Endangered Species (11 page)

Manuel smiled and began a tuneless whistle. The macaw imitated him. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said, a new thought occurring to him. “What if Adelina killed Nestor?”

“If Nestor was killed,” I corrected Manuel. “In that case, I'm sure Adelina is going to be one of the first people the police want to talk to. Now I need you to tell me where can I get hold of Sulfin.”

“At work. He does stuff for that weird rich guy. The one with all the animals. You know the one I'm talking about?”

“I do indeed.”

After Manuel left, I tried George again. This time the line was busy. Next I called Eli and extracted a promise from him to wait before going downtown, then I took a drive over to Jamesville to Parker Littlebaum's house.

He met me at the door with a shotgun in one hand.

But that was okay.

It was the lion he was holding on to with his other hand that made me nervous.

T
he lion mesmerized me. I couldn't move. My heart was thudding. My mind did what it always does under pressure. It ran for cover.

For some reason, I thought about how wild animals always look bigger in the flesh than they do in the movies, and how movie stars always look bigger on the screen than they do in real life.

Then I thought about how people say animals are supposed to be able to smell fear. If that's true, then this one was definitely getting a noseful.

The lion and I stared at each other for what seemed like forever. Its eyes were flecked with gold. Its ears were pricked forward. Its mouth was drawn back in a tight little grin. I noticed the white tufts of hair growing out of its ears, I noticed the way the tip of its pink tongue showed between its teeth, I noticed the powerful slope of its shoulders, the thickness of its bones, and the sheen of its coat, but most of all I noticed that it didn't look happy. Which made two of us.

“I haven't seen you for a while,” Littlebaum said. He spoke casually, as if we'd just run into each other in the street.

I took an effort, but I wrenched my gaze away from the lion. “At least a couple of years.”

Judging from his appearance, they hadn't been a good two years. The man looked as if he had been living in a cardboard box on the street. He was even skinnier than I remembered him being. His clothes, a dirty flannel shirt and a ripped pair of jeans, were a couple of sizes too big. The veins in his neck stood out like cords and his cheeks were sunken. The whites of his eyes were marbled with red lines and his left eye had a slight squint to it. His beard and mustache were flecked with remnants of the meals he'd eaten. His scraggly blond hair was fixed into a ponytail that ran down his neck.

He moved his lips into something that he probably thought was a smile. “Has it been that long?”

“Maybe even longer,” I told him, trying to disregard both the penetrating, low rumble coming from the big cat's throat and the fact that in the present circumstances Littlebaum's grip on the lion's red leather collar was a lot looser than I would have liked it to be.

“She make you nervous?” Littlebaum asked, his grin widening.

“Not at all,” I lied. Littlebaum was a bully. Show a bully you're afraid and they act even worse.

“Good.” He scratched his ear with the business end of his shotgun. “I figured, you handle six-foot monitor lizards. She's not that much different.”

“She's larger.”

“I thought women liked big things.” And he sniggered like a little boy telling a dirty joke.

I tried not to grit my teeth. “Not when it comes to cats.” I indicated her with my chin. “You've made your point. How about putting your playmate away?”

Littlebaum wrinkled his nose while pretending to think about my suggestion. “Maybe later.”

“I'm guessing you're still angry about the lizard.” The last time Littlebaum had been in the store he'd left in a snit because I wouldn't sell him a four-hundred-dollar monitor on credit. I'd figured he'd forgotten about it by now. Obviously, I'd been wrong. “You don't strike me as the kind of guy that holds a grudge.”

“Hurt might be a better word. You know how much she cost me?” He pointed to the lioness. Her tail was swishing back and forth, the way a tabby cat's does before it pounces on a mouse. I now knew how a slave in Roman times felt before it was thrown to the lions.

“How much?” I asked automatically while my mind was busy wondering whether or not Littlebaum would use his shotgun on her if she attacked me and how much damage she would do before he did.

“I paid eight thousand.” Littlebaum looked and sounded smug, like a collector who'd gotten a good deal on a painting. “Not bad, hunh?”

“No. Not at all.” The guy had definitely gotten taken, the part of my mind that wasn't busy picturing myself as a patchwork quilt, decided. Five thousand was the going rate for a lion cub, but I sure wasn't going to tell him that under the circumstances. “Where'd you get her?”

