CHAPTER 3
Waiting for the early edition of the Star, the driver cruises west on Thirty-eighth Street to Nicollet, hangs a right, and proceeds north. It’s half past one on Saturday afternoon, and he’s more than a little curious about the location of a certain black Packard.
He spent the morning in the single-car garage behind the stucco bungalow he shares with his wife and six kids on Bryant Avenue. There was nothing he had to do—the snow was gone so there was nothing to shovel or pull off the roof, and it was too early to cut the grass, what little of it might have survived the winter. He changed the Plymouth’s oil the previous Sunday, and washed the car on Monday.
The garage is his refuge. Margaret knows better than to bother him out here, and the kids are spooked by the venomous spiders and giant centipedes he’s convinced them lurk in its dark corners. He keeps a ratty canvas lawn chair and wobbly floor lamp inside, and after backing the car halfway into the driveway, he has room to read the paper and peruse the adult books and magazines he brings home from Shinders News and stashes behind the stacked snow tires.
When Margaret asked if he was going to Mass that afternoon, he told her he was working. “I’m running light this week,” he said, not exaggerating, though he’s always happy to have an excuse to avoid church. “Gonna work all weekend.”
That morning, in bed, at the kitchen table with Margaret and the oldest kids, and then by himself in the garage, he kept thinking about what happened last night. Was it real or had he dreamed it? Was it another one of his “visions”—one of the waking fantasies that both excite and unsettle him?
In the car at noon, Cedric Adams, on the radio, announced that the body of a young woman had been found along abandoned streetcar tracks in south Minneapolis. Murders are still big news in the Twin Cities, especially if the murder takes place in a comfortable part of town and if the victim is a young, presumably attractive white girl or young woman. But Adams has nothing more to report than that. He doesn’t have the victim’s name or age or any information about the circumstances or cause of death, much less any possible suspects. Maybe the newscaster has the information, but is honoring the cops’ request to withhold it for the time being.
Well, fuck Cedric Adams, the driver muses. And fuck the cops—bumblers and bullies all of them, the ones he’s encountered. The afternoon’s Star will surely provide at least the victim’s name, and maybe her age and what caused her death.
Crossing Franklin, he keeps an eye peeled for the dentist’s Packard. The Whoop-Tee-Doo Club is already open, but, by the looks of it, not doing much business yet, and the other businesses along this dreary avenue are either closed for the weekend or serving minimal traffic. And then, sure enough, he sees the black sedan, just where it was parked last night before he dozed off, on the south side of Fifteenth Street a few car lengths west of Nicollet. That must mean that Dr. Rose is upstairs, seeing patients.
The driver continues down Nicollet. At Fourteenth, he turns left and doubles around the block and a few moments later approaches the Packard from behind. There’s no place to park so he stops alongside. The Packard’s windows are rolled up so all he can see through the lowered passenger-side window of the cab is his own face and the reflection of the gray sky and the dingy brick building on the other side of the street.
For a moment, though, he sees the Packard as he saw it last night, after he woke from his drowse, realized the dentist and—he feverishly believed—the skinny blonde were no longer in his office above the nightclub, and set off to find them. He’d headed south on Hennepin and eventually wound up in the shadows along the east side of Lake of the Isles, among the several cars lined up on what in those days served as a lovers’ lane.
He sees himself returning to the spot fifteen minutes later, after circumnavigating the lake and slipping into the spot vacated seconds earlier behind the dentist’s sedan. As it happens, this is an area where he often parks between fares, to drink coffee from his Thermos, listen to dance music on the radio, and maybe see what he can see in the lovers’ cars. Tonight he feels uncharacteristically lucky. What are the odds he’d find the Packard in this very spot?
He sees two people in the Packard’s front seat, a man and a woman, sitting close but apparently not touching, only talking. It’s a chilly night and the windows are rolled up so he doesn’t hear their voices, yet it seems obvious, given the animated way they’re speaking to each other, that they’re arguing about something. He has no doubt that the man is the Jew dentist and the woman is the waitress from the Palace. The man in the car is tall, sitting high up behind the steering wheel, with dark hair (if he has a hat, he’s not wearing it) and what seems to be, when he turns toward the girl, a long face, prominent nose, and mustache. The girl is bareheaded, but seems to be wearing a coat.
Then he sees the front passenger’s door open abruptly and the girl step out. The man leans toward the door as though trying to keep her from leaving, but it’s too late. He is saying something, though she doesn’t seem to be listening if she can hear him after she slams the door. The driver watches her walk along the boulevard beyond the curb, past another four or five parked cars, their steamy windows opaque in the cool night air. But the girl doesn’t look at the other cars, and who knows if their occupants, in their own heated entanglements, notice her as she passes.
As the driver watches, the girl walks to the corner, where Euclid Place juts away from the East Isles Parkway. She disappears from his line of sight and presumably heads up the hill toward Twenty-sixth Street and Hennepin Avenue beyond.
Now, on Saturday afternoon, a car behind the taxi honks, snapping the driver out of his reverie. Glancing at the impatient face in his mirror, he proceeds back to Hennepin, where he turns left into the sluggish downtown-bound traffic. He tries to return to the Lake of the Isles scenario, but can’t reclaim it while he’s driving.
