The Koala of Death (12 page)
Since I hadn’t broken in for a trip down Memory Lane, I forced myself out of the Sixties and into the present by opening the cabinet door. Eureka! Crammed inside were a scuffed laptop and two thick manila file folders: one labeled ZOO NEWS, the other BLOGS. After a brief tussle with my conscience, Caro’s welfare won out. I grabbed everything and headed for the exit.
I had just started up the ladder to the deck when
Nomad
gave a sharp lurch to port. The wake of a speedboat? Through
this
fog? But try as the harbormaster might, she couldn’t keep boaters from cranking up the speed before they were out of the channel and into the Pacific. Shaking my head at reckless human folly, I continued up the ladder.
Just as I stuck my head out of the hatch, a shadow loomed out of the mist.
A tall man.
Brandishing a crowbar.
“Teddy Bentley! What the hell you doing snooping around Kate’s boat? I was about to bash your head in.”
“Just looking around,” I squeaked in alarm.
Heck Liddell’s craggy old face remained stared down at me. “No, you’re not. You’re stealing something.”
“These?” I hung onto the ladder with one hand and with the other held up the file folders in a gesture of complete openness. “No, no, no, I’m not stealing anything. These are just some files I need to write
ZooNews
. I’m taking over Kate’s job, so I have to…”
“What’d you mean, you’re taking over Kate’s job? She was a good writer, and you’re nothing more than a monkey’s ass-wiper.”
“Thank you so much for that enlightened job description, Heck, but would you please put the crowbar down? It’s making me nervous.”
With a grunt he put it down with one hand, and stretched the other toward me. “Gimme those files.”
Now that my head was no longer in danger of imminent bashing, my courage returned. “These files are property of the Gunn Zoo.” Not a total lie.
For a moment it looked like Heck was about to brandish the crowbar again, but then I heard a hatch slide back on the other side of the dock and a voice call, “Shut up out there! We’re trying to sleep!”
“Shut up yourself!” Heck yelled back. At the caller’s renewed demands for silence and a threat to call the police, Heck gave an exasperated sigh and turned away. Before stepping off the
Nomad
, he motioned me to follow him.
I was tempted to scurry back to the
Merilee,
but my curiosity got the better of me. Why was the old man so protective of
Nomad
? Consumed by curiosity, I scrambled up the ladder, locked the hatch behind me, and followed Heck down the dock toward his houseboat.
To put it baldly,
My Fancy
wasn’t.
More than just plain, Heck’s home was a floating slum. Little more than a shack on pontoons, the eyesore had enraged the yacht owners at the northern end of the harbor. We liveaboarders at the southern end weren’t crazy about it, either. Once, over a bowl of chowder at Fred’s Fish Market, the harbormaster had admitted to me that four-fifths of the complaints she received involved
My Fancy
. They ranged all the way from the houseboat’s outdoor appearance to the stench emanating from its cabin. Heck’s own behavior didn’t help. When approached about the possibility of cleaning up
My Fancy
’s act, he never just said “No,” it was always “Hell, no, and you know where you can shove your complaint!”
So it was with some trepidation that I accepted his offer for of a cup of tea. While I was no longer afraid of the man, I was afraid of catching something.
When I stepped inside, I saw that he had cats.
Lots
of cats. The smell of ripening kitty litter just about knocked me down.
Now, normally I like cats. I even have one myself. But Heck’s cats—I counted seven—were very “catty” cats, by which I mean that they looked semiferal, and appeared never to have been groomed. So they shed. Oh, did they shed. When I nudged aside a fat calico so that I could rest my butt on a tattered cushion, my hand came away covered with hair. The chipped coffee mug Heck handed me—it said STOLEN FROM THE SAUSALITO DEPARTMENT OF CORRECTIONS—had a hair stuck to its side. Another hair floated in the weak tea he poured.
But Caro had raised me to be polite. “Thank you,” I said, taking a faux sip. Then I sneezed. A little white cat that looked part Siamese sneezed, too.
“Asthma got you, Teddy?”
“Something tickled my nose.” My eyes began to water, making me wonder if I was developing an allergy to cats. I hoped not. I loved Miss Priss and I’d rather sneeze my life away than give her up. I loved hairy little DJ Bonz, too. And don’t even get me started on the anteater, the monkeys, the koalas…They were all my babies, my beloved babies.
