The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  Harold Hickman, in his green uniform and garrison cap, arrives with his middle-aged parents and a young woman the Herald’s man identifies as Hickman’s kid sister. The Hickmans don’t look bereft so much as harassed and annoyed. At the church’s front door, gingerhaired, bowlegged Walter Kubicek offers Private Hickman a picket-fence smile and an awkward military salute, but Hickman responds with only the slightest nod of acknowledgment. Hickman’s family seem determined to keep some space between themselves and the Kubiceks, and Robert imagines that among the differences is a city-country divide between the comparatively urbane Grand Forks Hickmans and the Kubicek rubes from Dollar.

  The biggest surprise is Kenneth Landa. He is not the rugged, broad-shouldered field hand that Robert imagined, but a slight, nervous-looking young man with black-rimmed glasses who could pass for a high school sophomore. He stands to the side, apart from both the Kubiceks and the Hickmans, though Robert knows that he and Harold Hickman are cousins. He heard that Landa and Hickman became rivals after Kenny made the mistake of introducing Teresa to Hal, at the time a sophomore and ROTC dropout at the North Dakota Agricultural College in Fargo.

  The service is mercifully brief. No attempt is made to broadcast beyond the church’s walls whatever words and music are employed inside to bid farewell to the deceased. The reporters hear only an occasional muffled exultation from the pastor and the high-pitched skirl of the church’s organ. Just before the service ends, the officious man in the orange toupee informs the journalists that there will be refreshments in the church parlor upon the service’s conclusion, but only for family and friends.

  “Grand Forks has several establishments that will be willing to serve you,” the man tells the reporters and photographers. He looks at them as though he’s talking to a scrum of lepers.

  “Fuck you,” Oscar Rystrom says under his breath. “And your ugly wife.”

  George Appel guffaws—an odd sound at a funeral.

  “How do you know his wife is ugly?” Marty Rice asks Rystrom.

  “You can tell,” Rystrom says.

  As most of the outsiders either head back to their cars or make plans to hang around and try to talk to family members after the burial out back, Mel Curry asks Robert Gardner if he wants to ride with him to Dollar. Detective Hessburg stayed in Grand Forks in order to speak to the police and other possible sources about the Hickman clan, and Curry tells Robert that he wouldn’t mind a “little company” on the sixty-mile drive into the North Dakota hinterlands.

  “The truth is, I don’t have any sense of direction out here,” he says. “All by myself I could wind up in Canada.”

  Robert is surprised and flattered by the invitation, whatever the detective’s real motive. He finds Curry attractive and interesting, though they’ve exchanged only a few words since the Hickman investigation began. He admires Curry’s intensity and soft-spoken manner, which doesn’t gibe with his tough-guy-with-a-hair-trigger-temper reputation, and sets him apart from the other cops Robert has met on the job. “Anderson is a loner, hard to approach and get close to, a combat vet with demons,” Mckenzie told him during a brief primer on the MPD’s homicide detectives a few days earlier. “Lakeland, Wren-shall, and Riemenschneider are old-school boom and bluster, probably on the take, and can’t be trusted. Hessburg and LeBlanc are inexperienced and ambitious, out for themselves. Curry’s a good guy, reasonably trustworthy. He’s also volatile, maybe a trifle unbalanced. Don’t get on his bad side.”

  Robert doesn’t like the country, either, and is easily disoriented even in the unevenly populated farmland of southeastern Minnesota that surrounds Rochester, where he grew up. He smiles at the idea of finding his way with Mel Curry, a pair of city slickers trying to navigate the wilderness.

  He wonders, briefly, sitting beside the detective in the unmarked Chevrolet, if there are professional guidelines he ought to keep in mind—if sharing a ride with a cop in the middle of a murder investigation, a ride initiated by the cop, is proper. He quickly decides that it is, so long as he doesn’t become the cop’s source of information instead of the other way around. Robert is mindful, of course, of his own secret and the possible consequences of revealing it, not to mention the temptation he will no doubt have to fight to keep from sharing it with a friendly cop.

