Zoo Story Page 26

  A swarm of TV news crews awaited them at a hotel near the airport. Usually the board meetings were convened at the school attached to the zoo, where young children attended classes and camps, but the board chairman had decided he didn’t want the kids being disturbed by the stampeding media.

  There had been a debate over whether the zoo should allow the press and public to attend the meeting. Pointing out that Lowry Park relied at least partially on public funding, Mayor Iorio and other officials argued it was only right that the meeting should be open. Instead, Lowry Park stonewalled. In a move that would make it clear that the zoo’s image problems could not be blamed solely on Lex, the zoo had hired five uniformed Hillsborough County sheriff’s deputies to keep reporters under control and away from the boardroom. The decision reinforced the impression that Lowry Park had a great deal to hide and offered fodder to critics who pointedly asked how the zoo could justify spending tax dollars to hire guards to keep the public out.

  Even before the meeting began, the scene at the hotel descended into farce. A spokeswoman, with a smile pasted on her face but with panic behind her eyes, waded into the crowd of reporters and photographers, trying to herd them into an upstairs room. The journalists, who knew a cage when they saw one, ignored her. They planned to maintain their vigil until Lex made his grand entrance—they needed the footage—and now they called out questions at board members who were trying their best to slip into the hotel unnoticed.

  The savage nature of the moment kept surging to the surface. As the journalists grew more impatient with the efforts to corral them and more frustrated with how long it was taking Lex to arrive, their aggression mounted. We are sharks, one reporter told herself, waiting to be fed.

  Lex and Elena were en route when word reached them about the mob out front. So they swung around to a back entrance. Lex got out and strode inside, ignoring the one or two reporters covering that door. Any thought of following him was rendered moot by the uniformed deputies.

  With nothing else better to do, some of the journalists reluctantly retreated to the confinement of the media room and poured themselves coffee. A deputy stood outside the door, making sure they didn’t get close enough to the meeting to snoop. A couple of reporters drifted back toward the parking lot, hoping Elena would make an offering to the beast of their daily news cycle—a quote, a denial, even a muttered insult. Anything was better than the nothingness of the hotel corridors.

  Elena parked the Pathfinder and hurried past them without a word, looking angry and disheveled. The reporters walked over to the SUV and noticed the vehicle had a bumper sticker in front: eat more beef. Peering inside, they saw one of Lex’s safari hats on the backseat, along with Pippi and Grub, who clamored by the window, barking at the strangers.

  “Oh my God,” said one reporter. “There’s dogs in the car.”

  By now it was midday and sweltering, with the sun bouncing off windshields. The reporters, sweating, looked at the terriers and knew they had a story. In Florida, dogs left in hot cars died all the time. Surely the wife of a zoo director would know that.

  Someone inside the hotel warned Elena that reporters were lurking near the Pathfinder, so she came back out and moved it to a parking lot a couple of blocks in the distance. She wanted to hear Lex’s speech to the board, and she thought Pippi and Grub would be fine, because she’d left the SUV in the shade of a live oak and rolled the windows down a few inches. Undeterred, the reporters hiked over and kept an eye on the dogs. They called their editors, and soon the news appeared online. A reader, worried about Pippi and Grub, called Hillsborough County Animal Control.

  “You can’t possibly be serious,” a spokeswoman for the agency said when she heard the news.

  Inside the hotel, Elena was frustrated because she had been blocked from hearing Lex’s defense or even sitting with him outside the meeting. Like the journalists, she wasn’t allowed near the proceedings. Finally she gave up and made the long walk back to the Pathfinder and the dogs. An animal control investigator was waiting. By this point Pippi and Grub had been locked inside for anywhere from an hour to two hours. They were panting, but did not appear in serious distress.

  The investigator confronted Elena.

  “Would you leave your baby in a car with the windows cracked?”

  Elena was tempted to reply that she wouldn’t put a dog collar on her baby, either, or have her baby neutered. Instead she looked at the investigator and said, “You’re absolutely right. I’m sorry.”

