The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  Lakeland directs Hickman into the backseat of an unmarked Plymouth, and then slides in behind the wheel next to the Red Cross official, a balding, bespectacled man named Jerry Ingram. Arne Anderson told Ferris to talk as little as possible during the twenty-minute drive downtown. “Tell him he can see his son later this evening or first thing tomorrow,” Arne said. “Tell him the kid is doing fine with his auntie.” If Hickman wants to see his wife’s body, Arne said he could arrange that later, too, after the two of them talked. If Hickman wants to see the man they arrested—well, that was out of the question, at least for now.

  Anderson and the rest of the murder squad have been busy during the past few days. Besides interrogating Dr. Rose, they brought in for questioning Bud Montgomery, Anatoli and Tony Zevos, and a freelance photographer named Richard Ybarra, and interviewed the chiropractor and dance instructors who occupy the office space across the hall from Rose’s practice and a dozen-odd bartenders, waitresses, and hangers-on from the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club downstairs.

  “Go over your lists,” Anderson told the squad. “Anybody out there on parole or who otherwise might look interesting, find them and bring them in, too.”

  A dragnet is standard operating procedure in a high-profile homicide case, but not everyone on the third floor of the courthouse believes that it’s necessary in this one.

  “What’s the matter?” Riemenschneider groused to Curry during the roundup. “Doesn’t Arne believe the kike’s our guy?”

  In fact, with the exception of Bud Montgomery and Tony Zevos, none of the possibilities has offered much reason to believe otherwise.

  Richard Ybarra, a curly-haired Romeo barely out of his teens, is a slippery hustler whose “professional portfolio” comprises mostly black-and-white photos of not particularly attractive, partially clad young women, the very attractive Teresa Hickman the notable exception. The cops spotted a couple of her photos on the street—obviously taken by the photographer who took the shots the detectives saw at the Montgomerys’ apartment—and these, no doubt for promotional purposes, had his name and phone number stamped on the back. They caught up with him walking into the Greyhound station at Seventh and Hennepin, that oversize portfolio in one hand, a battered overnight bag and camera case in the other.

  “Going when the going’s good, eh, slick?” Frenchy LeBlanc said, shoving the startled shutterbug into the backseat of an unmarked squad car. In the car, LeBlanc began their interview with a forearm shiver to Ybarra’s jaw. Once at police headquarters, however, while there was plenty to appreciate in the eight-by-ten glossies spread across a conference table, there was nothing to learn from either the portfolio or the photographer himself.

  “Did you fuck Teresa Hickman?” Einar Storholm asked him, holding up a photo of the dead woman.

  “No!” Ybarra whined. He was pressing a handful of wet tissues against his bloody mouth.

  “I bet it crossed your mind,” Storholm muttered, staring at the shot of Mrs. Hickman in the white shorts, smiling over her naked shoulder. “A fine ass like that.”

  Ybarra sniffed and attempted a just-one-of-the-boys smile. “Well, yeah,” he said, as though the detective had asked him if he liked hamburgers. Who wouldn’t? Who didn’t? But the photographer said he hadn’t seen Teresa Hickman since he gave her copies of the photos a week ago.

  “April Fool’s Day,” Ybarra said. He then produced the name of a half-dozen family members and friends whose wedding party he photographed in Duluth, two and a half hours away, the night of the murder, and swore the alibi would check out. Ybarra hadn’t left Duluth for Minneapolis, deciding to hitchhike down Highway 61, until the following afternoon.

  “Who gets married on a Friday night?” Storholm, with uncharacteristic persistence, wanted to know.

  Ybarra shrugged. “I guess they couldn’t get the church on Saturday,” he says. “Ask the Cunninghams. I gave you their phone number.”

  The chiropractor and dance instructors confirmed the report that Rose’s practice seemed to comprise a large number of women, and that their neighbor routinely worked evenings and weekends.

  The chiropractor, Artemis Fischer, said Rose was always cordial and polite, but not especially outgoing, rarely initiating even casual conversation when they encountered each other in the building or on the street.

  LaVerne Ridgeway, one of the dance masters, said he didn’t think he or his partner had exchanged more than a dozen words with the dentist beyond the occasional “Hello” and “Good evening.”

