by W. A. Winter
One evening, after a couple of glasses of wine, Ronnie tells the Roses that DeShields will never ask David if he murdered the girl.
“He’d consider the question disrespectful and insulting,” Ronnie explains, one lawyer purporting to describe the mentality of another. “He wants you to believe that he believes in you. Of course, it’s irrelevant what a lawyer thinks or believes regarding a client’s guilt or innocence. His job is to mount the best defense he possibly can and make the government prove its case—if it has one.”
Dr. Rose, who isn’t drinking, says nothing in reply, not certain how he feels about his defender’s opinion. When he welcomes the lawyers into his home the following afternoon, he’s not certain, as far as that goes, whose idea it was to hire DeShields in the first place. The decision seemed to have been made by a committee comprising Ruth, Ronnie, and Rose’s brothers, with Rose himself merely observing—but maybe that’s a dream, too. All he seems to know for sure is that he both likes and fears the scary little man and is glad he’s here.
DeShields sits at the head of the table, either making a point or indifferent to the fact that the head of the household, not his attorney, typically occupies that chair. He rarely smiles, never makes small talk, and holds his Herbert Tareyton cigarette gangster-style between his thumb and forefinger. He has the heaviest five-o’clock shadow Rose has ever seen—yes, heavier than Nixon’s—and could use a peroxide treatment to whiten his smallish, crooked teeth. Rose usually sits to DeShields’s right, and Michael Haydon (who has beautiful teeth, doubtless the result of a straightening appliance purchased by affluent parents during his adolescence) faces him across the table, only infrequently looking up from the notes he scribbles on a growing stack of yellow legal pads. The fourth chair, on the end closest to the kitchen, is often occupied by Ruth, who sees to the men’s coffee and occasional Fanny Farmer assorted chocolates, and doesn’t say a word until DeShields has left for the day.
Ronnie often slips into the room and sits down with his own pen and legal pad in a chair pushed back against the wall next to the built-in buffet. But he doesn’t interrupt or interject himself into the conversation. If DeShields notices him at all, he doesn’t acknowledge him, a snub or at least an indifference that Rose can’t help but wonder reveals the lawyer’s own anti-Semitic bias.
The conversation today, as on most days since they began meeting, is about Rose’s practice, especially his relationship with his patients, especially his female patients. DeShields’s unseen and never named investigator has not yet uncovered any formal complaints with state or county dental boards, nor any informal accusations of improper or unprofessional behavior, nor any allegations of criminal behavior or civil suits alleging paternity—only a few vague, unsubstantiated rumors that add up to nothing but hearsay. The county board does have in its files a half-dozen complaints about unfinished procedures and billing mistakes, but nothing, even in these litigious times, that could damage a dentist’s reputation and career.
DeShields has more than once pressed Rose on his evening and weekend hours and his recruitment of female patients, but Rose has no problem answering the same questions several times. He admires, in fact, the lawyer’s attention to detail and insistence on precision, which, of course, are qualities he prides in himself. In his starched white shirt, polished agate cufflinks, striped tie, and pressed suit pants, Rose sits perfectly still other than to cross and uncross his legs, his hands folded in his lap or in front of him on the polished table. During a break he may light or at least fiddle with one of his pipes and a leather pouch redolent of Mixture No. 79.
This afternoon, though, DeShields mentions for the first time Rose’s late-night visits to the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club, and Rose feels himself color, grateful that Ruth is at that moment in the basement tending to the laundry. He has never mentioned the club visits, innocent as they’ve been, to his family, though Ruth, who’s no stranger to the office, can’t be unaware of the raucous establishment on the street below. DeShields has obviously been briefed on Rose’s occasional afterhours stops there by the investigator, whom Rose imagines to be a sobersided sleuth in the mold of Humphrey Bogart, surely more urbane and sophisticated than the tag teams of Northside palookas sitting in the big sedan out front.
