The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  For one thing, Homer Scofield, who, barring a second delay, will begin prosecuting H. David Rose on a charge of first-degree murder in Hiawatha County District Court in July, is determined that his first case as county attorney will end with a conviction. This means that, prior to the opening gavel, every possibility must be reviewed, rereviewed, and eliminated. The other possibilities currently include Bud Montgomery, Richard Ybarra, Tony Zevos, and the still-unidentified skinny guy with glasses. Fortunately from the cops’ point of view, the skinny guy remains no more than the vaguest of descriptions, and the other three have more or less functional alibis for April 8 and 9.

  The detectives were able to reconfirm Ybarra’s and Tony Zevos’s alibis. Bud Montgomery’s alibi, the weakest of the lot, was provided by a coworker, who says the two of them watched a floor show at the Land O’Lakes Tap behind the Great Northern Depot, and then stopped for nightcaps at the Westerner at Hennepin and Lake. The coworker, a garrulous boozer named Allard Emmons, owns a car and told detectives he dropped Bud off in front of the Montgomerys’ apartment at two-thirty the morning of the ninth.

  “Triple check their stories,” Scofield tells the detectives. “Make goldarned sure every one of them holds water.”

  Looming, figuratively speaking, over the prosecution is the specter of Dante DeShields, Rose’s attorney, whose slashing attacks have sunk many a “watertight” prosecution. Scofield told his secretary, who whispered his words to her bridge partner May Grey, who confided in her lover Augie Fuller, who, leaning against one of the courthouse urinals alongside his lead investigator, told Anderson that the county attorney is “having actual nightmares” about facing DeShields in court.

  Arne would love to destroy Bud Montgomery’s alibi. He would love to destroy Bud Montgomery, though the reasons, when he tries to sort through them, are diverse and inchoate and buried in places Arne doesn’t want to dig. Curry, like the MPD brass and every other member of the Homicide Squad, has “accepted the fact” that Rose strangled Teresa Hickman, but Arne, who now grudgingly agrees, isn’t willing to let go of Bud for his own reasons, and continues to raise objections to the case against the dentist.

  Mel and Arne bicker over lunch and in the car and while breathing through their handkerchiefs in a dead man’s apartment.

  “He had the girl in his car and was driving in the vicinity where the body was found,” Mel says for the umpteenth time. “She was there beside him one moment, then gone the next. She was carrying his baby and making demands. They were arguing. We have all that in his own words, more or less.”

  “More or less,” Arne replies. “That’s the most cockeyed confession either one of us has ever heard, Mel. People do black out under pressure—I saw that in Europe. Bud Montgomery’s alibi comes from a souse. And Bud was fucking Teresa. We have his confession, too.”

  “Oh, hell, Arne. With you and Riemenschneider on top of him, he would have confessed to killing Lindbergh’s baby. Besides, he does have an alibi, which Rose doesn’t, if we don’t count the blackout. And half the male population on the South Side might have slept with Teresa Hickman since she hit town. There are even rumors that she was selling it.”

  Mel tells Arne that his judgment has been knocked sidewise by Lily Kline, who has both the inclination and the ability to get under Arne’s skin. But what Mel doesn’t know, though he may be right about Lily’s influence, is that Arne and Lily are on the outs, and that Arne, when the opportunity presents itself, is fucking Curry’s wife.

  Arne smiles wearily at his partner, who is also the closest of his few friends, all things considered.

  “Say what you will, Mel,” he tells him. “If the trial started today, my money’d be on DeShields.”

  On June 1, Robert Gardner moved out of his sister’s place on Forty-fourth Street and moved into a fitfully air-conditioned, one-bedroom basement apartment in a newish building on Pleasant Avenue just south of Franklin, less than a ten-minute drive or bus ride from the bureau. He’d decided he was making enough money to live on his own and was tired of mooching off his pregnant sister and brother-in-law, as much as they pretended to enjoy having him there. Just as important, he imagined putting some distance between himself and both Pam Brantley and the spot where he stumbled across Teresa Hickman’s body. He was and is kidding himself, of course, because he rarely thinks about anyone or anything else.