  He wonders how exactly he should talk to Curry, if, pen and notebook in hand, he should ask questions about the Hickman investigation or if he should be more circumspect and make general conversation, about the crime rate in Minneapolis, for instance, and the challenges of postwar police work. What would more experienced reporters such as Milt Hickok and Marty Rice do in this situation? Then he tells himself it doesn’t matter because he’s the one sitting beside Mel Curry on the road to Dollar.

  “Christ,” Curry mutters about twenty minutes into the drive. “I’d put a bullet between my eyes if I had to live out here.” He doesn’t sound as though he’s kidding.

  The detective tells Robert he grew up on the Near North Side of Minneapolis, attended Vocational High School downtown, worked on the Milwaukee Road while doing some prizefighting around the Midwest, and joined the MPD after returning home from three years in the Merchant Marine. “Other than that time at sea, I’ve never lived anywhere but in the middle of a city,” he says. He married his high school sweetheart, got divorced, then married again, got divorced, then married a third time—“this one’s a keeper”—on Valentine’s Day, two months ago.

  Though the detective doesn’t ask, Robert is eager to maintain the conversation. He offers his own private history, slightly more detailed.

  “My dad and three of my uncles are surgeons at the Mayo Clinic,” he says. “I attended public school in Rochester, then broke my parents’ hearts when I went off to study journalism at the U of M.” (“Who could blame them?” Curry interjected, seriously or not.) “I worked a year at the Post-Bulletin, then came up to the Cities and got the job at the United Press bureau. I’m staying with my sister in Linden Hills until I find my own place.”

  Curry, one hand on the wheel, turns his head.

  “Linden Hills,” he says. “So you know the area where the girl was found.”

  Robert blinks. Why did he mention Linden Hills?

  “Well, kind of, I guess,” he says. “It’s a block from my sister’s apartment.” Not to mention, he doesn’t say, a few steps from the apartment where I was fucking my girlfriend the night of the murder.

  It occurs to Robert that, despite his fears, there could be some benefit in telling the detective about his discovery. It could give him an importance unique among local reporters. It could also make him a suspect.

  Looking out at the empty highway, Curry says, “You didn’t see anything important that night, did you?”

  Once more, Robert can’t tell if Curry is making a joke. In his mind’s eye, he sees the girl’s hand protruding from the weeds. It takes him a moment to find his voice.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  The detective and the journalist say nothing for several minutes. Robert would now give just about anything to be somewhere other than in a car with Mel Curry. God knows what Curry is thinking. Robert hurriedly conjures up the picture of Pam in the back bedroom, Pam in her black bra and underpants and then Pam slipping out of them, and is relieved when he feels the familiar stirring. Maybe Curry is having a similar daydream about his third wife, the “keeper,” who, Robert guesses, given the detective’s good looks, is a sexy woman in her own right.

  * * *

  The town of Dollar, when it suddenly materializes on the North Dakota prairie, is pretty much what Robert anticipated.

  The sign says DOLLAR Pop. 950, though, on this Friday afternoon, none of those residents appears to be out and about, either on the short main drag or among the dozen-odd blocks of modest homes that look, the few that Robert sees, forlorn and needing paint in sere, mostly treeless yards. The three-block-long main street—U.S. Highway 2, reduced to a fifteen-mile-per-hour speed trap through town—is home to a Philips
66, a drugstore with a tin Greyhound bus sign swaying in the breeze out front, an out-of-business Ben Franklin emporium, a couple of storefront saloons facing each other across the street, a derelict movie house, a mortuary, a Catholic church, a Lutheran church, and a two-story frame building that advertises a doctor, dentist, and lawyer. All the establishments except the doctor and dental offices seem to be closed for the day.

  “Everybody went to Grand Forks for the funeral,” Curry says. “We beat ’em home.”

  The dental office makes Robert think of Dr. Rose, but when he and Curry step inside they learn that its owner, a Dr. James A. London, is a recent University of North Dakota grad who didn’t arrive in town and hang out his shingle until the first of the year and, according to the woman behind the receptionist’s window, is currently vacationing in Florida. His predecessor, the woman confides when Curry shows his badge, died “by his own hand” two years earlier. “That’s not unusual, dentists committing suicide,” she adds in a whisper, though there appears to be no one else around to hear her. “I read in a magazine article once that dentists take their own lives far more often than other professional men, though I don’t remember if the article said why.” She tells Curry that until that man’s arrival, most Dollar residents, including no doubt the Kubiceks, drove to Hartford or Grand Forks for their dental work. She says, however, that she remembers Terry Kubicek, “may she rest in peace,” and that Terry had a “lovely smile.”

