Cat In A Leopard Spot

Chapter 21

Taxidermy Eyes

“I can’t believe it,” Molina says.

It is 5:00 A.M. and she stands in a living room as upscale as a high-roller suite at the Bellagio, staring down at a corpse.

The captured killer stares down at the corpse too, eyes dilated, whiskers visibly twitching.

Molina regards the full-grown leopard.

It stands in the cramped cage brought to the crime scene by three animal control people, who have retreated to the room’s threshold to stare wide-eyed at the entire scene, as if they were sleepwalking.

The leopard roars plaintively and everybody jumps.

This is one perp who can plead diminished capacity and get away with it.

Molina turns to the other exotic animal in the room: the widow.

“It’s a good thing you knew how to corral the creature,” Molina comments.

She doesn’t mean a word of it, she just wants to get the woman talking so she can figure out what happened here.

All she knows so far is that victim is moneyed, that his body bears the tracks of a big cat. And that he has fallen onto the stuffed head of an oryx (she thinks) whose unicornlike horn has performed a quadruple bypass on his major cardiac organs.

Which beast is the actual killer: the live one, or the dead one?

The widow might be dead too. She has said nothing, but sits staring at a huge square glass-topped cocktail table. Carved wooden elephants with upheld trunks support it at each corner. Even in a wooden form elephants have to work.

Molina blinks bleary eyes. She is surrounded by the glassy taxidermy eyes of a couple dozen trophy heads staring down from the two-tiered living room’s walls. She can’t name all the species, except that they run the gamut from hooved to clawed. The beastly atmosphere is so overwhelming that she is beginning to think the widow looks like a mountain lion.

“Mrs. Van Burkleo?”

The woman’s oddly small eyes seem absent without leave in the overbearing frame of her massive facial bone structure. Her face looks like it has been trampled by an animal. She also has taxidermy eyes. Glassy amber eyes, bizarre somehow. From the age difference between the skewered corpse and the comatose widow, Mrs. Van Burkleo was a trophy wife. Fit right into the decor, especially with that lion’s mane of thick tawny hair.

“Mrs. Van Burkleo, how did the leopard get into the house? Was it a…pet?”

“A leopard is a wild animal,” the woman answers in a deep, low voice. “It’s foolhardy to keep one as a pet.”

“Did you and your husband—?”

“No. I don’t know how the leopard got here. There was no cage, nothing. Just the leopard. And Cyrus.”

Molina walks toward the body the widow regards with dazed indifference, as if he were now part of the trophyscape. Cyrus was a nondescript man in late middle age, thick of middle, thin of hair. Sixty-something.

The widow could be anywhere from twenty-nine to forty-nine, one of those high-fashion icons who freeze-frame into permanent limbo in the aging department.

Must take all of her spare time, and—Molina was finally believing the evidence of her own eyes—a lot of plastic surgery. Unsuccessful plastic surgery, or maybe too successful. The woman’s face seemed kissing cousin to more than one head on the wall.

Van Burkleo, he was Homo sapiens at its most uninspiring, a figure of power for his money alone, surrounded by figurative reminders of what enough money and high-caliber equipment will buy the aging white hunter.

“Any children?” Molina asks.

The widow Van Burkleo shrugs lean and bony shoulders revealed by a tiger-print spandex halter top. “The usual two. Before my time. They’re somewhere in the Midwest.”

“School, or grown?”

She shrugs again. “We traveled so much. All over the world. Didn’t see or hear much of them. Isn’t that how children should be, not seen and not heard?”

“Seen and not heard.”

“Oh. Well, Cyrus’s were ‘not’ both. When we married—”

“Which was?”

“Six years ago, here in Vegas. At the Goliath chapel. A very nice place. I recommend it.”

“I’ll tell all my friends.”

“I’m sorry. I still can’t grasp it. Cyrus. The leopard. How, when…”

“The medical examiner will do his best to tell us when. And how. I understand the maid found the body. You only arrived here afterward.”

“After the first police arrived, yes. I was at our suite in town.”