Rose has nothing to be ashamed of or even embarrassed about regarding the club, yet he is both. The Whoop-Tee-Doo is the kind of establishment his parents and brothers would not approve of, garish and loud and chock-a-block with men and women who would never be invited into a Rose living room. The Oshinskys are more tolerant than the Roses and have at least a dozen rough characters among their brood, including the men out front, and Rose wonders if Ruth would in fact be amused to learn that he was among the club’s customers.
DeShields apparently senses Rose’s discomfort because he looks up from his notes and says, “I ask about the club because the police have been there and the prosecution will ask questions, if only on a fishing expedition, and maybe cast aspersions. More importantly, it’s not inconceivable that another suspect could emerge from among the club’s clientele.”
Rose nods.
“Of course,” he murmurs.
Still, he’s relieved when the lawyer moves on to another subject moments before he hears Ruth’s footsteps coming up from the basement.
It’s now one o’clock in the morning, on the first day of May, and Grace Montgomery is celebrating her twenty-eighth birthday by herself. Bud is home, but he’s unconscious on the daybed, snoring like a Cossack, in what used to be Terry’s room, where he’s been sleeping for the past three weeks and where he collapsed upon returning home from another toot, God knows where and with whom.
Grace is drunk, or nearly so, herself, sitting in a foot and a half of tepid water in the rust-stained tub in the apartment’s tiny bathroom. The decrepit tub, behind the locked bathroom door, has become her refuge. So has the booze. She holds in her left hand a pint of Four Roses bourbon, which she lifted that afternoon from Shorty’s Holiday Liquors across the street, and in her right the damp but still burning Pall Mall she snatched from Bud’s stash on his dresser. There’s an inch left in the bottle.
Grace believes she’s lost everything in the past month. Mentally, behind her swimmy eyes, she ticks off the losses as though taking inventory after a burglary:
Her sister and her sister’s baby, who felt as much hers as he was Terry’s, if you counted the amount of time she spent with him.
Her friendship and part-time job with Dr. Rose, who has closed his office and doesn’t answer the phone. (When a crabby-sounding woman answers, Grace hangs up.)
Even her sexual relationship, bruising as it was, with her husband, who, ever since that night he literally crawled into the apartment, bloodied and broken and minus three teeth, has avoided all physical contact and hardly dares speak to her.
“Happy birthday, kiddo,” she says out loud, then downs the last of the whiskey, drops the empty bottle in the water, and watches it bob on its side between her spread legs. She struggles to get up, then, laughing at herself, sits back down in the water, then tries again and manages to throw her right leg over the edge of the tub. Her wet foot slips on the tile floor, and as she pulls her left leg out of the water, she slides and sits down hard on the tile floor, missing the ragged yellow bathmat and laughing even harder.
Wet and cold, she stares at her stubby feet sticking out in front of her. She begins to shiver and then to cry.
She thinks about the newspaper story that appeared after Terry’s funeral, the one in which the writer talked about young women coming to the Twin Cities from small towns around the Midwest, hoping to find a good, or at least a better, life, yet often ending up disillusioned and unhappy and, in at least one noteworthy case, dead. She and Terry already had husbands, such as they are or were—one an abusive drunk who fucked her sister, and the other a cold fish who lived thousands of miles away—but the jobs they managed to find didn’t amount to much, and life here was not so good or even much better than it
was back home.
Terry’s appearance just before Christmas seemed a good thing at the time. Watching her little sister step off the bus at the downtown depot with Hal Junior in her arms, Grace felt a wave of familial emotion she often didn’t feel. She thought that at last she and Terry might have a chance of forming a more or less normal relationship. She did her best to ignore the long looks Terry drew from the men in the crowded depot—soldiers and sailors and traveling salesmen—and noted that Terry seemed genuinely happy to see her.
For her part, Terry seemed grateful for a place to stay and someone to help look after the baby, and she managed to stay out of Bud’s clutches for a while. Grace took to Hal Junior immediately. She had given up on the idea of having children of her own, partly because she was afraid of the kind of father Bud would be, and partly because she was afraid that neither she nor Bud was physically able to conceive one. Until the Army screwed up Hal Senior’s monthly dependent allowance, Terry was self-supporting and no drain on the Montgomerys’ modest resources, and then she was able to pick up the slack when she got the job at the Palace.
