The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  DeShields reminds the court that the defendant never signed his statement, which means that May Grey’s transcriptions of Rose’s April 9, 10, and 11 conversations with the detectives are inadmissible. DeShields asks the judge to bar Anderson’s testimony.

  “Overruled,” replies Nordahl nevertheless, with the dry voice of a man declining cream with his coffee.

  At the press table, Robert has trouble keeping up, though Anderson is speaking deliberately. He is intrigued by the detective and finds it difficult to take his eyes off him. He wonders if Mel Curry has told Anderson (or Scofield) about their interaction. His name was not on the probable witness lists when they were announced by both sides, and he’s heard nothing more about it. As far as that goes, he has seen Curry only at a distance and has not had another word with him.

  Curry must believe that Robert’s statement about the skinny guy could only confuse, if not hurt, the case against Rose, so has chosen to keep it to himself. Maybe, Robert muses, Curry feels sorry for him. The fuckin’ kid can’t hold his liquor.

  Meanwhile, Robert envisions Anderson in combat gear, a .50-caliber machine gun on his shoulder, trudging through knee-deep snow behind a racketing column of Sherman tanks and halftracks in southern Belgium. (He found Hickok’s 1952 profile of the detective in the bureau’s files, along with a story about the allegations of excessive force that resulted in his two-month suspension from the MPD in 1949.) Solid is the word he jots down in his notebook, describing both the man’s physique and credibility. Anderson may have a short fuse, but it’s difficult to imagine him lying to you. In fact, according to Hickok’s story, he readily admitted his rough treatment of a couple of rape suspects and accepted without complaint or appeal the department’s punishment. Robert is glad, all things considered, that it wasn’t Anderson who confronted him behind Smokey’s that night.

  Answering Scofield’s questions, Anderson recounts the three interviews with Rose preceding the dentist’s arrest. DeShields then reminds the jury that his client’s statements, as reiterated by the detective, are only hearsay.

  Judge Nordahl stares balefully at the lawyer, but says nothing.

  Rose sits stoically, long legs crossed, large hands clasped on top of his knee. He might as well be watching the drama on TV. DeShields scribbles on a legal pad and springs to his feet every few minutes. Nordahl overrules the objections, and Anderson’s direct is finished in two hours.

  Back at the office, Robert writes a three-hundred-word sidebar to accompany Mckenzie’s feature and watches it clatter off to clients around the region. He has a pulsing headache and his back screams from spending six hours on a folding chair at the press table. His first long day in court has been exhausting, so he is relieved when Miles tells him that Pullman expects to feel good enough to help out in court the next day, “that tootsie he lives with permitting.”

  Robert joins Mckenzie, Appel, Rice, and a half-dozen other journalists at Smokey’s. He drinks more than he should and goes home dyspeptic and depressed, a few minutes after midnight, scraping the Ford’s whitewalls against the curb when he parks.

  He’s pretty sure he heard Miles say that Meghan is back from Michigan. Has been back, in fact, for several days.

  CHAPTER 12

  The next day, Curry corroborates Anderson’s testimony and the prosecution calls Dr. Sutcliffe Cummins, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Minnesota, who tells the jury that the “temporary loss of consciousness—sometimes called a blackout—is neither novel nor unusual.” Cummins’s testimony is apparently the prosecution’s attempt to raise and challenge Rose’s blackout defense before his lawyers can bring it up.

  “It often occurs during periods of emotional stress or after the patient suffers a blow to the head,” says Cummins, a chesty man with a crown of glossy yellow hair and an incongruous dark mustache similar to Rose’s.

  “Are there warning signs or signs after a purported blackout that a layman might notice?” Rudy Blake asks from the attorneys’ table.

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Is a purported blackout likely to repeat itself in a given individual?” Blake continues amiably. “Is a patient who purports to have had a so-called blackout likely to have them over and over again?”

  “Possibly. It is not a fully understood phenomenon.”

  “Is it possible for a person who has a purported blackout to drive a car and find his way around the city, or, say, find his way home while experiencing a purported blackout?”

