The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  He knows enough not to touch the body or turn it over to get a better look at the victim’s face. He’s a newsman, paid to be curious, but at this moment fear and what little he knows about crime-scene protocol tamps down his curiosity. He realizes that he’s shivering, though that could be the chilly night. He straightens up and looks around. Though he sees no blood or signs of a struggle, he presumes that the woman was murdered. Nothing runs on these tracks anymore, and they’re fifty yards from the street, so there’s no chance she was hit by a trolley or a car. What could it be except murder or maybe a suicide, though if it was suicide how would she have done it—he sees no weapon or bottle of pills—and why here?

  Could her assailant be nearby? For no good reason, Robert doubts it. The body seems rooted in the weeds, an organic part of the scrub and detritus that line the track bed. That helps him believe her killer is gone.

  Robert takes another, short step toward the body. He squats, extends his right arm, and touches the woman’s exposed hand. Impulsively, he strokes the back of her hand with his forefinger, and then traces a slightly raised vein just visible in the dim light. His finger maintains contact with the woman’s hand for only a moment, but he will remember the cold, wax-like sensation—he will compare it to the feel of a discarded candle—for the rest of his life.

  He believes, though he has no way of knowing without a better look at her face, that the woman was beautiful.

  CHAPTER 2

  Arne Anderson is still sleeping when Lily Kline pinches his shoulder and says, “Downtown’s on the phone.” He rolls over, rubs his eyes, and tells Lily to tell Downtown to fuck themselves. Lily, who’s already dressed and probably still angry about last night, snaps the shade up and walks out of the bedroom. “I told Mel you’d call him right back.”

  The phone is in the short hallway that connects the Chicago Avenue apartment’s single bedroom with the bath, kitchen, and a minuscule living room. Anderson, barefoot and yawning in his boxers and sleeveless undershirt, makes the call and scratches his back against the stuccoed hallway wall while waiting for Mel to pick up at the office. He can hear Lily in the kitchen, frying eggs and making toast. He figures she can’t be too angry if she’s fixing breakfast, and tries to remember what she might be angry about anyway. She’s been angry a lot lately.

  It’s a chilly Saturday morning, not yet eight o’clock if the worn-out Westclox on the dresser hasn’t stopped.

  Melvin Curry, Anderson’s Homicide Squad partner for the past three years, tells him that the body of a white female, probably in her late teens or early twenties, has been found along the streetcar right-of-way in Linden Hills. A couple of patrol cars responded to a citizen’s call half an hour ago. “Hessburg and LeBlanc will be waiting for us, plus the new guy from the coroner’s office,” Curry says. “Considering the victim and the neighborhood,” he says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if Augie and Big Ed are on their way as well.”

  Anderson straightens up and scratches himself between his legs.

  “You said Linden Hills?”

  “Strange but true.”

  Arne coughs.

  “When was the last time we had a body down there?”

  “Before my time, unless we’re counting a couple suicides,” Mel says. “I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

  When Curry arrives in an unmarked Chevy sedan, Anderson climbs in, balancing a plate of fried eggs, a slice of buttered toast, and a couple of browned sausages in his right hand. He carries a fork between his teeth the way a pirate carries a dagger. Mel, who’s no doubt been up for hours and enjoyed a proper breakfast with his fetching new wife, smiles and shakes his head.

  “Don’t let me forget the plate and fork somewhere,” Arne says. “Things are touch-and-go with Lily as it is.”

  Traffic is nonexistent this early on a Saturday morning so Curry doesn’t bother with the red dashboard light and siren. Even so, they’re at the crime scene—a stretch of deserted tracks behind three or four blocks of small apartment buildings, modest duplexes, and small, storefront businesses—in ten minutes.

  For decades, the Twin City Rapid Transit Company operated one of the finest public transportation systems in the country, and electric-powered streetcars the color of French’s mustard jars covered the Twin Cities like a blanket. This route, Line No. 1, carried riders from downtown Minneapolis through the populous south and southwest precincts of the city all the way out to the lakeside town of Excelsior in the far western suburbs. Then a cabal of shady businessmen, corrupt politicians, and organized-crime figures sold off the cars, ripped out most of the tracks, and turned the routes over to a fleet of diesel-powered buses that fouled the air and did little to improve service, traffic flow, or safety. In the spring of 1955, this forlorn scrap of track is one of the few vestiges of the trolley system in the city.

