Belly Up

  “How badly did Henry hurt you?” Summer wanted to know.

  “Real bad. That hippo totally messed up my leg. One of his teeth went straight through the muscle, one side to the other. Needed eighty-seven stitches and twelve shots. The doctor said God only knew what kind of bacteria could be in a hippo’s mouth. They jabbed me for tetanus, typhoid, yellow fever, you name it. I was like a freakin’ pin cushion. And I lost my job.”

  “Why?” Summer wanted to know.

  “The circus life ain’t exactly plush. There’s no medical and dental. If you can’t work, you’re out. And I had to be on crutches for three weeks. No one wants to see a midget clown on crutches. That’s not comedy. It’s tragedy.”

  “So how’d you end up here?” I asked.

  “Well, obviously, the circus wanted to get rid of Henry ASAP. So they offered him up cheap and FunJungle came sniffing around. I knew they were hiring—heck, everyone did—so I presented myself to them. I had good references, a degree from Clown College . . .”

  Summer laughed. “Clown College. That’s funny.”

  Charlie scowled at her. “It’s not a joke. It’s a prestigious institution serving those who seek the way of the clown. Not that this place gives a hoot. Here I am, a licensed practitioner of the harlequin arts—and they basically hired me ’cause I’m short. I thought they were looking for a real clown, not some yutz to stand around dressed as a lizard all day.”

  “You didn’t know you were going to be in costume?” I asked.

  “No, I did, but . . . I thought they’d let me do something. Acrobatics. Juggling. You know, let me entertain . But they don’t. Apparently, the legal department’s afraid us mascots might hurt a guest if we jump around too much. So we’re just supposed to stand still and wave. I might as well be a shrubbery for all I get to do.” Charlie angrily flicked the butt of his cigar toward the trash can. It bounced off the rim and landed on the floor, where it started to burn the carpet. Charlie made no attempt to pick it up.

  “So who killed Henry?” I asked, unable to keep the question inside any longer.

  Charlie stared at us for a while, enjoying keeping us in suspense. Then he said, “Pete Thwacker.”

  Summer and I looked at each other. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t like Pete, but it was hard to imagine him killing Henry. Summer seemed a bit more excited by the revelation, though I wasn’t sure if she even knew who Pete was. “How d’you know?” she asked. “Did you see him do it?”

  “No. In fact, he didn’t do the actual deed himself. He ordered someone else to do it. That’s what I saw.”

  “How?”

  “I was in costume. I was working over at Mbuko Hippo Overlook. That’s usually reserved for the Henrys, but the one who was supposed to be there that day got food poisoning at lunch and had to go to the infirmary. While they were waiting to get another Henry, I got dispatched over there to fill in. It was a bad call. People don’t want to see Larry the Lizard at Hippo River. They want to see Henry. In fact, most guests don’t want to see Larry the Lizard at all. He’s not a very interesting character. Plus, people think lizards are gross. Yet another reason this job bites.”

  “So what happened?” I prodded. Keeping Charlie on topic was like herding monkeys.

  “I’m standing there, being ignored, and then to top it off, Henry has one of his incidents: He fires a load of crap at the tourists. A huge load. He must’ve been saving up for a week. He doesn’t hit anyone, but he soils the glass at the overlook something awful, and it smells so bad, people are getting sick—so the park shuts down the Overlook till the cleaning crew can get there. Only, the rules state I’m not supposed to leave my post. Now, it’s like nine hundred degrees outside, it smells like hippo crap, and I’ve got nothing to do. So I decide to heck with that and go find a shady spot to sit. I don’t want the supervisor seeing me taking an unauthorized break, though, so I find a bench tucked back in the trees around Hippo River where there’s not a lot of traffic. I’m there maybe a minute when I see Thwacker come along with some security guard. . . .”

  “Which one?” Summer asked.

  “I don’t know. Some woman. A big woman. Built like a truck.”

  “Large Marge,” I said.

  Charlie looked at me, intrigued. “You know her?”

  “Yeah. I know her.”

  “She’s the one who really killed the hippo. I heard Pete tell her to.”

