by W. A. Winter
Their mother, a tiny, temperamental beauty who believed she could speak in tongues, spent much of her time, once the kids were old enough to fend for themselves, traveling the Dakotas, Montana, and Canada’s western provinces with a Pentecostal tent preacher from Winnipeg named Inman Akers. Despite a rumored relationship with the ravenhaired Bible-thumper, Marva Kubicek taught her daughters that sex was painful and dirty and even in marriage must be indulged only for procreation. If Marva noticed the attention her younger daughter was beginning to attract, she apparently believed she could pray it away.
Not coincidentally perhaps, more than one of the older men around Dollar in those days observed that Terry looked a lot like Marva had in her teenaged years—a small, sleek, fair-haired siren whose big eyes, sly smile, and provocative gait could make the most righteous man think salacious thoughts. Grace, meanwhile, had the springy reddish hair and thickset body of their father’s family. Like most everybody in those days, three of the four Kubicek kids had crooked teeth riddled with caries and the occasional abscess, while Terry alone, though not immune to cavities and toothache, was, like her mother, blessed with a beautiful natural smile.
Then, one after another, Grace’s mother and brothers died. Albert was killed in action in Korea on Christmas Day 1950, and Lyman suffocated after falling into a corn-filled silo during the late summer of 1953. Marva, who was always susceptible to infection, contracted pneumonia during an Akers “crusade” in Alberta and died in a Calgary hospital almost halfway between the passings of her sons. Grace had taken some satisfaction in delivering the news of Albert’s death to Terry, interrupting her sister’s pleasure in the backseat of Kenny Landa’s Pontiac one snowy night outside of town.
Six months after Lyman died, Walter Kubicek sold the farm to a neighbor and moved into a tiny bungalow in town. Terry moved in with Kenny for a while, then met and six weeks later married Kenny’s slightly older, taller, better-looking cousin, Harold Hickman. The newlyweds settled down in the knotty-pine-paneled basement of his parents’ house in Grand Forks, where Harold Junior was presumed to have been conceived. The couple stayed there unhappily—Harold’s parents made it clear that they never trusted Terry—until Hal enlisted and went off to basic training in Kansas.
Grace was gone by that time. The day after she turned twenty-one, she married another hometown no-account, Riley Read, whom she divorced after six months of mutual indifference. A few weeks later, she took a Greyhound bus to the Twin Cities, where she got a job clerking in the credit department of the JC Penney store in downtown Minneapolis and shared an efficiency apartment with a girl from Dollar. She met Henry Montgomery at Jax Cafe, where she had taken a second job waiting tables at night. Bud was the bad-tempered son of an alcoholic Minneapolis fireman, but he had broad shoulders, an attractive smile, and a taciturn manner that reminded Grace of her father.
For reasons having more to do with nostalgia than anything else, Grace insisted, when she married Bud a few months later, that the nuptials be held in Dollar. At the drafty little Lutheran church no one in the family had attended for years, Terry was the maid of honor and, because Bud had no brothers and none of his few Minneapolis friends made the trip to North Dakota, Kenny Landa served as best man. During the reception in the church parlor, Bud told Terry that she was the Kubicek girl he wanted to fuck that night.
But now Grace is thinking about Dr. Rose.
Was he the last person to see her sister alive?
Terry was sure she was pregnant and that the baby was his. Terry told Grace that she and Rose had sex during her appointment in late January, and that’s undoubtedly when it happened. Terry said she was going to tell him about the baby last night, after he took care of her toothache. That was odd, actually kind of comical, Grace thought, but that was Terry for you. Maybe Terry liked Dr. Rose, was not put off by his age and his Jew looks, and when he’d finished in her mouth last night maybe they had sex again. Grace’s jealousy flickers on and off like a defective lightbulb.
Then, before she can sink too deeply into her anger and hurt, she hears an unmistakable sound on the stairs. Even in the carpeted hallway, Bud’s footfalls sound like the hammer blows of doom.
It’s half past seven this Saturday evening when Arne Anderson returns to the apartment on Chicago. Lily isn’t home, and her unexpected absence makes him uneasy. Then he remembers that she was doing a friend a favor and took an extra shift—she’s one of three staff librarians at Mount Sinai Hospital—and then planned to have dinner with her ailing mother in St. Louis Park.
