by W. A. Winter
There are two policemen all right, but they’re wearing suits and Bud is nowhere in sight. One of the officers, the larger and over-looking of the two, holds out a leather case with a silver shield pinned to it, and introduces himself as Detective Sergeant Anderson of the Minneapolis Police Department.
“This is Detective Curry,” he adds, nodding toward the shorter, dark-eyed, very handsome man beside him. She opens the door wider, steps to the side, and asks them to come in.
The men’s hats and overcoats remind Grace that it’s chilly outside this morning. They both look like her vision of big-city detectives—square-jawed, broad-shouldered, and formidable, direct in manner and gaze. Before either she or they can say another word she somehow knows what this is about.
It’s not about Bud.
It’s about Terry.
Terry is dead.
“Are you Mrs. Henry Montgomery?” Sergeant Anderson asks her. For a split second she thinks, No, this is about Bud. When she says she is, the detective says, “We got your address from the Red Cross. They told us Teresa Hickman lives here. They said she’s your sister. Is that correct?”
Grace backs into the room and sits down. She thinks she’s going to throw up. “What about her?” she says.
The large detective doesn’t answer right away—he’s staring at the bruise on the side of her face. But she was right. This is about Terry. Terry is dead. Idiotically, she hopes it will be the dark-eyed detective who breaks the news.
Anderson says, “Your sister is dead, ma’am.” He pauses, watching her, and then adds, “We think she was murdered.”
No one says anything for a moment.
“We’d like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind,” the darkeyed detective, whose name she’s already forgotten, says. “It’s a homicide, so we need to move fast.”
She nods and, always the pleaser, tries to smile.
“Your sister’s body was found early this morning in the Linden Hills neighborhood,” Anderson says. “The coroner says she’d been strangled.”
Grace stares at him. She doesn’t know what to say.
“Do you have any idea why she would be down in that part of town last night?”
“No,” Grace manages. “Lincoln Hills? I don’t even know where it is.”
“Linden Hills,” Curry says. “It’s in the southwest corner of the city, out past the lakes.”
Anderson says, “What happened to your face, ma’am?”
She reaches up and touches the bruise. She’s all too aware of the pain, but the amount of swelling surprises her. “Oh,” she says. “I slipped on the back stairs and bumped my head against the bannister.” It occurs to her to be embarrassed by her bitten fingernails. Like Terry, she’s never been able to break the habit.
The policemen look at her skeptically.
“Where’s Mr. Montgomery?” Anderson asks.
“He drove over to his mother’s,” she says. “She lives in South St. Paul, and he goes over there on Saturdays.”
“Did he hit you before he left?” Curry asks.
“No,” she says. “I told you—I bumped my head on the stairs.”
She would love to tell him the truth, but doesn’t dare. It dawns on her that it’s going to be safer, and probably easier, too, to lie to these men about almost everything. So that’s what she decides to do—to lie at least as often as she tells the truth.
She is truthful when they ask if her sister has been living here since moving to Minneapolis, that the baby now squalling in the other room is Terry’s child, and that Terry’s husband, Harold Hickman Senior, is an Army private stationed in West Germany. She is truthful, too, when she tells them—after pausing to change the baby, heat his milk, and bring him into the living room, where she cradles him in the crook of her left arm while offering him the bottle—that her sister recently went to work at the Palace Luncheonette, a couple of blocks down Nicollet. When she’s asked why her sister turned to the Red Cross for money, she truthfully explains that Private Hickman’s monthly military allotment didn’t arrive in February and she needed emergency cash for baby formula and diapers. She watches with some satisfaction as the dark-eyed detective writes down what she tells them in a notebook.
She catches her breath when Detective Anderson pulls the red billfold out of his overcoat.
“Does this belong to your sister?” he asks, and she nods. The billfold originally belonged to her, one of those precious teenage possessions that get passed down to younger siblings and become ugly and unfashionable in the process. Anderson opens it and holds the photo sleeves out toward Grace.
