The Penguin Who Knew Too Much (24 page)

I studied his plate for a few seconds, then went in to help myself to the same things he was eating. Not that I could think of any logical reason for Blake to poison us, but he was rather pushing the food. He could just be one of those people who judges his success as a host by his guests’ food intake. Still, better safe than sorry.

I took my time loading my plate, so I could study the interior of the cottage. Either Blake was naturally tidy or the hotel housekeeping staff had been in recently. Apart from the food, the only sign of occupancy I could see was the neat little office set up just inside the front door. The Chippendale writing desk held not only the laptop, but also a small high-tech printer. Nearby was a piece of luggage that looked like a cross between a large briefcase and a small filing cabinet. I spotted a small stack of expensive-looking Montgomery Blake Foundation letterhead. A traveling office for the rich and famous. The screen saver on Blake's laptop was flipping slowly through a gallery of photos of Blake posing with assorted animals, birds, and reptiles.

Nothing suspicious, alas. But I hadn’t yet seen the bedroom or the bathroom. I made a mental note to visit the bathroom before I left, whether I needed to or not.

“Red or white?” Blake asked when I returned to the patio.

“White,” I said. I normally preferred red wine, but Blake was drinking white. I had to admit, though, that it was an amazingly good white wine.

“So,” I said. “Have you come up with an inventory of animals that might be turning up on our doorstep?”

“Not much on wasting time with useless social chitchat, are you?” Blake said with a chuckle. “Yes, here's your list.”

The list was neatly printed on pale cream paper that looked as if it would match the letterhead.

“Of course, it's only what I pulled together, based on what I
saw on my first visit last month, and the discussions I had with Patrick,” Blake said.

“And your visit to the zoo this afternoon,” I added.

“Yes,” Blake said. “Though I didn’t learn much from strolling around outside, and his office was locked. By the police, I presume. If I could just convince Chief Burke to let me see the zoo's files, I’d feel a lot more confident that the list was accurate.”

Was Blake really badgering the chief to see the files? Even if he was, that didn’t clear him of destroying Lanahan's files. If I’d burned the files, I’d make a point of demanding to see them.

As I scanned the list, I started to feel relieved. I didn’t see many animals that I didn’t already know about from my own trip to the zoo—and, of course, my observation of the creatures that had arrived in our yard. If Blake's list was at all accurate, we already had the lion's share of the zoo's population. I pulled out my notebook and flipped it open to a fresh page.

“Impalas, twelve,” I said. “I gather we’re not talking about the Chevrolets.”

“Ah, impalas,” Blake exclaimed. “The McDonald's of the African plains!” “The what?”

“We already have them,” Dad said. “In the pasture with the llamas. You know, those antelopes with the rounded M-shaped markings on their rump. Looks like the McDonald's logo. That's how they got the nickname.”

“Well, that and the fact that they’re the main staple in the diet of so many predators,” Blake said. “Lions, cheetahs, jackals, hyenas—”

“Let's make sure we still have all twelve of them, then,” I said, making some notes on the list. “Reeves's muntjacs, three. What and where are they?”

“Small deer,” Blake said. “Also known as barking deer. Interesting species, though not particularly rare.”

“Dr. Gruber's keeping them,” Dad said. “He has a big fenced area where he used to keep his St. Bernard before the poor old thing died. I don’t think we’ll be seeing the muntjacs—Dr. Gru-ber says he rather likes hearing the occasional bark from the yard again.”

“Check. Norwegian feral sheep?”

“They’re over at Seth Early's, with his herd,” Dad said. “Since they really are just exotic sheep themselves.” “Check. Emerald tree boa?”

“Oh, all the snakes and lizards are down at my office,” Rob said. “They’re fine there indefinitely. The guys like the company.”

“They would,” I said. “Have the guys figured out yet why you have such trouble recruiting and retaining women employees?”

“That was a problem long before the snakes arrived.”

“The snakes are only symptomatic,” I said.

