CHAPTER 5

Robert Gardner sits bare-assed on the edge of the narrow bed and tries desperately to think about other things: the pathetic threelegged mutt that hobbled around his Rochester neighborhood when he was a kid, the Life magazine photo of a Japanese soldier about to behead a blindfolded American airman, his grandmother’s elaborate funeral. He tries to picture the five-fatality car wreck on Highway 14 he helped cover for the Post-Bulletin—anything that will keep him from exploding in Pam Brantley’s mouth.

He manages to hold on for another few seconds before the past is swallowed by the present and he comes in a mighty rush and exclamation.

It was Monday night and it’s now very early Tuesday morning, the first time he’s seen or talked to her since Teresa Hickman’s murder. Pam said when he arrived a few minutes before midnight that they have “all the time in the world” because Karl is working an extra shift at the hospital. So they made love once, then twenty minutes later a second time, and then Pam went down on him, another first in his rapidly expanding portfolio of sexual experience.

This night, like the several nights they’ve trysted before it, has seemed too good to be true, though Robert can’t help but listen, at least during pauses between lovemaking, for the door at the bottom of the stairs to open and Karl’s footfalls on the steps. What if Karl changes his mind and heads home after his first shift? Robert worries, too, about Gwen waking up in her apartment and noticing it’s nearly two in the morning and her little brother hasn’t come in yet. Nothing, not even this wild carnal pleasure, is without complication and concern.

Robert wonders if he can fuck Pam a third time tonight. Nothing in his experience, or, for that matter, in his many years of sexual fantasy, has prepared him for the opportunities his seemingly insatiable lover is giving him—so different from his two years going steady with her cautious, abstemious sister.

Pam, lying beside him, is now snoring softly, like a child, her face turned toward him and her legs partially open as though inviting his return. The dark triangle between her thighs looks damp in the pallid light from the window. He wonders if he should repay the favor, if he should go down on her, wondering what she would taste like, wondering at the same time if the taste of her is something her husband knows, wondering if she has done to Karl what she has just done to him, and what Karl has done in response. He feels himself begin to stiffen.

When Pam, a moment later, stirs and sits up, Robert tells her that he saw the dead girl on the tracks after their lovemaking that night.

He says it just like that, in so many words, without forethought and without a plan. They have not talked about the murder at all tonight. Somewhat to his surprise, Pam hasn’t brought it up, and damned if Robert was going to say anything that might chill the erotic temperature level in the apartment.

Later, when he tries to find a way to explain his foolishness, he will tell himself that his secret had become too much to carry by himself, that he had to tell someone and there was no one else he could tell under the circumstance. Maybe sharing the secret with Pam might somehow lessen—what?—his cowardice in not telling the police and his boss. It was entirely possible, he would tell himself, that whoever reported seeing the skinny young man with glasses leaning over the body could identify him. The possibility has been on his mind since the Sunday meeting at the bureau—blocked out only by the intoxicating prospect and then the reality of another couple of hours with Pam—and maybe telling Pam is his way of dealing with that fear, which makes no sense whatever, he realizes as soon as he thinks it.

He will prefer to rationalize his mistake by telling himself that he has fallen crazy in love with Pam Brantley, and that sharing secrets is something lovers do, whether it makes sense or not.

Pam is looking at him quizzically.

“You saw what?” she says.

He knows he’s made a mistake, but, like a skier who’s launched himself over the lip of a precipitous hill, there’s no turning back.

“That murdered girl. Teresa Hickman.”

“You saw her get murdered?” Pam says. Her wide-eyed, bewildered expression almost makes him laugh.

“No,” he says, “but I might have been the first person to see her afterward. That was five or six hours before the guy who the police say discovered the body said he came across it.”

He isn’t sure what reaction he expected, but Pam, sitting up beside him, simply stares at him, nonplussed. It occurs to him that their lovemaking is finished for the night.

“What did she look like?”

Robert shakes his head.

“She looked dead,” he says sharply. He is annoyed by the witless question and angry with himself for being an idiot. “I don’t know,” he says in a softer tone. “She was lying on her stomach, so I didn’t get a good look at her face. It just was obvious that she was dead.”

Pam says nothing for another moment. He’s never seen her in what he would describe as a contemplative moment, or looking confused and uncertain, as though someone has said something important in a foreign language. He’s seen her elated and angry, aroused and then sated, but never in a serious situation such as this, all the more unlikely and absurd because the two of them are stark naked and sitting in the sticky aftermath of their sex.

