MONKEY ON A STICK

The instant Debra Gere woke up alone, she knew that Chuck's lame story about going out to collect fifty dollars from Dan Reid had been an excuse to party. She got out of bed angry. Oh well, she thought as she went down to the kitchen to prepare breakfast, he'll soon come stumbling in, make himself some tea, and go right to work. Chuck's recuperative powers had always amazed her.

Debra dressed the kids and fed them, then drove over to the nursery and started repotting plants. An hour went by and Chuck didn't show. Debra became worried. She took off her gloves, brushed the dirt off her clothes, scooped up the kids, and walked over to Kurt and Janet Cleaver's house. Kurt opened the door and Debra gave him a wry grin.

"Chuck snuck off to party with Dan Reid last night," she told Cleaver. "I'm a little worried because he hasn't come back. Could you go up there and check on him?"

"Reid says Chuck never showed," he told Debra. "He says he called Chuck last night and told him to come up, but Chuck must have changed his mind because he never made it. Reid ended up stayin' up half the night gettin' coked all by himself. He was really acting weird."

While Janet Cleaver looked after the kids, Debra and Kurt drove off to search the narrow, winding road that snakes up to the Artist's Studio. They checked every place where Chuck might have driven off the road and gone tumbling down a ridge. A couple of times they found tire tracks, and Kurt got out and investigated. Debra held her breath. But all he found were places where people had driven off the edge to dump garbage.

By the time Debra got home, it was late in the evening. She ran up to the bedroom and pulled out the top drawer of the nightstand on Chuck's side of the bed. She grabbed his address book and thumbed through it. There were many names she did not recognize. She skipped them and began calling mutual friends. None had heard from Chuck. Panicky, she called the Moundsville barracks of the West Virginia State Police.

Debra never got past the dispatcher. And she didn't get far with him. He refused to accept a missing-person report until Chuck had been gone forty-eight hours. "Those are the regulations, Ma'am," he insisted. If she did not hear from Chuck by tomorrow, she should call back. He hung up quickly to take another call.

Debra kept calling Chuck's friends until well after midnight. She spent the night wandering through the house, sobbing uncontrollably. Before dawn, she was back on the phone.

Nick Tsacrios, New Vrindaban's medic, laced up his New Balance running shoes, walked out of his small trailer, and began his daily warm-up. It was already seven o'clock and Thomas Drescher was uncharacteristically late for their morning run. Nick didn't quite know whether he was pleased or annoyed. He liked having company on his five-mile jog, but he didn't really like Drescher. As he stretched, touching his head to his knees, he berated himself for letting the guy bull his way into his life.

It had started in a neighborly way. Drescher showed up one day and said, "Hey, Nick, there's no shower at my place. Can I use yours?" Nick said sure, and from then on, Drescher would walk in and take a shower any time he wanted. Then he began showing up at night, uninvited, with a six-pack or two.

"Hey, Nick," Drescher would say as he walked into the trailer. "I need some company."

"Forget that, we're gonna party," Drescher would say, pulling up a chair and opening a beer.

Drescher had eased up on his late-night visits after they started running together. The way Nick figured it, the guy just needed a friend. As long as he ran with Drescher, Drescher was satisfied and left him alone the rest of the day. Nick didn't mind running with him. It was a lot easier to do the five miles with company.

Tsacrios is short, maybe five foot six, with tight, wiry muscles and long black hair that he ties in a ponytail. His face is deeply lined, but he keeps himself in good shape and looks younger than his forty-five years. In 1972, he graduated twenty-first in a class of seventy-two from the University of Florida Medical School. He did a year's residency in internal medicine at Tulane, and a year's residency in psychiatry at the University of Syracuse. He hated both specialties and returned to Jacksonville, where he did a residency in family practice. Along the way, he became an addict. From 1972 to 1978, Nick shot cocaine, and sometimes heroin. He was arrested in Gainesville in 1975 and convicted of selling cocaine. He was placed on ten years' probation, but allowed to keep practicing medicine. He kept mainlining cocaine. In 1977 he was arrested again, this time for forging a prescription for Percodan. He received a two-year sentence to Raiford, the Florida state penitentiary, and lost his medical license.