“From a firm down in Texas. Wildlife Specialists. Heard of them?” I shook my head. “They shipped her to me.
On credit.
No questions asked. I paid as soon as I got the invoice. Now we're talking about a baby giraffe,” he boasted. “What do you think about them apples?”

Why not say them oranges or pears or pineapples? I found myself wondering while staring at Littlebaum's face. The two sides didn't quite match. Which could be a metaphor for his personality.

“Well?” he demanded, waiting for my answer.

I gave it to him. “How's it gonna get here?”

“By truck. You know, I've always wanted to have one.”

And I'd always wanted to own a jet plane, but that didn't mean I was going to go out and buy one even if I did have the money. Jesus. A giraffe! The guy was a moron. I'd heard he'd gone around the bend. I just didn't think he'd gone this far. If I had, I would have phoned instead of dropping by.

What the hell was he going to do with a giraffe anyway? I couldn't even imagine what feeding an animal that large would cost. And where was it going to live? It couldn't stay outside in this kind of weather. As far as I knew, Littlebaum didn't have a barn on his property. Was he planning on cutting a big hole in the ceiling of his house?

As far as I'm concerned, people should stick to cats, dogs, hamsters, birds, and reptiles as pets. When you keep wild animals, the results are almost always predictably tragic, usually for the animals, which either die from improper care or have to be put down when their owners, tiring of the novelty, don't want them anymore. Sometimes, though, the results are tragic for people, too. Like now. For me. Becoming the only person in the history of Syracuse to be mauled by a lion was a distinction I could do without.

Of course, I didn't share this with Littlebaum. I may have a big mouth, but no matter what some people say, I'm not suicidal. Instead, I told him I was sorry for the way I'd treated him. “I should have sold you that monitor. I don't know what I was thinking about.”

“I guess maybe you should have.” He rested his left shoulder against the doorframe. His shoulders relaxed. He was expansive now, a CEO graciously accepting the mistake of a subordinate. “If you'd been smarter, you could have made a lot of money off of me.”

“I made a mistake,” I conceded, groveling a bit more.

Littlebaum scratched under the big cat's collar. His gnarled, blue-veined hands were the hands of a man of seventy, not forty. “Yes, you did make a mistake.” My admission seemed to please him. “Meet Matilda.” He took his hand off the collar, thought better of it, and grabbed hold again. “If you move slowly, everything will be fine.”

Actually, I wasn't planning on moving at all. Or at least I wasn't until the cat's tail stopped twitching. Even with Littlebaum holding on, I doubted he'd be able to restrain her if she really wanted to go. She probably weighed almost as much as he did, plus she had the advantage of having four legs and a lower center of gravity.

“She's a little nervous around strangers,” he observed.

“So don't take her to parties,” I retorted, nervousness making me facetious. It was the wrong thing to say.

“Parties,” he spat out. His hand tightened on the shotgun. “For years, no one could be bothered to give me the time of day. Now that I got my money, it's Oh, Parker, let's go to the bar and have a couple of rounds. Only of course I'm doing the paying.” His voice rose. “People are just a bunch of good-for-nothing pricks. Well, I say fuck 'em. I say we'd be better off without any of them around.” He punctuated his rant by punching the air with the hand that was holding the shotgun.

Matilda let out a low, angry growl of commiseration. She was matching Littlebaum's tone and going him one better.

“Matilda is a nice name. How did you choose it?” I asked, hoping to cool down the emotional climate.

“It was my mother's name.” Littlebaum's voice softened. He lowered his arm. “She's beautiful, isn't she?”

“Yes, she is.” I meant it, too. I could see why Littlebaum had fallen in love. Matilda was a golden poem of muscle and sinew, but a poem penned in the wrong time and place. “How old is she?”

Littlebaum stroked the lioness's head. She rubbed the side of her face against his leg. “She was two months when I got her and that was five months ago. She's not going to reach her full weight for another eight, nine months. I'm thinking about having a fence built around the place, so she can run free.” He chuckled. “Anyone sneaking in would definitely get a surprise.”

I made a crack about the postman not being a happy camper.

Littlebaum looked annoyed. “I'm talking about letting her out at night. Like a watchdog. She'd be my watchcat.”

