Zero at the Bone Read online

  “No. It was going to be a surprise.”

  The director held out his arms to them. “Please sit down. Miss Driscoll, I’m sure you could use a little rest. Could I get Kim to bring you some tea or a soft drink?”

  “No, thanks.” Katherine sat in the nearest chair. It was wondrously comfortable, deep and engulfing, the cracked green leather aged and softened to perfection. She let her open palms rest on the arms so she could feel it.

  McElroy and Sharb sat in chairs flanking her, but Hans Dieterlen stayed standing. He made a stiff bow in her direction. “Miss Driscoll, my condolences on your loss. Your father was a fine worker. He will be impossible to replace.”

  “Thank you.”

  He turned to the director. “I need to go now, Sam. I have just time to get to Dallas to complete the paperwork before the Frankfurt flight arrives.”

  “Oh, yes. Our visiting femme fatale. Go on, Hans. Thanks for your help.”

  The head keeper made little bows to each of them and left.

  “We have a rare white rhino arriving today,” Sam explained, “on breeding loan.”

  Sharb kept his handkerchief pressed to his nose. “Miss Driscoll,” he said, “what was the reason your father gave for wanting you to come see him? Was he in trouble of some sort?”

  She hesitated. “No. Not that I know of. He just wanted to talk, I guess. Get acquainted.”

  “Is there any other family, or are you it?” he asked.

  “I’m it. My father wrote that his sister, Julia Renfro, died last year, so I guess I’m the only relative left.”

  Sharb nodded. “You guess,” he said under his breath and began coughing.

  Katherine felt dislike welling up in her throat for the little man.

  Sam McElroy looked at him as if he just that moment had noticed his distress. “Lieutenant, would it help if I had King Tut”—he waved toward the bird—“taken out for a while? I hate to see you suffer.”

  Sharb shook his head in short irritated jerks. “No. No. It wouldn’t make any difference. The dander’s everywhere. I’m going anyway.” He stood and faced Katherine. “If you could come downtown later, Miss Driscoll—just some formalities, as next of kin. And a few more questions.” He reached in his jacket pocket and pulled out a card which he handed to her. “At five? I’ll be back in the office by then.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Just show them the card at the desk,” he said. Noticing Sam was about to rise, he held out a hand to stop him. “It’s been a long day. Stay where you are, Mr. McElroy. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” The minute he had risen, the bird began to flap its wings and shriek, “Bye-bye, bye-bye!”

  “Tut, quiet!” the director barked in the bird’s direction. This caused a raucous increase in volume that made Katherine want to cover her ears.

  The policeman looked back as he walked out the door, shaking his head in dismay.

  Sam McElroy leaned forward in his chair and looked directly into Katherine’s eyes. “Miss Driscoll, anything we can do to help, just let us know. Will you do that?”

  “Yes, thank you. What do you think is my next step here?”

  “Well, you need to see Travis Hammond. He was your father’s lawyer, so he’ll know just what to do. I believe your uncle, Cooper Driscoll, will help with arrangements. So you’ll want to talk to him, too, as soon as possible.

  “And we will do anything we can. You must know that I am beholden in many ways to your family. I’m talking here not just about your father. Living out of town, I don’t know how much you know about your mother’s family’s contributions to the zoo, but the Driscoll name is almost synonymous with the zoo. Coop Driscoll is our current board president, and your grandmother was one of our founders and continues to be our most generous benefactor. We owe your family a great deal. And now this.” He waved a hand in the air as if the accident had contaminated the very atmosphere of the room.

  Katherine was startled to find herself suddenly a member of a powerful family that habitually received this sort of special attention. It felt unaccustomed, undeserved, but there was something nourishing about it. She found herself taking a guilty pleasure in it. And she wondered how far she could go in making demands.

  “Mr. McElroy, I’d like to see where it happened,” she said. “And the tiger, I’d like to see him.”

  The director looked at the ivy-covered stockade fence out his window for several seconds, then back at Katherine. “Fine. We’ll go now.”

  “Thank you. Then I think I’ll drive over to the attorney’s before I go to see Lieutenant Sharb.”

