by W. A. Winter
She doesn’t raise her voice, curse, or use dirty language, even in the throes of their lovemaking, and he tries not to either when he’s with her.
Meghan, of course, could cost him his job and God knows what else, but he’s confident that she won’t—she has too much to lose herself, plus he’s pretty sure it wouldn’t be her way to kiss and tell, much less confess to backstreet infidelity. She rarely speaks about her husband, as though to do so while with another man would be in bad form. Thus Robert knows little more about the couple than that they’re childless and that “Howie,” who lost an eye in a childhood accident, is an avid fisherman, which helps account for her availability on summer weekends. She talks occasionally about Miles and Loretta, but always in an affectionate and uninformative way.
He can’t believe, given how easily their relationship blossomed, that he’s her first or only lover, but he doesn’t really care. He’s confident, earlier thoughts to the contrary, that he is not going to fall in love with her, nor she with him. Best he can tell, they are only colleagues who enjoy each other in bed (or a backseat) and are content to leave it at that. The attitude pleases him as European and sophisticated.
Though she is by all accounts a facile and resourceful writer, her father-in-law has not assigned her to the Rose trial or to any case-related stories.
“He won’t say it, but I know he doesn’t think a woman can report and write like a man,” Meghan says on a Saturday morning during the voir dire. “I also think he’s trying to spare me the ugliness of the stuff journalists have to report on, such as the murder of a pregnant girl. He has an old-fashioned, sensitive side that he doesn’t want you guys to see.”
“No kidding,” Robert says. “The way he shepherds you in and out of Smokey’s—like you’re a lamb passing through a pack of starving wolves. Is his son like that?”
Meghan shakes her head. “Howie’s indifferent,” she says without emotion. That helps explain, Robert thinks but doesn’t say, why you’re lying beside me in bed while your husband wets a line in a Montana trout stream. He also acknowledges that Meghan’s rationale for her infidelity echoes Pam Brantley’s.
“Does Miles say much about the case when you see him?” Robert asks.
“He thinks Rose is guilty, but isn’t sure he’ll be convicted,” she says. “I agree, though all I know is what I read in the paper.” She laughs at her feeble joke.
She is not especially curious about Robert. He’s told her he’s the son of a Mayo Clinic surgeon, which must be at least as prestigious, if not quite as lucrative, as a milling-company executive, but there’s an unmistakable gulf between them, owing to what—her private-school education and refined sensibilities, or maybe her age (she’ll turn thirty in October) and marital complications? He knows she finds him attractive and enjoys their lovemaking. For his part, he doesn’t volunteer much about himself, has never mentioned Pam (she’s never asked about other relationships), and is determined, this time, not to say a word about his secret connection to Teresa Hickman.
He does his best, certainly when he’s with Meghan, not to think about his gruesome discovery along the trolley tracks. He pretends, when he can, that his accidental involvement with the Hickman murder is still unknown and will stay that way forever.
Dr. Rose survives the thirteen days of stultifying jury selection and now sits beside Ruth, his brothers, Samuel and George, Sam’s wife and George’s girlfriend (George has been widowed for ten years), and Ronald Oshinsky in the row just in front of the gallery, a few feet behind the table where the attorneys have begun their opening statements.
Rose tries to be attentive, but, God help him, he has all he can do to stay awake. He knows, because he’s been advised by Ronnie and prepared by DeShields, that he will hear nothing new during these initial presentations, only the familiar arguments floated in the papers by County Attorney Scofield and discussed in his dining room by his lawyers.
So much of the experience, however, is new to Rose, a man who has never had to answer for so much as a traffic violation and has visited the courthouse only to pay his property tax.
Every day he will have to pass through a gauntlet of gawking, grinning, jabbering spectators waiting to claim a seat in the gallery as reporters shout his name and the name of his counsel—as though either he or DeShields is going to stop and chat—and the blue-white pop and hot stink of the photographers’ flashbulbs fill the hallway. Police officers in leather jackets stand by, but Rose feels no physical threat from the crowd. Despite the occasional shouts of “Rapist!,”
“Killer!,” and “Kike!,” he understands that he is a curiosity these people are here to see, not to lynch.
