The Otter of Death

by Betty Webb

  Not knowing what to say, I said nothing.

  “The week before my release, Daddy came to see me. He said that since I’d been, ah, abusing my allowance, he was cutting me off. Can you imagine? Here I’d dropped out of school, had no skills, and unlike you, had no means of support. The only way Daddy agreed to give my allowance back was if I moved into the family compound and settled down. It was clear that ‘settle down’ included getting married. Daddy actually made a list of people I was allowed to date—you wouldn’t believe how short it was—but Stuart was on it. For some reason, Daddy liked him.”

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or get furious on her behalf. “What did your mother think about that?”

  She shrugged. “Mother always agrees with everything Daddy says.”

  “But just because Stuart Booth was on the approved list doesn’t mean you had to marry him. This isn’t the Middle Ages.”

  “It is if you’re a Betancourt.”

  She had a point there. Curiosity getting the better of me, I wanted to know who else in San Sebastian County came Betancourt-approved. “Could you tell me who else your father deemed appropriate?”

  She reeled off several names, most of them mid-level county movers and shakers. A widowed congressman, two corporate attorneys, the owner of a famous winery—all either unmarried or wending their way through the divorce courts. The only name that surprised me was Frasier Morgan’s.

  “But Frasier was married then!” I said.

  Here Harper managed a smile. “Daddy said his marriage would never last, but somehow Evelyn stuck it out with him until just recently. These days, nine years is practically a lifetime. Speaking of, how long were you married? Five years, wasn’t it?”

  “Four and a half.”

  “Why didn’t you just let Michael have his affair? Eventually, the bloom would have been off the wild rose and you’d still be in the catbird’s seat.”

  The former teacher in me cringed at the mixed metaphors, but eager to get her off the subject of my failed marriage, I said, “The choice wasn’t mine. But back to Frasier. How’d he wind up on your dad’s list? Financially speaking, at the time he was hardly in the same category as the others. He still isn’t.”

  “True, but he’d just started at Prime Pacific and Daddy said he had an excellent future.”

  “Really?” The Frasier I knew wasn’t “excellent” at anything.

  “Really.”

  “So what are you going to do now? Have your father draw up another list?” The minute the words were out of my mouth I regretted them, but Harper didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she laughed.

  “He already has. He’s even trying to interest me in Frasier again, but I’ve got my own plans. I’m Stuart’s sole heir and the beneficiary of his insurance policy. When the funds are released, I’ll be moving to New York, maybe work in fashion design. Or on a magazine. That’s more my speed than playing dutiful daughter.”

  “New York’s a pretty expensive place.”

  Her laugh sounded as airy as wind chimes. “I’ll be getting just short of two million.”

  “I didn’t know college professors made that much.”

  “They don’t. Daddy paid him a bundle to marry me.”

  My shock must have been visible because she laughed again. “Oh, Teddy, you are such a prude! Payoffs like that have been going on for centuries. Besides, in the beginning, before I found out what a bore Stuart was, he wasn’t all that bad. He could even be fun on occasion, especially once he got involved with that Amber person. She loosened him up in some fun ways, if you get my meaning.” She winked.

  It was doubtful that Booth’s harassment victims would agree that he “wasn’t all that bad,” especially Lila Conyers, but I refrained from saying so. Something else had been puzzling me ever since I’d become interested in this case, and this might be my only chance to clear it up.

  “Okay, I plead guilty to being a prude, but how did Stuart find out about SeekingSugarDaddy.com in the first place?”

  The question didn’t put a dent in her laughter. “Because Daddy told him about it. He’s been a regular customer for years.”

  By five-thirty, I was back at Joe’s with the napkin-wrapped scone in my hand. The days I’d spent in Casa Rejas had taught me how much Colleen loved to bake. No matter the time of day, she could usually be found in the kitchen. But instead of standing sentinel in front of the stove when I walked into the kitchen, she was typing furiously away on her laptop in the tiny office nook. Upon seeing me, she closed down whatever she’d been working on and asked, “What’s that you’ve got?”