  “Objection,” DeShields says, not bothering to stand. “Mr. Blake’s repeated use of the word ‘purported’ is prejudicial and misleading to the jury. I ask that it be stricken from the record.”

  “Overruled,” Nordahl says. “Answer the question, Dr. Cummins.”

  “Well, I’d say, from my personal observation, that it would be highly unlikely that a patient experiencing a blackout could manage all that. The patient’s senses, including his eyesight, are, well, blacked out.”

  “Objection,” DeShields says again. “The witness is speculating about something he admits he doesn’t fully understand.”

  “Overruled,” Nordahl responds. “The witness seems to be telling the court what he knows, even if it doesn’t constitute full knowledge.”

  There’s a line of titters in the gallery.

  DeShields sits down and stares at the ceiling. Beside him, Michael Haydon scribbles furiously on his notepad.

  Blake, sounding like a man who intends to have the last word on the subject, at least for the time being, says, “Is it fair to say, then, that a blackout is a phenomenon that may or may not have taken place in actual fact? That, ex post facto, its existence in a given instance can’t be proved one way or the other, so we’re forced, when an individual purports to have had a blackout, to simply take his word for it, same as if he says that he’s just spoken to the Easter Bunny?”

  Over louder laughter in the gallery, Cummins says, “Well, yes, without actually witnessing its occurrence, we can only rely on the patient’s account. But, I must say, the Easter Bunny may be—”

  “Thank you, Professor,” Blake says. Turning from the witness to the judge, he says, “The prosecution rests.”

  DeShields declines to cross-examine the witness, and Nordahl adjourns the trial for the day.

  As the courtroom comes alive with conversation and Nordahl departs, Rose stands up slowly, with apparent arthritic stiffness, and watches the psychiatrist step down from the witness box, appearing confused as to what to do next. A bailiff points to a door at the side of the room. Rose has only once been called as an expert witness. A young dentist practicing in Vincennes, he testified for the defense of another Morrison County dentist being sued for malpractice. Though that was a long time ago, he understands Cummins’s disorientation. Rose recalls the sense of wondering if he provided anything of value to the cause of truth and justice. He doubted that he had.

  Rose isn’t certain whether Cummins hurt or helped his case. He makes eye contact with his brother George, who has been an expert witness in more than a dozen trials himself, but George merely shakes his head and shrugs. George looks as though he may have been dozing.

  The trial continues to be an Alice in Wonderland experience. Rose still believes, as do Ruth, his brothers, and Ronnie Oshinsky, that he is ably represented by DeShields, though he thinks (he’s not sure) that Blake raised significant questions about the blackout and the prosecutor’s repeated use of “purported” created the impression that he, Rose, was making things up. He heard Ronnie tell Sam that the judge’s refusal to sustain DeShields’s objections was “ominous.”

  “Nordahl’s just another blue-eyed anti-Semite,” he heard Ronnie whisper. “I know for a fact that he’s a member in good standing of the Minneapolis Athletic Club, which doesn’t—or didn’t until recently—admit Jews as members.”

  “That would be grounds for appeal, wouldn’t it?” Sam replied. “Of course an appeal would only follow a guilty verdict—right?”


  Ronnie didn’t reply.

  That night, Rose lies in bed and thinks about the April evening with Teresa Hickman. He has done his best to avoid such thoughts—to avoid, at any rate, the specific sights and sounds that make a remembered experience substantial and dangerous.

  Unable to sleep as Ruth snores softly beside him, he thinks about kissing Terry. Once their lips touched, she seemed to open like an exotic flower, fragrant and irresistible. It was inevitable that one thing would lead to another, though it was also true that it was in his head to seduce her from the moment she stepped into his office that January evening. He just didn’t expect it to be so easy. They made love—in his office or in the Packard—four times, and then again during her last visit.

