Nature Of The Beast

By Roland Keller

Since losing his job and its regular paycheck at an Albany investigative firm, life for private investigator Edward Zachery Taylor, known as Easy because of his initials, is going downhill. In business for himself– just himself, by himself, with no boss, no client, and no money– Easy’s car has been repossessed and he’s behind in his rent. Getting a referral from his friend, veterinarian Henrietta Van Voenderhueeks, Easy reluctantly accepts the assignment of finding Diana Hunter’s missing pit bull dog which may have been abducted for dog fighting.
With retainer in hand, Easy immediately places bets with his local bookie who gives him a lead that takes him into the seamy underworld of dog fighting. Then on an errand for the veterinarian to a local testing lab, Easy encounters the bizarre genetic research being conducted there by Dr. Phyllis Steen. The two worlds converge in the lab’s secretive efforts at genetically altering the nature of beasts by transforming passive creatures into aggressive ones.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PKA Publications
• Release date: Feb 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215221587

Roland Keller

When he wasn’t riding on one of his Paso Fino horses, Roland Keller was the editor of the literary tabloid, PKA’s Advocate, for over three decades. He is the author of the ‘Easy Taylor’ mysteries Pardee Holler, Nature of the Beast, Denial, Chimera, and Squirrelly, and of the political romance novella, Straw Man. He, his wife Patricia, and their Paso Finos live in the Catskill Mountains of New York.

Book preview

Nature Of The Beast

Copyright 2023 Roland Keller

Published by PKA Publications

At Smashwords / Draft2Digital

Nature of the Beast, as with so much in life, is entirely fiction, except for those few details that are real, like Greene County, Columbia County, the City of Hudson, the Village of Catskill, the Catskill Mountains, the riding skill of Angel Cordero and Angel Cordero himself, the names of the other jockeys mentioned, Tracy the sheep, and the highway numbers used in this work, and a few other details I don’t recall. All of the actual characters are completely fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, whether living or dead or anything in between, is really quite remarkable and not at all the result of the author’s efforts and so may be discounted totally or just ignored as irrelevant.

–RK

© 2018 PKA Publications All Rights Reserved

This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means whatsoever, without written permission from the publisher.

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This book is dedicated to

Lee Messing

and to the memory of

Ralph Messing,

and, of course, to Pat.

"Outside a dog, man’s best friend is a book.

Inside a dog, it’s too dark to read."

–Groucho Marx

20th Century American philosopher,

social critic, & comedian.

Nature Of The Beast

1

Lab

The hum of the fluorescent lights was the only sound until the laboratory assistant switched on the tape recorder and started to speak.

October thirty-one, seven pee em, defense-aggression response test number one-oh-oh-four.

He spoke softly, mostly out of fatigue, but partly because he always felt conspicuous and slightly vulnerable when he was all alone in the research facility, assuming he really was alone, which was not something on which he would have bet the ranch. As clinically antiseptic as the place was, it always gave him the creeps when he was alone there.

But no matter how loudly or softly he spoke, he was not going to be sensed by the two test animals, a large brown toad he recognized as the common Bufo americanus, and an even larger hognose snake of the genus Heterodon. Robert Einstadt could never remember the assorted species and subspecies of Heterodon, and fleetingly, he wished some other type of snake that he could precisely identify were being used.

Einstadt was seated in front of four TV monitors and a table microphone. Two of the screens showed the toad, two the snake. Each of the animals was in a separate, uniformly white, windowless chamber, one cubic foot in size, with a removable partition between them. By remote control, Einstadt removed the partition.

He would have liked a cup of coffee and one of those sticky sugar doughnuts going stale in his six-by-eight foot office down the hall. But he was barely on schedule as it was, and food and drink were strictly forbidden anywhere near the lab or the equipment. It was one of Doctor Steen’s rules. One of many.

