The Marriage at the Rue Morgue (A Rue and Lakeland Mystery) (23 page)

She said, “But . . .” and then fell silent.

Lance said, “Produce crisis.”

I seized two pineapples and threw them into the cart, while Lance added a giant watermelon. Then I whipped around to head for the checkout. Beside me, Lance had one hand on his head. Trailing behind, the police detective had grabbed a cantaloupe. I cut into the checkout line, threw a random credit card on the counter, and called out, “I’ll pick it up after the wedding.”

“Police business,” Detective Carmichael added.

As we exited the store, without waiting for anyone to bag up our purchases, I heard the cashier ask, “What kind of a police emergency needs
fruit
?”

We tumbled back into the car, and Carmichael screeched out to the edge of the parking lot. Before he could swing into traffic, a black car shot through the intersection. The detective hit his brakes and swore. Craning from the backseat, I saw a gray head behind the wheel. “I would swear that’s Gert Oeschle,” I said to Lance. “I think that’s Stan’s car.”

“I didn’t think Gert drove,” Lance said.

“I’d still swear that was Stan’s car.”

Carmichael pulled out behind it. I craned my neck to catch the plates. Stan’s custom tags said DONR. But the car was too far ahead, and it cut out at the turn for the hospital. Then we rushed through that intersection ourselves, and Lance and I resumed our discussion of the problem at hand.

The police cruiser had an engine that our primate mobile could only dream of, and it made our speeding dashes of the day before feel like cozy trolley rides. Including our stop at the grocery store, it took ten minutes from the time we left the sheriff’s office until we reached Olivia’s street.

“Now what?” Carmichael asked as he pulled up on the curb.

“Now we place the fruit, open the door, and stay as far back as we can,” Lance said. “Christian will come with a dart gun once I can raise him on the phone, but maybe we can get this hungry lady quarantined before that becomes necessary.”

“I don’t suppose either of these vehicles has a radio?” I added. When Carmichael indicated his cruiser’s two-way radio, I said, “No, like a radio-radio. One that picks up stations.”

Before I could pursue that avenue further, we saw Lucy. She was, as Olivia said, playing on her son’s jungle gym. While we all stood staring, she brachiated arm over arm across the monkey bars, covering the distance in two giant swings, then turning around without ever dismounting and going back the other way.

She was as filthy as Chuck, her hair matted with encrusted feces. She was too far away to smell, but I couldn’t imagine the odor was much better than Chuck’s had been. While we stood staring, she noticed us. With a huffing noise, she stopped mid-swing and dangled for a moment by one arm. For a few moments, she hung like that, looking at me with liquid brown eyes under her filthy orange hair. If she hadn’t been my orangutan before, then she certainly was now. How could I possibly let her get killed when I was so close to saving her?

I eyed the police around me, all of whom had hands on their sidearms, although no weapons had yet been drawn. We didn’t have any margin for error.

We had the answer to our pregnancy question, too. Lucy had labial swellings. Or, as Ace had put it, “her junk’s all messed up.” A human pregnancy showed in the stomach. An orangutan pregnancy showed in the bottom. Since Lucy was naked, she was quite literally hanging out all over the place. However, she didn’t act like she was about to drop a baby on the spot, so we had some time to get her contained.

“Do you reckon she has any idea how to parent?” I asked Lance.

“Doubt it,” he said. “Ace said she was hand-reared.”

There wasn’t anything to say to that. I turned my attention to our human companions. “She almost certainly associates guns with being darted,” I told Detective Carmichael. “If you draw on her, she’s not going to stick around to see what happens. Please, keep those things holstered.” Slowly, the detective moved his arm away from his gun. His companions followed suit.

Lucy resumed her swinging. She was too far away to hear us, but she recognized the relaxed body language and responded in kind. Then she extended off the end of the gym and, instead of turning around, she grabbed the rope ladder and used it to fly out away from the jungle gym exactly like a kid would do.

Maybe it was the fact that she was so clearly playing. Possibly it was because Lance, who was
finally
on the phone to Christian, said very loudly, “She’s
pregnant.
” Or maybe it was because all down the street, especially at Olivia’s house, there were kids hanging out the windows to watch. But the cops only even considered their guns one other time.

