by W. A. Winter
Then, fifteen minutes later, Judge Nordahl and the four attorneys return to the courtroom, heads down, lips pursed, distracted. The crowd, many still standing, goes quiet, all eyes on the bench.
“Owing to an unforeseen circumstance, the court is adjourned,” the judge announces. “The jury will follow the bailiff to the jury room and await further instructions.”
An excited, uncertain buzz fills the big room as almost everyone heads for the exits.
The driver lets his pew-mates squeeze past him. His erotic reverie dissolves like a dream upon waking. Everything he did to get a seat at this trial—the early wakeup, the lies he told Margaret and Fat Jack, the loss of a morning’s earnings. Once again, he tells himself that life is fucking unfair.
As the courtroom empties, Anderson and Curry drive the short distance to the Montgomerys’ apartment south of the Loop, the unmarked Chevy’s siren wailing and red light blazing. The better driver of the two, Curry is behind the wheel, weaving in and out of the midday traffic like a kid in a dodgem car at the state fair.
Charlie Riemenschneider and Ferris Lakeland are already at the site, as are a half-dozen patrolmen, and Alois Jensen from the coroner’s office. Assistant County Attorney Rudy Blake and a couple of sheriff’s deputies arrive behind Anderson and Curry.
Riemenschneider is in the living room, smoking a cigarette and looking through the mess of dated newspapers, magazines, and articles of clothing strewn across the sofa and floor. When he sees Arne, he jerks his head toward the bathroom and says, “In the shitter.”
Arne leads the delegation down the short hallway. The apartment is closed up and hot, much like the last time he and Mel were here. Lakeland has taken off his suit jacket and loosened his tie. In the bathroom the naked body of Grace Montgomery is lying supine on the floor alongside the tub. Someone, probably Ferris, has draped a colorless bath towel across her privates. The bathroom’s cracked tile floor is wet and slippery.
“The water was up to the top when the uniforms got here,” Ferris says, “and the faucet was still running. They pulled her out and pumped her chest, but she was gone.”
Curry nods toward an empty Four Roses bottle under the sink. There’s a bottle of sleeping pills, also empty, next to an empty water glass.
“Who called it in?” Arne asks, looking down at Grace’s body. Her hair is wet and tangled as though she just crawled out of a swamp. Her dull eyes are partly open. She looks a few pounds heavier than the last time he saw her.
“Her husband,” Lakeland replies.
“Anyone see a note?”
“Not I,” says Ferris.
Dr. Jensen squeezes into the room and squats beside the body.
“Those are old bruises,” he says, gently fingering the faded smudges on her chest and left shoulder. A contusion above Grace’s right eye has gone a grayish green.
“Where is he?” Arne asks.
“Back bedroom,” says Riemenschneider, standing in the bathroom door. As Anderson and Curry squeeze past, Charlie says, “We shoulda killed the fucker when we had the chance. I just reminded him that crime don’t pay.”
When Anderson walks into the back bedroom, Bud Montgomery, wearing a sleeveless undershirt and twill trousers, is sitting on the edge of the bed bent over his knees, his head in his hands. A veteran patrolman named Ralph Hitchens stands nearby, meaty arms folded across his chest.
When Montgomery lifts his head, the detective sees the bloody nose and swelling left eye, Riemenschneider’s reminder about the wages of sin.
“I came home and found her,” Bud says miserably. “I had nothing to do with it. She’s been a mess since Terry got killed, drinking day and night, crying all the time, complaining she can’t sleep. I haven’t had a decent meal in three months.”
Arne sighs. Once again the urge to throw the son of a bitch against the wall, or out the window, is difficult to resist. What a sorry excuse for a human being, he muses. Now that both Kubicek girls are gone, who would possibly miss him?
“Did she leave a note?”
Bud looks up and wipes his nose with the blood-streaked back of his hand.
“About what?”
“A suicide note, you stupid prick,” Curry says. Mel is moving around the little room, picking through the junk atop the dresser and peering into the wastebasket beside it. “Saying she couldn’t stand to live one more fucking minute in the same world as you.”
Officer Hitchens turns away and coughs.
Bud says, “I didn’t see no note.”