A condition of this relatively short sentence was a nine-month stint in a state-operated drug rehabilitation program. He graduated the star of his class. Nick's first job was washing dishes in a health-food restaurant. He was happy—until his parole officer told him it was time to find work worthy of his ability. Nick answered a classified ad for a lab technician and quickly ended up in trouble again.

This time it was for practicing medicine without a license. He knew he was going back to prison, so he ran. Friends brought him to New Vrindaban to hide out.

Tsacrios hired a lawyer and eventually straightened things out in Florida. By then, he had fallen in love with rural life. He spent long days scouring West Virginia's woods for exotic plants and became a first-rate herbalist. With Debra Gere, he set up New Vrindaban's first clinic. Nick developed a close working relationship with emergency-room doctors at Reynolds Memorial Hospital in Glen Dale, twelve miles

from the commune. When he saw patients who might have a serious problem, he referred them to the ER. That took the pressure off him.

He was still doing his warm-up stretches, waiting for Drescher, when his phone rang. This early, he figured it had to be a mother with a sick kid. His premonition seemed to be confirmed by the high-pitched, hysterical voice on the other end of the line. It was a few seconds before he figured out the caller was Debra Gere.

"Chuck's been gone two nights!" Debra announced between sobs. "Something's happened to him!"

"Maybe he just took off for a while; maybe he needed some time alone," Nick said.

"That's not like him," Debra wailed. "We've been together two years and he's never spent a night away without telling me. He's dead. I know it. I know it!"

Nick tried to comfort her, but Debra wouldn't listen. She slammed down the phone, leaving Nick holding a dead receiver. He put it back in the cradle and immediately thought of Tom Drescher.

Drescher had been obsessed by Chuck St. Denis for weeks. While running with Nick, he would moan and complain and curse St. Denis. The feud had begun when St. Denis bought the land for his nursery. In the middle of his plot was Drescher's half-finished house. St. Denis had tried to convince him to sell; Drescher refused. It seemed like much ado about nothing to Nick, but Drescher couldn't stop talking about it. Each morning, he insisted on telling Nick the latest outrage.

"That son of a bitch offered me eight grand for it yesterday," Drescher complained one morning. "It's worth twenty-five easy. Fuck him, I'll wait him out. I ain't got nowhere to go."

Nick thought eight thousand dollars was generous. Drescher, his common-law wife, and their two kids had been living in the basement for several years. It didn't look like Drescher would ever finish the place. Take the money and run, Nick told Drescher.

"We got a deal," Drescher said. "But I've got a surprise for that asshole. He's gonna pay me twelve grand and help me finish the house. He knows how to do wiring and complicated shit like that. In exchange, we get to live there a couple more months. Or so Chakradara thinks.

Drescher and St. Denis finished the house. The deadline for Drescher's move came and went. Drescher stayed and stayed, despite St. Denis's stomping around and threatening him. Then one day, Drescher showed up at Nick's white with anger.

"You know what that fuckin' dirt bag did yesterday?" Drescher yelled. "He cut off my goddamn water! He says he needs it for the nursery. Bullshit, he needs it—he did it to get me out of there. Well, fuck him, I'm goin'. I found a trailer down on Wheeling Creek. But I'm not gonna forget this."

Drescher moved his family later that day. But as a going-away present, he ripped out the sink and the hot-water heater.

After that, Drescher stopped talking about St. Denis. Nick figured that was it; the feud was over. He was sick of hearing about Chuck St. Denis. But actually, Drescher was burning. He felt St. Denis had humiliated him, shown him up and made him look weak. How could he, the enforcer, let St. Denis get away with it? He was sure devotees were laughing at him behind his back.

"You know, there are some people here who would like to see Chakradara done away with," he told Nick one morning.

