The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

“During this time,” DeShields asked his next witness, Dr. James J. St. Alban, the portly state dental board chair, “has there ever been a bad word spoken, or a formal complaint filed, against Dr. David Rose?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” St. Alban said. “I can tell you there is nothing of the sort—no legitimate documentation—in our files.”

  On the prosecutors’ side of the attorneys’ table, Blake murmured something to Scofield, who rose, after DeShields sat down, to crossexamine St. Alban.

  “If an individual has a complaint of impropriety against a dentist, would she know to contact the dental board instead of, say, telling her pastor or the police?”

  “The state board would be the logical place—”

  “But not necessarily the first place she would think of?”

  Heads turned at Scofield’s uncharacteristic aggressiveness. Blake covered his smile while DeShields rose to his feet.

  “Why must the complainant be a woman?” DeShields wanted to know. “The prosecution’s use of the feminine pronoun is prejudicial.”

  “Overruled.”

  Emboldened, Scofield said, “Isn’t it a fact, Dr. St. Alban, that two separate complaints about improper behavior on the part of Dr. Rose have been forwarded to you by, respectively, the Morrison County Sheriff’s office and the Minneapolis Police Department? One involved a forty-two-year-old woman, last name Harrelson, and the other a much younger woman whose name was apparently lost or not recorded.”

  The witness cleared his throat and glanced at DeShields.

  “When did you receive these complaints, Doctor?” Scofield persisted. St. Alban’s face colored dramatically. He twisted around in the witness box and crossed his legs like a kid in a dentist’s waiting room listening to the whine of the drill.

  “Those complaints, sir, were in fact only rumors—unsubstantiated reports at best,” he said in a rush. “I was told they were looked into by the civil authorities and dismissed. I became aware of them only in the form of, well, chitchat at a couple of dental association social functions. That would have been, I don’t know, maybe two or three years after the war.”

  “Then you are talking about hearsay, Doctor,” said DeShields, on his feet again. “I move that the reference to ‘rumors’ and ‘unsubstantiated reports’ be stricken from the record, Your Honor.”

  “Sustained. The witness’s last statement will be stricken.”

  Also that afternoon, a very tall, dark, doleful-looking man with long arms, large hands, and enormous ears—next to whose name two-thirds of the scribes at the press table immediately jotted down the word “Lincolnesque”—testified for the defense to the “irrefutable reality” of blackouts. The witness’s name was Ovid Cowper, and he was a Harvard University professor of neurology who flew in that morning from Cambridge, Massachusetts—DeShields’s expert witness.

  “They exist, like migraine headaches and the occasional fainting spell,” Cowper told the court. “Not well understood even by our best medical minds, but real nonetheless.”

  DeShields, standing with his arms folded across his chest, was obviously pleased with his expert.

  “No two blackouts are the same, or can be described in exactly the same way,” the expert went on to say, “no more than any two patients are exactly the same. It’s impossible to say what Dr. Rose could or couldn’t do—what he was capable of or not capable of doing—when in his particular state of un- or semi-unconsciousness. If Dr. Rose says he experienced a blackout, I believe we have no choice but to take him at his word.”

  “Would stress induce a blackout, Professor Cowper?” DeShields asked.

  “Very possibly,” Cowper said. “Patients who have reported blackouts have often described a period of extreme agitation prior to their onset. So can excessive physical exertion or a blow to the head or not eating for a prolonged period of time.”

  “The stress, or agitation, could be the result of a heated argument, could it not, Professor?”

  “Theoretically, yes.”

  Cowper then put the courtroom to sleep with a thirty-minute digest of the known science pertaining to blackouts. The prosecution was content to let the expert ramble until, mercifully, the judge, swallowing a yawn, declared the trial adjourned for the day.

  Robert was assigned to write nothing, and at four-thirty Mckenzie sent him home to have dinner with his parents.

  Now, after dining at The President, the Nicollet Avenue chop-house across the street from the Millers’ ballpark, and his parents’ dispiriting inspection of his apartment, Robert sends them on their ninety-minute drive back to Rochester. At least his father picked up the tab at the restaurant.

  The Gardners’ midnight-blue Lincoln Continental is barely out of sight before Robert ducks back inside and dials Pam Brantley’s number.