Wide awake now and almost supernaturally alert, he decides to stop at the Palace on the odd chance that it was not the blonde who was murdered last night and he’s either crazy as a shithouse rat or he’s just had one hell of a titillating vision.
To Arne Anderson’s surprise, when he and Curry reach Dr. H. David Rose’s office above, no joke, the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club on the Fifteen-hundred block of Nicollet, Detectives Ferris Lakeland and Charlie Riemenschneider are already there. The detectives—large, loud, ursine men, all the larger in their shapeless fedoras and tatty storm coats—all but fill the dentist’s small waiting room, leaving little space for Anderson and Curry.
“Where’d you come from?” Anderson asks the other pair, prepared to be angry if a couple of “his” men were operating outside his immediate direction.
“We’ve been over to the Red Cross on West Broadway,” Lakeland says. He has an exceptionally wide, flat nose that, like Curry’s, has been broken multiple times, though Ferris’s injuries were sustained while walking a skid-row beat as a young cop. “Their records showed that a Dr. Wallace Ralston, who has an office on East Hennepin, saw Teresa Hickman a week ago—the Red Cross covered the cost—so we called him at his office.”
Riemenschneider, his colorless eyes squinting behind round spectacles, says, “He said he couldn’t talk to us, doctor-patient confidentiality and all that shit, but I told him we were investigating a homicide and didn’t give a rat’s ass about doctor-patient this or that. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what I know.’ He said that Mrs. Hickman was three months pregnant and she’d told him that her dentist—none other than Dr. H. Star-of-David Rose—was the baby’s daddy. She told him that Rose put her to sleep with a pill and then banged her.”
Anderson has the not-unusual sensation of running alongside a moving train, keeping up but just barely. The name Ralston rings a bell, and he recalls a Dr. Ralston caught up in an abortion bust a few years back, which probably explains the good doctor’s sudden willingness to cooperate when Charlie raised his voice.
“Have you talked to Rose?” he says, nodding toward the closed door off the waiting room.
“He’s taking care of a patient,” Riemenschneider says. “He stepped out to see who it was, and we told him that one of his patients, Teresa Hickman, had been murdered.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked us to wait out here,” Lakeland says. “I said, ‘Sure.’ There ain’t no back way out of this place, unless you count the fire escape. He said we could look around while we waited. Not that there’s much to look at.”
Riemenschneider says Rose’s suite comprises the waiting room, a slightly larger room with a single dental chair and the usual cabinets and equipment where Rose sees his patients, plus a small room, more like a closet, with shelves filled with chemicals and medications, and yet another room, not much larger than the medicine closet, with a wooden desk, a swivel chair, and a four-drawer filing cabinet.
The waiting room is warm. Lakeland sits down, pushes his hat off his forehead, and grabs a six-month-old Saturday Evening Post from the table. Riemenschneider and Curry light cigarettes and look around for an ashtray, which is on a stand and stuck between an uncomfortablelooking chair and a small sofa. The dusty ashtray looks unused.
Curry absently rubs the knuckles of his left hand, wondering, he’ll tell Anderson, why exactly he hit Tony Zevos, knowing the answer and then forgetting the question. He’ll tell Arne he thinks about the girl they knelt beside in the weeds this morning, and the naked corpse they watched the coroner cut apart a couple of hours later.
Arne will understand. He’s been investigating homicides for almost eight years, yet will admit that he doesn’t seem to be figuring it out.
Sometimes there’s zero information to go on and no realistic expectation of a solution. Sometimes there’s too much data, and the possibilities seem capable of overwhelming him. True, there aren’t that many homicides to investigate in Minneapolis; there will likely be only a dozen by year’s end, a small fraction of the totals racked up in bigger cities and cities with more mob activity and larger colored populations. Here, most of the homicides are simple matters, involving a berserk husband who comes home after losing his $3-an-hour job on the railroad and finds his wife in the spare bedroom with the landlord or a couple of dope-addled niggers who came out on the shitty end of a crap game. Both types are easily closed, and the rest of the city doesn’t give a damn.
Then, on rare occasions, there’s a homicide like this one, with an unlikely victim and an unlikelier location. A young, pregnant white woman, the wife of a GI serving in Europe and the mother of a toddler, is found in the weeds in one of the Twin Cities’ tidiest precincts. How much info Arne and his men will be able to accumulate in the next few days remains to be seen, but the public’s expectations, and therefore the expectations of the press and the politicians and the MPD brass, will hit them like a tidal wave.
The piercing whine of a dentist’s drill and a sudden squeal from the other side of the closed door turns the detectives’ heads. The whine stops, then starts up again and lasts several seconds, cutting like razor wire through the hundred years of collective memories in the waiting room.
Lakeland laughs.
“Fuck me if there’s a worse sound in the world,” he says.
The drill whines again behind the door.
Curry says, “I used to hide in the neighbor’s fruit cellar. My ma and a couple of my aunts would walk up and down the block looking for me. Ma used to whip my ass when she found me, but I didn’t mind the whipping half as much as the drill.”
