CHAPTER 12

The next day, Curry corroborates Anderson’s testimony and the prosecution calls Dr. Sutcliffe Cummins, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, who tells the jury that the “temporary loss of consciousness—sometimes called a blackout—is neither novel nor unusual.” Cummins’s testimony is apparently the prosecution’s attempt to raise and challenge Rose’s blackout defense before his lawyers can bring it up.

“It often occurs during periods of emotional stress or after the patient suffers a blow to the head,” says Cummins, a chesty man with a crown of glossy yellow hair and an incongruous dark mustache similar to Rose’s.

“Are there warning signs or signs after a purported blackout that a layman might notice?” Rudy Blake asks from the attorneys’ table.

“Not necessarily.”

“Is a purported blackout likely to repeat itself in a given individual?” Blake continues amiably. “Is a patient who purports to have had a so-called blackout likely to have them over and over again?”

“Possibly. It is not a fully understood phenomenon.”

“Is it possible for a person who has a purported blackout to drive a car and find his way around the city, or, say, find his way home while experiencing a purported blackout?”

“Objection,” DeShields says, not bothering to stand. “Mr. Blake’s repeated use of the word ‘purported’ is prejudicial and misleading to the jury. I ask that it be stricken from the record.”

“Overruled,” Nordahl says. “Answer the question, Dr. Cummins.”

“Well, I’d say, from my personal observation, that it would be highly unlikely that a patient experiencing a blackout could manage all that. The patient’s senses, including his eyesight, are, well, blacked out.”

“Objection,” DeShields says again. “The witness is speculating about something he admits he doesn’t fully understand.”

“Overruled,” Nordahl responds. “The witness seems to be telling the court what he knows, even if it doesn’t constitute full knowledge.”

There’s a line of titters in the gallery.

DeShields sits down and stares at the ceiling. Beside him, Michael Haydon scribbles furiously on his notepad.

Blake, sounding like a man who intends to have the last word on the subject, at least for the time being, says, “Is it fair to say, then, that a blackout is a phenomenon that may or may not have taken place in actual fact? That, ex post facto, its existence in a given instance can’t be proved one way or the other, so we’re forced, when an individual purports to have had a blackout, to simply take his word for it, same as if he says that he’s just spoken to the Easter Bunny?”

Over louder laughter in the gallery, Cummins says, “Well, yes, without actually witnessing its occurrence, we can only rely on the patient’s account. But, I must say, the Easter Bunny may be—”

“Thank you, Professor,” Blake says. Turning from the witness to the judge, he says, “The prosecution rests.”

DeShields declines to cross-examine the witness, and Nordahl adjourns the trial for the day.

As the courtroom comes alive with conversation and Nordahl departs, Rose stands up slowly, with apparent arthritic stiffness, and watches the psychiatrist step down from the witness box, appearing confused as to what to do next. A bailiff points to a door at the side of the room. Rose has only once been called as an expert witness. A young dentist practicing in Vincennes, he testified for the defense of another Morrison County dentist being sued for malpractice. Though that was a long time ago, he understands Cummins’s disorientation. Rose recalls the sense of wondering if he provided anything of value to the cause of truth and justice. He doubted that he had.

Rose isn’t certain whether Cummins hurt or helped his case. He makes eye contact with his brother George, who has been an expert witness in more than a dozen trials himself, but George merely shakes his head and shrugs. George looks as though he may have been dozing.

The trial continues to be an Alice in Wonderland experience. Rose still believes, as do Ruth, his brothers, and Ronnie Oshinsky, that he is ably represented by DeShields, though he thinks (he’s not sure) that Blake raised significant questions about the blackout and the prosecutor’s repeated use of “purported” created the impression that he, Rose, was making things up. He heard Ronnie tell Sam that the judge’s refusal to sustain DeShields’s objections was “ominous.”

“Nordahl’s just another blue-eyed anti-Semite,” he heard Ronnie whisper. “I know for a fact that he’s a member in good standing of the Minneapolis Athletic Club, which doesn’t—or didn’t until recently—admit Jews as members.”

“That would be grounds for appeal, wouldn’t it?” Sam replied. “Of course an appeal would only follow a guilty verdict—right?”

Ronnie didn’t reply.

That night, Rose lies in bed and thinks about the April evening with Teresa Hickman. He has done his best to avoid such thoughts—to avoid, at any rate, the specific sights and sounds that make a remembered experience substantial and dangerous.

Unable to sleep as Ruth snores softly beside him, he thinks about kissing Terry. Once their lips touched, she seemed to open like an exotic flower, fragrant and irresistible. It was inevitable that one thing would lead to another, though it was also true that it was in his head to seduce her from the moment she stepped into his office that January evening. He just didn’t expect it to be so easy. They made love—in his office or in the Packard—four times, and then again during her last visit.

Yes, they argued after that final time, but the emotion Rose felt then was not anger so much as—what?—dismay. Of course, it wouldn’t have been surprising, after their lovemaking in January, if she had been carrying his baby, but the fact that she would be so sure of herself that she would demand compensation—logically or not, that disappointed him at the time and disappoints him now. He wonders if he should have brought up his own financial concerns, pointing out that not every professional man—not every Jew, either, if she had raised the point—is well-to-do. But she was an unsophisticated country girl so she probably wouldn’t have believed him.

