The Hand That Feeds You: A Novel Page 13

  “You don’t look like your picture,” he said in an uninflected voice. Did he mean it didn’t do me justice, or that I had perpetrated a fraud?

  “You look exactly like yours,” I said, trying to match his ambiguous tone.

  “I’m glad you were looking tonight. Holidays can be slow.”

  A wise friend had once told me that just because a man is good-looking doesn’t necessarily mean he is a bastard. I realized I was making excuses for him and he hadn’t done anything except respond to my query.

  “Can I get you another drink?” he asked, and signaled for the bartender before I answered.

  “Sure,” I said after the fact.

  I started asking him about himself. Not because I wanted information, per se, but so that I could listen to his voice. I had always been swayed by men’s voices. His was deep, and he sounded as though he were confiding in me. The trace of a Southern accent came from time to time; Louisiana? Oh, God, let him be from New Orleans.

  Close enough: he said he was from Lafayette, and that his daddy’s side was Cajun. And what had he acted in? This was a dicey question, potentially embarrassing. He said he’d had a small speaking part in a Gus Van Sant film, and he was up for a part in an HBO series.

  I had never wanted to be on screen or stage, but it didn’t stop me from the kind of interest many people felt for those who did. How were actors able to lose themselves in front of strangers? What if you were still trying to find yourself? “Do you want to keep”—here he made air quotes—“ ‘getting to know each other,’ or do you want to go have some fun?” He had managed to both mock and entice me. He had issued a dare. I had a moment of magical thinking that persuaded me that nothing bad could happen on Thanksgiving.

  We went to his place in Dumbo. The way in was complicated; we had to go around to the back of a renovated warehouse, where he jimmied the lock after inserting the key. Were it not for lights on in some of the building’s windows, I would not have considered going in.

  Inside his apartment, in front of a window facing the Brooklyn Bridge, hung a punching bag. Leather, the color of cognac, it looked as if it might have been a movie prop. “Is this where you train?”

  “No.” He did not offer more.

  I moved to the window to look at the view, but he cut my sightseeing short. He took off my coat and threw it over an armchair. Then he took my hair and wrapped it around his fist. He stood behind me like that. I held on to his wrist. He let go first. When I turned to face him, he picked me up the way a groom picks up his bride, and he carried me into the back of the apartment, to his bed.

  Within minutes, he turned on a bright bedside lamp. “I want to see you.”

  I saw the bank of windows in his bedroom had no curtains or shades, and that the room faced a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows in the modern building next door. In the same moment in which I felt exposed, and on exhibit, I also felt safe. I could be seen. He took off the rest of my clothes. He said he was surprised he found me so attractive, that I wasn’t his type.

  Would McKenzie have said such a thing, have had such a thought? I answered my own question: Trust me, he’s not giving you a thought.

  The flicker passed, and I was back in the moment. “Does your type do this?” I asked, touching myself. I didn’t take my eyes off his face. “Does your type do this?” I put my finger inside myself. What had put me off moments before—the brightly lit room open to the eyes of neighbors—was encouraging me in an unexpected way. I thought of Billie. She startled me. I felt myself in competition with her in front of this man, and at the same time I wanted to be her.

  I performed.

  While still watching me, he started to undress. I told him, “No.” So he left his clothes on and crouched at the foot of the mattress where he could see my body at that level—if I moved from posing on my knees to lying down. I could sense the pressure in him, the pressure of holding back. Of waiting. I went on. I took my time. I made myself come in front of him in the brightly lit room.

  He stayed where he was at the foot of the bed while I got dressed. Neither of us said a thing. I noticed a light go on in the building across the way.

  He made no plea for reciprocity. Was it astonishment that let him let me go?

  • • •

  The semester break was a week away, and I was at Rikers for a last session with a patient, a transsexual I had met with for the past year. She was being released the following week. Shalonda was able to convince anyone she was female. She had delicate features, a warm and lilting voice, and breasts she had saved up for since high school. She had taken the rap for her lover in a check-fraud scam, yet hoped they could resume their domestic life in Ozone Park.

