The Koala of Death (2 page)

An injury to Kate’s head must have accounted for the thin red smear across my soaked sweatshirt, which for some reason, Joe demanded I turn over to him along with my sweatpants. His request left me standing on the deck wrapped only in a terry cloth robe that had seen better days. I tried not to watch as two hefty EMT’s casually zipped Kate into a body bag, then just as casually carted her off toward a waiting ambulance. This just-another-day-at-the-office attitude seemed all wrong. Now that the fog was beginning to dissipate, I saw that the tourists gathered at the rail overlooking the harbor didn’t seem particularly disturbed, either. When had the world become so indifferent?

Remaining in sheriff mode, Joe asked, “Ms. Nido’s the one they call ‘Koala Kate,’ isn’t she? Has that TV segment on
Good Morning, San Sebastian
? Called ‘
Koala Kate’s Kuddly Kritters
’?”

“The zoo hired her two months ago, just before the new koala exhibit opened up,” I explained. “That TV show was only part of her duties.”

Who would call the station to tell them Kate wouldn’t appear tomorrow or ever again? Zorah Vega, the zoo director? A former zookeeper herself, Zorah was great with animals, but social niceties seemed beyond her. She’d delegate the job, perhaps even to me, since the owner of the TV station was an acquaintance of my mother’s. Oh, God. That meant…

“Who was there?” For some reason, Joe had taken out a note pad and was writing in it.

I pulled myself together. “Who was where?”

“At the Grimaldis’ party, Teddy.”

“Liveaboarders from the harbor. And zookeepers.”

He looked up from his note pad. “Why would zookeepers—besides yourself, of course, since you live here—attend a harbor beer bash?”

I swallowed again. The fact that I’d just pulled a coworker out of the water was beginning to hit home. Kate had felt so cold. So…so
dead.

“Teddy? Answer me.”

“They…uh, Sam and Doris Grimaldi are hosting this years’ Bowling for Rhinos fundraiser at their bowling alley, and they wanted…they wanted to treat the committee volunteers. They don’t live at the harbor, so they probably left for their house in S-S-San Sebastian once the p-party was…was…”

“Sit down.” Joe eased me onto a deck chair and hovered. “Take deep breaths.”

I followed his advice, and as soon as my head cleared, stood back up. “I’m fine, don’t fuss. This thing, it’s just a shock, that’s all. Nobody expects to…”
Get a grip, Teddy.
I forced my voice to sound steadier than I felt. “The party. You want to know who was there. Besides the BFR committee, there was Linda Cushing, whom you just met. Linda’s lived at the harbor for ages and can tell you anything you need to know about anyone. Besides Linda, there was Walt MacAdams, Larry DuFries, myself, and a couple of other liveaboarders from around here.”

“I need the zookeepers’ names, too, Teddy.”

One by one I counted them off on shaking fingers. “Buster Daltry. Since he’s the rhino keeper, he’s also Chairman of Bowling for Rhinos. And there was Robin Chase, big cats; Jack Spence, bears; Myra Sebrowski, great apes. Oh, and Lex Yarnell, the park ranger. He’s on the committee, too. And Zorah, of course.”

Joe stopped writing. “Zorah Vega, the zoo director?”

“I’m afraid so.” Not that long ago, Joe had arrested Zorah for suspicion of murder. Someone else had been proven guilty of the crime, but I knew she still carried a grudge against him for the time she’d spent in jail.

“Anyone else at the party besides the neighbors and the zoo folks?”

I searched my mind, but it refused to cooperate. “If I think of anyone else, I’ll let you know. But what difference does it make? It was an accident, wasn’t it? Kate probably had too much to drink, then slipped and fell into the harbor. I guess she hit her head and that’s why she didn’t call for help, even though you’d think…”

“How much did you have to drink last night, Ms. Bentley?” He’d become official again, and I hated it.

“One-and-a-half beers.”

“You didn’t hear anything unusual?”

“No.”

“Cries of distress? Anything that sounded like a struggle?”

“Hey, what’s all this…?”

“Thank you, Ms. Bentley. That’ll be all.” He stepped onto the dock and walked toward his deputies, leaving me standing on the
Merilee
’s deck with my mouth open.

***

My name is Theodora Esmeralda Iona Bentley, but most people call me Teddy. I’ve been a zookeeper at the Gunn Zoo for around a year, mostly working with the giant anteater and various small primates, sometimes helping out with the Mexican gray wolves and the marsupials in Down Under, the zoo’s Australian section.

