The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  Because there’s no door on his cubicle and because the walls rise only so far, there’s no respite, even for the chief, from the mechanical chatter of the teletype machines that receive, print, and spit out tightly spaced rolls of news from around the world twenty-four hours a day. Bells announce the arrival of a new item, the number of bells signaling the urgency of each.

  Mckenzie, in his bargain-basement short-sleeved white shirt and tartan tie that not quite reaches the bottom of his paunch, sits behind his desk looking at sheets of sliced-off teletype paper. He wears his watch on the inside of his right wrist and smokes incessantly. He is a United Press lifer, a newsman out of the movies, hoarse, gruff, and all business if you don’t count bad puns and corny wordplay.

  Bespectacled and prematurely bald, twenty-five-year-old Tommy Pullman sits in the chair beside Robert, furiously chewing Beech-Nut gum and fuming. Sunday is not Tommy’s day to work. There’s no bureau policy or union rule that gives him Sundays off, but Tommy, though with only a year and a half of seniority, carries a veteran’s aura of entitlement and simply presumes a Sunday-free schedule. When pressed, he will explain, in unabashedly personal terms, that he’s reserved the day for his newly married wife. Robert has met Bonnie Pullman, a slinky, six-foot-tall redhead, and has no trouble imagining how the couple spends their Sabbath.

  “That was a decent sidebar in last night’s Star,” Mckenzie says to Robert. The men sitting around the desk know that Robert only contributed to the short piece Mckenzie wrote to accompany the Star’s front-page story. They know that Mckenzie is going to be the lead on the Teresa Hickman story, directing the bureau’s coverage and writing both the features and the breaking-news reports that go out on the wires, and slapping his byline on top of most of them. The bureau’s five full-time reporters, including Pullman and Gardner, will do the grunt work, wear down the shoe leather, and be content with reflected glory.

  Milt Hickok, the foghorn-voiced veteran who’s worked at the bureau (and the one-man state capitol office in St. Paul) almost as long as Mckenzie, has just called in from the courthouse. Milt told Mckenzie that the cops are going to arrest the dead woman’s dentist. His source at the courthouse says Arne Anderson’s homicide unit questioned a Dr. H. David Rose yesterday afternoon and is picking him up at his home today.

  “That’s all?” Pullman asks.

  Mckenzie, lighting a Viceroy, says, “Shit, buddy, if that’s true, this ain’t some run-of-the-mill mugging arrest. This is a professional man, for chrissakes. A doctor of fucking dental surgery. Maybe the girl was a patient and he was filling more than her oral cavities.”

  “Rose,” Pullman says. “That’s a hebe name, isn’t it?”

  Mckenzie shrugs. “Sounds like it. Easy enough to find out.”

  Robert says, “Does that make a difference?”

  “In this town it does,” Tommy says. “The national press says we’re the, quote, ‘anti-Semitism capital of America.’”

  Still learning the ways of the city, Robert has read about the real-estate redlining that has kept Jews and Negroes out of the city’s better neighborhoods, and that Jewish doctors had to build their own hospital, Mount Sinai, because they couldn’t get operating privileges in the city’s established institutions. He’s heard that the city’s venerable country clubs and business associations and even the local YMCA have a history of denying Jews membership. But the anti-Semitism capital of America? He wonders if that can be true. Maybe once upon a time, but today? How would he know? He’s pretty sure he has never knowingly spoken at any length to a Jew, either at home in Rochester or here in the Twin Cities.

  “Rose might not be the only suspect,” Mckenzie says, the cigarette bouncing between his lips. “Someone told the cops they saw a guy standing over the body by the trolley tracks. A young guy with glasses, according to the source.”

  Robert feels the blood drain from his face. Jesus Christ! Someone did see him after he left Pam’s apartment! This is what he’s been worried about—someone having spotted him near the body and the police suspecting that he had something to do with the murder.

  He takes a breath and says, “Is that all? A young guy with glasses?”

  He’s relieved that neither Tommy nor Mckenzie bothers to look at him.