  “I know JJ is a fuckup, but I also know he loves me,” Shalonda said.

  “How does he show it?” I really wanted to know.

  “He tells his friends, and it gets back to me.”

  “He never tells you?”

  “He bought me a dress for when I get out. He wants me to have the final surgery.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to make JJ happy. You think that’s not a good reason.”

  I felt then that we had made no progress whatsoever. She still could not acknowledge her own wants and needs.

  “I learned a long time ago,” Shalonda said, “that you can be happy, or you can be right. I’m happy when JJ thinks he’s right.”

  My affair with Bennett had been so complete a secret that performing the night before in the brightly lit room with a stranger had been a kind of extreme antidote; it made me feel that I set the terms.

  “Say again?” I said to Shalonda.

  “Where did you go?” She was grinning. “You just went somewhere.”

  I blushed at the unprofessional lapse. I apologized for a late night and turned my attention back to my patient.

  “I said I know who I am in whatever form I take. The surgery doesn’t take anything away from me. Well, besides the obvious.”

  This felt like cheating—I was getting as much if not more from the session than Shalonda. Her solid sense of herself, her calm wisdom—I felt better the longer we talked.

  I told Shalonda it had been a privilege to work with her and said I hoped she would let me know how she was doing on the outside. I gave her a business card, after adding my home number to it in ballpoint pen. We hugged each other, and Shalonda said, “It’s a good feeling to surprise yourself—you’ll see.”

  Was Shalonda a mind reader? I’d certainly surprised myself last night.

  I decided to walk across the bridge to Queens even though it looked like a military zone with its razor wire and checkpoints. The wind was chafing.

  I’d had all the surprise I needed, thanks to Bennett. Or so I thought. When I passed a deli with a newsstand, I stopped when I read the Post headline: “Heartless.” The cover story was about a fifty-two-year-old woman found in her painting studio in Sag Harbor with her heart cut out of her body and placed on top of her chest.

  I sat down on a milk crate and put my head between my knees. When I could, I stood up and bought the paper. The clerk called after me to give me my change.

  The reporter wrote that the body had been posed in an approximation of self-portraits the victim had made in which she photographed herself with a pig’s heart on her chest. The coroner estimated the death had occurred a week prior. There were no leads yet as to who might have committed the grisly murder.

  I was in that studio a week ago. Pat’s dog had lunged at the window, at a sound outside. If I hadn’t left when I did, would I have been killed, too? My hair lifted slightly from my scalp as though lightning had passed through me. Had Pat’s killer seen me through the windows? Was the killer watching me now? I flagged a taxi and gave Steven’s address to the driver. I’d have to ask Steven to pay the fare from Queens.

  “You’re staying here tonight,” Steven said after I told him what had happened.

  “What about Olive?”

  “We’ll sm
uggle her in.” Dogs were not allowed in his building.

  “Samantha was the one who told me where Pat lived. She still thinks Bennett’s alive. She says he writes to her and sends her flowers.”

  Steven asked if I thought Samantha was capable of an act of such savagery.

  “I think she followed me to Sag Harbor.”

  “You didn’t tell me this. You’ve got to go to the police.”

  “They didn’t take me seriously when I called them about Susan Rorke.”

  “You weren’t there when she was killed.” Steven handed me his cell phone.

  I did what he wanted. I was connected with a detective in the Suffolk County PD and told him my suspicions in the calmest “I’m not a crazy person” manner I could summon. I said I thought this person had killed twice and told him about Susan Rorke. He scheduled an early-morning appointment for me to make a statement.

  I was exhausted when I got off the phone. I slumped into a chair in Steven’s living room, head in hand, the picture of defeat. Then Steven asked if I was ready to go pick up Olive. I saw that while I’d been on the phone, he had emptied out his gym bag and outfitted it with a soft fleece and towels warm from the dryer for my little dog.