  The investigator, Elena recalls, told her she was lucky not to be on her way to jail. If Elena had left the dogs in the heat any longer, the investigator said she would have been forced to break into the car and rescue the animals and have her arrested. Around them, the craziness kept escalating. A sheriff’s deputy pulled up, ready to take Elena into custody if necessary. Reporters hovered. A TV cameraman recorded Elena’s moment of shame. Pippi and Grub barked and barked.

  “Welcome to my world,” Elena told the investigator.

  Using a thermometer, the investigator determined that the temperature inside the SUV had climbed to ninety degrees. The investigator told Elena the dogs needed water. But when she brought some back, Pippi and Grub were more interested in declaring themselves to the cameraman. The investigator wrote Elena two tickets for improper confinement of animals, and two more for failure to have tags or vaccination records. Elena took the tickets, took the dogs, and drove away. Somehow, while her husband was inside fighting for his job, she had managed to get herself charged with animal cruelty.

  The journalists scattered to call their editors again. Lowry Park’s efforts to muzzle the press had backfired. The whole thing was an embarrassment not just for Lex and Elena, but for the institution that had employed Lex for the past twenty years. Already, news of the cruelty charges was attracting hits on the news sites and spreading to animal lovers and zoo haters around the world.

  The glee was unmistakable.

  The afternoon dragged on. Inside the media room, the captive journalists bristled. One reporter had to ask for permission to use the bathroom. The others kept poking their heads into the hall, watching for board members coming or going. They texted officials inside the meeting, begging for updates.

  Whatever transpired in the room—the arguments and counter-arguments, the vote itself—was supposed to remain a secret. Inevitably, though, details trickled out. The city auditor delivered a detailed accounting of Lex’s manifold sins, an indictment so scathing that it rattled at least one board member who had been inclined to think favorably of the CEO. The mayor, through a representative, made ominous suggestions about the dire consequences that would rain upon the zoo if Lex was not driven from their midst. One board member, a retired president of an insurance brokerage firm, defended the accused and cautioned against rushing to condemnation. As the man spoke, he had the impression that none of his fellow board members was paying him the slightest attention.

  Through it all, Lex waited in a nearby room, sequestered from the general proceedings—an odd requirement, given that even defendants in criminal trials are allowed to sit in court and hear the testimony and evidence arrayed against their future. When the board finally allowed Lex entrance into the inner sanctum, he was confronted by rows of faces, many appraising him with a detachment that caught him off guard. Others appeared livid. In the past, some of the directors had called him their friend, and before he entered the room, he had hoped that at least a few would remember the world they had created together at the zoo.

  Lex tried to make his case. He had prepared a bound volume of documents refuting the charges in the city audit and had made sure that a copy was placed before every board member. He was ready to demolish the audit, line by line. But as he stood there, he realized most of the board had not even glanced at his documents and had no intention of doing so. Looking them in the eye, he apologized for his part of what had happened, but insisted that the blame was not entirely his to shoulder. All he’d ever wanted to do, he to
ld them, was build a zoo that mattered.

  “Don’t judge me completely by the past year,” Lex said. “Judge me by all twenty-one years I’ve given.”

  One of the board members, a woman he’d danced with at Karamu, aimed a dagger of a question at his jugular.

  “Did anybody ever tell you no?” she asked.

  “Sure,” said Lex.

  When they were done with him, he was shown the door. By then all of his cautious hopefulness was gone. The hearing had been a well-designed piece of stagecraft, but the outcome had obviously been decided long before. Making matters worse, the news of Elena’s debacle with the dogs had spread through the hotel. If there had truly been hope of Lex holding on to his job, surely the animal cruelty charges had shattered it. Here was a man allegedly incapable of protecting his own pets. Could the board really trust him at the helm of an ark?