Did he in fact “black out” in the car?

The psychiatrist on the stand this afternoon, when discussing the science behind the phenomenon, left an opening for Blake to raise doubts about its legitimacy, reducing it in the end to the level of a make-believe character, a ridiculous joke. What actually happened that night in the car? He doesn’t know—or doesn’t remember, if there’s a difference—but isn’t that the definition, at least in this case, of a blackout? He’s never given much credence to clinical hypnosis, as fashionable as it is in some circles, especially out East, but maybe a competent hypnotist could help uncover the truth about what happened during his “purported” blackout. Then again it might not be wise to dig too deeply in his subconscious. Who knows what somebody might find there?

When he finally slips into a fitful doze, Rose is enmeshed in an extremely graphic dream in which he first shouts at, then forces himself on and strangles Terry Hickman. When Ruth, wakened by his wild thrashing, calms him down, his pajamas are wet and he’s shivering despite the warmth of the bedroom.

“It’s only a dream, darling,” she says, holding him close against her sturdy body. “That’s all this is—a horrible dream.”

* * *

Gwen Gilligan, Robert’s sister, had her baby earlier in the week.

Dr. and Mrs. William Gardner drove up from Rochester to inspect their first grandchild, a seven-pound-nine-ounce boy called Raymond John after the baby’s father and no one else in particular. The grandparents stay at the Leamington Hotel downtown and visit mother and child at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Elliot Park neighborhood nearby. They pronounce the boy a fine specimen—“definitely a Gardner, just look at the eyes”—and urge their daughter to promptly schedule the baptism at Rochester’s First Presbyterian, the Gardners’ church for three generations. But the baby’s father is Catholic, which Gwen doesn’t have to point out to her parents, so the issue of where, when, or even if—Ray Senior is in fact a happily lapsed Catholic—will be decided at a later date.

Afterward, the elder Gardners, noses in the air, briefly tour the bustling city and, in the early evening of yet another steamy summer day, agree to take a moment to visit Robert’s apartment before heading home. Robert has cranked up the apartment’s noisy air conditioner, but realizes he should have done it before he left for court in the morning. The apartment is almost, but not quite, stuffy enough to make the eminent surgeon loosen his tie.

While Vivian Gardner pokes around in the unit’s little kitchen, Robert asks his father—it’s either a joke or a dare—if he’s been following the trial. “I’m pretty sure the Post-Bulletin carries our stuff,” he says with a straight face.

“Such a sordid affair,” William Gardner says, shaking his head. He’s a tall, handsome man, though his swept-back graying hair is receding and he, like Dr. Rose, has developed a slouch in middle age.

“I don’t know how you can listen to those horrible people all day,” Vivian says from the kitchen. The apartment is small so she has no difficulty hearing the men in the other room.

“Not only listen to them, but repeat and print their stories in gory detail,” Dr. Gardner says. “If I were you, Bob, I’d have to rush home after every session and take a long, hot shower.”

“You haven’t seen my shower,” Robert replies. Only Robert smiles.

“Why on earth you want to be part of that seamy business I’ll never understand,” his father says.

Robert consoles himself with the knowledge that in a few minutes his parents will be on their way home. Also knowing that they would fall dead on his shabby carpet if they knew anything about his recreational life in Minneapolis—the “gory details” of his own sordid affairs. He considers asking about Janice Jones, Pam’s sister who still lives in Rochester, and then decides against it. The Gardners would remember Janice from the time Robert dated her. Whether they’d remember her sexy little sister is doubtful.

“He’s a Jew, isn’t he?” his father says. “The dentist?”

“The murderer,” Vivian says, huffing into the living room. “Have you ever cleaned that shower, Bobby? A little Dutch Cleanser and some elbow grease—”

“Yes, the dentist is a Jew,” Robert says. “The jury hasn’t decided if he’s a murderer.”

“You don’t think there’s any doubt, do you?” Dr. Gardner says.

Robert doesn’t know what he thinks. He believes—in no small part because his colleagues at the bureau seem convinced—that the jury will vote to convict. Whether Rose is in fact guilty, well, that’s another question. Robert can’t make up his mind. There are too many other possibilities.

“I’m glad I’ll only have to report the decision,” he says. He sounds more like his father than he would like.

That morning the defense asked Judge Nordahl to dismiss the case against Rose for lack of evidence. Nordahl refused. DeShields then proceeded to call Ruth Rose, both of Rose’s brothers, one of his long-ago mentors from the U of M’s dental school, the executive director of the Minnesota Board of Dentistry, and two Nicollet Avenue neighbors.

The family members, like a practiced chorale responding to an accomplished conductor, created a tone poem about the shy, studious, hard-working boy who was inspired by his revered father—a medical doctor, not a dentist—to follow two uncles and an older brother into dentistry. David graduated in the top third of his university class, married his college sweetheart, and returned to his rural hometown to practice alongside his uncles and brother. After five years as a smalltown professional, he established a solo practice near downtown Minneapolis while he and his wife began a family. That practice, if it has not made the David Roses rich, has provided the doctor, his wife, and their daughters a secure and comfortable life.