  The director sprang up easily from the chair while Katherine had to struggle to extricate herself. People rising seemed to stimulate the bird. It began shrieking and pumping its wings up and down, propelling pale-peach feathers and gray fluff into the air. “What kind of bird is that?” Katherine asked.

  McElroy was hooking a walkie-talkie over the back of his belt as he walked toward the door. “A Moluccan cockatoo. Damned nuisance, but I’m attached to him. Kim, I’ll be over in cats for the next half hour. Please call Travis Hammond and tell him Miss Driscoll is here and that she’ll be coming over to him in about forty-five minutes.”

  As they headed across the footbridge spanning Barton Creek, Katherine admired the free-flying native birds along the banks. Oh, yes. She remembered this place. She had been here before and she had loved it.

  The director talked and walked at the same rapid-fire pace. Katherine had to walk briskly and listen attentively to keep up. “We opened late this morning,” he said. “First time in the fifteen years I’ve been here. We’re open every day of the year but Christmas, and always on time. But it was so traumatic getting here to this … terrible news. We’ve put the big cats, all of them, inside. I’m afraid we may have to keep them off exhibit for a long time. The calls have been hair-raising, even worse than usual. Tomorrow the letters will start.”

  He looked hard at Katherine. “I don’t know where you line up on this, Miss Driscoll, but your father would have snorted at the idea of destroying an animal in a situation like this. He knew the job was dangerous. Keepers get hurt and even killed, no matter how careful they are. Everyone in zoo work knows that. It just happens sometimes.”

  As they passed an area where bulldozers were clearing rubble from what looked like a building site, he waved an arm to the workmen and said, “Here’s where our new small-mammal house is going. It’ll have one of the most advanced nocturnal sections in the world.” He looked at Katherine. “Some of the funding comes from the Driscoll Foundation.”

  He waved a hand to the row of enclosures on the right and pointed to a gangly blue bird in the last cage. “That’s our baby Goliath heron, first ever born in captivity.” As he talked, he kept up a pace so rapid it was closer to a trot than a walk.

  Katherine saw that promoting the zoo was so compelling a passion for him that he would be doing it in the middle of a nuclear attack. She found that kind of enthusiasm irresistible.

  He picked up a Styrofoam cup from the ground without slowing his pace. “Your father was a total professional in his job, the last one I’d expect to have an accident.” He stopped to toss the cup into a trash can.

  She took the opportunity of the rare silence to say, “Please call me Katherine.”

  “Oh, good. We like being on a first-name basis around here. And I’m Sam, of course. I want you to know, Katherine—this is difficult to say—that we regret this accident terribly, but I think you’ll find the zoo safety procedures beyond reproach.”

  He’s afraid I’ll sue him, Katherine realized.

  “Here we are.” He put his hand on her shoulder.

  They were approaching a large grassy enclosure, backed by what was supposed to look like a stone cliff but was clearly Gunite made to resemble rock. The rest of the exhibit was surrounded by a fourteen-foot-high green mesh fence with a one-foot lip at the top angled inward. A strip of grass separated that fence from a low barrier made of iron bars to
keep observers away from the fence.

  “This is the outdoor area shared by our two tigers. It was Brum’s turn to be out here last night and Imelda’s—the other tiger—to be in. Can’t leave two adult tigers together unless they are mating, and even then it’s risky, tigers being what they are.”

  Katherine glanced around the enclosure. Very pretty and natural with its grass and clumps of bamboo, huge boulders, a trickle of water simulating a stream. Then she noticed the door and she was hit with the reality of what had happened here. It was an inconspicuous gray door in the cliff, with a small window boarded over with plywood. The grass just outside the door was stained dark.

  She wondered how long it took to be killed by a tiger.

  They walked around the fence to a door in the back of the cliff. The director knocked on the windowless steel door. “We’ve assigned members of the staff to be here round the clock for a while—just in case.” He looked at Katherine. “You going to be all right? We could do this another time.”

  “No. I’m fine,” Katherine protested, wondering why her voice sounded so thin and far away.

  Sam knocked again. In response came the clank of a big lock being opened. Then the door swung open.