“I ran away from home once to avoid it,” says Riemenschneider. “Another time I begged my brother to yank out a bad tooth with pliers, which he did, thinking I wouldn’t have to go to the dentist, which I did anyways. Turned out my brother, the dumb shit, yanked out the wrong fucking tooth.”
“Our dentist, old Doc Wessel up on Johnson Nordeast, would shortchange us on painkiller,” Lakeland says. “I told my old lady once, ‘Ma, Wessel didn’t give me the novocaine,’ and she said, ‘Of course he did. You just have a low threshold for pain.’” Ferris laughs. “Low threshold, my ass! That fucker was a sadist!”
Arne says nothing, but he has vivid memories, too. His stepfather marching him up the stairs to Dr. Jurgensen’s office above the Sailor Tap at Forty-second and Cedar, shoving him through the door, and holding his skinny bicep in a vice grip while Arne surveyed the dismal waiting room, usually occupied by a school acquaintance or two, all of them sniffling and trying not to show how afraid they were. There was a bowl of penny toys—a tiny plastic airplane, a whistle in the shape of a race car, a scotty dog—that a young patient could pick as a “prize” when the appointment was over, not that anyone wanted anything more than getting out of that place.
Anderson tries to remember what happened to Dr. Jurgensen after Arne enlisted and left the neighborhood. Word had it that he fell out of a boat and drowned on a fishing trip up North, though Arne preferred the speculation that an unnamed patient tied the dentist to his chair and bored the largest drill at hand into his forehead, skipping the novocaine.
The door to the inner office swings open. A tall, slightly stooped, middle-aged man with a long face and a mustache stands back while a large woman in a polka-dot dress with perspiration stains under the arms walks out, holding a hanky up to the left side of her mouth.
Dr. Rose glances at the men in his waiting room, but doesn’t appear unsettled by their presence.
He says to the woman, “The anesthetic will wear off in a few hours, dear. Take a couple of aspirin if the pain persists. You may also wish to put some ice in a towel and hold it against your jaw. If the extraction site still hurts on Monday, please come back in.”
Ignoring the officers, Rose waits with his hands folded while the woman roots around in her purse.
“Ten dollars,” he says, as though he’s just sold her something nice for her table and needs to remind her of its cost. He thanks her when she hands him two crumpled fives. “Enjoy the weekend,” he says as the outer door closes behind her.
Rose is wearing a white shirt and striped necktie beneath his starched white jacket. Anderson notes that he has large, well-formed hands. He appears tired, but not in the least bit worried or frightened.
Arne holds out his leather-bound shield, thinking that this will be the first time he’s ever questioned a dentist about anything.
“We’d like you to come downtown with us, Doctor,” he says. “We also want to look around your office and take a peek inside your car.”
He wonders if Rose will want to see a warrant. Rose doesn’t.
Rose’s dark-eyed gaze moves from one detective to another. He appears curious and even mildly amused, as though he’s been invited to take part in a stunt of some kind. He says, “This has to do with Mrs. Hickman, the officer told me,” he says, nodding toward Lakeland. “Well, yes, of course. Mrs. Hickman was a patient of mine. I saw her last night. It’s terrible what happened.”
He fumbles in one of his pants pockets and withdraws a ring of keys.
“These are for my car, a black Packard Clipper parked around the corner on Fifteenth,” he says. “This one is for the office door. Please turn the lights off when you’re finished.”
This is not an arrest so there’s no need for handcuffs. It will be a “conversation” between investigators and a cooperative witness, Anderson tells the dentist. Arne hopes, of course, that it will be more.
While Lakeland and Riemenschneider begin to poke around the office, opening cabinets and drawers and riffling through papers on the dentist’s desk, Anderson and Curry follow Rose down the long flight of stairs and out into the gray afternoon. They can hear the jukebox in the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club—the Crew Cuts singing “Sh-Boom”—though it’s nothing like the cacophony that defines the place after dark.
Lakeland will tell Einar Storholm to pick up Rose’s car keys and drive the Packard downtown for a going-over by the forensics crew. Presumably, Hessburg and LeBlanc are back from Linden Hills, maybe with some helpful information, though Arne isn’t optimistic. The victim didn’t live there, and the odds of anyone coming forward with anything useful are shrinking by the hour.
He wonders why Grace Montgomery didn’t say anything this morning about her sister’s dental appointment. It’s inconceivable that she didn’t know about it, especially if Teresa Hickman’s toothache was bad enough for her to skip work and make an afterhours appointment. He wonders if Grace called Rose after he and Mel left her apartment. He wonders when Bud Montgomery will come home from wherever he’s been keeping himself. Grace’s surprise at the detectives’ news seemed to be genuine, but her apparent lack of curiosity about details might indicate a foreknowledge of events. Until Arne learns differently, Bud is as credible a suspect as Dr. Rose.
He’ll station Curtis Wrenshall and a couple of officers outside the Montgomerys’ building to pick up Bud when he shows himself. He will also send Sid and Frenchy to talk some more to Tony Zevos and his employees about last night and the luncheonette’s clientele.
Everybody on the eight-man murder squad plus what other bodies Augie Fuller can commandeer will be involved in this one.