  * * *

  The driver is back in Courtroom No. 1 the following morning, having risen again at four-thirty and elbowed his way into the queue in the courthouse hallway, which already reeks of high-summer sweat and surly impatience, and finally, at eight forty-five, claimed his twelve inches of gallery pew. The maddening wait gave him time to read the morning’s Tribune from front to back, doing his best to shut out the idiotic commentary of the trial addicts surrounding him.

  In the Trib, George Appel, an erstwhile sportswriter, opines that the duel between the trial’s attorneys “must be judged, at this stage, a toss-up.” He writes, “Both sides have scored points, but neither has delivered a knockdown punch. Of course, the trial of H. David Rose is only in its middle rounds.” The only really significant news is provided under an Associated Press byline. Martin Rice quotes Dante DeShields saying, “We’re done with the doctors and professors and scientists. We’ve got other people who have a lot to say. This trial is far from over.”

  The driver, folding the paper, wonders who those “other people” are.

  Grace Montgomery would have been an obvious witness, but she’s gone. So who else? Maybe a few of the witnesses who testified for the prosecution—the Zevos kid, the hick from North Dakota—and maybe a surprise witness or two. In the movies, the lawyers are always pulling someone or something out of their hat. A cold finger runs up and down his spine and a vision of himself on the stand flashes behind his eyes. Then he sees the jury taking their seats, and again he zeroes in on the two sweeties at the near end of the front row. He’s almost certain that the shorter girl, the one in the tight white blouse and short plaid skirt, made and held eye contact with him the other day.

  Sure enough, first thing DeShields calls Bud Montgomery, who impresses the driver as a big, dumb plug-ugly you’d cross the street to avoid. He looks, however, like he’s been taken down a peg or two by circumstances, which of course he has. He walks with a hitch and seems to be missing teeth. But if anyone expected DeShields to go easy on the new widower, he’s mistaken. Within minutes, Rose’s lawyer confronts Montgomery with his physical abuse of his late wife, accuses him of assaulting Teresa Hickman at the Montgomerys’ apartment, and suggests the possibility that he murdered both women.

  Typical is this exchange:

  “Did you have sex with Teresa Hickman?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “Did you rape her?”

  “No, goddamn it! It was her idea!”

  The judge pounds his gavel. “The witness will watch his language,” he says, looking down at Montgomery. “Another outburst like that and I’ll cite you with contempt.”

  Finally, the big lug—cursing, weeping, denying the charges all at once—is escorted out of the courtroom by a pair of sheriff’s deputies.

  Kenneth Landa, back from North Dakota, is called, technically another hostile witness, whom DeShields will use to pry open the Pandora’s box that was Teresa Kubicek Hickman’s sex life.

  Landa has already admitted that he was Terry’s frequent, if not sole, partner back in the day, and now, pressed by DeShields, he enumerates the teenagers’ trysts in his ‘41 Pontiac, on a blanket beside a creek in the Kubiceks’ past
ure, and in his attic bedroom when his widowed mother worked late at a Hartford tavern. Landa has a solid alibi so DeShields doesn’t suggest that he had anything to do with Mrs. Hickman’s death, but there will be little doubt when the young man steps down that the victim was addicted to sex from an early age.

  A prim, pretty brunette named Constance Canfield Bannister, formerly of Dollar and now residing in Minot with her schoolteacher husband, confirms Landa’s accounts. She says that she and Terry Kubicek were best friends from sixth to eleventh grade, when Connie missed several months of school after coming down with undulant fever. She says she watched her friend attract and flirt with high school boys and even older men beginning in her early teens.

  “It was like flies to honey,” Mrs. Bannister, now a twenty-two-year-old homemaker, three months pregnant, tells the jury. “They would follow her around and take her for rides in their cars and even come by the house. Terry’s mom was gone by that time, and Mr. Kubicek either didn’t notice—he was always worrying about the farm and the turkey business he wanted to start—or didn’t know how to deal with it. Later on, when Terry and Kenny were going steady, a lot of those guys were still coming around, you know, like Kenny didn’t exist.”

  “Was Terry averse to the attention?”

