stuck in some office.”
Belatedly realizing he hadn’t answered my question, he was that wily, I repeated it. “If the Gunn Trust is broken, could it mean the end of the zoo? At five miles inland, it’s not protected by the California Coastal Initiative.”
He took a deep breath. He shuffled his feet. He looked down at the carpet. “Maybe not.”
Never had the word “maybe” sounded so scary.
“Surely the zoo wouldn’t be broken up!” What would happen to my animal friends then? Would they be replaced by developers who couldn’t tell a Balearic Shearwater chick from a Hispaniolan galliwasp lizard?
He still couldn’t look at me. “Trimmed down in size, maybe.”
In other words, another Eden lost.
C HAPTER F IVE
My conversation with the zoo director didn’t go as planned.
When I entered the administration building the next morning, Helen Gifford, his secretary, informed me he had a visitor. “A woman with money,” she whispered, looking at the director’s closed door. “Absolutely dripping with diamonds.” She motioned me to a chair next to a table heaped high with magazines. “It shouldn’t take too long. He’s pretty fast when it comes to squeezing money out of women.”
I started leafing through a copy of National Geographic , but, horrified by photographs of poached mountain gorillas and their severed heads and hands, quickly put it down.
To get my mind off the images, I asked, “You like working for Barry Fields?”
She shrugged. “Since I’m over sixty, I haven’t had any trouble with him.”
Before I could ask what she meant, the office door opened and the aged Lorena Haskell Anders, widow of P. Stephen Anders, who’d founded a national chain of sports outfitters, emerged. A beaming Barry Fields followed behind, wearing a different Armani sports coat than yesterday’s. How many did he have?
A ten-carat rock weighed down one of the widow’s wrinkled finger, rings with fractionally smaller stones encircled around the others. On her dewlapped neck, a diamond-and-sapphire necklace rose and fell with each breath. Fields’ pitch on behalf of the zoo must have been successful, because she still held her checkbook in her hand.
Upon spotting me, Mrs. Anders gave me an air kiss. “How nice to see you, Theodora! I heard you were working at the zoo, but couldn’t quite believe it. Yet here you are. How’s your mother?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “So sad about Grayson. Jeanette must be crushed. Have you tendered your condolences yet? I know you two used to be great friends.”
There was no point in correcting her. “I plan to visit as soon as I get off work. She…”
Fields shifted his weight from foot to foot, looking anxious. Perhaps he feared that if the widow didn’t leave soon, she’d reconsider her contribution. He cast me a look of annoyance. “Do you want something?”
“Yes, I…”
“Wait in my office.” He slipped his arm around Mrs. Anders, gave her a peck on the cheek, and escorted her to the door. “Call me anytime,” he purred. “I’m never too busy to talk to beautiful women.”
Giggling, she left.
***
Ten minutes later I emerged from the director’s office in defeat. While he’d agreed that the anteater had been proven innocent of murder, he still insisted she’d shown her true nature in her post mortem attack and needed to be confined to the holding pen until the zoo board handed down its decision. My argument that the zoo housed many Code Red animals—and in fact, that was what zoos were for—fell on deaf ears.
Frustrated, I left the administration building and headed for the animals’ commissary, where I found the other keepers talking about the murder as they loaded lettuce and worms onto their zoo carts. Zorah wondered aloud what Grayson was doing at the anteater’s enclosure.
“Maybe he wanted to see how her pregnancy was progressing.” This from Jack Spence, the bear keeper.
Zorah sniffed. “Not with his fear of