  “That’s more than you got, Bobbo,” Tommy says.

  “Mr. Gardner,” says Mckenzie, as though suddenly inspired. He leans back in his noisy chair, which shrieks like a stuck pig under the torque and stress.

  “I want you to run over to the courthouse and give Hickok a hand. Introduce yourself to Sergeant Anderson, tell him you’re new on the beat. That’ll be to your advantage because Anderson hates the reporters he knows around town, including yours truly. To Arne we’re all parasites, bottom-feeders—or worse. Tell him you’re just off the bus from East Overshoe, Manitoba, some place where the press takes the cops’ word as gospel. See what he’ll tell you about the Jew dentist and the skinny kid with glasses.”

  Then the chief looks at Tommy and says, “You can go home and pleasure your bride, pal. Tell her you’re the Easter Bunny.”

  Robert, on his feet now, wonders how Mckenzie knew the kid with glasses was skinny.

  “You need to know, Dr. Rose, that anything you say may be used against you in court,” Captain Fuller says, after the two men and Detectives Anderson and Curry take their seats behind and around Fuller’s desk on the third floor of the courthouse. May Grey, clutching three freshly sharpened pencils and her steno pad, has joined the circle as well. Ruth Rose and Ronald Oshinsky have been directed to chairs along the wall behind the others. No doubt owing to the fact that it’s Easter Sunday, Ed Evangelist—not a religious man despite the name and yesterday’s provocations, but a man who fervently believes in his weekly day of rest—isn’t present.

  “Do you understand?” Augie says.

  “Yes, I do,” Rose replies.

  Rose has assumed the identical posture, expression, and disposition he displayed here yesterday. By the looks of him, Arne muses, the dentist might have spent the night in that chair.

  Investigators won’t be required for another eleven years to inform a criminal suspect of his Sixth Amendment rights—that he is not obliged to incriminate himself and has a right to have a lawyer present during an interrogation. But Fuller believes he owes a professional man a modicum of courtesy, and, in any event, he said nothing about the suspect’s right to a lawyer. Rose has a lawyer, of course, but on the drive downtown the dentist told Anderson and Curry (who told Fuller on their arrival) that Ronald Oshinsky, though “a bright young man with a promising future,” has handled only divorce and traffic cases in his short career and is present as a favor to Mrs. Rose.

  “He won’t be any trouble,” Dr. Rose assured the detectives, as though Oshinsky was a child permitted to remain at the dinner table while the grownups talk business.

  Fuller begins with questions about Teresa Hickman’s Friday evening appointment, her general appearance, her mood, and the specific reason she had made her appointment with the dentist.

  Rose answers each without hesitation or the slightest sign of discomfiture.

  “She was an attractive girl, I would say,” he says. “Not beautiful, actually a little on the thin side of the specter, but she had pretty eyes and an engaging natural smile. A dentist can’t help but appreciate a smile like that, especially when the patient grew up in a rural part of the country and probably didn’t have access to regular care.

  “She was in a good mood, or at least as good a mood as can be expected from someone with a toothache,” he says. “The infected tooth was an upper lateral. She told me it hurt like the dickens when she tried to eat something or even just touched it with her tongue.”

  He says he gave her an injection of two percent novocaine and one of his capsules, and then removed the existing filling, which had apparently been put in several years earlier. An unpleasant odor indicated infection and told him to proceed with a root canal, using his drill, reamers, and a f
lush of light peroxide.

  “Then I blew the thing dry and put in one or two cotton points and went ahead and used a medication on another cotton point, just put it up in there, put a little soft cement over that, then put in a soft porcelain on top of that, then after it set drilled into it so that any gas that formed would escape.”

  Arne glances at Miss Grey, who seems to be getting it all and is not put off by the clinical details. No one in the room could have understood a word Rose said.

  “Did she talk to you during this process?” Augie asks him.

  “Well, I had a saliva syringe and cotton in her mouth, so it would have been difficult for her to speak while I was working. But both before and after I’d say she was talkative.”

  Anderson catches Fuller’s eye, and Fuller nods.

