The Secret Lives of Dentists

by W. A. Winter

  Then a burly, bespectacled detective Meghan recognized as Charlie Riemenschneider slammed a folding chair across Curry’s shoulders, and Curry pitched forward on his face, his snub-nosed revolver skidding across the greasy linoleum. Riemenschneider, LeBlanc, and two or three others piled on, cursing and pummeling the shooter with their fists. The air, heavy with cigarette smoke, now stunk of gunpowder and sweat.

  Curry, usually a steady shot and firing at point-blank range, had missed his wife. Amazingly, the bullets hit no one, only savaged the photo gallery on the wall behind the tables, defacing the portraits of Ferdinand Twyman and three or four bewhiskered Hiawatha County jurists from the late 1800s whose names nobody in the room would know.

  In the five seconds that followed, one of Smokey’s back-sink men rushed into the room waving his arms, his high-pitched shriek shredding the stunned silence.

  “Hey!” he screamed. “Dere’s a guy shot up bad inna alley!”

  Even from the perspective of the following February, the overlapping events of that August afternoon and evening seem no less preposterous than they did in the days and weeks immediately following the mayhem.

  After a week of intense, sensational, some would say hysterical news coverage, there didn’t seem to be much more to say.

  Meghan Mckenzie got her first United Press byline, writing, per her father-in-law’s instruction, an on-the-scene account of the shootings in the conventional third-person voice. (“No first-person drivel out of this shop, sweetheart.”) Miles, Hickok, and Pullman filled dozens of column inches with features on both the trial verdict and the shootings. Hickok’s respectful sidebar reprising Arne Anderson’s life, wartime heroics, and police career, and Tommy’s tear-jerker detailing the cruel irony of the fashion model whose “million-dollar looks and bearing” were nearly destroyed by three “twenty-cent bullets” were widely read and discussed. Janine Curry’s injuries, sustained not by gunshots but during her fall and the ensuing chaos, were significant. Doctors said that, owing to a broken hip and dislocated knee, she would probably have difficulty walking for the rest of her life. Her smile, disfigured by several broken teeth and a fractured jaw, would never be the same.

  Pending Rose’s appeal and Curry’s trial there wasn’t any more relevant news.

  Robert Gardner, whatever his status as a suspect in the aftermath of Rose’s conviction, remained on the bureau’s masthead, though he was no longer the junior-most staffer since the hiring, a week before Christmas, of a pretty St. Ansgar College grad named Jennifer Hendricks. Miles made it clear, however, that Robert would not be assigned anything having to do with the Rose-Hickman case. Snowstorms, multiple traffic fatalities, four-alarm fires, and visiting celebrities—so long as they’re not too celebrated, in which case Miles himself would shoulder the task—will be the young man’s topics in the foreseeable future.

  On his own, without a word to anyone, Robert made several attempts to write the “definitive portrait” of the small-town girl and her ill-fated adventures in the big city that he envisioned after Teresa Hickman’s murder. But the right words wouldn’t come, or wouldn’t come quickly enough for an impatient young writer, and he gave up a couple of months after the trial’s conclusion. Maybe he would try again later, when he knew more about the world and the craft required to describe it. He would dream about Teresa Hickman’s body in the weeds along the tracks for two or three months after that, and then not at all.

  It’s early February when Robert asks Jenny Hendricks to go see East of Eden at the RKO Orpheum. They both worked that night so they caught the late show. Then, recalling a secluded spot where they can make out, he drives west on Highway 12 in a light snowfall and they end up, not exactly by chance, just down the road from the Starlight Motor Hotel. However the night plays out, Robert is thrilled to be in the company of an attractive young woman again. He considers the fact that she’s not married a positive development.

  Not long after the Rose trial ended, Robert, at wit’s end, had “staked out”—there was no other way to describe it—Pam Brantley’s apartment on West Forty-fourth Street. Her name, never mind the memory of her voice and body, was enough to arouse him, and he told himself, with a desperate man’s logic, that he had nothing to lose. Robert’s sister, brother-in-law, and infant nephew had moved to a little pastel-colored rambler in the fast-growing suburb of Bloomington, so, aside from Pam or Karl, nobody was likely to notice his Ford coupe parked at odd hours near the apartment buildings overlooking the abandoned streetcar tracks.