  My eyes widened in excitement. I could easily imagine Large Marge doing something as cruel as killing Henry.

  “Right in front of you?” Summer asked.

  “Damn straight. I think sometimes, people forget there’s a human in this costume. But maybe they didn’t see me. The costume’s green; it blends into the landscaping. They were off tucked in the trees themselves.”

  “What’d Pete say?” I asked.

  “He was royally pissed about Henry projectile crapping yet again. Going on and on about what a headache it was. The guests were all disgusted, as usual—and apparently this time, some old lady claimed she’d been hit. She said it had ruined her dress and she was gonna sue FunJungle for being unsanitary. Total crackpot, but still, it was a major headache for Thwacker. So he told this Marge he’d had it. He couldn’t wait for Martin to find another hippo to replace Henry with. He couldn’t deal with Henry one more day. The hippo was a disaster waiting to happen and Thwacker wanted him dead.

  “So Marge gets all conspiratorial and says, ‘Are you asking me to kill Henry?’

  “And Thwacker says, ‘Could you do it?’

  “And Marge says, ‘Not for what I’m getting paid right now.’

  “So they negotiate. Marge doesn’t seem too bothered by the idea of whacking the hippo. In fact, she seems excited about it. Like she’s James Bond and she’s been given orders to assassinate somebody. Thwacker’s much more nervous, like he knows this is a bad idea, but at the same time, he can’t take it anymore. The hippo’s driving him nuts. They talk money for a bit, and then they reach an agreement.”

  “You heard Marge say she’d do it?” I asked.

  Charlie hesitated. “Not exactly. The cleaning crew came along, so Thwacker and Marge split. But it was pretty much a done deal. He wanted her to do it. She wanted to do it. A week later, the hippo turns up dead. What more do you need?”

  I looked to Summer. She seemed happy with what she’d heard. I wasn’t quite so satisfied, though. There were still a few things bothering me about the whole situation. But before I could ask anything else, the tattooed man shouted, “Supervisor’s coming!”

  Instantly, the room became chaos. The lazy actors were suddenly full of energy, stubbing out their cigarettes and squirming into their suits as fast as they could. Charlie snatched his lizard head off the floor and slammed it onto his shoulders.

  “Gotta go,” he said, then grabbed my arm and pulled me close. “In case anyone asks, you didn’t hear anything from me. If I get in any trouble because of this, I’ll come find you.” Even though it was coming from a giant lizard, the tone of his voice still scared me.

  Charlie turned to go, but in his haste, he slammed into an open locker, denting his nose. “Damn it,” he muttered. “I’ve got to get a real job.” Then he slipped into the tunnel and vanished from sight.

  It was a good thing the Carnivore Canyon grand opening party wasn’t that night, because Mom was so angry at me for running off that she probably wouldn’t have let me go. I’d never seen her so upset in my life. She’d been worried sick—even though I’d left the note—and alerted security to keep an eye out for me. (It spoke to how crummy FunJungle’s security was that I’d been running around the park for over an hour and no one had spotted me.) After chewing me out, Mom planted me in a chair in her office and didn’t leave again until it was time to go home for the night. Then she marched me back to our trailer, made me dinner, and sent me right to my room. She also confiscated my phone so I couldn’t communicate with Summer.

  That was frustrating, because I knew Summer w
as probably in a heap of trouble as well. Once we left the dressing room, she’d checked her phone and found about a hundred messages from her mother and her bodyguards. “I gotta split,” she’d told me, and raced out the front gates to grab a cab. I hadn’t heard from her since and now wondered if she’d even be allowed to go to the gala event the next night, let alone bring a date.

  I told Mom what I’d learned, of course. (I’d tried to leave Charlie out, but she’d dragged his name out of me.) I wanted her to know I’d disobeyed her for a good reason: my own safety. “If Pete and Marge really killed Henry, then they’re also the ones who tried to kill me,” I explained. “We should tell the police!”

  “The police aren’t going to believe that story for one second,” Mom told me.

  “Why not?”

