by W. A. Winter
In the car at noon, Cedric Adams, on the radio, announced that the body of a young woman had been found along abandoned streetcar tracks in south Minneapolis. Murders are still big news in the Twin Cities, especially if the murder takes place in a comfortable part of town and if the victim is a young, presumably attractive white girl or young woman. But Adams has nothing more to report than that. He doesn’t have the victim’s name or age or any information about the circumstances or cause of death, much less any possible suspects. Maybe the newscaster has the information, but is honoring the cops’ request to withhold it for the time being.
Well, fuck Cedric Adams, the driver muses. And fuck the cops—bumblers and bullies all of them, the ones he’s encountered. The afternoon’s Star will surely provide at least the victim’s name, and maybe her age and what caused her death.
Crossing Franklin, he keeps an eye peeled for the dentist’s Packard. The Whoop-Tee-Doo Club is already open, but, by the looks of it, not doing much business yet, and the other businesses along this dreary avenue are either closed for the weekend or serving minimal traffic. And then, sure enough, he sees the black sedan, just where it was parked last night before he dozed off, on the south side of Fifteenth Street a few car lengths west of Nicollet. That must mean that Dr. Rose is upstairs, seeing patients.
The driver continues down Nicollet. At Fourteenth, he turns left and doubles around the block and a few moments later approaches the Packard from behind. There’s no place to park so he stops alongside. The Packard’s windows are rolled up so all he can see through the lowered passenger-side window of the cab is his own face and the reflection of the gray sky and the dingy brick building on the other side of the street.
For a moment, though, he sees the Packard as he saw it last night, after he woke from his drowse, realized the dentist and—he feverishly believed—the skinny blonde were no longer in his office above the nightclub, and set off to find them. He’d headed south on Hennepin and eventually wound up in the shadows along the east side of Lake of the Isles, among the several cars lined up on what in those days served as a lovers’ lane.
He sees himself returning to the spot fifteen minutes later, after circumnavigating the lake and slipping into the spot vacated seconds earlier behind the dentist’s sedan. As it happens, this is an area where he often parks between fares, to drink coffee from his Thermos, listen to dance music on the radio, and maybe see what he can see in the lovers’ cars. Tonight he feels uncharacteristically lucky. What are the odds he’d find the Packard in this very spot?
He sees two people in the Packard’s front seat, a man and a woman, sitting close but apparently not touching, only talking. It’s a chilly night and the windows are rolled up so he doesn’t hear their voices, yet it seems obvious, given the animated way they’re speaking to each other, that they’re arguing about something. He has no doubt that the man is the Jew dentist and the woman is the waitress from the Palace. The man in the car is tall, sitting high up behind the steering wheel, with dark hair (if he has a hat, he’s not wearing it) and what seems to be, when he turns toward the girl, a long face, prominent nose, and mustache. The girl is bareheaded, but seems to be wearing a coat.
Then he sees the front passenger’s door open abruptly and the girl step out. The man leans toward the door as though trying to keep her from leaving, but it’s too late. He is saying something, though she doesn’t seem to be listening if she can hear him after she slams the door. The driver watches her walk along the boulevard beyond the curb, past another four or five parked cars, their steamy windows opaque in the cool night air. But the girl doesn’t look at the other cars, and who knows if their occupants, in their own heated entanglements, notice her as she passes.
As the driver watches, the girl walks to the corner, where Euclid Place juts away from the East Isles Parkway. She disappears from his line of sight and presumably heads up the hill toward Twenty-sixth Street and Hennepin Avenue beyond.
Now, on Saturday afternoon, a car behind the taxi honks, snapping the driver out of his reverie. Glancing at the impatient face in his mirror, he proceeds back to Hennepin, where he turns left into the sluggish downtown-bound traffic. He tries to return to the Lake of the Isles scenario, but can’t reclaim it while he’s driving.
Wide awake now and almost supernaturally alert, he decides to stop at the Palace on the odd chance that it was not the blonde who was murdered last night and he’s either crazy as a shithouse rat or he’s just had one hell of a titillating vision.