As our inventory continued, I was relieved to see that most of the animals not already in our backyard or Dad's pasture were happily ensconced with people who seemed content to have them stay indefinitely. This could be a problem if and when the zoo tried to retrieve all its inhabitants—what if some of the foster families tried to assert squatters’ rights? But that wasn’t my problem. Eventually, we accounted for all of the missing animals except for a family of naked mole rats and Lola, the elderly bobcat. I suspected if we searched all the cubicles down at Rob's office, we’d find that his wayward band of programmers had taken in the naked mole rats, on the theory that they were the next best thing to reptiles—Though I hoped they realized that the naked mole rats were occupants of the zoo, and not provisions.

Blake wasn’t sure Lola the bobcat was still alive.

“I expect you’ll find Lola succumbed to old age, like poor old Reggie,” he said.

“If that's the case, then we can probably account for all the animals,” I said.

“That's a relief,” Blake said. “Though I confess, I wasn’t all that worried about the animals that are left. It's the ones that disappeared before Patrick died that concern me.”

Chapter 38

“What do you mean ‘disappeared’?” I asked. “I thought this was a complete list of animals in the zoo.”

“As of the time I showed up,” Blake said. “But from the cursory review I’d been able to make of Patrick's records last week, I found there was an extraordinary amount of attrition over the last two years.”

“Attrition?” I repeated. “What kind of attrition.”

“Animals he sold, animals who died, and animals simply unaccounted for,” Blake said. “And all three worry me. Take the animals who died. Sounded to me as if the mortality rate was a little high.”

“Could that just be a statistical anomaly?” I asked.

“Possibly. Or it could be reasonable—Patrick did say that the animals he’d been able to afford were often relatively mature when they arrived at the zoo. That's probably understandable, given his financial situation.”

“Like Reggie, the invisible lion,” I said. “In other words, he was buying over-the-hill animals at cut-rate prices to fill the zoo.”

“In a nutshell, yes,” Blake said. “And I don’t see a problem with that. Geriatric animals need a place to live, too. And from the size of his outstanding veterinary bills, it doesn’t look as if he stinted on their medical care. But I wanted to review each ani
mal's case in detail. See if they all sounded reasonable. And I’m even more worried about the animals he sold. An unusually large number of animals, most of them relatively young, healthy animals that would be in high demand.”

“Isn’t that the flip side of buying over-the-hill animals?” I asked. “Not that I particularly like this business of buying and selling animals like groceries or something, but doesn’t it make sense that if he was too broke to buy anything but geriatric animals, he was probably too broke to resist selling off the more valuable animals? To buy food for the rest?”

“After all, selling them's so much less messy than feeding the gazelles to the wolves,” Rob said.

“Yes,” Blake said to me. He was pointedly ignoring Rob. “But he doesn’t seem to have good records showing where he sold them. And it makes a difference. Did he sell them to other reputable zoos? That's fine. To private individuals? Much more dubious. Or to one of those so-called game ranches?”

“The places that run the canned hunts,” I said. “Yeah, that would be bad.”

“I don’t yet know he did that,” Blake said. “We were supposed to sit down and go over his records in excruciating detail this coming week. Medical records for the animals that died, sales records for the ones he sold, and whatever the hell kind of records he had for the animals who were missing. Animals don’t just go missing from zoos. Not often.”

“What kind of animals went missing?” Dad asked, sounding concerned. I wondered if the visions his imagination was tossing out were as interesting as mine. Emerald tree boas turning up on people's rose arbors. Water buffalo devastating the backyards of the Caerphilly Garden Society members. Rogue hyenas lurking behind the freshman dorms.

“Various kinds of exotic deer and antelope,” Blake said. “Wild
sheep, goats, and boars. In fact, that's also the kind of animal he sold.”

“From what I can see, those were the mainstays of the zoo,” I said. “Animals he could just turn loose in a pasture to graze.”

“They also happen to be the mainstays of these canned-hunting places,” Blake said.

“So you already suspected him of some kind of involvement in canned hunting,” Dad said, sounding shocked.

“No,” Blake said. “But I was starting to worry about whether he was really responsible enough to be running a zoo, even a small one. It wasn’t till Meg mentioned it that the pieces fell in place. Maybe I should have realized it sooner, but I didn’t really want to believe it. A trained zoologist. A friend of my grandson's.”

He shook his head and took a big swallow of his white wine.

“But before you could sit down to give Lanahan the third degree about his missing animals, he turned up dead.”