The widower will ride downtown with Riemenschneider and Lakeland, wearing handcuffs and likely fearing for his life. Jensen will finish his preliminary examination of the decedent’s body and its immediate surroundings, and accompany it downtown to the morgue, where MacMurray will be waiting. Before leaving the apartment, Anderson, Curry, and someone with a crime-lab kit and camera, if he ever arrives, will give the place a thorough going-over. They will make sure the sheriff’s boys on the steps outside don’t let reporters or photographers in the building.
First, though, the lead detectives, joined by Inspector Evangelist and Captain Fuller, confer with Rudy Blake, who’s now minus a key witness.
“Homer will be beside himself,” Blake says. “Already is.”
Anderson thinks he sees a smirk on the old lawyer’s face.
Blake, of course, has been around the block a few times. He’s lost an important witness before, in more than one important case. Among them: a Northside rubout presumed to have been ordered by Bunny Augustine the week after V-J Day, and a leap, or push, off the Tenth Avenue Bridge of a notorious white-slaver two years ago. The second untimely death probably cost the prosecution a conviction, the first one probably not, at least not as much as the bumbling of Homer Scofield’s alcoholic predecessor, Ferdy Twyman. Blake was Twyman’s second chair at both trials.
“DeShields will use this to pump up a case against Montgomery. He’ll say the asshole killed both women,” Fuller says. “How much you wanna bet?”
“No doubt about it,” says Big Ed, firing up the stub of a cigar.
“He was going to point at Montgomery anyway,” Blake says, lighting a Viceroy. “Along with the hundred other possible suspects who aren’t either a Jew or a dentist.” He blows a plume of smoke into the smoky room. “Homer will think it’s the end of the world, but I’m guessing Dante gains only marginally more from this than we lose.” Anderson lights a smoke of his own. Blake makes him smile in spite of the circumstances. Rudy reminds him of a baggy-suited, silverhaired physics teacher and assistant football coach he was fond of at Roosevelt High. Too bad the old man insists on wearing that silly toupee, which you can tell is a rug from a hundred yards away.
“We’ll see what Dr. Fred thinks—murder or suicide,” Arne says. “Or maybe the lady tried to kill herself with the pills, got drunk while she was waiting for them to kick in, then accidentally knocked herself unconscious on the edge of the tub and drowned.”
“Fat fuckin’ chance,” says Evangelist.
But no one is paying attention.
Two hours after the news of Grace Montgomery’s death is confirmed, Homer Scofield asks for and is granted a delay in the proceedings. The trial, per Judge Nordahl’s order, will resume at 9:00 a.m. on Thursday morning.
Sitting around the Roses’ dining-room table on Tuesday afternoon, Dante DeShields says the woman’s death can only help the defense. “She would have been helpful to us, on cross, establishing, or confirming, Teresa Hickman’s promiscuity, both back on the farm and once she moved to the city,” he says. “Better yet, her death adds credence to the idea that Bud Montgomery might have been Teresa’s killer. If the coroner rules Grace’s death a homicide, Bud’s the man.” DeShields says this in a growl that no one would mistake for celebratory. Still, Rose can’t help but find his lawyer’s remarks, even if it’s positive news for him in the trial’s context, disrespectful and unpleasant.
Rose is shaken by Grace’s death. She was a nice woman, kind and re
asonably intelligent. He felt sorry for her because he knew that she was unhappy. She rarely smiled or laughed, not in his presence anyway. Her clothes looked out-of-date, overly worn, and not always clean. He noticed the bruises on her neck and arms, once or twice a swollen eye or puffy lip, which he didn’t feel it his business to ask about, but which he suspected had been inflicted by her husband. People would be surprised to know how many women—white women and women from good homes—are assaulted by their husbands or boyfriends. They may not want to talk about it, not to their dentist at any rate, but the abuse is often plain to see.
Yes, he’d had sex with Grace Montgomery—in his office at night, before Teresa’s arrival last winter. The way Rose remembers it, the sex (he’d never call it lovemaking) was labored and rather awkward, always a mutual decision, but not especially satisfying for him and probably not for her, either. Rose felt bad for her and would sometimes hand her a five-dollar bill, even before he brought up the idea of referrals. To her credit, though she accepted what he handed her, she never asked for more. He had not seen or talked to her since her sister’s death.
