CHAPTER 4

When Anderson arrives at the Hiawatha County Courthouse a few minutes before ten on April 10—Easter Sunday—Charlie Riemenschneider is waiting for him. Mel, Ferris, and the other members of the squad are on their way in despite the holiday, but for the moment Arne and Charlie have the office to themselves.

Charlie, grinning his gat-toothed grin and squinting behind his glasses, holds up a brown paper bag. “Guess what I got, Sarge?” he says.

Arne sits down at his desk and scans the cluttered surface for anything new—callback slips from the front desk or directives from upstairs. He is thinking about Lily. Lily last night. Lily in bed. Lily different and indifferent. He wonders if he is falling in love with Lily at the same time Lily is falling out of love with him. Then again, when did she ever say she was in love with him?

“Pastrami on rye,” he says absently. Arne hates guessing games. “How the hell should I know?”

He looks up and sees Riemenschneider open the bag and turn it upside down. A woman’s low-heeled, black leather shoe clatters on the top of his desk. The single empty shoe looks odd on the desk. There should be a foot in it, or there should be a pair of them, and they should be on the floor.

“A citizen on Euclid Place flagged down one of our cars last night, said he found it in the street,” Charlie says. “I’ll lay you three to one this belonged to our dead beauty.”

Anderson unlocks his desk and pulls open the bottom drawer. He takes out another paper bag and withdraws a woman’s left shoe—sure enough, a match with the right shoe Charlie dropped on his desk. He holds the shoes up, one in each hand, and looks them over as though he knows something about women’s shoes other than what he likes or dislikes on attractive women. The shoes—size five and a half, according to the tag inside, bought at a JC Penney’s department store—look neither new nor expensive, but they aren’t badly worn or scuffed. Arne can imagine Teresa Hickman wearing them out to a movie in the evening, or to a dental appointment. He holds each up, looks closely at the insides, and slides his thick fingers into the toes. He resists the temptation to sniff them.

“Euclid Place,” he says.

“A block up from the lake,” Charlie says, meaning Lake of the Isles.

“That’s a couple of miles from where the body was found,” Arne says. “Less than a mile from Rose’s office.”

Also on his desk is a report from Donald Forsberg, the head of forensics. A thorough search and vacuuming of Rose’s Packard, front and back seats, floor, glove compartment, and trunk, yielded nothing other than what everyone else has in their cars. No sign of blood or semen or other bodily fluids. The only fingerprints were Rose’s—on the steering wheel, gear shift, front doors, glove compartment, and trunk handle. There were a couple of long blonde hairs on the back of the front passenger seat, possibly Teresa Hickman’s. But if Mrs. Hickman was in the car, where are her fingerprints? Rose must have wiped down her side after she either got out of the car or was murdered.

The squad’s other members are present by ten-fifteen.

“He is risen!” Ferris Lakeland declares by way of a wise-ass Easter Sunday greeting.

“Big fuckin’ deal,” Riemenschneider growls in response. “I’ve been up for three hours.”

Anderson senses a rare energy within the group. Even sluggish Einar Storholm, marking time until his end-of-the-year retirement, and legendary malingerer Curtis Wrenshall seem more than casually interested in the Hickman homicide. And why not? The case has the makings of an old-fashioned—and, in real life, exceedingly rare—whodunit. What’s more, the victim was a pretty young woman, a pregnant mother, and possibly a party girl, whose body was discovered in one of the city’s quieter corners, and one of the suspects—hell, the prime suspect at this point—is the victim’s Jewish dentist.

Arne assigns Storholm and Wrenshall to grab a couple of patrolmen, including the officer who brought in the matching shoe, and start canvassing the blocks around Euclid Place and the east side of Lake of the Isles. He sends Hessburg and LeBlanc to interview Rose’s Zenith Avenue neighbors. When the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club opens tomorrow, they can talk to the club’s staff and customers as well as Rose’s second-floor neighbors.

Riemenschneider and Lakeland will go see if Bud Montgomery is home yet (he didn’t come home last night, according to the stakeout), and if Grace Montgomery has anything more to say. “Bring them both in,” Anderson says. “If Bud falls down the stairs and bumps his head en route—well, those things happen.”

