The Hand That Feeds You by A.J. Rich Read Free Book Online

while weightless.
    I got out of the pool just as Ladies’ Only Swim was starting, a two-hour period in which only women, mostly Hasidic, could use the pool. Curtains were drawn over the glass windows that looked out to the lobby, and the lifeguard was female. In the locker room, a dozen women of all ages were getting into their swimsuits, long dresses made out of bathing-suit material. I swam in a Speedo, yet I never felt contempt from them. In truth, they treated me as if I didn’t exist. Except for Ethel, who was as curious about me as I was about her. She said she lived a staid life with her husband’s Satmar family in Williamsburg, except during the summers, when she proudly sat in as a lifeguard at a kosher girls’ camp in the Catskills. She told me about Aqua Modesta, the original kosher swimwear dealer, an online shop that sold “modest” bathing suits. In the summer, though, she wore Aqua Modesta’s latest bathing-suit fashion: “capris.” “As long as your elbows and knees are covered,” she had explained.
    I toweled off in the shower area and then walked into the crowded dressing room. For a moment, it looked as if scalps were hanging on hooks in the lockers. The ladies’ wigs!
    •  •  •
    “Did you have to look at the body?” Steven asked.
    “Mercifully, no.”
    “They tell you who he was?”
    “No fingers, no fingerprints.”
    The flippancy did not reflect my state of mind. It was more an attempt to level off a mounting hysteria.
    I waited for Steven to call it a night and then signed on to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, a database open to both the public and the police. Everyone in my Psychological Autopsy course had to register with NamUs. I clicked on the case number that the man at the coroner’s office had given me: ME 13-02544.
    Minimum age: 20
    Maximum age: 40
    Race: white
    Ethnicity:
    Sex: male
    Weight: 148
    Height: 68, measured
    Body parts inventory (check all that appl y ) :
    All parts recovered
    Head or partial head not recovered
    Torso not recovered
    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,