  Though two months have passed since he’s seen them, Robert can’t get either woman out of his head. He dreams about them both, sometimes at the same time, in the same dream, fantasizes about them obsessively, and pounds out erotic fictions about one or the other on the Royal portable his parents gave him when he graduated from high school. (The idea, of course, was to use the typewriter for his med school assignments and writing letters home.) The stories, though never violent, are relentlessly graphic, an amalgam of his growing sexual experience and an overheated imagination, and he is ashamed of himself afterward. He burns the pages in the bathroom sink and flushes the ashes down the toilet.

  At least once a week, usually on Sunday night, he dines with his sister and takes the opportunity to cruise past the Brantleys’ building down the street, hoping, like every fool who has been similarly torched, to catch a glimpse of his erstwhile flame. He keeps his eyes peeled as well for the guy who left his glasses under Pam’s bed. He can’t help but think the mystery man looks like him—a tall, skinny young man with glasses—and sometimes imagines the guy was Teresa Hickman’s murderer. When he’s back in the neighborhood, he keeps an eye out, too, for Karl Brantley, having no idea what Pam might have told him.

  The week before moving into his own apartment, he purchased, for $130 off a Lake Street car lot, a dark green ’46 Ford coupe, and he imagines himself fucking Pam in its cozy backseat. At the very least, he’d love her to see him drive past in his “new” car, maybe with another attractive woman beside him, and let her imagination run wild. The trouble is, he doesn’t know another attractive woman in Minneapolis, not counting his sister, Tommy Pullman’s wife, and an auburn-haired freelancer who only the other day was introduced to him as Meghan Mckenzie, his boss’s daughter-in-law.

  Meanwhile, he is putting in more than forty hours a week at the bureau, reporting, writing, or rewriting wire stories about severe weather, auto fatalities, drownings, notable visitors, and the occasional serious crime.

  On the third Saturday of June, Miles Mckenzie sends him to a murder scene on the South Side. An old man has been beaten to death in a dilapidated apartment building across the street from Holy Rosary church. The blue-collar, rough-and-tumble Phillips neighborhood has a parlous reputation—armed robberies, muggings, auto thefts, and sexual assaults if not a lot of homicides—so Robert is happy to park his little Ford behind a familiar Chevy sedan on East Twenty-fourth Street.

  Detectives Anderson and Curry are hustling out of a rundown apartment building as Robert trots up the broken front walk.

  “Nothing to see here, pal,” Curry says with a wave of his hand and a wry smile that acknowledges the hoary cop-talk.

  Both he and Anderson are red-faced and sweat-soaked, sucking in the relatively fresh air as though they just stepped out of a burning building. Both have slung their suit coats over their shoulders and tugged their ties away from their collars.

  “Go in at your own risk,” Curry says. “The body’s been removed, the crime scene is closed. Only the bad air remains.”

  “What can you tell me?” Robert asks. “Victim’s name? Age? Cause of death?”

  Curry says, “Hey, Arne, this was my traveling companion in North Dakota. Roger Gardner—right?”

  Robert corrects him with a forced smile, hoping Curry is only jerking his chain.

  “Robert Gardner—sorry, kid,” Curry says. “Okay, but only because we’re pals. The decedent’s name is Herman Joseph Goranski, spelled the way it sounds, but with an I, not a Y. Date of birth, according to his insurance papers, 23 April 1887. Next of kin, apparently nonexistent. It looks like he was assaulted wi
th a blunt object, a club of some kind.”

  Robert fumbles with a chewed-on pencil as he tries to get it all in his notebook, knowing he’ll have to call Curry later to check the details.

  “Was it a robbery?” he calls after the departing detectives.

  “Robbery or a fairy rape,” Curry says over his shoulder. “Either or both. But don’t quote me.”

  It will turn out to be neither, but on that day, and for weeks to come, that’s the best guess. The next day, following Fred MacMurray’s autopsy, Robert gets a firm determination of blunt-force trauma and a severely fractured skull, likely sustained three or four days previous, from the coroner’s office. On Monday, he writes a seven-paragraph story that will be picked up by a few of the larger papers around the state, trimmed to three or four grafs, and forgotten.

  “Just shows to go you,” Mckenzie tells Robert on Wednesday. “A pretty white girl is murdered in a nice part of town and that’s all anyone wants to read about. An old faggot is beaten to death in a shitty neighborhood and no one gives a damn. They’re both whodunits, but only one has an outcome that means anything to anybody.”