To Arne Anderson’s surprise, when he and Curry reach Dr. H. David Rose’s office above, no joke, the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club on the Fifteen-hundred block of Nicollet, Detectives Ferris Lakeland and Charlie Riemenschneider are already there. The detectives—large, loud, ursine men, all the larger in their shapeless fedoras and tatty storm coats—all but fill the dentist’s small waiting room, leaving little space for Anderson and Curry.
“Where’d you come from?” Anderson asks the other pair, prepared to be angry if a couple of “his” men were operating outside his immediate direction.
“We’ve been over to the Red Cross on West Broadway,” Lakeland says. He has an exceptionally wide, flat nose that, like Curry’s, has been broken multiple times, though Ferris’s injuries were sustained while walking a skid-row beat as a young cop. “Their records showed that a Dr. Wallace Ralston, who has an office on East Hennepin, saw Teresa Hickman a week ago—the Red Cross covered the cost—so we called him at his office.”
Riemenschneider, his colorless eyes squinting behind round spectacles, says, “He said he couldn’t talk to us, doctor-patient confidentiality and all that shit, but I told him we were investigating a homicide and didn’t give a rat’s ass about doctor-patient this or that. He said, ‘Okay, I’ll tell you what I know.’ He said that Mrs. Hickman was three months pregnant and she’d told him that her dentist—none other than Dr. H. Star-of-David Rose—was the baby’s daddy. She told him that Rose put her to sleep with a pill and then banged her.”
Anderson has the not-unusual sensation of running alongside a moving train, keeping up but just barely. The name Ralston rings a bell, and he recalls a Dr. Ralston caught up in an abortion bust a few years back, which probably explains the good doctor’s sudden willingness to cooperate when Charlie raised his voice.
“Have you talked to Rose?” he says, nodding toward the closed door off the waiting room.
“He’s taking care of a patient,” Riemenschneider says. “He stepped out to see who it was, and we told him that one of his patients, Teresa Hickman, had been murdered.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked us to wait out here,” Lakeland says. “I said, ‘Sure.’ There ain’t no back way out of this place, unless you count the fire escape. He said we could look around while we waited. Not that there’s much to look at.”
Riemenschneider says Rose’s suite comprises the waiting room, a slightly larger room with a single dental chair and the usual cabinets and equipment where Rose sees his patients, plus a small room, more like a closet, with shelves filled with chemicals and medications, and yet another room, not much larger than the medicine closet, with a wooden desk, a swivel chair, and a four-drawer filing cabinet.
The waiting room is warm. Lakeland sits down, pushes his hat off his forehead, and grabs a six-month-old Saturday Evening Post from the table. Riemenschneider and Curry light cigarettes and look around for an ashtray, which is on a stand and stuck between an uncomfortablelooking chair and a small sofa. The dusty ashtray looks unused.
Curry absently rubs the knuckles of his left hand, wondering, he’ll tell Anderson, why exactly he hit Tony Zevos, knowing the answer and then forgetting the question. He’ll tell Arne he thinks about the girl they knelt beside in the weeds this morning, and the naked corpse they watched the coroner cut apart a couple of hours later.
Arne will understand. He’s been investigating homicides for almost eight years, yet will admit that he doesn’t seem to be figuring it out.
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Sometimes there’s zero information to go on and no realistic expectation of a solution. Sometimes there’s too much data, and the possibilities seem capable of overwhelming him. True, there aren’t that many homicides to investigate in Minneapolis; there will likely be only a dozen by year’s end, a small fraction of the totals racked up in bigger cities and cities with more mob activity and larger colored populations. Here, most of the homicides are simple matters, involving a berserk husband who comes home after losing his $3-an-hour job on the railroad and finds his wife in the spare bedroom with the landlord or a couple of dope-addled niggers who came out on the shitty end of a crap game. Both types are easily closed, and the rest of the city doesn’t give a damn.