As work places go, the Gunn Zoo is ideal. Located four miles inland from Gunn Landing Harbor, it escapes most of the coastal fog, so my workdays tend to be sunny and bright. But every now and then, Aster Edwina Gunn, administrator of the Gunn Family Trust, which founded the privately-owned zoo decades earlier, limos over to spread fear and gloom among employees and animals alike. Given what had happened to Kate, today would be one of those days.

Despite the sad business of the morning, I arrived at work well before seven and was zipping along one of the wider zoo paths in my zebra-striped cart toward Down Under. When I had phoned the zoo director to tell her about Kate’s death, she’d told me to start my day with the marsupials before taking care of my own charges.

“I’ll call Bill, but you know how he is,” she’d said. “He was probably tending bar at the Amiable Avocado last night and has his phone turned off. In the meantime, the less the marsupials’ routines are disturbed, the better off they’ll be, so get down there first thing.”

Known to zoo visitors as “Outback Bill” because of his heavy Aussie accent, Bill was a part-time keeper who at one time had dated Kate. Recently their relationship had ended, and Bill had been seen around the local bars with a series of other women. Given their estrangement, I doubted Bill would grieve too hard over her death, especially since it meant that Zorah might now hire him full-time. Originally a keeper at the Sydney Zoo, Bill could tell the difference between a nail-tail wallaby and a rock wallaby. Even better, the koalas liked him almost as much as they’d liked Kate.

When my cart screeched to a halt outside the service entrance to the koala enclosure, I at first didn’t see them. Normally, Wanchu, the female, would be sleeping in a tree, with her mate, Nyee, snoring nearby. But when I climbed out of the cart, I saw Wanchu waddling across the enclosure toward me.

“Morning, cutie!” I called. “Ready for some fresh eucalyptus browse?”

She looked up with those big brown koala eyes.
Yes
, she thought at me.
Hurry up so I can get back to sleep.

Koalas look adorable with their Teddy-bear builds and goo-goo eyes. The Aboriginal people of Australia believe koalas are the reincarnation of lost children, a belief that—given the animals’ sweet dispositions—makes sense. Even wild koalas allow strangers to pick them up. Part of their docility stems from not only their temperament, but from the fact that koalas are almost always drowsy. If they’re not already asleep, they’re thinking about sleeping, because their diet of eucalyptus leaves is so poor in protein that they have to eat a pound of leaves per day merely to stay alive. All that chewing exhausts them so much that they wind up sleeping 75 percent of the time.

Wanchu was one of the only Gunn Zoo animals we keepers were encouraged to touch. Zoo-born and orphaned only days after she’d left her mother’s pouch, she had been hand-raised by an overly doting zookeeper. Now full-grown, she still loved to cuddled.

“Come to Mama, sweetness,” I cooed, grasping her by her forearms.

Wanchu pulled herself up and curled around my torso much as she would have around a tree trunk. Because of her heavy eucalyptus intake, she smelled like cough drops. After nestling against me for a few minutes while I sang a few bars of “Waltzing Matilda,” she lifted her head, gazed soulfully into my eyes, and chirped, “Eeep, eeep, eeep!”

“Yes, and I’m glad to see you, too, Wanchu. You’re my favoritest female koala.” I didn’t want to make Nyee jealous.

“Eeep?”

“You’re hungry? Well, your wish is my command. A large serving of eucalyptus browse coming right up.”

She snuggled again. “Eeep?”

“Yes, I’ll give Nyee some, too.”

“Eeep.”

Putting a koala down can be difficult, not only because you don’t want to, but because koalas cling. Wanchu finally allowed me to place her in the crook of her tree so I could return to my cart for a large bundle of wrapped eucalyptus leaves. I was tying them to her tree when I heard another cart screech to a halt on the other side of the fence.

Seconds later, Bill, all six feet four, two-hundred-and-twenty pounds of him, charged through the gate. “Rack off on your own bizzo, Teddy, and leave the walla to me.”

Fortunately, due to once having an Australian stepfather, I could translate:
Go mind your own business, Teddy, and leave the koala to me.

“Hi, Bill. Zorah told you about Kate?”

“That she carked it? Yeh.” Translation:
That she died. Yeah
.

He flapped his hand in a go-away gesture and started toward the koalas, but not before I saw a haunted look in his eyes. Did he still care for Kate?

