The Hand That Feeds You (7 page)

One or more limbs not recovered

One or both hands not recovered

Notes on body parts recovered:
Canine teeth marks are visible on all limbs and partial limbs, torso, and neck.

Body condition:
face avulsed.

Next I entered the Missing Persons database. Someone must have contacted the police when Bennett, or whoever he was, didn’t come home—a wife or his real mother, not Mme. Marie Vaux-Trudeau.

I went to their advanced-search page and entered Bennett’s physical description, the date last seen, the age when last seen. Three missing-persons cases in the tristate area matched his general description and the date he went missing.

I hesitated, both wanting and fearing the results. None of the photos remotely resembled Bennett.

I went to his website, the one he had showed me, for the list of indie bands he represented. Said he represented. The bands were real, but none had a manager named Bennett Vaux-Trudeau. I made a short list of other “facts” he had told me that I could easily verify. Turned out he had not attended McGill, had not won a scholarship to the Berklee College of Music, had not played bass with Radiohead.

Was there something Bennett had not lied to me about?

•  •  •

I had been staying at Steven’s for nearly a week before I asked him to come with me to get some clothes and books from my apartment. The yellow crime-scene tape had been taken down by then, but that didn’t keep a couple of my neighbors from coming out into the hallway when my key turned in the lock. Mrs. Szymanski offered condolences that seemed genuine. Grace del Forno closed her door when I looked at her.

I waited in the living room while Steven, consulting a list I had made for him, went into the bedless bedroom to find what I needed. As in a movie, I looked at a photo, taken in Maine, on the coffee table, Bennett with his arm around me, Lake Androscoggin in the background. For a moment I was confused, thinking the crime-scene cleanup service would have removed that, too. My confusion carried over to the smile on Bennett’s face. Was that a lie? I looked at him objectively. I wanted to find a coldness that would have been a clue had I noticed it sooner, but to my dismay I saw him as I always had.

Steven appeared in the doorway, holding up two pairs of jeans, a question on his face. “Both,” I said, feeling cowardly for remaining outside my own bedroom. Next, he brought out a short stack of textbooks. I asked him not to forget my laptop. I didn’t want to keep using his. I didn’t want Steven to discover what I planned to look up: Lovefraud.com, the first website Cilla had suggested. Then again, it might interest him as he had recently been blindsided by a new girlfriend.

Cilla, whom I’d started seeing as an outpatient in her Upper West Side office, had given me the names of websites where I might find others who had similarly been deceived; Cilla had said it helped a number of her patients.

I knew about these sites. I used them for my research, looking for women who seemed to fit the definition of pathological altruist. Women posted confessions: “He loves, he proposes, he gets money, he’s gone.” “Why do
I
feel guilty?” “Is his goal to break me?” “The only hope I have is that karma exists.” I’d never believed in pop psychology or communal “sharing.” I was a near professional in this field and felt it was beneath me. But I was desperate.

I went into the kitchen to get water for the ficus. I passed the rattan hamper that I used for storing dog toys. I lifted the lid and saw that it was now empty. Steven must have okayed their removal by the cleaning service. I looked for the dogs’ bowls. I was also looking for spots of blood the cleaners might have missed.

After Steven and I returned to his apartment, I pleaded exhaustion. But the moment he went to bed, I opened my laptop.

Sociopaths make up 4 percent of the population, 12 million Americans. They are not necessarily raging criminals: most of them are charming, intelligent, and know how to mimic concern, and even love. But they lack conscience, do not feel empathy, and feel neither guilt nor shame for their behavior. They are also expert manipulators. During childhood and adolescence, 9 percent of the sociopathic population tortures or kills animals.

Anyone studying victimology knows the
DSM-5
’s criteria for
antisocial personality disorder
, the clinical term for sociopaths:

Sociopaths lie constantly.

Sociopaths do not apologize.

Sociopaths think the rules do not apply to them.

Sociopaths believe that what they say becomes truth.

The only people who tolerate sociopaths for long periods are those the sociopath is able to manipulate into doing so.

Sociopaths do not treat pets well.

Sociopaths almost always have affairs.

•  •  •

I opened Lovefraud.com. I read about a woman whose fiancé had another woman’s name tattooed on his chest. He had told her it was the name of his little sister who had died at birth. It turned out to be the name of his wife.

Around four in the morning, reading without full comprehension, I snapped to attention.

Posted in: Hooked by a sociopath

by Lovefraud Reader

June 5, 2013

20 comments

I met him on a dating site for Jewish singles. His first letter to me was so charming. Instead of talking about himself, he asked me questions about myself. What book would you not take to a desert island? What song makes you cry but you’re ashamed to admit it? Do you like animals more than people? Peter L. was a literary agent; he showed me his website, and I had heard of some of the writers he represented.

I was living in Boston at the time, and he was living in Manhattan. He came to see me, never inviting me to his place. He never introduced me to any of his friends and never wanted to meet mine. He said we had so little time together he wanted to focus on me.

When we were apart we would Skype intimately. He made me comfortable where I was first self-conscious. His interest in my work, too, seemed genuine. I analyze incident reports for the Boston PD. One night I saw that one of his writers was giving a reading at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. I bought the book, and when I asked him to sign it, I mentioned I knew his agent. “How do you know Harriet?” he asked, reaching for a pen. “No,” I said, “Peter.” He looked confused. “Who’s Peter?” When I confronted Peter that night on the phone, he said, “Why were you spying on me?” Spying? Still, I continued to see him, though I felt he had noticed my new wariness. We met on weekends as before; now instead of coming to my place, we went to romantic B&Bs in Maine.

