CHAPTER 11

First thing in the morning of August 2, Arne Anderson is back in Courtroom No. 1, but now he is sitting with Mel Curry and Sid Hessburg in a stuffy anteroom, waiting to be called to the witness stand.

Gerald Bergen, the Eli Lilly Company detail man who happened upon Teresa Hickman’s body along the streetcar right-of-way behind West Forty-fourth Street shortly after sunup on April 9, is the prosecution’s first witness. Bergen, Arne observed in the anteroom, seemed puffed up and pleased to be there—a hitherto anonymous middle-aged citizen thrust into the spotlight of his community’s most talked-about event—then commensurately deflated when he returns to the anteroom ninety minutes later, following his plodding examination by Rudy Blake and a shorter, sharper-edged cross by Dante DeShields.

Bergen is followed by John James and Wyatt Campbell, two of the patrolmen dispatched in their radio car to Forty-fourth Street following Bergen’s call to the MPD. Blake spends a combined fifteen minutes on the two of them, having decided to let the detectives provide the important details from the crime scene. DeShields, however, is just as obviously determined to launch his argument about police incompetence by reducing, over the course of an hour, James and Campbell, a pair of experienced if not especially quick-witted officers, to the level of the Keystone Cops.

Campbell, the junior partner, is crimson-faced and blinking back tears when he returns to the anteroom at eleven o’clock.

“Son-of-a-fucking-bitch!” he says, possibly loud enough to be heard in the courtroom.

Older and arguably wiser, James shakes his head and smiles sardonically at the two detectives.

“Good fuckin’ luck to you boys,” he says, anticipating their grilling by DeShields.

Arne isn’t called until 1:00 p.m., after the hour-long lunch recess. He is wearing his new suit, a tan, double-breasted number, tight through the shoulders and chest, and a maroon, white, and blue-striped foulard, both items off the rack at Nate’s Menswear, and enjoyed a decent night’s sleep, waking, however, with the tatters of an unsettling dream about Lily Kline fluttering in his murky consciousness. He, Mel, and Sid, on notice from Scofield’s office, spent the weekend reviewing their notes with Augie Fuller and other members of the squad, their encounter with DeShields looming like a scheduled tooth extraction.

As always when he’s with Mel, Arne is hypersensitive to any mention or reminder of Janine, who he’s seeing as frequently as he can, though not frequently enough. Some days his longing for her burns. On such occasions, he can’t look Mel in the eye, can hardly bear to share a lunch-break sandwich with him, and can only hope that Mel attributes his heebie-jeebies to the pressures of preparing for trial. Is dreaming about Lily, whom he hasn’t seen or talked to or, for that matter, even dreamed about since she called it quits, the sign of a desperate man? he wonders. Only when he’s waiting in the anteroom four hours later does he recall that in the dream Lily was lying dead in the weeds beside a railroad track.

Seated on the elevated witness stand, Arne looks past the attorneys, the defendant, and the defendant’s family to the hundred-odd men and women jammed shoulder to shoulder in the gallery pews.

The grand room is charged with an almost palpable sense of expectancy, as though finally, after the endless preliminaries of jury selection and technical motions and conferences in the judge’s chambers, the actual trial, with important witnesses, is about to begin. He spots Private Hickman in his uniform and a doddering assemblage of elderly men and women whom he presumes, from the look of them in their blue serge suits and Sunday dresses, are relatives from North Dakota. He looks for but doesn’t see either Janine or Lily, which simultaneously relieves and disappoints him.

He looks at Rose seated behind DeShields. The dentist, expressionless, is jotting something in a notebook.

Scofield will question Arne, the first important witness in the first important trial of the prosecutor’s short public career. Scofield’s voice is weak in the vast expanse of the high-ceilinged room, and when, at Judge Nordahl’s request, he tries to raise it, he reminds Arne of a choirboy trying to sound like a man. Arne glances to his left, toward the jury box, where the seven men and five women are leaning forward as though by command, and wishes Rudy Blake, hardly a dynamo but at least capable of a commanding voice, would be handling the examination. But, for better or worse, this is Scofield’s show, and Arne can’t blame him for taking the leading role.

Scofield ushers Arne through the preliminaries: name, residence, age, rank, years with the MPD, and responsibilities as a homicide investigator. Then, looking down at his notes, the prosecutor pivots awkwardly to the events of Saturday, April 9, commencing with the investigators’ early morning encounter with the young victim’s body along the Linden Hills streetcar tracks. Scofield’s slow march will make everybody impatient, but Arne figures the young man is terrified of making a mistake and opening the floodgates to DeShields, who glares up at his opposite, all but tapping on his wristwatch to speed things along.

Scofield reminds Arne of the twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant—a shuffling, stuttering divinity-school washout from Greeley Creek, Oklahoma—who briefly commanded Arne’s platoon in Belgium. That experience didn’t end well, either.

