The Koala of Death (16 page)

In a post dated a week later, Kate indulged in more mischief making. After few paragraphs about sweet Tulang, the roly poly wombat, she started sniping at people again.

If there’s one thing you learn about working in zoos, Dear Readers, it’s that the world is growing smaller by the minute. No, I’m not talking about the shrinking Rainforest, sad as that may be, or other areas of our endangered eco-system. I’m talking about how we run into Familiar Faces in Unusual Places. Sometimes those FF’s aren’t happy to see you, and for good reason. There’s more to come about this, because I have a very special post planned to reveal the dastardly deeds of THIS particular FF. As they say on television, “Stay tuned for an important announcement.” I’m unsheathing my claws and am about to pounce. ROAARRR!!!

Biting back my distaste, I continued scrolling through more posts, noting a mixture of tender essays about Down Under animals—especially Wanchu—intermixed with increasingly harsh snipes at unnamed animal keepers, concession owners, volunteers, and even the denizens of an unnamed harbor.

Love can be blind, can’t it, Dear Readers? Especially when older women are married to younger men. A certain boat-owning woman I know is having trouble keeping Younger Hubby in check, which in her case, will be about as easy as picking up a 7-10 split. YH was recently seen boozing at a local watering hole and kanoodling with a girl who looked half his age. But as we all know, men are actually admired for that kind of behavior, aren’t they?

Given the 7-10 bowling reference, Kate had to be talking about the Grimaldis. Was Sam being unfaithful to Doris? Intrigued despite myself, I remembered the Post-it notes I’d found in one of Kate’s files.
T Doris t at party
. Could that have meant,
Tell Doris the truth at party
? This possible translation of Kate’s note brought about another question: had Kate died
before
she could tell Doris about Sam’s wanderings?

Shuddering, I read another post, this one dated only two weeks back. Kate spent several sweet-funny paragraphs on our new lion cub, then unleashed her claws on humans again.

If you ask me, Dear Readers, firefighters don’t belong on boats. They’re fine on calendars or when your stove catches fire, but that’s pretty much the end of their usefulness. Forget about sailing. Most of them couldn’t hoist a sail to save their lives, so they prefer gas-guzzling power boats. And a certain firefighter, who owns a boat named something like Berserker, is one of the worst of the species. Why, he’s so high on himself that he thinks “Hello” is an invitation to join you in the sack.

I ground my teeth. Walt MacAdams, the San Sebastian firefighter whose
Running Wild
was berthed near the
Merilee
, had once saved my life. And as far as being “high” on himself, as the old saying goes, “Point your finger at someone and you’ll find three fingers pointing back at YOU.” Maybe Kate had hit on him and he’d declined. Walt
was
pretty fussy about the company he kept.

With her snipe at Walt, I thought Kate had reached the epitome of her nastiness, but the last lines of the next post took my breath away.

Rich people are so boring, aren’t they, Dear Readers? The town where I’ve ended up is full of them. They try to act sooooo respectable, but when you dig into their backgrounds, you discover that almost all of them are the beneficiaries of past crimes. Typical of this pack of jackals is a certain multi-last-named ex-beauty queen who, not content to live off an embezzling ex-husband’s ill-gotten gains, is currently looking for a fifth husband to fleece. Parasites like her make you suspect old Karl Marx had it right.

Oh, the bitch!

I was so enraged that for a moment I forgot about the Post-it note that mentioned Caro, but it came back to me in a flash.

Tdy’s mom noz.

Could Kate have been considering writing a follow-up post, one that might suggest Caro knew where my on-the-lam father was hiding, and thus set her up for a round of questioning by the Feds?

I swallowed.
Tdy’s mom noz.
The answer to that question was a definite “Yes.” Caro knew which country Dad had fled to after his last sneaked visit to Gunn Landing because she had orchestrated his escape.

But “parasites”? We were talking about love here, and where love was concerned, morality went out the window, which Kate would have known if she had ever truly loved someone. As I sat there fuming over her treatment of my mother, more uneasiness crept into my mind. How far would Caro go to keep my father’s whereabouts a secret?

