The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  Meanwhile, his hands—large, white, and neither scarred nor blemished, with extraordinarily long, sturdy, well-shaped fingers and neatly tended cuticles—mark him, in his eyes, as an artistic man as well.

  Not that he expects to find any, he nonetheless looks closely for scratches or bruises on his body, especially on his face, neck, arms, and hands. Satisfied with the inspection, he steps into the clean pair of undershorts his wife has laid out for him and wonders which necktie he should wear to the office.

  Ruth Rose, who’s always needed less sleep than her husband, has been up for hours.

  Margot and Lael have a cousin’s birthday party to get ready for, and Ruth has the usual Saturday housecleaning to do. Though her husband has offered to pay for one, Ruth insists she neither needs nor wants a housekeeper, not even a woman who would come in once a week to dust, vacuum, and take care of the laundry. She believes that having hired help is ostentatious and undemocratic. She believes that dedicated and progressive Jews who vote for the likes of Humphrey and Stevenson and contribute to the NAACP don’t keep “servants.”

  Rose looks at his wife from the kitchen door. He has shaved, bathed, and dressed for the office—he selected the blue-and-green-striped tie she gave him on his last birthday—and is ready for breakfast. Breakfast is on many days the only meal he eats for twelve or fifteen or twenty-four hours.

  “That’s how he stays so thin,” Ruth tells friends.

  “As a matter of fact,” the doctor often interjects, “food is usually the last thing on my mind during the day. I hardly even think about it.”

  “Except in the morning,” Ruth adds with a wry smile, rounding out the discussion.

  From the kitchen door, the doctor says, “Ruth, you are an exceptional woman. My life would be unimaginative without you.”

  Ruth doesn’t hear such words every day, though her husband is not averse to sharing his feelings when so moved, often including an unintended malaprop. She knows he loves her and is reasonably certain he’s been faithful all these years, as she has been to him, but he often seems to have so many other things on his mind. The practice, of course, is paramount. She knows, because she’s heard it from sources she trusts—namely, his brothers—that he is not the most admired or popular dentist in town. He’s always had detractors, even back in Vincennes, where he practiced fresh out of the university, but then name a dentist, or a physician for that matter, who doesn’t. He reads the journals and attends the conventions and does his best, she knows for a fact, to stay up to date on both the technical and business sides of the enterprise.

  “Dave’s a student of the game,” his brother George, also a dentist, has said more than once.

  Everyone agrees that the technical side of the “game” is his strength. He has large, sure, steady hands, a passion for precision, and the knowledge and experience to operate confidently on his own. His bookkeeping, he will admit, could be improved.

  “Well, I manage,” he says when he and his wife have this discussion.

  Ruth, who grew up in her father’s very successful Oshinsky Brothers liquor business on the North Side, replies good-naturedly, “Oh, David, stop. Your books are a mess.”

  She has offered to straighten out her husband’s accounts at least as often as he has offered to hire a cleaning lady, with the same effect. Neither one of them will say it, but the doctor clearly believes that the hands-on practice of dentistry requires the sensitivity and technique of an artist while updating the ledger is an accountant’s work and, frankly, beneath him. He believes, as he tells his wife, he can manage those pedestrian tasks without outside help.

  In the past few years, Dr. Rose has researched and now specializes in “sedation dentistry,” in which, following the administration of a large capsule combining several legal pharmaceuticals, the patient is rendered blissfully unaware during even a long and complicated procedure. Complete Dental Care While You Sleep! is the intriguing if not entirely accurate tagline he has “borrowed” from a Chicago practitioner for a yet-to-be commissioned advertising campaign that he intends to run on select Twin Cities radio stations in the fall.

  He hasn’t told Ruth that he’s hired Grace Montgomery, one of his regular patients, to help spread the word of the practice among young working women in the area. He wants to see how Mrs. Montgomery works out first. But he can envision a “squad” of engaging ladies—energetic and personable and proud of their bright smiles—talking up Dr. Rose among their peers at Dayton’s, Young-Quinlan, First National, and sundry other stores, shops, banks, and offices in and around the downtown Loop, dispelling the hoary negatives about dentists and explaining the appeal of dental care while they “sleep.” For each new patient one of them sends his way, he will hand the recruiter a crisp five-dollar bill.

