by W. A. Winter
CHAPTER 10
On Sunday, July 17, the day before the scheduled beginning of Rose’s trial, major features—each dominated by at least three or four photographs and in a few instances a map of the Linden Hills neighborhood—appear on the front pages of newspapers throughout Minnesota, the Dakotas, Iowa, and western Wisconsin. The headline and kicker stretched across the top of the Minneapolis Tribune’s front page are typical:
CURTAIN RISES ON DENTIST’S TRIAL
Did Rose Strangle His Pregnant Patient?
Dante DeShields did everything but unspool the newsprint and lay out the pages. For many readers, the preview of the most highly anticipated criminal trial since the end of the war must seem predictable and tame, which was no doubt central to DeShields’s plan. Even the driver, reading the Tribune on a bench in sun-dappled Powderhorn Park this Sunday morning, is disappointed.
The photos of the dentist and his wife sitting demurely in their living room, with a portrait of their virginal daughters on the piano behind them, were nicely staged and are surely faithful if not exactly flattering portraits of a middle-aged, middle-American, upper-middle-class family circa 1955. Ruth appears straitlaced and competent, the doctor placid and self-possessed if perhaps a tad aloof. The driver wishes the girls’ photo was larger. It’s difficult to determine whether they’re pretty or not. Only the dentist looks unmistakably Jewish.
The driver, a slow reader, crawls through George Appel’s text. This includes the case’s chronology ending with Rose’s arrest, a who’s who of the attorneys, assistants, and presiding judge, a thumbnail sketch of the Honorable Haakon T. Nordahl (“a no-nonsense, twenty-four-year veteran of the district court bench,” according to Appel), a panoramic photo of Courtroom No. 1 with the key players’ designated positions boldly labeled, and a long list of possible witnesses, including the Nicollet Avenue characters the driver knows personally—Tony Zevos and Richard Ybarra. Reading the familiar names, the driver feels the shiver of excitement that people experience when they see a friend or relation on TV.
There is little discussion about courtroom strategy. But while County Attorney Scofield offers the usual huff about proving the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, Defense Counsel DeShields, choosing more vivid language, says he’s not only going to “dismantle, top to bottom, the state’s specious case against this innocent man,” he is going to “make it abundantly clear that, owing to police sloth, incompetence, and bigotry, Teresa Hickman’s actual killer still prowls our streets, threatening other young women.”
The driver decides that he will enjoy the trial in person. (Television sets are common in American living rooms in 1955, but no cameras of any kind are allowed in Minnesota courtrooms during trials.) From the Tribune story he learns, however, that Courtroom No. 1, though the courthouse’s largest, has a seating capacity of only a hundred spectators, and Judge Nordahl will allow no standing. Thus, added to the problem of finding a way to spend time off the Canary Cab clock is the necessity of showing up by six o’clock on a weekday morning to have a chance of securing a seat.
Well, no fucking way that’s going to happen unless Teresa Hickman herself is coming back from the grave to testify. The driver will rely on the papers, though he may try hanging around downtown to see what opportunities present themselves.
Miles Mckenzie and Milt Hickok will cover the trial for the United Press. Mckenzie, of course, conducted the bureau’s interview of the Roses. He did his usual businesslike job, with Hickok and Pullman adding detail and color to the stories and updates that clattered over the bureau’s teletype en route to regional clients. Mckenzie considers this one of the biggest stories of his career, certainly the biggest local murder case since Bunny Augustine rubbed out his erstwhile partner “Swifty” Platt in 1948 and walked free thanks to a hung jury. Robert Gardner is happy to pitch in and can’t help but feel he’s working a big story, too, though because his byline won’t run atop any of the Hickman dispatches, if anybody is going to know he’s part of the action, he’ll have to tell them.
All such grumpy considerations vanish, at least temporarily, when on Sunday afternoon Meghan Mckenzie stops by the bureau to drop a manuscript on her father-in-law’s desk and on her way out pauses at Robert’s station, brushes his collar with her manicured fingertips, and inquires if he’s free to join her for a drink when he finishes his shift.
“Do you know the Starlight on Highway 12?” she asks.
Hickok is preoccupied with something he’s typing, and Johnny Dawson, the bureau’s teletype mechanic, is tending to business on the other side of the room.