Then there was Dr. Rose.
Grace was startled at first by his advances—“I know a better way to take off your lipstick, dear,” he told her after she was ensconced in his big operatory chair and asked for a Kleenex to remove her makeup—but managed to leave after that initial evening appointment, groggy from the sedation but confident that she hadn’t given in to his advances. Then she agreed to return when he called her at the apartment, apologized for “any misunderstanding or personal discomfort” he might have caused, and offered to complete her dental work (a root canal and a crown) free of charge. He also hinted at an employment possibility. After her third, purely social visit—it was a wintry November evening—they became lovers.
All told, they had sex, in his office and in his Packard, maybe a dozen times during the fall and early winter. He was twenty years older than she was and if not exactly homely, then at least very different-looking from the men she was accustomed to, but he was always gentle and considerate. He didn’t force her to do anything. He never insisted she completely undress, for which she was grateful, and he never did more than lower his trousers and shorts. He smelled of pipe tobacco and bay rum. He had a pleasant smile, but she wondered if he ever laughed. He had enormous hands, surprisingly soft but strong and sure, and the largest penis she had ever seen, let alone allowed inside her. He made no painful or unnatural demands and never used filthy language. He was so unlike Bud that Dr. Rose and her husband might have been natives of different planets.
When Terry arrived in December, Grace couldn’t resist telling her that she’d taken a lover. She didn’t say her new man was her dentist, let alone a middle-aged Jew with a wife and kids. But the idea of having two men, counting Bud, when her irresistible sister had none, not counting Hal, tickled her. Terry hadn’t begun sleeping with Bud—at least not to Grace’s knowledge—and had not yet visited Dr. Rose. Tonight, bereft of all three, Grace wonders when she knew she was going to share both her husband and her lover with the sibling she both loved and hated.
It was another snowy night, this time in January, scarcely a month after Terry’s arrival in town. Terry had been complaining about a toothache for a couple of days and asked Grace if she knew a dentist. Grace could have feigned ignorance of the dentist around the corner who was available at night and on weekends, especially to young women, but she didn’t.
“I know someone we can call,” she said instead.
When Terry came home after the first time, it was almost eleven. She was helped up the stairs by the doctor, who smiled like an old friend when Grace opened the door and held onto Terry’s elbow until she was safely inside. The two of them had snow on their heads and shoulders, their winter coats radiating the outside cold. Terry was heavy-lidded and wobbly and eager to lie down. Grace, of course, knew the feeling. She knew that Terry would sleep deep into the following morning and probably not be good for much the rest of the next day. No matter; Terry didn’t have a job yet.
Grace would be in charge of Hal Junior again, but she didn’t mind. What was bothering her was the thought that Dr. Rose had been unable to keep those big hands off her sister once he’d sedated her and taken care of her bad tooth.
Standing now, holding onto the edges of the wash basin beside the tub, Grace avoids her reflection in the foggy medicine-cabinet mirror. She recalls Terry the afternoon following that initial visit to Dr. Rose, lying in the tub, her naked body sleek as a baby seal’s, one slim, shapely leg protruding from the water and a pretty painted toe playing with the dripping faucet, smiling at something but telling Grace nothing. Terry wasn’t going to gloat. She was no longer a randy teen determined to sleep with every able-bodied male in the county and make sure her sister kept score. She was now an adult, a wife and a mother, albeit as insatiable as ever. Grace knew what Terry was doing. She always knew.
Grace knew that Terry had been back to Dr. Rose three or four times between that first appointment and the last, each time telling Grace she had an urgent situation the doctor needed to treat. By that last visit, however, Terry was also having sex with Bud, plus the photographer, possibly her boss at the Palace, and God knows who else, all of them younger men who had to be more physically appealing than Dr. Rose. Maybe she was drawn to the Seconal, which she wouldn’t get from her other lovers.