  No. Lex would either step down, or they would fire him. The vote was unanimous. Even Lex’s defender went along with the motion, since it allowed his friend a measure of dignity. The board chairman went to the room where Lex was churning and laid out his options. Lex agreed to resign. Afterward, he emerged from the hotel, stony-faced and silent, and caught a ride to a friend’s house where Elena awaited with the dogs and the citations and her new infamy.

  It was unlikely that they would ever be invited back to the garden again.

  Epilogue

  Dusk

  In the year that followed Lex’s exile, Lowry Park fought to remove itself from the shadow of all that had gone wrong. The acting CEO—Craig Pugh, who had served for years as deputy director—oversaw a revamping of the zoo’s policies. By the following spring, the zoo had regained its accreditation with the AZA, a crucial first step back toward respectability.

  In September 2009, the zoo embarked on what could only be described as a halfhearted search for a new executive director. The search, such as it was, was announced with a classified ad on the AZA’s Web site. Curiously, the ad did not mention Lowry Park’s name or even that it was a zoo. Instead, it described the institution in question as simply a “West Central Florida nonprofit committed to education and species conservation.”

  Why did Lowry Park word the ad so strangely? Were they afraid that no one would want to apply to a zoo that had seen so much trouble? Were they trying to keep the search quiet so that relatively few candidates would apply, therefore making it more likely for them to promote someone from within? The zoo wouldn’t say. In fact, the zoo’s management no longer wanted to talk about the events of the past several years. Even in off-the-record conversations, they acted as though Lex had never existed. A few months later, the board unanimously voted to appoint Craig Pugh as the fulltime CEO. In the press release, the board chair praised the new leader’s ability “to move this organization forward.” Pugh talked about how Lowry Park was both an animal attraction and an institution devoted to conserving nature. “A business with two brands,” he called it.

  Given all the turmoil Lowry Park had endured, the desire to push on was understandable. But the zoo had become a place where certain chapters of the past were all too easily swept away. Nowhere on the public grounds was there any mention of Enshalla and all the years she’d ruled, bringing beauty and wonder to the masses. No statue of Herman had been erected. Instead a plaque was affixed to a rock near the chimp exhibit, commemorating the fallen king as “a gentle soul and friend to many.” The words, written by Lee Ann, were a true summation of Herman’s life. But most visitors walked past without noticing. The zoo was much more interested in drawing attention to the births of new animals. A map handed out at the front gates showed every exhibit where newborns awaited—marked with the word “Baby!” The marketing of new life had reached perfect clarity.

  The greeting on the phone lines had been refined as well. No longer did the recording allude to any magazine’s ranking of the zoo’s suitability for children and families. The new message was simpler:

  “Thank you for calling Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, voted the number one zoo in America.”

  Lee Ann remembered. Sometimes, it seemed as though she carried the entire zoo inside her. At the end of the day, when she rubbed her eyes from exhaustion, all of it was written on her face. The weight and hopes of this institution she loved beyond reason. Its past and present, its best moments and its worst. Countless keepers who had come and gone. Generation after generation of animals who had been born and died inside these walls. Their ghosts lived within her, and when she talked about them, it became clear that she was a captive in the garden, too, and could never let go of its endless joys and sorrows.

  Her voice grew especially quiet when she told the story of what had happened to the chimps after Herman was overthrown.

  “I swore I wasn’t going to talk about that,” she said.

  Bamboo ruled as the alpha for three years. Old and frail as he was, he prevailed. He did not let Alex’s displays fluster him. He got along with Rukiya and the other females and was especially close to Sasha. The young female, growing rapidly, still relied on Rukiya, her adopted mother. But in Bamboo, Sasha found a father. Many nights, she still climbed into his nest and slept beside him. Bamboo and Rukiya took turns watching over her. Entranced with Sasha, Bamboo would offer her fruit and entice her to climb onto his lap. He doted on her, and she adored him back. In their bond, Bamboo found his best self.