Pam says, “You told the police, didn’t you?”

Robert lies back against his rumpled pillow and drops his arm across his eyes. He’s cold now, the sweat on his chest and thighs chilling him unpleasantly, but he doesn’t try to pull her against him for warmth.

“No,” he says. “I haven’t told anybody, not even my sister or my boss. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll have to explain what I was doing down there at that time of night, and that would put the two us in jeopardy. So, no, Pam. You’re the only one.”

Pam looks at him uncertainly.

He says, “Now we have two secrets.” But if that’s an effort to calm the waters, it doesn’t seem to be effective. She says he better go.

En route to his sister’s apartment a few minutes later, Robert steps out the front door of the Brantleys’ building, not the back, and walks quickly down the sidewalk that runs along the north side of Forty-fourth Street in front of the apartments and other buildings. He is wearing a tan jacket and khakis, not the dark combination that he wore the night of the murder.

A yellow taxi passes heading west, but that’s the only car he sees going in any direction at this hour. He pats his breast pocket where he’s stashed his glasses.

Detective Ferris Lakeland and a representative from the Minneapolis office of the Red Cross greet Harold V. Hickman near dusk on Tuesday afternoon at Wold-Chamberlain Field. Private Hickman is a tall, lean, pale-faced man who would need another dozen pounds to make his dress greens fit properly. Even his envelope-shaped garrison cap looks a size too large. Presumably, as a North Dakotan, he’s been to the Twin Cities before today, but he looks bewildered and uneasy, as though he stepped off the plane in Timbuktu.

After offering the widower their condolences, Lakeland and the man from the Red Cross lead Hickman through the busy baggage claim (he has only his Army-issue duffel bag) and toward the terminal’s front door. A couple of newspaper photographers, somehow alerted to his arrival, fire off their Speed Graphics as the men pass, the flashbulbs on the big cameras popping like firecrackers.

“Stay the hell away from us,” Lakeland snarls at the photo boys, flashing his badge and dragging the skinny soldier out the door. The sun is still shining, but in a desultory, grudging way.

Lakeland directs Hickman into the backseat of an unmarked Plymouth, and then slides in behind the wheel next to the Red Cross official, a balding, bespectacled man named Jerry Ingram. Arne Anderson told Ferris to talk as little as possible during the twenty-minute drive downtown. “Tell him he can see his son later this evening or first thing tomorrow,” Arne said. “Tell him the kid is doing fine with his auntie.” If Hickman wants to see his wife’s body, Arne said he could arrange that later, too, after the two of them talked. If Hickman wants to see the man they arrested—well, that was out of the question, at least for now.

Anderson and the rest of the murder squad have been busy during the past few days. Besides interrogating Dr. Rose, they brought in for questioning Bud Montgomery, Anatoli and Tony Zevos, and a freelance photographer named Richard Ybarra, and interviewed the chiropractor and dance instructors who occupy the office space across the hall from Rose’s practice and a dozen-odd bartenders, waitresses, and hangers-on from the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club downstairs.

“Go over your lists,” Anderson told the squad. “Anybody out there on parole or who otherwise might look interesting, find them and bring them in, too.”

A dragnet is standard operating procedure in a high-profile homicide case, but not everyone on the third floor of the courthouse believes that it’s necessary in this one.

“What’s the matter?” Riemenschneider groused to Curry during the roundup. “Doesn’t Arne believe the kike’s our guy?”

In fact, with the exception of Bud Montgomery and Tony Zevos, none of the possibilities has offered much reason to believe otherwise.

Richard Ybarra, a curly-haired Romeo barely out of his teens, is a slippery hustler whose “professional portfolio” comprises mostly black-and-white photos of not particularly attractive, partially clad young women, the very attractive Teresa Hickman the notable exception. The cops spotted a couple of her photos on the street—obviously taken by the photographer who took the shots the detectives saw at the Montgomerys’ apartment—and these, no doubt for promotional purposes, had his name and phone number stamped on the back. They caught up with him walking into the Greyhound station at Seventh and Hennepin, that oversize portfolio in one hand, a battered overnight bag and camera case in the other.

