by W. A. Winter
“Just be sure the girls don’t see it,” Ruth replied. “And let’s not use that language in the house.”
Ronnie is a help and a comfort, but he has a way of making both Ruth and his brother-in-law nervous. (They suspect, but don’t know and don’t want to ask, that he carries a loaded handgun in his briefcase.) After the first of the threatening calls, he suggested the family request a police presence at both the house and the office. But when he called the MPD, he was told that DeShields had already made the request and it was rejected. Whoever Ronnie talked to said the department would “consider” increasing its patrols in the neighborhood, but nobody in the house has noticed any squad cars on either Thirty-ninth or Zenith during the week. Ruth says she hasn’t seen a police car on Zenith since she spotted one that she believes was en route to the crime scene at the trolley tracks.
Now, a few minutes before five this Saturday—a week since Teresa Hickman’s body was discovered—Rose is surprised when Detective Sergeant Anderson knocks on the outer office door.
“It’s a good idea to keep it locked,” Anderson says when Rose lets him in.
“Well, I don’t have to worry about turning away patients,” Rose says, his idea of a small joke. “I don’t have many left. None of my regulars, to be exact.”
The two men stand in the windowless waiting room, where the time of day or night is indeterminate, neither man seeming to know what to say next. Rose notes that Anderson is alone and that it’s a nice enough afternoon for him to have left his overcoat at the office or in his car. When the detective removes his fedora, Rose notices perspiration on his broad forehead.
“Come in, Sergeant,” Rose says. “Have a seat if you wish. What can I do for you?”
Is it possible the detective has a toothache? The big man has smiled only once or twice in the dentist’s presence, but that was enough to suggest that, like most middle-aged, working-class Americans, Anderson has been indifferent about his dental hygiene. He suspects Anderson is a year or two on the bright side of forty and, though ten or fifteen pounds overweight, appears generally healthy. There is, Rose noted on their first meeting, a vigor and physical strength about the man that’s shared by his younger partner, Curry, but not by the other detectives—large, bulky, slow-moving men—that he’s met during the past week.
There’s a quiet solemnity about this detective, too, Rose observes. He hasn’t encountered enough policemen in his life to hazard a generalization, but he’s seen a similar melancholy in ex-servicemen he’s dealt with since the war. He guesses that Anderson is a veteran who saw his share of combat.
Anderson sits down in one of the waiting-room chairs and says, “This is off the books, Doctor. Neither my superiors nor your lawyer would be happy to know I’m here. What you say to me today will not be used against you in court, I promise.”
The detective pauses, and Rose wonders if he’s struggling to decide if he should say what he came here to say. Could this be a ploy to trick him into stating, in no uncertain terms, that he murdered Teresa Hickman? Should he take the detective at his word?
“I won’t tell if you won’t,” Rose says, sitting down himself. He surprised himself. He’s not given to flippant remarks even with family and close friends—so why, he wonders, is he making a joke now? Surely, he doesn’t want to come across as disrespectful or, worse, unmindful of the allegations against him and the seriousness of a young woman’s death.
Anderson, leaning forward, his thick hands clasped between his knees, says, “I’ve had the chance to watch Dante DeShields at work. He’s an excellent lawyer, maybe the best criminal lawyer this side of Chicago. But, trust me, Doctor, you’re going to lose this case in court. You will be convicted of murder and sentenced to twenty years in prison.”
Arne pauses again, and then says, almost under his breath, “But I’m not convinced you’re guilty.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m not,” Rose says.
“Well, a jury will decide you are,” Anderson continues. “Partly because you’re a Jew, and partly because the circumstances you described during our conversations are preposterous. Even a juror who might not care if you’re a Jew—or a Jap or a colored—if there is such a person in this town, is going to laugh out loud when your lawyer says that you blacked out in the car with Teresa Hickman and when you woke up she was gone.”