Suppose, Arne muses, that Teresa Hickman was walking along Nicollet Avenue after her appointment and some scumbag leaving the Whoop-Tee-Doo followed her down the street and around the corner and attacked her in the shadows between buildings. But it was Friday night and the streets around the club were no doubt crowded. If her assailant had forced her into a car, her clothes would likely have been in disarray, and there would have been marks on her body. But she hadn’t been roughed up or beaten. There were no broken bones (besides the hyoid) and nothing on her skin except the bruise on her neck. She’d had sex with someone not long before she died, but there was no sign of the sex being forced. So she probably went willingly, on foot or in his car, with someone she knew at least casually.
It will take ten minutes to get from Rose’s office to police headquarters in the courthouse. Mel drives while Arne sits in back with the suspect. Arne sees Mel looking at Rose in the rearview mirror. Arne himself glances at the dentist when there’s a reason to look in his direction. Rose is not panicking and does not seem to be anticipating and rehearsing what he must surely believe will be more than a casual conversation. He did not seem surprised or inconvenienced when told about Teresa Hickman’s death and the need to go downtown in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. He said he didn’t have another patient scheduled today, but this couldn’t have been the way he expected to finish his workweek.
Anderson tries to remember the last time he interrogated a Jew. It was probably one of Bunny Augustine’s hoods, though Arne can’t recall who or when. (He’s seen but never spoken to the Northside crime boss himself.) One thing for sure: Arne has never seen anyone who looked more like a Jew than Rose. It’s almost comical—the long face, the large nose, the dark hair, and sallow complexion. In fact, now that he thinks about it, you could throw a towel over the man’s head and put him in a robe, and he’d be the spitting image of one of the Pharisees in the picture books Arne used to page through in the basement of Calvary Lutheran Church when he was a kid.
As Mel turns onto Fourth Street and looks for a parking spot in the lee of the fortress-like courthouse, Arne wonders what he’s going to say to Lily when he gets home this evening. Lily is the Jew he sleeps with, the Jew he once thought he loved, and the Jew who’s capable of making this case more complicated than it probably is already.
He will say nothing about the case to her tonight and hope there will be reason to arrest Bud Montgomery in the morning.
Responding to a sudden inclination that he attributes to self-preservation, the driver decides to skip the Palace and proceed instead across the river and onto the University of Minnesota’s East Bank campus. School is still in session, which means there will be a lot of girls around, strolling down the streets in twos or threes or on the arms of boyfriends, or lounging in front of one of the bookstores or at the soda fountain in Gray’s drugstore in Dinkytown.
He finds a parking spot a few doors down from the drugstore and grabs the last free stool at the lunch counter. He picks up the Star’s first evening edition, orders a cup of coffee and a slice of devil’s-food cake, and reads about the young woman found murdered early this morning in south Minneapolis.
Besides the woman’s name, age, and address, the brief article at the top of the front page has little information. Teresa Marie Hickman was the wife of Army Private Harold V. Hickman, who is reportedly en route to Minneapolis on emergency furlough from West Germany, and the mother of an eighteen-month-old child, Harold Hickman Junior. She was a graduate of Dollar High School, in Dollar, North Dakota, was living with her sister and brother-in-law, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Montgomery, until she could find permanent lodging, and worked part-time at the Palace Luncheonette on Nicollet Avenue.
Teresa Marie Hickman. He’d guessed the girl’s name was either Susan or Sally—who knows why? Unlike most girls who catch his fancy, this one didn’t remind him of anyone else, say one of the neighborhood girls he’d followed around or stared at during Mass at Holy Name, or one of the nubile teens Margaret has once in a while hired to watch their younger kids. A couple of them have been Susans and at least one was a Sally.
According to the paper, the police are saying nothing about the investigation, other than that all available personnel have been assigned to the case. An MPD bigwig, Inspector Edwin Evangelist (speaking of names!), is quoted as saying, “This heinous crime will be promptly solved, and its perpetrator will be apprehended. The citizens of Minneapolis can count on us.”
An even shorter story, enclosed in a box alongside the main story and carrying a United Press byline, describes the “shock, bewilderment, and outrage” of the “sleepy” Linden Hills neighborhood where the victim’s body was found. Gerald Bergen, who lives on West Forty-fourth Street, found the body alongside the streetcar tracks behind an apartment building while walking his dog, a six-year-old Dalmatian named Jocko, shortly after dawn this morning. Bergen told the reporter that he at first mistook the body for an “armload of old clothes.” A traveling pharmaceuticals salesman, Bergen says he saw no one else out and about at the time, approximately six-fifteen a.m.
Other residents said they couldn’t recall the last homicide in the neighborhood, although there’d been a couple of suicides and at least one accidental drowning in Lake Harriet during the past few summers.
For want of anything better to do, other than cruise the campus for a while, the driver will stop at the company’s garage near Seven Corners and get the cab washed inside and out. It hasn’t been a week yet, but the construction sites he’s driven through left enough dust and grime on the Plymouth’s canary finish to justify another hose-down. When he inspected the interior earlier today, he found only a used lipstick tube, a couple of Juicy Fruit gum wrappers, an unwrapped Ramses-brand condom (which he tucked away in his billfold), and a man’s monogrammed (JDM) handkerchief. Still, a thorough cleaning seems a good idea.
