The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  Anderson has heard hundreds of alibis, but never anything quite like this one, from a suspect quite like Dr. Rose.

  He says, “Where were you when you came to your senses?”

  “Well, only a block or two from my home. On Xerxes Avenue, at the south end of Lake Calhoun.”

  “And what time do you think it was then?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps about midnight.”

  Fuller says, “You didn’t know what had become of Mrs. Hickman?”

  Rose takes a deep breath and says, “Mrs. Hickman and I were in the car, and the next thing I knew she was gone.”

  Curry asks, “Do you remember driving—or stopping—near Forty-fourth Street? Forty-fourth and Zenith, or Forty-fourth and York?”

  “No.”

  “Do you remember driving on or across any streetcar tracks?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Do you recall walking on or stepping across any streetcar tracks?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill Mrs. Hickman, Doctor?”

  “I did not. Well, I don’t remember. Not that I know of.”

  When Anderson, now sweating like a prizefighter, lifts himself off the desk, Fuller and Curry stand up, too. Then so does Dr. Rose, slowly and laboriously, as though his back and legs are arthritic, and then so do Ruth Rose and Ronald Oshinsky. Arne hears Oshinsky tell his sister that he’s going to make a phone call and watches the lawyer hurry out of the room.

  Ruth catches Anderson’s eye and says, “I’m afraid my husband’s memory is not always very reliable, Sergeant. Maybe it’s his diet and all the pressure at the office. David is a perfectionist, and he doesn’t get enough rest.”

  Augie Fuller, coming around from behind his desk, says, “Dr. Rose, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of Teresa Hickman.”

  Rose looks at his wife and stands there, expressionless and awkward-looking, as though he no longer knows what to say or what to do with his hands.

  The following morning, after a breakfast of oatmeal, dry toast, and black coffee, Rose is fetched by Mel Curry and escorted in handcuffs down a flight of stairs to a small, untidy office on the second floor of the courthouse. After his arrest late yesterday, he was booked, issued a bedroll, and assigned a cell in the courthouse tower. The jailer, a blimpish sheriff’s deputy named Miller Haskins, told Curry that he had no complaints about the prisoner.

  “Didn’t hear a peep,” Haskins said. “Far as I know, he slept like a baby.”

  The office, according to the name on the frosted-glass door, belongs to James P. Jerecki, Deputy Director, Weights & Measures. It wouldn’t occur to Rose, a naif in such matters, but Jerecki’s unassuming venue has been selected to provide cover for the investigators, lest reporters get wind of developments and before Ruth Rose and Ronald Oshinsky can send an actual criminal-defense attorney to the courthouse.

  “We need another hour to ourselves,” Anderson says to Riemenschneider and Lakeland as he ushers them into Jerecki’s office. Neither the Weights & Measures director nor his secretary is present (Fuller has made the necessary arrangements), but Homer Scofield, the thirty-two-year-old Hiawatha County attorney, is leaning against one of the desks when the detectives arrive. Scofield is new to the job. This is his first county case of any kind, never mind his first homicide prosecution. He has a mop of red hair, a pale, freckled face, a long, bony frame, and Coke-bottle glasses with colorless plastic frames. His oversized suit makes him look like a ten-year-old pretending to be his father. He is here to decide whether to call his first-ever grand jury.

  Augie, who just met the new prosecutor, introduces him to the others as “Herbert Wakefield,” and then red-faced, hastily and with the prosecutor’s help, makes the necessary correction. “Sorry about that, sir,” he says. “I went to Patrick Henry High with a Herbie Wakefield.”

  Scofield smiles uncertainly.

  Curry brings Rose in and directs him to a large table the contents of which—stacks of files, ledgers, and three-inch-thick technical manuals—have been shoved to one side. May Grey, unnoticed until now, opens a fresh steno pad and steadies it on her knee.

  After a few tepid pleasantries, Anderson, facing Rose across the table, says, “Were you aware that Teresa Hickman had sexual relations shortly before she died Friday night?”

