The Anteater of Death (26 page)

Sue Fields, wife No. 1, didn’t pick up her phone so I left a message, then tried Pamela Curiani, Wife No. 2, a Bay Area yacht broker. Not only was she home, but once I’d explained my involvement with the case and my concern for Zorah, she loosened up. Apparently she felt kinship with any woman who’d been wronged by any man. Especially her ex.

“You’re that poor zookeeper’s friend, huh? I read about her arrest. Good luck to her, I say, and to you, too. That joker had a talent for spreading misery. He couldn’t keep his hands to himself, which is why I’m the
ex
-Mrs. Barry Fields.”

Considering the reason for my own divorce, our hearts beat as one on that issue. “How long were you married?”

“Six years, which was way too long. I must have masochistic tendencies I’m unaware of.”

“Were there any problems in the marriage? Besides the infidelity, I mean.”

A bitter laugh. “All kinds. He liked money, especially mine. He could never get enough.”

I sat up straighter. “Was he having financial difficulties?”

“Not really. He was greedy. It came from being raised poor, I think. His mother, who wasn’t married to his father, by the way, lived in one of those welfare-subsidy apartments over in Hunter’s Point. I’ll give the bastard this, though. After he graduated from college—on a full-bore scholarship, I might add—he never looked back. When we first met, I’d recently brokered the sale of almost an entire fleet full of luxury yachts, so I was living the high life. I ran into him at an A-list party where I was trying to sell a few more. He could literally smell money, which I guess is what made him so good at what he did. Right after we married, he insisted we open a joint checking account and to keep the peace I went along. As things turned out, he availed himself of it about ten times more often that I did. And though for a while he earned more than me—the yacht market turned soft for a couple of years—his deposits were always less than mine.”

“Was he hiding money?”

“The scum bucket sure was, but my forensic accountant found it. Barry came away with a lot less than he’d counted on, which is why he took that loser job at the zoo.”

I winced. Zorah had wanted that “loser job” with all her heart.

“Next time around, I’m getting a pre-nup,” she continued, acid in her voice. “If there is a next time.”

Before we hung up, she tried to sell me a sixty-five foot Irwin ketch.

I’d gone back to watching the remaining gulls pick through the garbage when my cell rang. Sue Fields, Wife No. 1, returning my call. She, too, already knew about Barry’s death, but unlike his other ex, her voice carried sadness. I also noticed she’d kept his last name.

The conversation started off much the same as with Wife No. 2, with me telling her about Zorah being charged with Grayson’s murder, and me now under suspicion for Barry’s. To my relief, she sounded even more sympathetic than Wife No. 2.

“Barry broke my heart,” she said. “Over and over, with each new woman.”

“How many, if I may ask?” Although at this point, the question was merely rhetorical.

“Too many to count. Women and money were aphrodisiacs for him. As bad as he was, though, I’d probably still be married to him if it wasn’t for the incident with my aunt. Look, I don’t feel comfortable talking about this over the phone. That’s a San Sebastian County area code you’re calling from, isn’t it?”

As it turned out, she was talking to me on her cell while driving down the Coast to San Luis Obispo. We made arrangements to meet in an hour at Fred’s Fish Market, where she’d planned to stop anyway for boat-fresh salmon. “You can’t miss me,” she finished up. “I’ll be the tall brunette in the pink pants suit. Save an outdoor table in the smoking section.”

When she tooled into the restaurant parking lot an hour later driving a ten-year-old Infiniti that needed a paint job, I was sitting at an outside table overlooking the Pacific, batting other people’s cigarette smoke away from my face.

She sat down and lit up a Winston. We chatted about women things for a while, then she got down to it. “I’m originally from Lodi, but I’d just started business school at University of San Francisco when I met Barry at a campus kegger. He was about to graduate and had already snagged a job raising money for some charity, and to this country girl, he seemed incredibly sophisticated. I liked the way he talked, the way he looked—this was before he started losing his hair, you understand—and I loved going to social events with him and watching him work the room. He’d get into these deep conversations with people who somehow always turned out to be super important. It was like he had a homing device that let him zoom right in on the real players. Know what I mean?”