Then, on rare occasions, there’s a homicide like this one, with an unlikely victim and an unlikelier location. A young, pregnant white woman, the wife of a GI serving in Europe and the mother of a toddler, is found in the weeds in one of the Twin Cities’ tidiest precincts. How much info Arne and his men will be able to accumulate in the next few days remains to be seen, but the public’s expectations, and therefore the expectations of the press and the politicians and the MPD brass, will hit them like a tidal wave.
The piercing whine of a dentist’s drill and a sudden squeal from the other side of the closed door turns the detectives’ heads. The whine stops, then starts up again and lasts several seconds, cutting like razor wire through the hundred years of collective memories in the waiting room.
Lakeland laughs.
“Fuck me if there’s a worse sound in the world,” he says.
The drill whines again behind the door.
Curry says, “I used to hide in the neighbor’s fruit cellar. My ma and a couple of my aunts would walk up and down the block looking for me. Ma used to whip my ass when she found me, but I didn’t mind the whipping half as much as the drill.”
“I ran away from home once to avoid it,” says Riemenschneider. “Another time I begged my brother to yank out a bad tooth with pliers, which he did, thinking I wouldn’t have to go to the dentist, which I did anyways. Turned out my brother, the dumb shit, yanked out the wrong fucking tooth.”
“Our dentist, old Doc Wessel up on Johnson Nordeast, would shortchange us on painkiller,” Lakeland says. “I told my old lady once, ‘Ma, Wessel didn’t give me the novocaine,’ and she said, ‘Of course he did. You just have a low threshold for pain.’” Ferris laughs. “Low threshold, my ass! That fucker was a sadist!”
Arne says nothing, but he has vivid memories, too. His stepfather marching him up the stairs to Dr. Jurgensen’s office above the Sailor Tap at Forty-second and Cedar, shoving him through the door, and holding his skinny bicep in a vice grip while Arne surveyed the dismal waiting room, usually occupied by a school acquaintance or two, all of them sniffling and trying not to show how afraid they were. There was a bowl of penny toys—a tiny plastic airplane, a whistle in the shape of a race car, a scotty dog—that a young patient could pick as a “prize” when the appointment was over, not that anyone wanted anything more than getting out of that place.
Anderson tries to remember what happened to Dr. Jurgensen after Arne enlisted and left the neighborhood. Word had it that he fell out of a boat and drowned on a fishing trip up North, though Arne preferred the speculation that an unnamed patient tied the dentist to his chair and bored the largest drill at hand into his forehead, skipping the novocaine.
The door to the inner office swings open. A tall, slightly stooped, middle-aged man with a long face and a mustache stands back while a large woman in a polka-dot dress with perspiration stains under the arms walks out, holding a hanky up to the left side of her mouth.
Dr. Rose glances at the men in his waiting room, but doesn’t appear unsettled by their presence.
He says to the woman, “The anesthetic will wear off in a few hours, dear. Take a couple of aspirin if the pain persists. You may also wish to put some ice in a towel and hold it against your jaw. If the extraction site still hurts on Monday, please come back in.”
Ignoring the officers, Rose waits with his hands folded while the woman roots around in her purse.
“Ten dollars,” he says, as though he’s just sold her something nice for her table and needs to remind her of its cost. He thanks her when she hands him two crumpled fives. “Enjoy the weekend,” he says as the outer door closes behind her.
Rose is wearing a white shirt and striped necktie beneath his starched white jacket. Anderson notes that he has large, well-formed hands. He appears tired, but not in the least bit worried or frightened.
Arne holds out his leather-bound shield, thinking that this will be the first time he’s ever questioned a dentist about anything.
“We’d like you to come downtown with us, Doctor,” he says. “We also want to look around your office and take a peek inside your car.”
He wonders if Rose will want to see a warrant. Rose doesn’t.
Rose’s dark-eyed gaze moves from one detective to another. He appears curious and even mildly amused, as though he’s been invited to take part in a stunt of some kind. He says, “This has to do with Mrs. Hickman, the officer told me,” he says, nodding toward Lakeland. “Well, yes, of course. Mrs. Hickman was a patient of mine. I saw her last night. It’s terrible what happened.”
He fumbles in one of his pants pockets and withdraws a ring of keys.