  “I don’t think he cares much about anything or anyone if they don’t involve his practice,” Ridgeway told Curtis Wrenshall. “He didn’t seem eager to make new friends.”

  The Whoop-Tee-Doo crowd, meanwhile, had nothing substantive to offer. To the detectives’ surprise, given his solitary, conservative nature, Rose occasionally stopped by the club for a “cordial” before going home at night. The club’s manager, a one-armed Guadalcanal survivor named Buster Haswell, said that when Rose comes in, maybe twice or three times a month, he’s always alone, rarely speaks to anyone after ordering his drink, and the drink is always a single Grand Marnier Orange.

  “He looks at the talent,” Haswell said, “but I’ve never seen him talk to anybody other than his waitress and the hatcheck girl, coming or going. He’ll sit at a table near the back of the room, nurse his drink for a good half hour, then leave. Not a bad tipper for a Jew, but a strange guy, I’d say.”

  “Have any of the girls been a patient?” Wrenshall asked.

  “Not that I know of,” Haswell said, “which is odd, since he’s right upstairs. Maybe they’re afraid of him, or vice versa. Feel free to ask around.”

  Wrenshall said that maybe he would. And he did. That night, he chatted with five or six girls sitting at the bar before the show, but only two seemed to know who Rose was and neither of them said she’d had any contact with the man. Wrenshall, who had all he could do to keep his hands to himself, especially when speaking to the brassy redhead in a sparkly halter top and net stockings, thanked them profusely and happily added their names and addresses to his detective’s notebook.

  Anderson and Curry spent a couple of hours with both Bud Montgomery and Tony Zevos, but learned nothing they didn’t already know—namely, that both men were crumbums and both deserved whatever rough handling they received. Both men, Anderson believed, were capable of forcing themselves on Teresa Hickman and then killing her, especially if she threatened to tell on them. It was possible, of course, that Mrs. Hickman, eager for male attention in her husband’s absence, initiated the contact. It would have been convenient enough considering that she was staying in Bud Montgomery’s apartment and worked for Tony Zevos.

  Unfortunately, both men had alibis that allowed them to walk out of the courthouse with no more than a couple of whacks and the promise of worse if either one of them turned up in the squad’s interrogation room again. Zevos produced the names of three individuals who would vouch for his presence at the luncheonette the night of April 8 and until four the next morning at a buddy’s stag party in Robbinsdale. Bud’s alibi—he insisted he was bar-crawling with a pal—was not as solid. Arne wanted more work done on that one.

  Afterward, Anderson and Curry met with Augie Fuller in Fuller’s office. Ed Evangelist hovered with no apparent purpose other than to butt in and annoy.

  “Well,” said Augie, “we all heard Rose confess, didn’t we?”

  “We did,” Arne said, “sort of. And we arrested him. Then his family hired Dante DeShields, who said that what Rose told us doesn’t amount to a confession. In any event, no doubt at DeShields’s direction, Rose declined to sign his statement. His family will post bail, and Rose will go home.”

  “Fucking kike,” Evangelist said.

  Ignoring the fat man, Anderson said, “Everything, including his own words, points to Rose, but DeShields knows how to play the game. We know that from experience.”

  “So what’s next?” Fuller wanted to know. As impatient as he can be, Augie l
ikes to give his investigators room to operate as they see fit. So far, at least with Anderson, that hasn’t gotten him in trouble.

  “We rule out the alternatives and build our case,” Arne said. “Grace Montgomery lied about Teresa’s Friday night appointment and surely knows more about her little sister and her little sister’s relationships than she’s told Mel and me. MacMurray couldn’t verify the dental work Rose said he’d done on Mrs. Hickman that night—the rigor mortis made it impossible to open her mouth wide enough during the autopsy. He could check again now that the rigor mortis has worn off, but I don’t think it’s relevant. I’m willing to take Rose’s word that he worked on her tooth.”

  But something deep and for the moment inaccessible is troubling Arne. With no apparent eyewitnesses and no meaningful forensic evidence, the case against Rose has come together too fast and too easily, and for reasons he can’t articulate he has doubts about Rose’s role in the murder. There’s a lot that bothers him about the dentist, but he has difficulty picturing him as a killer.