  “Not hardly,” the witness replies. “I always thought she couldn’t get enough of it.”

  In the silence that follows, Mrs. Bannister seems to be debating with herself about whether she should add another detail. She decides she will.

  “Sometimes, when it was warm enough, Terry would strip naked and dance in the headlights of Cullen Hanson’s truck. Later, Cullen joined the Army and was killed in Korea.”

  She doesn’t bother to include the fact that she and another couple of Dollar girls would sometimes join Terry in those “high-beam shows,” which were usually followed by a booze-fueled party in which the strippers joined the pickup’s owner and his buddies on blankets in the country dark. Her blush and averted eyes give away, however, her likely participation in the events, at least in the minds of some members of the gallery.

  By this time, the driver is thoroughly aroused—he keeps the copy of the Tribune on his lap—and considers for a moment following Constance Bannister to her hotel or wherever she’ll be spending the night, assuming she isn’t returning home today. He pictures her six or seven years earlier, showing off in the headlights with Terry, the two of them friendly but competitive, one blonde, the other dark, one skinny, the other “full-figured,” as the magazines say, the both of them strutting their stuff in the cones of yellow light that illuminate the dark road. Maybe Mrs. Bannister needs a cab to get from the courthouse to wherever she’s staying. It takes a moment before it occurs to him that Mr. Bannister might have accompanied her from Minot.

  Then DeShields calls Richard Ybarra, and the driver decides to sit still. Lest Ybarra spot him in the gallery, he slides down in his seat.

  The curly-haired photographer looks scared, intimidated by the surroundings, and likely terrified by what the man-eating lawyer is likely to ask. A petty thief and con man since junior high school, Ybarra has stood before a judge before, but never in a room like this one, and never, needless to say, as part of a murder trial.

  DeShields gives him a few seconds to get his bearings.

  “For the record, pronounce your name for us, please,” the lawyer says, with what passes for a cordial smile. “Did I get it right?”

  “Uh, yeah, no, Your Honor,” the witness stammers. “Not Wy-BEAR-rah. Ee-BAH-rah.”

  “Ee-BAH-rah,” DeShields says, exaggerating the pronunciation. “I’m not, by the way, ‘Your Honor,’” he adds, nodding toward the bench. “His Honor is sitting up there.”

  Everybody but the judge laughs, and the witness turns red.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says. “I know that.”

  “And what do you do for a living, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah?”

  “I’m a professional photographer.”

  “What or who do you photograph, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah?”

  “Well, I’ve done weddings and private parties, even some baby photos,” the witness replies.

  “Have you ever taken photos of young women wearing swimsuits or just their underwear or maybe nothing at all?”

  Though Ybarra, stupid as he is, must expect the question, he looks as though DeShields sucker-punched him in the gut. In the third row of the gallery, the driver sits up and leans forward, not about to miss a word of his pal’s testimony.

  “Well, sure,” the young man replies, trying desperately to sound as though undressing women and snapping their picture is all in a day’s work for a professional photographer.

  “Were you acquainted with Teresa Hickman?”

  Ybarra coughs into his fist.

  “We met,” he says.

  DeShields turns to Michael Haydon, who hands him a sheaf of eight-by-ten photographs. “Exhibit numbers sixteen through twenty-two, Your Honor,” he says, stepping up to the witness stand and handing Ybarra the photos.

  “Are these familiar to you?”

  Ybarra makes a halfhearted show of shuffling through the stack. “Yeah,” he says.

  “Well, they should be. The police confiscated them from your apartment. Tell the jury who’s in these photos.”

  Ybarra looks at the jury and mutters, “Terry Hickman.”

  “So I don’t have to show the photos to the jury, who I’m certain will be outraged by their salacious content, please tell them, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah, what Mrs. Hickman is wearing in the top two photos.” Ybarra glances down at the glossies.

  “A brassiere and underpants,” he mumbles.

  “And how about the next couple of shots?”

  “Just the underpants.”

  “And the last couple?”

  “Nothin’.”

  “What?”

  “She’s not wearing nothin’.”

  DeShields waits a beat, drawing out the effect. In the silence, the driver thinks, Goddamn him anyway! He never showed me the nudes. “Did you have sex with Mrs. Hickman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How often?”