  Over the next several days, however, a thought gnaws at Robert, one he’s not about to share with his bureau chief or anyone else. He believes that he and Mel Curry have a relationship, the beginning of one anyway, and he pictures himself building on that relationship the way big-league reporters cultivate important sources. Robert, who has no actual brothers, can’t help but fancy the two of them developing an almost kid brother-big brother bond that is both professionally and personally rewarding.

  Now all he’s got to do is figure out how to make it happen.

  The driver has been waiting for the heat.

  The house is unbearable, even with the screens on and the windows propped open and a couple of electric fans going full blast, and the garage turns into a Calcutta sweatbox when the temperature gets stuck in the low nineties for a few days. The cab is no refuge, either. Though he and the other Canary drivers keep telling O’Shaughnessy that within the next couple of years all the successful firms will have air-conditioned cars, Fat Jack, sitting in the air-cooled comfort of his office at the Canary garage, keeps saying that air conditioners create a drag on a car’s engine, and take a huge bite out of fuel economy.

  But it’s the heat that brings the girls outside in their halter tops and shorts and sandals, that draws the teenage temptresses to the beach, where they can show themselves off to their boyfriends and whoever else might be watching. The driver, sitting in the car on the north side of Lake Calhoun, binoculars in hand, can’t get enough.

  When he was a junior at De La Salle High School, three years before Margaret got pregnant the first time, the driver (who wasn’t a driver yet) flirted with a sexy, pint-sized sophomore named Judy Johansson, who, flirting back, said, “Do you ever go to the beach? I’m there all the time during the summer.” She meant the main beach at Lake Calhoun, and he took her comment for an invitation, and all that summer and for years to come he fantasized about lying beside her on the scorching sand. They’d share a large bath towel, and he’d spread cocoa butter over her naked shoulders and the lovely round calves of her legs. In real life, he never did join Judy at the beach because he suffered from eczema eruptions on his chest and arms and was selfconscious when he took off his shirt. The eczema problem eventually went away, as did his chances with Judy Johansson, but to this day he is aroused by the seasonal perfume of tanning lotion and sun-basted human flesh, and the crowded, simmering, shimmering beaches of the city’s famous lakes.

  This summer, however, the driver, like many others who have somehow stumbled into her story, sees Terry Hickman wherever he looks.

  Around the first of June, when he felt it was safe enough to loiter around Nicollet Avenue, the driver started talking to a new waitress at the Palace, a slim, dark-haired girl named Vondra. The Zevos kid had no doubt already had his hands all over her—it was a good guess the way they glanced at each other and interacted behind the counter when the Greek wasn’t around, not having to worry about Tony’s wife, who, the driver gathered from the small talk, had fallen down the stairs behind their apartment and would spend the summer upstairs in a cast.

  The new girl was willing to talk to the driver when he sat at the counter with his sugary coffee and a scavenged newspaper. She had glossy hair, a nice build, and a showy ass, but the overall effect was ruined when she smiled. Her teeth were gray and mottled, as though her childhood diet had been deficient in some nutrient or she had a medical condition that affected her teeth. Her gimpy boss didn’t seem to mind, but, as much as he admired the other parts, the driver was put off by that smile.

  He was tempted to ask Vondra about Terry, what she’s heard from Tony and the others, if there is gossip among the regulars, or any tributes to the dead girl—a photo tacked on the employees’ bulletin board or a memorial fund—like you hear about sometimes after a young person’s death. But Vondra (the driver never caught her last name) didn’t seem to know or care much about her predecessor. Then, just like that, Vondra herself was gone, replaced by a heavily freckled scarecrow the driver finds not in the least attractive. And now the sunshine and heat have settled in. He decides to spend his breaks at one of the city’s dozen-odd beaches that have opened for the season.

  The papers have taken a breather from the Hickman case, maybe saving their ammunition for the trial that’s expected to begin during the next few weeks. The driver religiously skims each edition of every paper he snatches off a park bench or lunchroom counter and, if there’s something he hasn’t read about the case, adds another clipping to the scrapbook he’s begun keeping and hides behind the tires in his garage. Lately, there hasn’t been much to clip.