  The local news coverage of Pat’s death seized on her being the granddaughter of the abstract expressionist Paul Loewi. Loewi was a contemporary of de Kooning and Pollock’s, famous for his Slaughterhouse paintings, giant, black canvases with carcasslike red forms. An “artist’s artist,” he had not shared the wealth or international acclaim of his friends, but his paintings were valued by those in the know.

  Steven and I watched the coverage on every news channel. I needed to hear every account of the gruesome murder. Yet no matter how many reporters spoke about it, I could not shake the feeling of disbelief.

  Nancy Grace was on a tear: One theory about the murder put the blame on a religious cult in the area that practiced ritual animal killing as part of their worship. She said that pets had disappeared on the East End over the past six months. The deceased’s dog was still missing. Another theory was a drug-fueled thrill kill, she said. But no suspects were in custody.

  “Nancy Grace should meet Samantha,” I said.

  Her next guest was an expert on religious ritual killings. He said that removing the heart from an animal is not uncommon, that in many animist religions, the heart signifies strength; by biting into it, the person who removed it assumes that creature’s strength. But to remove a human heart and place it atop the body is a desecration, unheard-of in any religion. It is an act of violence with nothing to redeem it spiritually, the expert said. Nancy Grace asked if he felt this murder was more along the lines of a cult like Charles Manson’s followers.

  The expert said, “The violence in this case is personal.”

  I asked Steven to pass me my cell phone on the table near him.

  I called Amabile and asked him to come with me to the precinct. I needed a cop who would believe me, not suspect me. I knew he had a cousin who was a detective in the Suffolk County PD.

  “He’ll listen,” Amabile said. “He’s a stand-up guy. If you don’t mind the motorcycle, I can drive you.”

  Amabile was a stand-up guy. And I told him so.

  • • •

  Riding a motorcycle on salted, icy streets in early winter put me in mind of the nickname donorcycle. I’d had spinouts on bikes as a teenager, and even though Amabile gave me a helmet to wear, my legs were vulnerable if we skidded out. On the other hand, holding on to a guy and leaning against his body is a sexy ride. I worried that Amabile might misread this—I was pretty sure he still wished things could have worked out with us.

  I got the cycle equivalent of sea legs and wobbled when I climbed off the bike. Amabile righted me with a hand on my arm, so that I first leaned into him. His arm went around me until I got my footing. We carried our helmets as we entered the precinct house.

  Amabile’s cousin, Bienvenido, invited me into an empty interview room and brought me a cup of hot coffee.

  “I may have been the last person to see Pat Loewi alive.” I told him why I had gone to see her and that it was the only time I had met her.

  “When did you get there and what time did you leave?”

  This was the first question in an hour of questions designed to eliminate me or establish me as a suspect. He gave his notes to another cop to check out my story, then asked if I’d noticed anything strange about Pat’s behavior that afternoon. I told him it would be easier to tell him what wasn’t strange about it. I asked if Amabile had told him that Pat had once lived with my late fiancé.

  “I know the history,” Bienvenido said. “What else can you tell me?”

  “You could look at Samantha Couper.” I told him why.

  When we finished, Amabile said, “Thanks, man. Appreciate this.”

  I thanked Bienvenido, too, and he said, “You’re welcome.”

  “No, you’re ‘welcome,’ ” I said. “I know that much Spanish.” Bienvenido.

  Amabile insisted on driving me home. On the back of his bike, as the cold wind seeped through my jacket and pants, I questioned the strength of my suspicions. What did I know? Maybe there wasn’t a connection between the two women’s murders.

  And then I thought of a third woman I needed to factor in.

  • • •

  Steven was against my going. To put it mildly. “How do you know Samantha’s not right and Bennett’s still alive? The police never identified the body.”

  “I know it was his body.”

  “You were in shock. What if this guy Jimmy Gordon is out there, and you’re about to visit his mother? What if he’s staying with his mother?”

  “The Boston PD matched the DNA found on Susan Rorke with the body in my bedroom.”

  “Someone is sending Samantha flowers,” Steven said.

  “She’s insane. She’s probably sending them to herself.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Can I borrow your car?”