As Anderson and Curry get ready to leave for Rose’s house, Arne notices a yellow call slip he overlooked amid the clutter on his desk. The slip says a man phoned in early this morning to report having seen a “young-looking male” walking along the streetcar right-of-way about one a.m. Saturday. He was “skinny and wore glasses” and “seemed to be interested in something in the weeds,” the caller said. Unfortunately, the caller didn’t leave his name or phone number or say how he happened to see the “young-looking male” strolling along the tracks at that hour. No one else has mentioned a skinny guy with glasses. Arne sticks the slip in his notebook.

Rose’s home, three doors off the southwest corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Zenith Avenue, is a two-and-a-half-story, red-brick structure bearded with English ivy. Later described in the papers as a Tudor Revival built in the early 1920s, it is not the largest or most ostentatious house on Zenith Avenue, but, like most of its neighbors, it is a house that a professional man and his family would be happy to call their own.

The house boasts a nicely landscaped front yard shaded by two fifty-foot American elms and a gently sloping backyard. A double garage is attached to the rear of the house and opens on a tidy alley that runs the length of the block. It is early April, so the yards, though likely free of snow for the season, will need another month, two or three inches of rain, and consistently warmer temperatures to green up and sprout their flowers.

Anderson and Curry, warm enough in their overcoats and fedoras, ring the front doorbell while a squad car idles at both ends of the alley. Arne would be flabbergasted if Rose tries to make a run for it, but protocol demands the backup.

Ruth Rose, a short, stocky, plain-faced woman Anderson figures to be about the dentist’s age, answers the door. Anderson extends his shield, but she knows who they are, if not by name then by their appearance. She appears as unruffled this morning as her husband seemed to be at the courthouse yesterday afternoon. Anderson was half-expecting a uniformed maid.

“David said we should expect you,” Mrs. Rose says, holding open the door.

Dr. Rose and a younger man are standing in the spacious, thickly carpeted living room to the left of the foyer. Rose is wearing a starched white shirt with a blue dotted necktie and pinstriped suit pants. His wingtip shoes gleam in the low light. He extends his right hand to each of the detectives and turns to the other man.

“May I introduce Ronald Oshinsky,” Rose says. “Ronnie is my brother-in-law and, for the moment, my legal counsel.”

Short, sturdy, and sobersided, Oshinsky is obviously Ruth’s kin. Unblinking behind a pair of plastic-rimmed spectacles, he looks like a well-dressed owl.

Anderson is angry with himself for not hustling Rose downtown before the dentist could hire a lawyer. At the same time, he’s relieved that this lawyer is not one of the high-octane defense attorneys that usually attach themselves to cases like this, headline-grabbing, cop-hating legal eagles, like Avery Kerr, Harry Hall, and Dante DeShields. Arne has never heard of Ronald Oshinsky.

The house smells of roast beef, fried onions, and furniture polish. A string quartet plays softly on the radio or phonograph in another room. Otherwise the house is silent.

Anderson says, “We want to take you downtown, Dr. Rose. To continue our conversation.”

Oshinsky says, “Is he under arrest?”

“No,” says Curry. “But we need more information.”

“Why not talk here?” the young man wants to know.

“Orders from the top,” Anderson says with a little smile, the usual bullshit response.

“That’s perfectly all right,” Rose says. He seems incapable of fluster, and it occurs to Anderson that the man is probably a pretty good dentist. Calm, self-confident, and steady.

Rose says, “May my wife and brother-in-law join us?”

Before Curry can say no, Anderson says, “If they can get themselves downtown and back on their own.”

Robert Gardner sits in Miles Mckenzie’s cramped office, seriously sleep-deprived and hungry for another adventure in Pam Brantley’s bed, whenever that might be.

Mckenzie’s “private” office is enclosed on three and a half sides by four-foot-high partitions topped with a foot of frosted glass and has hardly room enough for the bureau chief’s messy desk, squealing chair, and battered Remington typewriter, plus a pair of straight-backed metal chairs facing the desk. The entire bureau, maybe twelve hundred square feet crammed with mismatched furniture, dented file cabinets, incessantly ringing telephones, and a platoon of clattering teletype machines, stinks of cigarette smoke, burnt coffee, and a dozen-odd men for whom personal hygiene isn’t always the highest priority.

