by W. A. Winter
Yet, after an hour of passion, Arne believed that he would shoot Mel between the eyes if Mel walked in on him and Janine. He also believed that Mel would shoot him between the eyes if Mel got to his revolver first. Until that happened, they may have been the closest friends either one of them ever had.
This afternoon, Arne’s ache for Janine has overtaken other considerations. He has not spoken to her since he left the Currys’ apartment three weeks ago. He hasn’t asked Mel about her or tried to glean intelligence about her through office chatter. Now, during the biggest trial of his career, he happens to see her on the street and, without much thought other than the three reasons he shouldn’t be doing it, he does what comes naturally and begins to birddog the woman. He figures she will come out the door she entered because she’ll either want to walk to the courthouse to meet Mel or catch a southbound bus for home on that corner. If she exits a different door, he’ll be out of luck.
But she emerges through the revolving door closest to him, five minutes later. Petite as she is, he might have missed her in the crowd of shoppers coming out at the same time if she wasn’t wearing her favorite red dress. She is beautiful and confident and perfectly coiffed, and she is smiling.
Arne catches his breath, suddenly excited as a schoolboy, as he watches her cross the street. But then he realizes that she is not smiling at him but at a man coming toward her on the other side of Fifth.
He steps back into the shadow of the building where he stands presumably unseen, ducking his head and slouching into the bovine herd of commuters waiting for their bus ride home. From there he watches Mel and Janine embrace and kiss and turn westward on Fifth, toward the bars and restaurants on Nicollet and Hennepin. He thinks about following the couple, and then rejects the idea.
His eyes shaded by his fedora, he heads off in the direction of Smokey’s, where he intends to get good and drunk.
On August 10 and 11, a train of violent thunderstorms punches through the heat wave that has suffocated the Twin Cities since the middle of June.
Between midnight on the tenth and eight-thirty the following evening, more than seven inches of water swamp the region, and straight-line winds topple mature trees, rip the shingles off roofs, and turn somnambulant Minnehaha Creek into a roaring torrent. A pair of fourteen-year-old boys, seeking a thrill in a stolen canoe, are caught in the creek’s fast-moving current and hurtled, moments later, screaming for their mothers, over the lip of Minnehaha Falls. Their bodies are recovered three days later, twelve miles down the Mississippi River, where they’d been deposited naked, battered, and dead.
For a couple of days the storm and the drownings are all anyone can talk about downtown, eclipsing the Rose trial, which Judge Nordahl recessed on the ninth to allow the defense time to identify and subpoena two additional witnesses. Nobody envies Fred MacMurray and his crew, not only having to process the drowned kids’ ravaged bodies, but also having to remind citizens that water rushing over and between rocks the size of refrigerators and straight down a fifty-foot drop can yield nothing but a horrible death. He can’t say it, of course, but the truth is, the thieving knuckleheads got what was coming to them.
“Sweet Jesus,” Ferris Lakeland says in the squad room. “Us little dipshits used to do that all the time—push canoes down the creek when the water was running high after a hard rain. We’d hit rocks or slam into the bank and capsize before we got to the falls. Got a mouth full of water and broke an arm, but at least they didn’t find our bodies halfway down to Red Wing.”
That morning Scofield tells Anderson and Curry to bring in the reporter, Robert Gardner. After their “talk” behind Smokey’s, Curry mentioned Gardner to the county attorney, but made it clear that he didn’t consider the kid a suspect. Though he admitted to being in the vicinity on the night of the murder, Gardner could explain why he was in the neighborhood at the time, and there’s nothing to show that he’d ever met either Teresa Hickman or Dr. Rose. He didn’t own a car at the time and was living with his sister. Gardner is an accidental witness at best, Curry said, and if he’s hiding anything, it has nothing to do with the case.
“He’s banging a married lady in Linden Hills,” Charlie Riemenschneider says to the men slurping coffee in the squad room. “That or he’s got a boyfriend he messes around with down by the tracks.”