Once seated, he will do little more than take in the surroundings of the grand chamber and its accouterments. He finds mildly interesting the faded portraits of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century mayors, aldermen, and jurists, irregularly spaced on the cream-colored walls above the dark wainscoting. The gallery’s long, oak pews have been buffed to a dull sheen by uncounted backsides over the past fifty-plus years, but the tables and chairs in the well are nondescript and temporary-looking, and the linoleum covering what he assumes to be the original marble floors is scuffed and worn thin in the high-traffic areas. The big room has the feel of a temple that is no longer quite equal to its original mission.
Then the players begin filing in: the pokerfaced court clerk and court reporter, the three bailiffs, and the four attorneys. Dante DeShields and Michael Haydon are now as familiar to Rose as his family, but Homer Scofield and his second chair, an older man in a rumpled suit and hideous flowered necktie named Rudy Blake, are not. Rose, of course, has seen the Hiawatha County attorney at an early interview and then at the grand jury proceedings. He reminds him of the Catholic farm boys he grew up among in Morrison County—all sharp elbows and knees, with a skinny neck and protuberant Adam’s apple, skin white as parchment, and a wide mouth full of buck teeth. Blake, who looks to be in his sixties, is there, according to Ronnie, to add “experience and gravitas” to a prosecution needing both. He’s wearing a silver hairpiece that doesn’t quite match the dull gray that’s visible beneath its edges.
Rose will learn later that DeShields worked under Rudy Blake when DeShields, not long out of the University of Connecticut’s law school, was briefly employed in the Hiawatha County attorney’s office. “The old man may not be as quick as he used to be, but he knows a lot and has a mean streak you wouldn’t guess to look at him,” DeShields told Ronnie.
DeShields himself is the picture of controlled ferocity at the attorneys’ table. Is he a Jew? The possibility again occurs to Rose, who, besides his wife and siblings in the pew beside him, may be the only other Jew in the courtroom. The lawyer has revealed nothing, other than his East Coast education, about his background and personal life, and when referring to the Roses’ Jewishness or the community’s anti Semitism, he’s never suggested that he and his client have their heritage in common. A thin gold wedding band on his left hand suggests the presence of a wife, but she is never seen or mentioned. Rose has no idea where in town he lives.
When a bailiff shouts, “All rise! The Honorable Haakon T. Nordahl!,” a tall, straight-backed, white-haired man with eyes so blue their color can be discerned from the last row of the courtroom emerges through a door behind the bench and steps up to his perch. “He’s considered a prosecutor’s judge,” Michael Haydon said when Nordahl was named to the case earlier in the summer. A former county prosecutor himself, Nordahl, according to his official biography, is a member of the Interlachen and Minikahda country clubs, Mount Olivet Lutheran Church, the Sons of Norway fraternal organization, and the Twin Cities Torsk Club, among a dozen well-known local institutions.
Rose presumes that Nordahl is no friend of the Jews. Because the judge rarely smiles, it is difficult to speculate how he might feel about dentists.
On their way into the courtroom, Sam Ross’s pretty second wife, Noreen, hands Rose a small notebook and a freshly sharpened pen
cil.
“It will give you something to do while you sit here,” she tells him in a whisper. Her breath smells of cherry cough drops.
Now, as the razor-faced Viking in the black robe settles down behind the bench, Rose opens the notebook and prints in a neat, straight up-and-down hand, “God help me.”
In the days leading up to the trial, Grace Montgomery is twice delivered by Anderson and Curry to Homer Scofield’s office in the courthouse.
Grace stays sober on those days and does her best to look presentable in a clean dress and a touch of makeup. The most noticeable bruises have faded, and she avoids arguments with her husband, who, coincidentally or not, spends more time away from the apartment than usual. She knows the police are keeping their eyes on Bud, so she doesn’t worry about him one way or the other.
