by W. A. Winter
Scofield ushers Arne through the preliminaries: name, residence, age, rank, years with the MPD, and responsibilities as a homicide investigator. Then, looking down at his notes, the prosecutor pivots awkwardly to the events of Saturday, April 9, commencing with the investigators’ early morning encounter with the young victim’s body along the Linden Hills streetcar tracks. Scofield’s slow march will make everybody impatient, but Arne figures the young man is terrified of making a mistake and opening the floodgates to DeShields, who glares up at his opposite, all but tapping on his wristwatch to speed things along.
Scofield reminds Arne of the twenty-two-year-old second lieutenant—a shuffling, stuttering divinity-school washout from Greeley Creek, Oklahoma—who briefly commanded Arne’s platoon in Belgium. That experience didn’t end well, either.
Now, after a whispered conference with Blake, Scofield asks Arne to describe the position and condition of Teresa Hickman’s body, its immediate surroundings when discovered, and the absence of apparent witnesses and meaningful evidence at the site. He asks about the decedent’s identity, the coroner’s findings later that morning, and the identification, scarcely an hour after that, of Teresa’s sister, Mrs. Henry Montgomery. He asks about Grace Montgomery’s professed ignorance of her sister’s whereabouts the night before and suggestion that the detectives try Teresa’s place of employment, the Palace Luncheonette on Nicollet.
It was, Anderson confirms for the prosecutor, the Palace’s manager, Anthony Zevos, who told the police that Teresa had called in complaining of a toothache late that Friday afternoon.
Scofield pauses, this time with tactical intent.
“Did Anthony Zevos say he told Mrs. Hickman about a dentist in the neighborhood who might be able to take a patient on a Friday night, Sergeant?”
“No, he didn’t.”
“Did Anthony Zevos tell you about such a dentist when you spoke to him the next day?”
“Yes, he did,” Anderson replies.
“And that dentist’s name was?”
“Dr. H. David Rose.”
Oddly, Scofield stops there, and oddly (or not) DeShields declines—“for now, Your Honor”—to cross-examine the witness. Anderson steps down, and Scofield proceeds to examine Curry and then Hessburg, mostly about the same points he reviewed with Arne.
DeShields declines to cross Mel, but rises behind the attorneys’ table when Scofield is done with Hessburg. It is Sid’s first trial testimony in a murder case and, like the pharmaceutical salesman, he seems pleased to have all eyes focused on him. The youngest son of the Twin Cities’ largest tobacco distributor, he’s the only member of the murder squad who grew up with any family wealth, and Arne attributes the young man’s voluble self-assurance to his moneyed pedigree. Sid’s handsome suit today came from Hubert White’s downtown emporium, a long step up from Nate’s, and his glossy, carefully constructed pompadour gleams under the bright ceiling lights. He smiles confidently at the jurors, particularly at one of the pretty young women in the front row.
DeShields says, “You made quick work of that crime-scene investigation, didn’t you, Detective?”
Sid is surprised by the offhanded-sounding question. He won’t grasp the intent of the lawyer’s curveball until it’s past him.
“Yes, sir, we did,” he says with a toothy grin.
“A young woman is found dead, presumably strangled, in a highly unusual setting and circumstance,” DeShields continues, his deep voice slipping into its Doomsday mode, “and the Minneapolis Police Department’s crack homicide investigators take a quick look around, find nothing of interest, and move along. Is that correct?”
Hessburg’s face is suddenly as red as Patrolman Campbell’s was this morning, his mouth drawn tight, his eyes narrowed. He’s not sure how to respond.
“Is that correct, Detective?”
“Well, no,” Sid stammers. “You make it sound like—”
“Like heartless indifference, Detective?” DeShields barks. “How about gross incompetence?”
“No, sir! Like neither!”
Hessburg looks desperately at Anderson and Curry, who have taken seats behind the attorneys’ table. Anderson returns his stare and shakes his head, hoping to stop Hessburg in his tracks. He has to hand it to counsel. Like a wolf stalking deer, DeShields let the stronger members of the herd pass by and then pounced on the weakest.