Because there’s no door on his cubicle and because the walls rise only so far, there’s no respite, even for the chief, from the mechanical chatter of the teletype machines that receive, print, and spit out tightly spaced rolls of news from around the world twenty-four hours a day. Bells announce the arrival of a new item, the number of bells signaling the urgency of each.

Mckenzie, in his bargain-basement short-sleeved white shirt and tartan tie that not quite reaches the bottom of his paunch, sits behind his desk looking at sheets of sliced-off teletype paper. He wears his watch on the inside of his right wrist and smokes incessantly. He is a United Press lifer, a newsman out of the movies, hoarse, gruff, and all business if you don’t count bad puns and corny wordplay.

Bespectacled and prematurely bald, twenty-five-year-old Tommy Pullman sits in the chair beside Robert, furiously chewing Beech-Nut gum and fuming. Sunday is not Tommy’s day to work. There’s no bureau policy or union rule that gives him Sundays off, but Tommy, though with only a year and a half of seniority, carries a veteran’s aura of entitlement and simply presumes a Sunday-free schedule. When pressed, he will explain, in unabashedly personal terms, that he’s reserved the day for his newly married wife. Robert has met Bonnie Pullman, a slinky, six-foot-tall redhead, and has no trouble imagining how the couple spends their Sabbath.

“That was a decent sidebar in last night’s Star,” Mckenzie says to Robert. The men sitting around the desk know that Robert only contributed to the short piece Mckenzie wrote to accompany the Star’s front-page story. They know that Mckenzie is going to be the lead on the Teresa Hickman story, directing the bureau’s coverage and writing both the features and the breaking-news reports that go out on the wires, and slapping his byline on top of most of them. The bureau’s five full-time reporters, including Pullman and Gardner, will do the grunt work, wear down the shoe leather, and be content with reflected glory.

Milt Hickok, the foghorn-voiced veteran who’s worked at the bureau (and the one-man state capitol office in St. Paul) almost as long as Mckenzie, has just called in from the courthouse. Milt told Mckenzie that the cops are going to arrest the dead woman’s dentist. His source at the courthouse says Arne Anderson’s homicide unit questioned a Dr. H. David Rose yesterday afternoon and is picking him up at his home today.

“That’s all?” Pullman asks.

Mckenzie, lighting a Viceroy, says, “Shit, buddy, if that’s true, this ain’t some run-of-the-mill mugging arrest. This is a professional man, for chrissakes. A doctor of fucking dental surgery. Maybe the girl was a patient and he was filling more than her oral cavities.”

“Rose,” Pullman says. “That’s a hebe name, isn’t it?”

Mckenzie shrugs. “Sounds like it. Easy enough to find out.”

Robert says, “Does that make a difference?”

“In this town it does,” Tommy says. “The national press says we’re the, quote, ‘anti-Semitism capital of America.’”

Still learning the ways of the city, Robert has read about the real-estate redlining that has kept Jews and Negroes out of the city’s better neighborhoods, and that Jewish doctors had to build their own hospital, Mount Sinai, because they couldn’t get operating privileges in the city’s established institutions. He’s heard that the city’s venerable country clubs and business associations and even the local YMCA have a history of denying Jews membership. But the anti-Semitism capital of America? He wonders if that can be true. Maybe once upon a time, but today? How would he know? He’s pretty sure he has never knowingly spoken at any length to a Jew, either at home in Rochester or here in the Twin Cities.

“Rose might not be the only suspect,” Mckenzie says, the cigarette bouncing between his lips. “Someone told the cops they saw a guy standing over the body by the trolley tracks. A young guy with glasses, according to the source.”

Robert feels the blood drain from his face. Jesus Christ! Someone did see him after he left Pam’s apartment! This is what he’s been worried about—someone having spotted him near the body and the police suspecting that he had something to do with the murder.

He takes a breath and says, “Is that all? A young guy with glasses?”

He’s relieved that neither Tommy nor Mckenzie bothers to look at him.

“That’s more than you got, Bobbo,” Tommy says.

“Mr. Gardner,” says Mckenzie, as though suddenly inspired. He leans back in his noisy chair, which shrieks like a stuck pig under the torque and stress.