Ruth Rose said that while she’d never heard her husband speak of blackouts, away from the office he sometimes seemed “disoriented” and “confused,” which, she said, “I’ve always attributed to his skipping meals and not sleeping as long and as well as a man in a stressful profession needs to do.”

His brother Sam provided the most memorable comments from the stand. Grayer, shorter, and substantially beefier than his younger sibling, Dr. Ross described his brother’s practice in terms that no doubt surprised much of his audience (the gallery was packed again today), including Dante DeShields.

“I’d have to say—and I know George would agree—that Dave’s a better dentist than he is a businessman,” Sam said. He did not seem to be speaking unkindly, but from a big brother’s irreverent perspective. “I’m not sure he can tell you, off the top of his head, the name of his insurance agent or his pharmaceutical suppliers or the people that come in and clean the windows for him. He forgets names and numbers and gets tangled up when he’s speaking, sometimes like English is not his native language.”

Like some of the previous witnesses, Sam seemed to be enjoying his moments onstage.

“Those points aside, Dr. Ross,” DeShields said, speaking over the laughter from the gallery and the rap of the judge’s gavel, “would you hesitate to call on your brother if you personally needed dental work?”

“Absolutely not,” Sam replied. “But it would have to be a serious problem. I love my brother, but, for crying out loud, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Duluth!” He looked past both DeShields and the defendant at the tittering gallery, grinning like Milton Berle.

Speaking again over the laughter and Nordahl’s demand for order, DeShields asked the witness, “Did your brother ever talk about his patients, including his female patients?”

“Of course not,” Sam replied, straight-faced again. “That would violate professional ethics. And Dave is nothing if not ethical.”

“Prior to Teresa Hickman’s death, did he ever mention Mrs. Hickman or her sister, Mrs. Montgomery, if not as a patient then as an acquaintance?”

“No.”

“Were you aware, Dr. Ross, of anything unusual or unorthodox about your brother’s sex life?”

Ross laughed out loud.

“I didn’t know Dave had a sex life,” he said. “Outside of his happy marriage, that is.”

“Did he ever mention having suffered a blackout?”

“I wasn’t aware, until recently, that he had any of those, either.”

At the press table, Robert Gardner felt Mckenzie’s elbow in his ribs.

“Great stuff!” Miles whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Who knew the Roses had a sense of humor? The blackout question was pre-emptive.”

“During this time,” DeShields asked his next witness, Dr. James J. St. Alban, the portly state dental board chair, “has there ever been a bad word spoken, or a formal complaint filed, against Dr. David Rose?”

“Not to my knowledge,” St. Alban said. “I can tell you there is nothing of the sort—no legitimate documentation—in our files.”

On the prosecutors’ side of the attorneys’ table, Blake murmured something to Scofield, who rose, after DeShields sat down, to crossexamine St. Alban.

“If an individual has a complaint of impropriety against a dentist, would she know to contact the dental board instead of, say, telling her pastor or the police?”

“The state board would be the logical place—”

“But not necessarily the first place she would think of?”

Heads turned at Scofield’s uncharacteristic aggressiveness. Blake covered his smile while DeShields rose to his feet.

“Why must the complainant be a woman?” DeShields wanted to know. “The prosecution’s use of the feminine pronoun is prejudicial.”

“Overruled.”

Emboldened, Scofield said, “Isn’t it a fact, Dr. St. Alban, that two separate complaints about improper behavior on the part of Dr. Rose have been forwarded to you by, respectively, the Morrison County Sheriff’s office and the Minneapolis Police Department? One involved a forty-two-year-old woman, last name Harrelson, and the other a much younger woman whose name was apparently lost or not recorded.”

The witness cleared his throat and glanced at DeShields.

“When did you receive these complaints, Doctor?” Scofield persisted. St. Alban’s face colored dramatically. He twisted around in the witness box and crossed his legs like a kid in a dentist’s waiting room listening to the whine of the drill.

“Those complaints, sir, were in fact only rumors—unsubstantiated reports at best,” he said in a rush. “I was told they were looked into by the civil authorities and dismissed. I became aware of them only in the form of, well, chitchat at a couple of dental association social functions. That would have been, I don’t know, maybe two or three years after the war.”

“Then you are talking about hearsay, Doctor,” said DeShields, on his feet again. “I move that the reference to ‘rumors’ and ‘unsubstantiated reports’ be stricken from the record, Your Honor.”

“Sustained. The witness’s last statement will be stricken.”

Also that afternoon, a very tall, dark, doleful-looking man with long arms, large hands, and enormous ears—next to whose name two-thirds of the scribes at the press table immediately jotted down the word “Lincolnesque”—testified for the defense to the “irrefutable reality” of blackouts. The witness’s name was Ovid Cowper, and he was a Harvard University professor of neurology who flew in that morning from Cambridge, Massachusetts—DeShields’s expert witness.

“They exist, like migraine headaches and the occasional fainting spell,” Cowper told the court. “Not well understood even by our best medical minds, but real nonetheless.”