  Arne says, “When did she tell you she thought she was pregnant? Before or after you fixed the tooth?”

  Rose turns his head.

  “Afterward,” he says. “I’d helped her out of the chair and led her into the waiting room and encouraged her to lie down on the settee, until the medication I’d given her began wearing off.”

  Curry asks, “What did you do while she was on the settee?”

  “I went back to the operatory and cleaned up.”

  “There was no one else in the office at the time? No other patients waiting or anyone helping you?”

  “No. Mrs. Hickman was the last patient of the day. And, as I believe I told you, mine is a solo practice. I work by myself.”

  Arne can hear Mrs. Rose and her brother stirring behind him, the clearing of a throat and the shuffling of feet on the worn linoleum. The implication of Mel’s questions was obvious. Arne forms a picture of the dentist sitting down beside Teresa Hickman, who is supine and semiconscious and maybe blithely acquiescent, and sliding his hand under her skirt. But maybe, Arne muses, that is only what he might have done.

  “How long was she unconscious?” he asks.

  “She was never unconscious,” Rose replies. “She was in a semiconscious state.”

  Fuller says, “She was talking to you while she was lying on the settee?”

  “I was in the other room most of that time. It was probably another half hour to an hour before she sat up and started to talk.”

  “And that’s when she told you she’d missed her period.”

  Rose seems to be thinking. “Well, no, not right away,” he says. “We talked about other things, as I recall. I inquired about her sister, who’s also a patient of mine, and her husband in West Germany and her little boy, whose name I can’t remember.”

  “Harold Junior,” Curry interjects drily. He gives Anderson a look. Mel is already convinced that Rose is a murderer.

  “She told me she and her husband, when he gets out of the service, want to open a little motor hotel outside of Grand Forks.”

  “Just a little run-of-the-mill chitchat,” Augie says.

  “Yes,” Rose says. “She asked if I minded if she smoked. I told her I don’t allow smoking in the office, for obvious reasons. I’m sure she knew that, so it was odd that she asked. She wasn’t entirely lucid yet.”

  Arne wonders what those “obvious reasons” are. A little tobacco smoke might help mask the medicinal, hot-drill stink of the place. Fuller’s cramped office, as it happens, is thick with cigarette smoke by this time, though the doctor either doesn’t seem to notice or doesn’t mind. Maybe it’s only his own nest he doesn’t want to foul, though yesterday the detectives smoked without any objections in his waiting room.

  “So her statement about missing her period came out of the blue,” Augie says.

  “Well, actually, she’d mentioned it earlier, before I started to work on her, when I asked about her general health.”

  “But she didn’t say at that time she thought you might be the father.”

  “She did not. That was afterward. In the waiting room.”

  “What exactly did she say in the waiting room?”

  “Well, she said she believed I’d gotten her pregnant after I sedated her during her appointment in January.”

  Augie glances at the papers in front of him, and then looks up. “What did she say when you told her that was impossible, that it couldn’t have been you?”

  “She said, ‘Well, I can’t think who else it could be.’”

  “What did you say to that?”

  “I said, ‘Well, you need to think a little harder.’”

  “And she said?”

  “She said, ‘I’ve thought a lot about it already. I think it was you.’ She said, ‘You gave me that pill, and now I am pregnant.’”

  “Did she raise her voice?”

  “No.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. It was a civil conversation.”

  “Her accusation had to make you mad.”

  Rose thinks this over.

  “I was perturbed,” he says finally. “I’m sure my wife and brother-in-law will confirm that it takes a great deal to make me angry.”

  Fuller stares at Rose, whose posture and expression haven’t changed since they started. Rose might as well be talking about the weekend weather.

  Augie, who has a notoriously weak bladder, says it’s time to take a break. He stands, and the others, except May Grey, still jabbing at her steno pad, follow suit.

  Anderson glances back at Ruth Rose and her brother. She looks as unperturbed as her husband. Young Oshinsky, on the other hand, is clearly agitated, twisting in his chair and jiggling his legs, though it’s impossible to tell whether his discomfort is the result of his brother-inlaw’s narrative or the direction in which the detectives’ questions are heading.