His brother-in-law, Fat Jack O’Shaughnessy, who owns the company with a couple of downtown businessmen, gives him the stink eye when he pulls in. If a driver gives him the opportunity, O’Shaughnessy will bug the guy about how few fares he’s been carrying and how the guy’s got to put in more time on the street, as though any of his twenty drivers could keep up with the bigger outfits nowadays. Before O’Shaughnessy can collar him—“Hey, Juice! Let’s talk about your numbers!”—the driver slides back behind the wheel and exits the garage.
Even if he picks up a fare or two, he’ll be home in time for supper, though too late to join Margaret at five o’clock Mass.
It’s almost three p.m. before the small group of policemen, a single civilian, and a department stenographer assemble in the office of Detective Captain August Fuller on the third floor of the courthouse.
Fuller, looking uncomfortable as usual, sits behind a large, nearly empty wooden desk. Dr. Rose sits in a straight-backed wooden chair directly in front of the desk. Detectives Anderson and Curry sit on either side of him, far enough away to dispel any impression that Rose is a prisoner, but close enough in case he forgets that he is. A petite spinster named May Grey sits off to one side of the desk, a steno pad resting on her bony knee. Inspector Ed Evangelist stands in the office doorway, his bloodshot eyes swimming in his bloated face, the elephant not quite in the room.
“Dr. Rose,” Augie Fuller begins, “nobody here is accusing you of a crime. You may end this, uh, conversation at any time, and, of course, you are free to call an attorney.”
Rose sits with one long leg crossed over the other, his large, white hands folded atop his right knee. Arne is quite sure the man hasn’t changed his expression since he left his dental office almost an hour ago.
“I understand,” Rose says.
Fuller, glancing down at the paper in front of him, leads Rose through the basic data while May Grey, the picture of fussy competence, takes her meticulous shorthand off to the side.
“For the record, your full name, please.”
“My name is H. David Rose. The H. is for Herschel.” He turns his head toward the stenographer and smiles slightly. “That’s H-E-R-S-C-H-E-L,” he says. “Herschel with a C.”
May Grey casts him a glance, looking not especially grateful for the help.
“Date and place of birth, please.”
“June 18, 1908. Vincennes, Morrison County, Minnesota.”
“Are you married?”
“Yes. To Ruth Evelyn Rose. Maiden name Oshinsky. With a Y. We’ve been married for almost twenty years and have two daughters, Margot and Lael—L-A-E-L, Margot with a T— ages thirteen and eleven, respectively.”
“And your home address?”
“Thirty-nine-fourteen Zenith Avenue South. Minneapolis.”
The detectives know exactly where he lives, of course—five blocks north of where Teresa Hickman’s body was found.
“You’re a dentist.”
“Yes. I maintain a practice at Fifteen-twenty-eight Nicollet Avenue South, second floor. I’ve had a solo practice at that address since I moved to the city in 1940.”
“What did you do during the war, Doctor?”
“I tried to enlist, but was rejected because of inherited arthritis in my shoulders and knees.”
“Is yours a general practice, Doctor?”
“Yes. Men, women, and children.”
“But I understand the majority of your patients are women. Is that correct?”
“Well, that’s possible, I suppose. I couldn’t give you an exact percentage.”
“Is it kosher to call you ‘Doctor,’ Mr. Rose?” This is Big Ed butting in from the doorway.
Rose turns his head in Evangelist’s direction, surprised, and perhaps for the first time in the past hour a bit annoyed.
“My diploma from the University of Minnesota avers the fact that I’m a Doctor of Dental Surgery.”
“But that doesn’t make you a real doctor, does it?” Evangelist says. “Not like the guy who listens to my ticker and every once in a while checks my plumbing.” He winks at the stenographer and grins. “My apologies, Miz Grey.”
Rose looks back at Fuller, who momentarily shuts his eyes, a sign of either weariness or exasperation.
“That individual,” Rose says, “would be an MD. A Doctor of Medicine.”
“A physician,” Evangelist persists, pleased to have made the point.
May Grey has stopped writing. She looks at Fuller as though for a sign.
Augie says, “Did you have a patient named Teresa Marie Hickman, Dr. Rose?”
“Yes,” Rose replies. “But she’s listed in my office ledger as Mrs. Harold V. Hickman.”
“How long was she your patient?”
“Well, for a couple of months, or a little more. Since sometime in January or February. I know it was after Christmas.”
“Christmas?” From the doorway Evangelist clears his throat, a loud, phlegmy hack. “So you celebrate our Savior’s birth?” he says.
This time Rose doesn’t turn toward the inspector. Looking straight ahead, he says, “We put up a Christmas tree for our daughters, who have many Christian friends, and exchange gifts amongst ourselves. So, yes, we celebrate Christmas.”
“But you are a Jew, aren’t you?”
“Ruth and I describe ourselves as nonobservant Jews. We don’t attend services on a regular basis.”
“You’re circumscribed, I presume,” Evangelist says.
“Yes, I am.”
“How would you describe your sex life?”
Rose sighs, smiles slightly, and says, “Not what it used to be.” Making Big Ed laugh.
Fuller, in high color now and eager to regain control of the conversation, says, “What brought Mrs. Hickman to your office in January, Doctor?”
