The Monkey Handlers Read online

  “I’m going to have to make allowances? Why? I’m not his lawyer. And I’m not going to be, either. He gets his devoted ass busted, fuck him. He’s on his own. And something tells me with his attitude problem, he’s gonna get his ass busted.”

  “Oh, Michael, please. This whole thing down at Riegar is a mess. Completely unorganized. And Eddie’s an incredible organizer. That’s why I’m putting up with him. I’m not asking you to like him, just don’t do anything to screw things up.”

  They were downstairs by now and out on the balmy Sunday sidewalk.

  “I shouldn’t screw things up? What do you call giving that Irish reporter an interview without your lawyer present? And admitting, goddamn it, that the pictures exist?”

  They turned back toward the building. “Michael, don’t you see? The pictures don’t really show anything. The apparatus was empty. But Riegar doesn’t know what isn’t in the pictures. Maybe you can make a deal—”

  “Damn it, Sara, the only deals I’m going to make are with the prosecutor—to try to get you off. And you’ve just made that much harder.”

  “I’m sorry, Michael, I just thought—”

  “Well, stop thinking, okay? When it comes to this stuff, you’re not good at it. And another thing. I don’t care if you fuck Eddie Berg, but don’t fuck around with him. Get that? Guy looks like a fanatic. He’s gonna go down in flames, and I don’t want you along for the ride.”

  Sara flushed. “Who are you to talk to me like that!”

  “Your lawyer. Or do you want to get someone else?”

  “No … no…”

  They reached the door to Sara’s apartment. “Okay,” said Stone, “I want to know everything you told the Reuters guy.”

  “Other than the stuff about the pictures that you read, it was pretty much a combination of a rehash of the press conference and me dodging his questions—‘Was I in there?’ and ‘Did I take the pictures?’ I remembered what you said. Believe me, if I’d admitted anything, you’d have read that, too.”

  “What’s your take on the guy?”

  “The reporter? That’s what he is. Asks questions. That’s what reporters do. Why?”

  “I dunno. Too many coincidences, too many little things. I just remembered why that detective, Fisher, looked familiar. He’s the guy was hanging around the water cooler when we left the courtroom. Snoopin’.”

  “You’re getting paranoid, Michael. Reporters ask questions. Detectives snoop.”

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

  The two of them reentered the apartment. Saul was seated, eating a bagel and cream cheese. Eddie Berg was pacing up and down, fuming. As soon as he saw them, he opened his mouth to speak.

  “Don’t start, Eddie,” Sara said, “just don’t start.”

  Stone ignored Eddie Berg and spoke to Saul. “I don’t think either one of us is exactly welcome here just now. Got plenty of room over at my place. Cooking’s great, and the price is right. Whatta ’ya say. Grab your gear and let’s launch.”

  “Thought you’d never ask,” said Saul, swallowing his last mouthful of bagel. He got up and picked up a suitcase. “Ciao, everybody,” he said to his sister and Eddie Berg. Then he grinned at Stone and said, “Good to go.”

  * * *

  Helmar Metz was angry. “I tell you she knows something!” He held a newspaper in front of the seated Georg Kramer and pointed to a line of text. “‘Monkey handler,’ she used the term monkey handler. Isn’t that the exact term you told me is the … How do you call it? Nickname used by your employees for the men I provided Letzger? That’s inside information! She didn’t come by that in a late-night intrusion.”

  “I saw that article.” Kramer was trying to calm Metz with a moderate tone and reason. “You’ll note that the article deals with the employee of another company who actually was a ‘monkey handler.’ That’s what he did—he handled monkeys, and one of them bit him in the chest. He caught the disease that was harmless to the monkey, and because he was a human, not a monkey, he died. That’s all there was to it. It was just a coincidence.”