“I want you to run over to the courthouse and give Hickok a hand. Introduce yourself to Sergeant Anderson, tell him you’re new on the beat. That’ll be to your advantage because Anderson hates the reporters he knows around town, including yours truly. To Arne we’re all parasites, bottom-feeders—or worse. Tell him you’re just off the bus from East Overshoe, Manitoba, some place where the press takes the cops’ word as gospel. See what he’ll tell you about the Jew dentist and the skinny kid with glasses.”

Then the chief looks at Tommy and says, “You can go home and pleasure your bride, pal. Tell her you’re the Easter Bunny.”

Robert, on his feet now, wonders how Mckenzie knew the kid with glasses was skinny.

“You need to know, Dr. Rose, that anything you say may be used against you in court,” Captain Fuller says, after the two men and Detectives Anderson and Curry take their seats behind and around Fuller’s desk on the third floor of the courthouse. May Grey, clutching three freshly sharpened pencils and her steno pad, has joined the circle as well. Ruth Rose and Ronald Oshinsky have been directed to chairs along the wall behind the others. No doubt owing to the fact that it’s Easter Sunday, Ed Evangelist—not a religious man despite the name and yesterday’s provocations, but a man who fervently believes in his weekly day of rest—isn’t present.

“Do you understand?” Augie says.

“Yes, I do,” Rose replies.

Rose has assumed the identical posture, expression, and disposition he displayed here yesterday. By the looks of him, Arne muses, the dentist might have spent the night in that chair.

Investigators won’t be required for another eleven years to inform a criminal suspect of his Sixth Amendment rights—that he is not obliged to incriminate himself and has a right to have a lawyer present during an interrogation. But Fuller believes he owes a professional man a modicum of courtesy, and, in any event, he said nothing about the suspect’s right to a lawyer. Rose has a lawyer, of course, but on the drive downtown the dentist told Anderson and Curry (who told Fuller on their arrival) that Ronald Oshinsky, though “a bright young man with a promising future,” has handled only divorce and traffic cases in his short career and is present as a favor to Mrs. Rose.

“He won’t be any trouble,” Dr. Rose assured the detectives, as though Oshinsky was a child permitted to remain at the dinner table while the grownups talk business.

Fuller begins with questions about Teresa Hickman’s Friday evening appointment, her general appearance, her mood, and the specific reason she had made her appointment with the dentist.

Rose answers each without hesitation or the slightest sign of discomfiture.

“She was an attractive girl, I would say,” he says. “Not beautiful, actually a little on the thin side of the specter, but she had pretty eyes and an engaging natural smile. A dentist can’t help but appreciate a smile like that, especially when the patient grew up in a rural part of the country and probably didn’t have access to regular care.

“She was in a good mood, or at least as good a mood as can be expected from someone with a toothache,” he says. “The infected tooth was an upper lateral. She told me it hurt like the dickens when she tried to eat something or even just touched it with her tongue.”

He says he gave her an injection of two percent novocaine and one of his capsules, and then removed the existing filling, which had apparently been put in several years earlier. An unpleasant odor indicated infection and told him to proceed with a root canal, using his drill, reamers, and a flush of light peroxide.

“Then I blew the thing dry and put in one or two cotton points and went ahead and used a medication on another cotton point, just put it up in there, put a little soft cement over that, then put in a soft porcelain on top of that, then after it set drilled into it so that any gas that formed would escape.”

Arne glances at Miss Grey, who seems to be getting it all and is not put off by the clinical details. No one in the room could have understood a word Rose said.

“Did she talk to you during this process?” Augie asks him.

“Well, I had a saliva syringe and cotton in her mouth, so it would have been difficult for her to speak while I was working. But both before and after I’d say she was talkative.”

Anderson catches Fuller’s eye, and Fuller nods.

Arne says, “When did she tell you she thought she was pregnant? Before or after you fixed the tooth?”

Rose turns his head.

“Afterward,” he says. “I’d helped her out of the chair and led her into the waiting room and encouraged her to lie down on the settee, until the medication I’d given her began wearing off.”

Curry asks, “What did you do while she was on the settee?”