  In the men’s room down the hall, Anderson and Curry watch Fuller relieve himself in front of one of the rust-streaked urinals.

  Mel glances toward the men’s room door and says, “The guy’s a cool fucking customer.”

  Shaking himself off and stepping away from the pisser, Augie says, “You ask the rest of the questions, Arne. He’s our guy, but you’re more likely than I am to get him to say so.”

  After their break, instead of taking his chair, Anderson sits down on the edge of Fuller’s desk, at six foot three and two hundred twenty–plus pounds an intimidating figure, all the more so in this elevated position.

  “So then, Dr. Rose,” he begins, looking down at the suspect, “after another several minutes you led Mrs. Hickman out of the office and down the stairs and back to the Montgomerys’ apartment around the corner. Isn’t that what you told us yesterday?”

  Rose pauses for a moment, and then says, “Well, that may not have been entirely accurate. I drove her back to her apartment.”

  “You drove her?”

  “Yes. She seemed a little wobbly on her legs, so I led her down to my car, which was parked around the corner. I’ve done that for other patients—driven them home—especially when it’s been late or the weather’s been bad and the patient’s still under the influence of the medication.”

  Anderson and Curry exchange glances. Anderson hears Augie clearing his throat as he thumbs through the notes on his desk.

  “What time did you take Mrs. Hickman down to your car, Dr. Rose?”

  “Well, as I believe I mentioned yesterday, I don’t wear a watch,” Rose says. “But I suppose it was by this time about ten or ten-thirty. Maybe eleven.”

  “And you drove her home. But her apartment—the Montgomerys’ apartment—is right there where you’re parked, isn’t it?”

  Rose sighs.

  “Yes,” he says. “Let me start again. Terry told me she wanted to talk about her pregnancy. Now she was adamant about it, in fact, and I didn’t feel I had much choice but to discuss the matter with her. So I didn’t drive her home.”

  “Where did you go?”

  Arne, surely no more than anyone else in the room, was not expecting this. He does his best to keep from looking at Mrs. Rose seated behind her husband.

  Rose says, “I’m not sure. South on Nicollet o
r maybe Hennepin, away from downtown, in the direction of the lake. Lake of the Isles. Or Lake Calhoun.”

  “Can you be more definite, Doctor?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” Rose says. “I know we eventually parked by one of the lakes, where I thought we could talk.”

  Ronald Oshinsky is on his feet.

  “We need to stop here, gentlemen,” he says. The young man’s face is red and he looks self-conscious. He has to be as surprised as everyone else, and even with his limited experience he has to know that the discussion is lurching into dangerous waters.

  But Rose looks placidly over his shoulder and says, “There’s no need to stop now, Ronnie. The cat’s out of the box and there’s no reason to beat behind the bush. I took Mrs. Hickman, perhaps unadvisedly, for a ride in my car and we stopped to talk. That’s all.”

  Oshinsky looks at his sister, who says nothing, and sits back down.

  Anderson feels the energy changing in the room as it sometimes does during an interrogation.

  “Did you argue at that point?”

  Rose sits silent for a moment.

  “Well,” he says, “we probably did. I’m having difficulty recalling the specifics. It was very late, and I remember beginning to swoon in my weariness.”

  “Swoon?” Anderson says. The cat’s out of the box. There’s no reason to beat behind the bush. Rose has an interesting way with the language.

  “The poor man hadn’t eaten all day!”

  This, at last, is Ruth Rose jumping into the conversation. “Dr. Rose often forgets to eat. He goes all day without a meal, then suffers the effects.”

  Nobody says a word for a long moment. At last Anderson asks, “When did you finally drop Mrs. Hickman at her apartment?”

  For the first time, Rose displays some emotion. “I don’t know,” he says. He seems genuinely perplexed. “I don’t remember driving back toward downtown, and I don’t remember dropping her off at her apartment. I seem to have blacked out, and when I came to my senses she wasn’t in the car. I didn’t know where she’d gone.”