DeShields, standing with his arms folded across his chest, was obviously pleased with his expert.

“No two blackouts are the same, or can be described in exactly the same way,” the expert went on to say, “no more than any two patients are exactly the same. It’s impossible to say what Dr. Rose could or couldn’t do—what he was capable of or not capable of doing—when in his particular state of un- or semi-unconsciousness. If Dr. Rose says he experienced a blackout, I believe we have no choice but to take him at his word.”

“Would stress induce a blackout, Professor Cowper?” DeShields asked.

“Very possibly,” Cowper said. “Patients who have reported blackouts have often described a period of extreme agitation prior to their onset. So can excessive physical exertion or a blow to the head or not eating for a prolonged period of time.”

“The stress, or agitation, could be the result of a heated argument, could it not, Professor?”

“Theoretically, yes.”

Cowper then put the courtroom to sleep with a thirty-minute digest of the known science pertaining to blackouts. The prosecution was content to let the expert ramble until, mercifully, the judge, swallowing a yawn, declared the trial adjourned for the day.

Robert was assigned to write nothing, and at four-thirty Mckenzie sent him home to have dinner with his parents.

Now, after dining at The President, the Nicollet Avenue chop-house across the street from the Millers’ ballpark, and his parents’ dispiriting inspection of his apartment, Robert sends them on their ninety-minute drive back to Rochester. At least his father picked up the tab at the restaurant.

The Gardners’ midnight-blue Lincoln Continental is barely out of sight before Robert ducks back inside and dials Pam Brantley’s number.

* * *

The driver is back in Courtroom No. 1 the following morning, having risen again at four-thirty and elbowed his way into the queue in the courthouse hallway, which already reeks of high-summer sweat and surly impatience, and finally, at eight forty-five, claimed his twelve inches of gallery pew. The maddening wait gave him time to read the morning’s Tribune from front to back, doing his best to shut out the idiotic commentary of the trial addicts surrounding him.

In the Trib, George Appel, an erstwhile sportswriter, opines that the duel between the trial’s attorneys “must be judged, at this stage, a toss-up.” He writes, “Both sides have scored points, but neither has delivered a knockdown punch. Of course, the trial of H. David Rose is only in its middle rounds.” The only really significant news is provided under an Associated Press byline. Martin Rice quotes Dante DeShields saying, “We’re done with the doctors and professors and scientists. We’ve got other people who have a lot to say. This trial is far from over.”

The driver, folding the paper, wonders who those “other people” are.

Grace Montgomery would have been an obvious witness, but she’s gone. So who else? Maybe a few of the witnesses who testified for the prosecution—the Zevos kid, the hick from North Dakota—and maybe a surprise witness or two. In the movies, the lawyers are always pulling someone or something out of their hat. A cold finger runs up and down his spine and a vision of himself on the stand flashes behind his eyes. Then he sees the jury taking their seats, and again he zeroes in on the two sweeties at the near end of the front row. He’s almost certain that the shorter girl, the one in the tight white blouse and short plaid skirt, made and held eye contact with him the other day.

Sure enough, first thing DeShields calls Bud Montgomery, who impresses the driver as a big, dumb plug-ugly you’d cross the street to avoid. He looks, however, like he’s been taken down a peg or two by circumstances, which of course he has. He walks with a hitch and seems to be missing teeth. But if anyone expected DeShields to go easy on the new widower, he’s mistaken. Within minutes, Rose’s lawyer confronts Montgomery with his physical abuse of his late wife, accuses him of assaulting Teresa Hickman at the Montgomerys’ apartment, and suggests the possibility that he murdered both women.

Typical is this exchange:

“Did you have sex with Teresa Hickman?”

“Once or twice.”

“Did you rape her?”

“No, goddamn it! It was her idea!”

The judge pounds his gavel. “The witness will watch his language,” he says, looking down at Montgomery. “Another outburst like that and I’ll cite you with contempt.”

Finally, the big lug—cursing, weeping, denying the charges all at once—is escorted out of the courtroom by a pair of sheriff’s deputies.

Kenneth Landa, back from North Dakota, is called, technically another hostile witness, whom DeShields will use to pry open the Pandora’s box that was Teresa Kubicek Hickman’s sex life.

Landa has already admitted that he was Terry’s frequent, if not sole, partner back in the day, and now, pressed by DeShields, he enumerates the teenagers’ trysts in his ‘41 Pontiac, on a blanket beside a creek in the Kubiceks’ pasture, and in his attic bedroom when his widowed mother worked late at a Hartford tavern. Landa has a solid alibi so DeShields doesn’t suggest that he had anything to do with Mrs. Hickman’s death, but there will be little doubt when the young man steps down that the victim was addicted to sex from an early age.

A prim, pretty brunette named Constance Canfield Bannister, formerly of Dollar and now residing in Minot with her schoolteacher husband, confirms Landa’s accounts. She says that she and Terry Kubicek were best friends from sixth to eleventh grade, when Connie missed several months of school after coming down with undulant fever. She says she watched her friend attract and flirt with high school boys and even older men beginning in her early teens.

