The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  The important point is, Rose used the knowledge, skills, and tools to repair a patient’s tooth. The woman may have been relieved to get out of the chair when he finished, but she did so without the pain that had plagued her and interfered with her employment for the past several days. He provided her with the relief from disease and pain he has always believed to be the dentist’s mission, regardless of what the public thinks about dentists in general and now himself in particular.

  Sadly, the larger situation hasn’t changed.

  Ronnie, nervous as a cat and presumably armed, is still a boarder, sleeping in the spare bedroom and taking most of his meals in the Roses’ breakfast nook, and DeShields, accompanied by Michael Haydon, is an almost daily visitor, reviewing what seems to be every moment of Rose’s life, not just the night and early morning of April 8 and 9. The Roses miss their daughters and worry about the cost of their extended stay at the Wisconsin youth camp, but they console themselves with the knowledge that the girls are safe and enjoying themselves 150 miles from the threats and gossip and worries at home.

  For a while, from late May deep into June, though Rose rarely ventures outside, he and Ruth enjoy the sensation of an approximate return to normalcy. The number of ominous phone calls and anonymous letters has decreased appreciably, the bigots and the haters presumably having run low on vitriol and stamps, and the Chrysler Imperial with the large men inside makes only intermittent stops on Zenith Avenue. Ruth throws open the upstairs windows in the morning. It’s almost—but not quite—possible to forget that the master of the house will soon be on trial for murder.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” DeShields, a dark cloud surrounding any possible silver lining, cautions the family. “As we get close to trial, the press will stir up the muck again. And when the trial begins, Katie bar the door.”

  On June 23, Anderson and Curry return to the Montgomery apartment on Fifteenth Street. Their focus today is Grace, so they wait in their car across the street until Bud, who, judging from outward appearance, has more or less recovered from his cellar beating (he still limps slightly), leaves the building before they go inside.

  For the past several days, at Scofield’s insistence, the homicide crew has been revisiting Rose’s patients, past and present—all to no avail, at least so far as legitimate reports, complaints, and rumors of misconduct are concerned. Plenty of people believe that Rose is “unusual” or “a little odd,” but nobody is either able or willing to say that he has done anything untoward with a patient. His Nicollet Avenue neighbors, upstairs and down, cast no aspersions, either.

  Despite their lingering differences, Anderson and Curry agree that the most important witness, assuming DeShields won’t allow Rose himself to testify, will be the victim’s sister.

  It takes Grace Montgomery a good five minutes to answer the door, and when she does she looks like hell, even worse than during their last visit. This time, though, her pathetic condition appears to be self-inflicted, the death’s-door pallor and hollowed-out eyes the result of too much booze and not enough fresh air. The bumps and black-and-blue bruises are now the kind a drunk acquires while attempting to maneuver around the furniture and in and out of doors. She is smoking when she answers the door and is naked beneath her unbuttoned housecoat.

  The apartment is closed and dark. It smells of heat, sweat, cigarettes, and something gone bad in the kitchen.

  “You need to tell us everything you know about Dr. Rose,” Curry says. “You can tell us here or downtown.”

  Grace sighs, shakes her head, and sits down on a messy sofa, shoving several days’ newspapers onto the floor.

  “Okay, shoot,” she says. The idea of telling the cops to shoot makes her giggle. Much of her naked body, white and plump as a bedroom pillow, is falling out of the housecoat.

  Anderson says, “First go put some clothes on, ma’am. We’ll wait.”

  When she returns to the living room, she’s wearing a wrinkled dress and a pair of well-worn carpet slippers.

  Over the next hour and a half, she tells them, albeit haltingly and slurring her words, about her dental appointments, “friendship,” and eventual intimacy with Rose, about sending Terry to the dentist to treat her toothache, Terry’s evening visits to Rose after that initial appointment, the night of Terry’s murder, and, most surprisingly, her doubts about Rose’s guilt.

  “You don’t believe that Rose killed your sister?” Curry says.