No, Teddy, come back to the present. Here you are, sitting inside the houseboat of the harbor’s most disreputable resident. He’s armed with a crowbar, and you’ve lost your mind.
Come to think of it, Heck’s quick arrival on the scene should have tipped me off to something. Now that he’d stashed the crowbar under the galley sink, I asked, “Heck, were you actually guarding the
Nomad
?”
“Damn right. Kate was my friend and I don’t want anyone messing with her boat, even now she’s dead.”
“Friend?”
“For years and years.”
Puzzling, considering that Kate’s
Nomad
had only been berthed in the harbor for two months. Before I could ask him to explain, he added, “Look, Teddy. I gotta talk about what’s happened and how the cops have it all wrong. That buddy of yours never touched her, and you can take that to the bank.”
Why did everyone keep calling me Bill’s buddy? I barely knew the man. In this case, though, the mistake might come in handy. “I don’t think he killed her, either,” I said, “but if you wouldn’t mind telling me, why are you so sure? Do you know Bill?”
“We’ve shared a few beers.”
That came as a surprise. “You have?”
“Sure, while he was dating Kate. They used to drop by here every now and then.”
“Here?” I looked around. Besides the bow-to-stern cat hair, the houseboat was furnished with amateurish built-ins that were coming apart at the joints. The sickly green galley table tilted to starboard, and the long settee that ran almost the length of the boat was covered in disintegrating purple Naugahyde. The only halfway attractive item in sight was taped over an unmade bed in the bow: a Quicksilver Messenger poster identical to the one on the
Nomad
. “Did Kate give you that poster?”
He nodded. “Said her father had two of them so I could have the extra. Ty really liked ol’ Quicksilver. I did, too. Even saw them in concert, once. ’Course, that was a long time ago, when everybody and his brother was wearing hair down to their asses.”
“You knew Kate’s father?”
“We lived in the same harbor. Canaan, up by Sausalito. Three years back slip fees at Canaan got too high, so I hauled ass down here.”
“Heck, excuse me if I sound rude, but how old are you?”
“Seventy-five next month.” He gave me a big smile. His teeth were brown, but they were his own. “I been living on boats since I was in diapers.”
“Was Kate’s father, ah,
mature
, too?”
“Hell, no. He’s about twenty-five years younger than me. I was close with Grover, his dad, is what it was. Grover was my fishing buddy. But that Ty was a real good kid. Smart, too. ’Course, most of the kids around the harbor was smart in those days, but none smart as him. Terrible, what happened.”
“What was that?”
“He got that Alzheimer’s thing, and him so young. Wasn’t much more than fifty. Poor shit.”
I winced. An elderly aunt of mine on my father’s side had developed Alzheimer’s; it was a long, slow sadness before she finally forgot how to breathe. “What about Kate’s mother?”
“She died early on. Drowned in Canaan Harbor. Got stoned and fell off the boat, just like they first believed Kate did. But that turned out to be wrong, didn’t it?”
Mother and child, both said to have drowned in safe harbor, not at sea. The coincidence unsettled me.
Oblivious to the way my mind was running, Heck continued. “Kate was less than a year old when it happened. Let’s see, her mother woulda been…” He counted on his fingers. “Don’t know for sure, but she was young and she drowned right around the time Ronnie Reagan became president. Me being a Socialist, I didn’t vote for the jerk. Power to the people, I say. Hey, what’s wrong with your ear?”
“A flamingo bit me.”
“Birds peck, they don’t bite.”
“Tell that to the flamingo. So you’re saying Kate’s an orphan?” If so, who would take care of her funeral arrangements? Aster Edwina, maybe. If not…Well, I couldn’t let Kate molder away in Potter’s Field. I’d just put off purchasing a new engine for the
Merilee
, and use my overtime money to give Kate the sendoff she deserved.
Heck’s outraged voice startled me. “She wasn’t no orphan!”