Before long he asked me to marry him. I sold my apartment, gave up my job, and arrived at Penn Station where he was supposed to meet me. I got a text from him instead, apologizing for having to work late and telling me to use the key he had given me to let myself into his place. . . .

You see where this is going. There was no such address.

I
got a grim pleasure out of bringing Steven up to speed. I felt enlivened by his growing outrage.

“If the guy wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him,” Steven said. This was the kind of loyalty I ached for. Steven was reliably on my side and had always been, whether it was the standard bloodying of the nose of a boy who had started a rumor about me in school, or taking the time to teach me to drive a stick shift after our father had given up on me.

Steven fixed a couple of dirty martinis; he sipped his while I gulped mine. He lived on the twenty-ninth floor of a sliver building on Forty-Eighth Street. The lights at the United Nations were visible from Steven’s couch.

“And I’m damned if I’m going to let Cloud pay for my mistakes,” I said, holding my glass up for a refill. “Can you defend her at her hearing? It’s coming up soon.”

“I wish I could, but this is not my territory. You’d be better off with this guy I know from law school, Laurence McKenzie. He was the editor of the
Law Review
, but when he graduated, he turned down offers any of us would have grabbed. Instead, he devoted himself to animal advocacy law. We have drinks a few times a year. And I always see him at the Avaaz benefit. Want me to call him for you?”

“Can I afford him?”

“You’re my sister. He’ll do it pro bono.”

•  •  •

McKenzie’s office was on a dicey block in Bushwick near the Montrose Avenue subway stop between an auto repair shop and a new overpriced cheese store. His receptionist was a young woman with a buzz cut and a paw print the size of a silver dollar tattooed on the side of her neck. She didn’t make me wait but led me directly into McKenzie’s office.

The man at the desk looked to be in his late thirties. He was on the phone. He motioned me to a chair and held up a finger indicating he’d be off the call in a moment. It gave me a chance to look at a bulletin board covered with thumbtacked photos of dogs, not unlike the obstetrician who posts photos of the babies he has delivered. In a framed photograph McKenzie had an elephant’s trunk resting in his hand, and there was another of him surrounded by chimpanzees. He also had the brilliant Shanahan cartoon where, in the first panel, a drowning boy calls to the collie onshore, “Lassie! Get help!!”—and in the second panel we see Lassie lying on her back on a psychiatrist’s couch.

McKenzie’s clothes did not say
lawyer.
The man on the phone wore jeans and an
ADOPT NY
T-shirt with a silhouette of a pit bull’s head. He had a nicely lived-in face. The length of his prematurely gray hair would not have been a distraction when he appeared in court. I heard rustling under his desk just before a greyhound emerged and stretched.

The first thing he did when he hung up was introduce me to the greyhound. Faye was a delicate brindle wearing a standard, wide martingale collar and a string of faux pearls. Instead of licking my hand, her teeth clicked as though chattering in the cold. He said it was a greyhound thing.

The second thing he did was ask me if I had brought a picture of Cloud.

I searched through the photo app on my phone. When I saw that every recent photo of Cloud included Chester and George, I was overcome with remorse. I paused on one in which Chester and George lay side by side on my bed, while Cloud lay on her massive back across the pillows. I held up my phone to show him.

“Which one was shot by the police?”

I pointed to Chester.

“And the other two are being held in East Harlem?”

“I’m not even allowed to touch them.”

“Steven told me the whole story.”

I began to cry. “Did he mention that I can’t afford a lawyer?”

McKenzie got up to get me a cup of water from the cooler. “I’m not in it for the money. I mean, look around.” He motioned to the animal photos on the wall. “Those clients didn’t pay and I got judgments in their favor.”

“What was the elephant accused of?”

“Jasmine attacked her circus trainer. I was able to prove that she was defending herself against the trainer’s use of electrical prods.”

“But she didn’t kill the trainer.”

“He was lucky.”

McKenzie told me what he would need first: Cloud’s veterinary records and an evaluation from the American Temperament Test Society.

I asked what the chances were of saving her, and he gave what I took to be a stock reply that deflected the question, but which would prove to be an understatement: “I’m good at my job.”

“Steven has a lot of admiration for you.” I found myself in tears again, for which I apologized.

Faye rose and came to console me.

He said to Faye, “Good girl,” and then to me, “She’s good at
her
job.”

•  •  •

Daylight had folded into gloom by the time I opened my new front door (the cops had broken down the old one). It was the first time I was going to spend the night.

The bathroom and the bedroom were the only rooms I hadn’t gone into when I was last there with Steven. He had had the bathroom door replaced—it would take me a while before I understood why. And who had hung the new shower curtain?—a hotel standard, white, ribbed cotton over a clear plastic sheet. The collection of sample-size shampoos from hotels had been removed—disposed of? The toilet paper was a brand I had not used before; the wrap covering the rolls featured a cartoon of a playful puppy. Though the cleanup crew had replaced what was visible, they had not removed the contents of the medicine cabinet. On Bennett’s shelves I found his razor in place. I lifted it using a length of the Cottonelle toilet paper and carried it to the kitchen, meaning to put it in a Ziploc bag for DNA. Then I realized how crazy that was: his body was in the morgue. I threw it away.