  “Once or twice.”

  “It was more than once or twice, was it not, Mr. Ee-BAH-rah? More like a dozen times, usually at the love nest you called your studio in Stevens Square. Is that correct?”

  Ybarra is trembling. A sheen of perspiration glosses his forehead and upper lip.

  “I guess so.”

  “Tell the jury the last time.”

  Ybarra takes a deep breath.

  “I think it was Wednesday, April fifth,” he says.

  The witness is barely audible, so Nordahl tells him to speak up.

  “Wednesday, the fifth.”

  “Wednesday would have been the sixth,” DeShields says. “Two days before Mrs. Hickman was murdered.”

  Ybarra ignores the last statement. He is obviously working up the nerve to reassert himself.

  “She liked what we did,” he says, an answer that followed no question. “Everything we did, right from the first. I didn’t talk her into nothin’. She loved to get undressed and fuck, Your Honor.”

  Scofield is on his feet, demanding that the witness’s “depraved language” be stricken from the record. The gallery sits in stunned silence, and Nordahl holds his gavel in midair, not knowing quite what to do with it at this moment.

  DeShields takes the photos back from the witness and shakes his head.

  “That will be all, Mr. Wy-BEAR-rah,” he says.

  At five o’clock on the same afternoon, twenty minutes after court was adjourned for the day, Arne Anderson stands on the southeast corner of Fifth and Marquette, waiting for Janine Curry to emerge from Powers Department Store. He’s been standing there, kitty-corner from the store, pretending to be preoccupied by the midafternoon edition of the Star, for the past half hour, since spotting her coming out of Farmers & Mechanics Bank down the block.

  This is risky behavior for several reasons. One, her husband, who spent the afte
rnoon at the courthouse, will soon be on the street himself unless he’s going directly to Smokey’s. Two, there are any number of cops, lawyers, and other courthouse denizens who could spot him and wonder, since it’s now public knowledge that Lily Kline dumped him, who he’s waiting for outside Powers. And, three, Janine may well be on her way to Smokey’s herself and won’t be happy to see Arne or want anything to do with him this evening and maybe never.

  Their last meeting, on a rainy afternoon in mid-July, ended bizarrely. It was still too hot to close the windows, and Arne could hear the wind flicking the rain against the screens. Mel had been sent down to Albert Lea, two and a half hours south of the Twin Cities, to confer with that city’s detectives about a suspect in a Minneapolis murder case. The victim was a fifty-five-year-old homosexual whose beating death earlier in the week was similar to the murder of Herman Goranski in June. Yes, the MPD has a suspect who confessed to the Goranski homicide, but Willard Woolworth is certifiably crazy, so Captain Fuller said someone needed to drive down and take a look at the Albert Lea guy, “just to make sure there’s no connection.” Curry, Riemenschneider, and Lakeland drew straws for the honor, and Mel came up short. He would be gone all day.

  When she and Arne finished that afternoon, Janine, out of the blue, told Arne, “I can’t do this anymore.”

  Arne then surprised them both by saying, “I can’t either. You’re not the only one who loves Mel.”

  Janine didn’t like his response, mistaking it for either a confession of queer attraction or a personal insult. It later occurred to Arne that Janine has never been the rejected party in a relationship. She would do the rejecting, thank you.

  In fact, Arne will go to his grave not knowing why he said what he said that afternoon. True, Mel had become, more or less by default, his closest friend if he didn’t count first Lily and then Janine, which he didn’t. It has never been possible for him to consider a woman he sleeps with a friend. A friend is someone with whom you share everything important except sex.

  He reckoned, when he thought about it, that he’d had no more than five real friends in his life. One died in a boating accident on Rainy Lake when they were kids. (Arne, always afraid of the water, had turned down his pal’s invitation to join the boy’s family on their vacation trip up north.) One, with whom Arne was close in high school, moved to Ohio after graduation and fallen out of contact. Two guys with whom he had bonded during advanced infantry training were casualties of war, one while wading ashore in Sicily, and the other after an artillery barrage on a freezing evening near Bastogne, while Arne tried to assure the suddenly faceless man that he was going to see another morning. The fifth is—was?—Mel Curry.