Doctor Phyllis Steen, Ph.D. in biotechnical engineering and half a dozen other ultra-modern specialties, had a lot of rules for her underlings, immutable, unyielding rules that were bent or broken at the peril of employment in her private research facility, United States Research and Technology Services, quietly and disparagingly acronymed USRATS by some of its more menial help.

Einstadt, until last spring a lowly lab gofer, was only conducting this set of tests because his predecessor had dared bend one of those rules. He couldn’t afford to make the same kind of blunder, so he ignored the rumbling in his stomach and forced his attention back to the screens. If anyone were giving odds, Einstadt would have bet that this test was going to follow the same pattern as numbers one through one-oh-oh-three.

Safety partition removed, he said, checking the digital clock, at seven-oh-one pee em.

It took a full ten minutes of uninterrupted boredom before anything moved. Then the snake stuck out its tongue.

"Heterodon…" He hesitated, still unable to remember exactly which kind of hognose snake it was, although his best guess was that it was probably Heterodon platyrhinos, the eastern hognose. He was tempted to say Hognose-ius snake-ius, but that was the kind of joke that made the humorless Dr. Steen absolutely brittle. He decided to go with what he knew, cleared his throat and said, "Heterodon ingesting air samples beginning at seven-eleven. Movement toward adjoining chamber begun almost simultaneously."

Hardly a surprise, Einstadt thought. Toads are what hognose snakes eat. Science at its finest.

Einstadt knew what was to come: hognose snake enters other chamber, hognose snake senses toad, toad senses snake and tries to climb the wall of the box, snake strikes toad, wrapping itself around the struggling toad, then snake eats toad alive, always head first.

It did a lot to quell his appetite, if not the grumbling of his gut.

Einstadt was tempted to shut off the monitors and just fake the recorded observations. Having watched umpteen snakes scarf down umpteen frogs and toads made watching this particular event less than scintillating. The doomed Bufo was already trying to climb the walls of its death trap.

With a sort of mental detachment that always sounded like professional objectivity when he listened to his own recorded narrative, Einstadt watched the snake swallow the toad. As far as Einstadt could tell, USRATS had very little to show for all these defense-aggression response tests except proof positive that snakes eat toads and frogs. Personally, he believed it after the first test, but, of course, all he ever got to see of the highly secret, highly compartmentalized research on defense-aggression response was the snake feeding sessions. In a funk, he watched the peristaltic forward flow of the snake’s mouth over the stubby, bumpy body of the toad, mindlessly narrating the scene for future generations of underpaid researchers.

As far as he knew, which was damned little, only Dr. Steen herself had the full set of data. Nobody else at the lab seemed to know what the object of the research really was, or if they did, they certainly weren’t about to tell him. Einstadt didn’t even know what he was supposed to be seeking in these tests. What he did know, from his graduate education, was that the defense-aggression response syndrome is that set of actions, either conscious or reflexive, performed by an organism when confronted with a perceptible danger, taking on all the observable characteristics of overt aggression but only until the danger ceased. Defense-aggression responses included such things as herbivores– like horses– biting people, bees stinging, and Ronald Reagan invading Grenada.

But it didn’t seem to have diddly to do with watching hognose snakes swallow toads.

He was about to switch off and put the snake back into its holding tank when he saw it suddenly shudder and twitch. Damn, he thought, it’s going to upchuck.

From his experience, Einstadt knew that about one in five snakes regurgitated and either abandoned the dead toad or re-ate it if it were still alive. The first time he’d seen it, he about tossed his own cookies. But he knew that if he bothered the snake now, it might gag on the toad and die, and he’d be responsible. From behind half-closed eyelids that helped at least blur what he was watching, Einstadt resumed his narrative.

"Seven thirty-two pee em, Heterodon commencing regurgitation…"

With the calm only a true scientist could impart to such a totally disgusting display, Einstadt continued his blow-by-blow until the toad, blinking and gulping, sat eyeball to eyeball with its former host. Einstadt knew it was anthropomorphic projection, but he could have sworn the snake looked surprised.

Then the impossible happened.