“It was like flies to honey,” Mrs. Bannister, now a twenty-two-year-old homemaker, three months pregnant, tells the jury. “They would follow her around and take her for rides in their cars and even come by the house. Terry’s mom was gone by that time, and Mr. Kubicek either didn’t notice—he was always worrying about the farm and the turkey business he wanted to start—or didn’t know how to deal with it. Later on, when Terry and Kenny were going steady, a lot of those guys were still coming around, you know, like Kenny didn’t exist.”

“Was Terry averse to the attention?”

“Not hardly,” the witness replies. “I always thought she couldn’t get enough of it.”

In the silence that follows, Mrs. Bannister seems to be debating with herself about whether she should add another detail. She decides she will.

“Sometimes, when it was warm enough, Terry would strip naked and dance in the headlights of Cullen Hanson’s truck. Later, Cullen joined the Army and was killed in Korea.”

She doesn’t bother to include the fact that she and another couple of Dollar girls would sometimes join Terry in those “high-beam shows,” which were usually followed by a booze-fueled party in which the strippers joined the pickup’s owner and his buddies on blankets in the country dark. Her blush and averted eyes give away, however, her likely participation in the events, at least in the minds of some members of the gallery.

By this time, the driver is thoroughly aroused—he keeps the copy of the Tribune on his lap—and considers for a moment following Constance Bannister to her hotel or wherever she’ll be spending the night, assuming she isn’t returning home today. He pictures her six or seven years earlier, showing off in the headlights with Terry, the two of them friendly but competitive, one blonde, the other dark, one skinny, the other “full-figured,” as the magazines say, the both of them strutting their stuff in the cones of yellow light that illuminate the dark road. Maybe Mrs. Bannister needs a cab to get from the courthouse to wherever she’s staying. It takes a moment before it occurs to him that Mr. Bannister might have accompanied her from Minot.

Then DeShields calls Richard Ybarra, and the driver decides to sit still. Lest Ybarra spot him in the gallery, he slides down in his seat.

The curly-haired photographer looks scared, intimidated by the surroundings, and likely terrified by what the man-eating lawyer is likely to ask. A petty thief and con man since junior high school, Ybarra has stood before a judge before, but never in a room like this one, and never, needless to say, as part of a murder trial.

DeShields gives him a few seconds to get his bearings.

“For the record, pronounce your name for us, please,” the lawyer says, with what passes for a cordial smile. “Did I get it right?”

“Uh, yeah, no, Your Honor,” the witness stammers. “Not Wy-BEAR-rah. Ee-BAH-rah.”

“Ee-BAH-rah,” DeShields says, exaggerating the pronunciation. “I’m not, by the way, ‘Your Honor,’” he adds, nodding toward the bench. “His Honor is sitting up there.”

Everybody but the judge laughs, and the witness turns red.

“Oh, yeah,” he says. “I know that.”

“And what do you do for a living, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah?”

“I’m a professional photographer.”

“What or who do you photograph, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah?”

“Well, I’ve done weddings and private parties, even some baby photos,” the witness replies.

“Have you ever taken photos of young women wearing swimsuits or just their underwear or maybe nothing at all?”

Though Ybarra, stupid as he is, must expect the question, he looks as though DeShields sucker-punched him in the gut. In the third row of the gallery, the driver sits up and leans forward, not about to miss a word of his pal’s testimony.

“Well, sure,” the young man replies, trying desperately to sound as though undressing women and snapping their picture is all in a day’s work for a professional photographer.

“Were you acquainted with Teresa Hickman?”

Ybarra coughs into his fist.

“We met,” he says.

DeShields turns to Michael Haydon, who hands him a sheaf of eight-by-ten photographs. “Exhibit numbers sixteen through twenty-two, Your Honor,” he says, stepping up to the witness stand and handing Ybarra the photos.

“Are these familiar to you?”

Ybarra makes a halfhearted show of shuffling through the stack. “Yeah,” he says.

“Well, they should be. The police confiscated them from your apartment. Tell the jury who’s in these photos.”

Ybarra looks at the jury and mutters, “Terry Hickman.”

“So I don’t have to show the photos to the jury, who I’m certain will be outraged by their salacious content, please tell them, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah, what Mrs. Hickman is wearing in the top two photos.” Ybarra glances down at the glossies.

“A brassiere and underpants,” he mumbles.

“And how about the next couple of shots?”

“Just the underpants.”

“And the last couple?”

“Nothin’.”

“What?”

“She’s not wearing nothin’.”

DeShields waits a beat, drawing out the effect. In the silence, the driver thinks, Goddamn him anyway! He never showed me the nudes. “Did you have sex with Mrs. Hickman?”

“Yeah.”

“How often?”

“Once or twice.”

“It was more than once or twice, was it not, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah? More like a dozen times, usually at the love nest you called your studio in Stevens Square. Is that correct?”

Ybarra is trembling. A sheen of perspiration glosses his forehead and upper lip.

“I guess so.”

“Tell the jury the last time.”

Ybarra takes a deep breath.

“I think it was Wednesday, April fifth,” he says.

The witness is barely audible, so Nordahl tells him to speak up.

“Wednesday, the fifth.”

“Wednesday would have been the sixth,” DeShields says. “Two days before Mrs. Hickman was murdered.”