“Which means I still have to figure out what happened at the zoo, and I don’t even have Patrick to interrogate,” Blake said.

“Weird,” Rob said, refilling his wineglass. “If you were the murder victim, it would all make sense now. Lanahan would have killed you to keep you from finding out his crimes. But this doesn’t help us figure out who offed Lanahan.”

“Those animal-rights activists who’ve been marching up and down outside Meg's house all day,” Blake said. “Their leader's a nutcase, if you ask me. Trying to turn the hyenas loose with all those prey animals at large.”

“I don’t usually think of my family as prey animals, but I see your point,” I said.

“Chief Burke seems to have focused more on poor young Charlie Shiffley,” Dad said. “Can’t say I understand that.”

“He's probably got some forensic evidence,” I suggested. “Un
like us. All we have is our imaginations, so we’re wasting our time making wild, inaccurate guesses.”

“I doubt if your guesses are particularly wild or inaccurate,” Blake said. “But then, I don’t expect you to share them with someone who's probably one of your suspects.”

“Oh, I’m sure Meg doesn’t suspect you!” Dad said with a nervous laugh.

“The hell she doesn’t,” Blake said. He sat back with an annoy-ingly enigmatic smile on his face. Was it the smile of a murderer who knows he's unlikely to be caught? Or the smile of a consummate egotist who has to be the center of every conversation, even at the cost of being a murder suspect?

“I suspect everyone, of course,” I said.

“But especially me,” Blake said, as if egging me on. “Go ahead; tell them why. You’ve checked up on me, I presume?”

“Yes,” I said. I thought of giving Ms. Ellie credit, but decided maybe I was in a better position to take care of myself if Blake resented the snooping. “You have no living family.”

Blake frowned, almost imperceptibly.

“Yes,” he said. “I lost my only child to cancer seventeen years ago, and then, a few years later, my only grandson to a car accident.”

“A car accident in which Patrick Lanahan was a passenger,” I said. “Did you hold a grudge against Lanahan? Maybe because you thought he was to blame for the accident?”

“And killed him in revenge?” Blake said. “No, Tony dug his own grave. Drinking. Not the first car he’d totaled.”

“You had nothing against Lanahan?” I said.

“I admit, I resented Patrick for years,” Blake said. “Not because of anything he’d done, but because he lived when Tony died. But that had faded, and by the time he contacted me, asking for help with his zoo, I was feeling guilty about having lost
touch. I thought it was a good way to reconnect with a happier time in my life.”

Whatever discomfort Blake had felt when I’d brought up the subject of his grandson had vanished now. Or maybe I’d only imagined it.

“Why are you so interested in the Caerphilly Zoo?” I asked. “Because of your guilt about having neglected Lanahan?”

“I think it's important for young people to learn about the natural world,” Blake said. “There are people today who’ve never seen an animal larger than a cocker spaniel.”

“There's the National Zoo, in Washington,” I said. “And for that matter, Richmond and Norfolk have pretty decent zoos.”

“Yes, but they’re all at least a hundred miles away. It's so much better having the wild animals nearby—practically in your backyard.”

“On the contrary, I’d much rather have several hundred miles between me and the animals currently occupying our backyard,” I said. “Have you ever tried to sleep with a troop of bored hyenas laughing maniacally in your barn all night? Never mind, you probably have. So you feel strongly about the importance of small local zoos?”

“That's right,” Blake said. He was sitting back with his hands laced across his stomach, smiling enigmatically.

“I don’t recall seeing anything on your Web site about supporting worthy small zoos,” I said. “It's a new interest, then?”

“Not a new interest,” Blake said. “But one I’ve only recently made the time to pursue. When I turned ninety, it hit me that I should start thinking about posterity.”

“Supporting the Caerphilly Zoo's your way of thinking about posterity?”

“It's a start,” Blake said. “It's got potential.”

I nodded. I was tempted to point out that when older men
started talking about posterity they usually turned to trophy wives and Viagra, not penguins and llamas, but I stifled the impulse.

“So when are you going to make some kind of decision about whether you’re going to help the zoo?” I asked aloud.

“I’ll probably have to wait until the police let me see the files,” Blake said. “I’ll need to study what I’m taking on.”