  I unwrapped the scone. “I was wondering if you could match this.”

  With a bemused expression, she took it from me. After taking a bite of the delicious thing, she said, “Cranberries, apricots, a dusting of pistachio, sweetened with sugar and honey. Easy peasy.”

  She searched through the kitchen cabinets, laying out a collection of ingredients on the countertop. Taking inventory, she mourned, “Oh, fiddlesticks. I have everything but apricots and pistachios. It would have been nice to have scones for breakfast tomorrow. If only…”

  Never let it be said I can’t take a hint. “Whole Foods is only five minutes away. I’ll pop over there and get some. You want dried apricots or fresh?”

  “Dried will be fine. I’m a little low on baking soda, too. Used the last of it on the cake yesterday.”

  Bonz, trailed by Bridie and Tonio, followed me to the door. They would all have piled into my truck if I’d let them, but I made them stay home.

  A good thing, too, because once at Whole Foods, I ran across Frank Owens in the baking goods aisle. He was putting a bag of chocolate chips into an already loaded shopping cart. Nearby, two female shoppers were goggling at him. I couldn’t blame them. Hunky man. Buying chocolate. What’s not to goggle?

  “You bake?” I asked the otter keeper, pulling my mostly empty cart alongside his.

  Those devastating blue eyes looked into mine. “On occasion.”

  “It’s pretty hard to bake on a boat.”

  “That’s not where I bake.”

  “Ah. At Ariel Gonzales’ house, right?”

  He pulled a face. “I guess the cat’s out of the bag. Not that it was ever in there to begin with.”

  “How long have you known her?”

  “Several years.” He started rolling his cart down the aisle toward check-out, probably hoping I wouldn’t follow. But I did. Baking soda, dried apricots, and pistachios already in the cart, my own shopping was done.

  “I thought you worked on Tuesdays,” I told him.

  “Usually, yeah, but due to your being laid up, Zorah’s shifted everyone’s schedule around. Tomorrow was supposed to be my day off, but I’m working instead, so I have to do my shopping now.” He gave me a near-scowl. “Look, it’s always nice chatting with you, Teddy, and I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, but I’m in a rush here.”

  With that, he wheeled off to a longer check-out line before I could say anything else. I let him go, even though I had wanted to ask him why only Ariel had shown up to help me the night I’d been shot.

  Dinner could have gone better.

  Bridie, that adorable little blabbermouth, had fallen in love with my Nissan pickup, and began pestering her daddy to buy one just like it. “Teddy drives all over in her truck!”

  Joe frowned. “Drives? You’ve seen her drive, like today?”

  “And yesterday! Back and forth! Back and forth! I want a truck just like it! We can put puppies in it! Daddy, can we get a puppy?”

  At hearing the word “puppy,” Bonz looked up from where he’d been lurking under the dinner table in hopes someone would drop something.

  “You’ll have a dog when your daddy and I get married,” I assured Bridie, hoping to steer the conversation away from me driving back and forth, and back and forth, in my truck. “And a cat, too.”

  My ruse didn’t work.

  “I thought you were going to take it easy,”
Joe said.

  “Oh, but I’m feeling so much better! I’m even starting work again tomorrow. For a half day, anyway. Zorah’s loaning me the new trainee to do the heavy lifting, so I’ll be fine.”

  “Listen, Teddy…”

  “For breakfast tomorrow we’re having cranberry-apricot scones,” Colleen interjected.

  “What’s a scone?” Tonio piped up.

  God bless the boy. “Sort of a Scots biscuit, only bigger and more crumbly,” I told him. “And sometimes with fruit in it.”

  “Chocolate chips are common, too,” Colleen said, furthering my rescue.

  Before I stopped to think, I said, “Maybe that’s what Frank Owens was going to bake. Chocolate chip scones.”

  “Are you talking about the river otter keeper?” Joe didn’t sound happy.

  “Um, yes.”

  “When were you talking to Mr. Owens?”