“I went back to the operatory and cleaned up.”

“There was no one else in the office at the time? No other patients waiting or anyone helping you?”

“No. Mrs. Hickman was the last patient of the day. And, as I believe I told you, mine is a solo practice. I work by myself.”

Arne can hear Mrs. Rose and her brother stirring behind him, the clearing of a throat and the shuffling of feet on the worn linoleum. The implication of Mel’s questions was obvious. Arne forms a picture of the dentist sitting down beside Teresa Hickman, who is supine and semiconscious and maybe blithely acquiescent, and sliding his hand under her skirt. But maybe, Arne muses, that is only what he might have done.

“How long was she unconscious?” he asks.

“She was never unconscious,” Rose replies. “She was in a semiconscious state.”

Fuller says, “She was talking to you while she was lying on the settee?”

“I was in the other room most of that time. It was probably another half hour to an hour before she sat up and started to talk.”

“And that’s when she told you she’d missed her period.”

Rose seems to be thinking. “Well, no, not right away,” he says. “We talked about other things, as I recall. I inquired about her sister, who’s also a patient of mine, and her husband in West Germany and her little boy, whose name I can’t remember.”

“Harold Junior,” Curry interjects drily. He gives Anderson a look. Mel is already convinced that Rose is a murderer.

“She told me she and her husband, when he gets out of the service, want to open a little motor hotel outside of Grand Forks.”

“Just a little run-of-the-mill chitchat,” Augie says.

“Yes,” Rose says. “She asked if I minded if she smoked. I told her I don’t allow smoking in the office, for obvious reasons. I’m sure she knew that, so it was odd that she asked. She wasn’t entirely lucid yet.”

Arne wonders what those “obvious reasons” are. A little tobacco smoke might help mask the medicinal, hot-drill stink of the place. Fuller’s cramped office, as it happens, is thick with cigarette smoke by this time, though the doctor either doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s only his own nest he doesn’t want to foul, though yesterday the detectives smoked without any objections in his waiting room.

“So her statement about missing her period came out of the blue,” Augie says.

“Well, actually, she’d mentioned it earlier, before I started to work on her, when I asked about her general health.”

“But she didn’t say at that time she thought you might be the father.”

“She did not. That was afterward. In the waiting room.”

“What exactly did she say in the waiting room?”

“Well, she said she believed I’d gotten her pregnant after I sedated her during her appointment in January.”

Augie glances at the papers in front of him, and then looks up. “What did she say when you told her that was impossible, that it couldn’t have been you?”

“She said, ‘Well, I can’t think who else it could be.’”

“What did you say to that?”

“I said, ‘Well, you need to think a little harder.’”

“And she said?”

“She said, ‘I’ve thought a lot about it already. I think it was you.’ She said, ‘You gave me that pill, and now I am pregnant.’”

“Did she raise her voice?”

“No.”

“Did you?”

“No. It was a civil conversation.”

“Her accusation had to make you mad.”

Rose thinks this over.

“I was perturbed,” he says finally. “I’m sure my wife and brother-in-law will confirm that it takes a great deal to make me angry.”

Fuller stares at Rose, whose posture and expression haven’t changed since they started. Rose might as well be talking about the weekend weather.

Augie, who has a notoriously weak bladder, says it’s time to take a break. He stands, and the others, except May Grey, still jabbing at her steno pad, follow suit.

Anderson glances back at Ruth Rose and her brother. She looks as unperturbed as her husband. Young Oshinsky, on the other hand, is clearly agitated, twisting in his chair and jiggling his legs, though it’s impossible to tell whether his discomfort is the result of his brother-inlaw’s narrative or the direction in which the detectives’ questions are heading.

In the men’s room down the hall, Anderson and Curry watch Fuller relieve himself in front of one of the rust-streaked urinals.

Mel glances toward the men’s room door and says, “The guy’s a cool fucking customer.”

Shaking himself off and stepping away from the pisser, Augie says, “You ask the rest of the questions, Arne. He’s our guy, but you’re more likely than I am to get him to say so.”

After their break, instead of taking his chair, Anderson sits down on the edge of Fuller’s desk, at six foot three and two hundred twenty–plus pounds an intimidating figure, all the more so in this elevated position.