“Yes,” Robert says.
He’s never heard of the Starlight, but he’ll find it.
Arne Anderson spends Sunday by himself, so hungry for Janine that his body aches. He thinks about driving by the Currys’ apartment and coming up with an excuse to drop in, knowing he’ll probably interrupt Janine and Mel in bed, which, according to Mel, is how they like to spend Mel’s days off, and decides against it. He hasn’t seen or talked to Lily Kline since they split, so despite the obvious reasons not to, he thinks of Janine as his woman, though he knows their relationship can only end bad.
Arne skims the Tribune’s trial preview. When he spoke to Homer Scofield on Friday, the prosecutor, sounding anxious and unsure of himself, said he expects jury selection to be contentious and take more than a week. Arne’s job, and the job of his “colleagues,” as Scofield always calls the investigators, is to make sure the state’s witnesses are accounted for, available when they’re needed, and “steady on their feet.” Arne and his men have stayed close to Grace and Bud Montgomery, Richard Ybarra (who didn’t seem to know who his “buddy” with a car could be, so the cops wondered if Grace had made the guy up), and the Zevoses, father and son. Harold Hickman, granted another emergency furlough, is flying in from Germany on Monday, and Walter Kubicek and Kenneth Landa are scheduled to arrive from North Dakota the following day.
Gerald Bergen, who discovered the body, and Fred MacMurray, the coroner, are on board. But Wallace Ralston, the physician who informed Charlie Riemenschneider that Teresa Hickman told him that Rose is the father of her unborn baby, has since been treated for alcoholism, abandoned his practice, and disappeared, supposedly somewhere out West. Ralston’s hearsay testimony wouldn’t seem to matter a great deal, however, inasmuch as Rose himself told the police that Mrs. Hickman had accused him of her fetus’s paternity.
Arne daydreams about Janine taking the stand and describing for the court her experience with Rose, but it’s only a daydream and not the most excruciating ones he has about her.
He is eager for the trial to start. He’s now inclined to believe, more than he did a month ago anyway, that the dentist murdered the girl, but he still has trouble envisioning a convincing scenario. He knows DeShields’s cross-examination will be hellish. DeShields will accuse Arne and his squad of botching the investigation, giving in to the department’s—and the city’s—historic anti-Semitism, and letting the real killer run free. It could be the worst experience of Arne’s career that doesn’t involve his fists or a gun. He decides to buy a new suit and tie for the occasion.
Dr. Rose, sitting in a fragrant cloud of Mixture No. 79, listens to Brahms and Schubert, the Sunday paper partially read and discarded on the glass-topped coffee table in front of him.
The memory of going to work on Monday, the beginning of a new workweek with its challenges and satisfactions, seems as distant as images of his small-town boyhood. He has spoken to his daughters on the phone and enjoyed a half-hour visit with the girls at a roadside diner just over the Wisconsin line. This evening he is calm and disengaged, neither worried about the trial’s eventual outcome nor confident of the verdict.
If forced to describe his mood he would say he is saddened by everything he has lost. People don’t understand all that is taken from a man when he’s accused of a terrible crime, all that is lost. Time will tell what, if anything, can be reclaimed. He suspects that most of i
t is gone for good.
Ruth, who does understand, is finally showing signs of strain, snapping at Ronnie about some inconsequential matter and dropping a bowl of strawberries on the kitchen floor. Finally, she goes upstairs to “check on” her husband’s wardrobe for the coming week.
That night Rose has a dream about Teresa Hickman, but he will remember only a fragment of it in the morning. Terry, it seems, had twisted her ankle and lost a shoe.
Anderson and Curry are about to head downstairs to the courtroom when Sid Hessburg, putting down the phone, gets their attention and says, “Herman Goranski.”
Arne and Mel look at Sid. It takes a moment for the name to register, the murder of the old queer in a Phillips tenement, which, like the shootings of the two coloreds on Fourth Avenue, has been all but forgotten with the focus on the Rose trial. Hessburg scribbles something on a pad, tears off a sheet, and hands it to Anderson.
