Chapter 3 American Goldfinch #2
“That’s definitely one thing that’s been linked to that kind of promiscuous behavior.
If you accept that it’s behavior that degrades the woman, or the man, there are lots of reasons people give for what they do.
Some people think it’s meant as a kind of vengeance on the abuser .
. . look what you made me do! Some people think that it’s meant to be a way to establish power for somebody who felt powerless once.
Some say it’s purely transactional: I’ll give you this and you give me a lot of money.
But lots of people think that it’s an unconscious impulse to degrade themselves further because they feel ashamed even when it’s clearly not their fault.
Maybe it’s a little of all those things. ”
“Who do you think it was? Her stepdad? He’s a fundamentalist minister. You know the Starbright Ministry, that huge campus.”
“Sure. I mean, that’s classic, maybe too simple. Pedophiles lots of times try to get into situations where they’re going to
be respected and trusted . . . you know, plausible deniability but also lots of access to the victims.” He added, “Look at
the cases with Catholic priests. And even when those guys got nailed, half the time the diocese just tried to cover it up
and send them somewhere else.”
We talked for a while about people we both knew. After a two-year stint teaching in Tampa, Ross was happy being back in Wisconsin,
a place he once couldn’t wait to leave. I wondered if I would ever feel that way. I still sometimes thought that Midwesterners
were what Ivy called “primitive.” I still had strong if fleeting urges to flee.
At last, Ross handed me a card with three names. “I should never have written these down, Reenie. If anyone ever asks you,
this intel didn’t come from me.”
“You can trust me. It’s not like I’m going to go to these guys and say Ross Bell, you know the guy in psychology? He said
you were one of this hooker’s johns!”
Ross looked wretched. Two of them were professors, he went on, one a department head in his fifties, another who’d just achieved tenure, and the third one was university counsel, a specialist in the implementation of equity in women’s sports.
Not a good look for him at that moment. He must have been shitting a whole brick factory.
“These are decent guys. I play softball with them. They’re worried that it will all come out. She’ll expose them.”
“I assume they can probably count on that. Won’t the police talk to them? So I will too.”
“For a story? That could ruin their reputation,” Ross said.
“Wait, they’re the ones who ruin their own reputation, not me.”
“They have families.”
“Then they shouldn’t have been seeking the services of a sex worker.” I got up and stood next to the window, with its cool
against my hot cheek. Under a freckled scarf of stars, an ice boat glided across the lake, its hull festooned with a festive
string of small lights. It looked fleet as a gull, but I would bet that the pilot was getting his balls pounded by the surface
impact.
Ross sighed, then sighed again. “It’s not that simple, Reenie.”
“It is that simple. If I had a dime for every time a man has said to me it’s complicated, I’d never have to work again.”
“You’ve never done anything wrong?”
“I sure have. I’ve done things that were really wrong, but I never blamed it on my inability to resist biology.”
“Apparently, Felicity has some pretty irresistible biology.”
I thought of her in court, that pellucid skin, her magnificent reticence. My mind scampered away from a visual of her staring
over the fat, freckled shoulder of some grunting bald professor. I’d rather work at the landfill.
I asked Ross, “Did you ever?”
“Ever what?”
“Did you ever sleep with Felicity? Or anyone who makes her living off sex?”
He laughed. “No!” And he added, “I don’t have to pay for it.”
“And there it is! That’s the second thing that if I had a dime for every time I’ve heard a guy say it . . .”
“But you blame guys who do. I don’t. But there’s an allure for a man with a night creature like that.” He added, “I’m speaking
as a guy here, not as a psychologist.”
“A creature? Like a vixen? Like an animal? Being with a woman dozens of other guys have slept with?”
Ross said, “No, like she’d have special knowledge. As for the numbers, that’s what you’re looking at with most so-called nice
girls these days anyhow.”
“How it’s always been for so-called nice men.”
“It’s more like the ultimate lack of connection, in psychological terms. Pleasure but no strings. No need to think about what
she’s feeling or thinking or what she’ll feel or think later, tomorrow, or next week. Not me, this isn’t about me. But lots
of men? They want exactly the opposite of what women want. If women really understood that . . .”
“They’d all be gay.”
“Reenie! So, you just want to revisit this old friendship for feminist reasons?”
“I want to know what led to this, and that, and the next thing. That’s my job.”
“I know exactly what you do, Reenie. My girlfriend would never buy a Miaow bag without your advice.”