  “No,” Rose says. He wears this morning only a white dress shirt, beltless suit trousers, socks, and shoes, pending the issuance of regulation jail garb. He looks alert if somewhat rumpled and disoriented. “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Did you have sexual relations with Mrs. Hickman?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Either in your office or in your car?”

  “No.” He pauses, and then adds with a rare flash of impatience, “I did not.”

  “Yesterday, when I asked if you killed Mrs. Hickman, you told us that you didn’t remember. ‘Not that I know of,’ you said. Is it possible that you don’t remember having sex with her, either?”

  “Well, I suppose it’s possible, but I doubt it. It would be a violation of my professional ethics.”

  “You said the two of you argued when you were in the car,” Anderson says.

  “I suppose we did,” Rose replies, sounding uncertain, either forgetting or disregarding what he said yesterday.

  “What did you argue about?”

  Rose suddenly rolls his shoulders, as though easing out the kinks of having spent the night on a mattress the thickness of a couple Saturday Evening Posts. Arne recalls Rose’s comment about arthritis. “Her pregnancy, no doubt,” he says.

  “Was she making demands? Did she want you to pay for an abortion, or to help with the child once it was born?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Did she threaten to tell people about her situation, threaten to go to the police, or make a complaint to the state dental authorities?”

  “I don’t remember,” Rose says quietly. “If she did, I wasn’t going to stand for it, I can assure you of that.”

  “You have a good reputation in this community, don’t you, Doctor?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “During the drive, Doctor—”

  “The drive was her idea,” Rose says. “She wanted to talk about her pregnancy. I think your proposition is correct, though I can’t be certain I’m recalling this correctly. I think she wanted to ask me for money.”

  “Did she ask you for money?”

  “Well, I can’t say for certain. But I’m pretty sure that’s what she had in mind.”

  Arne looks around the room, but avoids eye contact with his colleagues and the county attorney.

  “Did she in fact ask you for money that night?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know or you don’t remember?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the difference.”

  Arne looks down at his hands, which are folded atop May Grey’s typed transcript of yesterday’s interrogation. “What’s the last thing you remember before you blacked out Friday night?” he says.

  “All I can recall with any certitude is coming out of it near my home,” Rose replies.

  “And Teresa Hickman was not in the car when you did?”

  “No, she wasn’t.”

  “She was sitting beside you in the front seat of your Packard, possibly threatening you with blackmail, and then, sometime later, when you looked in her direction, the seat was empty and she was gone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Hickman was manually strangled,” Anderson says. “According to the pathologist who performed her autopsy, there was a bruise on her neck and the hyoid bone in her throat had been crushed. She also had semen in her body, indicating recent sexual intercourse. Her body was dumped in the weeds a half-mile from your home. Does any of that information ring a bell, Dr. Rose?”

  Rose stares at Anderson, and then makes that little rippling motion with his shoulders.

  “As a professional man myself, I have to respect
the opinion of another professional man,” he says. “If the pathologist says she was strangled, I have to accept that she was strangled. If he says she’d had sexual intercourse, she must have had sexual intercourse. I won’t argue with another doctor’s report.”

  He sounds tired, Anderson muses, maybe from a bad night’s sleep or maybe because he’s finally out of gas.

  “It was just the two of us in the car, and the girl made me angry so I can see why you might wonder if I lost control,” Rose says quietly. “But I want you to know, Sergeant, I am not a violent man. I have no memory of laying a hand on Terry Hickman—of doing anything to her or with her, in any way harming her—and, frankly, I doubt very much that I did. I have not deliberatively hurt so much as an ant or a ladybug in my lifetime. I am not a murderer.”

  He manages a weak, almost apologetic smile and doesn’t say another word.

  That evening, the Star runs the story along the top of the front page below a headline set in sixty-four-point type:

  CITY DENTIST HELD IN WOMAN’S DEATH

  Under Oscar Rystrom’s byline, the story reiterates the basics of the case, the coroner’s findings, and the arrest of H. David Rose, a South-side dentist, providing, as the papers routinely do at the time, the home addresses of both the victim and the suspect. Rystrom quotes MPD Captain of Detectives August Fuller saying that Teresa Hickman had been Rose’s patient, and that the police believe he was the last person to see her alive.