Now, after a whispered conference with Blake, Scofield asks Arne to describe the position and condition of Teresa Hickman’s body, its immediate surroundings when discovered, and the absence of apparent witnesses and meaningful evidence at the site. He asks about the decedent’s identity, the coroner’s findings later that morning, and the identification, scarcely an hour after that, of Teresa’s sister, Mrs. Henry Montgomery. He asks about Grace Montgomery’s professed ignorance of her sister’s whereabouts the night before and suggestion that the detectives try Teresa’s place of employment, the Palace Luncheonette on Nicollet.

It was, Anderson confirms for the prosecutor, the Palace’s manager, Anthony Zevos, who told the police that Teresa had called in complaining of a toothache late that Friday afternoon.

Scofield pauses, this time with tactical intent.

“Did Anthony Zevos say he told Mrs. Hickman about a dentist in the neighborhood who might be able to take a patient on a Friday night, Sergeant?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Did Anthony Zevos tell you about such a dentist when you spoke to him the next day?”

“Yes, he did,” Anderson replies.

“And that dentist’s name was?”

“Dr. H. David Rose.”

Oddly, Scofield stops there, and oddly (or not) DeShields declines—“for now, Your Honor”—to cross-examine the witness. Anderson steps down, and Scofield proceeds to examine Curry and then Hessburg, mostly about the same points he reviewed with Arne.

DeShields declines to cross Mel, but rises behind the attorneys’ table when Scofield is done with Hessburg. It is Sid’s first trial testimony in a murder case and, like the pharmaceutical salesman, he seems pleased to have all eyes focused on him. The youngest son of the Twin Cities’ largest tobacco distributor, he’s the only member of the murder squad who grew up with any family wealth, and Arne attributes the young man’s voluble self-assurance to his moneyed pedigree. Sid’s handsome suit today came from Hubert White’s downtown emporium, a long step up from Nate’s, and his glossy, carefully constructed pompadour gleams under the bright ceiling lights. He smiles confidently at the jurors, particularly at one of the pretty young women in the front row.

DeShields says, “You made quick work of that crime-scene investigation, didn’t you, Detective?”

Sid is surprised by the offhanded-sounding question. He won’t grasp the intent of the lawyer’s curveball until it’s past him.

“Yes, sir, we did,” he says with a toothy grin.

“A young woman is found dead, presumably strangled, in a highly unusual setting and circumstance,” DeShields continues, his deep voice slipping into its Doomsday mode, “and the Minneapolis Police Department’s crack homicide investigators take a quick look around, find nothing of interest, and move along. Is that correct?”

Hessburg’s face is suddenly as red as Patrolman Campbell’s was this morning, his mouth drawn tight, his eyes narrowed. He’s not sure how to respond.

“Is that correct, Detective?”

“Well, no,” Sid stammers. “You make it sound like—”

“Like heartless indifference, Detective?” DeShields barks. “How about gross incompetence?”

“No, sir! Like neither!”

Hessburg looks desperately at Anderson and Curry, who have taken seats behind the attorneys’ table. Anderson returns his stare and shakes his head, hoping to stop Hessburg in his tracks. He has to hand it to counsel. Like a wolf stalking deer, DeShields let the stronger members of the herd pass by and then pounced on the weakest.

But Sid will not be taken down so easily. His chin jutting toward the lawyer, he says, “We launched an extensive investigation, and that afternoon we identified a suspect, Dr. Rose.”

DeShields glowers at the witness.

“And I’d call that a shameful rush to judgment,” he says. “That will be all, Detective.”

“The prosecution is going after Dr. Rose,” Oscar Rystrom wrote in that evening’s Star, “while the defense, as Dante DeShields made brutally clear, has set its sights on the MPD. If today’s fireworks are any indication, the prosecution should be worried.”

At the United Press office a few minutes before six, Robert Gardner watches Milt Hickok hammer out a feed for the bureau’s regional radio clients. Copies of the Star are scattered across several desks as Hickok punches the update into a chattering teletype machine. Everyone agrees that Rystrom hit the nail on the head. Unlike most of his newspaper and wire service competitors, the veteran courthouse hand has the freedom, at least in his periodic column, to pontificate on the events that everyone else is merely reporting, supposedly with cool objectivity. Everyone knows, even if they can’t say it, that DeShields set Scofield back on his heels with his cross of Detective Hessburg.

Scofield tried to recover in the two hours before the day’s adjournment with Fred MacMurray and Alois Jensen, who carefully laid out the grim details of the victim’s condition: the fractured hyoid bone, the red marks on her throat, and the fluid in her lungs all pointing to a determination of death by manual strangulation. MacMurray went on to say, based on his analysis of the contents of Mrs. Hickman’s stomach and degree of the body’s rigor mortis, that the time of death was between eight o’clock on the night of April 8 and 3:00 a.m. on April 9. There was no sign of alcohol or other drugs—only traces of acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in common pain relievers, and the sedative Seconal—in her system.

MacMurray is rarely challenged on the stand and never attacked, and he wasn’t this afternoon. Neither was Jensen, his chief assistant, who identified the victim’s clothing and underwear and testified to the presence of semen stains on her underpants.