“So then, Dr. Rose,” he begins, looking down at the suspect, “after another several minutes you led Mrs. Hickman out of the office and down the stairs and back to the Montgomerys’ apartment around the corner. Isn’t that what you told us yesterday?”

Rose pauses for a moment, and then says, “Well, that may not have been entirely accurate. I drove her back to her apartment.”

“You drove her?”

“Yes. She seemed a little wobbly on her legs, so I led her down to my car, which was parked around the corner. I’ve done that for other patients—driven them home—especially when it’s been late or the weather’s been bad and the patient’s still under the influence of the medication.”

Anderson and Curry exchange glances. Anderson hears Augie clearing his throat as he thumbs through the notes on his desk.

“What time did you take Mrs. Hickman down to your car, Dr. Rose?”

“Well, as I believe I mentioned yesterday, I don’t wear a watch,” Rose says. “But I suppose it was by this time about ten or ten-thirty. Maybe eleven.”

“And you drove her home. But her apartment—the Montgomerys’ apartment—is right there where you’re parked, isn’t it?”

Rose sighs.

“Yes,” he says. “Let me start again. Terry told me she wanted to talk about her pregnancy. Now she was adamant about it, in fact, and I didn’t feel I had much choice but to discuss the matter with her. So I didn’t drive her home.”

“Where did you go?”

Arne, surely no more than anyone else in the room, was not expecting this. He does his best to keep from looking at Mrs. Rose seated behind her husband.

Rose says, “I’m not sure. South on Nicollet or maybe Hennepin, away from downtown, in the direction of the lake. Lake of the Isles. Or Lake Calhoun.”

“Can you be more definite, Doctor?”

“I’m afraid I can’t,” Rose says. “I know we eventually parked by one of the lakes, where I thought we could talk.”

Ronald Oshinsky is on his feet.

“We need to stop here, gentlemen,” he says. The young man’s face is red and he looks self-conscious. He has to be as surprised as everyone else, and even with his limited experience he has to know that the discussion is lurching into dangerous waters.

But Rose looks placidly over his shoulder and says, “There’s no need to stop now, Ronnie. The cat’s out of the box and there’s no reason to beat behind the bush. I took Mrs. Hickman, perhaps unadvisedly, for a ride in my car and we stopped to talk. That’s all.”

Oshinsky looks at his sister, who says nothing, and sits back down.

Anderson feels the energy changing in the room as it sometimes does during an interrogation.

“Did you argue at that point?”

Rose sits silent for a moment.

“Well,” he says, “we probably did. I’m having difficulty recalling the specifics. It was very late, and I remember beginning to swoon in my weariness.”

“Swoon?” Anderson says. The cat’s out of the box. There’s no reason to beat behind the bush. Rose has an interesting way with the language.

“The poor man hadn’t eaten all day!”

This, at last, is Ruth Rose jumping into the conversation. “Dr. Rose often forgets to eat. He goes all day without a meal, then suffers the effects.”

Nobody says a word for a long moment. At last Anderson asks, “When did you finally drop Mrs. Hickman at her apartment?”

For the first time, Rose displays some emotion. “I don’t know,” he says. He seems genuinely perplexed. “I don’t remember driving back toward downtown, and I don’t remember dropping her off at her apartment. I seem to have blacked out, and when I came to my senses she wasn’t in the car. I didn’t know where she’d gone.”

Anderson has heard hundreds of alibis, but never anything quite like this one, from a suspect quite like Dr. Rose.

He says, “Where were you when you came to your senses?”

“Well, only a block or two from my home. On Xerxes Avenue, at the south end of Lake Calhoun.”

“And what time do you think it was then?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps about midnight.”

Fuller says, “You didn’t know what had become of Mrs. Hickman?”

Rose takes a deep breath and says, “Mrs. Hickman and I were in the car, and the next thing I knew she was gone.”

Curry asks, “Do you remember driving—or stopping—near Forty-fourth Street? Forty-fourth and Zenith, or Forty-fourth and York?”

“No.”

“Do you remember driving on or across any streetcar tracks?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you recall walking on or stepping across any streetcar tracks?”

“No.”

“Did you kill Mrs. Hickman, Doctor?”