“He ain’t a queer,” says Lakeland. “I got it on good authority he’s been boffing Miles Mckenzie’s daughter-in-law. You know, the goodlooking redhead with legs up to here—you see her over at Smokey’s once in a while. She strikes me as a tight-ass, but sometimes they’re the ones that turn out to be the fireballs.”
The detectives have never identified the anonymous caller who reported the “skinny guy with glasses,” never mind the skinny guy himself.
“Gotta be someone in the neighborhood,” Einar Storholm says. “Maybe someone we talked to, but doesn’t want his name in the papers or on DeShields’s witness list.”
“So did any of us talk to the guy down there?” Curry asks. The table remains silent. “No? I didn’t think so.”
“Maybe it’s the killer himself,” Riemenschneider says. “He’s toying with us, taunting us, the way that kind of asshole likes to do.”
“In the movies maybe,” says Storholm.
“The last thing we want to do,” Rudy Blake says, assuming a grownup’s voice of reason, “is give DeShields another possible suspect to dangle in front of the jury. The more alternatives to Rose, the muddier the water and the harder it’ll be to convict. And if we bring Gardner in on the QT, we run the risk of DeShields saying we’ve been holding back evidence.”
“We know where to find Gardner if we need him,” Anderson says, ending the discussion.
* * *
The driver is sweeping out his garage when a Hiawatha County sheriff’s deputy named John Harrington sticks his head in the door.
“Julius Casserly,” Harrington says.
The driver turns his head. When he sees the uniform, he stops sweeping and draws his arm across his sweaty forehead. He glances over his shoulder to make sure he hasn’t left any photos out where people can see them.
“I told him you were busy, honey!” Margaret says. She is standing on her tiptoes behind the deputy, trying to see over his shoulder.
“What do you want?” the driver says, ignoring his wife. Despite the break in the weather, and even with the big doors open, the garage holds the summer heat, and he’s sweating through his short-sleeve shirt. He pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket, mops his face, and steps around the yellow Plymouth. He sees the large manila envelope in the deputy’s hand.
“This is a subpoena issued by the Hiawatha County District Court,” Harrington says. “You are ordered to appear at the Hiawatha County Courthouse at nine a.m. on Tuesday, August sixteenth. If you fail to appear at the designated time and place, Judge Nordahl will direct the sheriff to bring you in.”
“Julius! What is this about?”
“Go in the house, Margaret!” the driver shouts.
She does, and he retreats into the garage and sits down in his canvas chair to think.
Fifteen minutes later, Deputy Harrington intercepts Robert Gardner as the reporter walks from his parked car toward the front entry of his apartment building. Robert carries a grease-stained sack with a Juicy Lucy and double order of French fries from Nib’s Bar on Cedar, and a six-pack of Grain Belt from the grocery store on the corner.
“Robert Gardner? This is a subpoena issued by the Hiawatha County District Court,” Harrington begins.
Robert was planning to eat, fortify himself with three or four bottles of beer, and then work up the nerve to call Pam again. Now he has to wonder why there’s a subpoena sitting on the kitchen table beside his supper and how much trouble he can possibly be in.
Like several of the driver’s grand ideas, this one comes to him as he cruises around Lake of the Isles in the cooling dark of late evening.
After supper, he picked up a quarreling middle-
aged man and woman going to the airport and, at the airport, three brothers, Okies from the sound of them, looking for something cheap downtown. (He dropped the brothers at the Vendome on South Fourth Street and told them to talk to one of the colored boys about girls.) Then he turned off the roof light, found some dance music on the radio, and crossed Lake Street to Lake Calhoun, where amorous couples were already fogging the windows of their parked cars.
It had to be the Zevos gimp that put the authorities on to him—who else could it have been? Even then, it had to take some doing for the cops to track him down since, to the best of his knowledge, Zevos didn’t know his name, nor did any of the girls who work there, or anyone else who’s crossed his path at the Palace. Zevos no doubt saw the cab parked out front, maybe jotted down the number, and gave it to investigators who talked to O’Shaughnessy at the Canary garage. The fat asshole then directed them to his door without so much as a heads-up or how-do-you-do.