Scofield reminds her of some of the homely boys she knew in Dollar, and can’t help but be amused to think that one of them, or one like them, has such an important job in the big city. He tells her she will testify for the prosecution—“You must and you will,” he says, sounding like the father of a five-year-old child—and “provide information about your sister and Dr. Rose that no one else can.” The prosecutor doesn’t use the term “star witness,” but the papers do, and that amuses her, too. Terry would be jealous.
Grace tells Scofield and Scofield’s assistant, who impresses her as a kindlier, more refined version of a couple of her Kubicek uncles back home, what she’s told the detectives over the past three months. The prosecutors are most interested, of course, in her experience with Dr. Rose and her understanding of Rose’s relationship with Terry. She will be asked to place Terry in Rose’s office on the evening of April 8.
“Just answer the questions, dear,” Blake (“call me Rudy”) tells her, and pats her arm with a slightly tremulous freckled hand. “Don’t reply to anything that isn’t asked. Look at the jurors from time to time when you’re speaking, as though they asked the question. Do your best to maintain your composure, but it won’t be the end of the world if you shed a tear when you’re talking about your sister.”
Like her uncles, Rudy has an old man’s yellowed smile and sour breath.
The prosecutors do not tell Grace that she is in for a long day, or days, on the witness stand. She is aware, as is most of the Twin Cities by this time, of DeShields’s reputation, but all Scofield says is that her cross-examination by Rose’s attorney will likely be “extensive.”
On her second visit to Scofield’s office two days after the first, the prosecutors lead her through a lengthy “dress rehearsal,” in Rudy’s words. She is sober and presentable, but visibly nervous, wringing her hands, licking her lips, crossing and uncrossing her legs.
“You need to control your emotions, Mrs. Montgomery,” Scofield says after she stumbles over a few anodyne questions.
“Take a deep breath, dear,” Rudy says. “We’re going over the information you’ve already given to the grand jury. The trial jury will be on your side.”
An hour into the rehearsal, Grace knows she won’t be able to do this. She was never good at exams in school, smart as she was and even when she’d studied. She did not do well in the face of other people’s expectations. Unlike Terry, she can’t stand people staring at her, waiting for a response. Today her mind darts away from the practice questions like a fearful dog when someone tries to pet it. Her resolve to pull herself together, do her civic duty, and see to it that her sister’s killer is punished has all but vanished.
She can tell by the lawyers’ reactions that she isn’t doing well. Scofield noisily pushes his chair away from the table where they’re sitting, stands up, and turns toward the window, running a hand through his thatch of red hair.
“Focus, Mrs. Montgomery!” Rudy tells her, no longer so avuncular. “For the love of God, madam, focus!”
Then he lights a cigarette for her, and they continue. She does a little better, describing Rose’s office and her visits there—but she knows it’s no use. They can’t say exactly when they will call her to the stand, but it will likely be a few days after the opening statements, following the testimony of the detectives and the coroner and the citizen who found Terry’s body. It doesn’t matter: she knows she won’t be there when she’s called.
She also knows she won’t tell the lawyers or Anderson and Curry or whoever is assigned to “look after her” (Rudy’s words) about her decision. She won’t tell her father or Hal or any of the other North Dakota witnesses who have arrived in Minneapolis during the past few days and who she’s managed to avoid, partly because the attorneys have cautioned her about speaking to other witnesses prior to her testimony, and partly because she doesn’t want to see them. The only kin she’d like to see is Hal Junior, but the child is now and likely forever beyond her grasp, in the hands of Hal Senior’s parents in Grand Forks.
She is overcome by the dizzying sensation that the life she’s led during the past half year belongs to another woman, a woman she doesn’t know, and therefore the names, dates, and places the lawyers are badgering her about have nothing to do with Grace Kubicek Montgomery.
She is suddenly, or maybe not so suddenly, very tired and sad. She wants to go home. She wants to have a drink. She wants to take a bath.
CHAPTER 11
First thing in the morning of August 2, Arne Anderson is back in Courtroom No. 1, but now he is sitting with Mel Curry and Sid Hessburg in a stuffy anteroom, waiting to be called to the witness stand.