  “There was nothing wrong with those streetcars,” Arne says. “I hear there are a lot of them on the streets of Mexico City.”

  Mel parks a car length north of where the tracks cross Zenith Avenue, behind Sid Hessburg and Frenchy LeBlanc’s Chevy, a white Chevrolet station wagon driven this morning by the coroner’s assistant, and the black Buick sedan bearing Detective Captain August Fuller and Fuller’s boss, Inspector of Detectives Edwin Evangelist. Black-and-white prowl cars are parked at odd angles on Zenith and York, effectively blocking those streets.

  The focus of the dozen-plus uniformed and plainclothes police and the coroner’s man is a bundle of winter clothing lying in the weeds off the south side of the tracks about halfway between the crossing streets. Behind them a dozen or so civilians, presumably neighborhood residents, stand in clusters of twos and threes, speaking in hushed voices and staring at the bundle in the weeds. The sun is up but hardly a factor behind a scrim of gray clouds, so Anderson is glad to see officers holding flashlights.

  Fuller, his unshaven moon face as dark and grisly as a Gateway wino’s, stands with his hands shoved deep in the pockets of his tweed overcoat. “You got this one, Arne?” he says without bothering to look at his best investigator.

  “Do I, Captain?” Anderson says in a flat voice. That’s neither selfdeprecation nor false modesty. He’s simply not one to take things for granted.

  “Yeah,” Fuller says. “You do.”

  “And too fuckin’ bad for you, Anderson,” says Evangelist, who’s lighting either his first cigar of the morning or the remains of last night’s. The fat bureaucrat is a political appointee despised for his inopportune appearances at crime scenes and his flaccid support of the department’s detectives. “This one’s gonna be a bitch.”

  Anderson steps forward and hunkers down alongside the body.

  It’s too early in the season for flies, but already there’s the unmistakable stink of death rising from the body. As an infantryman in George Patton’s Third Army during the Battle of the Bulge, Arne saw plenty of young corpses, many of them gruesomely bloodied, mangled, or dismembered. The bodies of a few females, too—stripped, abused, and murdered, or merely collateral damage. One snowy morning, he spotted Patton standing in an open Jeep, hands on his hips, looking at the same scatter of lifeless bodies, the bodies lying at odd angles, grotesquely contorted or oddly peaceful, as though only asleep.

  As a street cop and homicide detective, Arne has seen his share of civilian dead and dying, too, though this is Minneapolis, not Chicago or Cleveland or Kansas City, so not that many. But this body is out of the ordinary. It’s the body of a slight young white woman, fully and appropriately dressed, maybe a college student or a shop clerk, almost certainly not a barfly or a prostitute. She was small enough for her killer—most likely a man—to easily carry her body the one hundred-odd feet from either Zenith or York and dump it here.

  The woman is wearing a hip-length, dark green winter coat or jacket, but no cap, scarf, or gloves. An extended hand, her left, is white and cold, its delicate fingers already stiffened by rigor mortis; there’s a small diamond engagement ring and thin wedding band on the ring finger.
She’s wearing white anklets, but missing her right shoe. She’s also wearing what looks like an inexpensive necklace and matching bracelet. Anderson looks more closely at the rings, which appear to his untrained eye no pricier than the necklace and bracelet. Nevertheless, she’s still wearing them, which means she was probably not murdered during a robbery or mugging.

  He stares at the tiny diamond and wedding band. Where, he wonders, is her husband?

  Detective Sid Hessburg, eager to offer his opinion, squats down beside Anderson and says, “No purse in sight, but there was a billfold in her coat pocket. There’s a North Dakota driver’s license with the name Teresa Marie Kubicek—“KOO-bah-chek,” he pronounces the last name, correctly it turns out—of Dollar, North Dakota, “wherever the hell that is.” He reads off the driver’s license. “Five foot two. One hundred pounds. Date of birth: 9/2/33.”

  Anderson stands up and looks around.

  “Anything else in her pockets?”