  Metz slapped the paper down on the top of the desk that now belonged to him and sat down. “I don’t like coincidences,” Metz said. “Not when so much is at stake. We must know everything that woman knows. She must be working for someone, someone she reports to. That means she must prepare reports—”

  “You’re thinking like a German,” said Kramer, “very logically. Americans are not always so logical—” He was interrupted by the ringing of the telephone on the desk. Helmar Metz, leaning back in the spring-loaded chair behind it, checked his instinct to pick up the phone, motioning instead to Kramer, who was sitting in the wing chair. Kramer dutifully got up and answered his own telephone, listened for several moments, then said, “I’ll be back to you,” and hung up.

  “Well?” said Metz.

  “That was Fisher, the local detective I told you about who moonlights for our security company.”

  “Moonlights?”

  “An American expression for a second job. He’s my contact with the motorcycle thugs. One of them is an informant for him on drug matters. He reports that a half dozen of them beat up the lawyer for the Rosen woman, but that he gave a good account of himself. He has physical courage.”

  “His present condition?”

  “Fisher says the gang members he talked to said they were careful not to put him in the hospital or damage him where it could be seen. Face is okay, for example. Oddly enough, Fisher’s informant says a couple of the attackers needed medical attention.”

  “All right,” said Metz, “he has physical courage. We’ll see if he has moral courage. With your other idea, you may go forward.”

  Kramer picked up the telephone again. He punched in a number from memory and said, “It’ll just take a phone call.”

  * * *

  With the longest day of the year only twenty days away, at a little after 8:00 A.M. on Monday, the first of June, sunlight already flooded Aunt May’s kitchen as Stone and Saul Rosen were finishing breakfast. “So, how long can you stay?” Stone asked.

  “Within reason, as long as I want.”

  “Got a ton of annual leave stored up, huh?”

  “Yeah, but that’s not the reason. I’m under the ambassador, and he can do pretty much what he wants with his personnel. I’m just an assistant to one of his assistants, remember. When I told him my sister was in trouble, he said to take off and not worry about it. You know how Jews are about family.”

  “Something everyone could take a lesson from,” Aunt May interjected. “Speaking of family, a man your age, which is about the same age as my nephew, should be married and having one of his own by this time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Are you sure,” Saul asked Stone, “your aunt isn’t Jewish?”

  “Worse,” said Stone. “She’s Irish Catholic. They really know how to lay a guilt trip on you. I’ll put Catholic guilt up against Jewish guilt and spot you five any day.”

  The telephone interrupted simultaneous attempted rebuttals from Saul and Aunt May. Eager to get out of the hole he was digging for himself, Stone scooped it off the kitchen wall, said, “This is he,” then listened for a minute and said, “Yeah, I mean, yes, sir. Your office at eight forty-five. Yes. I could do that … right.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Stone.

  “You will, indeed,” agreed Aunt May.

  “What is it?” asked Saul.

  “That was old man Van der Hoven himself. Wants me to meet him in his office at eight forty-five. That’s late in the morning for him. I see him going to work when I’m still running.”

  “Who is this bird?” asked Saul.

  “Current senior partner of a law firm that was founded when the first Van der Hoven stepped off the Half Moon when Henry Hudson sailed her up the river. Local lawyers in their day to the Vanderbilts, the Roosevelts, and the rest of that crew.”

  “I wonder,” said Aunt May, “what he wants with the likes of you?”
r />   “I don’t know,” said Stone, “but I’m sure going to find out. Want to ride with me downtown, Saul? It’s an easy walk back, and you can get to look the town over.”

  Saul Rosen grimaced. “Jeeze, Mike! You just got through damn near killing me on that Marine reserve obstacle course this morning. If you don’t mind, I’ll hang here for a bit and digest this great meal, then I think I’ll walk down to the Riegar plant and check it out—see what’s going on.”

  “You one of those animal-welfare people like your sister?” asked Aunt May.

  “No, ma’am. Though I’d hate to think those Germans are treating helpless animals like Jews.”

  Stone checked his watch. “I’m outta here. Tell ya about it when I get back.”

  As Michael Stone steered the Mustang through downtown Rhine-kill, he yielded to an irresistible urge and went two blocks out of his way to drive past the public defender’s office. When he saw the yellow Prelude parked out front, he swept his eyes upward to the building’s windows, felt an ache deep inside him, then condemned himself for being little boy foolish. That accounted for the stern look on his face as he entered the office of William Van der Hoven.