  Then he reads that the judge who will be trying the case has granted the defense a delay, postponing the trial’s start from June 27 until July 18, presumably to give Rose’s lawyer more time to prove that another man is, in the lawyer’s words, the “real killer” of Teresa Hickman. The first time the driver sees the words “real killer” he catches his breath, then realizes that it’s only a lawyer’s trick and relaxes, and then begins to enjoy the idea that maybe there is more to the Hickman story than the public assumes.

  His dreams have become a weird confusion of water and sunshine and a young woman in a green winter coat. He sees her, in one dream, striding along Euclid Place, but in the dream the night is hot and the lake behind them is Calhoun, not Isles. He shouts at the girl and she turns and smiles, but her teeth are mottled and repugnant. Waking, wet and agitated, he struggles to crawl back inside the dream, desperate to fix Teresa’s smile and pull off her coat, to see her body unwrapped and warm and slathered with cocoa butter the way he might have seen her at the beach. He can’t get back inside that dream, but he will dream similarly again during the next several weeks. Tossing and twisting, he calls and pleads, more loudly than he knows.

  Finally, poor Margaret, his wife, looking more haggard than usual and a decade older than her thirty-five years, tells him that he has to use the Army cot in the basement because it’s hard enough to sleep in this heat and God knows she needs her rest.

  Lying by himself in the subterranean dark, he wonders what, if anything, he’s given away.

  On the morning of June 21, Dr. Rose receives a call at home from Buster Haswell, the manager at the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club.

  Not one to mince words, Haswell says, “One of my girls needs a tooth fixed, Doc. I know things are up in the air right now, but I’m wondering if you could open the office for Geri. She won’t be worth a damn down here until that tooth is taken care of.”

  Rose considers for a moment and then says, “Yes, of course.”

  He and Haswell agree on two o’clock this afternoon, before Haswell’s employee begins her shift. Rose isn’t certain, but he believes that “Geri” is the bottle blonde with a significant overbite who has waited on him a time or two when he’s gone downstairs after work.

  Ruth looks at him
quizzically when he hangs up and tells her he has scheduled his first patient in more than two months.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea, David?” she says.

  Rose relights his pipe and says, “I don’t see why not. I’m not a criminal. I still have my license. Nobody has said anything about my fitness to practice. And I can’t imagine I need permission from DeShields.”

  In fact, DeShields, when he learns about the appointment, thinks it’s a terrible idea. Unfortunately for the lawyer, it’s now almost five o’clock. Rose has drilled out the decay in Geraldine Fiola’s molar, disinfected the cavity, and filled it, all following only a weak injection of novocaine. After she handed him the ten dollars he and Haswell agreed on, he sat by himself in the operatory with the pleasant sensation of having returned to work after a long time away.

  “Are you kidding me?” DeShields growls into the phone after Rose returns to the house. “What if the woman tells someone you touched her inappropriately, or tried to kiss her, or suggested the two of you go for a ride?”

  Rose frowns and draws on his pipe.

  “Why on earth would she do that?” he asks. He glances at Ronnie Oshinsky, who is sitting with him and Ruth at the dining-room table and can hear DeShields’s excited voice on the other end of the line. Ronnie looks back at his brother-in-law, raises his eyebrows, and shrugs.

  Tonight, after supper, with Rachmaninoff on the stereo, Rose sits by himself in his favorite living-room chair and reflects on this unexpected turn of events.

  For an hour this afternoon he was a practicing dentist again, confidently moving around in the familiar environment in a starched white jacket, sterilizing and arranging his tools on the porcelain tray, and preparing the novocaine and Seconal if needed. With the patient in his chair, after the usual inquiries about her general health and specific complaint about the painful tooth, he worked with self-assurance and precision, probing, drilling, and completing the procedure with the proficiency borne of twenty-plus years of clinical experience. If the patient, who undoubtedly knows his recent history, was uneasy in the chair, or uneasier than most patients are during a dental procedure, she hid her discomfort well. Granted, Haswell was in the waiting room during most of the appointment, but that was for everybody’s benefit, like a chaperone at a high school dance. It was Haswell’s—actually the club’s—money that paid for the work.