“A pit bull might be simpler.”

“I'm not interested in simple.”

“Obviously.” Somewhere or other Littlebaum had turned the corner from animal admirer to animal fanatic. It wasn't enough for him to love animals anymore. He had to possess them. I'd heard about people like this, willing to sacrifice house, money, and family to possess a chimp or a big cat. I'd just never met anyone like that until now.

I'd named my store Noah's Ark, but Littlebaum seemed determine to build one. A Vietnam vet, he'd spent most of his time since the war pumping gas, bagging groceries, and working on a novel no one had ever seen. Then a distant uncle had died and he'd taken the very sizable inheritance he'd received from his death and bought a house with a quarter acre of land attached. After that, Littlebaum had gone on a buying spree.

He'd proceeded to acquire, if what I'd heard was true, several monkeys, a small baboon, snakes, lizards, several potbellied pigs, a goat, many parrots, and a couple of alligators from a variety of sources, which included breeding farms and small circuses. These places sell off their surplus stock to anyone who can pay for it, although they would deny it if asked. Lions, for example, are easy breeders. There's always a surplus. The cubs are either sold or killed. This is the side of the game parks and zoos no one wants to talk about.

“So, what do you want?” Littlebaum demanded. Oinks and squawks floated through the doorway. “Why are you here? I'm not selling anything.”

“I hadn't heard you were.”

Matilda made a move to sniff me. Littlebaum took his hand off her collar. I remained absolutely still. I was aware that my nose itched. I made no move to scratch it. As the lioness stepped forward, I realized how big her paws were, and then I thought about the scratches my cat, Jamie, could inflict with his. A faint odor of musk rose from Matilda as she came closer. I wondered what Jamie would think as Matilda rubbed her head against the side of my jeans, marking me with her scent. Then she licked my hand. Her tongue felt rough enough to scour the skin off my bones. I reached over and scratched her under her chin. She half closed her eyes and began a big, rumbly purr.

“See,” Littlebaum said. “She really is a big kitty.”

The cat leaned against my leg. Her whiskers trembled in the breeze. Her smell enveloped me. I could feel the hardness of the muscles under the fur. “I never said she wasn't.”

Littlebaum went on. “Lions are easy to train.”

“True.” They were more like dogs than cats in that regard. That's why so many circuses used them in their acts.

“They're much more reliable than those fifteen-foot pythons you handle. One of those could strangle you before anyone could get it off your neck.”

“I don't handle fifteen-footers by myself, and secondly, I don't let them get around my neck.”

“That's good.”

Matilda gave me a last cursory sniff and turned and padded back to Littlebaum. He scratched her back. His fingers made whorls in her fur. She stretched and leaned into him. “The funny thing about her is she doesn't like women very much. You're the exception. I think she was mistreated by a couple of them when she was a cub.”

“Usually it's the men that do the mistreating.”

Littlebaum shot me an odd look. “Not always. You'll forgive me if I don't ask you to come in. I'm not set up for company.”

Now that was a surprise. I shifted my weight slightly. “I wasn't going to ask to. The only reason I'm here is that I'm looking for Sulfin Olsen. I understand he works for you. I need to speak to him for a moment.”

Littlebaum rested the rifle against the wall. “He isn't here. He didn't show up for work today.”

I asked if he had his address.

Littlebaum pressed his lips together. “I forget. Look it up.”

“I tried that on the way over. Sulfin Olsen isn't listed. But then you probably know that. Listen,” I said when he didn't volunteer the information, “I'm doing you a favor. I want to speak to Sulfin about a police matter.”

“What kind of police matter?” Littlebaum asked suspiciously as he picked a Cheerio out of his beard and flicked it away.

“Nothing that has anything to do with you,” I hastened to reassure him. “But if I don't find him, the police might come here looking for him and I don't think you want that.”

Littlebaum digested the piece of news in silence. “Will it—this police matter—put Sulfin in jail?” he asked after a moment had gone by.

“No. I just want to know if he was with someone last night.”

“It was pretty bad out there.”

“I know. I was out in it.”

Matilda swished her tail impatiently. “So, who was Sulfin supposed to be with?” Littlebaum asked as he began scratching the top of her head.