  After three days without spotting either one of the Brantleys—or for that matter a skinny guy with glasses coming or going outside their building—he called the couple’s apartment only to be told by an operator that the number had been disconnected.

  The next day, when he wouldn’t start his bureau shift until four-thirty in the afternoon and Karl was likely to be at the hospital, he entered the building for the first time since the previous April and noticed that Brantley, K & P was no longer Scotch-taped to the mailbox in the entry. With his heart throbbing in his chest and his cock stirring between his legs, he climbed the stairs and knocked on the familiar door, certain now she wouldn’t be there. And she wasn’t. A gray-haired woman in a nurse’s uniform answered the door. He mumbled an apology and realized that it would be only by another happy accident if he ever saw Pam again.

  Robert has seen Meghan often enough at the bureau to take the spark off whatever electricity he imagined might still exist between them. Every once in a while he saw her with her husband—yet another tall, skinny guy with glasses, although this one had streaks of premature silver in his gleaming dark hair and seemed to hold his head at an odd angle when speaking, a tic that Robert attributed to his having only one functioning eye. Meghan always smiles when she sees Robert, and they often chat when they run into each other coming or going. But the small talk is never about anything very personal, and there’s never so much as a wink or allusion to their summer affair.

  At the bureau’s Christmas party—Smokey’s was abandoned by the regulars after the shootings, most of the cops, lawyers, and reporters redirecting their business to Gino Rinaldi’s red-sauce trattoria down the block—Robert learns, during one of Miles’s boozy toasts, that Meghan is pregnant. “The baby—with any luck a boy—is due in June,” Miles announced.

  Jenny Hendricks, who grew up on a Blue Earth County dairy farm, is smart, funny, and athletic. She “adores” horses and loves to sing. In February, after their third date—Oklahoma! at the Riverview, a couple of blocks from her Thirty-eighth Street apartment—they have sex on her living-room rug, and Robert tells himself that this is a woman he could marry even if he’ll never burn for her body the way he did—still does—for Pam’s. Jenny seems to like him a lot, too.

  Miles taps Jenny to help out with the Rose appeal later in the month. Dante DeShields releases a statement in which he again cites “numerous” procedural errors and, for the first time, mentions the shoe recovered by police near Lake of the Isles the day after the murder. According to DeShields’s statement, “The prosecution hid the existence of the missing shoe from the defense in a blatant violation of the Rules of Discovery. The existence of that shoe gives credence to the account of witness Julius Casserly, who testified at trial about a car parked on Euclid Place, and the apparent abduction of Teresa Hickman by two men in that car, on the night she was murdered.”

  Responding to reporters, Rudy Blake says the second shoe had not been hidden—it had been “inadvertently misplaced by investigators.” In any event, the shoe would only reinforce the fact that Rose and Mrs. Hickman were in the vicinity of Lake of the Isles and Euclid Place when they were driving around after her dental appointment. “They argued and struggled in his car,” Blake said. “Then she tried to escape and the shoe fell off, this before he killed her and drove her body over to the streetcar tracks near Forty-fourth Street.”

  Those are Blake’s last words on the subject. The following day, he announces his retirement.


  The Minnesota Supreme Court declines to hear DeShields’s appeal of Rose’s conviction. Rose, who has been free on a $100,000 bond, is ordered to report to Stillwater Prison on February 27.

  Mel Curry’s trial would likely have been eventful, but on February 29 (1956 is a leap year), Curry, through his lawyer, a down-at-the-heels public defender named Clement Bonsell, pleads guilty to first-degree murder and attempted second-degree murder. Hiawatha County Attorney Homer Scofield asks for a life sentence with no chance of parole, and District Court Judge Roy Winkler grants the request.