But Sid will not be taken down so easily. His chin jutting toward the lawyer, he says, “We launched an extensive investigation, and that afternoon we identified a suspect, Dr. Rose.”
DeShields glowers at the witness.
“And I’d call that a shameful rush to judgment,” he says. “That will be all, Detective.”
“The prosecution is going after Dr. Rose,” Oscar Rystrom wrote in that evening’s Star, “while the defense, as Dante DeShields made brutally clear, has set its sights on the MPD. If today’s fireworks are any indication, the prosecution should be worried.”
At the United Press office a few minutes before six, Robert Gardner watches Milt Hickok hammer out a feed for the bureau’s regional radio clients. Copies of the Star are scattered across several desks as Hickok punches the update into a chattering teletype machine. Everyone agrees that Rystrom hit the nail on the head. Unlike most of his newspaper and wire service competitors, the veteran courthouse hand has the freedom, at least in his periodic column, to pontificate on the events that everyone else is merely reporting, supposedly with cool objectivity. Everyone knows, even if they can’t say it, that DeShields set Scofield back on his heels with his cross of Detective Hessburg.
Scofield tried to recover in the two hours before the day’s adjournment with Fred MacMurray and Alois Jensen, who carefully laid out the grim details of the victim’s condition: the fractured hyoid bone, the red marks on her throat, and the fluid in her lungs all pointing to a determination of death by manual strangulation. MacMurray went on to say, based on his analysis of the contents of Mrs. Hickman’s stomach and degree of the body’s rigor mortis, that the time of death was between eight o’clock on the night of April 8 and 3:00 a.m. on April 9. There was no sign of alcohol or other drugs—only traces of acetylsalicylic acid, the active ingredient in common pain relievers, and the sedative Seconal—in her system.
MacMurray is rarely challenged on the stand and never attacked, and he wasn’t this afternoon. Neither was Jensen, his chief assistant, who identified the victim’s clothing and underwear and testified to the presence of semen stains on her underpants.
The defense was also interested in the pathologist’s declaration of manual strangulation and his later revelations that Teresa Hickman was three months pregnant and had sex shortly before her death.
“How do you know the victim wasn’t strangled with a short length of rope, or with a man’s belt or necktie?” DeShields asked.
“The marks on the victim’s throat were consistent with a pair of human hands, forcefully applied, not any sort of ligature,” MacMurray said, and DeShields set off in another direction.
“You can tell, Doctor, that a woman’s fetus is three months along, but you can’t provide us with the father’s identity—is that correct?” MacMurray nodded. “That’s correct, sir. We don’t have the means or the knowhow. Someday—maybe in only a few years or maybe in a decade or two—we will, but we don’t yet.”
“You can’t determine the source of the semen, either. Is that correct, Doctor?”
“That’s correct.”
“And you concur with the investigators’ determination that while the semen indicates the victim had sex not long before she was murdered, it’s unlikely she was raped. Is that correct?”
“The fact that her body exhibited no signs of force or struggle besides the bruise on the neck and the broken hyoid bone, not to mention the fact that the body was fully clothed when discovered and the clothes, including her underwear, were not torn or even especially disheveled, all mitigate against a determination of rape.”
Given the presu
med sensibilities of a daily paper’s readership in the mid-1950s, neither the Star nor the wire service accounts of the day’s testimony included those verbatim exchanges, choosing to say merely that while the victim was three months pregnant and “likely had sexual relations” the night of the murder, “authorities did not believe she had been sexually assaulted.”
Even Rystrom agreed that the prosecution had done better with the medical witnesses. At any rate, the examination and cross of MacMurray and Jensen ate up what was left of the afternoon.
Robert Gardner, who spent his shift reporting a four-alarm fire on the Near North Side, feels out of sorts. (Though the blaze caused an estimated quarter of a million dollars in damages, there were no deaths or serious injuries, and the structure, a little-used grain-storage complex, was hardly a community landmark.) While he’s not a part of the bureau’s trial team and has only a secondhand view of the proceedings, he still fears he may become part of the story—and not in a good way. The “skinny guy with glasses” has, according to the press coverage so far, not been mentioned in court, but the possibility remains out there like a landmine in a cornfield.