“Guy walks up to Dewey Ostlund’s car in front of the White Way on Cedar a half hour ago, says he knows who killed the geezer by Holy Rosary,” Hessburg says, looking at what he’s written on the pad. “‘Yeah, who?’ Dewey asks him. ‘Me,’ the guy says. ‘Bashed his head in with a leg off a table.’”
Officer Ostlund and his partner, whose name Arne can’t remember, are standing behind a sour-smelling, sorry-looking, middle-aged gent with a lazy eye in one of the interrogation rooms off the MPD’s lobby. Walking over from Homicide, the detectives can hear the hubbub in the courthouse atrium at the bottom of the grand staircase, preparatory to the gavel falling in Courtroom No. 1.
“This here’s Willard Woolworth,” says Ostlund, a trim, pink-faced cop in his late twenties. “Says he clubbed his neighbor Goranski and knocked him dead.”
“Woolworth?” Curry says. “Any relation to—”
“Sheee-it,” the suspect says, shaking his head at the question’s foolishness. “Do you think I’d be living in that dump if I was? Maybe a coupla generations ago there was a connection, but that never done me no good.”
Woolworth, who can produce no identification but says he’ll turn fifty on Labor Day, tells the officers he was having sex—“after a fashion”—in his pal’s apartment when Goranski “started making fun of my equipment.” Woolworth pulls a stiff, yellowed handkerchief out of his back pocket and loudly blows his nose. “I’d warned him about that crap, but once Hermie got going, he wouldn’t let go.” With that wandering eye, it’s difficult to know whom Woolworth is addressing.
Anderson and Curry look at the man while the patrolmen make halffhearted attempts to stifle their snickers.
“Where’d the table leg come from?” Curry asks.
Woolworth fusses with his nose, which is bulbous and cross-hatched with broken blood vessels.
“I brought it up from the alley.”
“So you were planning to kill him,” Hessburg says.
“Naw. I thought I’d see if there was enough scratch in his billfold to borrow some—I’d only smack him if he objected.” He shakes his head. “Turns out there was only about ninety cents, so I thought, fuck it, we’ll have a little fun instead and unbuttoned my trousers. Hermie would be alive today if he hadn’t cast aspersions on my winky.” Hard to know with his eye, but he seems to be talking to Anderson.
“That was more than a month ago,” Mel says. “What took you so long to tell us?”
Woolworth pulls out the handkerchief again and says, “I was thinking about the old cocksucker this morning and realized I missed him. I thought maybe I should tell someone what happened, you know, for the next of kin.” Goranski, the cops have learned, has a nephew in Colorado.
Arne tells Hessburg to book Woolworth on suspicion of murder and take him upstairs.
By the time Arne and Mel enter the courtroom Judge Nordahl has ascended to the bench and the lawyers are facing each other across the attorneys’ table, two on each side. There are twenty-six reporters seated on folding chairs behind two long tables on the left side of the well while the two-tiered jury box on the far right side awaits the dozen jurors and two alternates. From the back of the room, standing alongside a half-dozen uniformed officers, Arne can see, seated in the front row of the gallery, Dr. and Mrs. Rose, Ronald Oshinsky, and two well-dressed couples Arne presumes to be the defendant’s brothers and their wives. The ninety-odd other gallery seats are filled with spectators. Only the policemen and miscellaneous court personnel are standing.
Arne has been in Courtroom No. 1 several times and is always impressed. The big, high-ceilinged room, with its ornamental light fixtures, stained-glass windows, decorative columns, and heavy, dark wood, reminds him of the Calvary Lutheran Church he attended with his mother until he was out of high school. Most of the major criminal cases tried in Hiawatha County since the turn of the century have taken place here.
This morning’s session, already under way, will comprise a numbing series of procedural issues between and among the attorneys, rulings by the judge, and anticipation replaced by boredom in the gallery as spectators, most of whom have been up since well before sunrise, stifle yawns, look at their watches, and wonder when the judge will declare a recess for lunch. Many, clutching brown paper bags, have brought sandwiches, carrot spears, homemade cookies, and apples, though Nordahl has made it clear that there will be no eating while court is in session.
Arne, standing beside Mel, wonders what Janine is doing at the moment, and damned if he doesn’t feel, at the thought of her, the familiar thrill between his legs. Like a concupiscent high school kid during Sunday services, he tries to find another image to take his mind off the activity in his trousers. He settles on Herman Goranski and his red-nosed, wild-eyed killer, and that seems to do the trick.