  * * *

  The night before his lawyers drive him to Stillwater, David Rose sits by himself in his living room, staring out the bay window at Zenith Avenue. There are several inches of fresh snow on the lawn, shrubs, and outstretched limbs of the boulevard elms, and the snow muffles what few sounds rise above the late evening quiet of the neighborhood.

  The words of the Christian carol “Silent Night”—“all is calm, all is bright”—come to mind, though the music in his ears at the moment is “Clair de Lune,” from the Debussy recording slowly turning on the Magnavox.

  Before Ruth went upstairs to iron the white shirt he will wear tomorrow morning, she turned off, at his request, the lamp beside his chair, so he sees little of his reflection in the window. He feels the warmth of the meerschaum bowl in his hand and is aware of the piano playing softly on the phonograph.

  Rose has said his goodbyes to Margot and Lael, who are spending the night at a cousin’s house, and to his brothers, in-laws (except Ronnie Oshinsky, who will be part of his escort to the prison gates), and the handful of Linden Hills neighbors who remained cordial during the past ten months. He has signed the papers relinquishing the lease on his office space and authorizing the sale of his tools, equipment, and furniture to the pair of young dentists—the Negro brothers Walker and Emlen Johnston—who will open their first practice in Rose’s space before the end of next month. Ruth, Ronnie, and Sam, God bless their good hearts, took care of the negotiations. (Rose’s license was promptly revoked after the high court denied his appeal.)

  The family’s financial situation has been extensively discussed and more or less settled. Despite several public assertions and widespread perception, Rose was not a wealthy man. His practice income covered the office expenses, utilities, taxes, upkeep of the Linden Hills home, and the cost of driving a late-model Packard, but left little for a more luxurious lifestyle. (The car was sold after Ruth decided she wanted something “less conspicuous.” The house will go on the market in April.) His brothers have paid the legal bills, and Ruth’s family will make sure that she and the girls can relocate to an acceptable location in St. Louis Park. The Roses’ daughters will continue to attend public school, regardless of where the family resettles, and spend several weeks at camp in the summer. Believing it is “important to stay busy,” Ruth intends to work at least part-time for one of the Oshinsky enterprises.

  Tonight the couple shared a simple supper at the dining-room table that, not long ago, had been piled high with legal documents and law books. There seemed little left to talk about—no more decisions to discuss, no more contingency plans to evaluate. Ruth has never suggested that an apology was in order. On several occasions, including this evening, Rose has expressed his regret about the developments of the past year, but neither he nor his wife believes a regret is the same as an apology. Privately, she has spoken to Ronnie about the possibility of a divorce, but that’s all it will be—a possibility—for the time being.

  Now, alone in front of the window, the words of the Christmas carol fade and Rose is left to his fate.

  What a fool I was to succumb to that urge and opportunity, he muses.

  True, it wasn’t the first time and, if it hadn’t been discovered, wouldn’t have been the last. But he was not a sex fiend. He did not ogle women on the street and had no interest in filthy pictures. He enjoyed watching the show at the Whoop-Tee-Doo Club after a long day upstairs, but that was all he ever did—watch and maybe chat a moment if one of the girls stopped by his table. The truth is, those women, with their coarse language and clownish makeup, frightened him—they were not his type, to say the least. He never cheated with one of Ruth’s friends or cousins, either, even after zoftig Myra Oshinsky tried to push him into the upstairs bathroom one New Year’s Eve a dozen years ago.

  In his office at night he was his own man—not a husband or father, but the master of his private domain. Most nights, he had the second floor to himself, and on the rare evenings he didn’t, the racket from the club downstairs would drown out the noise behind his doors.

  The sedation, when he felt it necessary, was a tool that presented itself quite by chance, not something he incorporated into his practice with any purpose other than relaxing a nervous patient and reducing her pain. The fact that it relaxed the occasional attractive and amenable woman was a wholly unintended development. Nobody was ever completely unconscious. The women he made love to always knew, more or less, what was going on and submitted without objection or struggle. He knew what he was doing.

  There were seven women in all—mostly ordinary, working women, closer to Ruth’s age than to Terry’s, but each appealing in her way. Grace Montgomery and a couple of the others were married, and all were unhappy for one reason or another. He liked to think they appreciated his kindnesses.