The defense was also interested in the pathologist’s declaration of manual strangulation and his later revelations that Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant and had sex shortly before her death.

“How do you know the victim wasn’t strangled with a short length of rope, or with a man’s belt or necktie?” DeShields asked.

“The marks on the victim’s throat were consistent with a pair of human hands, forcefully applied, not any sort of ligature,” MacMurray said, and DeShields set off in another direction.

“You can tell, Doctor, that a woman’s fetus is three months along, but you can’t provide us with the father’s identity—is that correct?” MacMurray nodded. “That’s correct, sir. We don’t have the means or the knowhow. Someday—maybe in only a few years or maybe in a decade or two—we will, but we don’t yet.”

“You can’t determine the source of the semen, either. Is that correct, Doctor?”

“That’s correct.”

“And you concur with the investigators’ determination that while the semen indicates the victim had sex not long before she was murdered, it’s unlikely she was raped. Is that correct?”

“The fact that her body exhibited no signs of force or struggle besides the bruise on the neck and the broken hyoid bone, not to mention the fact that the body was fully clothed when discovered and the clothes, including her underwear, were not torn or even especially disheveled, all mitigate against a determination of rape.”

Given the presumed sensibilities of a daily paper’s readership in the mid-1950s, neither the Star nor the wire service accounts of the day’s testimony included those verbatim exchanges, choosing to say merely that while the victim was three months pregnant and “likely had sexual relations” the night of the murder, “authorities did not believe she had been sexually assaulted.”

Even Rystrom agreed that the prosecution had done better with the medical witnesses. At any rate, the examination and cross of MacMurray and Jensen ate up what was left of the afternoon.

Robert Gardner, who spent his shift reporting a four-alarm fire on the Near North Side, feels out of sorts. (Though the blaze caused an estimated quarter of a million dollars in damages, there were no deaths or serious injuries, and the structure, a little-used grain-storage complex, was hardly a community landmark.) While he’s not a part of the bureau’s trial team and has only a secondhand view of the proceedings, he still fears he may become part of the story—and not in a good way. The “skinny guy with glasses” has, according to the press coverage so far, not been mentioned in court, but the possibility remains out there like a landmine in a cornfield.

Robert has not seen or heard in more than a week from Meghan Mckenzie, who, at last report, was planning to vacation with her husband in Upper Michigan, and he can’t help but wonder if Miles has been scheming to keep her away from the bureau and therefore away from him. He wonders, too, if she has tired of their relationship.

When he’s not thinking about Meghan, he pines for Pam.

During visits to his sister’s apartment, he drives past the Brantleys’ building, both hoping for and fearing a glimpse of her coming or going. He tortures himself with images of Pam sunning herself on the patch of grass alongside their building or lounging around her nodoubt stifling apartment in a bra and panties or wearing nothing at all. On more than one occasion, he dials all but the last digit of her phone number, prepared, if he has the guts to dial the last one, to invite her to come enjoy his air-conditioned quarters.

Robert has not seen or talked to Mel Curry since that awful night behind Smokey’s, though he thinks about the detective every time he takes a deep breath and looks at the purple bruise in the mirror. He can’t believe that Curry or someone from the prosecutor’s office hasn’t contacted him since that night. Had he only imagined telling the detective that he’d walked past the crime scene, or had Curry, who was possibly as drunk as Robert on that occasion, forgotten Robert’s remark? Or is the prosecution going to spring a trap during the trial?

Hickok, finished with his update, has pushed his chair back and hoisted his scruffy brogans on the desk. He lights a Camel and leans back in the chair.

“Why do you think Scofield didn’t object when DeShields was pantsing Hessburg?” Tommy Pullman asks.

“Scofield’s scared shitless of DeShields,” Mckenzie says, “but I can’t help but think—this is Rystrom’s theory—that the farm boy doesn’t mind seeing the MPD discredited, which can be his excuse if he loses the case. Nevertheless, he can put the girl in Rose’s office that night and try to use Rose’s statement to the cops that she was in his car that night and they were arguing. Plus the fact that the body turned up a few blocks from Rose’s home. No matter how much he’s worried about DeShields, Homer’s still holding the good cards.”

“Blake told me the girl’s old man and husband will be on the stand tomorrow, to describe their pain,” says Hickok. “Then the bereaved sister will describe the connection between Teresa and the dentist. Of course, DeShields will then have a shot at her.”

“Anderson and Curry will have to go back on the stand, won’t they?” says Robert, standing on the periphery of the impromptu circle of analysts. Mckenzie, Hickok, and Pullman all look at him, as though they’ve forgotten that he’s in the room.

“Yeah,” Hickok replies, wearily. “And then DeShields will take their pants off and leave them bare-assed.”

Despite his misgivings, the driver decides to take his chances, get in line at sunup, and see if he can wangle a seat in Courtroom No. 1.