  An unidentified “well-placed” source is quoted as saying that in interviews with the police on Sunday and earlier today, “The suspect has all but confessed to the crime.” None of the detectives Rystrom interviewed, however, would confirm or deny that statement on the record.

  Rose has hired “flamboyant local defense attorney” Dante DeShields, Rystrom notes. DeShields immediately issued a statement, calling the arrest “totally unjustified” and concluding, “David Rose is an eminent doctor of dental surgery, a law-abiding citizen, a loving husband, and a conscientious father. To suggest that he had anything to do with Teresa Hickman’s murder is outrageous. Dr. Rose is innocent. He has ‘all but confessed’ to absolutely nothing.”

  A rudimentary map of the Linden Hills neighborhood, extending from West Forty-fourth Street to the south end of Lake Calhoun and including Rose’s Zenith Avenue home five blocks from the spot where the victim’s body was found, accompanies the story. There is a photograph, no doubt from her high school yearbook, of Teresa Hickman and a studio portrait of Dr. Rose.

  Teresa Hickman is smiling. Dr. Rose is not.

  CHAPTER 5

  Robert Gardner sits bare-assed on the edge of the narrow bed and tries desperately to think about other things: the pathetic threelegged mutt that hobbled around his Rochester neighborhood when he was a kid, the Life magazine photo of a Japanese soldier about to behead a blindfolded American airman, his grandmother’s elaborate funeral. He tries to picture the five-fatality car wreck on Highway 14 he helped cover for the Post-Bulletin—anything that will keep him from exploding in Pam Brantley’s mouth.

  He manages to hold on for another few seconds before the past is swallowed by the present and he comes in a mighty rush and exclamation.

  It was Monday night and it’s now very early Tuesday morning, the first time he’s seen or talked to her since Teresa Hickman’s murder. Pam said when he arrived a few minutes before midnight that they have “all the time in the world” because Karl is working an extra shift at the hospital. So they made love once, then twenty minutes later a second time, and then Pam went down on him, another first in his rapidly expanding portfolio of sexual experience.

  This night, like the several nights they’ve trysted before it, has seemed too good to be true, though Robert can’t help but listen, at least during pauses between lovemaking, for the door at the bottom of the stairs to open and Karl’s footfalls on the steps. What if Karl changes his mind and heads home after his first shift? Robert worries, too, about Gwen waking up in her apartment and noticing it’s nearly two in the morning and her little brother hasn’t come in yet. Nothing, not even this wild carnal pleasure, is without complication and concern.

  Robert wonders if he can fuck Pam a third time tonight. Nothing in his experience, or, for that matter, in his many years of sexual fantasy, has prepared him for the opportunities his seemingly insatiable lover is giving him—so different from his two years going steady with her cautious, abstemious sister.

  Pam, lying beside him, is now snoring softly, like a child, her face turned toward him and her legs partially open as though inviting his return. The dark triangle between her thighs looks damp in the pallid light from the window. He wonders if he should repay the favor, if he should go down on her, wondering what she would taste like, wondering at the same time if the taste of her is something her husband knows, wondering if she has done to Karl what she has just done to him, and what Karl has done in response. He feels himself begin to stiffen.

  When Pam, a moment later, stirs and sits up, Robert tells her that he saw the dead girl on the tracks after their lovemaking that night.

  He says it just like that, in so many words, without forethought and without a plan. They have not talked about the murder at all tonight. Somewhat to his surprise, Pam hasn’t brought it up, and damned if Robert was going to say anything that might chill the erotic temperature level in the apartment.