Robert has not seen or heard in more than a week from Meghan Mckenzie, who, at last report, was planning to vacation with her husband in Upper Michigan, and he can’t help but wonder if Miles has been scheming to keep her away from the bureau and therefore away from him. He wonders, too, if she has tired of their relationship.
When he’s not thinking about Meghan, he pines for Pam.
During visits to his sister’s apartment, he drives past the Brantleys’ building, both hoping for and fearing a glimpse of her coming or going. He tortures himself with images of Pam sunning herself on the patch of grass alongside their building or lounging around her nodoubt stifling apartment in a bra and panties or wearing nothing at all. On more than one occasion, he dials all but the last digit of her phone number, prepared, if he has the guts to dial the last one, to invite her to come enjoy his air-conditioned quarters.
Robert has not seen or talked to Mel Curry since that awful night behind Smokey’s, though he thinks about the detective every time he takes a deep breath and looks at the purple bruise in the mirror. He can’t believe that Curry or someone from the prosecutor’s office hasn’t contacted him since that night. Had he only imagined telling the detective that he’d walked past the crime scene, or had Curry, who was possibly as drunk as Robert on that occasion, forgotten Robert’s remark? Or is the prosecution going to spring a trap during the trial?
Hickok, finished with his update, has pushed his chair back and hoisted his scruffy brogans on the desk. He lights a Camel and leans back in the chair.
“Why do you think Scofield didn’t object when DeShields was pantsing Hessburg?” Tommy Pullman asks.
“Scofield’s scared shitless of DeShields,” Mckenzie says, “but I can’t help but think—this is Rystrom’s theory—that the farm boy doesn’t mind seeing the MPD discredited, which can be his excuse if he loses the case. Nevertheless, he can put the girl in Rose’s office that night and try to use Rose’s statement to the cops that she was in his car that night and they were arguing. Plus the fact that the body turned up a few blocks from Rose’s home. No matter how much he’s worried about DeShields, Homer’s still holding the good cards.”
“Blake told me the girl’s old man and husband will be on the stand tomorrow, to describe their pain,” says Hickok. “Then the bereaved sister will describe the connection between Teresa and the dentist. Of course, DeShields will then have a shot at her.”
“Anderson and Curry will have to go back on the stand, won’t they?” says Robert, standing on the periphery of the impromptu circle of analysts. Mckenzie, Hickok, and Pullman all look at him, as though they’ve forgotten that he’s in the room.
“Yeah,” Hickok replies, wearily. “And then DeShields will take their pants off and leave them bare-assed.”
Despite his misgivings, the driver decides to take his chances, get in line at sunup, and see if he can wangle a seat in Courtroom No. 1.
He listened in last night while a couple of fares—half-in-the-bag lawyers he picked up outside the Flame Room after dinner—discussed the case. Probably because they were lawyers, they seemed to know what was going on. The driver decided there and then that a chance to see Teresa Hickman’s next-of-kin, including her sister, would justify getting up at four-thirty, stashing the car downtown, and standing in line for three hours. It will be his secret. He’ll tell Margaret he expects to be on the street all day and have her pack him a sack lunch. Later, he’ll call the garage and tell Fat Jack that his sciatica is acting up again.
So here he is, in the second row from the back, squeezed into what looks and feels like the unforgiving wooden pews at Holy Name, craning his neck to see what he’s here to see. He’s surprised that the lawyers are all sitting at the same table, unlike the separate, side-by-side tables on the television dramas. DeShields, when he stands, is taller than the newspaper photo led him to believe—but not much. The Jew is also taller than he expected, or would be if not for that stoop, six feet two or maybe more. When he and his lawyer stand next to each other, who doesn’t think of Mutt and Jeff in the comics? The driver is pleasantly surprised to see two comely young women in the jury box, cupcakes in their twenties who, before the judge comes in, smile and giggle as though they enjoy being looked at. They remind the driver of a couple of dollies in the Holy Name choir he looks for on the rare occasions that he accompanies his wife to Mass.