After studying the situation, I decided to pay a visit to Heck to see if Kate had ever discussed my mother, or the Tasmanian Devil’s other victims, with him. Stepping topside, I walked down the dock to
My Fancy
, where I found its owner daubing some sort of compound on the seal of an aft window.

“Damned rain blew in last night while I was sleeping,” he said.

I’d slept so deeply that I hadn’t noticed the rain. Also, the
Merilee
was a much tighter boat than
My Fancy
. Swallowing my anger at Kate, I asked Heck if he needed any help. “I’m pretty good with a putty knife.”

He straightened up with a groan. “All done. How ’bout some tea?”

Remembering all the cat hair I’d found in the last cuppa he’d served me, I started to decline, then changed my mind. However unpalatable, the tea would give me plenty of time to talk about Kate’s blog. “Sounds delicious, Heck.”

When his gnarly face creased into a relieved smile, I realized how lonely he was. Kate had been his only friend. Making a mental note to visit with him more often, I followed him into the cat-hair museum he called a houseboat. Within minutes I found myself sipping another questionable cup of tea while a catarrhal cat made phlegmy sounds in my lap. After a bit of chatter about the difficulties of harbor life, I steered the conversation around to the blog. Now that my anger had faded, I decided to leave her comments about my mother to the last.

“What the hell’s a blog?” he asked.

When I explained it was just an online diary, he grunted. “Don’t have a computer. Things are a big waste of time, if you ask me.”

I tried a different tack. “Yesterday when we talked, you mentioned that Kate and Bill both used to drop by and visit. How’d they get along?”

He shrugged. “Fine, I guess. For as long as it lasted, anyways, Kate being like she was.”

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged again. “You know, goin’ from man to man, just like her daddy always done with the ladies.”

Having known Kate for only two months, all I had seen was the end of her relationship with Bill; nothing ominous about that. Then again, endings could get rough, and given the Aussie’s size, well…I didn’t want to ask my next question, but did anyway. “What caused the breakup? I found something that makes me think she might have been, well,
flirting
with another man. Did Bill get rough with her over it?”

“Girl’s got a right to go after who she wants to, doesn’t she?”

Sure. If she was, as they say, unencumbered. And the other party was, too. “If she was dating Bill at the time, he wouldn’t think so.”

“Nah, she broke up with him before she started seeing that other guy.”

This was something new. “The way I heard it, Bill broke up with her.”

“Then you heard it wrong. One thing she complained about was he kept callin’ her all the time. Drove her nuts, that did.”

Joe had said something about Bill’s phone records. Is that what he’d meant, that Bill was harassing Kate? Or was it all just a ‘he said, she said’?

“Who was the other guy she’d started seeing?”

“Some good-lookin’ stud at the zoo. Forget his name.”

Other than Bill, the only other truly handsome man that popped into my mind was the park ranger. “Would his name have been Lex?”

“That sounds about right. Yeah. Lex something or other.”

I frowned. Lex Yarnell hadn’t seemed the slighted bit disturbed about Kate’s death. Either Kate had been lying to Heck, or…“Her blog also mentioned that Kate, let’s see, how did she put it? Oh, yeah, she ran into ‘familiar faces in unusual places.’ You know anything about that?”

He gave me a proud, snaggle-toothed smile. “What with the TV show my girl was on, she’d got kinda famous, ya know. She said folks was always coming up to her sayin’ did she remember them from grade school or high school or shit like that.”

I soldiered on. “How about Sam Grimaldi? Did she ever talk about him?”

“Young guy has the
Gutterball
? Married to that old bitch?”

One day I would give Heck a lecture on political correctness, but this wasn’t the time. “Right, the
Gutterball
guy with the older wife. Kate wrote a note saying that she was going to tell Doris the truth about something at their party the night she died.”

“Truth about what??”

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

Heck shook his head. “Mostly she just yammered about them animals down at the zoo. But sometimes we talked about the old days back in Canaan Harbor. She missed them. Can’t say I did.”

I plucked another name from Kate’s blog. “How about Walt MacAdams? She have any trouble with him??”