Rose thinks about DeShields’s insistence on silence and wonders what he could say. Anderson is not taking notes, so the dentist isn’t sure what, if anything, could be used against him if the detective went back on his word. He realizes, with a small sense of surprise, that he likes the man. Despite Ronnie’s offhand comment about a brutality complaint, Anderson impresses him as an intelligent, honest, even considerate man. Rose suspects that he can speak candidly, at least when the two of them talk one-to-one, in such a familiar setting, without a roomful of police, a prosecutor, and a stenographer who’s writing everything down.
The two men stare at each other across the small room. Neither seems to be aware of the Latin music shimmying in from the dance studio across the hall or the thudding bass from the jukebox downstairs. When Rose relights his pipe, Anderson strikes and holds a match to a Camel. So much for the office rules.
“You need to tell me exactly what happened that night,” the detective says.
“I told you,” Rose replies.
“Tell me again.”
Anderson says, “Tell me about your relationship with Grace and Teresa, Dr. Rose.”
Rose draws thoughtfully on his pipe.
“Well,” he says, “I’ve known Mrs. Montgomery since last fall. She came to me because she needed a root canal and because my office was around the corner from her apartment. I’ve treated her for various concerns maybe three or four times since. I’ve also hired her to solicit patient referrals, for which I agreed to pay her a modest amount.”
“Did she provide any referrals?”
“Yes, she did. Two or three, I believe.”
“One of those referrals was her sister, wasn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Did you ever see Mrs. Montgomery outside the office?”
Rose seems to think about this for a moment. Finally, he says, “Not that I recall, though, since she lives nearby, it’s possible we have encountered each other on the street. A couple of times, I felt I had to help her return to her apartment after a long procedure because she was slow coming out of the sedation. On those occasions, I walked her downstairs and around the corner to her building. It would’ve been dark and maybe slippery on the sidewalk. Sometimes there are unsavory men lingering outside the club.”
“‘Lingering’? Do you mean ‘loitering’?”
“Well, hanging around, watching the women—that sort of thing.”
“Did you ever go inside with her?”
“Once for sure. I was afraid she couldn’t make it up the stairs.”
“Was Mr. Montgomery at home that evening?”
“Not that I was aware of. She said he worked late hours at the tractor plant.”
“Did you spend any time in her apartment?”
“She made me a cup of Nescafe. I stayed long enough to drink it.”
“Would you say you developed a friendship with Mrs. Montgomery, Doctor?”
Rose sucks on his pipe, and then takes it out of his mouth.
“She is, or was, a patient of mine. You could say we were friendly, but I’m not sure that made us friends.”
Anderson stares at the dentist. He notices that while he is perspiring in the stuffy anteroom, Rose is not. Rose looks as crisp and comfortable as he must have looked driving away from Zenith Avenue that morning.
“If and when you and Grace Montgomery talked about personal matters, what would you talk about?”
Rose uncrosses and then recrosses his legs.
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says. “She would tell me about her family and talk about her life in North Dakota and her trouble finding a good job in the Twin Cities. She didn’t s
eem to like it here, and I got the impression that she was unhappy with her marriage. Unhappy with just about everything, or so it seemed to me.”
“Have you met her husband?”
“No. And I don’t think I’d care to. He sounds like a brute.”
“Did you ever have sex with Grace, Doctor?”
“Sexual relations with a patient would violate my professional ethics, Sergeant,” Rose replies evenly. “I thought I made that clear. So, no, I have not.”
“Did Grace talk about Teresa?”
Rose sighs and shakes his head.
“She mentioned a sister, but didn’t say much about her until she called one afternoon after the first of the year and said her sister was in town and needed to see a dentist. She said Teresa had a toothache.”
“What were your initial impressions of Teresa Hickman, Doctor?”
“Well, Sergeant,” Rose says, the hint of a smile playing on his lips, as though he is speaking of someone they both knew well, “she struck me immediately as very different from her sister. Physically different, that’s for sure, but in her manner as well. I’m not certain I would have thought of them as sisters if I hadn’t known they were.”