  Now, early on Tuesday evening, Lakeland knocks on the captain’s open door.

  “Excuse me, Sarge,” he says to Anderson. “Private Hickman is waiting. It’s been an hour and a half, and he wants to see his wife and kid.”

  Arne Anderson walks down the hall, knocks on the door, and enters the smaller of the third floor’s two conference rooms.

  A gaunt young man in ill-fitting Army greens looks up from his folded hands, which are the only things on the conference-room table. The mostly unadorned uniform speaks of a buck private with less than a year in service, with, however, a familiar red, blue, and yellow triangle on the left shoulder. Jerry Ingram, from the Red Cross, sits silently, apparently having run out of conversation with the soldier, at the other end of the table.

  Arne extends his right hand. The soldier’s right hand is moist and cold.

  “First Armored,” Arne says, sitting down and acknowledging the tricolor patch on the soldier’s jacket. “I was an infantryman in the Fourth Armored during the war. Part of Patton’s Third Army. I saw Old Blood ’n’ Guts once, on the way to Bastogne.”

  He wonders if a twenty-three-year-old recruit will be familiar with the nickname—famous in 1945, but maybe not so familiar ten years after the war’s end and the general’s death in a car accident. He also wonders, too late, if bringing up the war and the aura of death, even if intended to open some common ground between them, was a good idea. Probably not.

  Arne feels sorry for the kid, who has to be exhausted by a twenty-four-hour (or longer) trip from Germany and in shock over the death of his wife. The kid’s eyes are red-rimmed but dry. He can’t seem to decide what, if anything, he should say to the detective.

  “Are you hungry?” Arne asks him.

  “We had a bite downstairs,” Jerry Ingram interjects. “That little place off the lobby.”

  Anderson stands up. “Let’s, just the two of us,” he says to the soldier, “go see your family.”

  Ingram rises and starts to say something, but Arne forces a smile and says, “I’ll take him over to Hiawatha General and then to the Montgomerys’ apartment. Give me his lodging information, and I’ll see that he’s there at a decent hour. Maybe we’ll have a drink at the hotel. You can check on him in the morning.”

  Ingram’s frown says he doesn’t like the idea, that it’s probably “against policy,” but he’s either intimidated by the big detective or doesn’t care to argue.

  For the next forty-five minutes Hickman says nothing. Arne doesn’t try to make conversation, but simply nods or touches the soldier’s arm when leading him through the corridors and down the stairs to the morgue in Hiawatha General’s basement. Then he steps out of the way when one of Fred MacMurray’s white-jacketed assistants raises the sheet and reveals the chilled remains of Teresa Hickman. Arne watches Private Hickman’s shoulders; but if the soldier twitches or shudders, he doesn’t see it.

  Hickman says nothing. He merely stands there, his hands at his sides, looking down at the lifeless body, and then turns away. His pale eyes are still dry. There’s nothing Anderson can tell him that he hasn’t already been told, including the cause of death and the arrest of a suspect.

  At the Montgomerys’ apartment half an hour later, Grace awkwardly hugs her brother-in-law and says, “Our poor Terry.” Her eyes are red and puffy. The apartment smells of fried onions and something sweet. Arne is not surprised that Bud Montgomery isn’t around. There is a lot Arne wants to talk to Grace about, without Bud in the room, but that will have to wait. Bud, she says when he asks, is bowling with friends.

  Then Grace tiptoes into her bedroom and returns a moment later with Harold Hickman Junior, who stirs in his aunt’s arms but doesn’t come fully awake.

  “This is your daddy, honey,” Grace says, tears sliding down her cheeks.

  Private Hickman stands stock still, his arms still at his sides, when she holds the baby out in front of him. He doesn’t take the child, but bends forward at the waist and leans over the red, fussing face as though he’s inspecting a strange and maybe dangerous object. When Grace asks, “Don’t you want to hold him, Hal?” Hickman says, “I better not.”