  The man behind the huge mahogany desk looked like a self-portrait of Frans Hals in the latest from Brooks Brothers. The office itself resembled a museum more than a law office. The ceiling was high, the paneling everywhere and almost covered completely by oil portraits of ancient Van der Hovens and seventeenth-century deeds to half the New World. Hidden among all this was the usual in the way of academic and bar-membership credentials. Van der Hoven himself looked as if he wouldn’t accept a fee unless it was in gold. “Come in, Mr. Stone,” he said with a voice surprisingly firm for someone so old. “Sit down. Good of you to come over on such short notice. Cigar?”

  Stone took a seat in a deep maroon leather chair and declined the cigar with a gesture.

  “Little early for me, too,” said Van der Hoven. Then he said, “I’ll get right to the point, sir. You’ve been following this savings-and-loan mess that’s still all over the news?” Van der Hoven assumed Stone had and continued without waiting for an answer. “Bad business, sir. Bad business. But, as with everything, from the point of view of this firm, some good has come of it.

  “After all the mergers and reformations have shaken out, the firm has ended up representing several more banks in the area and one savings and loan. The manpower resources of the firm are taken up completely with the banks and our other clients. The savings and loan, under the new federal rules, will be limiting its investments strictly to real estate mortgage loans—what savings and loans were invented to do and did well until they got greedy and went into things they knew nothing about. But they’re back on the track now, sir, back on the track!

  “To be brief, the firm needs a lawyer with knowledge of the local real estate scene and experience in real estate law to handle this one client. I must tell you that were he still alive, this offer would have been made to your uncle. Outstanding man in his field. But it is your field, too, and from what everyone tells me, you’re good at it. Now, do you know what a newly admitted lawyer who graduated from, say, Fordham or Columbia Law as Law Review and in the top ten percent of his class commands in New York City? Ninety thousand a year, sir. Ninety thousand a year.”

  Stone broke in as Van der Hoven paused for breath in his “brief” monologue. “I think you may have received some bad information, sir. I was never Law Review, and I wasn’t in the top ten percent of my class.”

  Van der Hoven didn’t like being interrupted by anyone under seventy. “Let me finish, sir. Let me finish. In spite of his academic performance, a newly admitted lawyer is an unknown quantity when it comes to practicing law. You have experience, sir. In the exact field we need. I’m offering you a position as a senior associate at ninety thousand a year. When can you start?”

  “Mr. Van der Hoven, I haven’t accepted your offer yet. I’d like a little time to think it over, I—”

  “Time, young man, is something that unfortunately we do not have. This client, for all intents and purposes, is a brand-new institution. It must get off to a correct start. The scrutiny will be severe, as you can imagine, in view of the circumstances. I’d like you to start tomorrow.”

  “Sir, that’s not possible. I represent a young woman—”

  “Yes, yes, yes, I know all about that. Against Riegar Pharmaceutical—”

  “No, sir. Against the state of New York, which indicted her.”

  “Principle’s the same. She’s accused of breaking into the Riegar premises. Riegar is a client of the firm. I’m afraid there’s a clear conflict of interest here.”

  Stone stood up. His face was cold with anger. “No,” he said, deliberately dropping the sir. “There is no conflict, because I am not now, nor will I ever be, representing your firm.” He looked at his watch. “You have just wasted a half hour of my time in an attempt to bribe me to discontinue representing my client. I’d have you up on charges before the bar association if I didn’t know it’d be a waste of more of my time, the way you guys play cover each other’s ass. Which, sir, is where I suggest you stick your offer.”

  Stone turned on his heel and walked out, leaving the door to Van der Hoven’s office wide open. “Here!” He could hear the old man’s voice shouting as he left. “Here!”

  9

  Saul Rosen was still rubbing his eyes when he walked into Aunt May’s kitchen on Tuesday morning. “Sorry,” he announced, “I overslept.” His disheveled hair and the stubble on his jaw proved it. The chiming of the grandfather clock reproached him. Saul looked small in Stone’s bathrobe, the shoulder seams hanging halfway down his upper arms.