  Grace lights a cigarette from a fresh pack of Pall Malls she brought from the bedroom.

  “There were a lot of men in Terry’s life,” she says.

  “We know that, and we’ve talked to several of them,” Mel says. “Including your husband.”

  Grace wearily waves away the cigarette smoke in front of her face.

  “Didja talk to Richard Ybarra?”

  “Yes,” Curry says. “He told us he was in Duluth, or on his way up there, the night of the murder. His alibi checks out.”

  “Do you know better?” Anderson says.

  Grace makes a face that might include a smile. She shrugs and says, “I know that Terry was sweet on him. I know he picked her up one night after her shift, and they were out until early the next morning. A day or two later she had a bunch of pictures he took and said, ‘I think I’m in love.’”

  “When was that?”

  Grace ashes the cigarette and coughs into her hand.

  “I dunno. March maybe, early April. Sometime before she died.” She giggles, and then starts to cry.

  Arne stares at the woman with a combination of pity and contempt.

  “Ybarra had a car?” he says, recalling that his detectives had picked up the photographer at the bus station.

  “It wasn’t his,” Grace says. “He’d borrow his buddy’s, Terry said.” She says she didn’t know the buddy’s name.

  “Did you ever meet Ybarra?” Arne says.

  “No. But I could smell his aftershave on Terry’s clothes. He must’ve slapped it on real heavy. Bud said Terry came home smelling like a queer.”

  Grace Montgomery, Arne muses, is a lush and a liar. (Who isn’t? he asked himself.) Still, if her husband doesn’t kill her and she doesn’t drink herself to death, she’s going to be the center of attention when the Big Show starts next month.

  Then he recalls his last conversation with Rose—that quiet Saturday afternoon in late April—and asks her, “Do you talk to Dr. Rose anymore, Grace?”

  She looks at him, and again her eyes fill with tears. She shakes her head. From somewhere between the sofa cushions she pulls out a couple of wadded tissues.

  “He told me the two of you are friends,” Arne says, taking a leap, knowing the conversation is near its end. “Is that so?”

  Grace’s doughy face collapses on itself.

  “Dr. Rose is a very nice man,” she says, barely audible between sobs. “People don’t want to believe that, but he is.”

  CHAPTER 9

  No longer tied to the Linden Hills neighborhood by family and sex, Robert Gardner now spends most of his waking hours downtown.

  He likes the rush and hustle and flashing neon of the bars and supper clubs that line Hennepin Avenue between the Gateway and the Auditorium and jut out in both directions along the busy cross-streets between Washington and Grant.

  He likes what people call the “character” of the Loop’s older structures: the ornate Metropolitan Life building (reported to be marked for demolition if the federal government’s Urban Renewal program ever gets under way), the broad-shouldered Farmers & Mechanics, First National, and Northwestern National banks, the glittery Century, RKO Orpheum, Lyceum, Lyric, World, and State movie houses, the Curtis, Leamington, and Nicollet hotels, the clock-towered courthouse, neoclassical Federal Reserve, intimidating Great Northern Depot, and august Westminster Presbyterian Church. All of this is a big part of why he moved to the city, he tells himself while walking the hot, noisy, litter-strewn streets.

  During working hours, Robert either chases fire rigs
and ambulances around town in his Ford coupe or works the phones at the United Press office, confirming the identification of the city’s latest drowning or industrial-accident victim. He and Tommy Pullman and whoever else is on duty at the time take turns recording for posterity the names, ages, and addresses of the day’s traffic fatalities in a large, scruffy ledger they refer to as St. Peter’s Log.

  After work, he has become a frequent patron of Smokey’s Bar & Grill on Fourth Street. In the summer of 1955, Smokey’s remains the preferred afterhours hangout of Mill City detectives, prosecutors, criminal lawyers, and journalists, most of whom can thereby drink and schmooze only steps from their offices. Miles Mckenzie is a regular, often ducking in for a midafternoon bump after announcing that he’s running downstairs to plug his parking meter. Milt Hickok helps shut the joint down after shuffling over from the police reporter’s cubbyhole at the courthouse. Oscar Rystrom and George Appel will drop in after their papers go to press.