“Did you and your husband often stay in different residences?”

Those razor-sharp shoulder bones shrugged again. Molina had the irritating impression she was showing off.

“Cyrus loved to gamble as much as he loved to hunt,” the widow said. “So did I. But we didn’t pursue both hobbies at the same time. They’re a bit of the same thing, aren’t they? People like to see the heads. He probably had clients to entertain out here.”

“And a misplaced leopard,” Molina said.

The woman stares at the big cat, now pacing in the small cage. It stops to stare back.

Molina has the oddest feeling that it knows her, it knows Leonora Van Burkleo.

“I don’t know why or how the big cat got here. Cyrus admired them. He liked the fact that the big wild cats were so much more dangerous than any wild dog. The dog was a degenerate breed, he used to say. Only the domestic cat could claim a huge, savage ancestor still stalking the earth.”

“However many are left,” Molina said shortly. Dead bodies offended her sense of universal harmony. Even dead animal bodies.

The widow’s feral glance froze on her with deadly intent.

“Hunting is the world’s oldest profession. Oh, I know what they say it is, but they’re wrong. It’s not hustling. It’s hunting. My husband was proud to put himself up against the wiles of a wild animal, and win.”

Molina eyed the trophy heads. They were much more lordly-looking than the sorry lot of humans, alive and dead, gathered around the huge trophy suite in this trophy house so far from and yet so near to a city dedicated to the hunter and hunted, to the winner and loser. The hunted and the losers always outnumbered the others, even in the wild kingdom.

Is it poetic justice that a big cat has clawed the big game hunter into a corner? That the stab of a long-dead antelope’s horn has finished him?

Or was the means of death not only a medium but a message?

She takes a last look at the leopard. It has stopped pacing and regards her with an expression she recognizes. Feline sagacity.

She wonders how many other people would be glad that this time the animal has won. Or has it?

By four that afternoon, Molina was alert and ready for a break in the case. She had heard from several highly placed men in city government and commerce that Cyrus Van Burkleo was a highly regarded member of the community. Translation: they owe him, she had better deliver a killer soon, and it had better be someone—or something—whose identity will not rattle anyone’s cages. Enter the leopard.

Molina doesn’t believe in worms turning, not even on fishermen. She certainly doesn’t believe in leopards committing murder one.

Su and Alch think they have a prime suspect. In fact, they think they have three.

“Who found them?” Molina asked.

“Employees of the deceased,” Alch said amiably.

“‘Animal keepers,’” Su put in, her china doll face wearing a mask of hard-edged suspicion that Molina reads like a child’s book.

“You don’t think Mr. Van Burkleo’s employees are what they say they are.”

“They’re muscle,” Su said contemptuously, as contemptuously as a four-foot-eleven black belt in karate can say of large lumbering musclemen.

“Why did Van Burkleo need muscle?”

“Because of these three people,” Alch answers promptly, good Boy Scout that he was thirty-five years ago.

Alch and Su crack her up: such an unlikely team, and so effective for that very fact. The 180-degree difference in their ages, their sizes, their genders, their cultural background, Jewish and Chinese, makes them the perfect complement to any case, like sweet and sour sauce to pork loin. Except that, contrary to stereotypes, Alch is the sweet, and Su is the sour. Molina doesn’t show her amusement, or her approval, of course. They would be insulted.

“You think these ‘employees’ were itching to have these people found?” Molina asked.

“Of course.” Su stubbornly folded her arms, inadvertently displaying her Mandarin-long fingernails. Weapons, in her case.

Alch shifted in his chair, scratched his neck, put off an answer until Su’s elderberry eyes flashed imperial impatience.

“Maybe,” Alch conceded, with a wicked feint of a glance at his steaming partner. “But the fact is they were trespassers on private property. And they were armed.”

Su spat out an unspoken comment. “Flare guns.”

Molina nodded.

“They’re animal-rights activists,” Alch said.

“Interesting.” Molina stood. “You’ve got their names, ranks, and serial numbers?”

Su nodded.

