A. Rich - The Hand That Feeds You

“But her dogs killed a cop.”

“She told the police that you let the dogs loose from their cages. What do you know about those dogs?”

“Billie gave them commands in German. They were attack-trained.”

“Jesus.”

I told him I knew how suspected cop killers were treated. I’d read Mumia Abu-Jamal’s book, Live from Death Row. I had seen the infamous video of Esteban Carpio, beaten unrecognizable and made to wear a Hannibal Lecter — like mask, escorted to his arraignment for killing a cop. I told Steven that if convicted, I would spend twenty-three hours a day in complete isolation.

An officer unlocked the holding cell and told Steven to wrap it up. Steven told me he’d see me in the courtroom in a couple of minutes.

The courtroom was right next door. The officer led me in and sat me at the defense table. To my right, a door opened, and a group of women wearing orange jumpsuits and handcuffs were directed into the jury box. Talk about a jury of your peers.

Steven entered the courtroom through the public entrance and joined me at the table.

The judge read the charges. Steven indicated the moment when I was to declare myself “not guilty.” It was over in less than half an hour. Bail denied.

The only way I could tell the time was by the arrival of meals, not that I could eat. The smell of urine and feces was constant. I didn’t want to lie down on the bench; I tried to touch as few surfaces as possible. My breath was sour from vomiting the night before. My clothes were rank. The itching had subsided, but the welts remained. Anxiety had mutated to dread — of the next ten minutes, and the rest of my life.

Shortly after lunch — a bologna sandwich and a small carton of milk — which I didn’t touch, a CO collected me, again in handcuffs, and walked me around the corner to a tiny office where McKenzie was waiting.

“You can take the cuffs off her,” McKenzie said, standing.

“You sure?” the CO said.

McKenzie waved him off and waited while the CO unlocked me. When we were alone, McKenzie pulled me into a hug and held me for a long time. Of all the things I should have been worrying about, I worried about the way I looked and smelled.

“You know Billie did this, right?”

“I’ve already been to the shelter and checked the intake records. They show that the Dogos were surrendered by ‘Morgan Prager.’ ” He watched for my reaction.

“Of course.”

“Steven told me they were attack-trained. I checked with all the training schools in the tristate, and no one has worked with Dogos in the last couple of years. Which means that she had them trained somewhere else, or she trained them herself. Do you have any idea where she might have kept them?”

“I never went to her home.”

“Neither did I.” My gratitude for what he had just told me must have been evident, because he repeated what he had just said. “And the address she gave when she worked for me was fake.”

“Her grandmother has a horse farm in Connecticut.”

“The family’s lawyer told me I’ll need a court order to search the property.”

“Wherever she kept them, she’s had them for six months at least.” I asked what the press was doing with the story.

“They’ll be on to something else tomorrow.”

“I hope it’s the murders of Susan Rorke, Pat Loewi, and Samantha Couper.”

“I got it all from Steven.”

“She wouldn’t be the first person to get away with murder,” I said.

“People slip up, even someone like Billie.”

“Unless they don’t.”

“Steven’s lining up a criminal defense attorney right now. Carol Anders will be here in the morning. She’s first-rate; she was in practice with my wife.

“And now that that’s out of the way, I can tell you I met with Billie before she was released from the hospital. Her grandmother was in the room — this was early this morning. With no reason to believe she would, I went there to try to get her to cooperate, to tell the truth. I asked where she had kept the Dogos. Her grandmother told me not to bother her, and Billie suggested her grandmother go down to the cafeteria for coffee while we talked.

“She became furious, but in this quiet, icy way. She couldn’t risk drawing the attention of medical staff, so she kept her voice down, but the rage in her eyes was absolute. She knew I believed you and not her. And she saw she couldn’t control me.”

“You met Libertine.” I told McKenzie the whole story.

“I knew there was something off from the start.”

“But you kept seeing her.”

“It’s a cliché, I know, but she was like a drug. I didn’t come down until she came to work in my office. I saw the way she treated people she didn’t need anything from.” He raised his hand to signal the impatient guard standing outside that he needed five more minutes. “She never asked about the second cop, if he was going to make it. I think she feels she’s getting away with everything. And I think she’s enjoying it.”

“That’s why she’s so dangerous. I just found the silver lining to my incarceration. Billie can’t get to me in here.”

“I’ve got an investigator continuing the Dogos search. And we’re hoping the injured cop will be able to give a statement soon.”

I asked him to contact the Boston detective, to tell him about the e-mails I had read in which Billie as Libertine had confessed to killing Susan Rorke.

I asked him the question that had occurred to me before: “Are e-mails admissible as evidence?”

“If you can verify who sent them.” McKenzie apologized for having to leave me here. He said he could do more for me outside.

No way I could argue with that. I could do nothing.

• • •

I could do nothing, that is, except conjure the single act that might exonerate me.

After McKenzie left, I was told I had to wait in my cell until there were enough “bodies”—that’s what they called us — to bring upstairs. There, we were handcuffed behind our backs to another prisoner and marched down the stairs to street level, where a bus to Rikers Island was idling. It was awkward to sit while shackled to someone else, and the bus’s shocks were all but gone; since we were traveling on some of the city’s worst surface roads, the ride was painful. I had only ever entered Rikers as a grad student, there to get the required credit hours for clinical training. I had the absurd impulse to pull rank, immediately squelched by the woman I was shackled to, who didn’t stop coughing. Shalonda, the transsexual I was fond of, had told me that the incidence of tuberculosis at Rikers is three times higher than in the city, and mostly drug-resistant.

We women were separated from the men and led to the Rose M. Singer Center, the women’s prison. I was freed from my partner, taken to a small ward with only eight doors, and put in a cell. I didn’t know where the rest of the women were taken.

My cell had a platform with a mattress, a metal sink, an exposed toilet, and a desk of sorts, attached to a wall. I sat on the bed on full alert. All those sessions I had conducted with inmates — was the guy who couldn’t stop telling jokes still here? The guy who had exposed himself in the Metropolitan Museum? I remembered Shalonda’s last words to me: “It’s a good feeling to surprise yourself — you’ll see.”

I lay down, folding my arms behind my head since no pillow was provided. Nothing was on the filthy, long-ago-whitewashed cinder-block walls to snag my attention. No graffiti. I willed myself to envision a bedroom that was the opposite of where I was. Whose bedroom came to mind? Billie’s, the one at her grandmother’s estate. Not a bedroom so much as a wing, a gallery, I recalled. Those white-carpeted floors, the paintings displayed, blue-chip art by Motherwell and de Kooning. And in the adjoining room, the electrifying black canvas with the red shape like the letter H filled with blood. This last by Loewi. Pat’s grandfather.