Anderson tries to picture Teresa Hickman presenting herself in the dentist’s office the first time, a pretty young woman with large eyes, a trim, provocative figure, and a smile that makes a dentist swoon. He imagines a cold night, a couple of inches of fresh snow on the sidewalk and maybe flurries in the air, though Rose’s office is uncomfortably warm, the big cast-iron radiators in both rooms hissing and clanking. Because she has a toothache, the young woman presses a handkerchief against her cheek, but the discomfort doesn’t depress her. In fact, there’s a liveliness about her that her older sister doesn’t have and that animates her physical appeal.
“She struck me as a young woman who knew how to enjoy herself,” Rose says. He pauses as though to fix the picture in his mind’s eye. “That seemed apparent the first time I met her.”
“Did you have sex with Teresa Hickman, Dr. Rose?”
“No.” He sighs and shakes his head. “I repeat: I don’t have sex with my patients.”
“Did you attempt to have sex with Teresa Hickman?”
“No.”
“Did you consider having sex with her?”
Rose is quiet. He seems to be thinking. Or trying to remember. Or wondering what he should say.
“I suppose you could say that I considered it,” he says at last. “She led me to believe it was something we both would enjoy.”
Anderson stares at the dentist.
“She propositioned you?”
Rose sighs again.
“Not in too many words,” he says. “But I felt she was flirting with me. She led me to believe she would not be opposed to the idea.”
“How did you respond?”
“I’m sure I told her that that would be against the rules.”
The conversation goes on long enough for Rose to tell Anderson that he had seen Teresa five or six times, always in his office and always in the evening, and that only two of those visits—the first time in January and the last time the night she was murdered—were actual dental appointments.
“She would come by to talk,” Rose says quietly. “She’d call first and come up if I didn’t have a patient. She could do that because she lived close by. We’d sit in this room. Sometimes she seemed sad and confused. She laughed a lot, but she cried, too. She’d be talking about something—her husband or her child or someone at home—and I’d notice that her eyes were brimmed with tears. She said she’d married the wrong man and hated living with her sister and wanted to move somewhere warm, like California.”
“Did she tell you why she didn’t like living with her sister?” Arne asks. The shadowed image of Bud Montgomery looms behind the question.
But Rose shakes his head.
“Teresa would say something and then either take it back or refuse to explain,” he says. “That’s the way she talked.”
“Was there any physical contact between you at all, besides the dental work, during her visits?”
Rose sighs.
“Well, I might have given her a hug.”
“A hug? That’s all?”
“I might have kissed her once.”
“Just once?”
“I don’t remember.”
Anderson lets this sink in.
“Did she ever ask you for money?”
“If she did, it was only during that last visit.”
Rose makes a strange face, his lips pursed as though he’s about to whistle. It’s an expression that Anderson hasn’t seen until now. Rose says, “I felt sorry for the girl, Sergeant. She was sad behind her smile. I think she was very unhappy.” He shook his head, and then added, “Folks think we’re heartless people, but that isn’t true.”
Arne considers those last few words.
Was Rose talking about Jews or about dentists, he wonders.
CHAPTER 7
The driver doesn’t have to buy the Star on the following Monday because a fare left everything but the sports pages on the backseat when he got out in front of the Farmers & Mechanics Bank downtown. Maybe the cheap asshole, a crabby business type who looked like he could do better, figured the paper would be his tip. Anyhow, that’s where the driver gets the evening news today, and as soon as he pulls it into the front seat at a stoplight, he sees the skinny blonde’s face staring back at him.
It finally feels like spring. There’s a bright blue sky with a fragrant breeze from the southwest, and the sun warms his left arm, which, shirtsleeve rolled above the elbow, he dangles out the driver’s-side window.