  Anderson watches. He wonders if Hickman would like a few moments alone with his son and sister-in-law, but by the look of the two adults—both staring at the little boy but neither saying a word—he doubts if either one of them wants that. Besides, he’s reluctant, for investigative reasons, to leave them alone. If they have something meaningful to say to each other, he wants to hear it.

  After a few minutes, Hickman, staring at Hal Junior in Grace’s arms, says, “I’m very tired and should probably get some sleep. Thank you for looking after the boy, Grace. I’ll take him off your hands when we go home for the funeral.” Hickman says that with the help of the Red Cross he’s made funeral arrangements in Grand Forks, where his parents live.

  Grace looks at her brother-in-law as though he slapped her in the face. Whatever she might have been expecting, she apparently thought she’d be consulted about the arrangements. Anderson suspects that these are the sorts of families that don’t talk much to each other in the best of times and not at all during crises. He wonders if Grace thinks she ought to keep the baby, or if she’s relieved he will no longer be her responsibility. He thinks, not for the last time, that there is so much he doesn’t know about Grace Montgomery, and he wonders how much of it matters. He supposes that he’ll find out soon.

  The Red Cross has arranged for Private Hickman to stay at the Talmadge, a small, clean, slightly down-at-the-heels hotel on the south end of Marquette Avenue. Waiting while the young man registers, Anderson is surprised when he turns and says, “I’ll have that drink now, sir.”

  The two men sit in a corner of a nearly empty bar off the lobby and drink the whiskey that Anderson orders and pays for. Hickman seems more alive than he was an hour earlier, and Arne suspects that he’s relieved to have seen his wife and son and can now relax. For the first time since he’s been with the detective, and probably for the first time since he left Germany, he loosens his black, Army-issue tie and undoes the top button of his khaki shirt. The jukebox, for better or worse, is playing Patti Page.

  Arne keeps one eye on the door in case someone has tipped off the press about the widower bunking at the Talmadge. If anybody’s going to have a conversation with Private Hickman, it’s going to be him. He is curious about military life in postwar Germany—curious about the ravaged landscape and certain places that they might have in common—but more interested in Hickman’s late wife and the life the couple briefly shared.

  “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Teresa, if you don’t mind, Harold,” Arne says. Hickman has asked for Canadian Club and 7-Up. Arne takes the CC on the rocks.

  Hickman shrugs, so Arne begins.

  “When was the last time you spoke with her? I assume you had a chance now and then to make a long-distance phone call.”

  Hickman shrugs again. “That wasn’t
so easy,” he says, staring at the glass in his hand. “We don’t have that much access to the phones, and calls are expensive. I don’t think we’ve talked since Christmas.”

  “She’d moved down here by that time, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “When did you get her last letter?”

  Hickman doesn’t answer right away. He stares into his glass and shakes his head.

  “The first of March,” he says.

  Before Arne can point out the obvious—that the first of March was more than a month ago—Hickman says, “She told me she wanted out of the marriage. She said she wanted to meet other men or that she was dating them already, I don’t remember which.”

  He picks up his glass and drains the rest in a gulp.

  Wow, Anderson says to himself. He expected the young man to tear up and show some emotion, but he doesn’t. Still, Arne wonders how far he can push the questions under the circumstances. He spots the bartender eyeballing their now-empty glasses and nods his head.

  “Do you know,” he ventures, leaning forward over the little table, “who she might have been seeing just before she died?”

  Hickman sighs. His eyes are closed now, and Anderson worries that he will fall asleep in his chair.

  Then Hickman says, “I don’t guess that’s something a cheating wife tells her husband—the names of the men she’s sleeping with.”

  Arne wonders if Hickman is aware that his wife was pregnant when she died. If he picked up a newspaper at the airport that afternoon he would know. Arne decides not to mention it for the time being.

  “Did Teresa ever mention the dentist Grace referred her to—Dr. Rose?” he asks.

  “No,” Hickman says. “I don’t know anything about a dentist.”

  “How about the place where she worked, the Palace Luncheonette, near the Montgomerys’ apartment? Did she tell you about the job there or about her boss, a guy named Tony Zevos?”

  “No.”

  “How about a photographer named Richard Ybarra?”