  Grace Montgomery has been his patient for almost a year. A typical child of the rural Midwest, she is reasonably pretty albeit a few pounds overweight, though her appeal was compromised by a youth and early adulthood of indifferent or incompetent dental care, which Rose has taken steps to correct. She has been working for Rose for only a couple of months and has directed three other women—one of them her sister—his way. If she becomes more productive, he may not need additional recruiters. He may also have to figure out a way to pay her less than five bucks for each recruit. He’s enough of a businessman to know that much.

  He drinks the black coffee Ruth puts in front of him and eats a bowl of Cream of Wheat with a piece of lightly buttered toast, the extent of today’s breakfast. He feels vaguely unsettled this morning, and he’s not entirely sure why. He has gauzy, weirdly disturbing images behind his eyes that he assumes to be remnants of last night’s dreams. Rose dreams often and luridly, though he must not talk much in his sleep because Ruth, a light sleeper, rarely mentions anything he’s said the next morning. Now, when he tries to remember what transpired last night before he came home, went to bed, and commenced dreaming, his recollections are as unsubstantial as the fragments in his head. He will do his best to forget them.

  He thanks Ruth for breakfast and kisses her on the cheek. Then he walks into the living room, with its large bay window overlooking Zenith Avenue, the baby grand piano they bought for the girls, carefully matched overstuffed chairs and sofa, a fieldstone fireplace, and a floor-to-ceiling walnut bookcase. He has a few minutes to kill. He fills and lights one of the several meerschaum pipes he keeps in a rack on a side table and considers sitting down at the piano on which he was once reasonably proficient. Instead, he sighs deeply and puts Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 on the big Magnavox phonograph Ruth gave him at Christmas.

  From the kitchen he hears Ruth talking over the swelling music and turns down the sound.

  “I forgot to tell you, David,” she says, “an ambulance and police car drove past while you were sleeping. But they didn’t have their sirens on, so maybe it wasn’t anything important.”

  Fred MacMurray—Hiawatha County’s chief of pathology, not the Hollywood film star—performs the autopsy midmorning.

  He’s a loose-limbed, good-looking, middle-aged man who, like the popular actor, seems almost preternaturally fit and happy, often humming a show tune as he supervises the plumbing of a decedent’s stomach or sawing off the top of its skull. Today, though, even Dr. Fred, as he’s known among the cops and his colleagues, is glum and terse.

  Assisted by Alois Jensen, he bends over the lifeless body of Teresa Marie Kubicek Hickman, of Dollar, North Dakota. According to the document detectives found in her billfold, she was the wife of one Harold V. Hickman, a U.S. Army private stationed in Stuttgart, West Germany. Speaking into a tape recorder as he reviews the appearance and condition of the naked corpse, he describes her as a young, fair, slightly underweight Caucasian woman, five foot two and one-half inches tall, one hundred and two pounds. Aside from her nibbled fingertips, she bears no noticeable scars, birthmarks, or other visible imperfections, and would seem to have been constructed to lead a long and healthy life. She has beautiful teeth—wh
ite, straight, and reasonably well cared for—at least what he can see of them. (“The anterior portions of the anterior teeth,” he will put in his report.) The rigor mortis prevents him from opening her jaw wide enough to make a comprehensive evaluation of the decedent’s dental health.

  When Dr. Jensen cuts into Mrs. Hickman’s thorax and abdomen and removes one by one the woman’s internal organs—he looks as though he’s lifting produce out of a shopping bag—MacMurray can see the evidence of her demise. While her heart appears normal, her lungs are filled with fluid, which suggests suffocation. Her brain reveals trauma usually caused by an interruption in the flow of oxygen. Looking at her bruised throat, he notices that the hyoid bone, a tiny component of the larynx, has been crushed and there’s been bleeding at the site.

  Then MacMurray steps away from the table and pulls off his mask. “Death by homicide,” he says for the record. “Cause of death: asphyxia due to manual strangulation.”