  The visitors split up and spend an hour knocking on doors, sticking their heads in an open establishment when they find one, asking their separate but probably similar questions.

  Back in the car, Curry grins and says, “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.” But neither man has learned anything he didn’t know, or hadn’t heard, already: Teresa Kubicek—everyone calls her Terry—was a “very popular” girl. She had a lot of friends both boys and girls, did okay in school (Grace was “the brains in the family,” they heard more than once), had a “pretty” singing voice, loved to dance, and never got into “serious” trouble. It was unclear whether the latter reflected the speaker’s ignorance of or indifference to the reports of shoplifting and flights of “wild” behavior that were by now common knowledge among Twin Cities investigators and reporters.

  The pastor of Our Savior’s Lutheran Church, now semiretired, told Robert that Terry was confirmed in 1948.

  “She was a nice girl, always considerate of others,” the Reverend Evert Thomason said. “But she had a careless side, too. She made bad choices sometimes. I worried about her.” He declined to elaborate.

  Everyone the visitors spoke to knew and expressed regret about her murder, though not everyone seemed especially surprised.

  “The Kubiceks have been cursed since Marva ran off with that Holy Roller,” a muscular middle-aged man who worked at one of the grain elevators off Main Street opined, citing the untimely deaths of Terry’s brothers and Marva herself. “Poor Walter—he never knew if he should shit or shine his shoes,” the man, J.D. Fessler, said. “Still doesn’t, you ask me. All those deaths in his family left him permanently shellshocked.”

  A pair of fiftyish women who might have been twins mentioned rumors that Terry had divorced Harold Hickman and secretly married Kenneth Landa.

  “Kenny was her one true love,” said the first woman, and her mirror image nodded. The women identified themselves as the Hamblin sisters and said they lived down the block from Walter Kubicek on Third Street. “That’s after he sold the farm and moved into town,” the second woman said.

  A young man in a double-breasted suit refueling a yellow DeSoto at the town’s lone filling station spoke darkly of a rumor that Terry had become a “top-dollar prostitute” in the Twin Cities. “I’m not sure I believe that,” the man, who declined to give his name, told Robert, “but I knew Terry in high school, and I can tell you it wouldn’t be beyond the realm of possibility. She had the looks and a way about her, that’s for sure. At the same time, I think most of the gossip about her has been wishful thinking on the part of a lot of guys around here.”

  “That include you?” Robert ventured.

  The man grinned.

  “That’s for me to know and you to find out,” he said.

  The Kubicek farm, now reportedly owned by a Hartford family, is in obvious disrepair behind a ragged evergreen windbreak that flanks the gravel approach off the highway. Curry drives up to the house, but neither man can find any sign of life, human or animal, on the property. Robert feels himself shiver in the chilly gloaming as he looks around, hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his overcoat. On their way back toward town, he sees a cluster of barren trees bordering a meandering creek and wonders if the sheltered space once provided cover for Terry and her boyfriends.

  At their Grand Forks hotel that evening, Robert calls the bureau from a pay phone in the lobby and reports what he’s learned, prefacing his remarks by saying that neither the Kubiceks nor the Hickmans have been willing to talk to reporters, hoping he is right about that.

  In Minneapolis, Miles Mckenzie says, “Well, goddammit, then you’ll have to stay another day. Try to talk to the girl’s old man and that ex-boyfriend, Leander or Landreau or whatever his name is. Her husband, too, if he isn’t on his way back to Deutschland already. Call in what you get and find a way back tomorrow night or Sunday morning. I’ll probably need you Sunday afternoon.”

  Before hanging up, Mckenzie tells him that Rose was indicted that afternoon and will be arraigned the next morning. “Then he’s expected to post bond and go home,” he says.