Einstadt almost forgot to speak when the toad first attacked the snake. In the first seconds of the toad’s onslaught, Einstadt thought that the Bufo was simply experiencing a spasm and hurling itself at the snake reflexively. Apparently, so did the snake because it barely reacted, still recovering from its indigestion.

But the toad didn’t stop. With growing ferocity, the toad lunged at the snake, slapping the snake’s head with its fore pads.

Having recoiled, the snake struck at the toad, taking hold of it again as if to re-ingest it. But this time, the toad wasn’t having any of it.

Einstadt had never seen anything like it. Wide-eyed, he watched the toad grab the snake’s jaws and, like a lion tamer in a circus, force the jaws apart. Free again of the snake’s jaws, the toad lunged, its own mouth agape.

The toad now had hold of the snake just behind the serpent’s head. Like a terrier with a rat, the toad whipped the snake violently back and forth, bouncing the two of them off the white sides of the arena. Unabated, the violent outburst continued until, limp and lifeless, the snake hung from the toad’s mouth.

Then the toad began to ingest the snake.

By the time Einstadt had gotten from the console to the room where the test arena was set up, the toad was dead, too, having choked on the first inch and a half of the hognose.

As he dialed Dr. Steen’s private number, following his laboratory manual’s instructions in case of unusual laboratory events, Einstadt kept repeating to himself, The toad ate the snake. The toad ate the snake.

He was still saying that when Dr. Steen answered her phone.

Well, it’s about time, she said. Don’t touch anything. I’m on my way over.

2

The Call

I know you’re in there, Taylor. Answer me. I’m not leaving till you do!

The banging at his apartment door accompanied by the landlady’s shouts were really beginning to annoy Easy. Not enough to make him answer, but enough to break his concentration.

At this rate, he’d never finish his manuscript. Hell, at this rate, he wouldn’t even be able to start it. As long as Mrs. Rockefeller, the old dear, held her ground and kept pounding, Easy would have to keep still and pretend he wasn’t home. He couldn’t risk letting her hear him clack away on his typewriter, even if he had any idea what to write, which he didn’t. She’d never give up if she really knew he was in there.

Boy, you wouldn’t think a couple of months of back rent would be worth all the commotion.

The phone rang and he jumped. Two, three rings. Had he left his machine on? He couldn’t think with all that pounding. Mustering what little stealth he could, Easy tip-toed half way across the room to where he could see if the green ‘answer’ light was on. Naturally, it wasn’t.

Damn, he muttered, hurrying to click the thing on before the ringing stopped. But the stupid phone shut up before he got there. Okay, that’s it. Enough is enough. He headed for the door. His hand was on the dead bolt when the phone started up again. Throwing caution to the winds, he shot over to the answering machine and hit the button. It answered on the third ring.

Hi, Easy, it’s me, Hank.

The familiar voice of Doc Hank– Doctor Henrietta Van Voenderhueeks, DVM, the current principal player in what passed for Easy’s love life– was the sweetest sound Easy had heard in days. Even Mrs. Rockefeller stopped pounding to listen, no doubt, Easy guessed, with her ear pressed hard up against the keyhole. If he weren’t so determined to hide from her, he would have whistled full blast into the hole. Serve her right, the snoopy old witch.

I know you can’t pick up right now. You’re probably still hiding from your landlady… Hank’s voice was teasing.

How the hell does she know things like that? Easy wondered.

…Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, I passed your name along to a friend of mine and told her to call you. She needs some help and I told her you’re the best p.i. in Greene County…

Easy nodded in agreement. As far as he knew, he was the only p.i. in Greene County.

…So when she calls, be nice…

I’m always nice, he said indignantly.

I heard that! Mrs. Rockefeller yelled. Now you open up before I break down this door!

…Her name’s Diana. And be careful, she’s a real tough lady. ’Bye

I’m warning you! Mrs. Rockefeller bellowed.

Why do women have to be so tough? Easy asked himself, wondering if Mrs. Rockefeller really could break down the door.

Open this door right now!

Absolutely she could.

