The Monkey Handlers Read online

  Sara stared at the floor, looking sheepish. “I’m not religious.”

  Stone dropped the subject and went back into the living room. He opened the front door, then squatted down and intently studied the face of the cylinder lock beneath the doorknob. Then he got up and went to the open window. He raised the shade a few inches to examine the window latch. “You leave the window to your apartment unlocked when you go out?”

  “No. I could have sworn I locked it before I left last night. But so much has happened … I just don’t know. I guess I did.”

  “No, you didn’t. There’s no indication of it being forced at all, but there are tool marks on the keyway of your front-door lock.”

  “So,” said Sara, “instead of a sadistic pervert, we have a skilled sadistic pervert.”

  “Not sure we have a pervert at all,” said Stone. He sat on what was left of the arm of the ruined sofa. “Why would a nut out to sniff your panties pick your front-door lock, then try to make you think he got in through an open window? What would he care?”

  Sara closed the refrigerator door and turned to him. “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t think we’ve got a pervert. I don’t think we’ve necessarily got a sadist. Or even a man. It could be a woman. Or more than one man. But whoever they were, they’re smart. What we have here is the result of a very thorough professional search.”

  Stone got up and gestured toward the kitchen. “All the opened food containers were dumped. They didn’t do that to make a mess and piss you off. Those are the favorite hiding places of clever people. They gave you credit for brains—and having something to hide.” Stone paused. “So, you have something to hide, Sara?”

  “Oh God,” said Sara. “You, too?”

  Stone checked his watch. “We’re running behind, kid. We can talk while we eat. C’mon, let’s get outta here.”

  “Okay. But don’t call me ‘kid.’”

  If anything, the experience Sara Rosen had gone through had caused her to sweat even more. Once again in the close confines of the Mustang, Stone felt himself responding to her natural chemical attractant and made a conscious effort to dismiss it.

  “I’m really not hungry anymore,” said Sara.

  “Yeah, I can understand that. We don’t have all that much time, anyway. Tell me about it. Start at the beginning. Don’t leave anything out. Lying to your lawyer is as stupid as lying to your doctor. When you die or get convicted, they’re embarrassed, but you do the dying or the time.”

  “Okay,” said Sara, “it’s not that long a story. Barry … Saul and I have dual citizenship. We were both born here, in Brooklyn. He’s six years older than I am. Anyway, right after his bar mitzvah when I was seven, my father and mother, in a fit of religious fervor, gave up everything and moved to Israel under the law of the return. That’s how we got dual citizenship.”

  Stone negotiated a curve that led to a park down at the riverbank. “I didn’t know Saul had U.S. citizenship,” he said.

  “Well, he does,” said Sara. “Anyway,” she continued, “we did the whole thing, including the kibbutz. Barry ate it up. I hated it. I bitched, pissed and moaned, and generally made life miserable for my parents until they sent me back to my grandparents in Brooklyn when I was thirteen. They’re well-off and were delighted to get me, because they’d been feeling robbed of their grandchildren and now at least they had one back that they could fuss over. I guess they spoiled the hell out of me, because I ended up doing pretty much what I wanted. Which was kind of cruel, because what it turned out I wanted was to go to college at U. Cal., Santa Cruz, which, as far as they were concerned, was as far away as Israel.”

  “Santa Cruz?” Stone said as he parked the Mustang at the seawall. This conversation was important, and he wanted to be able to look Sara in the eye during it.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Sara grimaced. “Okay, the town is a living museum of that goofy hippie stuff that went on thirty years ago, but the school is good. One of the best Shakespeare departments in the country.”

  “You studied Shakespeare?”

  “Undergraduate. English Lit. major. Shakespeare concentration. But I minored in bio. That’s biology, not biography. I got good grades. Never fell into the ‘do dope and fuck off’ trap. So I got into Berkeley for a master’s program in bio, made it, and decided to try for a Ph.D. Never made it.”

  “Why?” asked Stone.