Ybarra ignores the last statement. He is obviously working up the nerve to reassert himself.

“She liked what we did,” he says, an answer that followed no question. “Everything we did, right from the first. I didn’t talk her into nothin’. She loved to get undressed and fuck, Your Honor.”

Scofield is on his feet, demanding that the witness’s “depraved language” be stricken from the record. The gallery sits in stunned silence, and Nordahl holds his gavel in midair, not knowing quite what to do with it at this moment.

DeShields takes the photos back from the witness and shakes his head.

“That will be all, Mr. Wy-BEAR-rah,” he says.

At five o’clock on the same afternoon, twenty minutes after court was adjourned for the day, Arne Anderson stands on the southeast corner of Fifth and Marquette, waiting for Janine Curry to emerge from Powers Department Store. He’s been standing there, kitty-corner from the store, pretending to be preoccupied by the midafternoon edition of the Star, for the past half hour, since spotting her coming out of Farmers & Mechanics Bank down the block.

This is risky behavior for several reasons. One, her husband, who spent the afternoon at the courthouse, will soon be on the street himself unless he’s going directly to Smokey’s. Two, there are any number of cops, lawyers, and other courthouse denizens who could spot him and wonder, since it’s now public knowledge that Lily Kline dumped him, who he’s waiting for outside Powers. And, three, Janine may well be on her way to Smokey’s herself and won’t be happy to see Arne or want anything to do with him this evening and maybe never.

Their last meeting, on a rainy afternoon in mid-July, ended bizarrely. It was still too hot to close the windows, and Arne could hear the wind flicking the rain against the screens. Mel had been sent down to Albert Lea, two and a half hours south of the Twin Cities, to confer with that city’s detectives about a suspect in a Minneapolis murder case. The victim was a fifty-five-year-old homosexual whose beating death earlier in the week was similar to the murder of Herman Goranski in June. Yes, the MPD has a suspect who confessed to the Goranski homicide, but Willard Woolworth is certifiably crazy, so Captain Fuller said someone needed to drive down and take a look at the Albert Lea guy, “just to make sure there’s no connection.” Curry, Riemenschneider, and Lakeland drew straws for the honor, and Mel came up short. He would be gone all day.

When she and Arne finished that afternoon, Janine, out of the blue, told Arne, “I can’t do this anymore.”

Arne then surprised them both by saying, “I can’t either. You’re not the only one who loves Mel.”

Janine didn’t like his response, mistaking it for either a confession of queer attraction or a personal insult. It later occurred to Arne that Janine has never been the rejected party in a relationship. She would do the rejecting, thank you.

In fact, Arne will go to his grave not knowing why he said what he said that afternoon. True, Mel had become, more or less by default, his closest friend if he didn’t count first Lily and then Janine, which he didn’t. It has never been possible for him to consider a woman he sleeps with a friend. A friend is someone with whom you share everything important except sex.

He reckoned, when he thought about it, that he’d had no more than five real friends in his life. One died in a boating accident on Rainy Lake when they were kids. (Arne, always afraid of the water, had turned down his pal’s invitation to join the boy’s family on their vacation trip up north.) One, with whom Arne was close in high school, moved to Ohio after graduation and fallen out of contact. Two guys with whom he had bonded during advanced infantry training were casualties of war, one while wading ashore in Sicily, and the other after an artillery barrage on a freezing evening near Bastogne, while Arne tried to assure the suddenly faceless man that he was going to see another morning. The fifth is—was?—Mel Curry.

Yet, after an hour of passion, Arne believed that he would shoot Mel between the eyes if Mel walked in on him and Janine. He also believed that Mel would shoot him between the eyes if Mel got to his revolver first. Until that happened, they may have been the closest friends either one of them ever had.

This afternoon, Arne’s ache for Janine has overtaken other considerations. He has not spoken to her since he left the Currys’ apartment three weeks ago. He hasn’t asked Mel about her or tried to glean intelligence about her through office chatter. Now, during the biggest trial of his career, he happens to see her on the street and, without much thought other than the three reasons he shouldn’t be doing it, he does what comes naturally and begins to birddog the woman. He figures she will come out the door she entered because she’ll either want to walk to the courthouse to meet Mel or catch a southbound bus for home on that corner. If she exits a different door, he’ll be out of luck.

But she emerges through the revolving door closest to him, five minutes later. Petite as she is, he might have missed her in the crowd of shoppers coming out at the same time if she wasn’t wearing her favorite red dress. She is beautiful and confident and perfectly coiffed, and she is smiling.

Arne catches his breath, suddenly excited as a schoolboy, as he watches her cross the street. But then he realizes that she is not smiling at him but at a man coming toward her on the other side of Fifth.

He steps back into the shadow of the building where he stands presumably unseen, ducking his head and slouching into the bovine herd of commuters waiting for their bus ride home. From there he watches Mel and Janine embrace and kiss and turn westward on Fifth, toward the bars and restaurants on Nicollet and Hennepin. He thinks about following the couple, and then rejects the idea.

His eyes shaded by his fedora, he heads off in the direction of Smokey’s, where he intends to get good and drunk.

