The Secret Lives of Dentists by W.A. Winter

Author:W.A. Winter [Winter, W.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: The Secret Lives of Dentists
ISBN: 9781645060314
Publisher: Seventh Street Books
Published: 2021-01-31T22:00:00+00:00

SUMMER 1955

CHAPTER 8

People bitch about the snow and frigid temperatures of a Minnesota winter, but it’s the summer heat and humidity that bring out the worst in the natives.

This year, in the three months between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Minneapolis will record six homicides, more than half the total for the year: two by gunfire on the same night in the same house on Fourth Avenue South, a fatal beating behind the Sourdough Bar in the Gateway, a domestic knifing in a Seven Corners rooming house, the intentional drowning of an infant in a Nordeast duplex, and the bludgeoning of Herman Goranski, a sixty-eight-year-old recluse in one of the city’s few remaining tenements, kitty-corner from Holy Rosary Catholic Church on East Twenty-fourth Street.

The Gateway case, the domestic, and the infanticide were solved at the site before the bodies were removed; the Fourth Avenue shootout involved coloreds killing coloreds during a crap game, which is low- (or no-) priority downtown. Which leaves Herman Goranski, whose body was discovered by the building’s absentee owner after other tenants complained about the stink.

On June 18, a Saturday, the temperature reaches the high nineties by early afternoon. Arne Anderson and Mel Curry are standing in the dead man’s apartment, sweat liquefying their faces and handkerchiefs pressed to their noses and mouths. The corpse has moments earlier been removed by Fred MacMurray’s crew, and Goranski’s pathetic estate lies strewn across the grimy floor. Luckily, it’s a small apartment—a single room, maybe fifteen by twenty feet, plus an alcove that passes for a kitchen, and a doorless closet. The toilet is down the hall, shared by the floor’s other hapless denizens.

The old man’s head has been crushed. Cause of death, Dr. Fred will declare, was blunt-force trauma. Anderson stumbles over a maple table leg sticking out from under the bed. He picks it up with a gloved hand and extends it toward Curry, showing his partner what both men are right away pretty certain are bloodstains.

“Whoever killed him he let in,” Curry says, acknowledging the absence of forced entry. (Goranski’s apartment is on the third floor; its only window is painted shut, and the flimsy wooden door was unlocked when the building’s owner found him.) There are, according to Jordan Fanshawe, one of the city’s more notorious slumlords, fourteen other tenants, twelve of them men, and the detectives will speak to all of them, except for one who’s recovering from a broken hip in a nursing home, before the sun sets today.

With the shiny toe of his two-tone wingtip, Curry probes a pile of queer magazines and paperback novels, neither the names nor the authors of which mean anything to Mel, who looks only at smut showcasing women. Goranski’s dresser drawers have been pulled out and dumped on the threadbare rug in front of it. The victim’s worn-out billfold has been riffled and tossed atop the rubble. Even its unbuttoned change pocket is empty.

“Robbery seems to have been the idea here,” Mel says. But the old guy was wearing only skivvies, and they were down around his skinny ankles.

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