  “You don’t know what you might run into. Plus, what if someone is sending flowers to Samantha? I don’t want you to be collateral damage if someone is gaslighting Samantha. Maybe it’s the same person who tricked you into going to Boston.”

  “I’m pretty sure that was Samantha.”

  “Pretty sure isn’t the same as sure,” Steven said. “What do you expect to learn?”

  “What I need to find out is something no one but his mother can tell me: how I fell in love with him.”

  “Why do you think she can tell you that?”

  “Because she must have loved him, too.”

  The nine-hour drive to Rangeley, Maine, gave me too much time to think about what I was headed into. I’d stopped alongside the Androscoggin River to walk for a bit, even in the cold, to try to summon compassion for Bennett’s mother before I got to the Lake House, the bed-and-breakfast she owned.

  Rangeley in winter is a quiet, snow-packed small town, nothing like it would have been in summer, with tourists filling the small lodges and covering the lake in kayaks and sailboats.

  I didn’t hurry to the Lake House. Bennett’s mother was not expecting me until evening, and I regretted having allowed her to insist that I stay there. When I told her on the phone that I had been engaged to her son, his mother—who had only been told ten days before that her long-missing son was dead—thought that I was calling about coming to his funeral. It was scheduled for this Sunday. I swallowed my surprise at what I had blundered into. I didn’t tell her the real reason I wanted to talk with her. She told me how much it would mean to her to meet me and have me at the service. I found myself relenting in the face of a mother’s wishes. I would use the occasion to find out as much as I could about her son as a child. I would conduct research.

  I parked Steven’s used Saab a couple of blocks away and walked past the Lake House. I wanted to size it up before entering. I passed a couple of sporting-goods stores, a homemade-doughnut shop, and a pub with a couple of old m
en at the bar. Across the street, behind a strip of cafés and a gas station, was Rangeley Lake, iced over in patches, boathouses locked. I assumed his mother’s would be similar to the B&Bs Bennett had taken me to. But instead of lace curtains and lit-candle lamps, the windows of the Lake House were covered with dark shades. While I would not expect window boxes planted with flowers in early December, I was surprised that the flagstone path to the front door was not even marked by small lanterns in the dark. Nothing covered the glass front door, so I could see into the sitting room before I rang the bell. Nothing frilly, just knotty-pine paneling and utilitarian camp furniture.

  A wiry, white-haired woman opened the door. “I’m Jimmy’s mother.” From there on, I made myself think of Bennett as “Jimmy.” Renee hugged me, whereas I had offered my hand in greeting. She put a hand to my back to urge me into the warmth of the parlor. She had a pot of water boiling for tea in the kitchen and asked if I’d eaten.

  Had I?

  “I’ll warm up some chicken soup someone brought over last night. People have been very kind.”

  “Thank you.” I thought nothing she could tell me about Jimmy was worth this.

  “You’ll have your pick of rooms tonight. I’ll show you the place after dinner. It’ll just be the two of us. Jimmy’s sisters can’t join us.”

  Fuck me.

  Instinctively, I looked toward the door, gauging an exit. I would rather have had the sisters join us than sit with the grieving mother through dinner. But was she grieving? She moved about the kitchen like an athlete—efficient and deft. She wore no makeup. She was maybe sixty-five, and her white hair was braided down her back. She wore jeans and a turtleneck, topped with a heavy, red plaid overshirt. She must have kept the temperature on the low side to save money, I thought. It was chilly. Her eyes were red-rimmed and her lids puffy, as though she had been crying—over her son’s death, or a lifetime of being wounded by him?

  I wandered into the parlor and looked at the framed photos set about the room. Several were shots of what must have been the two daughters as young girls on a rocky beach. With them—a boy. Their brother, Jimmy. The girls are focused on something in the plastic pails they carry, but Jimmy is looking into the camera. I had to be careful not to project what I knew about his later behavior onto this image of a boy who looked to be no more than eight. Even so, his gaze had an intensity that I did not associate with a child.