  Later, when he tries to find a way to explain his foolishness, he will tell himself that his secret had become too much to carry by himself, that he had to tell someone and there was no one else he could tell under the circumstance. Maybe sharing the secret with Pam might somehow lessen—what?—his cowardice in not telling the police and his boss. It was entirely possible, he would tell himself, that whoever reported seeing the skinny young man with glasses leaning over the body could identify him. The possibility has been on his mind since the Sunday meeting at the bureau—blocked out only by the intoxicating prospect and then the reality of another couple of hours with Pam—and maybe telling Pam is his way of dealing with that fear, which makes no sense whatever, he realizes as soon as he thinks it.

  He will prefer to rationalize his mistake by telling himself that he has fallen crazy in love with Pam Brantley, and that sharing secrets is something lovers do, whether it makes sense or not.

  Pam is looking at him quizzically.

  “You saw what?” she says.

  He knows he’s made a mistake, but, like a skier who’s launched himself over the lip of a precipitous hill, there’s no turning back.

  “That murdered girl. Teresa Hickman.”

  “You saw her get murdered?” Pam says. Her wide-eyed, bewildered expression almost makes him laugh.

  “No,” he says, “but I might have been the first person to see her afterward. That was five or six hours before the guy who the police say discovered the body said he came across it.”

  He isn’t sure what reaction he expected, but Pam, sitting up beside him, simply stares at him, nonplussed. It occurs to him that their lovemaking is finished for the night.

  “What did she look like?”

  Robert shakes his head.

  “She looked dead,” he says sharply. He is annoyed by the witless question and angry with himself for being an idiot. “I don’t know,” he says in a softer tone. “She was lying on her stomach, so I didn’t get a good look at her face. It just was obvious that she was dead.”

  Pam says nothing for another moment. He’s never seen her in what he would describe as a contemplative moment, or looking confused and uncertain, as though someone has said something important in a foreign language. He’s seen her elated and angry, aroused and then sated, but never in a serious situation such as this, all the more unlikely and absurd because the two of them are stark naked and sitting in the sticky aftermath of their sex.

  Pam says, “You told the police, didn’t you?”

  Robert lies back against his rumpled pillow and drops his arm across his eyes. He’s cold now, the sweat on
his chest and thighs chilling him unpleasantly, but he doesn’t try to pull her against him for warmth.

  “No,” he says. “I haven’t told anybody, not even my sister or my boss. I’m afraid if I do, I’ll have to explain what I was doing down there at that time of night, and that would put the two us in jeopardy. So, no, Pam. You’re the only one.”

  Pam looks at him uncertainly.

  He says, “Now we have two secrets.” But if that’s an effort to calm the waters, it doesn’t seem to be effective. She says he better go.

  En route to his sister’s apartment a few minutes later, Robert steps out the front door of the Brantleys’ building, not the back, and walks quickly down the sidewalk that runs along the north side of Forty-fourth Street in front of the apartments and other buildings. He is wearing a tan jacket and khakis, not the dark combination that he wore the night of the murder.

  A yellow taxi passes heading west, but that’s the only car he sees going in any direction at this hour. He pats his breast pocket where he’s stashed his glasses.

  Detective Ferris Lakeland and a representative from the Minneapolis office of the Red Cross greet Harold V. Hickman near dusk on Tuesday afternoon at Wold-Chamberlain Field. Private Hickman is a tall, lean, pale-faced man who would need another dozen pounds to make his dress greens fit properly. Even his envelope-shaped garrison cap looks a size too large. Presumably, as a North Dakotan, he’s been to the Twin Cities before today, but he looks bewildered and uneasy, as though he stepped off the plane in Timbuktu.

  After offering the widower their condolences, Lakeland and the man from the Red Cross lead Hickman through the busy baggage claim (he has only his Army-issue duffel bag) and toward the terminal’s front door. A couple of newspaper photographers, somehow alerted to his arrival, fire off their Speed Graphics as the men pass, the flashbulbs on the big cameras popping like firecrackers.

  “Stay the hell away from us,” Lakeland snarls at the photo boys, flashing his badge and dragging the skinny soldier out the door. The sun is still shining, but in a desultory, grudging way.