volume all the way up. That gave him fifteen minutes. He picked up Kirby's body… most of the blood from the wound had been absorbed by the heavy coat Kirby was wearing, which was why there wasn't any blood on the floor and why Dettlinger didn't get any on him. And why I didn't notice, fifteen minutes later, that it was starting to coagulate. He carried the body to the cage, put it inside with the thirty-two in Kirby's hand, relocked the access door-he told me he didn't have a key, but that was a lie-and then threw the key in with the body. But putting Kirby in the cage was his big mistake. By doing that he made the whole thing too bizarre. If he'd left the body where it was, he'd have had a better chance of getting away with it.
'Anyhow, he slipped out of the building without being seen and hid over by the otter pool. He knew I was due there at midnight, because of the schedule we'd set up; and he wanted to be with me when that recorded gunshot went off. Make me the cat's-paw, if you don't mind a little grim humor, for what he figured would be his perfect alibi.
'Later on, when I sent him to report Kirby's death, he disposed of the recorder. He couldn't have gone far from the Lion House to get rid of it; he did make the call, and he was back within fifteen minutes. With any luck, his fingerprints will be on the recorder when your men turn it up.
'And if you want any more proof that I'm on the right track, I'll swear in court I didn't smell cordite when we entered the Lion House; all I smelled was the gamy odor of jungle cats. I should have smelled cordite if that thirty- two had just been discharged. But it hadn't, and the cordite smell from the earlier discharges had already faded.'
That was a pretty long speech and it left me dry-mouthed. But it had made its impression on the others in the room, Branislaus in particular.
He asked Dettlinger, 'Well? You have anything to say for yourself?'
'I never did any of those things he said-none of 'em, you hear?'
'I hear.'
'And that's all I'm saying until I see a lawyer.'
'You've got one of the best sitting next to you. How about it, Mr. Factor? You want to represent Dettlinger?'
'Pass,' Factor said thinly. 'This is one case where I'll be glad to plead bias.'
Dettlinger was still strangling me with his eyes. I wondered if he would keep on proclaiming his innocence even in the face of stronger evidence than what I'd just presented. Or if he'd crack under the pressure, as most amateurs do.
I decided he was the kind who'd crack eventually, and I quit looking at him and at the death in his eyes.
'Well, I was wrong about that much,' I said to Kerry the following night. We were sitting in front of a log fire in her Diamond Heights apartment, me with a beer and her with a glass of wine, and I had just finished telling her all about it. 'Dettlinger hasn't cracked and it doesn't look as if he's going to. The D.A.'ll have to work for his conviction.'
'But you were right about the rest of it?'
'Pretty much. I probably missed on a few details; with Kirby dead, and unless Dettlinger talks, we may never know some of them for sure. But for the most part I think I got it straight.'
'My hero,' she said, and gave me an adoring look.
She does that sometimes-puts me on like that. I don't understand women, so I don't know why. But it doesn't matter. She has auburn hair and green eyes and a fine body; she's also smarter than I am-she works as an advertising copywriter-and she's stimulating to be around. I love her to pieces, as the boys in the back room used to say.
'The police found the tape recorder,' I said. 'Took them until late this morning, because Dettlinger was clever about hiding it. He'd buried it in some rushes inside the hippo pen, probably with the idea of digging it up again later on and getting rid of it permanently. There was one clear print on the fast-forward button-Dettlinger's'
'Did they also find the second bullet he fired?'
'Yep. Where I guessed it was: in one of the slabs of fresh meat in the open storage locker.'
'And did Dettlinger have locksmithing experience?'
'Uh-huh. He worked for a locksmith for a year in his mid-twenties. The case against him, even without a confession, is pretty solid.'
'What about his accomplice?'
'Branislaus thinks he's got a line on the guy,' I said. 'From some things he found in Dettlinger's apartment. Man named Gerber-got a record of animal poaching and theft. I talked to Larry Factor this afternoon and he's heard of Gerber. The way he figures it, Dettlinger and Gerber had a deal for the specimens they stole with some collectors in Florida. That seems to be Gerber's usual pattern of operation, anyway.'
'I hope they get him too,' Kerry said. 'I don't like the idea of stealing birds and animals out of the zoo. It's… obscene, somehow.'
'So is murder.'
We didn't say anything for a time, looking into the fire, working on our drinks.
'You know,' I said finally, 'I have a lot of sympathy for animals myself. Take gorillas, for instance.'
'Why gorillas?'
'Because of their mating habits.'
'What are their mating habits?'
I had no idea, but I made up something interesting. Then I gave her a practical demonstration.
No gorilla ever had it so good.
Skeleton Rattle Your Mouldy Leg
He was one of the oddest people I had ever met. Sixty years old, under five and a half feet tall, slight, with great, bony knobs for elbows and knees, with bat-winged ears and a bent nose and eyes that danced left and right, left and right, and had sparkly little lights in them. He wore baggy clothes-sweaters and jeans, mostly, crusted with patches-and a baseball cap turned around so that the bill poked out from the back of his head. In his back pocket he carried a whisk broom, and if he knew you, or wanted to, he would come up and say, 'I know you-you've got a speck on your coat,' and he would brush it off with the broom. Then he would talk, or maybe recite or even sing a little: a gnarled old harlequin cast up from another age.
These things were odd enough, but the oddest of all was his obsession with skeletons.
His name was Nick Damiano and he lived in the building adjacent to the one where Eberhardt and I had our new office-lived in a little room in the basement. Worked there, too, as a janitor and general handyman; the place was a small residence hotel for senior citizens, mostly male, called the Medford. So it didn't take long for our paths to cross. A week or so after Eb and I moved in, I was coming up the street one morning and Nick popped out of the alley that separated our two buildings.
He said, 'I know you-you've got a speck on your coat,' and out came the whisk broom. Industriously he brushed away the imaginary speck. Then he grinned and said, 'Skeleton rattle your mouldy leg.'
'Huh?'
'That's poetry,' he said. 'From archy and mehitabel. You know archy and mehitabel?'
'No,' I said, 'I don't.'
'They're lower case; they don't have capitals like we do. Archy's a cockroach and mehitabel's a cat and they were both poets in another life. A fellow named don marquis created them a long time ago. He's lowercase too.'
'Uh… I see.'
'One time mehitabel went to Paris,' he said, 'and took up with a torn cat named francy who was once the poet Francois Villon, and they used to go to the catacombs late at night. They'd caper and dance and sing among those old bones.'
And he began to recite:
'prince if you pipe and plead and beg you may yet be crowned with a grisly kiss skeleton rattle your mouldy