The proceedings begin at nine o’clock sharp, when the judge, black-robed and self-important as the archbishop, steps through a paneled door, and sits down behind his tall desk.
Teresa Hickman’s father is called first. He’s a small, bowlegged sodbuster in a brown suit he probably bought before the world war—the first one. The old man looks self-conscious in the formal setting, grinning occasionally at no one in particular and tugging at the collar of his overlarge white shirt. He reminds the driver of a jack-o’-lantern with those gaping spaces between his teeth.
Walter Kubicek says his daughter was a good girl who he’d warned against moving to Minneapolis.
“I told both my daughters that the cities was dangerous,” he says, shaking his head. “We all heard the stories about young girls getting in trouble down there.”
He’s on the stand for less than ten minutes. DeShields doesn’t bother to cross-examine.
The driver is more curious about Harold Hickman, the lanky sad sack in the Army greens, who the county attorney calls next. The driver is interested in his testimony because, of course, the soldier slept with Terry and presumably fathered at least one of her children. Hickman seems drawn and depressed, and so soft-spoken the gallery has to strain to hear him, hardly a match for the spitfire the driver imagines Terry to have been in their conjugal bed. He tries to picture the couple having sex, but can’t.
Most of Hickman’s twenty-minute testimony the driver can’t hear, even after the judge tells the witness to speak up. He does hear, however, the following exchange between the soldier and DeShields.
“After your wife moved to Minneapolis, did she ever mention another man? A male friend or a fellow she might have met at work?”
Hickman sighs and looks up toward the ceiling. “Only Kenny Landa,” he replies at last. “But he’s my cousin so I knew about him already.”
“Did she ever say anything about dental problems? A toothache maybe?”
“No.”
“Did she ever mention Dr. Rose?”
“No.”
Hickman is excused a few moments later, and Scofield calls the aforementioned Kenneth Landa, who identifies himself as both Harold Hickman’s cousin and Teresa Hickman’s boyfriend when she was Teresa Kubicek. The rube is not as tall as his cousin. And instead of sad-looking, he appears to be angry. He wears glasses with black rims and a tight-fitting blue-and-gray checkered sport jacket that’s a bad match with his brown trousers.
The driver has as m
uch trouble picturing Terry with Landa as with Harold Hickman, though he senses a wild fury in the guy that a girl might believe is passion.
Landa testifies that while he corresponded “a time or two” with Teresa after she moved to Minneapolis, she never mentioned the dentist.
“She had a perfect smile,” he volunteers, as though challenging the presumption that Teresa would ever need dental work.
Then, on cross-examination, DeShields asks him if he’d had a “sexual relationship” with Mrs. Hickman.
Landa’s face reddens, and Scofield jumps up.
“Objection, Your Honor! That’s not relevant.”
DeShields, on the opposite side of the lawyers’ table, says, “Of course it is, Your Honor. Mrs. Hickman’s sexual history couldn’t be more relevant in this case.”
Judge Nordahl overrules the objection, and a murmur ripples through the gallery.
“Answer the question, Mr. Landa.”
The witness, red as a beet and looking even angrier than a moment ago, nods his head. “Hell, yes!” he says. “We had plenty of sexual relations! We were in love!”
Nordahl raps his gavel to silence the sudden chatter and widespread guffaws in the gallery. As the crowd quiets, a bailiff appears at the judge’s elbow and hands him a folded piece of paper. After reading the note, the judge raps the gavel again and rises.
“We’ll take a recess at this time,” he says. “Counsel will join me in my chambers.” The black robe flaring behind him like a raven’s wings, he disappears through the door behind the bench.
The driver looks at his watch. It’s only half past ten, too early for lunch, so obviously something’s come up. While people on both sides of him get up, stretch, yawn, and look around, he stays put. He is titillated by Landa’s testimony, by the idea of the little honyocker and the skinny girl having “plenty of sexual relations,” and he pictures her in various states of undress in the backseat of a moonlit car or flat on her back in a dusty hayloft. The girl he pictures is younger than the twenty-one-year-old with the come-hither smile and suggestive poses in the photos he bought from Ybarra.