“Going when the going’s good, eh, slick?” Frenchy LeBlanc said, shoving the startled shutterbug into the backseat of an unmarked squad car. In the car, LeBlanc began their interview with a forearm shiver to Ybarra’s jaw. Once at police headquarters, however, while there was plenty to appreciate in the eight-by-ten glossies spread across a conference table, there was nothing to learn from either the portfolio or the photographer himself.

“Did you fuck Teresa Hickman?” Einar Storholm asked him, holding up a photo of the dead woman.

“No!” Ybarra whined. He was pressing a handful of wet tissues against his bloody mouth.

“I bet it crossed your mind,” Storholm muttered, staring at the shot of Mrs. Hickman in the white shorts, smiling over her naked shoulder. “A fine ass like that.”

Ybarra sniffed and attempted a just-one-of-the-boys smile. “Well, yeah,” he said, as though the detective had asked him if he liked hamburgers. Who wouldn’t? Who didn’t? But the photographer said he hadn’t seen Teresa Hickman since he gave her copies of the photos a week ago.

“April Fool’s Day,” Ybarra said. He then produced the name of a half-dozen family members and friends whose wedding party he photographed in Duluth, two and a half hours away, the night of the murder, and swore the alibi would check out. Ybarra hadn’t left Duluth for Minneapolis, deciding to hitchhike down Highway 61, until the following afternoon.

“Who gets married on a Friday night?” Storholm, with uncharacteristic persistence, wanted to know.

Ybarra shrugged. “I guess they couldn’t get the church on Saturday,” he says. “Ask the Cunninghams. I gave you their phone number.”

The chiropractor and dance instructors confirmed the report that Rose’s practice seemed to comprise a large number of women, and that their neighbor routinely worked evenings and weekends.

The chiropractor, Artemis Fischer, said Rose was always cordial and polite, but not especially outgoing, rarely initiating even casual conversation when they encountered each other in the building or on the street.

LaVerne Ridgeway, one of the dance masters, said he didn’t think he or his partner had exchanged more than a dozen words with the dentist beyond the occasional “Hello” and “Good evening.”

“I don’t think he cares much about anything or anyone if they don’t involve his practice,” Ridgeway told Curtis Wrenshall. “He didn’t seem eager to make new friends.”

The Whoop-Tee-Doo crowd, meanwhile, had nothing substantive to offer. To the detectives’ surprise, given his solitary, conservative nature, Rose occasionally stopped by the club for a “cordial” before going home at night. The club’s manager, a one-armed Guadalcanal survivor named Buster Haswell, said that when Rose comes in, maybe twice or three times a month, he’s always alone, rarely speaks to anyone after ordering his drink, and the drink is always a single Grand Marnier Orange.

“He looks at the talent,” Haswell said, “but I’ve never seen him talk to anybody other than his waitress and the hatcheck girl, coming or going. He’ll sit at a table near the back of the room, nurse his drink for a good half hour, then leave. Not a bad tipper for a Jew, but a strange guy, I’d say.”

“Have any of the girls been a patient?” Wrenshall asked.

“Not that I know of,” Haswell said, “which is odd, since he’s right upstairs. Maybe they’re afraid of him, or vice versa. Feel free to ask around.”

Wrenshall said that maybe he would. And he did. That night, he chatted with five or six girls sitting at the bar before the show, but only two seemed to know who Rose was and neither of them said she’d had any contact with the man. Wrenshall, who had all he could do to keep his hands to himself, especially when speaking to the brassy redhead in a sparkly halter top and net stockings, thanked them profusely and happily added their names and addresses to his detective’s notebook.

Anderson and Curry spent a couple of hours with both Bud Montgomery and Tony Zevos, but learned nothing they didn’t already know—namely, that both men were crumbums and both deserved whatever rough handling they received. Both men, Anderson believed, were capable of forcing themselves on Teresa Hickman and then killing her, especially if she threatened to tell on them. It was possible, of course, that Mrs. Hickman, eager for male attention in her husband’s absence, initiated the contact. It would have been convenient enough considering that she was staying in Bud Montgomery’s apartment and worked for Tony Zevos.

Unfortunately, both men had alibis that allowed them to walk out of the courthouse with no more than a couple of whacks and the promise of worse if either one of them turned up in the squad’s interrogation room again. Zevos produced the names of three individuals who would vouch for his presence at the luncheonette the night of April 8 and until four the next morning at a buddy’s stag party in Robbinsdale. Bud’s alibi—he insisted he was bar-crawling with a pal—was not as solid. Arne wanted more work done on that one.

