The Secret Lives of Dentists
Page 32
Two days later, the driver spots one of the pretty jurors—the one who was crying in the newspaper photograph the day after the Rose verdict—on a street corner downtown. The papers identified her as Miss Melinda Wakeley, twenty-five, with a Fourteenth Avenue South address. The several times he’s cruised past the house, however, he’s never caught sight of her, in the yard or coming and going, the window shades on the house always pulled down, so he more or less gave up. Now, spotting her waiting for the light to change at Sixth and Marquette, he can’t believe his eyes. What are the odds? But he’s almost positive it’s her.
He pulls into the first open space he sees and jumps out of the yellow car. He loses sight of the girl, and then spots her again on the other side of Marquette, a few steps from the Rand Tower entrance. Darting into traffic, he is knocked off his feet, run over, and dragged fifty feet by the southbound No. 4 bus. He is rushed to Hiawatha General Hospital, where he lingers for eight hours before succumbing to a fractured skull and multiple internal injuries.
“I never saw the guy,” bus driver G.V. Higgins tells the Star.
Higgins is not charged.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I was a kid, I was fascinated by the crime stories published in the Minneapolis papers. One of the most memorable involved the murder of a young rural Minnesota woman and the eventual arrest, trial, and conviction of a middle-aged Minneapolis family man—her dentist, of all people. I found the case shocking, tragic, sordid, and at times incomprehensible. But with the limited experience and nascent vocabulary of a ten-year-old, I pored over the lurid particulars the way my buddies studied the box scores on the sports pages.
It would be a mistake, however, to say that The Secret Lives of Dentists is based on the actual Mary Moonen–A.A. Axilrod homicide case. The book you’ve just read is fiction; it was only inspired by the infamous events of the spring and summer of 1955. With my novelist’s hat on, I have invented the characters, places, institutions, scenarios, timelines, and conversations that occasionally echo the real thing, but exist on these pages solely for my storytelling purposes. Well, Minneapolis circa 1955 is pretty much the way I remember it.
I need to credit—by no means for the first time—the invaluable work of Twin Cities journalist and author Larry Millett, whose vivid review of the Moonen–Axilrod case in a wonderful compilation of true-crime features entitled Murder Has a Public Face (Borealis Books, Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2008) refreshed my memory and fired me up to tell my fictional story.
My thanks also to Dan Mayer and his crew at Seventh Street Books for their confidence, encouragement, and attention to detail. And to my wife, Libby Swanson, for everything else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
W.A. WINTER is the pen name of William Swanson, a Minneapolis journalist. Swanson is the author of three true-crime books—Dial M: The Murder of Carol Thompson; Black White Blue: The Assassination of Patrolman Sackett; and Stolen from the Garden: The Kidnapping of Virginia Piper—published by Borealis Books, an imprint of the Minnesota Historical Society Press. Writing as W.A. Winter, he has published, besides The Secret Lives of Dentists, three suspense novels available online from Kindle Books and Smashwords.com: Handyman, See You / See Me, and Wolfie’s Game.
Author photo by Libby Swanson