  He says this, too: “The victim was three months pregnant, and there’s a trace of semen in her vagina, which tells us she had sex within a few hours of her death.”

  Robert Gardner is wolfing down a fried-egg sandwich in his sister’s kitchen when the phone rings. The sudden noise shakes him out of a very pleasant erotic reverie.

  “It’s for you,” Gwen says, handing him the receiver.

  A chill runs up Robert’s back. Nobody calls him here. If Pam wants to talk to him, she calls the bureau. What about Karl? Karl doesn’t know he’s here, much less his sister’s number. Robert is being silly.

  He’s only slightly less nonplussed when he hears Miles Mckenzie’s gravelly voice on the other end of the line. He experiences a familiar sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He’s supposed to be off today, his first free day since last Saturday, and he’s been looking forward to doing little more than dreamily reliving his newfound love life and fantasizing about its next installment.

  “You live in Linden Hills, don’t you, kid?” Mckenzie says.

  “Uh, yeah,” Robert replies. “For the time being anyway.” Something else pricks the lining of his stomach.

  “Well, a girl got murdered down there last night,” Mckenzie says. “A guy walking his dog along the streetcar tracks stumbled across the body early this morning. If you look out your window, you’ll probably see the cops knocking on doors.”

  Robert woke up half an hour ago with nothing but visions of Pam Brantley dancing in his head. But gradually, like a face emerging from a photographic negative, the image of the dead woman coalesced behind his eyes, pushing his lover aside. Lighting a cigarette and pouring himself a cup of coffee, he said good morning to Gwen, who was still in her curlers and bathrobe, and hoped she wouldn’t ask about last night. He wanted to think that the corpse was a bad dream, a nightmarish counterpart to his sweet dreams about Pam. But, no, it was real. It is real. Its ugly factuality has just been confirmed by the United Press bureau chief.

  Before falling into a fitful sleep last night, Robert lay in bed and listened to Ray, his brother-in-law, saw logs, and his sister, now in her fourth month of pregnancy, go to the toilet a couple of times. He knew he couldn’t call the police, much less tell Gwen and Ray, much less give the scoop to his employer. He should, of course, but he can’t, not without having to explain what he was doing on the streetcar track at that hour, two blocks from where he was expected to be, and nowhere near the direct route he might have taken from the bus stop to his sister’s apartment. He would run the risk of revealing the affair, destroying the Brantleys’ marriage, and shaming himself in the eyes of his family. It’s not inconceivable that he would also become a suspect in the girl’s death.

  “Gardner!” Mckenzie says. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here, Chief.”

  Robert smiles in spite of himself. No one calls Mckenzie “Chief,” but Robert can’t bring himself to call the man either “Miles” or “Mr. Mckenzie.” He’s pretty sure it will be “Miles” when he can build up the nerve and if he has the job that long.

  “Get out there and start talking to people,” Mckenzie says. “I sent Pullman to the coroner’s office, and Hickok’s talking to the murder cops at the courthouse. That leaves you to sniff around the crime scene. Get some detail, some color. How are the neighbors dealing with a murder in their backyard—‘Nothing like this ever happens around here,’ that sort of thing. See if the girl lived in the vicinity, or if anybody was up and about that might have seen her. I got no one else to send down there right now. You’re our man on the scene!”

  Robert wonders if he should write down Mckenzie’s instructions, not that the instructions weren’t obvious and easy enough to remember. He’ll have to wash up and brush his teeth and put on a sport coat and tie before he goes out. He’s all at once both terrified by the possibilities and excited by the prospect of covering a murder, the first of his career. He could use another cup of Gwen’s strong coffee, but he doesn’t want to take the time.

  “Gardner!” Mckenzie barks. “The guy who found the body—his name is Gerald Bergen, and the address I got for him is Thirty-three-eighteen West Forty-fourth Street. Talk to him first.”

  The folded sheet of pink paper stuck in the victim’s billfold is a form from the Red Cross in Minneapolis, a voucher for the amount of $12.50, paid to Mrs. Harold V. Hickman, of Nine East Fifteenth Street, Apartment 204.