“I take it this is you,” Anderson says, pointing to the young woman in the wedding dress.
Grace feels herself color.
“My first wedding,” she says truthfully. “That was six years ago.”
“And the soldier? Is that Private Hickman?”
“Yes,” she says. “That’s Hal. Right after basic training.”
She looks at the snapshot of the old couple sitting behind a large cake. “Our Kubicek grandpa and grandma in North Dakota. This was their wedding anniversary ten years ago. They’re both gone now.”
All of this is the truth.
But when Anderson points to the photo of the other young man, the one in civvies, she says she doesn’t know who it is, though of course she does. It’s Kenny Landa, and she doesn’t know why she lied about him. “It might be a guy Terry knew before she got married,” she says, backtracking a few steps.
She closes her eyes and thinks about Kenny and starts crying.
“Terry,” she says with an embarrassed smile, “knew a lot of guys. She’s always been very popular.” Was always very popular. But she doesn’t bother to correct herself.
When the detectives ask about last night, Grace says she believed Terry went to work at the Palace. She says that’s where Terry told her she was going. When Curry asks if her sister was wearing her waitress uniform when she left, Grace says she can’t remember, but was pretty sure she was. When he asks if Terry had plans for after work, Grace says not that she knew of.
“Well,” Anderson persists, “is there any place she liked to go when she wasn’t working? A bar or the roller garden or a friend’s apartment?”
Grace shakes her head. “She liked to be here at home, with me and the baby.”
Anderson says, “Were you aware, Mrs. Montgomery, if your sister was seeing any men here in town? Did she have a boyfriend?”
Grace shakes her head again, her eyes filling with tears.
“No,” she says sharply. “She loved her husband.”
Maybe startled by the tone of Grace’s voice, the baby starts to cry.
The detectives exchange glances.
“When do you expect Mr. Montgomery home?” Anderson asks.
Grace says she isn’t sure.
Curry looks at his watch, and Anderson says they’d like to look at her sister’s things. Grace shows them into the apartment’s second bedroom, which is hardly large enough for the three of them, what with its single bed, four-drawer dresser, and the bassinet that Grace says they borrowed from the landlady and hauled upstairs. A pair of cheap-looking suitcases are visible under the bed.
Grace knows it won’t take the detectives long before they find the cheesecake photos among Terry’s delicates. She will lie when they ask her about those, too, insisting that this is the first time she’s seen them.
While Anderson pokes around in the bedroom, Curry walks into the bathroom, opens the medicine cabinet, and looks inside a narrow linen closet. He peeks into the kitchen and opens the door leading to the back stairs. Finally, he steps into the larger bedroom. Grace is embarrassed because the room is a mess, the double bed unmade and littered with clothing, both clean and dirty. There are also clothes on the rug, and God knows how many months’ worth of dust on the floor beneath the bed.
She lies once more when she apologizes for the disarray and tells the dark-eyed detective that she’s been under the w
eather for the past several days and is just now beginning to feel like herself again.
Curry doesn’t seem to hear. Or maybe, she thinks, he doesn’t care. He’s no doubt seen bedrooms far worse than hers, bedrooms spattered with blood and gore and strewn with battered bodies. Then he looks at her and asks, “Did your sister get along with your husband?” She notices that his top two front teeth are not as white as the others. Probably replacements.
“She hated him,” she says without thinking. “We all do.”
She told the truth, more or less, and immediately wishes she hadn’t.
At noon, Robert Gardner is on the No. 1 bus en route downtown. He needs to file a story, or at the very least combine what little he got from his desultory inquiries around the neighborhood with the presumably more substantial information Milt Hickok and Tommy Pullman picked up from the coroner and the police.
In the space of an hour he talked to a dozen individuals. Nobody had much to say beyond reiterating what a quiet and peaceful part of town the Linden Hills neighborhood has been for as long as anyone can remember. No one knew, or knew of, Teresa Marie Kubicek (he wasn’t aware of her married name). No one saw or heard anything unusual last night.