  “I met some people at Berkeley. Sort of ‘Save the fill in the blanks’ types, and I guess I decided my life needed some direction, something other than myself, finally, to devote my energies to. Anyway, I met this guy, he was into raptors—”

  “Raptors?”

  “Birds of prey. Really bright guy. Got me interested in the whole animal-testing thing, and, with one thing and another, I never did get the Ph.D.”

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “About four months ago, Eddie—the raptor guy—and I broke up. We’re still friends, and I have tremendous respect for what he’s doing, but I needed to get away—change of scene. Our thing had been pretty intense. Some of the movement people told me about the campaign that was going to start here, against Riegar, and it’s only eighty miles away from my grandparents, so I packed my cat and rode the dog back here.”

  “Rode the dog?”

  Sara laughed. “Greyhound bus.” It was the first time since he’d met her, Stone thought, that Sara Rosen had laughed. He liked it.

  “So who’s running this protest group,” Stone asked, “you?”

  “Oh, no. The movement’s not that structured. In fact, that’s one of the main things wrong with it. Why it doesn’t get very far. Too many factions. It’s just from time to time they jell on a target—like Riegar. In fact, I think I’m the only real representative of what I guess you’d call my faction. Naturally, I think it’s the only one that makes sense and has any chance of getting anywhere. I mean, I understand and can even sympathize with where the others are coming from, but their actions are, for the most part, counterproductive.”

  Stone glanced at his watch. “Tell you what. We’re getting a little short of time here. We’ll hold the philosophical exposition until after the hearing, if you don’t mind—I’m not blowing you off; I’m interested—but that’s not going to be the subject matter of the hearing. Don’t worry, I’m not going to put you on the stand.…”

  “But I want to testify. This story has got to get out! People just don’t understand; they think our position is based on emotion and bleeding-heart-fuzzy-good-for-animals shit! The whole point—”

  “The whole point,” Stone interrupted her, “has nothing to do with what we’ve just been talking about. I need to know everything you can tell me about last night. Not because I’m going to have you testify about it at the preliminary hearing—we’re doing this to get information, not give it. I need to be able to cross-examine any of the people’s witnesses intelligently, and I can’t do that if I don’t know what happened. Why’d you go down to the plant in the middle of the night with a camera? You on some kind of photo-recon mission for your group?”

  “No! It’s like I told them. I was looking for my cat!”

  “Sure.”

  “Goddamn it, Stone! I’ve got this cat—Romeo—a big old tom. Tiger markings. Head and ears all notched up from getting laid in alleys from here to California. I tried to keep him in, but no, he’s gotta go find himself some pussy—no pun intended. So he shot out of the apartment between my feet the minute I opened the damn door. And I mean he’s gone!

  “Usually, he does his thing and comes back. This time, he didn’t. Well, have you noticed there’re no stray cats running around Rhinekill?”

  “Can’t say I have,” said Stone, “but then, now you mention it, I haven’t seen any. Not lately, at any rate.”

  “Right!” said Sara, warming to her subject. “Now, the protest people have three theories—about the cats I mean. One, the Chinese restaurant, if you check the records, got convicted a year or so ago f
or serving cat meat. They promised never to do it again, but who knows? Two, there’s a rumor that some sick city cops on the late-night shift amuse themselves by shooting stray cats with silenced twenty-twos—but if that’s true, where’re the bodies? Three, we know Riegar’s using animal experimentation to develop new drugs. They admit it! So, I took my Polaroid, got on my bike, and cruised the streets from here to Riegar. One, to find my cat. Two, on the off chance I spot someone grabbing him, I nail him in the act with the Polaroid—it has auto focus and auto flash—I.D. the bastard, and I’ve got my cat and Riegar!”

  “How does that scheme,” asked Stone, “get you ending up inside the plant?”