“These are for my car, a black Packard Clipper parked around the corner on Fifteenth,” he says. “This one is for the office door. Please turn the lights off when you’re finished.”
This is not an arrest so there’s no need for handcuffs. It will be a “conversation” between investigators and a cooperative witness, Anderson tells the dentist. Arne hopes, of course, that it will be more.
While Lakeland and Riemenschneider begin to poke around the office, opening cabinets and drawers and riffling through papers on the dentist’s desk, Anderson and Curry follow Rose down the long flight of stairs and out into the gray afternoon. They can hear the jukebox in the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club—the Crew Cuts singing “Sh-Boom”—though it’s nothing like the cacophony that defines the place after dark.
Lakeland will tell Einar Storholm to pick up Rose’s car keys and drive the Packard downtown for a going-over by the forensics crew. Presumably, Hessburg and LeBlanc are back from Linden Hills, maybe with some helpful information, though Arne isn’t optimistic. The victim didn’t live there, and the odds of anyone coming forward with anything useful are shrinking by the hour.
He wonders why Grace Montgomery didn’t say anything this morning about her sister’s dental appointment. It’s inconceivable that she didn’t know about it, especially if Teresa Hickman’s toothache was bad enough for her to skip work and make an afterhours appointment. He wonders if Grace called Rose after he and Mel left her apartment. He wonders when Bud Montgomery will come home from wherever he’s been keeping himself. Grace’s surprise at the detectives’ news seemed to be genuine, but her apparent lack of curiosity about details might indicate a foreknowledge of events. Until Arne learns differently, Bud is as credible a suspect as Dr. Rose.
He’ll station Curtis Wrenshall and a couple of officers outside the Montgomerys’ building to pick up Bud when he shows himself. He will also send Sid and Frenchy to talk some more to Tony Zevos and his employees about last night and the luncheonette’s clientele.
Everybody on the eight-man murder squad plus what other bodies Augie Fuller can commandeer will be involved in this one.
Suppose, Arne muses, that Teresa Hickman was walking along Nicollet Avenue after her appointment and some scumbag leaving the Whoop-Tee-Doo followed her down the street and around the corner and attacked her in the shadows between buildings. But it was Friday night and the streets around the club were no doubt crowded. If her assailant had forced her into a car, her clothes would likely have been in disarray, and there would have been marks on her body. But she hadn’t been roughed up or beaten. There were no broken bones (besides the hyoid) and nothing o
n her skin except the bruise on her neck. She’d had sex with someone not long before she died, but there was no sign of the sex being forced. So she probably went willingly, on foot or in his car, with someone she knew at least casually.
It will take ten minutes to get from Rose’s office to police headquarters in the courthouse. Mel drives while Arne sits in back with the suspect. Arne sees Mel looking at Rose in the rearview mirror. Arne himself glances at the dentist when there’s a reason to look in his direction. Rose is not panicking and does not seem to be anticipating and rehearsing what he must surely believe will be more than a casual conversation. He did not seem surprised or inconvenienced when told about Teresa Hickman’s death and the need to go downtown in the middle of a Saturday afternoon. He said he didn’t have another patient scheduled today, but this couldn’t have been the way he expected to finish his workweek.
Anderson tries to remember the last time he interrogated a Jew. It was probably one of Bunny Augustine’s hoods, though Arne can’t recall who or when. (He’s seen but never spoken to the Northside crime boss himself.) One thing for sure: Arne has never seen anyone who looked more like a Jew than Rose. It’s almost comical—the long face, the large nose, the dark hair, and sallow complexion. In fact, now that he thinks about it, you could throw a towel over the man’s head and put him in a robe, and he’d be the spitting image of one of the Pharisees in the picture books Arne used to page through in the basement of Calvary Lutheran Church when he was a kid.
As Mel turns onto Fourth Street and looks for a parking spot in the lee of the fortress-like courthouse, Arne wonders what he’s going to say to Lily when he gets home this evening. Lily is the Jew he sleeps with, the Jew he once thought he loved, and the Jew who’s capable of making this case more complicated than it probably is already.