  A slight man in zoo coveralls stood aside deferentially to let them enter. A badge on the left side of his shirt identified him as “Danny, Cat Keeper.”

  The second Katherine stepped through the door her nose twitched in reaction to the powerful stench of cats—urine and spray. Nothing like the odor of dogs, she thought. Far more aggressive and potent. She stifled the impulse to sneeze.

  The director closed the door behind them and the keeper quickly locked it with his big key ring. “Thanks, Danny. This is Katherine Driscoll, Lester’s daughter. I’m going to show her where it happened. Katherine, this is Danny Gillespie. He’s been assigned to the big cats for the last several months, working for your father.”

  Danny glanced at her, shuffled his feet inside the knee-high rubber boots he was wearing, and gave a sheepish half-smile, keeping his teeth covered.

  “You were on the shooting team,” she said.

  He lowered his eyes and ran a hand across the top of his wispy blond hair, trying to smooth it over the balding spot at the top of his head. “It was just too late to do anything for him, Miss Driscoll. I got there so fast, in just a couple of minutes, ’cause I was in the office when the call came in, but it was just too late.” He looked up at her. His pale-blue, lashless eyes were magnified behind the thick glasses that made them seem elongated. She wondered if the swelling around the rims was permanent or if he had been crying.

  “What made you so sure it was too late?” she asked.

  The question startled them both. Katherine hadn’t known she was going to ask it, and Danny blinked his eyes several times with the impact of it.

  After a long silence, he said, “Well, he was all … oh, it was clear from the way he … you know, when tigers make a…” He stopped and looked at the director in desperation.

  Sam stepped forward and put a hand on Danny’s shoulder. “Danny, I know this is difficult, but some reporters at the press conference kept asking about it.”

  Danny sighed. “Oh.” He looked at Katherine. “Miss Driscoll, I wish I could’ve gotten here in time, but the way he was lying, his neck was clearly broke, and the blood … well, it was just everywhere. I admired Mr. Renfro so much. He did such a good job with the cats and taught me so much. I’ve only been in cats four months, but I felt I’d found a home here.” He shook his head apologetically. “I’m sorry.”

  Katherine looked away. They were in a white-tiled room with a drain running down the center of the floor. At the far end was a cage. Inside, an immense bushy-coated tiger lay on his side watching them with luminous yellow eyes.

  “Well, there he is,” said the director. “That’s Brum. Five years old. Born here at Austin Zoo. Aggressive as all get-out from day one. What’s he been like?” Sam asked the keeper.

  “Pretty quiet, sir. We fed them both when the police finally left. And he ate pretty good. I’ve just finished hosing down the cage.”

  Katherine approached the cage slowly and stared at the cat, who stared right back at her. She’d never looked really closely at a tiger before. The bramble of black stripes framing his orange-and-white face looked like an inkblot, the same on both sides. If a psychiatrist asked her what the blot resembled, she would say the roots of some enormous plant. A man-eating plant, perhaps. The abundant quill-like white whiskers sprouted aggressively beside the pink nose. It was a beautiful face. Undeniably.

  Sam approached quietly and took a firm grip on her elbow. “Do you want to see the rest?”

  Katherine pulled her eyes away from the tiger and nodded.

  Danny had unlocked the next door and was standing aside to let them enter. Sam preceded her in into a tiny closetlike room and stood with his back against the wall so she would have more room. The second she entered, she felt the horror it of. It was a gray concrete sarcophagus with a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. She flinched as she looked at the boarded window. It was impossible not to imagine what had happened here this morning: the sudden crash of glass breaking, the huge striped head punching through the window, the lightning-fast claws hooking into soft flesh. God.

  When Danny entered the room too, the claustrophobia became too much. She pushed her way out. Until she saw this place, Lester’s death had been a distant accident. Now it had come home. And she hated it.

  She stood outside the door breathing hard, while the two men talked in low voices. “The police swept up all the glass,” Danny was saying, “and took it away. Very thorough. They stayed for more than three hours.”