  “A pack of Pall Malls,” Hessburg says, standing, too. He holds up a familiar dark-red package. There are three cigarettes left. “Pall Mall—that’s a guy’s brand. I don’t know any women who smoke Pall Malls. Maybe she swiped ’em.”

  “Find her other shoe?” Anderson asks him.

  “Not yet.”

  Arne takes the red, imitation leather billfold from the young detective. He glances at the driver’s license and flips through a halfdozen two-by-three-inch snapshots in their cloudy glassine sleeves. There’s a studio shot of a baby, a headshot of a young man in an Army uniform, and photos of another young man in civilian clothes, a bareshouldered young woman in a wedding gown, and an elderly couple grinning from behind a decorated layer cake. Either the soldier or the young civilian could be the victim’s husband, assuming the victim is in fact married. The woman in the wedding dress is pudgy and curly-haired, definitely not the victim, but maybe a sister or a friend. The old couple are no doubt parents or, more likely, grandparents back in Dollar, North Dakota.

  There’s a tightly folded sheet of pink paper in the last sleeve, a small typewritten document of some kind. In the zippered change pocket: a folded sawbuck, three crumpled singles, fifty-three cents in change, and a pair of bus tokens.

  Anderson waits for an MPD photographer to shoot the scene from this angle, and then squats down again beside the body. He, Mel, Sid, and Dr. Alois Jensen from the coroner’s office turn the woman face up. They might as well be lifting a child, the body is so light. Mel shines his flashlight on her face. Her mouth is slightly ajar, what little lipstick remains is smudged off her lower lip, and her pale, gray or green eyes are half-open and dull, staring at the sky but seeing nothing. One slightly rouged cheek bears traces of the unkempt ground it’s been pressed against, but there’s no sign of physical stress or violence.

  “Wow!” Hessburg says softly, admiringly, peering at the young woman’s face.

  Dr. Jensen reaches between the unbuttoned flaps of the woman’s coat and gingerly probes the body inside.

  Anderson stands and looks down at the corpse. “This was a very pretty young lady,” he says to no one in particular.

  “You can say that again,” Hessburg murmurs.

  “You’re assuming she was a lady,” Evangelist, standing behind them, says out of the side of his mouth.

  “Doesn’t look like a sexual assault,” Jensen says, writing something in a small notebook as he speaks. “Her clothes are damp, probably from lying in the weeds for several hours, but I don’t see any rips or tears. No visible bullet holes or puncture wounds.” Jensen’s boss, Hiawatha County Medical Examiner Fred MacMurray, will likely want to perform an autopsy as soon as possible this morning.

  “No visible blood, either,” Jensen continues. “But there’s a mark, some bruising maybe, on the left side of her neck.”

  “Have a guess as to how long she’s been here?” Anderson asks.

  “I’m thinking she could have died anytime late last night into early this morning. Probably not here. We’ll get a better idea downtown.”

  Other than Hessburg, the detectives are reluctant to offer their two cents’ worth until they’re sure Evangelist and Fuller have offered theirs. Oddly, neither of the senior officers says a word. Big Ed is hung over. He’s literally swaying in the weeds beside Augie, a safe distance from the corpse and rheumy eyes focused elsewhere. Augie, who’s been fighting a spring cold, doesn’t look very chipper, either.

  “Sid, we’re talking to the neighbors, aren’t we?” Anderson says to Hessburg. “You and Frenchy, take five or six uniforms and keep at it. Go three blocks east and west, on both sides of the right-of-way. See if anyone saw or heard anything last night. Keep your eyes out for her other shoe.”

  “Unfamiliar cars, maybe unusual activity down here along the tracks,” Hessburg, an overgrown Eagle Scout, says needlessly.

  Anderson smiles.

  “Yeah, Sid. All of that,” he says.

  Fuller clears a phlegmy throat and says, “It’s possible she didn’t live in the neighborhood, but maybe her killer does.”

  Six months ago, Augie, who is third-generation MPD, ran Forgery and Swindle; before that, he was Auto Theft’s second-in-command. He has the probational respect and affection of the murder cops who work for him today. He tries hard to make a point that his charges will appreciate, and occasionally he does.