The trial, so far, struck him as a curious affair.
He knew, from his high school civics classes, reading the papers, and watching the occasional courtroom drama on television, what trials are supposed to look and sound like, but, as with many things in life, the reality, especially when you’re in the middle of it, is something else. He is amazed, for instance, that so many people are involved in the process, presumably interested in the actions (or inactions) of a single individual, a total stranger to most of them. Listening to the lawyers on both sides of the table, he often drifts away, his mind wandering to unrelated subjects—and then he’ll hear his name spoken and his mind snaps back to the here and now, and he’s surprised to realize the judge or a lawyer or one of the witnesses is talking about him.
He’s no expert, but it seems clear that Scofield is in over his head. The young prosecutor is jumpy, disorganized, and obviously intimidated by DeShields. Scofield’s assistant, the much older and presumably wiser Mr. Blake, strikes Rose as too amiable and disinterested to ultimately secure a guilty verdict.
Rose took notes during the first couple days of jury selection, but then didn’t see the point, other than, he supposed, to keep himself focused on the proceedings. (Not wishing to hurt his sister-in-law’s feelings, he’s kept the notebook in his lap. From where she sits, she can’t tell if he’s writing in it or not.) DeShields’s assistant, Michael Haydon, occasionally leans over and asks how he’s doing, but otherwise there’s been little conversation with his attorneys when court is in session.
Back home in the evening, the lawyers eventually leave and the Roses, often including Ronnie Oshinsky and at least one of the doctor’s brothers, have dinner. Ruth, as always, does the cooking—corned beef and cabbage, macaroni and cheese, a Cobb or Waldorf salad, a small dish of Jell-O pudding or lemon sherbet—with one of the other women helping out. DeShields doesn’t want the Roses dining in public, not that they did a lot of that before the trial. The defendant, who has been free on bail since his indictment in April, is not considered a flight risk, but that’s not to say some hotheaded bigot might not want to render his own twisted form of justice if given the chance. Apparently there was such a threat, during jury selection, because, though no one has mentioned it, he has spotted a maroon county squad car crawling past the house or idling in the alley. (The Oshinskys’ gray Imperial is an occasional presence as well.)
For now, Rose is content to return home, listen to his lawyers and family members discuss the case, eat dinner, and peruse the several professional journals he subscribes to while listening to his music and sucking on one of his pipes.
His daughters are still at their camp in Wisconsin. Once a week, Rose adds a carefully written sentence to Ruth’s letters and on Sunday speaks briefly to each of the girls on the phone. Every other week, Ronnie drives Ruth across the border to the town of Spooner, where they visit with the girls over lunch and take a walk along the lake. The trial is never discussed.
On her return to Linden Hills, Ruth says the girls are doing just fine and “send their love to Daddy.”
First thing on Thursday morning, Judge Nordahl denies the prosecution’s request for an additional delay to “allow Counsel time,” said Rudy Blake in his motion, “to reformulate strategy following the death of a key witness.”
“You have plenty of witnesses, Counsel,” Nordahl tells Blake, who looks as though he’s going to respond, and then thinks better of it.
The judge also denies, for the second time, a defense motion for a change of venue.
Nodding toward the two-dozen scribes seated at the press tables, he says, “I’m quite sure these proceedings are front-page news all over the Midwest, Mr. DeShields. What’s more, I strongly doubt that the anti-Semitism you’ve referred to in your public remarks —if in fact it’s a significant factor in this city—would be any less so in Duluth or Fergus Falls or Rochester. So again, motion denied.”
Fred MacMurray has declared Grace Montgomery’s death a drowning, though whether by the woman’s intent, an accident (“misadventure”), or a combination of both can’t be determined. Neither the police nor the medical examiner found any sign of foul play. Following MacMurray’s ruling, Bud Montgomery, whose alibi for that morning was corroborated by his boss, is released from his courthouse jail cell, and Frenchy LeBlanc drives him home to his empty apartment, leaving him at the curb with the admonition to “stay put until we tell you otherwise.” A sheriff’s deputy, pulling up behind Frenchy’s car, will make sure that he does.