  Teresa Hickman was unique. She was several years younger than the others and very sensual, very seductive. She showed herself off that first night, not in the vulgar fashion of the women at the club, but more subtly, coquettishly, slipping off her coat, for instance, and turning to reveal her backside while she hung the coat on the rack, then catching his eye while he watched her, and smiling in a way that he doubted most men, not only a dentist, could resist. She didn’t object that January night when he stepped around her, brushed his hand against the small of her back, and locked the outer door.

  A few minutes later, she sat back in the big chair and laughed at his line about a better way to remove her lipstick, knowing exactly what he meant. She was so composed and compliant, he thought he might skip the capsule and simply administer a little novocaine to block the dental pain. But then he thought he’d best not take anything for granted and gave her the sedative.

  After he repaired her tooth, he let her doze in the chair for another half hour. Then he caressed her cheek with the back of his hand and, when she opened her eyes, helped her out of the chair and led her, his arm around her narrow waist, into the outer room and onto the settee. She let him kiss her and slide his hand between her legs.

  What a fool I was to succumb to the urge and opportunity! Then again, how many healthy men, given that opportunity, would have declined it?

  Ultimately, his mistake was not the sex, but not being willing to pay for it. The cost of an abortion. Or cash for her own apartment. Even if it was more than he could afford, he could have borrowed the money from his brothers, telling them that it was to cover a hike in the office rent or to replace a piece of worn-out equipment. His brothers rarely asked questions and never refused him.

  Of course, he couldn’t be sure when she made her demand that April evening that she was in fact pregnant, let alone by him. As the trial witnesses made abundantly clear, Terry was a wanton young woman and any one of a number of men could have been the baby’s father. She was calculating, too, waiting that last night until he’d finished the dental work and they’d had sex before making her accusation. She knew what she was doing, too, even under the influence of his pill.

  Later that night, in fact—it might have been when they were in the car—she told him that the baby’s father “might be” the Landa boy. She said that he had driven down to Minneapolis in early January and the two of them had spent the night at his hotel. The problem was, Kenny wouldn’t have the cash for an abortion and would be terrified of what his family—not to mention his cousin’s family—would do if they found out. There were already rumors that Landa, not her husband, was the
father of her first child. So Terry brought her problem to him, to Dr. Rose. She obviously believed that he would be willing and able to help her, especially if he believed that she would go public if he didn’t. It was blackmail pure and simple.

  Even worse was her ingratitude. He’d eliminated the cause of her physical pain and provided her with friendship and advice. And he would have done a great deal more if and when she needed it. He sometimes imagined Terry as his mistress, like the paramours of well-to-do European businessmen and politicians, with their own apartments and “allowances.” After all that, for her to threaten him—well, who could be surprised if he was angry?

  But did he kill her?

  Despite the jury’s verdict, the state Supreme Court’s de facto affirmation, and the opinion of eighty-two percent of the Minnesota public, according to a Tribune poll conducted after the trial’s end, Rose can’t decide. He will concede, given his own account of that April night, that there’s no other plausible explanation for Teresa Hickman’s death. But tonight that explanation seems as flimsy as a dream.

  He doesn’t know what happened that night. He doesn’t know or can’t remember.

  Which, granted, doesn’t mean that he’s not a murderer.

  The driver stares at the photo on the day-old Star’s front page: Dr. Rose sitting on a bench in the admissions area at Stillwater Prison, “awaiting processing.” To the driver’s eye, Rose looks the same as he did in the courtroom, in a starched white shirt and striped tie. The driver is sure the guy would wear the same dead-eyed expression whether someone was sucking his dick or lighting his feet on fire.

  The driver wonders if Rose and ex-detective Curry, the other hometown killer of recent notoriety, will bump into each other in the pen. Considering the amount of time they’ll be there, a meeting would seem inevitable. When they do, he wonders, what will they say to each other? Maybe Rose will work on Curry’s teeth if he’s willing to treat one of the cops who sent him to prison and if Curry doesn’t mind the Jew poking a drill in his mouth.