“OK,” Lance said, flipping his phone shut. “Christian’s coming, but I think we’d all like to get her into the van before he can get here. We need to bust up the fruit a little, make it smell stronger, so it might get her attention. And I wish we had a radio.”

“Surely
somebody
’s got a radio,” I said. “You work on the fruit.”

I headed to Olivia’s house. “I’m sorry I panicked on the phone,” she said when she came to the door. It looked like
her
baby wouldn’t be getting a nap, because it was wide awake sitting up on Olivia’s hip in a sling. Her house opened into the living room, and every room fanned right off of that. I could see a row of doors to the right, and the kitchen was clearly visible behind the TV. In a word, the house was tiny. Like every other home in the neighborhood, it made even Lance’s and my small home look capacious.

Unlike the other houses in the neighborhood, though, Lance and I had helped build this one. I knew its layout intimately because I was here when they laid the foundation, and we had helped do everything but the plumbing and electricity. Olivia and her mother lived here with the children, and we had been part of her sweat-equity team helping a local housing program erect the building. The jungle gym was a surprise from Olivia’s church. It was popular with the neighborhood kids. Also, it seemed, with visiting orangutans.

Olivia’s baby started beating on her mother’s chest and pointing back toward the little bedroom on the end of the living room where they and a crew of six or seven boys had been watching the action out the window.

“Miss Noel, can I pet it?” Olivia’s son demanded, running up behind his mother.

A search through my memory failed to produce the child’s name. I had met him. Once. Kids couldn’t really be on a build site, but when the home was almost finished, Olivia’s mother brought him by to see. Olivia was pregnant then. Her son was probably five years old now, and he didn’t bear much resemblance to the little boy I remembered meeting. He had grown fast. So I was relieved when Olivia said, “Shush, Randy. No.”

“Please?” Randy asked. He was clearly talking to me.

“No, honey,” I said. “She’s a wild animal. She doesn’t know her own strength. She could really hurt you without even meaning to.” A collective groan met my statement. It seemed the kids had been waiting for me to referee this question and had held hopes I would rule in their favor.

“I’m sorry,” Olivia repeated.

“Don’t sweat it,” I said.

Randy ignored her. “What’s going to happen to it?”

“She’ll go to the Ohio Zoo. The zoo can take care of her.” Another groan from the bedroom suggested that this was the wrong answer, too. Did they think I was going to put up a fence and house her in the backyard?

“Those policemen won’t hurt it?” Randy persisted. Oh, good lord. How much did this kid know about what happened up north?

“No,” I assured him, with more confidence than I felt. It looked like he had a string of questions to follow up, and I didn’t have time to answer them. Olivia kept trying to shoo him back into the other room, but he clearly planned to stay out and talk to me. “Honey,” I told him, wondering as I spoke if he knew what I was talking about, “I have to go help catch that orangutan right now, and I need to talk to your mom. But if we get through this without anybody getting hurt, I absolutely promise that I’ll invite you and your friends to come visit us at the monkey sanctuary before summer’s out.”

“Ohhh,” he said. Clearly he
did
know what I was talking about. “Mama says you don’t allow visitors out there.”

I said, “These are extraordinary circumstances. I’ll make an exception.”

Round-eyed, he backed away to the bedroom with his friends, without looking away from me. He didn’t even ask what “extraordinary” meant.

I refused to think about the chaos I had offered to unleash in a climate that was
not
a zoo or anything like it. But it bought me the peace I needed. Finally, I could talk to Olivia. “Have you got a radio I could borrow?”

Olivia looked over her shoulder at her entertainment center, where the radio was pretty much built in with the cable box and DVD player. She looked back at me and wordlessly shook her head.

“I got one!” Randy was back, hauling something red. It took me a minute to realize it was a CD player and boom box, probably a prized possession.

“I forgot all about that thing,” Olivia said. “The CD player’s busted, but I guess the radio still works if the batteries aren’t dead.”

Solemnly, Randy turned the machine on. It blasted us with static, but that was fine. I could worry about tuning it later. Suddenly, I didn’t regret promising this little kid and his buddies a tour of our facility. In fact, I felt pretty good.