  “If that shoe isn’t in the immediate vicinity, she probably wasn’t murdered here,” Anderson says. “Unless the killer took it with him.”

  “Somebody needs to find her old man,” Evangelist says. He’s right, of course—the husband is the prime suspect at this point in most investigations of murdered married women—but there isn’t a cop in the world who needs a bibulous hack like Big Ed to tell him that.

  Jensen, Hessburg, LeBlanc, and a young uniform Anderson doesn’t recognize are placing the woman on a stretcher. Jensen then pulls an army blanket over her body and draws it up to cover her face. Arne looks around as Fuller and Evangelist turn back toward their car. The brass will be happy to let him handle this one for now. If the woman’s death turns out to be something more than a run-of-the-mill homicide, they’ll have second thoughts and want their names on the public statements and in the newspaper features, prepared, of course, to back off again if the investigation gets messy. For the time being they’re happy to let Anderson and his crew kick the can down the road.

  “Where’s the guy that found the body?” Anderson asks.

  Hessburg nods toward a thin, bespectacled man in a corduroy jacket and matching cap standing next to a uniformed officer beyond the semicircle of detectives. The man has gray hair and looks to be in his forties. He’s holding a cigarette in one hand and a leash with a handsome Dalmatian tugging against it in the other. His name, Hessburg says, is Gerald Bergen. Citizen Bergen is looking at Arne and smiling self-consciously.

  Anderson walks over, introduces himself, and guides Bergen to one side, out of earshot of the other civilians. Both men are aware of the growing number of the curious, many of whom must be acquainted with Bergen, and the arrival of a gaggle of downtown reporters and photographers who will be eager to introduce him, along with the late Teresa Marie Kubicek, to the rest of the city.

  At nine forty-five this Saturday morning, Dr. Rose is just getting up. This is not unusual. After a late night, the doctor almost always sleeps in. He typically doesn’t schedule patients before one in the afternoon. He’s always preferred afternoons and evenings to mornings. He believes that later in the day he’s more alert, focused, and adroit—demonstrably more dexterous—and in the past several years he’s developed a comfortable practice with working women and women with small children who can’t get away for appointments during daytime office hours.

  Today, he plans to go in before noon, to give himself time to tidy up the office before the afternoon’s first patient arrives at one.

  He removes the sleep mask and walks stiffly to the bathroom. His joints ache; his parents’ arthritis is an unfortunate inh
eritance. He is, among other things, a man of purposeful and unvarying routine. He will sit in the big claw-footed tub for fifteen minutes, his bony knees poking out of the sudsy water like a pair of Pacific atolls. He will then follow the precise and unalterable protocol taught him and his brothers by their father back in Vincennes—preparing the lather with the porcelain mug and boar-bristle brush, then scraping away his thick beard with one of his father’s bone-handled razors (properly stropped while the lather softens the beard), then rinsing and drying his face with a clean towel, and slapping on the Barberry Coast bay rum that he’s been buying since college.

  Before all that, however, he stares in the mirror at his long, almost comically somber face as though it belongs to a stranger.

  It’s the face, sans mustache, wrinkles, and pouches, that he’s had all his life, its features shared by his father and paternal grandfather, uncounted uncles and cousins, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, his two brothers, yet it’s a face that inevitably surprises him when he leans over the bathroom sink and peers into the mirror.

  He would never describe himself as a handsome man, certainly not by gentile standards, especially here in the German-and Scandinavian-dominated Upper Midwest, but there’s a presence about him that indicates a serious, sensitive, substantial man. His well-groomed hair, combed straight back from his forehead, and soulful eyes are no doubt his best features, and, though not everyone in the family agrees, he believes that the neat mustache he has worn since dental school adds gravitas to his appearance.

  Today, in the privacy of his toilet, he’s inspired to take a close look at his naked body in the full-length mirror attached to the bathroom door. His stooped shoulders and bandy legs belong to an older man, no denying that. But the ropy musculature of the arms, especially the hairy forearms, the pale torso free of the moles and keratoses that cling like barnacles to many middle-aged men, and the long, circumcised penis, thick as a ship’s rope, that shows signs of life as he stares at it—all of that speaks of a vital man still very much in the prime of his life.