  Curry is drinking whiskey with Sid Hessburg in the noisy lobby bar. He looks up, but doesn’t invite Robert to join them. Robert thanks the detective again for the ride out to Dollar and then joins the half-dozen Twin Cities reporters hunched over their drinks and complimentary bowls of shelled peanuts at a long table next to the wall. Nobody is excited about spending the night in Grand Forks.

  Oscar Rystrom, already slurring his words, is speculating about the “rampant inbreeding out here in the boondocks,” and George Appel, who’s heard this before, seems to be struggling to stay awake. Robert glances at his wire service rival, Marty Rice, who’s enjoying a Seagram’s 7 and 7. Rice rolls his eyes and smiles at Robert. Not a bad guy for the competition, Robert thinks.

  Robert wonders how he’s going to get back to Dollar, assuming that’s where he’d catch up with Walter Kubicek, then decides to stay put in Grand Forks and try to find Kenny Landa and one of the Hickmans, preferably the widower. Mckenzie will be okay with that. Then he’ll take the train back to Minneapolis on Sunday morning.

  He’s no longer thinking about the “definitive portrait” of the small-town girl who comes to grief in the city. Instead, he wonders when he’ll see Pam Brantley again.

  At four o’clock Saturday afternoon, Dr. Rose sits at the desk in his private office, looking with little interest at the numbers in the cloth-bound ledger in front of him. Following an unusually swift grand jury proceeding yesterday, he was indicted on charges of first-degree murder in the death of Teresa Marie Hickman. This morning, after entering a plea of not guilty, his lawyer, Dante DeShields, posted a $15,000 cash bond and Rose went home. Having nothing else to do, and with a vague notion of putting his affairs in order prior to what he expects to be a prolonged hiatus, he then drove himself to his office.

  He can hear what he’d describe as “mambo music” from the dance studio across the hall and the pounding jukebox racket from the club below, but pays no attention to either. Breaking his own stricture against tobacco smoke in the office, he packs, tamps, and lights his pipe, always a pleasing ritual, and wonders what he’s supposed to do with himself in the absence of patients. This will be the most difficult phase of his “situation,” he muses. The inability to practice dentistry is almost impossible for him to comprehend.

  Thanks to Ruth, talking to his daughters was not as painful as he feared it would be. She told the girls, “Your father never laid a malicious hand on that
poor young woman and had nothing to do with her death. Mr. DeShields will make that perfectly clear if and when the case goes to trial. Your father is a good and gentle man and would never do anything that would besmirch the family or damage his practice. But our lives will be different, at least for a couple of months, and in the meantime we must carry on as best we can.”

  She could have added, but didn’t: “Our people have survived far worse than this.”

  Of course the girls cried, especially Lael, the younger of the two, but they take after the Oshinskys, a tough, stolid, and when necessary combative family, and will soldier through this crisis. Ruth has already confirmed plans for the girls’ six-week summer camp in northwestern Wisconsin that begins shortly after school lets out in mid-June.

  The appointment cancelations began the Monday after news of Rose’s arrest appeared in the papers, then continued through the new week and didn’t stop until there were no appointments left to cancel. With her husband’s approval, Ruth hired a woman who worked for her family’s business to sit in his shuttered office and answer the phone while Rose, on his lawyer’s advice, speaks to no one and keeps a low profile at home. On the legal pad the woman left for the doctor are sixty-seven canceled appointments beginning on April 11, representing nearly every woman, man, and child on his active patient list.

  Most of the threats have come by way of phone calls, to both the house and the practice. Anonymous and all but two or three a male’s voice, the worst cursing Minnesota’s abolition of the death penalty more than forty years earlier and wishing Rose at least a life sentence at “backbreaking labor.” Several letters bristled with anti-Semitic language, often accompanied by crude drawings of large-nosed men, nooses, daggers, and swastikas. The most unusual mailing was a supposedly comical rant against dentists that had been cut from a yellowed men’s magazine and clotted with scurrilous handwritten marginalia.

  Ruth’s brother Ronnie, who had begun staying at the house, collected everything in a large cardboard box that he kept in a closet in his bedroom. “If one of these morons resorts to more than words,” he explained to his sister, “the police will want to look at this shit.”