Robert didn’t know what he would have done if one of those citizens said he or she saw him beside the right-of-way between midnight and one o’clock this morning. He didn’t need to worry. No one showed the slightest sign of having recognized him, despite the fact that he’s been coming and going to and from his sister’s place for the past few months.
Of course he would have loved for Pam—Karl, too, for that matter—to see him doing the work of a wire service reporter, but he knew he couldn’t trust either Pam or himself to act surprised to see each other, as though less than ten hours earlier they hadn’t been going at it like a pair of rabbits in the Brantleys’ apartment. The more he thought about it, in fact, the more he feared bumping into either one of them. He therefore steered clear of the Brantleys’ building, working the residences east of the crime scene and then staying on the north side of the streetcar tracks.
When he rang the bell at the address he’d been given for Gerald Bergen’s apartment, he was told, presumably by his wife, that Mr. Bergen had been driven down to police headquarters for a statement.
On the bus downtown he wonders what Pam must be thinking, assuming a police officer or another reporter has knocked on her door. She knew that Robert left her building by the back door and would likely have walked down the dark right-of-way behind the buildings. Would she wonder whether he had seen either the victim or the killer—or maybe the murder itself? Would she have been worried about him? The thought of her concern both warms and excites him, and then freezes into a stab of panic that she might have said something without thinking, either to the police or afterward to Karl, that would raise suspicion not of murder but of adultery. She’s a smart girl, he tells himself, but she has a tendency to say things without thinking, especially when she’s excited.
“Oh my God,” he imagines her exclaiming, her fingers splayed against her cheeks, “what if Robert saw—”
Oops!
Then he remembers that Karl would have returned to the apartment not long after he crept out the back. When the Brantleys learned about the murder, they surely would have considered the possibility that Karl might have seen something, unlikely as that would have been because he habitually walks from the bus stop via Forty-fourth Street and enters their building through the main door in front.
Maybe Pam will call Robert at the office—though how would she know he’s at work? Last night he told her he was off today, and she knows better than to call him at Gwen’s.
His head swims with possibilities as he gets off the bus at Fourth and Hennepin and jogs through the thin Saturday crowds—shoppers mainly—to the bureau’s shabby office across the street from the Star and Tribune building on Portland. As he climbs, two at a time, the long, steep stairway to the second floor, it occurs to him, not for the last time, that he should be thrilled to be working on the first big story of his career. Instead, he’s unsettled by the thought that the murder of that girl might ruin him.
Anderson and Curry leave the Montgomerys’ apartment and drive along the Nicollet Avenue dogleg to Twelfth Street, where the Palace Luncheonette, a cheerless hole-in-the-wall that reeks of garlic, fried onions, and cigarettes, occupies the southeast corner. Faded color photos of the Acropolis, Parthenon, and other glories of ancient Greece scissored out of travel magazines, stuck in cheap frames, and hung too high on the dingy yellow walls provide the sole ornamentation. When the detectives walk in, the Saturday lunch crowd has shriveled to a pair of solitary diners reading the paper.
Curry flashes his shield, and Anderson asks the lone visible employee, a youngish woman with henna hair, to see the owner. Saturday is the one day of the week Anatoli Zevos takes off, so his son, Tony, steps out of the kitchen dragging his bad leg and wiping his hands on a gray dishtowel.
Curry shows his badge to Tony and asks if Teresa Marie Hickman worked there.
Tony says, “Still does, though if she doesn’t haul her sweet ass in here pretty soon I’ll have to decide if she’s still got the job. She had to see her name on the schedule.”
Anderson steps around the counter and pushes Tony through a swinging door into the kitchen. As though on cue, the kitchen’s only occupant, a swarthy short-order cook in a sweaty T-shirt and greasy apron, ducks out the back door into the alley.
“Hey!” Tony says. “What’s this about?”
Curry is right behind Anderson.