“Then I’ll take a look at them.” Molina checked the names and facts the detectives had recorded from their separate preliminary interviews, then led the way to the interrogation rooms, curious as a cat.

Three people might be just what it would take to stage-manage the Van Burkleo death scene to make it look like a wild animal had turned the tables on the hunter. Predator turned prey, turned predator.

Everybody liked a happy ending.

First Molina eyed the trio through three different two-way mirrors.

“The old woman’s the leader,” Su told her. “A retired professor from Davis, California.”

“Late middle-aged,” the thirty-something Molina corrected the twenty-something Su.

The fifty-some thing Alch just snickered to himself.

Su shrugged. Over thirty was one big Do-Not-Go-There Zone.

The twenties seem to last forever, Molina thought, remembering what it was to be kid-free…also as green as goat cheese that had been sitting out for three months. Don’t-Go-Back-There Zone.

They marched off to eye the other suspects. Molina passed on the twenty-some thing surfer boy with the punk haircut.

At the late-forties tree hugger in the ponytail, she smiled nostalgically. “I’ll try him first.”

Su’s sharply arched eyebrows rose. She plucked them in a dragon lady pattern that Molina had only seen in that old comic strip, Terry and the Pirates, drawn decades ago when the “Oriental menace” had been Fu Manchu instead of sweatshop labor.

Every generation reached back to find fodder for rebellion. With Mariah, it was ear decor so far. So good.

Alch was nodding approvingly, not that she sought it.

Molina left the two detectives behind the mirror and entered the room, sat down, turned on the tape recorder. “Lieutenant C. R. Molina,” she began, adding date and time in a toneless official voice.

She flipped open a manila folder and appeared to study it.

“Evan Sprague.” She repeated his name aloud without acknowledging him. “You don’t have a criminal record.”

“Of course I don’t,” he said, trying to sound indignant and merely sounding nervous.

Molina slapped the folder shut. “We’re investigating a murder.”

“I…I’ve been told that, Lieutenant.”

“What were you doing on the deceased’s property?”

“I told the other officers. Detectives. Whatever. We were…scouting.”

“Just a bunch of Boy Scouts on a camp-out?”

“No, uh, we’re green.”

“I guess!”

“We’re for animal rights.”

“So.”

“You must know what goes on at that ranch.”

“We’re just ignorant city police. You tell me.”

“It’s a head-hunting place.” Mr. Limp Noodle was turning into Mr. Barbed Wire before her eyes. “They collect de-accessioned once-wild animals, like excess zoo stock, illegal exotic pets that have been confiscated from all over, anything that used to be wild and free and has a beautiful coat of fur or a handsome set of horns.”

Molina nodded to show comprehension. He would never tell from her expression that she was also nodding agreement with his indignation.

“These animals are not wild in any sense of the word. They’ve become dependent on humans. They’re domesticated, fed, watered like sheep or cattle. And then they bring in these wealthy weekend ‘hunters’ who don’t have time to go to authorized hunting areas, these weekday lawyers and doctors who want heads for their office walls, and let them take potshots with bows and arrows and rifles and bullets at the animals until they kill them. It may take a while. These ‘professional men’ are lousy shots, and they don’t want to mar the heads and shoulders before they’re stuffed.”

“I get the picture. So, if Van Burkleo was this…pimp for canned hunters”—Sprague’s pale eyes glittered at the word she’d armed him with—“why couldn’t your dedicated group have turned a leopard loose, thrown Van Burkleo on the antelope horn, and clawed him somehow, leaving a dead body with no suspect but a dumb animal, with which the community outrage is usually satisfied if it’s put down for the sin of touching a human. Case closed. The leopard was doomed anyway.”

Sprague practically leaped up from his chair at her throat.

“That’s just it. We subdue, brutalize, imprison, abuse these wonderful beasts that nature has given us, and let one—one—raise a paw in protection or protest or plain animal instinct, and we kill the animal. We are the animals that deserve killing!”

“Exactly,” Molina said coolly. “Which of your compatriots was the mastermind?”