  “Because I don’t even believe it. Pete Thwacker doesn’t know a thing about hippos—and Marge is even dumber. You really think those two blockheads could put together that plan to kill Henry?”

  “Maybe,” I said. Although the truth was, this had already occurred to me. It was what had bothered me about Charlie’s story. A couple weeks earlier, Pete had actually remarked at a press conference that hippopotamuses were basically whales with legs. I didn’t doubt that he might have truly wanted Henry dead—or that Marge would have been willing to do it for extra pay. But the two of them seemed more likely to go the poisoning or shooting route than doing something as subtle as killing Henry slowly via peritonitis. Still, that didn’t mean they couldn’t have done it.

  “There’s no ‘maybe’ here,” Mom told me. “It’s completely implausible.”

  “What if they got help from someone else? Like one of the hippo keepers? They’d know how to kill Henry without making it look like a crime.”

  Mom just shot me an angry look, as though the idea that one of the keepers would help kill their own animal was offensive to her. Then she got up, went into the adjoining office and made a phone call.

  I didn’t find out who she’d called until later that night. I was sitting in my room, reading, when Mom came in and said I had a visitor. I stepped out into our little kitchen and found Buck Grassley there.

  “Evening, Teddy,” he said. “Your mother tells me you’ve been looking into Henry’s death on your own.” Unlike a lot of the other adults at FunJungle, Buck always talked to me like I was a grown-up. He didn’t seem upset that I’d been investigating. Instead, he seemed to be intrigued, like he was my grandpa asking how school had been that day.

  “I guess,” I replied.

  Buck chuckled a bit. “It’s a nice night,” he said. “Why don’t we all have a little chat outside?” It wasn’t really a question. He held open the door for us.

  I looked to Mom. She nodded that it was all right. So I went out.

  We had a couple of cheap Target lawn chairs set up outside our door, facing the woods. Dad and Mom liked to sit there at night, stare up at the sky, and imagine they were back in Africa. Ever the gentleman, Buck waited for Mom and I to sit before he did.

  It was still humid out, but the heat of the day had broken. The stars were bright and the woods were alive with the chirp of crickets.

  “Your mother tells me you talked to Charlie Connor today,” Buck said. “He told you Pete Thwacker and one of my own people might have had something to do with Henry’s death?”

  I thought it was interesting that he didn’t call Large Marge by her name. Or call Henry’s death a “murder.” “That’s right.”

  “I don’t suppose Charlie told you what he did before he was in the circus?”

  “No.”

  “He was in jail.”

  I swallowed hard, worried. Charlie had threatened me not to mention his name and I had—and now he turned out to be a criminal. “For what?”

  “Armed robbery.”

  “You mean like from banks?”

  “No, nothing that big. He mugged people. Just a two-bit thug.”

  Mom stared at Buck, even more upset than me. “You hired an ex-con to work as a mascot?”

  Buck shrugged. “He’d served his time. Got early parole for good behavior. The system considers him reformed.”

  “I’m all for giving people a second chance,” Mom said, “But as a mascot here? Most of that job is working with children. You couldn’t have given him a behind-the-scenes position instead?”

  “I’m in security, not personnel. From what I understand, there’s not a whole lot of people lining up to work as mascots. Those suits are hot and uncomfortable, and we’ve got to put people in them. I understand your concern, though. I have it too. So I’ve kept an eye on Charlie. . . .”

  “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

  “To people? Not really. Charlie never actually used a weapon on anyone. He only used it to scare his victims. When he got busted, there weren’t even bullets in the gun. But animals might be a different story. . . . I know he likes to hunt, so he’s killed animals before. And he did have a grudge against Henry.”

  “So you think maybe he murdered Henry?” I asked. “And then accused Pete and Marge to distract attention from himself?”

  Buck just gave another shrug. “First of all, we still don’t have any proof Henry was murdered. . . .”

  I almost interrupted him to say that wasn’t true—that I’d even found evidence of the murder—but Mom signaled me to keep my mouth shut, so I did.