“Teresa Hickman is dead, shitbird,” Mel says. Mel is the Homicide Squad’s “sweetheart” until something—and it doesn’t have to be much—gets under his skin. Then you notice the outsized shoulders, meaty hands, and wide nose flattened by three-plus years in Golden Gloves.
Young Zevos looks at the cops. He’s dark-complected, dark-haired, dark-eyed, and oily. To a Swede and an Irishman, he looks guilty of something. “I don’t know nothin’ about it,” he says. He’s also the kind of knucklehead who sounds as though he’s lying even when he’s not.
“She work last night?” Anderson asks him.
“No,” Tony snaps.
He looks from the big cop to the smaller one, who, despite their four-inch, twenty-odd-pound difference, looks more dangerous at the moment.
“No,” he says again, calming down a little, re-establishing, at least in his own eyes, a slice of the authority that comes with running a restaurant, even a dump like this one. “She was supposed to, but called in late afternoon, just before her shift started. Said she had a toothache.”
“A toothache,” Anderson says. “So she said she was going to stay home, go to bed, or what?”
Tony says, “She didn’t say. She just said her tooth was killin’ her.”
He looks at the detectives with a smirk. “Maybe it was her tooth that killed her.”
The detectives stare at him. They obviously don’t have a sense of humor.
Anderson wants to ask the little greaseball if he ever fucked Teresa Hickman, or at the very least shoved his hands down her pants, willing to bet good money, judging by the looks of him and by what Arne has learned about the world, that he has—which may, but more likely may not, be relevant in this instance. Instead he asks, “Is there anybody in the neighborhood who can fix a toothache on a Friday night?”
Tony gets an odd look on his face, almost a look of amusement, as though it’s a question he is asked a lot. He fumbles in the pocket of his wilted white shirt and pulls out a Lucky Strike.
“I don’t know where she went,” he says, patting his pants pockets for his lighter, “but I know there’s a dentist a couple blocks up Nicollet who works nights and weekends. A Jew named Rose.” He grins. “A Rose is a Rose is a Jew—ain’t that what the man said?”
“Rose,” Anderson says, ignoring the rest.
“Up the street above the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club,” Tony says, smirking now at whatever crude a
llusion he attaches to the idiotic name.
Anderson glances at Curry, who looks over his shoulder at the deserted counter area out front and nods. Mel punches Tony Zevos in the face, knocking him on his back.
Tony looks up at Mel, blood bubbling in his nostrils and grouting his teeth.
“Jesus Christ!” he cries. “What the fuck you do that for?”
Curry massages the knuckles of his left hand as though contemplating additional action. “General principle,” he says and follows Arne toward the front door.
CHAPTER 3
Waiting for the early edition of the Star, the driver cruises west on Thirty-eighth Street to Nicollet, hangs a right, and proceeds north. It’s half past one on Saturday afternoon, and he’s more than a little curious about the location of a certain black Packard.
He spent the morning in the single-car garage behind the stucco bungalow he shares with his wife and six kids on Bryant Avenue. There was nothing he had to do—the snow was gone so there was nothing to shovel or pull off the roof, and it was too early to cut the grass, what little of it might have survived the winter. He changed the Plymouth’s oil the previous Sunday, and washed the car on Monday.
The garage is his refuge. Margaret knows better than to bother him out here, and the kids are spooked by the venomous spiders and giant centipedes he’s convinced them lurk in its dark corners. He keeps a ratty canvas lawn chair and wobbly floor lamp inside, and after backing the car halfway into the driveway, he has room to read the paper and peruse the adult books and magazines he brings home from Shinders News and stashes behind the stacked snow tires.
When Margaret asked if he was going to Mass that afternoon, he told her he was working. “I’m running light this week,” he said, not exaggerating, though he’s always happy to have an excuse to avoid church. “Gonna work all weekend.”
That morning, in bed, at the kitchen table with Margaret and the oldest kids, and then by himself in the garage, he kept thinking about what happened last night. Was it real or had he dreamed it? Was it another one of his “visions”—one of the waking fantasies that both excite and unsettle him?