Afterward, Anderson and Curry met with Augie Fuller in Fuller’s office. Ed Evangelist hovered with no apparent purpose other than to butt in and annoy.

“Well,” said Augie, “we all heard Rose confess, didn’t we?”

“We did,” Arne said, “sort of. And we arrested him. Then his family hired Dante DeShields, who said that what Rose told us doesn’t amount to a confession. In any event, no doubt at DeShields’s direction, Rose declined to sign his statement. His family will post bail, and Rose will go home.”

“Fucking kike,” Evangelist said.

Ignoring the fat man, Anderson said, “Everything, including his own words, points to Rose, but DeShields knows how to play the game. We know that from experience.”

“So what’s next?” Fuller wanted to know. As impatient as he can be, Augie likes to give his investigators room to operate as they see fit. So far, at least with Anderson, that hasn’t gotten him in trouble.

“We rule out the alternatives and build our case,” Arne said. “Grace Montgomery lied about Teresa’s Friday night appointment and surely knows more about her little sister and her little sister’s relationships than she’s told Mel and me. MacMurray couldn’t verify the dental work Rose said he’d done on Mrs. Hickman that night—the rigor mortis made it impossible to open her mouth wide enough during the autopsy. He could check again now that the rigor mortis has worn off, but I don’t think it’s relevant. I’m willing to take Rose’s word that he worked on her tooth.”

But something deep and for the moment inaccessible is troubling Arne. With no apparent eyewitnesses and no meaningful forensic evidence, the case against Rose has come together too fast and too easily, and for reasons he can’t articulate he has doubts about Rose’s role in the murder. There’s a lot that bothers him about the dentist, but he has difficulty picturing him as a killer.

Now, early on Tuesday evening, Lakeland knocks on the captain’s open door.

“Excuse me, Sarge,” he says to Anderson. “Private Hickman is waiting. It’s been an hour and a half, and he wants to see his wife and kid.”

Arne Anderson walks down the hall, knocks on the door, and enters the smaller of the third floor’s two conference rooms.

A gaunt young man in ill-fitting Army greens looks up from his folded hands, which are the only things on the conference-room table. The mostly unadorned uniform speaks of a buck private with less than a year in service, with, however, a familiar red, blue, and yellow triangle on the left shoulder. Jerry Ingram, from the Red Cross, sits silently, apparently having run out of conversation with the soldier, at the other end of the table.

Arne extends his right hand. The soldier’s right hand is moist and cold.

“First Armored,” Arne says, sitting down and acknowledging the tricolor patch on the soldier’s jacket. “I was an infantryman in the Fourth Armored during the war. Part of Patton’s Third Army. I saw Old Blood ’n’ Guts once, on the way to Bastogne.”

He wonders if a twenty-three-year-old recruit will be familiar with the nickname—famous in 1945, but maybe not so familiar ten years after the war’s end and the general’s death in a car accident. He also wonders, too late, if bringing up the war and the aura of death, even if intended to open some common ground between them, was a good idea. Probably not.

Arne feels sorry for the kid, who has to be exhausted by a twenty-four-hour (or longer) trip from Germany and in shock over the death of his wife. The kid’s eyes are red-rimmed but dry. He can’t seem to decide what, if anything, he should say to the detective.

“Are you hungry?” Arne asks him.

“We had a bite downstairs,” Jerry Ingram interjects. “That little place off the lobby.”

Anderson stands up. “Let’s, just the two of us,” he says to the soldier, “go see your family.”

Ingram rises and starts to say something, but Arne forces a smile and says, “I’ll take him over to Hiawatha General and then to the Montgomerys’ apartment. Give me his lodging information, and I’ll see that he’s there at a decent hour. Maybe we’ll have a drink at the hotel. You can check on him in the morning.”

Ingram’s frown says he doesn’t like the idea, that it’s probably “against policy,” but he’s either intimidated by the big detective or doesn’t care to argue.

For the next forty-five minutes Hickman says nothing. Arne doesn’t try to make conversation, but simply nods or touches the soldier’s arm when leading him through the corridors and down the stairs to the morgue in Hiawatha General’s basement. Then he steps out of the way when one of Fred MacMurray’s white-jacketed assistants raises the sheet and reveals the chilled remains of Teresa Hickman. Arne watches Private Hickman’s shoulders; but if the soldier twitches or shudders, he doesn’t see it.