Rose says, “Her sister, Grace Montgomery, has been a patient of mine since last fall. She referred me to Terry—I mean Terry to me. Mrs. Hickman, I’m talking about.”
Augie pauses, lifts the top sheet of papers on his desk, then pulls a well-used handkerchief out of a back pocket and blows his nose before pushing on.
“You treated Mrs. Hickman last night, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I did. She had a seven-thirty appointment.”
“How long would you say she was in your office?”
Rose appears to be thinking. “Oh, I’d say she was in the chair for two and a half or three hours.”
“Three hours?” Fuller and Anderson say at the same time. May Grey looks up from her notebook. Curry looks past Rose to make eye contact with Arne.
“Permit me to explain,” Rose says. “I practice a technique, not uncommon in the profession, called sedation dentistry. For patients who need a significant amount of work, or for those who have a low tolerance for pain or a high level of anxiety, I make up a pill—a capsule—usually containing one and a half grams of Seconal, which is a barbiturate derivative, and the contents of a common headache remedy, such as Anacin. I provide the capsule instead of, or in addition to, an injection of novocaine.”
“And this capsule puts them out?” Fuller asks.
“It puts the patient in a deeply relaxed state.”
“For three hours?”
“Sometimes for even four hours or more. A procedure rarely takes that long, but the patient will be drowsy for a while afterward. If it’s late and I don’t feel they can safely navigate their way home, I will arrange for a taxi or, in some instances, escort the patient home myself.”
“How did Mrs. Hickman leave your office last night?”
“Well, I helped her down the stairs and walked her to the entrance of her apartment building around the corner. I thought the fresh air would pep her up.”
“What time was that?”
“I can’t say for certain. Probably about eleven. I don’t wear a watch”—Rose raises his left arm, exposing a bare wrist—“but that’s probably pretty close.”
Anderson says, “You walked her to the entrance of the building where she’s staying with the Montgomerys?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“I watched her go into the building and up the stairs to her sister’s apartment. I waited for about a minute—enough time for her to enter the apartment—and walked back to the office. I needed to catch up on my books. And then, probably because I hadn’t eaten all day and felt a little woozy, I sat down and dozed a while on the settee in my waiting room. I do that sometimes, before driving home.”
“So the last time you saw Mrs. Hickman she was entering her sister’s apartment building at approximately eleven p.m.?” Fuller says.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember what she was wearing?”
“Well, it was chilly last night, so I know she had a coat on. A short coat or a jacket. I believe it was either dark blue or dark green.”
Fuller stares at Rose and clears his throat. Anderson knows his boss isn’t sure how to proceed. Augie has spent most of his police career investigating property crimes and has only since last fall been running the homicide unit. He’s sure as hell never overseen a case like this one.
“Did you know that Mrs. Hickman was pregnant?” Augie says at last.
Rose says, “I always ask my patients about their general health. Last night, Mrs. Hickman volunteered that she’d missed her period. She didn’t seem very concerned, even though her husband has been overseas for several months.”
Fuller’s office is silent for a moment. The room is stuffy, and there’s a feeling of restlessness among its occupants. Augie says, “Well, that’s right. If Mrs. Hickman was pregnant—and according to her autopsy this morning she was—Private Hickman, over there in West Germany, could hardly have been the father.” He pauses, and then asks, “She didn’t happen to say who the father might be, did she?”
“Well, she said she thought it might be me,” Rose says.
The room is silent for another moment.
“What did you say to that?” Fuller asks.
Rose, his legs crossed, his immaculate hands sitting atop his knee, raises his eyebrows and says, “I told her I didn’t understand how that could be possible.”
“And why couldn’t that be possible?”
“Because I’ve never had sexual relations with the woman.”
Evangelist, after a few moments of quiet, can no longer restrain himself. “Dr. Rose,” he says, “did you murder Teresa Hickman?”
“Of course not,” Rose says. “Why on earth would I murder one of my patients?”
In the ensuing silence, all eyes stare at the dentist. Not even Big Ed says a word.
Finally, Rose looks around the room at his interlocutors and says, “If that will be all, Captain, I should return to my office. I still have that paperwork to catch up on.”
Augie sighs and says, “That will be all, Doctor. Your car is downstairs.”
Grace Montgomery sits in the late afternoon gloom with the baby, who’s content for now to sleep in his aunt’s ample lap. Bud has not returned to the apartment. He is not, despite what she told the detectives, visiting his mother in South St. Paul; his mother lives with her latest boyfriend in Hudson, Wisconsin. Grace isn’t sure why she gave the policemen false information. But then she’s not sure of anything right now, including her husband’s actual whereabouts.
Grace, always the “responsible” sister, has taken care of business since the detectives left. She called her widowed father in Dollar and tracked down Kenny Landa through his sister, one of Grace’s school chums, who now lives in Grand Forks. Grace gave her father the few details she had about Terry’s death as straightforwardly as she could manage, and, after a few moments of silence, he responded in kind. Hanging over her like a gravid cloud was the knowledge that her father had always doted on Terry while only tolerating her. A man of few words, he said little in response to Grace’s news and asked few questions, almost as though Grace’s bad news was not news at all, or anyway didn’t come as much of a shock. He thanked her for the call and hung up before she could.
