Chapter 5 Northern Cardinal
Five
Northern Cardinal
Cardinalis cardinalis. Medium-sized red songbirds, cardinals are named after Roman Catholic bishops because the color of the robes those priests
wear is very like the bird’s plumage. Males are intensely territorial, whistling from a high perch to warn others off their
patch. A male cardinal may even mistake his own image on a shiny surface for an invading male and relentlessly fight that
reflection. Admired backyard birds, cardinals go bald in late summer to make way for new feathers. Their lifespan is variable,
from three to fifteen years. In Native American traditional images and lore, cardinals often symbolize monogamy.
A couple of days later, I stared at the list of names of Felicity’s purported clients given to me by my friend Ross, starting
with the third name only because he lived in Crystal Creek, just south of Sheboygan, and he was a professor, still on winter
break, so I might catch him at home.
There was no way that any of these men would happily agree to talk to me.
A few times, I’d spent weeks campaigning to snare a few tense minutes with neurotic designers.
I sent them fruit and flowers and antique laces, everything except a camel, cajoling them to permit the attention they actually craved but must pretend to despise.
Felicity’s amours had no incentive at all to give me time.
They would not be swayed by books or blooms. So I decided on a direct frontal assault.
On a clear but frigid morning, I located the home of Finn and Briony Vogel, parents to Louis, Levi, and Lars. Theirs was one
of those mid-twentieth-century raised ranchers made over into craftsman houses with the addition of a covered porch and a
gable, houses my dad hated not because they were bad houses but because they were good houses with good bones. As the lady
once wrote, they had stood for seventy years and might stand for seventy more, for about a third of the cost of one of the
baby mansions his company put up. The facade was a creamy beige with dark green shutters and a dark red door. I watched as
the garage door peeled up and Briony left with tots in tow. Fifteen minutes later, time I used to listen to Finn Vogel’s remarks
during a radio interview about why scientific knowledge was not always the best guide for public health policy, I knocked
on that red door for about five minutes, and I was just turning away when that door swung open and a man stood there. Like
Roman, he was intimidatingly good-looking, surfer-boy handsome, his hair shower wet, his toned arms in a crisp white shirt
with the cuffs rolled to the elbows.
I had not expected a cute younger guy. What had I expected? Ross’s words, I don’t have to pay for it, bannered across my brain. This story got more curious by the moment.
“Can I help you,” he said, not a question.
“I’m looking for Finn Vogel?”
“You found him.” He looked me over, head to toe, and leaned into the doorframe.
Though his hair was feathered and his body gym trim, his diction came from a generation decades past. When this young man spoke, I could hear my grandfather, my mother’s dad, telling me stories about his college years when he worked summers as a roughneck for the last of the great train-show carnivals, rolling and rattling through the night from one small rural town to the next, playing poker with a woman and her husband who were each only three feet tall.
This guy had an accent too. He was . . . maybe Canadian. Or something.
“If you have a few minutes, I need to talk to you.”
“Honey,” this man said. Honey? Honey? Who did he think he was? “I am a card-carrying member of the Republican Party in good
standing, and I’ve got all the magazine subscriptions and life insurance a man could ever need. So can you tell me what brings
you here today?”
I fumbled with my bag as I extracted my business card, culminating in a messy drop that sent my lipstick, pens, comb, and
my carefully wrapped cheese-and-pickle sandwich tumbling into the shrub next to his steps. I lunged to recover them and nearly
slipped on a patch of black ice, but finally recovered my balance and my card.
“I’m Felicity Wild, from Fuchsia magazine,” I said.
“You’re not Felicity Wild.”
Great opening! “Yes, you’re right, I’m not,” I said. “I’m Reenie Bigelow from Fuchsia magazine. Felicity Wild is . . . I want to talk to you about Felicity Wild. For a story that I’m doing.”
“Who’s Felicity Wild?”
I stared at him, raising my eyebrows.
“Okay, fine. Well, I’m not going to talk to you about Felicity Wild.”
“You had a relationship with Felicity . . .”
The man huffed at the word relationship, drawing in his chin as if I’d slapped him. “What relationship? That’s my own business.”
“Maybe it was once, but what if you’re called to testify by the prosecution in her murder trial?