Hickman says nothing. He merely stands there, his hands at his sides, looking down at the lifeless body, and then turns away. His pale eyes are still dry. There’s nothing Anderson can tell him that he hasn’t already been told, including the cause of death and the arrest of a suspect.

At the Montgomerys’ apartment half an hour later, Grace awkwardly hugs her brother-in-law and says, “Our poor Terry.” Her eyes are red and puffy. The apartment smells of fried onions and something sweet. Arne is not surprised that Bud Montgomery isn’t around. There is a lot Arne wants to talk to Grace about, without Bud in the room, but that will have to wait. Bud, she says when he asks, is bowling with friends.

Then Grace tiptoes into her bedroom and returns a moment later with Harold Hickman Junior, who stirs in his aunt’s arms but doesn’t come fully awake.

“This is your daddy, honey,” Grace says, tears sliding down her cheeks.

Private Hickman stands stock still, his arms still at his sides, when she holds the baby out in front of him. He doesn’t take the child, but bends forward at the waist and leans over the red, fussing face as though he’s inspecting a strange and maybe dangerous object. When Grace asks, “Don’t you want to hold him, Hal?” Hickman says, “I better not.”

Anderson watches. He wonders if Hickman would like a few moments alone with his son and sister-in-law, but by the look of the two adults—both staring at the little boy but neither saying a word—he doubts if either one of them wants that. Besides, he’s reluctant, for investigative reasons, to leave them alone. If they have something meaningful to say to each other, he wants to hear it.

After a few minutes, Hickman, staring at Hal Junior in Grace’s arms, says, “I’m very tired and should probably get some sleep. Thank you for looking after the boy, Grace. I’ll take him off your hands when we go home for the funeral.” Hickman says that with the help of the Red Cross he’s made funeral arrangements in Grand Forks, where his parents live.

Grace looks at her brother-in-law as though he slapped her in the face. Whatever she might have been expecting, she apparently thought she’d be consulted about the arrangements. Anderson suspects that these are the sorts of families that don’t talk much to each other in the best of times and not at all during crises. He wonders if Grace thinks she ought to keep the baby, or if she’s relieved he will no longer be her responsibility. He thinks, not for the last time, that there is so much he doesn’t know about Grace Montgomery, and he wonders how much of it matters. He supposes that he’ll find out soon.

The Red Cross has arranged for Private Hickman to stay at the Talmadge, a small, clean, slightly down-at-the-heels hotel on the south end of Marquette Avenue. Waiting while the young man registers, Anderson is surprised when he turns and says, “I’ll have that drink now, sir.”

The two men sit in a corner of a nearly empty bar off the lobby and drink the whiskey that Anderson orders and pays for. Hickman seems more alive than he was an hour earlier, and Arne suspects that he’s relieved to have seen his wife and son and can now relax. For the first time since he’s been with the detective, and probably for the first time since he left Germany, he loosens his black, Army-issue tie and undoes the top button of his khaki shirt. The jukebox, for better or worse, is playing Patti Page.

Arne keeps one eye on the door in case someone has tipped off the press about the widower bunking at the Talmadge. If anybody’s going to have a conversation with Private Hickman, it’s going to be him. He is curious about military life in postwar Germany—curious about the ravaged landscape and certain places that they might have in common—but more interested in Hickman’s late wife and the life the couple briefly shared.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions about Teresa, if you don’t mind, Harold,” Arne says. Hickman has asked for Canadian Club and 7-Up. Arne takes the CC on the rocks.

Hickman shrugs, so Arne begins.

“When was the last time you spoke with her? I assume you had a chance now and then to make a long-distance phone call.”

Hickman shrugs again. “That wasn’t so easy,” he says, staring at the glass in his hand. “We don’t have that much access to the phones, and calls are expensive. I don’t think we’ve talked since Christmas.”

“She’d moved down here by that time, right?”

“Yes.”

“When did you get her last letter?”

Hickman doesn’t answer right away. He stares into his glass and shakes his head.

“The first of March,” he says.

Before Arne can point out the obvious—that the first of March was more than a month ago—Hickman says, “She told me she wanted out of the marriage. She said she wanted to meet other men or that she was dating them already, I don’t remember which.”

He picks up his glass and drains the rest in a gulp.

Wow, Anderson says to himself. He expected the young man to tear up and show some emotion, but he doesn’t. Still, Arne wonders how far he can push the questions under the circumstances. He spots the bartender eyeballing their now-empty glasses and nods his head.