As I returned to the curb, Lance threw down the watermelon with a good deal of drama, smashing it open before he picked it up and tossed it in the paddy wagon. “Check it out,” I said, holding up the radio.

Lance countered, “Look at
this.
” The paddy wagon had blankets. I saw them as soon as Lance stood aside from tossing in the melon. He had arranged them so they showed out the door.

“How’d that happen?” I asked.

Detective Carmichael answered me. “I heard you all talking about what kind of traps you’d been setting up, and I had them grab us some blankets down at the jailhouse.”

“I could kiss you,” I told him.

He chuckled. “What do you plan to do with the radio?”

“Your brother said the orangutans come to music. I’m hoping to put the radio up on the roof and play something she likes.” We already had Lucy’s attention. She had stopped brachiating and rope-flying and was now perched on top of the monkey bars watching us intently, opening and closing all four of her great hands.

“All right, did he say what kind?” Carmichael asked, taking Randy’s red radio out of my hands. “What station you think I ought to turn on?”

At first, I couldn’t answer him, because it seemed so ridiculous. Here we were standing around on the curb urbanely talking about an orangutan’s favorite tunes. “Crunk,” I finally said. “But he seemed to think any rap would be OK.”

“All righty. One-oh-four-point-three, then, coming up.” Carmichael tuned the radio to a Columbus station that was initially on commercial break. Then he got in his squad car and talked on the two-way radio. “Edie,” he said to the woman running dispatch. “We need a favor down here. Can you get a call through to a radio station in Columbus?”

While I had been getting the radio, police cars had arrived quietly at either end of the street, sealing the neighborhood off from traffic. I didn’t feel like telling them it wouldn’t do much good if Lucy took off across the yards. If I had, they probably would have started trying to evacuate the houses.

The station cycled through a commercial for a used-car lot, an ambulance-chaser lawyer, and a chiropractor. Lucy largely ignored us. She resumed the jungle gym games, climbing up the ladder now without using the rungs. Instead, she gripped the posts with her massive hands and shimmied up to dangle by the arms from the T-bar across the equipment’s top. Then she pulled up and hung suspended by all four hands for a minute before she suddenly dropped to the ground, flipping upright along the way.

“Oh!” I jumped back. Even knowing how primates play, with a lot of physicality and sudden descents, the maneuver startled me. All of the cops went for their pieces, except for Detective Carmichael, who was still in the car on the two-way with Edie. But nobody drew and Lucy, completely unaware of her peril, began shimmying up the poles once more.

“She’s going to do it again,” I quietly warned the company on the sidewalks and around the cars. “They like repetition.”

“Tell me about it.” Deputy Greene was among the assembled forces, and he reached up to check his hat as he spoke.

Carmichael got out of the car and turned the FM radio up so that the tail end of the chiropractor’s commercial blasted across the lawn. With a little help, he placed the radio on top of the paddy wagon, then led all the cops around the other side, out of Lucy’s line of sight. Lance and I also stood back, though we remained in view. If she wasn’t intimidated by us now, she wasn’t likely to be. We stood close together, tightly holding hands while we waited for the ape to notice the change.

At first, she did not. The chiropractor wound into a public service announcement of some kind, and she dropped and climbed up the poles again. Sweet-smelling watermelon and tempting blankets had nothing on the playground equipment for an animal who had been living in boring confinement for the most recent months of her life. She surely recognized the paddy wagon for what it was, and the question wasn’t whether we could trick her to come inside, but whether we could convince her that the confinement had more benefits than the kind of freedom she had been enjoying. And so we waited.

The PSA ended, and the DJ came on. “Welcome back to one-oh-four-point-three, hip-hop and
more.
I am High-T and I aim to keep you pumping through the weekend. Now the all request lunch-power-hour is purely a weekday event, and it happens around noon, as I’m sure you all know, not the middle of the afternoon. How
ever,
I have a special request right now from Detective Andrew Carmichael of the Muscogen County Sheriff’s Office.” Behind the paddy wagon, the detective was shifting from foot to foot, looking anywhere but at the rest of the force. Which was difficult, since they were all crowded together in the vehicle’s shadow.