Then Chuck took over—and I do mean took over. He has to be the greatest conman who ever lived. He had been caught red-handed with a bale of marijuana, and he told the jury he was just getting the stuff away from kids in the area. By the time he was through testifying about his sky-diving club, even I was looking for his parachute. After the not-guilty verdict, one of the jurors came over to Chuck.
“There just wasn’t enough evidence against you,” the juror said. “We couldn’t be 100 percent sure you were guilty. But if you ever get into hot water again, we’ll know.”
Now they know.
As we were leaving the courtroom, I reached out and took a handful of Exhibit A—the marijuana—and stuck it in Chuck’s jacket pocket. I know how irrational I was but I was half-hoping they’d search him on the way out of the courtroom, find the stuff, and try him all over again.
Chuck was on top of the world that afternoon, as up as I was down. He kept telling me about his glorious career as a high school debater, kept bragging about how he had turned a district attorney into a monkey.
I was depressed for several reasons. I was still not free of Chuck and, beyond that fact, I had just seen how easy it was for an accomplished liar to defeat the legal system in this country. It had been so easy for Chuck Traynor to manipulate the jury, the judge, the whole system. I had the feeling that there was nothing that could stop him now.
I was overcome with a feeling of hopelessness . . . of absolute depresion . . . of futility. Then, one more escape attempt. My older sister Jean had come with her little boy to Florida and they were staying at my parents’ home.
Chuck arranged for a social outing, a day at the beach. But Jean must have picked up bad vibrations. We had been at the beach only a few minutes when she suddenly decided to go back to my parents’ house. Chuck was angry but he went along with Jean.
Our first stop was Chuck’s house. As Jean put on her clothes, I started rummaging through a bureau drawer. I saw something that sent chills through me. Photographs. Photo-graps of myself with another girl. Oh, God, what was her name again? Chicklet! Dozens of photos shot from every conceivable angle. Without saying a word, I swept all the photos into my purse and they remained there during the drive north to my parents’ home. When we pulled up, I could see my father waiting for us beside the front door. Jean got out of the car and started walking toward the front door. I did the same.
“Where are you going?” Chuck said.
“Just a minute,” I said. “You stay here.”
Even as I stepped from the car, I had no clear idea of what I was doing. I turned away from Chuck and ignored what he was saying. My hands were trembling but once I started, there was no stopping. I followed my father and my sister into the house and the voice behind me, Chuck’s voice, took on a pleading note.
“Yon can’t leave me,” he said. “You’re my
wife
.”
Until he said that, I didn’t fully realize that I was leaving him. Not until I closed the front door of my father’s house did it hit me. I was on one side of a closed door, and Chuck Traynor was on the other. As I leaned against the door, resting my back against it, my strength drained out of me. Was it going to be this simple then? Was that even remotely possible? After everything, was I just going to be able to walk away from him? ,
“Oh?” My father noticed my presence. “Is something the matter?”
“Yes, everything’s the matter. I’ve got to get away from Chuck. I don’t ever want anything to do with him again.”
“What’s the matter, Linda?”
“I wouldn’t even know how to tell you,” I said. “You wouldn’t believe it. You wouldn’t believe any of it. There’s just something wrong with Chuck. He’s a very sick man. I don’t ever want to go back to his house.”
“How do you mean, sick?”
“He makes me do things. He makes me do things that aren’t right. Sexual things.”
I couldn’t tell my father any more than that. I just couldn’t. I didn’t even know how to put it into words. And as I realized there was a closed door between the two worlds—two worlds that would never, ever understand each other—I felt a flood of emotions.
That afternoon my father took my sister and myself out to another beach. We were stretched out in the sun, just tanning ourselves, but I couldn’t relax inside. I told myself that this was freedom and that I should enjoy it, but I kept opening my eyes and looking around. I expected to see Chuck coming for me. My father is a big man, well over six feet tall, but even his presence didn’t reassure me. Chuck would come for me. I knew that. There was no way he would let me get away this easily. But when?
The next morning Jean opened up my purse and saw all those photographs. She woke me up.
“Linda, what’re these?”
“That’s my life with Chuck.”
Jean went through the pictures methodically, stopping to study each one of them. I could see that she was going through changes.
“These pictures are
awful
!” she said. “You’ve got to get rid of them. If Mommy ever sees these pictures, she’ll die.”
We tore the photographs into small pieces and took turns flushing them down the toilet. I felt better, much better, as I watched the pieces swirl away. But I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get Chuck out of my life and out of my mind that easily.
Later, as both my folks went off to work, Jean and I stayed home together. I had to make plans. Chuck knew where I was. Therefore, I had to go somewhere else. I had to get out of Chuck’s range. But where? I was stumped. This was the only place I seemed to have any protection at all. And how could I even get away from there? I imagined Chuck outside, still in the neighborhood, hiding behind a bush or a telephone pole, just waiting for me to try and slip away.
By late afternoon I still hadn’t come up with a specific plan of action. All I knew was that I would have to get away from Florida. Just before dinner my mother said she wanted to talk to me.
“Chuck has been calling all day,” she said. “I’ve talked to him a few times now and all I know for sure is that he really loves you.”
“Mother, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, you never think that I know what I’m talking about,” she said. “I’ve been married a good long time, longer than you’ve been alive, and after all this time I guess I know a thing or two about husbands and wives. You don’t want to forget that he’s your husband and you’re his wife. No matter what little difficulties you’ve been having, you should be able to work them out.”
“Little difficulties?
Little
difficulties!”
“Chuck told me everything,” my mother said. “He told me enough so that I know this is just a lovers’ quarrel.”