He listened in last night while a couple of fares—half-in-the-bag lawyers he picked up outside the Flame Room after dinner—discussed the case. Probably because they were lawyers, they seemed to know what was going on. The driver decided there and then that a chance to see Teresa Hickman’s next-of-kin, including her sister, would justify getting up at four-thirty, stashing the car downtown, and standing in line for three hours. It will be his secret. He’ll tell Margaret he expects to be on the street all day and have her pack him a sack lunch. Later, he’ll call the garage and tell Fat Jack that his sciatica is acting up again.

So here he is, in the second row from the back, squeezed into what looks and feels like the unforgiving wooden pews at Holy Name, craning his neck to see what he’s here to see. He’s surprised that the lawyers are all sitting at the same table, unlike the separate, side-by-side tables on the television dramas. DeShields, when he stands, is taller than the newspaper photo led him to believe—but not much. The Jew is also taller than he expected, or would be if not for that stoop, six feet two or maybe more. When he and his lawyer stand next to each other, who doesn’t think of Mutt and Jeff in the comics? The driver is pleasantly surprised to see two comely young women in the jury box, cupcakes in their twenties who, before the judge comes in, smile and giggle as though they enjoy being looked at. They remind the driver of a couple of dollies in the Holy Name choir he looks for on the rare occasions that he accompanies his wife to Mass.

The proceedings begin at nine o’clock sharp, when the judge, black-robed and self-important as the archbishop, steps through a paneled door, and sits down behind his tall desk.

Teresa Hickman’s father is called first. He’s a small, bowlegged sodbuster in a brown suit he probably bought before the world war—the first one. The old man looks self-conscious in the formal setting, grinning occasionally at no one in particular and tugging at the collar of his overlarge white shirt. He reminds the driver of a jack-o’-lantern with those gaping spaces between his teeth.

Walter Kubicek says his daughter was a good girl who he’d warned against moving to Minneapolis.

“I told both my daughters that the cities was dangerous,” he says, shaking his head. “We all heard the stories about young girls getting in trouble down there.”

He’s on the stand for less than ten minutes. DeShields doesn’t bother to cross-examine.

The driver is more curious about Harold Hickman, the lanky sad sack in the Army greens, who the county attorney calls next. The driver is interested in his testimony because, of course, the soldier slept with Terry and presumably fathered at least one of her children. Hickman seems drawn and depressed, and so soft-spoken the gallery has to strain to hear him, hardly a match for the spitfire the driver imagines Terry to have been in their conjugal bed. He tries to picture the couple having sex, but can’t.

Most of Hickman’s twenty-minute testimony the driver can’t hear, even after the judge tells the witness to speak up. He does hear, however, the following exchange between the soldier and DeShields.

“After your wife moved to Minneapolis, did she ever mention another man? A male friend or a fellow she might have met at work?”

Hickman sighs and looks up toward the ceiling. “Only Kenny Landa,” he replies at last. “But he’s my cousin so I knew about him already.”

“Did she ever say anything about dental problems? A toothache maybe?”

“No.”

“Did she ever mention Dr. Rose?”

“No.”

Hickman is excused a few moments later, and Scofield calls the aforementioned Kenneth Landa, who identifies himself as both Harold Hickman’s cousin and Teresa Hickman’s boyfriend when she was Teresa Kubicek. The rube is not as tall as his cousin. And instead of sad-looking, he appears to be angry. He wears glasses with black rims and a tight-fitting blue-and-gray checkered sport jacket that’s a bad match with his brown trousers.

The driver has as much trouble picturing Terry with Landa as with Harold Hickman, though he senses a wild fury in the guy that a girl might believe is passion.

Landa testifies that while he corresponded “a time or two” with Teresa after she moved to Minneapolis, she never mentioned the dentist.

“She had a perfect smile,” he volunteers, as though challenging the presumption that Teresa would ever need dental work.

Then, on cross-examination, DeShields asks him if he’d had a “sexual relationship” with Mrs. Hickman.

Landa’s face reddens, and Scofield jumps up.

“Objection, Your Honor! That’s not relevant.”

DeShields, on the opposite side of the lawyers’ table, says, “Of course it is, Your Honor. Mrs. Hickman’s sexual history couldn’t be more relevant in this case.”

Judge Nordahl overrules the objection, and a murmur ripples through the gallery.

“Answer the question, Mr. Landa.”

The witness, red as a beet and looking even angrier than a moment ago, nods his head. “Hell, yes!” he says. “We had plenty of sexual relations! We were in love!”

Nordahl raps his gavel to silence the sudden chatter and widespread guffaws in the gallery. As the crowd quiets, a bailiff appears at the judge’s elbow and hands him a folded piece of paper. After reading the note, the judge raps the gavel again and rises.

“We’ll take a recess at this time,” he says. “Counsel will join me in my chambers.” The black robe flaring behind him like a raven’s wings, he disappears through the door behind the bench.