  Anderson hands the paper to Curry, who reads it and smiles at his partner. The detectives are just leaving Hiawatha County General Hospital, where they watched MacMurray and his men disassemble the woman’s body and render a preliminary judgment. To Sid Hessburg, who is trailing behind but not out of earshot, Anderson says, “Call that Red Cross office. The number’s on the form. If they’ve got a file on the Hickmans, tell them we want to see it.”

  Mel passes the voucher to Sid, and Arne says, “If they don’t want to give it to us over the phone, tell them we’ll come down and get it.”

  Then to Curry he says, “Let’s the two of us go see what we can see on Fifteenth Street.”

  On the sidewalk, Anderson spots a couple of familiar newspapermen and a photographer, notebooks and Speed Graphic at the ready, hustling self-importantly but without a clue toward the hospital’s main entrance. The Star’s police reporter, a fat, red-faced man in a checkered hat named Oscar Rystrom, sees the detectives before they can duck around the corner and hollers, “Hey, Sarge, whadda we got here? A homicide? Rape? Who the fuck gets murdered in Linden Hills?”

  In the considered opinion of Anderson and most of his colleagues, Rystrom, while no dummy, is a pain in the ass and so are most of his pals.

  “A girl died,” Arne says over his shoulder. “That’s all I know, boys. Best of luck.”

  * * *

  Grace Montgomery is in a snit.

  She has called Dr. Rose’s office three times this morning and gotten no answer—she could look up the doctor’s home number in the phonebook, but she wouldn’t have the nerve to call him there—then tried the Palace, where the Greek said he hadn’t seen Terry since Thursday night. “She said she have a toothache,” he told her and hung up.

  Grace dug the photos out of Terry’s underwear drawer and checked the backs to see if the photographer had written his name and phone number. He hadn’t. It occurred to her to call Kenny Landa’s folks back home, on the odd chance that Kenny had driven down to surprise her sister, and then thought that was a foolish idea for several reasons and would only cost her the price of a long-distance call, which Bud wouldn’t be happy about when they got the phone bill.

  The left side of her face, where Bud smacked her when she couldn’t get Terry’s baby to hush up this morning, has darkened and swelled. An hour ago she dumped the last of the ice cubes into a dishtowel and pressed it against the pain, and all she has now is a wet dishtowel dripping on her faded flowered housedress and the relentless throb of the bruise. The baby has been asleep for a couple of hours now, but that won’t last much longer. He’ll need a clean diaper and a bot
tle in another hour. Thank God Bud left early for wherever it is he goes this time of day.

  If she had Dr. Rose’s home number, she thinks now, she would call it, no matter how angry that might make him, or his wife if she answers the phone. Calling him at home would probably cost her the referral job, but she really doesn’t care, she’s that mad herself. In fact, at this hour, almost ten-thirty in the morning, after hardly two hours’ sleep, she’s angrier than she is worried. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all, that “something came up,” as Terry likes to explain her random absences and delays, having left the baby in Grace’s hands and showing up the following morning smudged and disheveled and smiling.

  As usual, Grace’s righteous anger about her sister is curdled with jealousy. Whoever Terry may be with, including Dr. Rose, the guy most certainly would be an improvement over Bud. Once more, Grace burns with resentment of Terry’s almost magical appeal to men of all ages, and jealous of Terry’s blithe self-assurance and willingness to take chances. And, yes, she’s jealous of Terry’s baby, even though she feels she spends more time with the child than Terry does. Her own maternal experience has been limited to a hush-hush pregnancy and abortion several years ago.

  Grace closes her eyes and listens to Harold Junior as he begins to fuss in the other room; then, after a few minutes, the baby quiets again. She may have dozed off herself when the apartment’s doorbell buzzes.

  “Police!” a man’s voice calls out.

  Grace’s first thought is Bud. He’s finally done it. He’s gotten in a fight with a bigger, tougher guy, smashed up the car, or sassed off to a cop who stopped him for spitting in the street. She expects to open the door and see her husband slumped and bloodied between a pair of husky patrolmen.