It wasn’t the cops who tracked him down, though. A sheriff’s deputy isn’t, to the driver’s mind, a cop—deputy sheriffs patrol the state fairgrounds and handle auto wrecks outside the city limits—so it must be Rose’s lawyers who want him to testify. What the hell could they expect him to say, other than he’d met and exchanged a few words with the victim?
Then the grand idea occurs to him—the proverbial bolt out of the blue.
When he’s called to the stand, he will tell the hushed courtroom that he saw Teresa Hickman sitting in Rose’s Packard parked along the east side of Lake of the Isles on the night of April 8. He’ll say that he could see they were arguing about something—he’ll say they were talking “animatedly.” Then, after a few minutes, he’ll say he saw the woman “abruptly” get out of Rose’s car and head up the cross-street alone.
Curious, and, yes, concerned for the safety of a young woman out alone in the dark—he has daughters of his own, he’ll tell his rapt audience—he followed her up the hill, away from the lake, on Euclid Place. He intended to turn on his roof light and offer to drive the woman home free of charge.
But before he could do that, she crossed the street and walked over to a car parked on the east side of Euclid. There were two men in the front seat of the car—a late-forties, pale green Oldsmobile sedan. The men and the woman exchanged a few words. Then the man on the passenger side got out, grabbed the woman’s arm, and pushed her into the car. For a moment, the man seemed to be looking for something in the street; then, cursing, he jumped back into the car and the car took off, its tires squealing. The car took a right at the corner, and proceeded in the direction of Hennepin.
“Can you describe the two men?” the nasty little lawyer will ask him.
The driver can feel the eyes of the entire courtroom staring at him. He’ll look pensive for a moment, maybe glance away from the lawyer, maybe sneak a peek at the cuties in the jury box, before replying.
“I think I can,” he’ll say at last. “Maybe not the man behind the wheel—I didn’t get a good look at him—but certainly the man who got out of the car and grabbed the girl. He was on the tall side, I’d say, at least six feet, maybe six one or two, and thin, with a narrow face and a pencil mustache. He was wearing a hat—so was the other man, I could see that much when the interior light went on—so I can’t say anything about the color of his eyes and hair.”
He imagines the carrot-topped prosecutor jumping up to ask how he knew that it was Dr. Rose and Mrs. Hickman before Mrs. Hickman got out of Rose’s car.
“It was pure coincidence I parked behind them at the lake,” he’ll reply coolly. “And it wasn’t until I saw their pictures in the paper the next day that I realized who it was that I’d seen.”
“Why is it only now that you’re coming forward with this information?”
This question is trickier, and the driver isn’t sure how he should reply.
“Well, to tell you the truth,” he might say, “I was afraid. What if the men in the Oldsmobile were gangsters? Would I be putting my family and myself in jeopardy by going to the police?”
No, even with the mention of his family, that would sound cowardly.
He could say, “Even after seeing the photos in the paper, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure it was Rose and Mrs. Hickman. It was dark, and there was only the light from a streetlamp, which wasn’t much help.”
Or he could say that he was under a lot of stress at the time, wasn’t sleeping well, and, frankly, didn’t always trust his own eyes. He was having extremely vivid dreams—he dreamed, for instance, that he saved a boy from drowning in Lake Nokomis—and, though he never said anything to anyone, even his wife, he was having hallucinations. “So how could I be certain that I hadn’t dreamt or hallucinated seeing Rose and Mrs. Hickman that night?”
The last explanation seems best, though he’s not sure why.
However confusing this is right now, the idea of taking center stage—stealing the show!—at the biggest local trial of the year, maybe the decade, maybe the century, makes him giddy. One day he’s just another schmo, anonymous and unimportant. The next, he’s on the witness stand in the city’s grandest courtroom, the focus of all present, including the sweethearts in the jury box and the two tables of newspapermen writing down his every word.
The facelessness that always worked to his advantage suddenly didn’t have much appeal. Julius Casserly would be a star!
CHAPTER 13
The trial resumes, the defense calling its witnesses, on Tuesday, August 16. But it’s been a busy several days since Judge Nordahl adjourned the proceedings last week.