The driver looks at his watch. It’s only half past ten, too early for lunch, so obviously something’s come up. While people on both sides of him get up, stretch, yawn, and look around, he stays put. He is titillated by Landa’s testimony, by the idea of the little honyocker and the skinny girl having “plenty of sexual relations,” and he pictures her in various states of undress in the backseat of a moonlit car or flat on her back in a dusty hayloft. The girl he pictures is younger than the twenty-one-year-old with the come-hither smile and suggestive poses in the photos he bought from Ybarra.

Then, fifteen minutes later, Judge Nordahl and the four attorneys return to the courtroom, heads down, lips pursed, distracted. The crowd, many still standing, goes quiet, all eyes on the bench.

“Owing to an unforeseen circumstance, the court is adjourned,” the judge announces. “The jury will follow the bailiff to the jury room and await further instructions.”

An excited, uncertain buzz fills the big room as almost everyone heads for the exits.

The driver lets his pew-mates squeeze past him. His erotic reverie dissolves like a dream upon waking. Everything he did to get a seat at this trial—the early wakeup, the lies he told Margaret and Fat Jack, the loss of a morning’s earnings. Once again, he tells himself that life is fucking unfair.

As the courtroom empties, Anderson and Curry drive the short distance to the Montgomerys’ apartment south of the Loop, the unmarked Chevy’s siren wailing and red light blazing. The better driver of the two, Curry is behind the wheel, weaving in and out of the midday traffic like a kid in a dodgem car at the state fair.

Charlie Riemenschneider and Ferris Lakeland are already at the site, as are a half-dozen patrolmen, and Alois Jensen from the coroner’s office. Assistant County Attorney Rudy Blake and a couple of sheriff’s deputies arrive behind Anderson and Curry.

Riemenschneider is in the living room, smoking a cigarette and looking through the mess of dated newspapers, magazines, and articles of clothing strewn across the sofa and floor. When he sees Arne, he jerks his head toward the bathroom and says, “In the shitter.”

Arne leads the delegation down the short hallway. The apartment is closed up and hot, much like the last time he and Mel were here. Lakeland has taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. In the bathroom the naked body of Grace Montgomery is lying supine on the floor alongside the tub. Someone, probably Ferris, has draped a colorless bath towel across her privates. The bathroom’s cracked tile floor is wet and slippery.

“The water was up to the top when the uniforms got here,” Ferris says, “and the faucet was still running. They pulled her out and pumped her chest, but she was gone.”

Curry nods toward an empty Four Roses bottle under the sink. There’s a bottle of sleeping pills, also empty, next to an empty water glass.

“Who called it in?” Arne asks, looking down at Grace’s body. Her hair is wet and tangled as though she just crawled out of a swamp. Her dull eyes are partly open. She looks a few pounds heavier than the last time he saw her.

“Her husband,” Lakeland replies.

“Anyone see a note?”

“Not I,” says Ferris.

Dr. Jensen squeezes into the room and squats beside the body.

“Those are old bruises,” he says, gently fingering the faded smudges on her chest and left shoulder. A contusion above Grace’s right eye has gone a grayish green.

“Where is he?” Arne asks.

“Back bedroom,” says Riemenschneider, standing in the bathroom door. As Anderson and Curry squeeze past, Charlie says, “We shoulda killed the fucker when we had the chance. I just reminded him that crime don’t pay.”

When Anderson walks into the back bedroom, Bud Montgomery, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and twill trousers, is sitting on the edge of the bed bent over his knees, his head in his hands. A veteran patrolman named Ralph Hitchens stands nearby, meaty arms folded across his chest.

When Montgomery lifts his head, the detective sees the bloody nose and swelling left eye, Riemenschneider’s reminder about the wages of sin.

“I came home and found her,” Bud says miserably. “I had nothing to do with it. She’s been a mess since Terry got killed, drinking day and night, crying all the time, complaining she can’t sleep. I haven’t had a decent meal in three months.”

Arne sighs. Once again the urge to throw the son of a bitch against the wall, or out the window, is difficult to resist. What a sorry excuse for a human being, he muses. Now that both Kubicek girls are gone, who would possibly miss him?

“Did she leave a note?”

Bud looks up and wipes his nose with the blood-streaked back of his hand.

“About what?”

“A suicide note, you stupid prick,” Curry says. Mel is moving around the little room, picking through the junk atop the dresser and peering into the wastebasket beside it. “Saying she couldn’t stand to live one more fucking minute in the same world as you.”

Officer Hitchens turns away and coughs.

Bud says, “I didn’t see no note.”

The widower will ride downtown with Riemenschneider and Lakeland, wearing handcuffs and likely fearing for his life. Jensen will finish his preliminary examination of the decedent’s body and its immediate surroundings, and accompany it downtown to the morgue, where MacMurray will be waiting. Before leaving the apartment, Anderson, Curry, and someone with a crime-lab kit and camera, if he ever arrives, will give the place a thorough going-over. They will make sure the sheriff’s boys on the steps outside don’t let reporters or photographers in the building.