  One summer day, the keepers discovered the king’s body curled in the nighthouse. The years had caught up with him. He had struggled with congestive heart failure; his lungs had filled with fluid. Afterward, the other chimps paid their respects. One by one, they ventured inside his den and reached out to touch him and confirm he was truly gone.

  Bamboo’s death, so soon after Herman’s, was difficult enough. But even more painful was the unexpected collapse of Sasha. She was three years old and appeared healthy. One Friday, she was playing and running. The next day, the keepers noticed that she wasn’t eating and seemed a little off. The following morning, when she lost consciousness, the staff took her to the clinic. Murphy tried to revive her, but it was no use. Suffering from a viral heart infection, she never woke up.

  Lee Ann, who had taken such pleasure in cradling Sasha as a baby, made herself carry the female’s body into the nighthouse so that the other chimps would understand she was dead. The staff did not yet know what had killed her, because Murphy had not yet performed the necropsy. Worried that Sasha might be infectious, Lee Ann did not place her inside any of the dens. Instead she walked up to the mesh, holding the body for the others to see. The group exploded with grief. Rukiya whimpered and wailed. Then she grew angry and stomped back and forth, showing her disbelief. Finally she became silent. As the others approached the mesh and reached their fingers through the openings to touch Sasha’s body, Rukiya retreated to the back of her den and sat facing the wall. She could not bear to look at her daughter, lifeless in Lee Ann’s arms. She couldn’t look at any of them.

  For days, Rukiya had trouble accepting Sasha’s death. When Lee Ann came back to the nighthouse to check on her, Rukiya would grow excited. It was obvious that the matriarch clung to the hope that the humans who had taken Sasha away could also bring her back.

  The combined loss of the group’s oldest and youngest members devastated the others. Bamboo had been their leader; Sasha’s youth had graced them with new energy and purpose. Afterward, when Lee Ann watched the remaining chimps, she was struck by how subdued they were. Sometimes, they seemed lost inside an almost eerie stillness.

  Nearly a year later, Alex was still not quite mature enough to become the alpha. He acted like the king, strutting along the rock wall. But when his displays grew too annoying, Rukiya quickly put him in his place. The chimps remained unfocused. They needed a spark. Lee Ann was considering bringing in an older male who could take control. Or maybe another baby.

  Deciding the future of the chimps was only one of the many projects filling Lee Ann’s every waking minute. Seventeen manatees, a record number, we
re swimming in the rehab pools. Naboo and Jamie, the Indian rhinos, had a young calf. In Safari Africa, a pair of shoebill storks guarded a brand new chick, the first ever hatched in North America.

  Lee Ann had not forgotten Lex. She wished him well, hoped he found his way. But she had little interest in theorizing about whatever had gone wrong under his tenure. She had a zoo to watch over. An imperfect zoo, yes. Sometimes glorious, sometimes maddening. But for better or worse, it was hers to worry about now.

  El Diablo Blanco stared into the flames. The wind rustled through the live oaks. In the distance, across the rolling fields of his private ranch, zebras grazed and warthogs strutted. High above, vultures circled in a flawless sky.

  “Turkey vultures,” said Lex, identifying the species with a glance. He leaned toward the campfire he’d just stoked to ward off the chill of an unseasonably cool Sunday afternoon. He took off his safari hat and removed his work gloves, one finger at a time, and explained how his enemies and supposed friends had brought him down.

  “I’m not a political guy,” he said, repeating a familiar theme. “I’m an operations guy, and that was part of my problem. That’s why I got bitch-slapped the way I did.”

  A luxuriant pause.

  “I thought if I did everything under the rules and regulations, then I would be fine.”

  Elena, sitting close by, joined in. “He was doing his job. He’s never been interested in politics as a full-contact sport.”

  It was the last day of February 2010. Several months before, Lex and Lowry Park had reached a financial settlement. Originally he had been told he owed $200,000. But the zoo, clearly weary of the whole affair, had agreed to accept $2,212. And just the other day, the Florida Attorney General’s Office had removed another cloud with a letter to Lex’s attorney.