  He lowered his voice and spoke in reverent tones as if they were in some tiny roadside shrine. “But I don’t understand it. He always said that ninety-five percent of safety on the job was locks. He wouldn’t even be in here while Brum was still outside. He taught us always to secure the outside tiger into its holding cage before doing anything else. Always. A rule of his.”

  The director said, “It’s hard to see. He was the most regular of men.”

  While the men talked, Katherine watched the tiger. He was on his feet now, pacing the cage, his lean hips undulating, his huge orange testicles swaying. He filled the cage with his color and vitality. Suddenly he reared up on his hind legs and rested his forepaws on the bars, brushing his head against the top of the cage. He towered over Katherine, glaring down at her. She stumbled a few steps backward to get out of his range of power.

  She was embarrassed to note that Sam McElroy had left the anteroom and was watching her. She said, “Sam, I’ve got to go. I left my dog in the car for more than an hour. I need to rescue him and get to the lawyer’s office.”

  As they left, Danny locked the door behind them. Sam walked her out to the car, giving her careful directions to Travis Hammond’s office.

  “And, Katherine,” he said, “I want to repeat that anything I can do to help you, I want to do. Just let me know what it is and it will be done. Promise you’ll let me know?”

  She started the car, thinking of estates and wills. She was desperate to know if she could get what her father had for her in time to prevent the foreclosure. Would it be enough? Ninety-one thousand dollars? She took a deep breath. Well, she was about to find out.

  As she pulled away from the zoo parking lot she looked in the rearview mirror at Ra, his ears blowing in the breeze from her open window. It had to be enough.

  6

  KATHERINE had been surprised to hear that Travis Hammond was Lester’s lawyer. He was the only person from her old life in Austin that Leanne Driscoll had kept in touch with. He had been a close family friend and attorney to three generations of Driscolls, and given the rancorous split between her parents, it was mystifying that her father would choose Hammond to handle his estate.

  The office of Hammond and Crowley was in a tiny, low stone house on Guadaloupe Street. A historic landmark meda
llion with the profile of Texas glittering in stainless steel was affixed to the left of the door.

  Katherine liked the interior instantly. It was sparsely furnished and cool, with white walls roughly plastered, and wide-planked pine floors, bare except for some Navaho rugs tossed at random angles. On the walls hung three black-and-white photographs—originals by Ansel Adams, she thought.

  A very young receptionist wearing blue jeans and a faded workshirt was busy typing with two fingers at the keyboard of a Macintosh computer. When Katherine identified herself, she stood up and started to smile, but stopped herself, and instead said, “Yes, ma’am. Sorry to hear about your father. Please sit down for just a sec.” She hurried from the room and slammed a door in the back. Before Katherine could sit down she had returned, with the old attorney limping at her side.

  He was very thin and exquisitely tailored in a charcoal-gray suit. Above the snowy shirt collar and yellow paisley tie, his tanned, leathery face looked like a mask of tragedy. His mouth turned down at the corners, and his skin was a mass of brown wrinkles, like a peeled apple left out in the sun to dry. As he greeted her, a tic in his right eye convulsed all the muscles in that side of his face.

  But his courtly Texas charm shone through. “Katherine Driscoll.” He drawled the name out as he took her right hand into both his own. “Thank you for coming to see me. I can’t tell you how devastated I am to hear about your father’s accident. I would have called you right away, but I was in Lubbock and just got back to Austin at noon to hear about it. Sam McElroy tells me you found out by accident. I’m so, so sorry about that. Forgive me.”

  Katherine thought he really did look devastated. She wondered if that meant he had been close to Lester.

  “Oh,” he said, turning to his young receptionist, “this is my granddaughter, Susan Hammond, helping me out in the office while she decides whether to go to college or not. Hold my calls, please, Susie Q, so I can talk with Miss Driscoll.”

  “Okay, Grampa,” she said, already back at her slow typing.

  Travis Hammond took Katherine’s arm and ushered her through the door of his office, taking care of her as if she were the frail one with a bad knee and a case of the shakes. He settled her on a beige camelback sofa and turned to close the door. The office, like the entry, was cool and simple, but she was jarred by the glassy eye of a huge deer head hanging on the opposite wall. It looked out of place in this civilized environment.