Kenny Landa, when she finally reached him in Fargo, where he’d recently taken a job at a used car lot, was, by contrast, thunderstruck. Kenny wasn’t the brightest boy in North Dakota, but Grace was surprised to have to explain and repeat the news as though she was describing a complicated world event to a third grader. When he didn’t reply for a few seconds, she realized that he was crying.
“Kenny,” she said, waiting for him to collect himself, “will you do me a favor and pick up my dad in Dollar and drive him to Minneapolis if he wants to come down? I don’t trust him driving by himself anymore.” Kenny, bless his heart, said that he would, though, as it turns out, she won’t see either Kenny or her father until Terry’s funeral in North Dakota.
Someone at the Minneapolis Red Cross told her that the organization had begun the paperwork to fly Hal Senior home from West Germany. Apparently, the local authorities had alerted the organization. Factoring in logistics, the international time changes, and the vagaries of the weather, a kindly woman told Grace on the phone, Private Hickman should arrive in the Twin Cities no later than Tuesday evening.
Grace turns on a lamp and spreads a blanket on the living-room rug. She checks Hal Junior’s diaper and puts him down on the blanket, then lights a cigarette and goes to the window. The cars on the street have switched on their lights, and the few people on the sidewalk are moving briskly in the gloaming, their coat collars turned up and their necks drawn into their collars. “April,” she remembers learning in school, “is the cruelest month.”
For the first time today the tears roll freely down her cheeks. She loved Terry as much as she hated her, admired her as much as she envied and resented her and wished she was dead.
As the oldest of the four Kubicek kids, Grace was the leader when they were little, but her authority had evaporated by the time they reached adolescence.
The two boys, duplicitous Albert and oafish Lyman, either ridiculed or ignored Grace while celebrating “baby Terry.” Grace struggled with her weight, a difficulty telling the truth, and a temptation to take things that didn’t belong to her, which got her into trouble in town. Terry stole stuff, too—lipstick and movie magazines and Butterfinger candy bars from the Dollar Rexall—but Terry rarely got caught and, if she did, could usually wiggle her way out of the bind, especially if her accuser was a man. When Terry turned twelve and began attracting serious male attention, her brothers kept a protective eye on her. No one bothered about Grace until local ne’er-do-well Otto Garley knocked her up after the ’47 Harvest Whirl, quietly paid for an abortion in Mandan, and then moved to parts unknown under threat of death from her brothers.
Their mother, a tiny, temperamental beauty who believed she could speak in tongues, spent much of her time, once the kids were old enough to fend for themselves, traveling the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada’s western provinces with a Pentecostal tent preacher from Winnipeg named Inman Akers. Despite a rumored relationship with the ravenhaired Bible-thumper, Marva Kubicek taught her daughters that sex was painful and dirty and even in marriage must be indulged only for procreation. If Marva noticed the attention her younger daughter was beginning to attract, she apparently believed she could pray it away.
Not coincidentally perhaps, more than one of the older men around Dollar in those days observed that Terry looked a lot like Marva had in her teenaged years—a small, sleek, fair-haired siren whose big eyes, sly smile, and provocative gait could make the most righteous man think salacious thoughts. Grace, meanwhile, had the springy reddish hair and thickset body of their father’s family. Like most everybody in those days, three of the four Kubicek kids had crooked teeth riddled with caries and the occasional abscess, while Terry alone, though not immune to cavities and toothache, was, like her mother, blessed with a beautiful natural smile.
Then, one after another, Grace’s mother and brothers died. Albert was killed in action in Korea on Christmas Day 1950, and Lyman suffocated after falling into a corn-filled silo during the late summer of 1953. Marva, who was always susceptible to infection, contracted pneumonia during an Akers “crusade” in Alberta and died in a Calgary hospital almost halfway between the passings of her sons. Grace had taken some satisfaction in delivering the news of Albert’s death to Terry, interrupting her sister’s pleasure in the backseat of Kenny Landa’s Pontiac one snowy night outside of town.
Six months after Lyman died, Walter Kubicek sold the farm to a neighbor and moved into a tiny bungalow in town. Terry moved in with Kenny for a while, then met and six weeks later married Kenny’s slightly older, taller, better-looking cousin, Harold Hickman. The newlyweds settled down in the knotty-pine-paneled basement of his parents’ house in Grand Forks, where Harold Junior was presumed to have been conceived. The couple stayed there unhappily—Harold’s parents made it clear that they never trusted Terry—until Hal enlisted and went off to basic training in Kansas.
Grace was gone by that time. The day after she turned twenty-one, she married another hometown no-account, Riley Read, whom she divorced after six months of mutual indifference. A few weeks later, she took a Greyhound bus to the Twin Cities, where she got a job clerking in the credit department of the JC Penney store in downtown Minneapolis and shared an efficiency apartment with a girl from Dollar. She met Henry Montgomery at Jax Cafe, where she had taken a second job waiting tables at night. Bud was the bad-tempered son of an alcoholic Minneapolis fireman, but he had broad shoulders, an attractive smile, and a taciturn manner that reminded Grace of her father.