“Firefighter guy lives on
Running Wild
?” At my nod, he continued. “She might a been sweet on him, him such a manly man and all. That’s the kind of guy she always went for. Big strong studs, like the Aussie and that other guy at the zoo. Come to think of it, couple weeks ago I did see her talking to that firefighter over at Chowder & Cappuccino. She looked all dithery.”

“How’d he look?”

“Not so dithery.”

Being rejected could have explained the wrath in the
Tasmanian Devil
. Rejection was something few people took well, except maybe poets, who used it as fodder for their work. The next time I saw Walt, I’d ask him about Kate, but it would probably turn up to be a dead end. Inwardly sighing, I realized it was time to bring up the subject of Kate’s last Post-it note, however much it pained me:
Tdy’s mom nos
.

“Do you know if Kate ever had a run-in with my mother?”

Heck’s old face morphed into an expression of pure lechery. “Wouldn’t be surprised if any woman had a run-in with your mother, but it’d be all about jealousy. Kate wasn’t bad-looking, but she wasn’t nowhere in your mother’s league. You don’t mind me saying so, that’s one hot broad, regardless of how old she hasta be. Too bad you don’t look anything like her.”

He must have seen me wince, because he immediately covered his slip. “Not that you’re not cute, Teddy, what with all that curly red hair and them freckles, but your mom was Miss San Sebastian County once and she doesn’t look much different now. Why, every time the paper runs an article about your dad and what he done, they run her old pageant photo, and Christ on a crutch, what I wouldn’t do for a piece of…” At my expression, he trailed off. “Well, any man who’s at least half alive would want a go at her.”

Diplomacy, thy name is Heck. “I’ll convey your compliments.”

His rheumy eyes lit up. “You’d do that for me?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. She’s dating somebody else.” Prospective Husband Number Five owned a national chain of upscale women’s shoe stores. “Anyway, back to Kate. Did she ever say anything about my mother—or my father—to you?”

“Never talked about your father, and the only thing I remember her ever sayin’ anything about your mom was when she saw that big car of hers, that big silver Mercedes. Kate thought the gas-guzzling thing was eating up the rain forest and driving out the monkeys, or something like that. Hell, even when she was a kid, she was like a lot of us at Canaan Harbor, didn’t care for the hoity-toity types, thought the power should be with the people, and damned right, too! But comes the revolution, I’m willin’ to let your mother keep that Mercedes. She looks awful foxy drivin’ it.”

Beauty, the great class leveler.

“Heck, are you sure there’s nothing more you can tell me about Kate that might help me finger her killer? Given that the killer isn’t Bill, of course.”

“Bill ain’t who done it, you can make book on that. He was crazy about that girl, maybe too crazy. But nah, I can’t think of anything else, exceptin’ lots ’people around here didn’t like her because she tended to say what she thought. Kate was honest, she was. The thing she hated most was people who acted like they was one kind of person when they was really something else. Couldn’t stand hypocrites, Kate couldn’t.”

Too bad she hadn’t named them in
The Tasmanian Devil
. Out of a fear of legal action, perhaps? Setting the murder case aside for a moment, I decided to take a stab at something that had been bothering me for the past couple of hours. “Say, this might not have anything to do with Kate’s death, but do you by chance…” I gestured at the cats occupying every seat, shelf, and otherwise flat surface in the houseboat. “…know anything about that animal psychic who’s set up shop in San Sebastian?”

“Animal psychic? What the hell’s that?”

Deciding not to get into an explanation about the Great Animal Spirit, I just said, “A kind of animal psychologist. Helps them out with their problems.”

“This damn world’s getting crazier and crazier, innit? But nah, I never heard of anybody like that. My cats have problems, I fix them myself.”

From the aft bedroom I heard a feline sneeze. Then another. It probably had asthma from all that loose hair floating around. “I’m sure you take great care of your cats, Heck.” Then I sneezed, myself.

“Got a cold, Teddy?”

“Might be coming down with one. You know, I’ve got an idea. Why don’t you let me come over tomorrow night after work and help you clean up this place? I’ve got a special vacuum that’s terrific with pet hair.” If I was having trouble breathing, I knew he was. “What do you say?”

He flashed those brown teeth of his. “Why, that’s damned neighborly of you, Teddy!”