  “Look,” Sara shot back, “I saw nothing until I got down to the plant. Then I saw a cat—wasn’t sure it was mine—inside the fence on the Riegar grounds. I locked my bike to the fence, took my camera out of the saddlebag, used the bike seat as a ladder, and went over the fence after the cat. I guess the guard saw me. Anyway, he came running out, yelling, and the cat zips right past him into the place. I pointed at the cat and ran past him. No cat. Guards coming. I ran around the corner, hit the elevator, went up—I dunno, ten or so floors—got out, hit the fire stairs, and found myself on one of the floors where they do the animal testing.”

  “See any animals?”

  “No.”

  “So how do you know that’s where they do the testing?”

  “I saw the equipment. It’s horrible. They had Ziegler chairs, Blaylock presses, Collison cannulas, even some Noble-Collip drums. God, it was awful. You know what they use that press for?”

  “You can tell me later. Wha’d you do then?”

  “I photographed everything in the room as best I could. There’re only ten pictures in a pack of Polaroid film. I got off eight before I heard the guard coming. I think what happened is he heard me first. Or the camera, rather. It makes this buzzing sound when it ejects the film? Anyway, I hadn’t stopped to close the door to the hall behind me, and I think that’s what happened.”

  “Okay, so he nails you. What happened to the pictures? He grab them, too?”

  “No,” said Sara, irritated, “he didn’t ‘nail’ me, not then, at any rate.”

  “But you just said—”

  “Damn it, Stone, if you would just stop interrupting me and listen for a minute, I might be able to—”

  “Okay, okay.” Stone lifted his hands, palms outward in a placating gesture. The sleepless night and the shock of her vandalized apartment had clearly taken its toll on his client, and he had a hearing to face. “Just tell me in your own way.”

  “Thank you,” said Sara. “Anyway, I heard him coming, stopped shooting, looked around, saw this inner door. Thought maybe it was a closet. Ducked in to hide. Turns out to be like a monitoring room for the lab—bank of TVs on the wall, PCs on desks. All off. Secretary’s section partitioned off to the right, L-shaped desk, word processor, In-Out trays, postage meter, phone, phonebooks, stuff like that. I hid behind it.”

  Stone started the Mustang’s engine and let out the clutch a bit too fast. The red convertible bolted forward, snapping Sara Rosen’s head back against the headrest. “Sorry,” he apologized, suppressing the impulse to ask her what had happened next.

  Sara reproached him with a look, then said, “Minute after I got down behind the partition, I could hear the door open. I kept waiting for his head to pop over the partition and get me, but I guess he just looked around, then closed the door behind him. I waited a bit till I thought it was safe, then sneaked back out to the lab and headed for the hall. That’s when he got me. Bastard outsmarted me. He was waiting behind the door to the monitoring room.”

  Gingerly, Stone ventured another question, “That’s when he got the pictures, too?”

  Sara had been waiting for him to ask that. “No,” she said with an air of triumph, “because I outsmarted him. With any luck, I’ll be able to show them to you, although I didn’t wait to see what I had. No time to watch them develop.”

  Stone passed a slow truck on the right. “What happened then?”

  “They caught me, yelled at me, called the police, and turned me over to them.”

  “Were you read your rights?”

  “Everyone read me my rights: the guard, the cop, the sheriff’s deputy…”

  “Did you tell them anything?”

  “Just that I was trying to find my cat, which was true. But when they wanted me to give a statement, I remembered what they said when they read me my rights and said I wanted to talk to a lawyer. When I was down at my grandparents’ in the city, I talked to my brother on the phone for the first time in quite a while and mentioned I would be up here doing movement work. Well, you know how big brothers are. Right away, he assumed I’d get in trouble and made me promise to call you if I did. He’s really high on you, you know. Says you’re real good at what you do.”

  “Did,” said Stone.

  “Did? Past tense?”

  Stone’s smile bordered on the sardonic. “Your brother and I fought together in Nam, where we used weapons, not law books. He’s never seen me in a courtroom in his life.”

  “He said you were honest, and I could trust you with my life. Is that past tense, too?”

  “No. So I have to tell you. I’m a lot better at keeping people alive than I am at keeping them out of jail. One thing’s for sure, though.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t do either for someone who won’t follow orders.”