All day I had been thinking about how I could tell my parents what was going on in my life. I felt that I should break it to them gently. Well, all those plans just flew out the window. I laid the situation flat-out, using the bluntest words that I knew.
“Mom, Chuck has beaten me bloody,” I began. “He has held a gun to my head and made me do awful things. He has forced me to have sex with women and other men. And now he is talking about making me have sex with animals. He has made me pose for dirty pictures and he is turning me into a prostitute. He is always threatening to kill me. He has even threatened to kill you and Daddy.”
“But, Linda, he’s your
husband
.”
“Mother, you’re not hearing me. You’re not hearing a word that I’m saying.”
“Well, let me tell you something else,” she said. “Chuck happens to be on his way over here right this minute. He should be here any time now, and I want you to remember one thing. He’s your husband and you’re his wife.”
“I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to go.”
“Linda, he’ll be here in just a second.”
“
Mom!
”
“He
promised
me! He promised me that he would never make you do anything wrong again.”
I got up to go.
“Mom, you just don’t understand a thing.”
“Oh, yes, I do,” she said. “Chuck told me everything. He also told me that he was sorry for anything bad that happened, and he doesn’t know what came over him.”
The doorbell was ringing. My mother opened the door and Chuck was there, all dressed up the way he had dressed for his trial. He smiled as my mother led the two of us into a room.
“I’m leaving the two of you alone to talk things out,” she said.
Chuck and I were alone then. Well, not quite alone. My sister’s little boy came into the room and starting playing with his toy trucks. Chuck showed me the bulge in his trouser pocket.
“I’m going to shoot this little boy in his fucking head,” he said, still smiling. “If you don’t get up and come along with me, this little boy will die first.”
“My father will—”
“Your father will die next,” he said. “When he comes through that door, he will get a bullet between his eyes. Then your mother and your cunt-sister, I’ll blow them all away. Maybe then, when they’re all fucking dead, you’ll decide to come along with me. Maybe not.”
I followed him then through the rest of the house and out the front door. My mother was beaming.
“See, Linda,” she said, “I knew you two kids could work things out.”
People always ask me why I never called the police. It seemed to me that the system would never work for me, only against me. Then, too, I believed Chuck’s totally absurd story that a wife could not charge a husband with a crime. The one time I did bring in the police—this was much later on—I discovered that that totally absurd story could also be true.
Now I was Chuck Traynor’s prisoner and Phil Mandina’s meal ticket. Since he would be handling my case up in New York, Mandina suddenly decided that I was socially acceptable. When he took his girlfriend Barbara up to North Carolina to look over a piece of investment property, we were invited along for the ride.
We flew up in the lawyer’s private plane, a twin-engined Cessna. Barbara was a beautician, a little on the plump side, with dirty blonde hair. Apparently beauticians didn’t spend much time working on their own hair. But at least she was a nice dresser. Barbara wore matching outfits or cocktail dresses while I was wearing jeans and insulated thermal shirts. Mandina favored vested suits, and Chuck looked like a refugee from an army-navy store window.
Although Chuck and I were never well dressed, it only became a problem when we were out of our element. And this weekend we were in a fancy resort hotel filled with potential investors from all over the country. I felt self-conscious from the beginning, and Chuck didn’t help matters at all when he gave me my standard public-appearance briefing.
“Listen, there’s going to be a lot of people down there for dinner,” he said, “and I don’t want to see you drifting away. Don’t go to the john without me; don’t even fucking ask. If you’ve got to go, we’ll come back up to the room here. I don’t want to see you talking to no strangers. Don’t say nothing to no one. Some clown asks you a question, you don’t know shit.”
This speech, with minor variations, was given to me whenever we were to be in the company of strangers. I must’ve come off like the world’s dumbest human being. I was allowed to say, “This food tastes nice” or “The weather is nice today” but that was about the extent of my social conversation. I’ve got to wonder what other people thought. And what on earth did they think when they saw me asking Chuck’s permission to go to the bathroom?
After the dinner that first night, the four of us—Chuck, myself, Mandina and Barbara—got together in one of the bedrooms. The two men were drinking Scotch and passing around joints. Then they got into a bragging contest; they each claimed to be the world’s greatest hypnotist. Mandina said he could hypnotize Barbara into doing anything he wanted. Chuck told them how he had hypnotized me into the deep-throat techniques.
“She can take the whole thing in her mouth,” he said. “She can swallow the whole thing.”
“Oh, Phil tried to get me to do that,” Barbara giggled. “But I could never manage it. I think Phil’s just too much man for me.”
This was the level of conversation that night. And before we were through, the two men decided to demonstrate their prowess as hypnotists. Mandina put Barbara under and gave her a post-hypnotic suggestion: “When you wake up, you are going to be very thirsty. You’re going to feel like you’re in the middle of the desert, and you’re going to run into the bathroom for a drink of water.”
After awakening, Barbara fluttered her eyes, a couple of times and then made a dash for the bathroom. She immediately realized what had happened and she said, “Oh, Phil, you did it to me again.”
Then Chuck hypnotized me. Chuck had a sure-fire way of telling when I was really hypnotized and when I was faking it so there was nothing to do but allow myself to be hypnotized. Chuck’s post-hypnotic suggestion took a somewhat different course, one more in keeping with his personality.
“When you come to, you are going to take off all your clothes,” he said. “You will get undressed and you will get turned on when you look at Barbara. Then you are going over to Barbara and you are going to undress her. And then you’ll make love to Barbara. All she’ll have to do is touch you and you’ll come.”