Teeth, Treats and Murder

1. Chief Investigator

Chief Investigator

Ayear later I could tell you the exact moment the good part ended, but at the time it just looked like a banner going up.

It was the second week of August and the town was filling for Fiesta again, and I was standing in my own courtyard at eight-forty in the morning with a cortado in my hand — the three hundred and something-th; we'd both stopped counting out loud, though Marisol had not — watching a crew on a scissor lift hang forty feet of vinyl across the front of the old bank building on the other side of State Street.

"What does it say," said Tess, from behind the cart, not looking up.

"It says LUMINOUS."

"What's Luminous?"

"There's a face."

"Whose face?"

The crew got the second panel up and the face resolved: a man of about forty-five with silver at the temples and a jaw you could level a shelf with and teeth — I want to be precise about this, since it's my field — teeth that had cost somebody about forty thousand dollars and had been photographed under a ring light by a person who knew exactly what they were doing.

"DR. PRESTON HALE," I read. "DENTAL WELLNESS. OPENING SOON. Then there's a — Tess, there's a QR code. On a man's chin."

Tess came around the cart to look. Floss came too, because Floss goes where I go, and she sat down on the tile in her bandana and regarded the enormous face across the street with polite interest.

"Huh," said Tess.

"Huh," I agreed.

And that was all either of us said about it, that morning, because it was eight-forty on a Thursday in August and the year had been, against all reasonable expectation, good.

Let me account for it, since the accounting matters later.

Cole Ferris took a plea in March rather than let a jury hear about a gold crown, which meant I was deposed for eleven hours and never had to testify.

The county gave Harriet Vance's estate to the people she'd actually named in the will before the one Miles Prentiss drew, and eleven of her paintings hang in the Museum now with a little brass card that says GIFT OF HARRIET A.

VANCE, and I have been to look at them the way some people go to church.

Kyle Deverell got a suspended sentence and moved to Oregon and sends Marisol a Christmas card, which is a sentence I could not have written two years ago.

Santa Barbara Smiles had its best year since 1997.

Some of that was the story — I would like to say it wasn't, but this is a small town and for four months I was the dentist who caught a murderer, and people came in with mild sensitivity and a great deal of curiosity.

Some of it was that I hired an associate two days a week, a serious young woman named Dr. Anh Trinh who is better at endo than I am and who tolerates the dog.

And some of it was Marisol, who took the surge and turned it into a schedule and turned the schedule into a practice, because that is what Marisol does with chaos.

Floss turned five. She wore the Chief Investigator bandana every working day, and Marisol made two more so there was always a clean one, and by that August the dog was so thoroughly part of the operation that patients asked for her by name on the phone.

Mateo Alvarez, age seven, checked in quarterly on the status of her caseload.

She had no cases. She had a routine, which was: morning rounds of the waiting room, the lean for anyone crying, sleep under my desk, and Sundays at Hendry's Beach with the enormous love of her life.

And Nate.

Nate Corrigan and I had been — I never found a word for it that year that didn't sound either too small or too much.

Four months of Fridays, then not only Fridays.

He had a house up on the Mesa, a rented one with a bad kitchen and a good yard, and I had an apartment over a dental practice with a dog in it, and we did not live together and we did not not live together, and Bear had a bed in my courtyard and Floss had one in his yard and neither dog would tolerate the arrangement ending.

He came at eight-forty most mornings with two cups.

He replaced Marisol's geranium twice, as promised, and killed both, and the third one Marisol planted herself and told him not to touch.

He was, after a year, still a careful man; he still went quiet sometimes and came back a minute later from wherever it was; there was still a door with DC behind it that neither of us opened.

But he laughed now. He laughed a lot, actually, and it had turned out that under all that carefulness Nate Corrigan is funny in a dry, terrible, deadpan way that ambushes you in public, and there is a particular sound he makes when Bear does something enormous and stupid that I would not trade for a great deal of money.

So: good. The year was good. I want that written down before the rest of it.

At nine I went in and looked at teeth. Mrs. Adele Whitcombe, eighty-three now and entirely unchanged, came in at ten for a cleaning and reported on the banner as though it were a weather front.

"It's a chain," she said, from the chair, while Marisol scaled. "Or it isn't a chain, but it's chain-shaped. My niece went to one in Newport. They give you a robe."

"A robe."

"A robe, and a smoothie, and she came out four thousand dollars lighter with a mouthguard she doesn't use.

" Adele closed her mouth to make the point and Marisol patiently reopened it.

"He's a television dentist. That man. He's been on one of those programs where they fix people's faces and everyone cries. "

"How do you know that?"

"Because I watch it," said Adele Whitcombe, with dignity.

At one, Walt Ostrander came by with a coffee cake and stood in the courtyard arch looking across the street for a long time without saying anything, which is not how Walt does anything.

"You all right?" I said.

"Mm." He was still looking at the forty-foot face.

"Saw one of those come into Ventura in 'eighty-nine.

Different flavor — they were all about the dentures then, the same-day dentures, big sign, big smile.

Took two practices down the tube inside a year and then went bust itself in a year and a half and left about four hundred people with dentures that didn't fit and nobody to complain to.

" He handed me the cake. "The money's never the dentist, Lila.

Remember that. There's always a fella behind the fella, and he's not in the picture, and he doesn't care what happens to the teeth. "

"That's very cheerful, Walt."

"I'm seventy-five," said Walt Ostrander. "I've earned it."

That evening Nate and I took the dogs up the Preserve in the hot gold light with the whole town laid out below and Fiesta bunting going up on the lampposts downtown, and Bear rolled in something, and Floss brought me eleven separate sticks and a flip-flop, and I told him about the banner and the robe and the QR code on the chin and he laughed at the QR code.

"You're not worried," he said. It wasn't quite a question.

"I've got the best hygienist in the county, a full book, and a dog with a following," I said. "I'm not worried."

That was the last true thing I said to him for five weeks, and it wasn't even true then.