He turns off the roof light and drives south on Portland, takes a left at Thirty-eighth, then a right onto Chicago, and drives another block. He likes to park here, alongside a large playground and ball field, in the valley between Chicago and Park avenues that runs south from Thirty-ninth Street. He parks on Chicago, across the street from an imposing yellow-brick church, and walks down the steps to a bench near the wading pool. The pool is empty and the benches otherwise deserted, this being only April, but when school lets out in a few minutes, Central High girls will stroll through the park in chattering, giggling twos and threes, with their winter coats off or at least flung open, promising good things to come.
FAMILY, FRIENDS SAY GOODBYE TO SLAIN NODAK WOMAN, the Star’s eight-column, top-of-the-page headline reads. Below the headline are two stories, one by the Star’s Oscar Rystrom and the other by Miles Mckenzie of the United Press. (The driver pays attention to the bylines. He once fancied himself going to college and becoming a newspaperman, and then decided it would be more work than it was worth.) For several minutes, however, the driver can’t get past Teresa Hickman’s photo, which looks in its posed primness very much a high school graduation picture, which of course it is, courtesy, according to the photo credit, of the 1951 Dollar High School Greenback.
There are other photos as well, two on the front page and two more inside on the jump. They were taken on Friday, before and after the funeral in Grand Forks, according to their captions, and show the girl’s soldier husband and farmer father and a cluster of “family and friends,” heads down and eyes averted, coming out of the church after the service. Only one man in the group, an angry-looking little guy with black-rimmed glasses, glares at the photographer. Maybe one of the girl’s brothers, if she had any, or a cousin or a boyfriend. They all look like hayseeds in their bad-fitting suits and outback haircuts. Even in uniform the girl’s husband looks like a hick.
There was a packed church and an “uplifting” Baptist service, according to Rystrom’s account. The pastor, whose sermon had been mimeographed and distributed to the press, talked about spring being the season of “hope and renewal.” While Teresa was murdered on Good Friday, his remarks concluded, “Easter Sunday—Resurrection Day—followed only two days later. Could that be a coincidence? I don’t think so. It tells us that life will triumph over death.”<
br />
“What an idiot,” the driver mutters.
According to witnesses, Teresa’s sister, Grace Montgomery, attempted to give the eulogy, but was “overcome by grief and returned sobbing to her pew.” Walter Kubicek, the sisters’ father, then “rose from his seat, turned to face the congregation, and shouted in a hoarse voice, ‘Terry was a good girl, always neat and punctual, and respected her elders. I don’t think she deserved what happened to her.’”
The driver laughs out loud. “Neat and punctual!” Hell, he thinks, I could have done better than that half-witted bohunk, and I didn’t know the girl. Not officially anyway.
The United Press sidebar begins, “As a pretty teenager growing up in Dollar, ND, population 950, Teresa Marie Kubicek was little known beyond the small town’s limits. Now, as a twenty-one-year-old murder victim coming home from the big city, she is famous.”
The story describes Dollar and a handful of its residents, clearly implying that anybody in his or her right mind would have done what Teresa did and head for the bright lights of the city as soon as he or she could pay for bus fare.
Pretty Teresa Marie.
The writer got that right.
Harold Hickman, the widower, didn’t speak to reporters, nor, apparently, did any of his family in Grand Forks. According to a one-paragraph statement issued on the family’s behalf, Harold and Teresa’s toddler will remain in the care of Hickman’s family when he returns to West Germany at the end of the week. A couple of Teresa’s friends, Kenneth Landa and Constance Canfield Bannister, were quoted, but neither said anything the driver found interesting.
Wrestling with the paper when the breeze rattles it in his hands, the driver returns to the girl’s photo on the front page. This is not what she looked like at the Palace or on Euclid Place that night—at least it’s not the way he remembered, or imagined, her. The large, pale eyes are unmistakable, but the posed and practiced expression in the yearbook photo is not the face that is burned into his brain. He can’t help but wonder what expression she wears in her grave.