Arne is drinking whiskey out of a water glass and reading the Star’s sports page when Lily gets home at nine-thirty. She looks tired, but not unhappy to see him, seemingly in a better mood than when he left this morning. (He remembered to bring home his breakfast plate and silverware, and to rinse them off in the kitchen sink.) He’s happy to see her and wonders if she’s up for sex tonight.
“That murdered girl in the paper this afternoon—is that where you were today?” she says, after pouring herself a glass of red wine and sitting down beside him on the couch.
“Afraid so,” he says, looking at her.
Lily Kline will be thirty-five in September. She is slightly built and dark-eyed, not particularly attractive, but sensual in the vaguely exotic, Eastern European way that Arne associates with Jewish women.
“Have you arrested anyone?”
“No,” he says.
He wonders, for maybe the tenth time in the last hour, what he’s going to tell her about Dr. Rose. “We’re looking at a handful of suspects. A guy where she worked and a brother-in-law who beats up her sister. Maybe some of the knuckleheads that hang around the neighborhood, too.”
“Was the girl raped?”
Arne shakes his head, taking a sip of his whiskey. “Didn’t seem to be,” he says softly, thinking about Teresa Hickman’s still, small form on the coroner’s gurney and also the cheesecake photos they found in her dresser. “She had sex not long before she died, but MacMurray said he didn’t think it was forced. She was dressed when we found the body, and her clothes weren’t torn or disheveled. She was missing a shoe, is all.”
“Poor thing,” Lily says.
Arne takes another swallow. This one drains the glass. He knows he shouldn’t, but he can’t help himself, so he pushes on.
“She had a dental appointment last night. A dentist named H. David Rose, on Nicollet Avenue south of the Loop. Ever hear of him?”
She gives him a look.
“Why? Because he’s a Jew?”
Arne shrugs. He’s relieved to hear her chuckle.
“We don’t all know each other,” she says.
Arne gets off the couch and pads into the kitchen for a refill. Lily has lived here for almost three years, Arne not quite six months, though he feels as if it’s been longer than that. He doesn’t give any thought anymore to either Charlotte or Marianne, his ex-wives—luckily, for everyone, there are no children—much less to the several apartments and the one cramped bungalow he and Marianne rented on the North Side. He has shacked up with a couple of other women, too, in various locations around town, but he can hardly remember either the women or the addresses.
“I just thought, you know—all the doctors at Mount Sinai—”
“All the Jew doctors at Mount Sinai, you mean,” she calls after him, seeming to enjoy this in her way.
He appears a moment later with his tumbler half-full. “Yeah, that’s what I meant.”
“Well, no, I’ve never heard of that Jew,” she says. “You know, of course, the difference between a physician and a dentist? The dentist wasn’t smart enough to get into medical school.”
It’s an old joke. Arne forces a smile.
“This dentist strikes me as pretty smart,” he says, sitting down again. “We brought him downtown and had a long talk, Augie, Mel, fucking Ed Evangelist, and me. He told us about this procedure of his—sedation dentistry, he calls it. He gives the patient a barbiturate and a headache remedy that
knocks them out for several hours. Ever hear of anything like that?”
“No,” she says, looking at Arne over her wine glass. “But what do I know about dentists, except I hate them? Well, did you arrest the dirty Jew and give him the third degree?”
Arne sighs. It’s been a long day. He’s tired and now halfway drunk. He wants to fuck Lily, or somebody, and go to sleep.
“No,” he says. “But we have reason to give him a good look. He told us that when he saw the girl last night, she accused him of being the father of the baby she was carrying. We’re going to talk to him again tomorrow.”
“So whoever murdered the girl murdered a child, too—the unborn baby?”
Arne closes his eyes.
“The fetus doesn’t count, Lil, as you well know. Maybe someday, but not now, not under the law. Give me a break, will you? One victim is enough.”
CHAPTER 4
When Anderson arrives at the Hiawatha County Courthouse a few minutes before ten on April 10—Easter Sunday—Charlie Riemenschneider is waiting for him. Mel, Ferris, and the other members of the squad are on their way in despite the holiday, but for the moment Arne and Charlie have the office to themselves.