I’m going to count to three, Mrs. Rockefeller announced.

When in doubt, Easy said to himself, try subterfuge.

One!

If he’d had a disguise, Easy would have used it.

Two!

Running to his bedroom-living-dining room-office-den closet, Easy grabbed his phony velcro-zipper full leg cast and his pair of old wooden crutches. She’d never throw a cripple out onto the street. Maybe.

Three!

He was just able to get the bogus cast on over his pants leg and get the crutches tucked under his arms when he heard the lock click and the door swung open.

Mrs. Rockefeller, Easy said, smiling and hobbling to the door, how nice to see you again. The cast had been fitted to his leg before his car had been repossessed and he hadn’t yet taken up bicycling as a serious alternative to being stranded. Now it was very tight, especially over his jeans. With larger thigh muscles, the cast nearly cut off blood circulation to his foot. He grimaced in not altogether feigned discomfort.

My rent, Taylor, Mrs. Rockefeller demanded. You’re two months late. I want my money. She eyed the cast, then looked at Easy’s face. Clearly, he was in pain. So, now you’re not only fired, you’re crippled, too, huh?

All the sweet old lady landlords in America, and he had to pick her. Fired? Easy tried to sound casual. Mrs. Rockefeller, as I told you in August–

The last time I saw any rent money from you, Mrs. Rockefeller pointedly interrupted.

Easy nodded. I wasn’t fired. I quit. To go into business for myself. It wasn’t exactly a lie. Easy had at least mouthed the words I quit while lying in a hospital bed just moments before his former employer, Raymond J. Donovan of Lauder & Donovan Investigations, fired him at an uncomfortably high decibel level. And he was, in a manner of speaking, in business for himself. Just himself. All by himself. No boss, no partner, no client, no money. I’m self-employed now, Mrs. Rockefeller. But it’s going to take a little time for me to get the ball rolling. He tapped the cast so that she’d notice why his ball wasn’t quite rolling yet.

Self-employed, self-employed. Puh! Mrs. Rockefeller looked like she wanted to spit. Un-employed, you mean. And a cripple to boot.

Easy wondered if she meant ‘to boot’ literally. Well, as a matter of fact, he said, slipping a finger between the cast and his jeans and running it back and forth to ease the pinch. I’m not unemployed. I have a client. At least, he hoped he had, or would have, if Doc Hank’s Diana ever called.

Then you have my money. Mrs. Rockefeller folded her thick arms across her ample bosom. She looked like an immovable object, a little old lady sumo wrestler who could snap Easy’s cash-poor neck in a heartbeat if he didn’t come across with some bucks. If New York Lou, Easy’s favorite bookie, ever needed some extra muscle, Mrs. Rockefeller would do nicely.

Uh, not exactly, Easy said, trying one of his sure-fire win-anybody-over smiles.

The smile fell on deaf ears.

Not exactly? What does that mean, ‘not exactly’? Mrs. Rockefeller kept looking from his face to his cast and back.

Easy thought how well she managed to hide her sympathy for him, the poor injured tenant. Maybe the cast idea wasn’t working. She looked like she was contemplating breaking his other leg. Well, see, he tapped the cast and hobbled a little, it’s just that right now I’ve got to take it a little easy for a while. But just a little while, mind you. I should have this month’s rent real soon.

And what about September’s and October’s?

Oh, is it November first already? Easy asked ingenuously.

Okay, that’s it. I’m not buying any of this crap. Mrs. Rockefeller unfolded her arms and Easy almost flinched. You give me something right this minute or you’re out of here, buddy.

But Mrs. Rockefeller, I’m injured, and it’s almost winter–

That’ll do for starters, she said and stalked over to his typewriter. This ought to cover a week’s rent.

Dropping his crutches, Easy lunged for the battered, antediluvian Remington. No, wait! He draped himself over the machine just as Mrs. Rockefeller’s iron grip closed on it. You can’t take this. I need it, he pleaded.