  “Just in time,” Aunt May said with a hint of disapproval in her voice. “The kitchen was about to close. Sit down, there’re still some scrambled eggs left that the disposal there was too embarrassed to finish.”

  “Ha!” Stone replied. “She’s really mad ’cause I didn’t finish them. If I ate everything Mazie cooked for me, I could work out four hours a day and still end up a blimp.” He looked accusingly at Saul. “I was looking for you this morning when I started my run.”

  “Hey,” said Saul, seating himself at the table and picking up a brimming cup of hot coffee, “I’m still getting over the Marine ‘O course.’ I’m the same age you are, and we’re both out of the ‘Hoo-Rah’ business. Only I admit it. I’ll work out with you from time to time, but you still go at it like the old days. I’m not getting shinsplints and worn-out knees because you’re a fanatic.” He sipped some more coffee and picked up a section of the morning paper, saying, “What’s new?”

  “Eddie Berg’s looking for trouble. Got himself arrested down at the Riegar plant yesterday. Violating an injunction not to interfere with employees going to work.”

  Saul put down the paper and relied on Stone for the details. “What’d he do?”

  “Chained himself to the main gate. Five’ll getcha ten I get a call from Sara to help him out.”

  “No deal. She’s stuck on the guy.”

  “Yeah,” said Stone, “I can’t figure it. Guy’s been around raptors so long, he’s developed their personality.”

  “What’s a raptor?” asked Aunt May, putting a plate down in front of Saul.

  “Bird of prey,” Stone answered.

  “You mean like an eagle?” The telephone started ringing. Aunt May went to pick it up off the wall.

  “Looks and acts more like a vulture to me,” Stone said, but Aunt May was listening to the telephone.

  “For six months?” she said into the receiver. “All my bills for six months?” She listened awhile more, then said, “Well, how much do you think I’ll get back?… I see. Well, all right, I’ll bring them down this morning.”

  As Aunt May hung up, Stone said, “What was that all about?”

  “New York Oil and Gas. The government says they overcharged customers. Something about counting a tax as an expense in setting the rates or something, I don’t k
now. If I take my bills down for the last six months, they can tell how much I should get back.”

  “Wonder why they didn’t write you a letter.”

  “I don’t know. Everything’s different these days. Nobody has any last names. I’m supposed to see Marsha, whoever she is.”

  “Better take a sandwich,” said Stone. “There’ll be a line a mile long behind the person who tells you where to find Marsha.” Stone got up and pulled down the bottom of his suit coat to make it fit better over his shoulders. “Well,” he said, “I’ve gotta get going. Gonna hit the DA with another motion in Sara’s case. Make him work for it.” He turned to Saul. “What’re you gonna do, go back to bed?”

  “Nope,” said Saul, lingering over his coffee, “gonna shave ’n bathe and check out the fun down at Riegar.”

  “Just don’t get busted,” Stone said, smiling, and was out the door.

  As Stone’s Mustang pulled out of the driveway at 182 Garden Street, a man in a dark green Chevrolet four-door sedan, parked half a block back on the same side of the street, spoke in German into a transceiver: “I have him.”

  The transceiver’s squelch broke with the reply: “Not too close.” The Chevy driver hit his transmit button twice to acknowledge the instruction, then pulled away from the curb.

  A little while later, Aunt May, clutching a pocketbook containing six months’ worth of heating-oil bills, started walking toward downtown.

  Again there was a transmission in German, this one from a Chrysler K car across the street, three houses up, watching through a side mirror. “She’s afoot!”

  “So? Get out and follow on foot!” The speaker was dressed in coveralls and a paper cap that read DURON, and was seated in the right-front seat of a van with a rack of ladders on the top. The side of the van read CLARKE & SONS, PAINTING CONTRACTORS. It was parked on Blain Terrace, a side street that intersected Garden. “That’s both of them,” the passenger said to the van driver. “Let’s go.”