Scofield calls Anatoli and Anthony Zevos to the stand.
Anatoli, looking impatient and out of sorts, confirms that Teresa Hickman worked for him at the Palace Luncheonette on Nicollet Avenue between March 23 and April 7.
“She ’spose to work on the eighth,” he says with his comical Greek accent, “but my son he say she call in sick.”
Tony Zevos is clearly eager for the spotlight when he follows his father to the stand. He’s wearing a yellow suit and a wide tie ablaze with Mediterranean colors. The jury and the gallery can’t help but notice both the bum leg and the smirk on his dark, handsome face.
“Not seek,” he says, mimicking his father. “She said she had a toothache. I thought, what the hell, so your tooth hurts. You can still pour a guy a goddamn cup of coffee, can’t ya?”
Someone snickers in the gallery, and Tony grins in that direction. Judge Nordahl raps his gavel and tells the witness to watch his language.
“Did Mrs. Hickman call in sick very often?” Scofield asks.
“No more than the others,” Tony says. “They come and go, these girls. They work for a coupla days, then decide they need a vacation. Their feet hurt or they’ve got the blind staggers or it’s that time of month, so they call in sick.” He glances toward the jury box, in particular at the two young women sitting side by side in the front row.
The smirk disappears when DeShields stands up at the attorneys’ table and stares at the witness for a long moment before beginning his cross.
“Did the defendant patronize the Palace Luncheonette, Mr. Zevos?” DeShields asks.
“The dentist?” Zevos says. “I never seen him before today.”
“Did Teresa Hickman ever mention him in your hearing?”
“No.”
“When Teresa Hickman called in that Friday and told you she had a toothache, did you suggest she visit Dr. Rose?”
“I didn’t suggest nothin’.”
“Was Teresa Hickman popular with your customers, especially your male customers?”
“Maybe. I dunno. I never took a survey. One guy—I don’t know his name, all’s I know he drives a cab—he asked about her once or twice.”
“Did you find Teresa Hickman attractive, Mr. Zevos?”
Tony doesn’t reply for a moment. His face takes on the look of a feral animal sensing a trap. “Not especially,” he says at last. “She wa
s kinda skinny for my taste. Plus I’m married.”
DeShields says, “Did you ever make a pass at Mrs. Hickman? Try to kiss her, or put your hands up her skirt? Back in the kitchen, say, or in the pantry, where your father or your wife couldn’t see you?”
“Objection!”
Scofield is on his feet.
“The witness’s actions are not the issue in this trial, Your Honor.”
“Sustained,” Nordahl says from the bench.
“No more questions,” DeShields says and sits down without another look at young Zevos, who stumbles off the witness stand, flushed and perspiring, looking down at the floor, not at his wife and his father, who watch him with hard eyes from the gallery.
Robert Gardner, seated between Miles Mckenzie and Marty Rice at one of the press tables, a late replacement for Milt Hickok, says, “Wow!” under his breath. Mckenzie nods, acknowledging the rookie’s response to DeShields’s aggressive blade work.
Robert was at home last night, typing up another erotic fever dream starring himself and Pam Brantley, when Mckenzie called.
“Fucking Hickok,” Miles said with more than his customary irritation. “The dumb son of a bitch fell off a ladder while fishing his kid’s baseball out of a drain pipe. He’s in traction at Deaconess Hospital for at least a week.”
Before Robert can express his condolences (he likes Milt, though he’s afraid of him), Mckenzie says, “Pullman’s wife says Tommy has the flu, so it’s you and me at the trial tomorrow. Be there by eight-thirty. And look halfway professional, for chrissake.”
Robert was at the courthouse at eight-fifteen wearing, his good sport coat and a sharp dotted tie that he bought the day after he slept with Meghan Mckenzie for the first time. He stuck three ballpoint pens in a jacket pocket and holds a reporter’s notebook in his sweaty hand.
Stepping past him on his way into the courtroom, Marty Rice clapped him on the shoulder and said, “You’re in the big tent now, kid.”
Robert watches Arne Anderson take the stand. Scofield has recalled the big detective to tell the jury what DeShields has decided that his client will not—namely, what Rose told the police soon after Teresa Hickman’s murder.