  “. . . but if someone did try to harm the hippo, I think Charlie would be as much as suspect as anyone else. Certainly more than one of my own people. I know Marge has a big beef with you, Teddy, but that doesn’t mean she’s a bad person, understood?”

  I stifled a smile. “Understood.”

  Buck suddenly leaned forward, fixing me with a hard stare. “The thing is, these investigations can get dangerous. Someone’s already made one attempt to scare you off and you could have been seriously hurt. Now there’s a known felon in the mix. So from now on, let me and my people handle this, okay? This is a big park. I’m sure you and Miss McCracken can find something else to occupy your time here.”

  I reacted with surprise—which was exactly what Buck was expecting. Now that he had me on the hook, he let me wriggle a bit. He picked a chunk of cedar wood off the ground, took his Bowie knife from its holster and started to whittle, carefully shaving off the bark.

  “Remember how we have all those cameras everywhere?” he asked. “Well, we’ve been reviewing all the tapes of Hippo River from the last few days. So we’ve got plenty of footage of you two and your little swim party.”

  “That was all my idea.” I spoke so quickly, I wasn’t even sure why I’d said it. Trying to protect Summer just seemed like the right thing to do.

  “Was it now?” The tone of Buck’s voice indicated he knew Summer well enough to guess whose idea it really was. He and Mom shared a smile, as though they thought my attempt at chivalry was cute. “What exactly were you doing in there?”

  “Looking for the murder weapon.”

  “Did you find it?”

  I hesitated before answering, then realized that this was as good as an answer. “Yes,” I admitted.

  “Where is it?”

  “Doc has it.”

  Buck didn’t seem quite sure how to respond to that. He fell silent for a bit, like he was mentally jotting down notes.

  I realized I’d just dragged Doc into the investigation, which would probably make him even more annoyed at me than usual. But I still felt right in telling Buck about the weapon. I was glad someone in law enforcement was finally showing an interest in Henry’s murder. I also felt some relief in letting Buck take over. After all, he was right. It was getting dangerous. The incident at World of Reptiles had been scary, but somehow, learning that Charlie Conner was a felon was even more unsettling. It seemed no one at FunJungle was exactly what they appeared to be. I wondered how many other people were hiding something.

  “Why’d you give it to Doc?” Buck asked.

  “I didn’t, really. He took it.”


  “You mean he stole it from you?”

  “No. I went to show it to him because I thought he’d want to see it. He’d suspected Henry was murdered during the autopsy, but couldn’t find the weapon.” I explained everything that had happened at the vet lab that day: How there’d been someone else in the operating room with Doc, how Doc had seemed on edge and taken the jack from me, how I’d caught a glimpse of the dead jaguar . . .

  “Whoa there.” Buck looked up from his whittling. “What dead jaguar?”

  “It must have come for Carnivore Canyon, I guess. Doc was doing an autopsy on it.”

  “You mean to see if someone had killed it, too?”

  “No,” Mom said. “Nothing like that. It’s just Doc’s policy to autopsy any animal that dies at the park.”

  “So . . . he doesn’t suspect there’s a serial animal murderer here?”

  “No. He thinks Henry is the only animal that’s been killed.” Mom suddenly seemed to doubt her statement and looked at me. “Is that right?”

  “As far as I know,” I agreed.

  “But he still autopsies everything anyhow?” Buck asked.

  “Yes,” Mom said. “To determine the cause of death so that similar deaths can be prevented.”

  Buck had chewed his toothpick to pulp. He tossed it aside, then shaved off a new sliver of wood and stuck it in his mouth. “Teddy, you keep referring to this murder weapon as a jack. Can you describe it to me?”

  I did. Then I explained how anyone could have picked up a package of jacks at FunJungle Emporium, turned them into murder weapons, and easily fed them to Henry. Buck listened intently, nodding thoughtfully, his mood darkening the whole time. I think he was starting to grasp that I was no longer just some bored kid crying wolf—although I’d have thought the murder attempt at World of Reptiles would have convinced him of that.

  Mom grew more intrigued as she listened as well. “All these cameras you’ve got, Buck. Are any of them aimed at the tourist areas of Hippo River?”