On August 10 and 11, a train of violent thunderstorms punches through the heat wave that has suffocated the Twin Cities since the middle of June.

Between midnight on the tenth and eight-thirty the following evening, more than seven inches of water swamp the region, and straight-line winds topple mature trees, rip the shingles off roofs, and turn somnambulant Minnehaha Creek into a roaring torrent. A pair of fourteen-year-old boys, seeking a thrill in a stolen canoe, are caught in the creek’s fast-moving current and hurtled, moments later, screaming for their mothers, over the lip of Minnehaha Falls. Their bodies are recovered three days later, twelve miles down the Mississippi River, where they’d been deposited naked, battered, and dead.

For a couple of days the storm and the drownings are all anyone can talk about downtown, eclipsing the Rose trial, which Judge Nordahl recessed on the ninth to allow the defense time to identify and subpoena two additional witnesses. Nobody envies Fred MacMurray and his crew, not only having to process the drowned kids’ ravaged bodies, but also having to remind citizens that water rushing over and between rocks the size of refrigerators and straight down a fifty-foot drop can yield nothing but a horrible death. He can’t say it, of course, but the truth is, the thieving knuckleheads got what was coming to them.

“Sweet Jesus,” Ferris Lakeland says in the squad room. “Us little dipshits used to do that all the time—push canoes down the creek when the water was running high after a hard rain. We’d hit rocks or slam into the bank and capsize before we got to the falls. Got a mouth full of water and broke an arm, but at least they didn’t find our bodies halfway down to Red Wing.”

That morning Scofield tells Anderson and Curry to bring in the reporter, Robert Gardner. After their “talk” behind Smokey’s, Curry mentioned Gardner to the county attorney, but made it clear that he didn’t consider the kid a suspect. Though he admitted to being in the vicinity on the night of the murder, Gardner could explain why he was in the neighborhood at the time, and there’s nothing to show that he’d ever met either Teresa Hickman or Dr. Rose. He didn’t own a car at the time and was living with his sister. Gardner is an accidental witness at best, Curry said, and if he’s hiding anything, it has nothing to do with the case.

“He’s banging a married lady in Linden Hills,” Charlie Riemenschneider says to the men slurping coffee in the squad room. “That or he’s got a boyfriend he messes around with down by the tracks.”

“He ain’t a queer,” says Lakeland. “I got it on good authority he’s been boffing Miles Mckenzie’s daughter-in-law. You know, the goodlooking redhead with legs up to here—you see her over at Smokey’s once in a while. She strikes me as a tight-ass, but sometimes they’re the ones that turn out to be the fireballs.”

The detectives have never identified the anonymous caller who reported the “skinny guy with glasses,” never mind the skinny guy himself.

“Gotta be someone in the neighborhood,” Einar Storholm says. “Maybe someone we talked to, but doesn’t want his name in the papers or on DeShields’s witness list.”

“So did any of us talk to the guy down there?” Curry asks. The table remains silent. “No? I didn’t think so.”

“Maybe it’s the killer himself,” Riemenschneider says. “He’s toying with us, taunting us, the way that kind of asshole likes to do.”

“In the movies maybe,” says Storholm.

“The last thing we want to do,” Rudy Blake says, assuming a grownup’s voice of reason, “is give DeShields another possible suspect to dangle in front of the jury. The more alternatives to Rose, the muddier the water and the harder it’ll be to convict. And if we bring Gardner in on the QT, we run the risk of DeShields saying we’ve been holding back evidence.”

“We know where to find Gardner if we need him,” Anderson says, ending the discussion.

* * *

The driver is sweeping out his garage when a Hiawatha County sheriff’s deputy named John Harrington sticks his head in the door.

“Julius Casserly,” Harrington says.

The driver turns his head. When he sees the uniform, he stops sweeping and draws his arm across his sweaty forehead. He glances over his shoulder to make sure he hasn’t left any photos out where people can see them.

“I told him you were busy, honey!” Margaret says. She is standing on her tiptoes behind the deputy, trying to see over his shoulder.

“What do you want?” the driver says, ignoring his wife. Despite the break in the weather, and even with the big doors open, the garage holds the summer heat, and he’s sweating through his short-sleeve shirt. He pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket, mops his face, and steps around the yellow Plymouth. He sees the large manila envelope in the deputy’s hand.

“This is a subpoena issued by the Hiawatha County District Court,” Harrington says. “You are ordered to appear at the Hiawatha County Courthouse at nine a.m. on Tuesday, August sixteenth. If you fail to appear at the designated time and place, Judge Nordahl will direct the sheriff to bring you in.”

“Julius! What is this about?”

“Go in the house, Margaret!” the driver shouts.

She does, and he retreats into the garage and sits down in his canvas chair to think.

Fifteen minutes later, Deputy Harrington intercepts Robert Gardner as the reporter walks from his parked car toward the front entry of his apartment building. Robert carries a grease-stained sack with a Juicy Lucy and double order of French fries from Nib’s Bar on Cedar, and a six-pack of Grain Belt from the grocery store on the corner.

“Robert Gardner? This is a subpoena issued by the Hiawatha County District Court,” Harrington begins.