Charlie, grinning his gat-toothed grin and squinting behind his glasses, holds up a brown paper bag. “Guess what I got, Sarge?” he says.
Arne sits down at his desk and scans the cluttered surface for anything new—callback slips from the front desk or directives from upstairs. He is thinking about Lily. Lily last night. Lily in bed. Lily different and indifferent. He wonders if he is falling in love with Lily at the same time Lily is falling out of love with him. Then again, when did she ever say she was in love with him?
“Pastrami on rye,” he says absently. Arne hates guessing games. “How the hell should I know?”
He looks up and sees Riemenschneider open the bag and turn it upside down. A woman’s low-heeled, black leather shoe clatters on the top of his desk. The single empty shoe looks odd on the desk. There should be a foot in it, or there should be a pair of them, and they should be on the floor.
“A citizen on Euclid Place flagged down one of our cars last night, said he found it in the street,” Charlie says. “I’ll lay you three to one this belonged to our dead beauty.”
Anderson unlocks his desk and pulls open the bottom drawer. He takes out another paper bag and withdraws a woman’s left shoe—sure enough, a match with the right shoe Charlie dropped on his desk. He holds the shoes up, one in each hand, and looks them over as though he knows something about women’s shoes other than what he likes or dislikes on attractive women. The shoes—size five and a half, according to the tag inside, bought at a JC Penney’s department store—look neither new nor expensive, but they aren’t badly worn or scuffed. Arne can imagine Teresa Hickman wearing them out to a movie in the evening, or to a dental appointment. He holds each up, looks closely at the insides, and slides his thick fingers into the toes. He resists the temptation to sniff them.
“Euclid Place,” he says.
“A block up from the lake,” Charlie says, meaning Lake of the Isles.
“That’s a couple of miles from where the body was found,” Arne says. “Less than a mile from Rose’s office.”
Also on his desk is a report from Donald Forsberg, the head of forensics. A thorough search and vacuuming of Rose’s Packard, front and back seats, floor, glove compartment, and trunk, yielded nothing other than what everyone else has in their cars. No sign of blood or semen or other bodily fluids. The only fingerprints were Rose’s—on the steering wheel, gear shift, front doors, glove compartment, and trunk handle. There were a couple of long blonde hairs on the back of the front passenger seat, possibly Teresa Hickman’s. But if Mrs. Hickman was in the car, where are her fingerprints? Rose must have wiped down her side after she either got out of the car or was murdered.
The squad’s other members are present by ten-fifteen.
“He is risen!” Ferris Lakeland declares by way of a wise-ass Easter Sunday greeting.
“Big fuckin’ deal,” Riemenschneider growls in response. “I’ve been up for three hours.”
Anderson senses a rare energy within the group. Even sluggish Einar Storholm, marking time until his end-of-the-year retirement, and legendary malingerer Curtis Wrenshall seem more than casually interested in the Hickman homicide. And why not? The case has the makings of an old-fashioned—and, in real life, exceedingly rare—whodunit. What’s more, the victim was a pretty young woman, a pregnant mother, and possibly a party girl, whose body was discovered in one of the city’s quieter corners, and one of the suspects—hell, the prime suspect at this point—is the victim’s Jewish dentist.
Arne assigns Storholm and Wrenshall to grab a couple of patrolmen, including the officer who brought in the matching shoe, and start canvassing the blocks around Euclid Place and the east side of Lake of the Isles. He sends Hessburg and LeBlanc to interview Rose’s Zenith Avenue neighbors. When the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club opens tomorrow, they can talk to the club’s staff and customers as well as Rose’s second-floor neighbors.
Riemenschneider and Lakeland will go see if Bud Montgomery is home yet (he didn’t come home last night, according to the stakeout), and if Grace Montgomery has anything more to say. “Bring them both in,” Anderson says. “If Bud falls down the stairs and bumps his head en route—well, those things happen.”