Nick flinched. "Tirtha, please, whatever is going on, don't get involved," he said as seriously and as warmly as he could. "I'm telling you as a friend, stay out of it."

Nick was sitting by the phone in his living room, thinking about Debra's frantic call and his conversations with Drescher, when the door flew open. In strode Drescher. He was wearing his jogging suit and his usual pout.

Nick stared at him. Then, slowly, he got up from his chair. "You did it," he said quietly. "Goddamn it, Tirtha, you did it!"

Drescher's eyes widened. He took a few steps back toward the door. "Listen, man, forget the run," he said. "Let's go for a walk." Nick followed Drescher out into the warm morning and they turned down a dirt road. Drescher was silent; Nick felt a rising panic. He kept his eyes downcast, as if he had to watch his feet to keep them from taking him the hell away from there. Birds and the two men's footsteps were the only sounds.

"Nick, I've killed a few people in my life and I've never seen anything like what happened," he said. "I shot the guy twelve times and he wouldn't die. He actually got up and tried to run away. You're a doctor, tell me how he could do that."

Drescher went on, "The most amazing thing is, the whole time we were getting ready to plant him, the guy was making these incredible sounds. I didn't realize what was happenin' until later. It was his karma coming out. He passed through all his animal lives. You should have heard it. I swear, there were bears, tigers, camels, every animal you can think of.''

Nick and Drescher walked up and down the road for almost an hour. Drescher kept talking about the murder. He wouldn't stop. When Nick couldn't take any more, he told Drescher he had to go over to the clinic. He was turning to walk away when Drescher grabbed his shoulder.

Nick only nodded. Then he got in his beat-up Pinto and drove away. His hands were trembling so badly the steering wheel shook. He knew Drescher would kill him if need be, and describe his murder as nonchalantly as he had described St. Denis's.

Debra spent the day calling every name in Chuck's address book. Nobody had heard from him. That night, she drove into Moundsville and filed a missing-person report with the state police. She asked the desk sergeant if the state police had an airplane.

Debra had convinced herself that instead of going to Reid's, Chuck must have gone for a ride. He liked to drive around the steep hills, pushing the truck over the sudden crests and swinging it through the tight switchbacks. On the way home, she thought, he must have fallen asleep and driven off a mountain. The Blazer had to be in the bottom of some ravine with Chuck inside.

If she could get a plane, she could fly over the hills and find him. So after filing the report, Debra went to the Cleavers and talked it over with Kurt and Janet. Kurt then got out the Yellow Pages and made a few calls. They pooled their money and chartered a plane.

Early the next morning, Kurt and Debra spent an hour in the air, flying over the commune and the surrounding hills. It was beautiful;

soaring over thick green forests in the hills, surrounded by brown and green farmland. No sign, however, of the cinnamon Blazer with its distinctive black fender. But Debra wasn't about to give up.

After paying off the pilot, she asked Kurt to drive her to a friend of Chuck's, a guy she knew only as "Big John" or "John from Athens." She'd been calling him for two days without getting an answer.

They knocked on Big John's door in Bridgeport. Before opening it, his wife peeked out and asked who they were. As Debra was telling her about Chuck's disappearance, Big John emerged from the basement. He listened quietly for a few minutes.

"Something funny's going on," Big John's wife said to him. "It's weird, is what it is," Big John said. "Chuck's Blazer is parked just down the block. We've been wonderin' what it's doin' here."

The keys were in the ignition. Chuck's checkbook was in the glove compartment. A half bottle of flat Molson's was sitting in the beverage container. Debra called the West Virginia State Police. They told her that since the car was found in Ohio, it was not their case. Debra called the Bridgeport police. An officer was finally dispatched. They waited for him in the street, but the cop missed them. He stopped at the end of the block and backed up to where they were standing. He was an old guy, and if he had any enthusiasm for his job, he kept it hidden. He spent less than twenty minutes filling out a standard report and had the

"I don't think the cops are going to do anything," Debra said to Kurt on the way home. "They couldn't care less."