Gerald Bergen, the Eli Lilly Company detail man who happened upon Teresa Hickman’s body along the streetcar right-of-way behind West Forty-fourth Street shortly after sunup on April 9, is the prosecution’s first witness. Bergen, Arne observed in the anteroom, seemed puffed up and pleased to be there—a hitherto anonymous middle-aged citizen thrust into the spotlight of his community’s most talked-about event—then commensurately deflated when he returns to the anteroom ninety minutes later, following his plodding examination by Rudy Blake and a shorter, sharper-edged cross by Dante DeShields.
Bergen is followed by John James and Wyatt Campbell, two of the patrolmen dispatched in their radio car to Forty-fourth Street following Bergen’s call to the MPD. Blake spends a combined fifteen minutes on the two of them, having decided to let the detectives provide the important details from the crime scene. DeShields, however, is just as obviously determined to launch his argument about police incompetence by reducing, over the course of an hour, James and Campbell, a pair of experienced if not especially quick-witted officers, to the level of the Keystone Cops.
Campbell, the junior partner, is crimson-faced and blinking back tears when he returns to the anteroom at eleven o’clock.
“Son-of-a-fucking-bitch!” he says, possibly loud enough to be heard in the courtroom.
Older and arguably wiser, James shakes his head and smiles sardonically at the two detectives.
“Good fuckin’ luck to you boys,” he says, anticipating their grilling by DeShields.
Arne isn’t called until 1:00 p.m., after the hour-long lunch recess. He is wearing his new suit, a tan, double-breasted number, tight through the shoulders and chest, and a maroon, white, and blue-striped foulard, both items off the rack at Nate’s Menswear, and enjoyed a decent night’s sleep, waking, however, with the tatters of an unsettling dream about Lily Kline fluttering in his murky consciousness. He, Mel, and Sid, on notice from Scofield’s office, spent the weekend reviewing their notes with Augie Fuller and other members of the squad, their encounter with DeShields looming like a scheduled tooth extraction.
As always when he’s with Mel, Arne is hypersensitive to any mention or reminder of Janine, who he’s seeing as frequently as he can, though not frequently enough. Some days his longing for her burns. On such occasions, he can’t look Mel in the eye, can hardly bear to share a lunch-break sandwich with him, and can only hope that Mel attributes his heebie-jeebies to the pressures of preparing for trial. Is dreaming about Lily, whom he hasn’t seen or talked to or, for that matter
, even dreamed about since she called it quits, the sign of a desperate man? he wonders. Only when he’s waiting in the anteroom four hours later does he recall that in the dream Lily was lying dead in the weeds beside a railroad track.
Seated on the elevated witness stand, Arne looks past the attorneys, the defendant, and the defendant’s family to the hundred-odd men and women jammed shoulder to shoulder in the gallery pews.
The grand room is charged with an almost palpable sense of expectancy, as though finally, after the endless preliminaries of jury selection and technical motions and conferences in the judge’s chambers, the actual trial, with important witnesses, is about to begin. He spots Private Hickman in his uniform and a doddering assemblage of elderly men and women whom he presumes, from the look of them in their blue serge suits and Sunday dresses, are relatives from North Dakota. He looks for but doesn’t see either Janine or Lily, which simultaneously relieves and disappoints him.
He looks at Rose seated behind DeShields. The dentist, expressionless, is jotting something in a notebook.
Scofield will question Arne, the first important witness in the first important trial of the prosecutor’s short public career. Scofield’s voice is weak in the vast expanse of the high-ceilinged room, and when, at Judge Nordahl’s request, he tries to raise it, he reminds Arne of a choirboy trying to sound like a man. Arne glances to his left, toward the jury box, where the seven men and five women are leaning forward as though by command, and wishes Rudy Blake, hardly a dynamo but at least capable of a commanding voice, would be handling the examination. But, for better or worse, this is Scofield’s show, and Arne can’t blame him for taking the leading role.