Grace and Terry said nothing to each other about their respective relationships with Dr. Rose, nor did Grace and Dr. Rose ever discuss Terry. Terry’s latest pregnancy was news, though hardly a shock, and Grace, to this day, doesn’t know if she believes that the unborn baby was Rose’s, not when there were so many other possibilities.
But if the baby wasn’t his, she wonders, why would he kill her?
SUMMER 1955
CHAPTER 8
People bitch about the snow and frigid temperatures of a Minnesota winter, but it’s the summer heat and humidity that bring out the worst in the natives.
This year, in the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Minneapolis will record six homicides, more than half the total for the year: two by gunfire on the same night in the same house on Fourth Avenue South, a fatal beating behind the Sourdough Bar in the Gateway, a domestic knifing in a Seven Corners rooming house, the intentional drowning of an infant in a Nordeast duplex, and the bludgeoning of Herman Goranski, a sixty-eight-year-old recluse in one of the city’s few remaining tenements, kitty-corner from Holy Rosary Catholic Church on East Twenty-fourth Street.
The Gateway case, the domestic, and the infanticide were solved at the site before the bodies were removed; the Fourth Avenue shootout involved coloreds killing coloreds during a crap game, which is low- (or no-) priority downtown. Which leaves Herman Goranski, whose body was discovered by the building’s absentee owner after other tenants complained about the stink.
On June 18, a Saturday, the temperature reaches the high nineties by early afternoon. Arne Anderson and Mel Curry are standing in the dead man’s apartment, sweat liquefying their faces and handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and mouths. The corpse has moments earlier been removed by Fred MacMurray’s crew, and Goranski’s pathetic estate lies strewn across the grimy floor. Luckily, it’s a small apartment—a single room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, plus an alcove that passes for a kitchen, and a doorless closet. The toilet is down the hall, shared by the floor’s other hapless denizens.
The old man’s head has been crushed. Cause of death, Dr. Fred will declare, was blunt-force trauma. Anderson stumbles over a maple table leg sticking out from under the bed. He picks it up with a gloved hand and extends it toward Curry, showing his partner what both men are right away pretty certain are bloodstains.
“Whoever killed him he let in,” Curry says, acknowledging the absence of forced entry. (Goranski’s apartment is on the third floor; its only window is painted shut, and the flimsy wooden door was unlocked when the building’s owner found him.) There are, according to Jordan Fan
shawe, one of the city’s more notorious slumlords, fourteen other tenants, twelve of them men, and the detectives will speak to all of them, except for one who’s recovering from a broken hip in a nursing home, before the sun sets today.
With the shiny toe of his two-tone wingtip, Curry probes a pile of queer magazines and paperback novels, neither the names nor the authors of which mean anything to Mel, who looks only at smut showcasing women. Goranski’s dresser drawers have been pulled out and dumped on the threadbare rug in front of it. The victim’s worn-out billfold has been riffled and tossed atop the rubble. Even its unbuttoned change pocket is empty.
“Robbery seems to have been the idea here,” Mel says. But the old guy was wearing only skivvies, and they were down around his skinny ankles. “Okay, money and sex. Or sex and then money if there was any money in the billfold.”
“Couldn’t have amounted to much of either,” Anderson mutters behind his handkerchief. The heat and the reek are threatening to cost him his lunch. He’s tempted to use the murder weapon, still in his hand, to smash the stuck window for a breath of fresh air.
“Let’s get the hell out of here and let the lab guys find what they can find,” he says. “I’ll get Hessburg and LeBlanc to brace the other tenants.”
When the detectives get back to the office, they’ll check Goranski’s name against the department’s homosexual register and be surprised if he’s not in it.
But the Goranski case is only a distraction. Anderson and Curry will poke at it over the next several weeks the way a steak-eater pokes at a side salad. Almost two and a half months have passed since Teresa Hickman’s murder became an obsession, but it might have been yesterday.