“I did not. Well, I don’t remember. Not that I know of.”

When Anderson, now sweating like a prizefighter, lifts himself off the desk, Fuller and Curry stand up, too. Then so does Dr. Rose, slowly and laboriously, as though his back and legs are arthritic, and then so do Ruth Rose and Ronald Oshinsky. Arne hears Oshinsky tell his sister that he’s going to make a phone call and watches the lawyer hurry out of the room.

Ruth catches Anderson’s eye and says, “I’m afraid my husband’s memory is not always very reliable, Sergeant. Maybe it’s his diet and all the pressure at the office. David is a perfectionist, and he doesn’t get enough rest.”

Augie Fuller, coming around from behind his desk, says, “Dr. Rose, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Teresa Hickman.”

Rose looks at his wife and stands there, expressionless and awkward-looking, as though he no longer knows what to say or what to do with his hands.

The following morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and black coffee, Rose is fetched by Mel Curry and escorted in handcuffs down a flight of stairs to a small, untidy office on the second floor of the courthouse. After his arrest late yesterday, he was booked, issued a bedroll, and assigned a cell in the courthouse tower. The jailer, a blimpish sheriff’s deputy named Miller Haskins, told Curry that he had no complaints about the prisoner.

“Didn’t hear a peep,” Haskins said. “Far as I know, he slept like a baby.”

The office, according to the name on the frosted-glass door, belongs to James P. Jerecki, Deputy Director, Weights & Measures. It wouldn’t occur to Rose, a naif in such matters, but Jerecki’s unassuming venue has been selected to provide cover for the investigators, lest reporters get wind of developments and before Ruth Rose and Ronald Oshinsky can send an actual criminal-defense attorney to the courthouse.

“We need another hour to ourselves,” Anderson says to Riemenschneider and Lakeland as he ushers them into Jerecki’s office. Neither the Weights & Measures director nor his secretary is present (Fuller has made the necessary arrangements), but Homer Scofield, the thirty-two-year-old Hiawatha County attorney, is leaning against one of the desks when the detectives arrive. Scofield is new to the job. This is his first county case of any kind, never mind his first homicide prosecution. He has a mop of red hair, a pale, freckled face, a long, bony frame, and Coke-bottle glasses with colorless plastic frames. His oversized suit makes him look like a ten-year-old pretending to be his father. He is here to decide whether to call his first-ever grand jury.

Augie, who just met the new prosecutor, introduces him to the others as “Herbert Wakefield,” and then red-faced, hastily and with the prosecutor’s help, makes the necessary correction. “Sorry about that, sir,” he says. “I went to Patrick Henry High with a Herbie Wakefield.”

Scofield smiles uncertainly.

Curry brings Rose in and directs him to a large table the contents of which—stacks of files, ledgers, and three-inch-thick technical manuals—have been shoved to one side. May Grey, unnoticed until now, opens a fresh steno pad and steadies it on her knee.

After a few tepid pleasantries, Anderson, facing Rose across the table, says, “Were you aware that Teresa Hickman had sexual relations shortly before she died Friday night?”

“No,” Rose says. He wears this morning only a white dress shirt, beltless suit trousers, socks, and shoes, pending the issuance of regulation jail garb. He looks alert if somewhat rumpled and disoriented. “No, I wasn’t.”

“Did you have sexual relations with Mrs. Hickman?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Either in your office or in your car?”

“No.” He pauses, and then adds with a rare flash of impatience, “I did not.”

“Yesterday, when I asked if you killed Mrs. Hickman, you told us that you didn’t remember. ‘Not that I know of,’ you said. Is it possible that you don’t remember having sex with her, either?”

“Well, I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. It would be a violation of my professional ethics.”

“You said the two of you argued when you were in the car,” Anderson says.

“I suppose we did,” Rose replies, sounding uncertain, either forgetting or disregarding what he said yesterday.

“What did you argue about?”

Rose suddenly rolls his shoulders, as though easing out the kinks of having spent the night on a mattress the thickness of a couple Saturday Evening Posts. Arne recalls Rose’s comment about arthritis. “Her pregnancy, no doubt,” he says.