First, though, the lead detectives, joined by Inspector Evangelist and Captain Fuller, confer with Rudy Blake, who’s now minus a key witness.

“Homer will be beside himself,” Blake says. “Already is.”

Anderson thinks he sees a smirk on the old lawyer’s face.

Blake, of course, has been around the block a few times. He’s lost an important witness before, in more than one important case. Among them: a Northside rubout presumed to have been ordered by Bunny Augustine the week after V-J Day, and a leap, or push, off the Tenth Avenue Bridge of a notorious white-slaver two years ago. The second untimely death probably cost the prosecution a conviction, the first one probably not, at least not as much as the bumbling of Homer Scofield’s alcoholic predecessor, Ferdy Twyman. Blake was Twyman’s second chair at both trials.

“DeShields will use this to pump up a case against Montgomery. He’ll say the asshole killed both women,” Fuller says. “How much you wanna bet?”

“No doubt about it,” says Big Ed, firing up the stub of a cigar.

“He was going to point at Montgomery anyway,” Blake says, lighting a Viceroy. “Along with the hundred other possible suspects who aren’t either a Jew or a dentist.” He blows a plume of smoke into the smoky room. “Homer will think it’s the end of the world, but I’m guessing Dante gains only marginally more from this than we lose.” Anderson lights a smoke of his own. Blake makes him smile in spite of the circumstances. Rudy reminds him of a baggy-suited, silverhaired physics teacher and assistant football coach he was fond of at Roosevelt High. Too bad the old man insists on wearing that silly toupee, which you can tell is a rug from a hundred yards away.

“We’ll see what Dr. Fred thinks—murder or suicide,” Arne says. “Or maybe the lady tried to kill herself with the pills, got drunk while she was waiting for them to kick in, then accidentally knocked herself unconscious on the edge of the tub and drowned.”

“Fat fuckin’ chance,” says Evangelist.

But no one is paying attention.

Two hours after the news of Grace Montgomery’s death is confirmed, Homer Scofield asks for and is granted a delay in the proceedings. The trial, per Judge Nordahl’s order, will resume at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.

Sitting around the Roses’ dining-room table on Tuesday afternoon, Dante DeShields says the woman’s death can only help the defense. “She would have been helpful to us, on cross, establishing, or confirming, Teresa Hickman’s promiscuity, both back on the farm and once she moved to the city,” he says. “Better yet, her death adds credence to the idea that Bud Montgomery might have been Teresa’s killer. If the coroner rules Grace’s death a homicide, Bud’s the man.” DeShields says this in a growl that no one would mistake for celebratory. Still, Rose can’t help but find his lawyer’s remarks, even if it’s positive news for him in the trial’s context, disrespectful and unpleasant.

Rose is shaken by Grace’s death. She was a nice woman, kind and reasonably intelligent. He felt sorry for her because he knew that she was unhappy. She rarely smiled or laughed, not in his presence anyway. Her clothes looked out-of-date, overly worn, and not always clean. He noticed the bruises on her neck and arms, once or twice a swollen eye or puffy lip, which he didn’t feel it his business to ask about, but which he suspected had been inflicted by her husband. People would be surprised to know how many women—white women and women from good homes—are assaulted by their husbands or boyfriends. They may not want to talk about it, not to their dentist at any rate, but the abuse is often plain to see.

Yes, he’d had sex with Grace Montgomery—in his office at night, before Teresa’s arrival last winter. The way Rose remembers it, the sex (he’d never call it lovemaking) was labored and rather awkward, always a mutual decision, but not especially satisfying for him and probably not for her, either. Rose felt bad for her and would sometimes hand her a five-dollar bill, even before he brought up the idea of referrals. To her credit, though she accepted what he handed her, she never asked for more. He had not seen or talked to her since her sister’s death.

The trial, so far, struck him as a curious affair.

He knew, from his high school civics classes, reading the papers, and watching the occasional courtroom drama on television, what trials are supposed to look and sound like, but, as with many things in life, the reality, especially when you’re in the middle of it, is something else. He is amazed, for instance, that so many people are involved in the process, presumably interested in the actions (or inactions) of a single individual, a total stranger to most of them. Listening to the lawyers on both sides of the table, he often drifts away, his mind wandering to unrelated subjects—and then he’ll hear his name spoken and his mind snaps back to the here and now, and he’s surprised to realize the judge or a lawyer or one of the witnesses is talking about him.

He’s no expert, but it seems clear that Scofield is in over his head. The young prosecutor is jumpy, disorganized, and obviously intimidated by DeShields. Scofield’s assistant, the much older and presumably wiser Mr. Blake, strikes Rose as too amiable and disinterested to ultimately secure a guilty verdict.

Rose took notes during the first couple days of jury selection, but then didn’t see the point, other than, he supposed, to keep himself focused on the proceedings. (Not wishing to hurt his sister-in-law’s feelings, he’s kept the notebook in his lap. From where she sits, she can’t tell if he’s writing in it or not.) DeShields’s assistant, Michael Haydon, occasionally leans over and asks how he’s doing, but otherwise there’s been little conversation with his attorneys when court is in session.