  “Today, in the baked goods aisle at Whole Foods. It was only a conversation in passing.”

  Joe was so unhappy with this turn of events that he delivered another lecture about the dangers of amateur sleuths mixing themselves up in murder investigations.

  When he finally ran out of breath, I said, “Point taken.”

  Colleen, quick to take advantage of my apparent surrender, steered the conversation to a less incendiary topic.

  Politics.

  After we’d all peacefully agreed to disagree, I excused myself from the table, explaining that my shoulder was aching and I wanted to turn in early. Instead, I dragged my laptop out from under the bed and opened the BAC file—Booth/Amberlyn Case—and transcribed my conversations with Ariel Gonzales and Harper Betancourt as best I could. Once finished, I updated several other interviews, most notably those with Kenny Norgaard, Ariel Gonzales, and Darleene Bauer, president of the Otter Conservancy. While I was typing, it became clear that I needed to talk to Darleene again. That otter count thing kept bothering me.

  Something else was bothering me, too.

  The behavior of Janet Hewitt, the zoo’s trainee zookeeper, made no sense unless something had been going on between her and Booth. And, if so…I typed in my reservations about her, then moved on to someone else.

  To keep my suspect list honest, even when it hurt, I added my conversations with Lila Conyers to the list. Just because she had saved Bonz from being euthanized didn’t mean she was incapable of killing a human or two.

  Then, hating myself, I shut down my laptop and tried to sleep.

  Chapter Nineteen

  An uneasy conscience prevents a good night’s sleep, so the next morning I showered and dressed with the self-awareness of a robot. I didn’t truly come alive until I arrived at the zoo, where I found more flowers waiting for me in the staff lounge. While I admired the American Beauty roses, several zookeepers squabbled over the right to fetch me coffee.

  “Hey, I’m not all that sore,” I told Robin Chase, big cats. “I can get my own.”

  “You’d say that if you were hobbling around on a broken leg,” scoffed Manny Salinas, birds. Winning the coffee urn battle, he filled me an extra-large cup and brought it to the table. “Now tell us what happened. Unless you’d rather not.”

  The other zookeepers had such expectant looks on their faces that I relented and told them everything, from my foggy walk, to the rustling in the bushes. “And that’s basically all I remember,” I finished, “until I came to and found Ariel Gonzales leaning over me.”

  “Did you get a look at the shooter?” said Myra Sebrowski, her beautiful face not looking cranky for once.

  I didn’t get the chance to answer because Robin gave her a how-dumb-can-you-get glance. “Of course she didn’t, Myra. Otherwise there’d have been an arrest. And it’d be all over the papers.”

  The coffee was terrible. It usually was. Since we zookeepers had to furnish our own beans, we almost always wound up with the cheap stuff. But today I was feeling generous, so I made a mental note to stop by Dark ’N’ Deadly Roasters for something tastier to contribute. As a further treat, I would bring in whatever cranberry-apricot scones were left over from Colleen’s baking frenzy. Hers had matched the Betancourts’, maybe even surpassed them.

  Later, while driving my zebra cart toward Tropics Trail to meet up with trainee Janet Hewitt, I remembered that although Frank Owens hadn’t been in the staff lounge, he was scheduled to work today. So instead of continuing south, I detoured up the path leading to the river otter enclosure. My luck was in. Frank was on the other side of the pond, scooping otter poop into a plastic baggie while four otters—three females and one male—looked on.

  “Hi, Frank!” I called over the clear acrylic fence.

  He jerked his head up. So did the otters.

  “Oh. Hi.” Frank didn’t sound thrilled to see me, although one of the otters—Mr. Wiggles, I think—humped over to the fence to check me out.

  “I need to ask you a question.”

  A scowl. “Can’t you see I’m busy here? Mr. Wiggles has been acting mopey, so I need to take his droppings down to the Animal Care Center to be checked under a microscope.”