As Anderson and Curry get ready to leave for Rose’s house, Arne notices a yellow call slip he overlooked amid the clutter on his desk. The slip says a man phoned in early this morning to report having seen a “young-looking male” walking along the streetcar right-of-way about one a.m. Saturday. He was “skinny and wore glasses” and “seemed to be interested in something in the weeds,” the caller said. Unfortunately, the caller didn’t leave his name or phone number or say how he happened to see the “young-looking male” strolling along the tracks at that hour. No one else has mentioned a skinny guy with glasses. Arne sticks the slip in his notebook.
Rose’s home, three doors off the southwest corner of Thirty-ninth Street and Zenith Avenue, is a two-and-a-half-story, red-brick structure bearded with English ivy. Later described in the papers as a Tudor Revival built in the early 1920s, it is not the largest or most ostentatious house on Zenith Avenue, but, like most of its neighbors, it is a house that a professional man and his family would be happy to call their own.
The house boasts a nicely landscaped front yard shaded by two fifty-foot American elms and a gently sloping backyard. A double garage is attached to the rear of the house and opens on a tidy alley that runs the length of the block. It is early April, so the yards, though likely free of snow for the season, will need another month, two or three inches of rain, and consistently warmer temperatures to green up and sprout their flowers.
Anderson and Curry, warm enough in their overcoats and fedoras, ring the front doorbell while a squad car idles at both ends of the alley. Arne would be flabbergasted if Rose tries to make a run for it, but protocol demands the backup.
Ruth Rose, a short, stocky, plain-faced woman Anderson figures to be about the dentist’s age, answers the door. Anderson extends his shield, but she knows who they are, if not by name then by their appearance. She appears as unruffled this morning as her husband seemed to be at the courthouse yesterday afternoon. Anderson was half-expecting a uniformed maid.
“David said we should expect you,” Mrs. Rose says, holding open the door.
Dr. Rose and a younger man are standing in the spacious, thickly carpeted living room to the left of the foyer. Rose is wearing a starched white shirt with a blue dotted necktie and pinstriped suit pants. His wingtip shoes gleam in the low light. He extends his right hand to each of the detectives and turns to the other man.
“May I introduce Ronald Oshinsky,” Rose says. “Ronnie is my brother-in-law and, for the moment, my legal counsel.”
Short, sturdy, and sobersided, Oshinsky is obviously Ruth’s kin. Unblinking behind a pair of plastic-rimmed spectacle
s, he looks like a well-dressed owl.
Anderson is angry with himself for not hustling Rose downtown before the dentist could hire a lawyer. At the same time, he’s relieved that this lawyer is not one of the high-octane defense attorneys that usually attach themselves to cases like this, headline-grabbing, cop-hating legal eagles, like Avery Kerr, Harry Hall, and Dante DeShields. Arne has never heard of Ronald Oshinsky.
The house smells of roast beef, fried onions, and furniture polish. A string quartet plays softly on the radio or phonograph in another room. Otherwise the house is silent.
Anderson says, “We want to take you downtown, Dr. Rose. To continue our conversation.”
Oshinsky says, “Is he under arrest?”
“No,” says Curry. “But we need more information.”
“Why not talk here?” the young man wants to know.
“Orders from the top,” Anderson says with a little smile, the usual bullshit response.
“That’s perfectly all right,” Rose says. He seems incapable of fluster, and it occurs to Anderson that the man is probably a pretty good dentist. Calm, self-confident, and steady.
Rose says, “May my wife and brother-in-law join us?”
Before Curry can say no, Anderson says, “If they can get themselves downtown and back on their own.”
Robert Gardner sits in Miles Mckenzie’s cramped office, seriously sleep-deprived and hungry for another adventure in Pam Brantley’s bed, whenever that might be.
Mckenzie’s “private” office is enclosed on three and a half sides by four-foot-high partitions topped with a foot of frosted glass and has hardly room enough for the bureau chief’s messy desk, squealing chair, and battered Remington typewriter, plus a pair of straight-backed metal chairs facing the desk. The entire bureau, maybe twelve hundred square feet crammed with mismatched furniture, dented file cabinets, incessantly ringing telephones, and a platoon of clattering teletype machines, stinks of cigarette smoke, burnt coffee, and a dozen-odd men for whom personal hygiene isn’t always the highest priority.