“None! We didn’t do it. We protest peacefully. We disrupt the hunt.”

“You risk getting yourself skewered with an arrow or a bullet. Killed yourselves.”

He took a deep breath. “If so, it shows what kind of ‘recreation’ this sort of hunting is.”

“Then you don’t object to sanctioned hunting on designated preserves in season?”

Another deep breath. “Those people observe the law, and at least give the prey a fighting chance. But I still wonder why they have to kill something when it’s no longer necessary to survive.”

“I hunt killers myself,” Molina said suddenly, quietly, leaning closer. “There’s nothing worse than someone who violates another creature’s right to live. But I’ve never shot my firearm in tracking a killer. I let the laws levy justice. Did your group decide to levy justice for the law this time, in this case, for this man?”

“No! We protest. That’s what we do.”

“Who was to watch your protest, way out there? Those ‘security forces’ could have shot you all and buried your bodies hipbone-deep in sand for decades, eternity, and no one would have ever known. Just as no one would have ever known your group was out there to kill Van Burkleo if you hadn’t been spotted.”

“Who spotted us?” He was suddenly belligerent. “Not the security guys. They were looking for vehicles, and we hiked in. We’re good at subterfuge; have to be to spring ‘surprises’ on the killers. Who was it? That guy who claimed to be on his own out there?”

“Guy?”

“He dove into the same wash with us to avoid being spotted by a patrol. Somebody else must have mentioned him. You want a suspicious character, he was it.”

“I haven’t talked to the other suspects yet,” Molina said, “and I’m not interested in any lone wolf your imagination dreams up. I bet they don’t mention any such person when I get to them.”

“They will! He wasn’t one of us. We have no reason to protect him.”

“Glad to hear it. So tell me about this guy.”

“Well, he dives right on top of us. Broad daylight. Doesn’t want to be seen, all right, but he’s wearing black from head to tail. Foot, rather.”

“Black?”

“Yeah. Midday on the desert. Says there’s always a shadow so it’s a good cover. Black. He doesn’t know at first what we’re doing out there, but he figures it out real fast. Acted like he was sympathetic to the cause, but Alyce wasn’t buying any of it. We didn’t argue too much with him; any uproar would draw the patrols, but we never bought his lame story for being out there. And he got mad at us. Said we were fools and risking our lives. That the security forces would have us for barbecue. Well, they didn’t catch us. Your people did.”

“City slickers,” Molina said, pleased.

“That’s what this guy was. A city slicker. He had a lot of nerve to be out there with us.”

Molina was struck by the last sentence. A city slicker with a lot of nerve. All in black.

“What did he look like?” she asked blandly.

Sprague rolled his eyes as if the gesture would jump-start his memory. “Tall guy. I think. Lean as a whipsnake. Dark hair. Eyes…not sure. Thirty-four or -five maybe. Maybe younger. Acted…seasoned. We were kind of dazzled when he was there, and when he took off, we wondered what kind of line he was handing us.”

Molina leaned her head on her hand. Turned off the tape recorder. “Can you just sit here for a minute?’

Sprague looked startled to death at her question. What the heck else could he do until someone told him he could leave or bailed him out?

She left the room, peeked in on the detectives. “Hang on,” she told them. Then she did a straight-line dive back to her office and a certain manila folder in her bottom file drawer.

In four minutes she was back, sitting across from Evan Sprague and flipping open the folder.

“Look anything like this?” she wondered. Idly.

Sprague frowned at the single sheet of paper inside the open folder. “Bad hair. Worse jewelry.”

“Can’t argue with you.”

“I guess it could be him. Yeah. The face structure is the same, but the effect is…way different.”

“Can I call that a strong maybe?”

“Maybe.” He frowned at Janice Flanders’s sketch of Vince from Secrets. “Like the same person inside a way different skin, you know what I mean?”

“Oh, yes,” Molina said, spinning the sketch to face her. “I do.”

Snakes shed their skins all the time…. And at last one of them had done it on the scene of a crime in her jurisdiction.