For reasons having more to do with nostalgia than anything else, Grace insisted, when she married Bud a few months later, that the nuptials be held in Dollar. At the drafty little Lutheran church no one in the family had attended for years, Terry was the maid of honor and, because Bud had no brothers and none of his few Minneapolis friends made the trip to North Dakota, Kenny Landa served as best man. During the reception in the church parlor, Bud told Terry that she was the Kubicek girl he wanted to fuck that night.
But now Grace is thinking about Dr. Rose.
Was he the last person to see her sister alive?
Terry was sure she was pregnant and that the baby was his. Terry told Grace that she and Rose had sex during her appointment in late January, and that’s undoubtedly when it happened. Terry said she was going to tell him about the baby last night, after he took care of her toothache. That was odd, actually kind of comical, Grace thought, but that was Terry for you. Maybe Terry liked Dr. Rose, was not put off by his age and his Jew looks, and when he’d finished in her mouth last night maybe they had sex again. Grace’s jealousy flickers on and off like a defective lightbulb.
Then, before she can sink too deeply into her anger and hurt, she hears an unmistakable sound on the stairs. Even in the carpeted hallway, Bud’s footfalls sound like the hammer blows of doom.
It’s half past seven this Saturday evening when Arne Anderson returns to the apartment on Chicago. Lily isn’t home, and her unexpected absence makes him uneasy. Then he remembers that she was doing a friend a favor and took an extra shift—she’s one of three staff librarians at Mount Sinai Hospital—and then planned to have dinner with her ailing mother in St. Louis Park.
Arne is drinking whiskey out of a water glass and reading the Star’s sports page when Lily gets home at nine-thirty. She looks tired, but not unhappy to see him, seemingly in a better mood than when he left this morning. (He remembered to bring home his breakfast plate and silverware, and to rinse them off in the kitchen sink.) He’s happy to see her and wonders if she’s up for sex tonight.
“That murdered girl in the paper this afternoon—is that where you were today?” she says, after pouring herself a glass of red wine and sitting down beside him on the couch.
“Afraid so,” he says, looking at her.
Lily Kline will be thirty-five in September. She is slightly built and dark-eyed, not particularly attractive, but sensual in the vaguely exotic, Eastern European way that Arne associates with Jewish women.
“Have you arrested anyone?”
“No,” he says.
He wonders, for maybe the tenth time in the last hour, what he’s going to tell her about Dr. Rose. “We’re looking at a handful of suspects. A guy where she worked and a brother-in-law who beats up her sister. Maybe some of the knuckleheads that hang around the neighborhood, too.”
“Was the girl raped?”
Arne shakes his head, taking a sip of his whiskey. “Didn’t seem to be,” he says softly, thinking about Teresa Hickman’s still, small form on the coroner’s gurney and also the cheesecake photos they found in her dresser. “She had sex not long before she died, but MacMurray said he didn’t think it was forced. She was dressed when we found the body, and her clothes weren’t torn or disheveled. She was missing a shoe, is all.”
“Poor thing,” Lily says.
Arne takes another swallow. This one drains the glass. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help himself, so he pushes on.
“She had a dental appointment last night. A dentist named H. David Rose, on Nicollet Avenue south of the Loop. Ever hear of him?”
She gives him a look.
“Why? Because he’s a Jew?”
Arne shrugs. He’s relieved to hear her chuckle.
“We don’t all know each other,” she says.
Arne gets off the couch and pads into the kitchen for a refill. Lily has lived here for almost three years, Arne not quite six months, though he feels as if it’s been longer than that. He doesn’t give any thought anymore to either Charlotte or Marianne, his ex-wives—luckily, for everyone, there are no children—much less to the several apartments and the one cramped bungalow he and Marianne rented on the North Side. He has shacked up with a couple of other women, too, in various locations around town, but he can hardly remember either the women or the addresses.
“I just thought, you know—all the doctors at Mount Sinai—”
“All the Jew doctors at Mount Sinai, you mean,” she calls after him, seeming to enjoy this in her way.
He appears a moment later with his tumbler half-full. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
“Well, no, I’ve never heard of that Jew,” she says. “You know, of course, the difference between a physician and a dentist? The dentist wasn’t smart enough to get into medical school.”
It’s an old joke. Arne forces a smile.
“This dentist strikes me as pretty smart,” he says, sitting down again. “We brought him downtown and had a long talk, Augie, Mel, fucking Ed Evangelist, and me. He told us about this procedure of his—sedation dentistry, he calls it. He gives the patient a barbiturate and a headache remedy that knocks them out for several hours. Ever hear of anything like that?”
“No,” she says, looking at Arne over her wine glass. “But what do I know about dentists, except I hate them? Well, did you arrest the dirty Jew and give him the third degree?”
Arne sighs. It’s been a long day. He’s tired and now halfway drunk. He wants to fuck Lily, or somebody, and go to sleep.
“No,” he says. “But we have reason to give him a good look. He told us that when he saw the girl last night, she accused him of being the father of the baby she was carrying. We’re going to talk to him again tomorrow.”
“So whoever murdered the girl murdered a child, too—the unborn baby?”
Arne closes his eyes.
“The fetus doesn’t count, Lil, as you well know. Maybe someday, but not now, not under the law. Give me a break, will you? One victim is enough.”