Chapter 10 Turkey Vulture
Ten
Turkey Vulture
Cathartes aura. Nature’s garbage collector, this large species has been around since prehistoric times, using keen smell and sight to find
ripe carcasses. Turkey vultures are scavengers that rip apart carrion. Scientists are studying how they can eat rotten diseased
carcasses and not get sick and why their droppings are also disease free. Through their digestion, disease is cleaned out
of the environment. Despised and unattractive as they may be, often regarded as harbingers of death, they play an important
role in protecting other animals and people from contagion.
A few days later, I showed up at the coffee shop where I would meet Jack. I still wasn’t sure that he would show, and I was
ordering my latte when I realized that he was already there. Most people, even people older than me, scanned their phones
while waiting for their order, or for their companion to arrive, or for their turn to board the flight. Jack wasn’t doing
that. He simply sat there perfectly composed without even the social crutch of a cup of coffee to legitimize him. I sat down
across from him and fought the inane urge to comment on the weather. He was older, maybe in his early forties, on the other
side of that decade in life when so many significant events seemed to occur. He said he had just taken his youngest, who was
three, to preschool.
“My wife sees no sense in it. She would just rather keep them all at home. But I see it as socialization. Socialization skills can’t start too early. They’re the emollient of business. They’re the emollient of life.”
“Do you have older children too?”
“Four sons,” he said with no trace of either pride or unease. “I desperately want a little girl of my own, but the wife says
she’s done and done, and she won’t consider adoption. It just seems like too much of a hassle, for Lucia, I mean. I would
do it in a heartbeat,” he said. “But you didn’t want to talk about my home life.” In that moment, I considered the truth that
his home life, in a sense, was exactly what I wanted to talk about. “You wanted to talk about Felicity Wild.”
“I do but back up first.” I turned on my phone and took out my purple leather binder with its tablet of scented notebook paper.
“You’re a father. Of sons. You own a strip club. How does that square?”
“I own four apartment buildings, two commercial buildings, a couple of small hotels, and a tree farm as well. A whole slew
of assumptions come along with that place, and most people think it’s a dive that attracts lowlifes. But the customers are
ordinary guys out for a laugh. Or lonely. Or bored. Guys who like to see pretty women undressed, which does not mean they
are perverts.” He rubbed at an imaginary speck on his sleeve and added, “Once in a while, sure, there’s a bad actor. Lily
never fails to spot him—it’s her training—and if Kelly can’t handle it on his own, I come over and we convince this person
to move on.” He smiled.
“I’m just curious though. Why does a family man own a strip joint, because, at the end of the day, a strip joint is not a
library, as Lily likes to say.”
“I inherited it. It belonged to my godfather . . .” He gave me a wry look to signal that he knew just what he was saying.
“None of his kids was interested, and I love the guy. The price was right—” he made a circle with one thumb and forefinger “—and I was just a couple of years out of law school. It seems like an odd thing, but it’s not that different from any other bar. ”
“Okay.”
“So, why are you writing this story?”
“I can only say I’m compelled to. Felicity and I grew up together, we were close friends,” I added.
“Do you think she’s innocent?”
“I go back and forth, every day.”
“She’s a terrific person,” Jack said. “You can ask any of the girls. Thoughtful and very, very smart. The few times I got
to really talk to her, I was so impressed by the way she could assess situations, whether it was a separate parking area for
the girls or the problem of a geriatric president, in just a few words . . .”
“So that was what I wanted to know about. You had a relationship with her.”
“Well, don’t write this down—she was more interesting to talk to than some. She had more life experience and intellectual
curiosity.”
“I didn’t mean the working relationship.”
Jack’s face changed then, so slightly that if I hadn’t been close enough to smell his faintly floral and clearly costly cologne,
I might never have noticed. His face realigned somehow, right down to its texture and color, as if he had put on a very flattering
mask. He looked not agitated, but even calmer and more composed. He said, with the ghost of a smile, “I never had any kind
of romantic relationship with Felicity Wild.”
“I thought, I understood that it was . . . ” I stammered, feeling my face heat up.
“Who told you that?”
“No one specifically. Really, no one at the club ever said as much. I just had the sense that she, that you . . .”
“A professor told me history is really just gossip. She didn’t mean the dates of this battle or that factory fire, she meant personalities.
That it was mostly anecdotes, somebody saying this, somebody saying that, and some of those things were wrong.
” Jack took an old-fashioned hemmed and monogrammed handkerchief from his pocket.
I didn’t know that men carried these anymore; the idea was both courtly and disgusting.
He began to fold the crisp square into an elaborate trumpet-shaped pattern.
“So the same information is repeated many times, a consensus forms, and then, from that consensus, a presumption that there had to be something to it.”