I gave her a smile. “He could tell the difference between zircons and diamonds.”

Her eyes, rimmed in black eyeliner, moistened. Or maybe it was the cigarette smoke. “That’s one way of putting it.”

Which begged the question. Nothing about her, from her heavy makeup to her old car, signaled serious money and although she was attractive enough, she was no beauty queen. Given Barry’s propensity for “real players,” why had he bothered with her?

She noticed my puzzled expression. “My maiden name was Epple.”

Ah. Epple Farm Equipment and Supplies, based in Lodi, was the largest farm and ranch supplier in the state, with branches throughout all the inland valleys, including San Sebastian.

“Technically, I inherited everything at seventeen after my parents were killed in a car wreck,” she continued. “Four years later, when I met Barry, I was still young and dumb enough to think he loved me for myself. But as you said, he could tell zircons from diamonds.” She flexed her fingers, drawing my attention to a ring with a diamond almost the size of her thumbnail. No wedding ring, though. “Anyway, he told me this sad story about being raised by a struggling single mother who lived in government housing, that she’d died while he was in high school, and he’d had to make it on his own. As an orphan myself, it really got to me.”

She took another long drag on her cigarette. “Turned out, the whole thing was a crock. His mother was still alive and no longer struggling. She’d married a dentist, but Barry didn’t get along with his stepfather so they were estranged. I didn’t find out the truth until we were married. Fortunately, my Aunt Evelyn, who raised me after my parents died, was the executor of my parents’ estate until I turned twenty-five, and she kept him from getting his hands on most of my money. But that’s also what caused the problem that ended my marriage.” She stabbed out her half-smoked cigarette.

“On the phone, you said something about an incident with your aunt?”

She shook another cigarette from her pack, muttering, “I need to stop this.” She lit her second cigarette in five minutes. “Barry tried to blackmail her.”

I sat up straight, though the movement engulfed me in second-hand smoke.

She took two more drags and put out that cigarette, too. When she looked at me again, anger sparked her eyes. “That was his big mistake, because I loved Aunt Evelyn. When I saw what he was trying to do to her…” Another cigarette slid from the pack. This time she didn’t light up, just sat there looking at it while seagulls screamed overhead.

“Sue, what did he try to do?”

“I already told you. He tried to blackmail her.”

“For…?”

She put the cigarette back into the pack. “I’m trying the Taper Off Smoking Plan. This week I’m limiting myself to five a day. Next week I’ll be down to four. But you don’t care about my addictions, do you? Okay, here’s the deal. When my aunt was a teenager, she got mixed up with a local boy who…let’s just say he was a bad influence. Anyway, he held up a gas station, and the attendant got shot. Thank God he didn’t die. My aunt was driving the car. She’d been stupid enough to see it as a big adventure, you know, like Bonnie and Clyde, and didn’t think beyond that. The shooting brought her to her senses. She broke up with her boyfriend and never told a soul what happened that night until Barry tried to do what he did. But she was willing to go to jail rather than give him access to my inheritance.”

For a moment I couldn’t speak. Barry had been even worse that I’d thought. Finally, I managed, “How did he find out about the robbery?”

“He had relatives in Lodi and one of them knew the boy involved. You know how small towns are.”

I sure did. I tried to picture her aunt as a foolish teenager, then as a sad-but-wiser older woman trying her best to raise another foolish teenager and doing okay until Barry showed up. “When he approached your aunt, what did she do?”

A seagull swooped down and tried to steal a French fry from a nearby table. The man sitting there slapped it away in disgust.

Sue smiled. “He read my aunt wrong, really wrong. Instead of knuckling under, she invited both of us over for dinner, and during dessert, laid out the whole story. She finished by telling me what he’d threatened to do if she didn’t funnel the lion’s share of my inheritance his way.”

“You believed that Barry tried to blackmail her.”

“I was young and in love and believed in my husband.”

I knew how dumb girls in love could be. “So he denied the whole thing?”