The body of Grace Kubicek Montgomery was transported via the Great Northern Empire Builder to Grand Forks, and then by a Pontiac hearse to Our Savior’s Lutheran Church in Dollar, accompanied by Bud Montgomery and Detectives Riemenschneider and Storholm. While only Anderson still harbored suspicions about the sullen widower’s involvement in Teresa Hickman’s death, most of the murder squad still felt he might have had something to do with his wife’s death.
Meantime, Willard Woolworth, the lunatic who confessed to this summer’s murder of Herman Goranski, botched a suicide attempt in his jail cell, first sawing off his penis with a table knife, then trying to choke himself on it. (On a scrap of notebook paper he also stuck in his mouth he had scribbled, apparently referring to his choice of weapon, “What good has it ever done me?”) But, after Curry ruled out the possible Albert Lea suspect, the MPD was prepared to declare the Goranski case closed. Aided by a county-supplied attorney, Woolworth is expected to plead not guilty by reason of insanity to Goranski’s murder, and spend the rest of his life in the state madhouse at St. Peter.
Finally, in a development that shocked everyone who knew him, Fred MacMurray dropped dead of a heart attack moments after trimming a row of lilac bushes behind his Victory neighborhood split-level. Dr. Fred was only fifty, though it was learned shortly afterward that neither his father nor paternal grandfather had lived long past middle age, both dying suddenly of myocardial infarctions. The county announced that MacMurray’s first assistant, Alois Jensen, will serve as medical examiner on an interim basis.
From his chair behind the attorneys’ table, Rose watches the trial’s resumption in his now-familiar posture, one leg crossed over the other, hands clasped atop his knee. He betrays no emotion, not even boredom, sometimes going long minutes without seeming to blink.
The defendant’s “entourage” (George Appel’s snide label) has thinned. His brothers and their partners have returned to Vincennes and Duluth; even Ruth’s brother Ronnie is absent more often than not, having his own practice to tend to. Only Ruth, who even the most unapologetic anti-Semite would have to concede is the picture of a loyal, loving wife, stays close to her husband, smiling at him, stroking his arm, occasionally leaning over and whispering something in his ear. On those occasions, he will smile slightly, nod, and sometimes whisper a word or two in reply.
DeShields has made it clear that he will spend the lion’s share of his time, having established
Dr. Rose’s good character and reputation, discussing Teresa Hickman’s “susceptibility to the lure of sexual adventure” and the “sexual adventurers” who may have killed her. The lawyer has promised the Roses that he will not refer to Mrs. Hickman as a “whore,” “slut,” or any of the other ugly terms a person hears on the street these days. “That wouldn’t be right, the poor girl not here to defend herself,” Ruth has said more than once at the Roses’ dining-room table.
The most recent witnesses DeShields has called have been, in Rose’s eyes, men of dubious character. Grace’s thuggish husband. The sex-addled boy and girl from North Dakota. The limping lunchroom proprietor. The oily pornographer. Who among that lot, with the possible exception of the childhood friend now married to a schoolteacher, could an objective person consider anything but a rotten apple from the bottom of the bottle, if not a plausible murder suspect?
The current witness, a wan, shifty-eyed fellow named Julius Casserly, identifies himself as a “commercial driver” employed by the Canary Cab Company of Minneapolis. He says he’s “a lifelong city resident currently living on Bryant Avenue South, a proud graduate of De La Salle Catholic Boys’ High School, a husband for nineteen years, and the father of six children ages eighteen to seven.”
Casserly, who says he’s in his “late thirties,” is the kind of person you could pass on the street a hundred times and not remember a thing about him. Yet here in court he has a curious studied quality—as though he’s playing a witness in a theater production. Every once in a while he turns toward the jury box and smiles, apparently to ingratiate himself with the young women in the front row. (Rose has noticed the young women himself. He has watched them come and go, noted their smiles—both would have benefited from appliances during adolescence—and wondered about their lives beyond the basic data collected during the voir dire.)