“Do you know,” he ventures, leaning forward over the little table, “who she might have been seeing just before she died?”

Hickman sighs. His eyes are closed now, and Anderson worries that he will fall asleep in his chair.

Then Hickman says, “I don’t guess that’s something a cheating wife tells her husband—the names of the men she’s sleeping with.”

Arne wonders if Hickman is aware that his wife was pregnant when she died. If he picked up a newspaper at the airport that afternoon he would know. Arne decides not to mention it for the time being.

“Did Teresa ever mention the dentist Grace referred her to—Dr. Rose?” he asks.

“No,” Hickman says. “I don’t know anything about a dentist.”

“How about the place where she worked, the Palace Luncheonette, near the Montgomerys’ apartment? Did she tell you about the job there or about her boss, a guy named Tony Zevos?”

“No.”

“How about a photographer named Richard Ybarra?”

Hickman shakes his head. “She didn’t tell me anything,” he says quietly.

Arne waits a moment, and then asks, “How did Teresa get along with her sister? And with Bud Montgomery?”

For the first time in the past couple of hours, Hickman manages a laugh. A small, bitter laugh.

“Grace was jealous of Terry, how pretty and popular she was,” he says. “Terry, I think, felt sorry for Grace, especially after she married Bud and put on more weight.”

“Do you think Terry slept with Bud?”

Hickman closes his eyes again.

Very softly he says, “I wouldn’t be surprised. Terry wasn’t very choosy. She knew a lot of guys before we got married, and I guess she knew a lot of guys afterward, especially while I’ve been away. When she was sad, which was often, she counted on sex to make herself feel better.”

Anderson can’t get the conversation out of his mind as he drives through the late-night streets after making sure Hickman was safely tucked into his room for the night. He has assigned a patrolman to sit outside the soldier’s door, just in case Oscar Rystrom or some other bottom-feeder from the papers manages to find out where he’s staying or, for some reason, he decides to take a powder. Hickman will no doubt sleep soundly tonight, maybe feeling sorry for himself and for the child, but not sleepless with grief for his round-heeled wife. Still, it doesn’t hurt to take precautions.

Anderson isn’t sure how he’ll sleep tonight. He’s going to have the bed to himself because Lily is spending a couple of nights at her mother’s house. Tomorrow morning, after checking on Hickman, he will pick up Mel Curry, go back to see Grace, and get her to tell them more about Rose, though, after Hickman’s comments about his wife’s activities, they have good reason to consider the other possibilities. He will ask Grace what he did not ask Harold Hickman this evening: Is Harold Hickman Junior the soldier’s child?

The thought of Mel Curry sets something else off inside him, something unrelated to the Hickmans, and he turns right at Thirty-eighth Street and heads west a few blocks to Columbus. Cruising south now on Columbus, he drives past a neat, stuccoed duplex and cranes his neck to look up at the second-floor windows. A light is on behind the curtains, so he makes a U-turn at the end of the block and doubles back, more slowly than on the first pass.

He parks across the street under a leafless elm, cracks a window, and lights a cigarette. He’s not certain what he expects to see in the Currys’ bedroom window tonight, but decides then and there to send Mel to Grand Forks for Teresa Hickman’s funeral.

The driver has given his usual haunts a wide berth since Teresa Hickman’s murder, avoiding especially the Palace, the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club, and other locations on and around Nicollet Avenue between downtown and Franklin.

He’s stayed clear of Lake of the Isles, too, especially the east side, spending more time in other parts of town, such as Powderhorn Park and Lake Nokomis and the U of M campus. Another couple of months and there’ll be plenty to see, especially at the Big Beach of Nokomis, but for now there’s nothing going on and nobody’s likely to notice him on the prowl. For the time being, on the east side of town, he’ll be just another faceless schmo driving a canary-colored cab.

He follows the Hickman case in the papers: the arrest of the dentist, the dentist’s hiring of a big-shot lawyer, then the lawyer getting the dentist out on bail. If the cops are still looking at other suspects, the papers don’t know about it or have agreed not to say anything that might queer the investigation.

