2. Luminous
Luminous
They opened on the Saturday of Fiesta, which was either a stroke of marketing genius or the most aggressive thing anyone has done on State Street since the Spaniards, and possibly both.
The old bank building had been white and hushed for two years.
Now it had a glass front, a live DJ at four in the afternoon, and a queue.
A queue. Around the corner of Figueroa Street, in August, for a dentist. There were free tote bags.
There was a woman with a clipboard and a headset whose actual printed job title was Smile Concierge.
There was — I counted — a wall of nine hundred small white ceramic tiles, each one, according to a brushed-brass plaque, representing "a smile transformed. "
"That's not nine hundred smiles," said Marisol, beside me, in her good dress. "That's a tile wall from a catalog."
We had come as neighbors. This was Tess's idea and I still think it was the right one: that you cannot be the dentist across the street who didn't come, that in a town this size the not-coming becomes the story.
So the three of us came, and we got tote bags, and we ate the little canapés, and Tess flirted with a bartender, and Marisol stood in the middle of the room with her arms folded and did an appraisal.
The place was beautiful. I want to be fair to it, a year on; it's the only way any of this makes sense.
Luminous was beautiful. Pale oak, brass, linen, a scent in the air that a consultant had chosen.
Ten operatories behind frosted glass with names instead of numbers — they were named after California islands, which I found unforgivable and effective.
A "wellness lounge" with oat-milk lattes and a wall of moss.
And the technology was real: a same-day milling unit, a cone-beam scanner better than mine, an intraoral scanner I had priced twice and not bought.
"They've got the CEREC," I said.
"They've got two," said Marisol.
"How do you know?"
"I asked the girl with the headset. She thought I was impressed." Marisol's eyes moved over the room like a woman counting silver. "Mija, look at the staff."
I looked. Eleven people in matching linen, all of them young, all of them beautiful, and not one face I recognized — which in Santa Barbara dentistry, where the assistant pool is about sixty people who have all worked for each other, is close to impossible.
"Nobody local," I said.
"Nobody local," Marisol agreed. "And no hygienists."
That stopped me. "What?"
"Count the operatories. Ten. Count the hygiene rooms." She nodded at the frosted glass.
"There aren't any. Ten rooms, all restorative, no hygiene suite, no perio, no sterilization you can see from the floor, which by the way.
" She sniffed. "A practice that doesn't clean teeth isn't a practice, Lila. It's a store."
And then Dr. Preston Hale found me, because of course he did; I had been in the room eleven minutes and he had, I later understood, been told exactly who I was before I came through the door.
He was better in person than on the vinyl.
That's rarer than you'd think. Mid-forties, silver at the temples, a linen jacket, and the particular relaxed physical confidence of a man who has been the best-looking person in every room since he was nineteen.
He had a glass of something and he did not have a handler with him, which I noticed, because everyone else at that party had a handler.
"Dr. Bennett." He put out his hand. "Preston Hale. I'm told I've put a very large banner in your window."
"It's a beautiful banner."
"It's a grotesque banner," he said, cheerfully. "There's a QR code on my chin. I lost that argument in March." He glanced at it through the glass front, forty feet of his own face, with something I would have called distaste on anyone else. "How long have you been across the street?"
"Two years. I bought Walt Ostrander's practice."
"Ostrander." He said it with actual recognition, which surprised me. "I trained with a man who trained with Ostrander. He wrote a letter to the board in the nineties about same-day crown marketing that people still photocopy." A real smile, this time, off the clock. "How's your endo?"
"Better than it was. I've got an associate who's very good."
"Send me the ones you hate. I mean it." He leaned in half an inch, conspiratorially. "I have a milling unit that cost more than my first house and I am so bored, Dr. Bennett, you have no idea. Do you know what I did this week? I approved a marketing calendar."
And there it is — the thing that made the whole case, sitting right there in the first eleven minutes, and I heard it as a charming man complaining.
I approved a marketing calendar. Not: I placed forty crowns.
Not: I'm building a team. A dentist in a room full of his own equipment telling a competitor he was bored.
"Preston." A hand landed lightly on his forearm. "You're monopolizing the neighbors."
The woman who'd arrived was perhaps fifty, in a cream suit, with a short expensive haircut and the kind of face that photographs well in a trade journal.
She was warm. That's the first thing anyone said about Serena Locke and it was true.
She radiated a sort of competent maternal interest, like a very good nurse or a very good salesperson, and she had my hand in both of hers before I'd been introduced.
"Serena Locke. I'm the reason all this exists, and I apologize for the tile wall." She laughed at herself, which is a hard move and she did it well. "You're the dentist from the murder."
"I'm the dentist from Anacapa Street."
"Of course you are, and I'm sorry, that was crass — but honestly, half this room has been waiting all night to work up the nerve.
" She pressed my hand. "For what it's worth, I read about it, and what you did with that crown was extraordinary.
That's not detective work, that's clinical attention.
The profession doesn't reward it. We ought to. "
I liked her. I want that on the record, since the record's the point of this book. I stood in that room and Serena Locke told me I was good at my job, and I liked her, and I have thought about that more than almost anything else that happened.
"What do you do, exactly?" I asked.
"Practice management." She waved it away.
"The boring end. Doctors want to do dentistry, not run a business — Preston shouldn't be approving marketing calendars, should he?
So we handle the calendar, the billing, the hiring, the insurance, all of it.
He does the teeth. Everybody's happier." She smiled.
"Come and see the milling unit. It's obscene. "
We came, and it was, and I left at nine with a tote bag.
Nate had come for the last half hour, out of solidarity, in the one jacket he owns, having left Bear in the truck with the windows down and a ban on heroics.
He'd stood at the edge of it with a beer he didn't drink, and he'd been — I noticed; I noticed at the time and I put it down to the room — quiet.
Quieter than a party explains. He'd looked at the tile wall for a long time.
Outside, walking up Anacapa with the Fiesta noise two blocks over and the dogs' claws on the sidewalk, I said, "You hated that."
"I don't love a party."
"You've done four weddings this summer."
"I like weddings." He shifted Bear's lead to the other hand. Ahead of us Floss stopped to be appalled by a skateboard. "Practice management. What's that mean, exactly? Legally. She's not a dentist."
"She's not allowed to be. California's got a corporate practice bar — a non-dentist can't own a dental practice or direct clinical judgment.
So the dentist owns the practice on paper and a management company handles the business side and takes a fee.
" I shrugged. "It's normal. Everybody does some version of it.
The DSOs run half the offices in the state. "
"Uh huh," said Nate Corrigan.
"What?"
"Nothing." We'd got to my arch. He stopped under it, and the streetlight did the thing it does, and for a second I thought he was going to say something else entirely. Then he said, "How much of your work comes from insurance?"
"Maybe sixty percent. Why?"
"No reason." He kissed me. He held onto my hand a second longer than the kiss needed. "Lila — if that place starts doing anything that looks wrong to you. Clinically. Anything at all. Tell me. Before you tell anyone."
"Why would I tell anyone?"
"Because you can't help it," said Nate, "and because I love that about you and it takes ten years off my life. Goodnight. Goodnight, Floss."
He went up the street with his enormous dog and I stood in my arch with a tote bag in my hand thinking about a beautiful room with no hygiene suite, and a bored man with a forty-foot chin, and a woman in cream who had told me I was good at my job.
I did not think, even once, about why a federal agent who works art fraud had asked me how much of my income comes from insurance.