Back home in the evening, the lawyers eventually leave and the Roses, often including Ronnie Oshinsky and at least one of the doctor’s brothers, have dinner. Ruth, as always, does the cooking—corned beef and cabbage, macaroni and cheese, a Cobb or Waldorf salad, a small dish of Jell-O pudding or lemon sherbet—with one of the other women helping out. DeShields doesn’t want the Roses dining in public, not that they did a lot of that before the trial. The defendant, who has been free on bail since his indictment in April, is not considered a flight risk, but that’s not to say some hotheaded bigot might not want to render his own twisted form of justice if given the chance. Apparently there was such a threat, during jury selection, because, though no one has mentioned it, he has spotted a maroon county squad car crawling past the house or idling in the alley. (The Oshinskys’ gray Imperial is an occasional presence as well.)

For now, Rose is content to return home, listen to his lawyers and family members discuss the case, eat dinner, and peruse the several professional journals he subscribes to while listening to his music and sucking on one of his pipes.

His daughters are still at their camp in Wisconsin. Once a week, Rose adds a carefully written sentence to Ruth’s letters and on Sunday speaks briefly to each of the girls on the phone. Every other week, Ronnie drives Ruth across the border to the town of Spooner, where they visit with the girls over lunch and take a walk along the lake. The trial is never discussed.

On her return to Linden Hills, Ruth says the girls are doing just fine and “send their love to Daddy.”

First thing on Thursday morning, Judge Nordahl denies the prosecution’s request for an additional delay to “allow Counsel time,” said Rudy Blake in his motion, “to reformulate strategy following the death of a key witness.”

“You have plenty of witnesses, Counsel,” Nordahl tells Blake, who looks as though he’s going to respond, and then thinks better of it.

The judge also denies, for the second time, a defense motion for a change of venue.

Nodding toward the two-dozen scribes seated at the press tables, he says, “I’m quite sure these proceedings are front-page news all over the Midwest, Mr. DeShields. What’s more, I strongly doubt that the anti-Semitism you’ve referred to in your public remarks —if in fact it’s a significant factor in this city—would be any less so in Duluth or Fergus Falls or Rochester. So again, motion denied.”

Fred MacMurray has declared Grace Montgomery’s death a drowning, though whether by the woman’s intent, an accident (“misadventure”), or a combination of both can’t be determined. Neither the police nor the medical examiner found any sign of foul play. Following MacMurray’s ruling, Bud Montgomery, whose alibi for that morning was corroborated by his boss, is released from his courthouse jail cell, and Frenchy LeBlanc drives him home to his empty apartment, leaving him at the curb with the admonition to “stay put until we tell you otherwise.” A sheriff’s deputy, pulling up behind Frenchy’s car, will make sure that he does.

Scofield calls Anatoli and Anthony Zevos to the stand.

Anatoli, looking impatient and out of sorts, confirms that Teresa Hickman worked for him at the Palace Luncheonette on Nicollet Avenue between March 23 and April 7.

“She ’spose to work on the eighth,” he says with his comical Greek accent, “but my son he say she call in sick.”

Tony Zevos is clearly eager for the spotlight when he follows his father to the stand. He’s wearing a yellow suit and a wide tie ablaze with Mediterranean colors. The jury and the gallery can’t help but notice both the bum leg and the smirk on his dark, handsome face.

“Not seek,” he says, mimicking his father. “She said she had a toothache. I thought, what the hell, so your tooth hurts. You can still pour a guy a goddamn cup of coffee, can’t ya?”

Someone snickers in the gallery, and Tony grins in that direction. Judge Nordahl raps his gavel and tells the witness to watch his language.

“Did Mrs. Hickman call in sick very often?” Scofield asks.

“No more than the others,” Tony says. “They come and go, these girls. They work for a coupla days, then decide they need a vacation. Their feet hurt or they’ve got the blind staggers or it’s that time of month, so they call in sick.” He glances toward the jury box, in particular at the two young women sitting side by side in the front row.

The smirk disappears when DeShields stands up at the attorneys’ table and stares at the witness for a long moment before beginning his cross.

“Did the defendant patronize the Palace Luncheonette, Mr. Zevos?” DeShields asks.

“The dentist?” Zevos says. “I never seen him before today.”

“Did Teresa Hickman ever mention him in your hearing?”

“No.”

“When Teresa Hickman called in that Friday and told you she had a toothache, did you suggest she visit Dr. Rose?”

“I didn’t suggest nothin’.”

“Was Teresa Hickman popular with your customers, especially your male customers?”

“Maybe. I dunno. I never took a survey. One guy—I don’t know his name, all’s I know he drives a cab—he asked about her once or twice.”

“Did you find Teresa Hickman attractive, Mr. Zevos?”

Tony doesn’t reply for a moment. His face takes on the look of a feral animal sensing a trap. “Not especially,” he says at last. “She was kinda skinny for my taste. Plus I’m married.”