Cleaver nodded. They drove on in silence for a while. "Why don't you talk to that county cop who's always coming around, asking questions. You know, the guy with the fat mustache. He's always trying to find out who people are, where they came from, stuff like that. Maybe he could find out where Chakradara went?"

Sergeant Tom Westfall parked his black Ford cruiser behind the dilapidated stone courthouse and walked into the dreary offices of the Marshall County sheriff.

"Teletype for you," the desk officer shouted. It had become a standard greeting. "The Hairy Kritters again. I put it on your desk."

Tom Westfall has a stomach that threatens to burst through his uniform and an easy-going disposition that hides a first-rate analytical mind and a ferocious desire to uncover the truth. He looks like a classic back-country deputy sheriff, the kind who is so bored he has forgotten he's bored, or even that he's a cop.

The son of a large contractor, Westfall grew up in Wheeling hating cops. But he wasn't the classic delinquent rebelling against authority. Westfall hated cops because cops were corrupt. He had seen them drive their shiny cruisers up lonely roads with women in the front seat; he'd seen them going in the back door of restaurants that were little more than fronts for gambling, and he had seen them drinking in bars in the middle of the day in uniform.

In 1967 he enlisted in the Army. A recruiter told him he would be a clerk. He ended up an MP in Okinawa, a tough place to be a military cop. Japanese students were protesting America's military presence with bamboo poles and Molotov cocktails; GIs fresh from Vietnam were celebrating their survival with raging drunks.

After his discharge, Westfall enrolled in West Liberty State College and worked in a grocery store while trying to decide what to do next. His neighbors convinced him that the police force would never improve until honest people became cops. He took the test, finished first, and became a deputy sheriff. He liked to think of it as nothing more than a temporary gig. It probably would have been, if it weren't for the Krishnas.

When Westfall joined the force in 1971, the Krishnas might as well have been invisible. The other members of the small police department did not want anything to do with them and pretended they weren't there. Westfall watched them coming and going to New Vrindaban and became curious: Who were they? Where did they come from? Why did they choose this exotic religion? He let devotees sell him a couple of the movement's books, and he read them. The Krishnas were harmless enough, he concluded—until he ran a few routine license checks. Because Caucasians with Hindu names have trouble buying insurance, most devotees registered their cars in their Western, or karmi, names. When Westfall traced devotees' license plates, obtained their names, and ran them through the FBI's computers, he was amazed how many came back with long rap sheets. What could be going on out there? he wondered. He decided to keep an eye on them.

that skirt the commune. When he passed a devotee, he stopped to chat. He was careful not to judge them, and to avoid religious arguments. Too many officers wanted to lecture devotees. Westfall listened, drew devotees out, made them feel that what they had to say mattered. On Sundays he sat in front of his television, watching the Pirates or the Steelers and organizing his few kernels of information on three-by-five index cards. He'd done the same thing in the Army, only then he was keeping track of deserters.

The work paid off almost immediately. When parents called trying to locate their children, or when a missing-person report came over the teletype, it was Westfall who went out to New Vrindaban. He became the "Krishna cop," both in his department and on the commune. During orientation tours for new devotees, Kuladri, the temple president, used to say, "That road leads to the swami's house. There's a general store where you can buy gas a half mile down this road, and that guy over there in uniform, he's the police. He keeps track of us better than we do."

Over the years, the inquiries from other police departments became more and more frequent, and more and more serious. License checks turned into criminal reports as sankirtan, the traditional public chanting to propagate the faith and raise money, turned into "scamkirtan." Westfall knew that in 1979 devotees had followed the Pope around the country selling bumper stickers and claiming they were collecting for Catholic charities. At Christmas, they dressed as Santa Claus and stood on street comers, ringing bells and collecting money. His file was full of similar reports.

So Westfall wasn't surprised to get to his desk and find one more teletype inquiring about sankirtan. This one came from a small town in Connecticut. Westfall read it, picked up the phone, and called the chief of police.

"These Hare Krishnas, are they legitimate?" the chief asked when he got on the line.

