'I don't want to get anybody in trouble.'
'She was involved with someone at school? An older man?'
'You have to remember I didn't know her very well. I knew who she was to say hello to, and maybe I was in a class or two with her at one time or another, but I barely knew her.'
'Was it tied in with her leaving school just a few months shy of graduation?'
'I don't really know that much about it.'
I said, 'Marcia, look at me. Anything you tell me about what happened at college will be something I would otherwise find out, anyway. You'll just save me a great deal of time and travel. I'd rather not have to make a trip out to Indiana to ask a lot of people some embarrassing questions. I-'
'Oh, don't do that!'
'I'd rather not. But it's up to you.'
She told it in bits and pieces, largely because she didn't know too much of it.
There had been a scandal shortly before Wendy's departure from campus. It seemed that she had been having an affair with a professor of art history, a middle-aged man with children Wendy's age or older. The man had wanted to leave his wife and marry Wendy, the wife had swallowed a handful of sleeping pills, was rushed to the hospital, had her stomach pumped, and survived. In the course of the ensuing debacle, Wendy packed a suitcase and disappeared.
And according to campus gossip this was not the first time she had been involved with an older man.
Her name had been linked with several professors, all of them considerably older than she was.
'I'm sure a lot of it was just talk,' Marcia Thal told me. 'I don't think she could have had affairs with that many men without more people knowing about it, but when the whole thing blew up, people were really talking about her. I guess some of it must have been true.'
'Then you knew when you first roomed with her that she was unconventional.'
'I told you. I didn't care about her morals. I didn't see anything wrong with sleeping with a lot of men.
Not if that was what she wanted to do.' She considered this for a moment. 'I guess I've changed since then.'
'This professor, the art historian. What was his name?'
'I'm not going to tell you his name. It's not important. Maybe you can find out yourself. I'm sure you can, but I'm not going to tell you.'
'Was it Cottrell?'
'No. Why?'
'Did she know anyone named Cottrell? In New York?'
'I don't think so. The name doesn't ring a bell or anything.'
'Was there anyone she was seeing regularly? More than the others?'
'Not really. Of course she could have had someone who came over a lot during the afternoons and I wouldn't have known it.'
'How much money do you suppose she was making?'
'I don't know. That wasn't really something we talked about. I suppose her average price was thirty dollars. On the average. No more than that. A lot of men gave twenty. She talked about men who would give her a hundred, but I think they were pretty rare.'
'How many tricks a week do you think she turned?'
'I honestly don't know. Maybe she had someone over three nights a week, maybe four nights a week.
But she was also seeing people in the daytime. She wasn't trying to make a fortune, just enough to live the way she wanted to live. A lot of the time she would turn down dates. She never saw more than one person a night. It wasn't always a full date with dinner and everything. Sometimes a man would just come over, and she would go straight to bed with him. But she turned down a lot of dates, and if she went with a man and she didn't like him she wouldn't see him again. Also, when she was seeing someone she had never met before, if she didn't like him she wouldn't go to bed with him, and then of course he wouldn't give her any money.
There would be men who would get her number from other men, see, and she would go out with them, but if they weren't her type or something, well, she'd say she had a headache and go home. She wasn't trying to make a million dollars.'
'So she must have earned a couple hundred dollars a week.'
'That sounds about right. It was a fortune compared to what I was earning, but in the long run it wasn't a tremendous amount of money. I don't think she did it for the money, if you know what I mean.'
'I'm not sure I do.'
'I think she was, you know, a happy hooker?' She flushed as she said the phrase. 'I think she enjoyed what she was doing. I really do. The life and the men and everything, I think she got a kick out of it.'
I had obtained more from Marcia Thal than I'd expected. Maybe it was as much as I needed.
You have to know when to stop. You can never find out everything, but you can almost always find out more than you already know, and there is a point at which the additional data you discover is irrelevant and time you spend on it wasted.
I could fly out to Indiana. I would learn more, certainly. But when I was done I didn't think I would necessarily