DeShields says, “Did you ever make a pass at Mrs. Hickman? Try to kiss her, or put your hands up her skirt? Back in the kitchen, say, or in the pantry, where your father or your wife couldn’t see you?”

“Objection!”

Scofield is on his feet.

“The witness’s actions are not the issue in this trial, Your Honor.”

“Sustained,” Nordahl says from the bench.

“No more questions,” DeShields says and sits down without another look at young Zevos, who stumbles off the witness stand, flushed and perspiring, looking down at the floor, not at his wife and his father, who watch him with hard eyes from the gallery.

Robert Gardner, seated between Miles Mckenzie and Marty Rice at one of the press tables, a late replacement for Milt Hickok, says, “Wow!” under his breath. Mckenzie nods, acknowledging the rookie’s response to DeShields’s aggressive blade work.

Robert was at home last night, typing up another erotic fever dream starring himself and Pam Brantley, when Mckenzie called.

“Fucking Hickok,” Miles said with more than his customary irritation. “The dumb son of a bitch fell off a ladder while fishing his kid’s baseball out of a drain pipe. He’s in traction at Deaconess Hospital for at least a week.”

Before Robert can express his condolences (he likes Milt, though he’s afraid of him), Mckenzie says, “Pullman’s wife says Tommy has the flu, so it’s you and me at the trial tomorrow. Be there by eight-thirty. And look halfway professional, for chrissake.”

Robert was at the courthouse at eight-fifteen wearing, his good sport coat and a sharp dotted tie that he bought the day after he slept with Meghan Mckenzie for the first time. He stuck three ballpoint pens in a jacket pocket and holds a reporter’s notebook in his sweaty hand.

Stepping past him on his way into the courtroom, Marty Rice clapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’re in the big tent now, kid.”

Robert watches Arne Anderson take the stand. Scofield has recalled the big detective to tell the jury what DeShields has decided that his client will not—namely, what Rose told the police soon after Teresa Hickman’s murder.

DeShields reminds the court that the defendant never signed his statement, which means that May Grey’s transcriptions of Rose’s April 9, 10, and 11 conversations with the detectives are inadmissible. DeShields asks the judge to bar Anderson’s testimony.

“Overruled,” replies Nordahl nevertheless, with the dry voice of a man declining cream with his coffee.

At the press table, Robert has trouble keeping up, though Anderson is speaking deliberately. He is intrigued by the detective and finds it difficult to take his eyes off him. He wonders if Mel Curry has told Anderson (or Scofield) about their interaction. His name was not on the probable witness lists when they were announced by both sides, and he’s heard nothing more about it. As far as that goes, he has seen Curry only at a distance and has not had another word with him.

Curry must believe that Robert’s statement about the skinny guy could only confuse, if not hurt, the case against Rose, so has chosen to keep it to himself. Maybe, Robert muses, Curry feels sorry for him. The fuckin’ kid can’t hold his liquor.

Meanwhile, Robert envisions Anderson in combat gear, a .50-caliber machine gun on his shoulder, trudging through knee-deep snow behind a racketing column of Sherman tanks and halftracks in southern Belgium. (He found Hickok’s 1952 profile of the detective in the bureau’s files, along with a story about the allegations of excessive force that resulted in his two-month suspension from the MPD in 1949.) Solid is the word he jots down in his notebook, describing both the man’s physique and credibility. Anderson may have a short fuse, but it’s difficult to imagine him lying to you. In fact, according to Hickok’s story, he readily admitted his rough treatment of a couple of rape suspects and accepted without complaint or appeal the department’s punishment. Robert is glad, all things considered, that it wasn’t Anderson who confronted him behind Smokey’s that night.

Answering Scofield’s questions, Anderson recounts the three interviews with Rose preceding the dentist’s arrest. DeShields then reminds the jury that his client’s statements, as reiterated by the detective, are only hearsay.

Judge Nordahl stares balefully at the lawyer, but says nothing.

Rose sits stoically, long legs crossed, large hands clasped on top of his knee. He might as well be watching the drama on TV. DeShields scribbles on a legal pad and springs to his feet every few minutes. Nordahl overrules the objections, and Anderson’s direct is finished in two hours.

Back at the office, Robert writes a three-hundred-word sidebar to accompany Mckenzie’s feature and watches it clatter off to clients around the region. He has a pulsing headache and his back screams from spending six hours on a folding chair at the press table. His first long day in court has been exhausting, so he is relieved when Miles tells him that Pullman expects to feel good enough to help out in court the next day, “that tootsie he lives with permitting.”

Robert joins Mckenzie, Appel, Rice, and a half-dozen other journalists at Smokey’s. He drinks more than he should and goes home dyspeptic and depressed, a few minutes after midnight, scraping the Ford’s whitewalls against the curb when he parks.

He’s pretty sure he heard Miles say that Meghan is back from Michigan. Has been back, in fact, for several days.