  Yes, they argued after that final time, but the emotion Rose felt then was not anger so much as—what?—dismay. Of course, it wouldn’t have been surprising, after their lovemaking in January, if she had been carrying his baby, but the fact that she would be so sure of herself that she would demand compensation—logically or not, that disappointed him at the time and disappoints him now. He wonders if he should have brought up his own financial concerns, pointing out that not every professional man—not every Jew, either, if she had raised the point—is well-to-do. But she was an unsophisticated country girl so she probably wouldn’t have believed him.

  Did he in fact “black out” in the car?

  The psychiatrist on the stand this afternoon, when discussing the science behind the phenomenon, left an opening for Blake to raise doubts about its legitimacy, reducing it in the end to the level of a make-believe character, a ridiculous joke. What actually happened that night in the car? He doesn’t know—or doesn’t remember, if there’s a difference—but isn’t that the definition, at least in this case, of a blackout? He’s never given much credence to clinical hypnosis, as fashionable as it is in some circles, especially out East, but maybe a competent hypnotist could help uncover the truth about what happened during his “purported” blackout. Then again it might not be wise to dig too deeply in his subconscious. Who knows what somebody might find there?

  When he finally slips into a fitful doze, Rose is enmeshed in an extremely graphic dream in which he first shouts at, then forces himself on and strangles Terry Hickman. When Ruth, wakened by his wild thrashing, calms him down, his pajamas are wet and he’s shivering despite the warmth of the bedroom.

  “It’s only a dream, darling,” she says, holding him close against her sturdy body. “That’s all this is—a horrible dream.”

  * * *

  Gwen Gilligan, Robert’s sister, had her baby earlier in the week.

  Dr. and Mrs. William Gardner drove up from Rochester to inspect their first grandchild, a seven-pound-nine-ounce boy called Raymond John after the baby’s father and no one else in particular. The grandparents stay at the Leamington Hotel downtown and visit mother and child at St. Barnabas Hospital in the Elliot Park neighborhood nearby. They pronounce the boy a fine specimen—“definitely a Gardner, just look at the eyes”—and urge their daughter to promptly schedule the baptism at Rochester’s First Presbyterian, the Gardners’ church for three generations. But the baby’s father is Catholic, which Gwen doesn’t have to point out to her parents, so the issue of where, when, or even if—Ray Senior is in fact a happily lapsed Catholic—will be decided at a later date.

  Afterward, the elder Gardners, noses in the air, briefly tour the bustling city and, in the early evening of yet another steamy summer day, agree to take a moment to visit Robert’s apartment before heading home. Robert has cranked up the apartment’s noisy air conditioner, but realizes he should have done it before he left for court in the morning. The apartment is almost, but not quite, stuffy enough to make the eminent surgeon loosen his tie.

  While Vivian Gardner pokes around in the unit’s little kitchen, Robert asks his father—it’s either a joke or a dare—if he’s been following the trial. “I’m pretty sure the Post-Bulletin carries our stuff,” he says with a straight face.

  “Such a sordid affair,” William Gardner says, shaking his head. He’s a tall, handsome man, though his swept-back graying hair is receding and he, like Dr. Rose, has developed a slouch in middle age.

  “I don’t know how you can listen to those horrible people all day,” Vivian says from the kitchen. The apartment is small so she has no difficulty hearing the men in the other room.

  “Not only listen to them, but repeat and print their stories in gory detail,” Dr. Gardner says. “If I were you, Bob, I’d have to rush home after every session and take a long, hot shower.”

  “You haven’t seen my shower,” Robert replies. Only Robert smiles.

  “Why on earth you want to be part of that seamy business I’ll never understand,” his father says.

  Robert consoles himself with the knowledge that in a few minutes his parents will be on their way home. Also knowing that they would fall dead on his shabby carpet if they knew anything about his recreational life in Minneapolis—the “gory details” of his own sordid affairs. He considers asking about Janice Jones, Pam’s sister who still lives in Rochester, and then decides against it. The Gardners would remember Janice from the time Robert dated her. Whether they’d remember her sexy little sister is doubtful.

  “He’s a Jew, isn’t he?” his father says. “The dentist?”