Jury selection, the vital process the law dictionaries call voir dire, is, as Homer Scofield predicted, drawn out and contentious. There are the usual gaffes and buffoonery, which would be amusing if it didn’t make a long process even longer.
An elderly Northside woman says, for example, she’s had no personal experience with violent crime, and then recalls that her husband served a decade in the state penitentiary after an aggravated-assault conviction before the war.
A distinguished-looking man with a fashionable Kenwood neighborhood address is promptly selected, only to be promptly dismissed when he’s overheard chatting about the case with the Star’s Oscar Rystrom during the lunch recess. (Rystrom throws himself on the mercy of the court and is fortunate to be allowed to keep his courtroom privileges.)
A retired Augsburg College classics professor is rejected when his pseudobulbar affect—unprovoked, uncontrollable laughter, later described to Arne as “emotional incontinence”—is determined to be a distraction.
DeShields rejects thirty-seven prospects when each admits to an “extreme fear” and/or “loathing” of dentists. Oddly enough to several observers, the defense asks no questions about the prospective jurors’ feelings toward Jews, as though DeShields hopes to ignore the subject entirely or intends to fall back on a bias plea if the verdict is appealed.
After almost two weeks and the examination of ninety-two prospective jurors, seven men and five women, plus a pair of male alternates—ages twenty-three to sixty-four, all white and all Christian—are seated on July 29.
Opening arguments will begin on August 1.
The Starlight on Highway 12, a dozen miles beyond the Minneapolis city line, is a two-story, twenty-four-unit motor hotel with a detached knotty-pine bar at one end, across the small parking lot from the office. Robert Gardner and Meghan Mckenzie have met in the bar three times since the day before the trial opened and have so far resisted the temptation—though it’s been discussed—to rent one of the motel rooms for their tryst.
Robert is taking his cue from Meghan, an older, presumably more experienced adulterer, and suspects the tawdriness of a motel room, even in a relatively clean and respectable-seeming establishment such as the Starlight, is below her.
She does not seem nervous about meeting him for a drink here,
but comes across skittish as a sixteen-year-old virgin when he suggests booking a room. Howard and Meghan Mckenzie, she’s told him, live twenty-some miles away, in the south Minneapolis suburb of Richfield, three blocks from Miles and Loretta Mckenzie, so the Starlight, on the edge of west suburban Wayzata, is distant enough from friends, neighbors, and in-laws to meet a guy for drinks. Why it’s a step too far to rent a double bed on the other side of the parking lot remains a mystery.
So they have sex in the backseats of his Ford coupe and her more capacious late-model Dodge, off one of the heavily wooded back roads that snake around Lake Minnetonka minutes from the Starlight or, if time allows, in his modest but air-conditioned apartment in Minneapolis.
She doesn’t invite him to her house, even when her husband is out of town.
Meghan fucks the way she walks and talks—purposefully and with a studied competence, as though she studied the erotic arts in grad school and is determined to follow the lesson plan. Her pale, lightly freckled, small-breasted body is beautiful in what Robert considers an austere, aristocratic sense, and he tries not to compare her with the voluptuous, olive-skinned, indefatigable, unmistakably hoi polloi Pam Brantley, whom, ironically, he misses with renewed passion since beginning his affair with Meghan.
But he’s not about to pass up the opportunity to have sex with a beautiful woman, and he’s filled with both affection and admiration for Meghan, the only child of a Pillsbury Company vice president and his socialite wife.
An English major at Northwestern University, Meghan might be the best-educated woman he’s ever met, and surely the most widely traveled. She has studied in France, hitchhiked through the Balkans, and sailed around the Horn of Africa. She subscribes to The New Yorker, speaks knowledgeably about the reportage of John Hersey and Joseph Mitchell (Robert’s gods since j-school), and is “intrigued” by the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and other modernists. She voted for Stevenson in ’52—the first member of her father’s family, she says, to vote Democratic in a presidential election—and vows to do it again if he runs in ’56. (She also speaks enthusiastically about a handsome, young Massachusetts senator named John Kennedy.)