” I could see from the chase of expressions across his face that he had already been contacted.
“And they would just drill down on why you were a client, even though you have a beautiful wife and three little children, and how much you spent on Felicity, and if you ever felt threatened by her, and since mine is going to be an in-depth story, really mostly about Felicity, not as much about what she did for a living, this is really going to be your only chance to share your side of this, whatever that is, to get it right.”
“Okay,” he said.
It always worked. It worked like a key in a lock, the your-side-of-the-story thing, along with the your-take-on-all-this thing.
It was like a magic trick.
“Could I come in?”
Finn Vogel looked me up and down again. I tried to keep my face neutral. I added, “It’s ten degrees out here.”
Finally, he moved to one side, sweeping his arm in another courtly gesture, and I stepped into the foyer. We sat down by a
fireplace bigger than my bed. He brought me some very good coffee. I brought out my little digital tape recorder; the old
this-is-for-your-own-protection-from-any-mistakes thing worked as well as the your-side-of-the-story thing. Finn Vogel sighed
gustily, the sound of chickens coming home to roost.
“My wife is taking our children to a kids’ literature class she teaches with the other mothers. This never should have happened,”
he began.
You can say that again, I wanted to add. Instead, I only nodded, which a person could interpret as anything he wanted, including understanding. As
I recalled, people can’t bear silence for long,
“Felicity, she called me that day,” Finn said. “I’m not a criminal lawyer but most people, even very bright people, think
this is all the same. I guess she thought that too. She told me an old man who was her guest had died of a heart attack and
she was afraid and what should she do? I told her to call the police. But she said her mother was coming over, and I assumed
that she didn’t want her mother to know . . . what she did.”
“So you didn’t go to her place.”
“It was right after Christmas. My whole house was filled with family, my brothers and their kids. My grandparents were here
from Amsterdam. I had not seen them in years. I couldn’t just walk out of our party and drive an hour. I repeated to her,
call the police. But she just started to cry and said that was not a possibility for her.” He sighed again. I almost felt
sorry for him, although he was a de facto piece of shit, philander, and (I could hear my father’s voice) a Republican on top
of that. I definitely felt sorry for his wife and little boys; if his marriage had been withering, now it would turn to dust.
He could end up alone, which he deserved, except for the fact of the children, who were only innocent.
“Your kids are sweet,” I said, gesturing at one of the silver-framed photos on the piano.
“They are terrific. They are scamps,” he said. “I wonder if girls are gentler. I will never have a little girl now.”
I didn’t know if this regret stemmed from a decision not to have more children or the presumptive end of the marriage. Of
course, there was no guarantee that he wouldn’t have another family, given how forgiving women seemed to be of men and their
pasts.
“How did you feel when you found out that he didn’t really die of a heart attack?”
“Well, that wasn’t for quite a long time,” said Finn. “At first, I just felt sorry for her, to have somebody die in her house.
Her life was so lonely.”
Ugh, I thought. All it took was a death at a very inconvenient moment for Finn Vogel to even consider how lonely Felicity’s life would have been.
Did he think about the context of her life otherwise, at all?
Did you think about what your dentist was doing at a given moment?
At that same time, I considered the timeline: It seemed as though this happened while Felicity was supposedly at her parents’ house, but Finn Vogel had just put Felicity at the scene of the murder.
“How do you know that she was in her apartment?”
“I didn’t really. I didn’t even recognize her cell phone number because she never called me . . .”
Even before he completed the sentence, I completed it for him: for obvious reasons . . . The reasons being because if she existed at all, she was supposed to exist in a shadow world from which she popped up at his
convenience. Then, against my will, I felt a terrible pang for her too, so frightened and friendless on the darkest night,
despite what she’d done, if she had done it, even more so if she had not, knowing as she did that it would be so much harder
to maintain her innocence. After all, she was a person who had fallen so far and would now need to prove she had not fallen
still further. I wrote that down.
“Are you quoting me?” Finn asked. “You should have said that.”
“What did you think I was doing?”
“I don’t know, background for a magazine story.”
“Well, I do intend . . . I do want to quote you on this, not on anything salacious, Mr. Vogel, but as you know, this could
all come out in court anyhow . . .”