Need it? What for? Write your letters with a pen. Mrs. Rockefeller hefted the typewriter with Easy still clinging to it.

In the back of his mind, Easy was deeply impressed by the old lady’s strength. No, you don’t understand. I need this for my writing. For my novel. He hadn’t meant to say it. It just got said. It was the first time he’d ever mentioned it, his novel, his dream– actually, more like his daydream since he barely had a page written and no outline, no solid notion of what it was to be. He groaned inwardly, waiting for the ridicule.

But, as usual, he didn’t get the reaction he expected.

Instead of ridiculing him, Mrs. Rockefeller only got angrier. Writer! You? I thought you had a profession! When I rented to you, you told me you had a license, that you had a job!

I did. I mean, I do. Easy wasn’t sure how, but he seemed to have made a bad thing worse.

I should have known you were no good, Mrs. Rockefeller said in a low, sinister voice. Wrenching the typewriter from under Easy, she stepped back a pace and said, My first husband, rot him, was a writer. And I swore when I was finally rid of him I’d never have anything more to do with your filthy kind.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to explain that he wasn’t any good at it, Easy thought.

Sit around all day, in the house, not doing an honest day’s work. No wonder you don’t have my rent money. Mrs. Rockefeller marched to the door. And probably when you do get the money, she paused, the typewriter under one powerful arm, one hand on the doorknob, you’ll just drink it away, won’t you?

Uh, no, I don’t drink, Easy fumbled.

Then you’ll gamble it away, Mrs. Rockefeller shot back.

Easy hesitated, wondering if he could explain that his betting system wasn’t really gambling, or wouldn’t be, anyway, as soon as he got the bugs out.

I knew it! Mrs. Rockefeller crowed, triumphant. You’re all alike, you writers. I knew it. Well, you just consider this a favor, Taylor. I’ll take this useless machine and credit whatever old man Murphy gives me for it against your rent–

Murphy! Easy gasped. But he’s a junk dealer! Couldn’t you at least pawn it?

Junk is what it is and the sooner you’re rid of it, the sooner you’ll get around to real work and making money to pay me my rent. Mrs. Rockefeller slammed the door behind her.

Easy stuck out his tongue at the closed door when it suddenly swung open again, catching him in his adolescent gesture.

And don’t be using that cast as an excuse either, you. My poor cousin Rudy had a broken leg once and I didn’t let him miss a rent payment, so it isn’t going to work for you. She slammed the door again.

This time, Easy waited until he heard her stamping down the stairs before he stuck out his tongue. With her gone, he ripped off the cast, wincing at the sudden hot sensation of normal blood circulation. Should have brained her with the crutches, he grumbled. Stupid old witch. Take my typewriter, sure. Why don’t you just cut out my heart, he said to the door. Now he’d never be able to write a decent manuscript.

He was still rubbing his throbbing leg ten minutes later, chastising himself for having tried a sympathy ploy on a person he should have known didn’t have an ounce of sympathy, when it occurred to him that maybe, just maybe, he didn’t need the typewriter. After all, some of the great works of literature were written before they had even invented the typewriter.

With that thought in mind, he hobbled over to his desk, sensation painfully returning to his leg, and started looking for the racing form amidst a sea of scrap paper, of unpaid bills, and of letters from the finance company that had preceded their repossessing his Bronco. Boy, could I use some insight here, he said aloud. I need some bucks.

If he could pick a decent horse, he’d be okay for a while, provided New York Lou was willing to extend a little credit. Okay, so it’s a lot of credit, he admitted. But hey, didn’t he always make good on his losses? Yeah, damned right I do. Who’d want to go around with both legs in a cast.

Easy was trying to decide between a couple of low payoff probables, one ridden by Eddie Maple and the other with Brumfeld in the irons, when he noticed a horse named Quill Pen running the next day at a forty-to-one early posting.

Talk about omens, he said, abandoning his system, bugs and all, in favor of Fate’s recommendation. He was about to grab the phone and beg New York Lou for credit when it rang. Feeling his luck