Robert was planning to eat, fortify himself with three or four bottles of beer, and then work up the nerve to call Pam again. Now he has to wonder why there’s a subpoena sitting on the kitchen table beside his supper and how much trouble he can possibly be in.

Like several of the driver’s grand ideas, this one comes to him as he cruises around Lake of the Isles in the cooling dark of late evening.

After supper, he picked up a quarreling middle-aged man and woman going to the airport and, at the airport, three brothers, Okies from the sound of them, looking for something cheap downtown. (He dropped the brothers at the Vendome on South Fourth Street and told them to talk to one of the colored boys about girls.) Then he turned off the roof light, found some dance music on the radio, and crossed Lake Street to Lake Calhoun, where amorous couples were already fogging the windows of their parked cars.

It had to be the Zevos gimp that put the authorities on to him—who else could it have been? Even then, it had to take some doing for the cops to track him down since, to the best of his knowledge, Zevos didn’t know his name, nor did any of the girls who work there, or anyone else who’s crossed his path at the Palace. Zevos no doubt saw the cab parked out front, maybe jotted down the number, and gave it to investigators who talked to O’Shaughnessy at the Canary garage. The fat asshole then directed them to his door without so much as a heads-up or how-do-you-do.

It wasn’t the cops who tracked him down, though. A sheriff’s deputy isn’t, to the driver’s mind, a cop—deputy sheriffs patrol the state fairgrounds and handle auto wrecks outside the city limits—so it must be Rose’s lawyers who want him to testify. What the hell could they expect him to say, other than he’d met and exchanged a few words with the victim?

Then the grand idea occurs to him—the proverbial bolt out of the blue.

When he’s called to the stand, he will tell the hushed courtroom that he saw Teresa Hickman sitting in Rose’s Packard parked along the east side of Lake of the Isles on the night of April 8. He’ll say that he could see they were arguing about something—he’ll say they were talking “animatedly.” Then, after a few minutes, he’ll say he saw the woman “abruptly” get out of Rose’s car and head up the cross-street alone.

Curious, and, yes, concerned for the safety of a young woman out alone in the dark—he has daughters of his own, he’ll tell his rapt audience—he followed her up the hill, away from the lake, on Euclid Place. He intended to turn on his roof light and offer to drive the woman home free of charge.

But before he could do that, she crossed the street and walked over to a car parked on the east side of Euclid. There were two men in the front seat of the car—a late-forties, pale green Oldsmobile sedan. The men and the woman exchanged a few words. Then the man on the passenger side got out, grabbed the woman’s arm, and pushed her into the car. For a moment, the man seemed to be looking for something in the street; then, cursing, he jumped back into the car and the car took off, its tires squealing. The car took a right at the corner, and proceeded in the direction of Hennepin.

“Can you describe the two men?” the nasty little lawyer will ask him.

The driver can feel the eyes of the entire courtroom staring at him. He’ll look pensive for a moment, maybe glance away from the lawyer, maybe sneak a peek at the cuties in the jury box, before replying.

“I think I can,” he’ll say at last. “Maybe not the man behind the wheel—I didn’t get a good look at him—but certainly the man who got out of the car and grabbed the girl. He was on the tall side, I’d say, at least six feet, maybe six one or two, and thin, with a narrow face and a pencil mustache. He was wearing a hat—so was the other man, I could see that much when the interior light went on—so I can’t say anything about the color of his eyes and hair.”

He imagines the carrot-topped prosecutor jumping up to ask how he knew that it was Dr. Rose and Mrs. Hickman before Mrs. Hickman got out of Rose’s car.

“It was pure coincidence I parked behind them at the lake,” he’ll reply coolly. “And it wasn’t until I saw their pictures in the paper the next day that I realized who it was that I’d seen.”

“Why is it only now that you’re coming forward with this information?”

This question is trickier, and the driver isn’t sure how he should reply.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he might say, “I was afraid. What if the men in the Oldsmobile were gangsters? Would I be putting my family and myself in jeopardy by going to the police?”

No, even with the mention of his family, that would sound cowardly.

He could say, “Even after seeing the photos in the paper, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was Rose and Mrs. Hickman. It was dark, and there was only the light from a streetlamp, which wasn’t much help.”

Or he could say that he was under a lot of stress at the time, wasn’t sleeping well, and, frankly, didn’t always trust his own eyes. He was having extremely vivid dreams—he dreamed, for instance, that he saved a boy from drowning in Lake Nokomis—and, though he never said anything to anyone, even his wife, he was having hallucinations. “So how could I be certain that I hadn’t dreamt or hallucinated seeing Rose and Mrs. Hickman that night?”

The last explanation seems best, though he’s not sure why.

However confusing this is right now, the idea of taking center stage—stealing the show!—at the biggest local trial of the year, maybe the decade, maybe the century, makes him giddy. One day he’s just another schmo, anonymous and unimportant. The next, he’s on the witness stand in the city’s grandest courtroom, the focus of all present, including the sweethearts in the jury box and the two tables of newspapermen writing down his every word.

The facelessness that always worked to his advantage suddenly didn’t have much appeal. Julius Casserly would be a star!