“But you said her father…”
“Just because you get Alzheimer’s doesn’t mean you drop dead on the spot. Ty’s alive, if you can call it that. Kate’d suspected something was wrong, but since he seemed to be taking care of himself all right she let it slide for a while. Ty always was the eccentric type, so I guess she just thought he was just getting more that way. It wasn’t til she got back from Australia that she saw how bad he’d got. Losing weight ’cause he was forgetting to eat. She had to work and all that, and she couldn’t take care of him herself, so she put him in this nursing home in Oakland. That’s why she left her San Diego job and signed on with the Gunn Zoo, so she could drive up there to see him every week. I went with her, once. Don’t plan to go again ’cause this Ty ain’t the boy I used to know. Tell you this much, if that Alzheimer’s thing ever starts with me, I’ll take
My Fancy
out for a cruise past the breakwater and we’ll let the ocean do what the ocean’s gonna do.”
A sea dog’s preferred death. Who was I to judge? “If Kate’s mother drowned when she was just a baby, who raised her?”
“Ty did, him and what other woman he could coax into staying on the
Nomad
. He wasn’t all that good-looking and like I said, kinda weird, but there’s women can get past that. The one that stayed the longest was Peony Moonbeam. At least that’s what she called herself. Fixed the
Nomad
up like it was the
Love Boat
or something, she even talked Ty into letting her paint the hull like that. Christ Almighty!” He vented a rare chuckle.
“’Course, Ty was a one of those retro-hippies himself,” he continued. “Never cared for money or anything ’cept Kate and tinkering around in that workshop he rented. Anyways, after about ten years or so, Peony Moonbeam ran off with some other guy and that was the end of that. No more women for Ty. Kate was pretty much old enough to take care of herself by then. Not having a mama, maybe that’s the reason she turned into such a little runaround!” He chuckled again, as if her behavior didn’t bother him.
The single cat hair floating in my coffee mug had somehow multiplied into three. I fished them out with my finger and wiped it on the purple Naugahyde settee. “Does Kate have any other living relatives?”
“Aunts and uncles’re all dead. Ty’s own father died early on, same with his mother. That family tended to burn out fast, but they sure blazed bright while they was alive. Smart as whips, the whole pack of them. In the genes, I expect. Anyway, it was just Ty and Kate.” All traces of humor gone, he shook his head woefully. “Now it’s just Ty. You never know how life’s gonna turn out, do you?”
No, you don’t. “Do you remember the name of that nursing home? They’ll need to be contacted about Kate’s death and new arrangements will have to be made for her father’s care.”
He scratched his head and dandruff flew. “Let’s see. Was it Sunshine Acres? Sun Peak Acres? Sun Acres? It was Sun something Acres, I know that much.”
“In Oakland itself? Or just somewhere around there?”
“Outside of town a little ways. Oh! You know what? I just remembered that she had to move Ty a couple months ago ’cause the Sun something Acres was being tore down to build another damned shopping center. Pretty soon, that’s all this country’s gonna be, one big shopping center Atlantic to Pacific, nothing but glass and steel connected by thousands of miles of asphalt. Damn Republicans. Not that them Democrats is any better.”
That explained some of the confusion over Kate’s next-of-kin contact information. She’d died before she had a chance to update it. One thing puzzled me.
“Did Kate know you lived in Gunn Landing Harbor? Is that why she moved
Nomad
here?”
He bared brown teeth at me. “Nah. I ’bout fell over when I saw her steering
Nomad
into that slip. And I gotta tell ya, I wouldn’t have recognized her if it hadn’t been for that thing. How many psychedelic orange and blue sailboats you ever seen?”
None, as a matter of fact. Sailboat owners usually had more restrained tastes.
“So, Teddy, you gonna find out who killed Kate?”
“Me? I’m a zookeeper, not a cop. Sheriff Rejas is working the case.”
“Yeah, and went and arrested the wrong man. I heard about that thing you did last year, finding out who murdered that rich guy down at the zoo. My girl was worth ten of him, so why don’t you get her some justice like you did that other creep.”
I was growing increasingly uncomfortable, whether because of the catty air or Heck’s suggestion that I become Kate Nido’s avenger, so I put my hairy coffee mug down on the ugly green table and gathered up the file folders. “It’s been nice visiting with you, Heck,” I said, standing up. “But if I don’t get going, I’ll be late to the zoo.”
“You pay attention to what I said, hear?”
Before I could stop myself, I said, “I’ll see what I can do.”
***
Once at the zoo, I visited the Administration Building to tell Zorah what I’d discovered about Kate’s father. By the time I left her office, she was already on the phone with the Oakland Police Department.