  Dante DeShields occasionally holds forth at a corner table in the company of local political bigwigs, though he’s rarely seen since going to work for Dr. Rose. Michael Haydon, when temporarily off DeShields’s leash, makes an occasional appearance, showing surprising signs of a comic sensibility and an admirable capacity for Irish whiskey. Homer Scofield’s notoriously bibulous predecessor, Ferdinand Twyman, now back in private practice, is often at or under another table, though Scofield himself, a teetotaling Methodist, has yet to darken the establishment’s door.

  One stuffy evening at the end of June, Robert finds himself sitting beside Meghan Mckenzie at a crowded table with her father-in-law, the AP’s Marty Rice, and a trio of Star sportswriters who are drunkenly arguing about the Millers’ pitching staff. Meghan, whom he sees up close and at length tonight for the first time, is a pretty woman in her late twenties or early thirties. He assumes that she’s not a breathless nymphomaniac like Pam Brantley, but her quiet self-possession, not to mention her luminous green eyes and the auburn hair that cascades down her back, is very appealing. On this occasion, Robert learns that her husband, Miles’s son Howard, is a copyright attorney who works for the papers and on this night is in Des Moines on company business.

  Away from the bureau, Meghan turns out to be relaxed and friendly, a talker and a toucher, though not egregiously so. She has been nursing her Beefeater’s-and-tonic for an hour, and keeps an eye on her father-in-law across the littered table, signs, in Robert’s eyes, of a cautious, sensible personality. On his third Grain Belt, he begins entertaining thoughts of sleeping with her tonight. Those thoughts begin to evaporate when he notices Miles’s gimlet eye on him from across the table, and disappear completely when Miles abruptly rises and shouts above the room’s racket, “’Bout time I drive you home, Meg,” and Meghan dutifully gets up to leave.

  Many of the men in the vicinity turn their heads and follow her progress away from the table. Robert hears his boss saying, “You’re lucky, honey. Five years ago, they wouldn’t let a gal in here.”

  Watching Meghan wend her way toward the door, Robert wonders if he’s destined to fall in love only with married women.

  The following evening Robert and other late arrivals dash into Smokey’s seconds ahead of a sudden thunderstorm. Meghan isn’t there—nor, for some reason, is her father-in-law—but Mel Curry is, seated at a table next to an upright piano that Robert has never heard anyone play.

  Curry sits with a small group of men and women, including, if Robert can judge from their proximity and body language, his newlywed wife, a diminutive, dark-eyed beauty in a tight dress. He recognizes Frenchy LeBlanc and Sid Hessburg from the MPD, but that’s all besides Curry. LeBlanc sees Robert, but ignores him, probably unable to recall his name. Curry grins and hoists his glass in his direction before returning to the conversation around him.

  Robert makes his way through the crowd, spotting several additional familiar faces from the courthouse, his eyes stinging from the thick tobacco smoke. He sees Marty Rice standing by himself at the bar and makes his way over, inserting himself between Marty and an obese copy editor from the Tribune. Robert and Marty have become friendly in the past several weeks. Both rent bachelor apartments on the same block of Pleasant (Rice is recently divorced) and occasionally share a ride downtown.

  Despite working for the competition, Marty is open and encouraging. Both men have reported, written, or rewritten stories relating to the Hickman case and Rose’s impending trial, though neither has dug up anything new or particularly interesting in the past couple of weeks. Robert admires Marty’s understated confidence and facile prose.

  They have little newsworthy to talk about during this lull in the case, so the topic is usually women, cars, or baseball. Tonight Rice says he’s got a couple of tickets to the Millers-Saints game on July 3, and Robert says, hell, yes, he’d love to come along. He still hasn’t been to a game this year (though he religiously tracks the box scores) and the season’s almost half gone.

