so aptly named.” With that, he and the rest of the wedding party moved on.

  As the very young bride passed by, I studied her dress, a frothy affair which had probably been purchased from Gabrielle’s, the outrageously expensive wedding boutique in Carmel. The strapless sweetheart neckline showcased the bride’s thin, fashion-model shoulders, while the belle-of-the-ball skirt encompassed yards and yards of misty tulle and hand-beaded lace appliqués. It probably cost more than my truck and boat combined. As if recognizing my state of near-penury, the bride lifted her chin and gave me an arrogant stare.

  Oh, well. Good marriages aren’t based on beaded lace appliqués alone.

  Roughly ten minutes later, shrieks began emanating from the direction of Lemur Island. At first I ignored them because it was close to the red-ruffed lemurs’ feeding time, and they always started calling for their keeper well in advance. But as I listened more carefully, I realized the shrieks were human.

  I dropped my rake and ran down the hill toward Lemur Lake. Upon reaching the overlook, I saw the wedding party leaning over the stone wall, calling out encouragement to someone in the water below.

  “Outta my way!” I yelled, shoving aside the mother of the little girl who had wanted a ride on the “horsie.”