On Wednesday, not quite a week since the murder, the Tribune runs an interview with the lawyer, Dante DeShields. What the hell kind of name is that anyway? the driver wonders. Probably another Jew, the way they stick together. The photo that accompanies the interview shows DeShields standing in front of a desk the size of an aircraft carrier on the tenth floor of the Foshay Tower. The lawyer looks awfully short, almost midget-short, with a large head wreathed in curly gray-black hair. His dark eyes bulge below heavy black eyebrows. There’s a bulbous nose and jug ears poking out of the thick hair. He has a five-o’clock shadow every bit as prominent as Richard Nixon’s. And he looks as though he’d like nothing better than to rip a guy’s lungs out.

The Tribune’s headline runs big and black across the top of the front page.

LAWYER: DENTIST CAN’T GET FAIR TRIAL HERE

“Although no date has been set for the trial of a Minneapolis dentist accused of murdering a pregnant North Dakota woman, Dr. H. David Rose’s lawyer says a fair trial in the Mill City is unlikely due to ‘systemic anti-Semitism’ that has drawn nationwide attention since before the war,” staff writer George Appel writes in his opening paragraph. “According to defense attorney Dante DeShields, empaneling an unbiased local jury for his client, who is Jewish, will be ‘virtually impossible.’”

The driver is sitting in his car in one of the parking areas along the West River Road, this morning’s paper propped against the cab’s steering wheel. After dark, the site is popular among amorous teens, who pack the space as though they’re at a drive-in movie, the cars often rocking on their suspensions within minutes of their arrival. In broad daylight, he has the space to himself.

Appel notes that though Rose has not yet been indicted in the strangulation death of serviceman’s wife Teresa Hickman, DeShields, “according to unnamed courthouse sources, seems to be setting the stage for a change-of-venue request or an appeal if the dentist is eventually convicted.”

DeShields says Rose, while conceding that Mrs. Hickman was his patient the night of the murder, has not confessed to the crime. “Police sources say Rose admitted driving the victim around town after her appointment and discussing her pregnancy. According to detectives, the woman, whose husband is on active duty in West Germany, believed Rose was the father of her unborn baby.” At some point during the drive, Appel’s sources told him, Rose “suffered what he described as a ‘blackout,’ and when he ‘woke up’ the woman was no longer in the car. Rose told police he had no idea what happened to her.” The allegations appeared earlier in both the Star and Tribune. What’s new is DeShields’s pre-emptive strike.

Appel’s story concludes, “Hiawatha County Attorney Homer Scofield, who is expected to convene a grand jury later this week, calls Rose’s story ‘not credible’ and DeShields’s suggestion of a biased jury pool ‘insulting to the good citizens of this city. Counsel should be ashamed.’”

The driver carefully excises the story with a single-edge razor blade he keeps in the glove compartment, neatly folds the rest of the paper, and stuffs it into one of the trash bins on the edge of the parking lot. He’s no expert, but he reads the papers and listens to the news and knows that the Teresa Hickman case will be a hot topic for weeks, maybe months, through the trial and beyond.

He recalls the comment he’s heard several times over the years, something to the effect that, in high-profile murder cases, the victim is all but forgotten amid the legal wrangling and the focus is on the accused. That may be true, he muses, but he won’t lose sight of the victim in this case. He knew her, after all. He’s seen and talked to her. He’s seen her up close. In the flesh.

He sees her now, in his mind’s eye, moving back and forth behind the Greek’s counter, in and out of the kitchen, her perfect ass in perpetual motion, usually within reach of the Greek’s gimpy kid. He can see her walking along the street in front of the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club, the sidewalk trash whistling and catcalling and grabbing at her as she passes, dying to get a feel for what’s under the winter coat. Then he sees her disappearing through the doors that lead upstairs to the dentist’s office.

The next time he sees the girl she is sitting with the dentist in the black Packard along the east side of Lake of the Isles. It’s much later, closer to midnight. What he sees now is much clearer—the couple arguing in the Packard’s front seat, then the girl exiting the car and striding up Euclid Place, away from the lake and the car. This time, however, the driver doesn’t leave the lake and head back toward Hennepin Avenue. He pulls out and around the Packard and follows the girl past the other cars parked along the boulevard. Turning onto Euclid Place, he spots her a quarter of a block away, her blonde hair bouncing on her shoulders and her winter coat turning from black to dark green as she passes under a streetlamp.

He switches on the cab’s roof light and creeps along behind and then alongside the girl. He leans across the front seat and cranks down the passenger-side window. The girl, not five feet away now, stops, turns, and looks his way. He can see her smile.