"That depends," Westfall said. "If you're talking about their religion, I'd have to say, yeah, they're legitimate. It's a form of Hinduism that goes back centuries in India. If you're talking about raising money, the answer is no way."

"Do they have anything to do with a Vietnam Veterans' organization?" the chief asked.

"I'm glad to hear that," the chief said. "They're up here claiming to be collecting for Vietnam veterans. Let's just say some of the boys got a little upset. They took it kind of personal and kicked the shit out of a couple of 'em."

"Well, I guess that's a risk they run," Westfall said. He hung up and was making notes for his file when the phone rang. It was Debra Gere.

"He was on his way to see a guy called Dan Reid and he disappeared," Debra said. "There's rumors all over the place that Reid and a devotee named Drescher killed him."

Westfall told Debra to come in and see him right away. He didn't need Debra to tell him about St. Denis or Drescher. Westfall knew them. He walked over to the stack of cabinets that held his Krishna files and pulled out two. One was Drescher's, the other St. Denis's. The years spent collecting information were paying off. He knew St. Denis was a marijuana dealer. He also knew that Drescher was the commune's enforcer. Westfall had opened a file on Drescher the first time he'd seen the so-called bus driver. With his Krishna dog-collar encircling his neck, the guy had looked at him the way a pit bull does just before it attacks. Westfall took the files back to his desk and thumbed through them. So, he said to himself, it's come to murder.

He opened a drawer and pulled out his dog-eared copy of Prabhu-pada's nine-hundred-page Bhagavad-Gita. As he waited for Debra, he nipped idly through it. He was genuinely puzzled: How come a religion that was supposed to save somebody like Chuck St. Denis had ultimately destroyed him? And how had the Krishnas got into swindling and dealing drugs? More to the point, how had people who started out searching for spiritual truth wound up behaving like hoodlums and common criminals? It seemed like the pattern was always the same. Timothy Leary thought you could use drugs to find peace and light and had ended up spreading death and addiction. The Students for a Democratic Society had started out protesting against violence and had ended up using it. It had happened every time. Somehow, the movements of the sixties all ended up becoming the opposite of what they had started out to be.

"Hi, sorry to disturb you. I'm Sergeant Tom Westfall from the sheriff's office. I'm out here investigating the disappearance of Chakradara, Chuck St. Denis. Mind if I come in for a moment?"

The devotee, a tall, thin woman with long blond hair, stood speechless behind the screen door. She didn't seem to know what to say.

"Well, I guess it would be all right," she finally answered. "Except that I don't know anything."

For weeks, Westfall had been driving out to the commune in his spare time to knock on doors. The investigating he had already done had convinced him he wasn't going to bust the case wide open. He simply wanted to keep the pressure on.

At first, most of the devotees had been afraid of him. Kuladri, Arthur Villa, the temple president, had ordered them not to talk. But West-fall's devotee contacts had called him at home to tell him what they'd heard. Some new sources had also called. They all had one thing in common: they hated Drescher.

"Who called the fucking sheriff?" Drescher asked Nick Tsacrios. "I just saw the son of a bitch going into a house down by Wheeling Creek. Did Ambudrara call him? It had to be Ambudrara. What the hell's the matter with her? Can't she forget about it?"

Drescher then started ranting about Kurt Cleaver. Kurt Cleaver was one of the few devotees who weren't afraid of Drescher. "Murderer! You're a murderer!" Cleaver screamed every time he saw Drescher. "What are you doing here, walking around? You should be behind bars!"

"Your neighbor better watch his goddamn mouth," Drescher told Dr. Nick. "Tell him. Tell him if he doesn't keep his mouth shut, he's going to have an accident."

Debra was a haunted woman. Lying in bed at night, unable to sleep, she heard Chuck's voice. Every time the old farmhouse creaked, she would jump up, thinking he was back. Then she would lie till dawn hugging her pillow, convinced one moment that Chuck would be coming home, terrified the next that Drescher had snuck into the groaning house to kill her.