  “The murderer,” Vivian says, huffing into the living room. “Have you ever cleaned that shower, Bobby? A little Dutch Cleanser and some elbow grease—”

  “Yes, the dentist is a Jew,” Robert says. “The jury hasn’t decided if he’s a murderer.”

  “You don’t think there’s any doubt, do you?” Dr. Gardner says.

  Robert doesn’t know what he thinks. He believes—in no small part because his colleagues at the bureau seem convinced—that the jury will vote to convict. Whether Rose is in fact guilty, well, that’s another question. Robert can’t make up his mind. There are too many other possibilities.

  “I’m glad I’ll only have to report the decision,” he says. He sounds more like his father than he would like.

  That morning the defense asked Judge Nordahl to dismiss the case against Rose for lack of evidence. Nordahl refused. DeShields then proceeded to call Ruth Rose, both of Rose’s brothers, one of his long-ago mentors from the U of M’s dental school, the executive director of the Minnesota Board of Dentistry, and two Nicollet Avenue neighbors.

  The family members, like a practiced chorale responding to an accomplished conductor, created a tone poem about the shy, studious, hard-working boy who was inspired by his revered father—a medical doctor, not a dentist—to follow two uncles and an older brother into dentistry. David graduated in the top third of his university class, married his college sweetheart, and returned to his rural hometown to practice alongside his uncles and brother. After five years as a smalltown professional, he established a solo practice near downtown Minneapolis while he and his wife began a family. That practice, if it has not made the David Roses rich, has provided the doctor, his wife, and their daughters a secure and comfortable life.

  Ruth Rose said that while she’d never heard her husband speak of blackouts, away from the office he sometimes seemed “disoriented” and “confused,” which, she said, “I’ve always attributed to his skipping meals and not sleeping as long and as well as a man in a stressful profession needs to do.”

  His brother Sam provided the most memorable comments from the stand. Grayer, shorter, and substantially beefier than his younger sibling, Dr. Ross described his brother’s practice in terms that no doubt surprised much of his audience (the gallery was packed again today), including Dante DeShields.

  “I’d have to say—and I know George would agree—that Dave’s a better dentist than he is a businessman,” Sam said. He did not seem to be speaking unkindly, but from a big brother’s irreverent perspective. “I’m not sure he can tell you, off the top of his head, the name of his insurance agent or his pharmaceutical suppliers or the people that come in and
clean the windows for him. He forgets names and numbers and gets tangled up when he’s speaking, sometimes like English is not his native language.”

  Like some of the previous witnesses, Sam seemed to be enjoying his moments onstage.

  “Those points aside, Dr. Ross,” DeShields said, speaking over the laughter from the gallery and the rap of the judge’s gavel, “would you hesitate to call on your brother if you personally needed dental work?”

  “Absolutely not,” Sam replied. “But it would have to be a serious problem. I love my brother, but, for crying out loud, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Duluth!” He looked past both DeShields and the defendant at the tittering gallery, grinning like Milton Berle.

  Speaking again over the laughter and Nordahl’s demand for order, DeShields asked the witness, “Did your brother ever talk about his patients, including his female patients?”

  “Of course not,” Sam replied, straight-faced again. “That would violate professional ethics. And Dave is nothing if not ethical.”

  “Prior to Teresa Hickman’s death, did he ever mention Mrs. Hickman or her sister, Mrs. Montgomery, if not as a patient then as an acquaintance?”

  “No.”

  “Were you aware, Dr. Ross, of anything unusual or unorthodox about your brother’s sex life?”

  Ross laughed out loud.

  “I didn’t know Dave had a sex life,” he said. “Outside of his happy marriage, that is.”

  “Did he ever mention having suffered a blackout?”

  “I wasn’t aware, until recently, that he had any of those, either.”

  At the press table, Robert Gardner felt Mckenzie’s elbow in his ribs.

  “Great stuff!” Miles whispered out of the corner of his mouth. “Who knew the Roses had a sense of humor? The blackout question was pre-emptive.”