“Was she making demands? Did she want you to pay for an abortion, or to help with the child once it was born?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Did she threaten to tell people about her situation, threaten to go to the police, or make a complaint to the state dental authorities?”

“I don’t remember,” Rose says quietly. “If she did, I wasn’t going to stand for it, I can assure you of that.”

“You have a good reputation in this community, don’t you, Doctor?”

“I believe I do.”

“During the drive, Doctor—”

“The drive was her idea,” Rose says. “She wanted to talk about her pregnancy. I think your proposition is correct, though I can’t be certain I’m recalling this correctly. I think she wanted to ask me for money.”

“Did she ask you for money?”

“Well, I can’t say for certain. But I’m pretty sure that’s what she had in mind.”

Arne looks around the room, but avoids eye contact with his colleagues and the county attorney.

“Did she in fact ask you for money that night?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know or you don’t remember?”

“I’m not sure I understand the difference.”

Arne looks down at his hands, which are folded atop May Grey’s typed transcript of yesterday’s interrogation. “What’s the last thing you remember before you blacked out Friday night?” he says.

“All I can recall with any certitude is coming out of it near my home,” Rose replies.

“And Teresa Hickman was not in the car when you did?”

“No, she wasn’t.”

“She was sitting beside you in the front seat of your Packard, possibly threatening you with blackmail, and then, sometime later, when you looked in her direction, the seat was empty and she was gone.”

“Yes.”

“Mrs. Hickman was manually strangled,” Anderson says. “According to the pathologist who performed her autopsy, there was a bruise on her neck and the hyoid bone in her throat had been crushed. She also had semen in her body, indicating recent sexual intercourse. Her body was dumped in the weeds a half-mile from your home. Does any of that information ring a bell, Dr. Rose?”

Rose stares at Anderson, and then makes that little rippling motion with his shoulders.

“As a professional man myself, I have to respect the opinion of another professional man,” he says. “If the pathologist says she was strangled, I have to accept that she was strangled. If he says she’d had sexual intercourse, she must have had sexual intercourse. I won’t argue with another doctor’s report.”

He sounds tired, Anderson muses, maybe from a bad night’s sleep or maybe because he’s finally out of gas.

“It was just the two of us in the car, and the girl made me angry so I can see why you might wonder if I lost control,” Rose says quietly. “But I want you to know, Sergeant, I am not a violent man. I have no memory of laying a hand on Terry Hickman—of doing anything to her or with her, in any way harming her—and, frankly, I doubt very much that I did. I have not deliberatively hurt so much as an ant or a ladybug in my lifetime. I am not a murderer.”

He manages a weak, almost apologetic smile and doesn’t say another word.

That evening, the Star runs the story along the top of the front page below a headline set in sixty-four-point type:

CITY DENTIST HELD IN WOMAN’S DEATH

Under Oscar Rystrom’s byline, the story reiterates the basics of the case, the coroner’s findings, and the arrest of H. David Rose, a South-side dentist, providing, as the papers routinely do at the time, the home addresses of both the victim and the suspect. Rystrom quotes MPD Captain of Detectives August Fuller saying that Teresa Hickman had been Rose’s patient, and that the police believe he was the last person to see her alive.

An unidentified “well-placed” source is quoted as saying that in interviews with the police on Sunday and earlier today, “The suspect has all but confessed to the crime.” None of the detectives Rystrom interviewed, however, would confirm or deny that statement on the record.

Rose has hired “flamboyant local defense attorney” Dante DeShields, Rystrom notes. DeShields immediately issued a statement, calling the arrest “totally unjustified” and concluding, “David Rose is an eminent doctor of dental surgery, a law-abiding citizen, a loving husband, and a conscientious father. To suggest that he had anything to do with Teresa Hickman’s murder is outrageous. Dr. Rose is innocent. He has ‘all but confessed’ to absolutely nothing.”

A rudimentary map of the Linden Hills neighborhood, extending from West Forty-fourth Street to the south end of Lake Calhoun and including Rose’s Zenith Avenue home five blocks from the spot where the victim’s body was found, accompanies the story. There is a photograph, no doubt from her high school yearbook, of Teresa Hickman and a studio portrait of Dr. Rose.

Teresa Hickman is smiling. Dr. Rose is not.