“You mean a Miu Miu bag. Ah, but those are so 2019, Ross.” When he didn’t respond, I continued. “So what happened to make
her quit school? What changed the whole picture? She got straight As. She had a great scholarship. You would think a breakdown,
or a death, or a pregnancy, but those things didn’t happen.”
“Being serious now? Just my gut? If I had to guess, I would say the reason was the money,” Ross said. “It’s confusing. Felicity
always seemed to be almost demure in a way, when I knew her.”
“It had to be more than money.”
“For a night, four thousand dollars. For a couple of hours, half that. That’s what I heard.”
Against my own will, I whistled. “Wow.”
“I know.”
“College professors can afford that?”
“Maybe they budgeted for it, like a car payment.”
Even if she worked only ten hours a week, only two weeks a month . . . it wouldn’t be long until . . . until what? She would
have amassed hundreds of thousands. A fast, if ruinous, track to wealth? Those nontaxable earnings aside, there was also that
life insurance money, the supposed motive for her crimes.
Ross said, “I don’t know the specifics. Just what people say.”
“Do you want to know?”
“Sure.”
“You know there were two guys,” I said. “Both of them had life insurance policies, one for five million dollars, one for two
million, both with her as the beneficiary.”
“That’s a lot of money.”
“It is,” I agreed. “The older guy, Emil Gardener . . .”
“The dairy,” said Ross.
“Right. In his case, it almost made sense. He was in his late sixties, and he had big issues with high blood pressure. His
wife, Erica, some years older, is terminally ill with kidney disease. They had no children of their own.
“The other man, Cary Church, wasn’t even forty,” I went on. “He was a healthy man.”
Ross said, “He wasn’t just healthy, he was a fanatic. He was always in the gym or the pool.”
“Those insurance policies would have been costly, difficult to conceal from your wife or your stockbroker. And Felicity almost collected on them. But Cary Church wrote a letter to the police, a letter he never mailed,” I explained.
“The letter detailed how he’d helped Felicity move Emil Gardener’s body from her apartment to a snowbank in a forest near the university’s golf course, giving an exact location.
He wrote two letters, in fact, and in the second one, he changed his mind and said that the defendant was not responsible for Mr. Gardener’s death. ”
“That’s crazy,” Ross said.
“I have no idea. Almost like he knew he was going to die. But why say two different things?”
“You’d have to ask him, huh?”
“The first guy, they thought died from hypothermia. People sometimes take off their clothes in the last stages of freezing
to death. It’s called paradoxical undressing. I looked it up. Like those skiers in Russia, a long time ago? Apparently, the
way the blood vessels react, you feel too hot?”
“Paradoxical,” Ross said.
I nodded. Emil Gardener’s clothes were found right beside him.
“That’s pretty horrifying, Reenie. I’m like most people. I’m not really into that kind of stuff.”
“That actually makes you just the opposite of most people, Ross. Have you ever noticed the sheer number of true crime podcasts?
And movies? Sad ones? Funny ones? Ones that are only about murders that took place in national parks? There are specialties
and subspecialties. It’s nuts.”
“I don’t think many guys listen to podcasts, Reenie. That’s a female thing.”
“Maybe. Lots of men make those podcasts, though. Your students are listening right now!”
“So then the professor . . .” Ross prompted me.
Several days later, I told him, Cary Church’s wife, Suzanne, couldn’t reach him.
He hadn’t come home. She tried for hours.
She called his sister. She called his racquetball partner.
They all thought he was with her. Finally, when he didn’t show up to take their children to visit their grandparents, she called the police.
They found him dead in his own bathtub, naked but with no water in the tub and not a mark on him.
Healthy young men in their thirties don’t just climb into an empty bathtub and die.
“I heard about the apartment thing from somebody,” Ross recalled now. “It was this great apartment because Cary Church had
a lot of money, some kind of family trust.”
“They were separated,” I said.
Ross told me that they were apparently trying to work things out, as their sons were only four and six years old. He asked
me, “Didn’t it say that in the police report?”
I’d read only the arrest report so far and not the rest of the file I’d obtained, but I told him that I didn’t think that
those reports detailed the victims’ domestic arrangements. In fact, they might, for all I knew. Admittedly, I hadn’t yet spoken
with police detectives, still fearful, despite Sally Zankow’s assurances, that authorities would consider me a lightweight.