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

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