Before I could ask, another cart pulled up. When the brakes didn’t squeal, I guessed it was Zorah, glorying in her recent promotion to zoo director by requisitioning the zoo’s newest cart.

My guess proved right. A big woman, both in height and breadth, Zorah’s arms were covered with tattoos of the animals she’d cared for prior to her promotion: a Bengal tiger, a black-maned lion, a jaguar, and various and sundry great apes. Zorah was nothing if not colorful.

“Teddy, I need to talk to Bill. Privately.”

To offer him a full-time job, I hoped. God knows the man needed the work. Besides his three-nights-a-week stint as bartender at the Amiable Avocado, he was also bagging groceries at a Monterey supermarket. Strange, considering he’d resigned from a full-time job as marsupial keeper at the San Diego Zoo to move up here. Not to follow Kate, I hoped, because if that had been his motive he’d shown more heart than brains, since their relationship hadn’t survived the move.

“Okay, I’m gone,” I said to Zorah. “If either of you need anything, call me on the radio.”

She didn’t answer, just started talking to Bill in a low voice.

I steered my cart out of the Down Under enclosure and headed toward Tropics Trail.

The three hundred-acre Gunn Zoo is always beautiful, but in the early mornings it is pure magic. Surrounded by twenty-five hundred acres of blue gum eucalyptus forests and vineyards, the zoo is further buffered from the outside world by a ring of hills high enough to hold back most of the coast’s fog. No sound of civilization’s hubbub intrudes. Instead, we fortunate zookeepers are treated to the serenade of waking animals: the lilting music of larks and jays in the aviaries, the eerie calls of New Guinea singing dogs, and from the large animal sanctuary that encircles the entire zoo, elephants trumpeting their joy at just being alive.

How anyone could work in an office was beyond me.

By now visitors were trickling in, so I drove with care in order to keep from mowing them down. Most were headed toward the giant anteater enclosure. Thanks to recent publicity, much of it generated by Kate, who had also taken care of the zoo’s PR, Lucy and her baby had become celebrities.

A few tendrils of morning fog had unexpectedly made their way over the surrounding hills, and wisps of it clung to the tall eucalyptus trees that ringed the grounds. I loved these rare mornings, when fog hushed the visitors’ chatter, thus encouraging the animals to venture away from their resting spots and get closer to the fence. As I passed through Tropics Trail, I noticed Willy, one of the Andean bears, waving a furry paw at an admiring crowd as he sat on his rump at the edge of his moat. He was looking one teenager in the eye, a most un-animal thing to do.

“Look, he’s saying hello!” said one woman to another, as she nibbled on a bag labeled Poppy’s Kettle Korn. “Isn’t that sweet?”

Willy was merely begging. Since visitors didn’t always obey the signs telling them not to feed the animals, the bear had developed a taste for popcorn.

More begging was going on in the iguana exhibit. Lilliana, the female, flicked her tongue at the crowd in the hopes that they would toss her big fat bug. From time to time she’d attempt a wave but an iguana isn’t as agile as a bear, so the effort failed. Her elderly mate, Reynaldo, ignored Lilliana’s act and continued his snooze-fest by a rock.

I felt privileged to work here, surrounded by friends both human and animal, spending my time outdoors under the California sky instead of some stuffy office. As I drove along, the scents of animals, popcorn, and salt air blended together in a pleasant potpourri and helped ease the sting of the morning’s tragedy.

Monkey Mania was a quarter-acre open-air enclosure where twenty squirrel monkeys named after various movie stars mingled freely with zoo visitors. Such an arrangement could never have worked if it weren’t for the many volunteers who kept human hands away from monkey tails, and in turn, monkey teeth from nipping at human hands. Bernice Unser, one of those volunteers, met me at the exhibit’s entrance gate, her face creased in concern.

“Why’s the zoo so weird this morning?” she asked. “I can’t get anyone to talk to me or even look me in the eye. On my way through the parking lot, I saw Aster Edwina’s limo pulling up, too. What’s going on?” The other volunteers crowded around her, eager to hear my answer.

I had three choices: tell the truth, play dumb, or plead the Fifth. I chose the latter. “There’ll be an announcement later, but for the time being, sorry, I can’t say anything.”

“Did somebody escape?” another volunteer asked, one of the high school seniors enrolled in our ZooTeen program. From his avid expression, he hoped somebody had. Somebody big, like a lion or a rhino. Oh, the thrills.

“Nothing like that. You’re all perfectly safe. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to release the monkeys.”