“Sure,” I said.
“But that consensus isn’t fact. That’s why hearsay evidence is inadmissible, for the simple reason that the person who said
it isn’t there. Even if there’s like a diary entry from the day that something supposedly happened, if there’s no corroboration,
it’s not evidence.”
I got up to top off my coffee. As I sat down again, I watched Jack finish his cotton sculpture. He didn’t hurry. Everything
I knew about the power of silence was now working, from him on me. “Ophelia is a sort of community. A bunch of women, kind
of like an old-time convent, right? And I’m the priest, right? Like in the old days, when my father was a kid. I’m not a spiritual
adviser but I’m their boss. One of me, twenty of them. They’re waiting to dance, doing their nails, reading books, talking,
talking, talking, about each other and their customers and me. One little nugget of gold turns into a gold mine. One conversation,
one pat on the shoulder, one laugh, one tear, and boom.” He smiled. “I want to answer your questions, about the impact this
incident had on our little world. But not if you presume that I had an affair with Felicity.”
“Even if you did, the story is more about the effect on this . . . well, community.”
“Agreed. But I didn’t.” He added, “People love a good story, including my girls, including your readers. You get your information by what you see and hear and read, and I realize you haven’t done this for years, like Miranda, but you can still tell, presumably, when somebody is lying.
” Then he raised a warning finger. “But what if a person doesn’t know she’s lying? You wouldn’t be able to tell.”
He went on to describe the chill that stole over the club when Felicity was arrested. “There’s a lot of longing, right after
Christmas. People think, another year and what have they done with their lives? The girls thought that Felicity was going
back to college. They thought, Maybe I should do that too. Then, her real job, the murders, that was a Felicity they never knew.” He shook his head. “Everybody caught a cold, not the
best look at a place like mine. Everyone coughing, crying at the drop of a hat. Major waterworks! I had to give everybody
a raise.”
“Did that help?”
“It never hurts. But you can’t put a price on an illusion. Although I guess that’s what the customers at Ophelia are paying
for, an illusion.”
“I wanted to ask why you named the club that. Or was it called that before?”
Jack said, “I just liked the name. I have a relative called that. It was a name I thought I would like to call my daughter.
Before, the place was called Club Sir. Another illusion, I guess.”
“It’s a beautiful name but it has a very sad connotation.”
“You mean in Shakespeare. Well, yes . . . ”
“Naming someone that, isn’t it bad luck? Like I never got naming a baby Jonah.” It occurred to me then, the truth of what
one of my professors at journalism school always said, that the answer to any question was in the question. Ophelia was a
beautiful name, but because of Hamlet, it would always be sad. Jack might want to make the place over into a diner after the trial. With the same chili for sure.
“I’ll bring my kids up knowing that sexuality is just a natural thing. But if it ever gets to where other parents talk about
it, I’ll peddle the place. Kids have it hard enough fitting in. Are you a jock? Are you a nerd? No sense making it harder.”
He stood up, smoothing the front of his pants. “Will that do it?”
“Almost,” I said. “Oh right, what did you mean about Lily, her training? What kind of special training does a strip club manager
get?”
“I meant her training as a cop. Lily was a cop.”
“Lily was a police officer? When? Why isn’t she still?”
“She left, what, three years ago? She left when she got her twenty years in. She got her pension. She got hurt once too, and
I guess that changed her.”
“How was she hurt?”
“I wasn’t there. That would be hearsay,” Jack said.
“Okay, wait . . . just a moment. This story won’t appear for months, long after the trial is over, and it won’t be as much
about a trial as about women’s sexuality, and men’s perceptions of women’s sexuality, at this point in our culture. What I’m
saying is, this isn’t breaking news, more of a sort of third-wave feminism analysis based on one woman’s actions at a particular
place in time. And so, I want to ask you, did you ever think of Felicity as someone who could murder people for money? Did
you ever think of her as being an escort?” I added, “Just from what you knew of her as someone who worked for you. As an acquaintance.”
Jack looked off into the middle distance, as if considering. “I know she was driven. And people who are driven can be ruthless.
Just an instinct, but I’ve met all kinds of people. Still, I didn’t know her that well.”
That was the last thing I expected him to say. He was, however, correct about my intuition. I could usually tell when people were lying. And he was. As he put on his gloves, he said, “Give my regards to Mr. Damiano. He is that rare thing, a lawyer with a conscience. Are you friends?”
“Yes,” I said. “He is a friend.”
Not until Jack had disappeared up the street did a couple of things occur to me.
Although he was perfectly relaxed, the way Jack talked was just like the way Ross described people who were lying: He used
too many words and gave too many details. And also, how did he know my mother’s name?