  Coming out of the men’s room a few minutes after midnight, he is surprised to find Mel Curry at his side, squeezing his arm, and pulling him out of the tipsy traffic in the hallway. The detective looks a little drunk himself, his eyes bloodshot and squinty, though that may be from the cigarette smoke.

  “I want to talk to you,” Curry says, clearly enough.

  “Now?” Robert says.

  “No time like the present,” Curry says and directs Robert to the exit at the end of the hall.

  The alley behind Smokey’s is what you’d expect: a narrow, foulsmelling passage lined with overflowing garbage cans, sagging towers of empty cardboard boxes, and a couple of dozing tramps who’ve shambled over from Washington Avenue and will probably spend the night where they lie. Halfway down the alley, a sailor with the trousers of his summer whites down around his ankles is doing his inebriated best to penetrate his evening’s rental. The thunder and rain have stopped, replaced by a damp, debilitating heat and a chain of large, oil-slicked puddles.

  “Are you the skinny guy with glasses?” Curry asks Robert.

  There’s a harsh overhead light that casts the detective’s face into shadow. He’s let go of Robert’s arm, but leaves the reporter, his back against Smokey’s brick wall, no space to maneuver or even think about fleeing. Robert is sober enough to understand that the detective is serious, but sufficiently buzzed to believe that a clever response might be the ticket.

  “Well, lemme see,” he says, grinning broadly and slurring his words. “I’m skinny and I wear glasses. So you betcha, Kemo Sabe.”

  Curry drives his fist into Robert’s midsection. He does it so swiftly that Robert wouldn’t be sure he’s been punched if it wasn’t for the explosion of pain and expulsion of air from his body. Curry, clutching Robert’s arm, keeps him on his feet. Struggling for breath, Robert wants to curse and demand an explanation and maybe sputter something about freedom of the press, but he doesn’t have the wind to do any of that. He recalls, five seconds too late, that Curry was once a semi-pro fighter, maybe a good one, and that he and Anderson have been known for occasional rough stuff.

  “Don’t fuck with me, dickwad,” Curry says. “Three things I know. One, you told me you were near the crime scene the night of the murder. Two, you’re skinny and you wear glasses. Three, no other skinny guy with glasses has been identified and placed at the scene. And a fourth thing—our pencil-neck prosecutor won’t get off our back until every goddamn report and rumor is accounted for.”

  Still in the detective’s grip, Robert sags against the building. His shirt and sport coat are damp. Slowly he’s regaining his ability to breathe and speak.

  “Are you asking if I murdered Teresa Hickman?” he manages, barely.

  “I’m asking if you were in fact in the neighborhood that night, and, assuming you were, if you have something more to tell me.”

  At that moment, Smokey’s screen door flies open and half a dozen men and women tumble into the alley, laughing and pointing at each other and somehow managing to remain upr
ight, most of them anyway, and hold onto their drinks. Robert recognizes a senior editor from the Tribune and a county court reporter among the howling inebriates.

  Curry tugs Robert away from the drunks.

  “I was on my way home from work that night,” Robert says, still struggling for breath. “Someone must have seen me walking along those trolley tracks.”

  More people come spilling into the alley, which now looks like a scene in a Marx Brothers movie. Curry ignores the noisy slapstick and stares hard at Robert.

  “You were walking along the streetcar tracks about midnight?” he says, his face three inches from Robert’s.

  “Yes,” Robert says. He is trying not to pee in his pants.

  “What time was it? Be specific.”

  “I don’t know. Ten or twenty minutes after maybe. After midnight.”

  “Did you see anybody?”

  Robert shakes his head, and then feels the warm flush of piss coursing down his right leg.

  “I swear to God, Mel. I didn’t see a thing.” He wonders if he made a mistake by calling him “Mel.”

  Curry stares at him for a moment, and then lets him go. Robert leans against the wall for maybe five minutes after the detective goes back inside, and then walks stiff-legged and miserable past the revelers and down the noxious alley, deciding not to go back inside and trying to remember where in hell he’d left his car.

  For reasons he will never understand, the driver sometimes fantasizes about saving a young man from drowning.