  Mr. Wiggles looked fine to me, but as any zookeeper knows, appearances can be deceiving. “Hope it’s nothing. Um, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you. The other night when I was shot, Ariel showed up to help me. Where were you? You don’t come across as a man who’d ignore someone in distress.”

  With a sound of disgust, Frank stood up. “Since when are my whereabouts any of your business?”

  I pointed to my shoulder and the bandages peeking out from under my shirt’s short sleeve.

  “Aw, hell, Teddy.” Clutching the bag of otter poop, he walked around the pond and approached the fence. Lowering his voice, he said, “For your information, I didn’t know you’d been shot because I wasn’t there when it happened. I was someplace else. Ariel stayed behind on the boat. When she heard the gunshot she did her Marine thing and rushed to the rescue.”

  “If you weren’t on your boat, where were you?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Would I be here if I didn’t?”

  A sigh. “I was at the north end of the harbor, attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. By the time I returned, you’d already been hauled off to the hospital.”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh. Now, is there anything else?”

  “Nope.” Embarrassed, I started up the cart.

  “Don’t take off yet, Teddy. I have a question of my own.”

  “What?”

  “In all this poking around into other people’s business, did you ever find out what was going on with the otter count?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Those final numbers. They don’t seem off to you?”

  Shrugging, although it made my shoulder hurt, I said, “I’ve had other things to worry about.”

  “Hmph.” Without further explanation, he went back to work.

  Frowning, because he was right, I headed down to Tropics Trail to join Janet, my helper for the day. Her being assigned to me was good in more ways than one. I needed clarification on her relationship with Stuart Booth, given her tearful outburst while returning from the TV station last week. Maybe she was just the overly emotional type, but then again, those tears could have stemmed from something else.

  True to Zorah’s word, Janet was waiting for me next to the giant anteater enclosure. Lucy and her pup hadn’t been let out of their night quarters yet, so Lucy was restless.

  “I appreciate this.” I told Janet as I climbed down from the cart.

  No smile. “Yeah, well. So what do you want me to do?”

  “Help me sweep up.”

  After I’d released Lucy and Little Ricky into the holding pen, Janet and I worked silently for the next half hour. Whenever I attempted conversation, she swept her way toward the other end of the enclosure, pointedly ignoring me. Once she came within the anteaters’ grabbing distance at the pen’s gate. Alarmed, I called out a warning.

&n
bsp; “Get away from there! That anteater has four-inch talons!”

  Janet moved, but not by much.

  I spent the rest of our time in Tropics Trail making certain she didn’t get herself killed. After the last animal was taken care of, I sent her over to Friendly Farm, where nothing would try to disembowel or eat her. As soon as she disappeared down the trail, I called Zorah on my cell, eschewing the more public radio frequency.

  “Janet needs retraining. And she certainly doesn’t need to work with big cats.”

  “Funny you should say that,” Zorah replied. “Robin Chase told me pretty much the same thing yesterday.”

  “The girl’s not careful enough.”

  “Robin said she actually tried to pet Maharaja.”

  I gasped. As beautiful as the big cat was, like all five-hundred-pound Bengal tigers, Maharaja was a perfect killing machine. You don’t get cuddly with killing machines.

  “Zorah, did you check Janet’s references?”

  “No references to check, since this is her first job at a zoo.”

  “She didn’t do any volunteer work at one before getting her degree?”

  “Not that I could find.”

  “Then why’d you hire her?”

  Zorah’s answer wasn’t comforting. “Janet Hewitt is Aster Edwina Gunn’s grand-niece, or something like that. She insisted I hire her.”

  Nepotism, thy name is idiocy. “I’m calling Aster Edwina right now.”

  “Better you than me.” Zorah hung up.

  Aster Edwina wasn’t pleased to hear my complaint. “I asked you to keep me apprised of what’s happening in the Booth case, not meddle in Gunn Zoo’s hiring practices.”

  “You don’t care if your niece gets her hand bitten off? Or something worse?”

  “I’ll speak to her about it. But the girl needs a job.”

  “Not one she’s temperamentally unsuited for.”