She gave me the saddest smile I’ve ever seen. “Wrong. He admitted it. He was very self-righteous about the whole situation and said that as a young married couple, we deserved to have my parents’ money to ‘work with,’ as he called it, and not have to wait until I turned twenty-five. As soon as we arrived home, he made me watch as he called the sheriff and turned my aunt in. When I tried to stop him, he hit me hard enough to knock loose a tooth. The next day I filed for divorce.”

The seagull came back. This time the man, finished with his meal and enjoying an after-burger smoke, let it have the French fry.

“What happened to your aunt?” I asked.

“She went to the police and confessed. Since the crime was more than thirty years old and the victim had made a full recovery, she wound up serving only a week in jail, plus six months’ community service.”

“How’s she doing now?” Even a week in jail could be hard on a person. Zorah still hadn’t fully recovered from her time in the slammer.

The smile brightened. “Oh, she’s fine. In fact, her experience with the California corrections system inspired her to start a halfway house for newly-released female inmates with children. It’s in San Luis Obispo, which is where I’m headed now. I brought an ice cooler and I’m going to load it up with enough fresh salmon to feed everyone.”

I looked back toward her faded Infiniti and was willing to bet that Epple Farm Equipment and Supplies donated a lot more than salmon to the halfway house. Hard times cause some people to turn hard themselves, others to open their hearts.

After we’d said our goodbyes, I returned to the
Merilee
and sat on the deck for a while, wondering if Barry had changed much since his marriage to Sue Epple. That he wasn’t above marrying for money, I’d already guessed. That he could be violent toward women came as no shock, either.

But blackmail? That created a whole new motive.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

The next day Dad, dressed like a casual yachtsman in chinos and windbreaker, paid a visit to the
Merilee
.

“What, not all bundled up for the cold May wind?” I asked, not halting at my task of swabbing the deck.

“Ha-ha.” In the morning sun, his dyed black hair glistened. “What do you have to drink?”

“Just some cheap Riesling. Don’t you think ten o’clock a little early to get started?”

“Too early to be drinking sludge, that’s for sure.” He plopped himself down on a deck chair. DJ Bonz and Miss Priss, who had been sunning themselves on the bow, jumped up to join him so he scrunched over to make room. “Ooo,” he ruffled their fur. “Nice doggie, nice kitty! Does ooo remember ooo’s Daddy?”

He sounded so much like me that I had to force myself not to smile. “Aren’t you going to help me swab?”

“I prefer to watch others work.”

“You ought to try it yourself, sometime. Work’s good for the digestion.”

“There’s nothing wrong with my digestion.” A pelican trailed by two gulls flew by. He watched them, his head laid back, the picture of contentment. “Anyway, my stomach’s not the reason I stopped by. What’s this I hear about some of the boats in the harbor losing their berths?”

While I swabbed, I told him about the complaint Maxwell Jarvis had lodged with the harbor master. “And before you bring it up, no, I’m not going to use the money you put in the Caymans account to fix up the
Merilee
.”

“You always were a little prig.”

“Hey, now! I am not a…” A backfire from the
Texas Hold ‘Em
, a Hydra-Sport a few slips over, interrupted my denial. The owner had been tinkering with the engine all morning and it sounded like he was making it worse. When the noise faded, I decided not to bother defending my ethics to my father. It was like speaking Mandarin to a Greek. I changed the subject. “It’s not a good idea for you to be sitting out here in the open. What if the sheriff drops by?”

He removed his sunglasses and gave me an unsettling look. “Right now your boyfriend is the least of my worries. I’m here to say goodbye.”

“I told you, he’s not…” I stopped swabbing. “You’re going back to Costa Rica?”

“With Chuckles’ goons waiting for me? Hardly. This time I think I’ll try Indonesia. I’ve always liked the cuisine. Or Cameroon. Now
there’s
an interesting place.”

“Cameroon?!”

“The weather’s nice. At times. And they’ve almost solved that malaria problem. Last night it occurred to me that I could make some serious money there. Did you know they export aluminum? I’m sure they could use some help with that. Best of all, Cameroon don’t have much of an extradition agreement with the U.S., so as long as I stay clear of the Bakassi Peninsula—where nobody in his right mind goes these days, anyway—I should be fine. You could come visit. The country’s crawling with elephants.”

“Dad, I don’t…”