  They were back in the parking lot now, where they had started from after Stone had effected Sara’s release. They got out of the car and walked toward the city court entrance.

  “Okay,” said Stone to his client, “as I said, I’m no criminal lawyer. But I know a hell of a lot more about what’s going on here than you do. I want your promise that there’ll be no outbursts, or anything else. We’re here to find out what the other side has—or as much as we can. On the other hand, we want to give them nothing. You understand?”

  Sara nodded.

  “Does that mean you agree?”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “Bullshit!” Stone barked. “There are times in life when your best isn’t good enough. You’re not out to do your best; you’re out to do what is required. There’s a hell of a difference. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you agree?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then,” said Stone, “let’s go in there and play guts football.”

  As Stone and his client walked into city court, they found it virtually deserted. A young man of about Sara’s age, wearing too much hair and a three-piece suit, sat before the bar in the front row, the place usually reserved for lawyers. An aged bailiff, seeing the couple enter, rose stiffly, walked over to the door to the judge’s chambers, and tapped on it gently.

  Almost immediately, the door opened and a man of sixty with a full head of naturally wavy white hair and kindly blue eyes behind rimless glasses entered. His black robe marked him as a judge. As he crossed to his seat behind the bench, the bailiff chanted his mantra: “All-rise-the-city-court-of-the-city-of-Rhinekill-is-now-in-session-the-Honorable-Judge-Abraham-Gershen-presiding-draw-nigh-and-ye-shall-be-heard.”

  A stenographer, late, scurried into place and looked up expectantly from her machine. “Call the case,” said Judge Gershen, and the stenographer’s fingers played the keys.

  “People v. Rosen,” said the bailiff.

  “Mark Cole, assistant district attorney, Mohawk County, ready for the People,” the young man said. Still standing, Stone followed suit.

  “Michael Stone, ready for the defense.”

  “Proceed,” said the judge, settling back in his chair.

  “Your Honor,” Mark Cole began, his expression that of a bridge player who is in the process of trumping his opponent’s ace, “it is my duty to inform the court that within the hour the grand jury of the county of Mohawk handed down a true bill indicting the defendant for one count of b
urglary in the second degree in connection with the incident that is the subject of this scheduled preliminary hearing, thereby rendering these proceedings moot.”

  “To no one’s great surprise, I’m sure,” said the judge. His voice weary, he continued, “Very well, ladies and gentlemen, I assume whatever bail arrangements made previously are to continue?”

  Stone spoke up: “Defendant was released on her own recognizance by Judge Martin after a habeas corpus proceeding in county court earlier today, Your Honor.”

  The judge looked over to the assistant district attorney.

  “Counselor?”

  “If the court please, People at this time advise defendant that arraignment is set for ten A.M. tomorrow morning before Judge Carlini in county court. At that time, the People intend to move for setting of bail. People therefore request, in view of the short time before arraignment, that defendant be remanded until ten A.M. tomorrow.”

  Stone looked as if he was about to rip up the bar, but Judge Gershen cut him off before he could begin to object.

  “No, I won’t do that, counselor. If recognizance is good enough for Judge Martin, it’s good enough for this court.”

  “But, Your Honor,” Cole expostulated, “in the intervening time, the grand jury has spoken and—”

  “The ruling stands, counselor.” Judge Gershen’s eyes were no longer kindly. “There has been reference to a habeas corpus hearing, and the court notes that this defendant was originally scheduled to appear before it at seven-thirty this morning and was not produced here by those who had her in custody. You have your indictment. Quit while you’re ahead, counselor.”

  With that, the judge banged his gavel sharply and said, with obvious irritation, “Adjourned.”

  “All rise,” said the bailiff as Judge Gershen left the bench for his chambers. As the door shut behind him, Stone took Sara Rosen’s arm, wheeled her around, and said, “C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

  On the now-familiar walk back to the parking lot, Sara asked, “What do we do now, coach? Punt?”