7. Questions
Questions
It took an hour and ten minutes and it was completely fair and I have rarely been more frightened in my life.
That's the thing nobody warns you about.
Ray Dominguez has eaten coffee cake in my courtyard.
Ray Dominguez sat there with his notebook and asked me, kindly, in order: what I'd said at the mixer, who'd heard it, whether I'd been angry, how much business I'd lost, whether I had debt, whether the debt was current, where I'd been on Sunday between six p.m. and midnight, whether anyone could confirm it, whether I had ever been inside the Luminous building, when, for how long, with whom, and whether I had ever been alone with Preston Hale.
And I answered all of it truthfully and watched the answers land, and every single one of them was worse than the last.
I had lost forty patients in six weeks. I had a note with eleven years on it.
I had stood up in front of a hundred and forty people and accused the deceased of mutilating healthy patients for money.
I had been in his building, at the opening.
And on Sunday evening between six and midnight I had been in my apartment, alone, with the dog, doing laundry, because Nate had gone down to Los Angeles on Sunday afternoon for what he'd called a thing with the trial team and had not come back that night.
"Alone," said Ray.
"With the dog."
"Uh huh." He wrote it down. He didn't editorialize. That was somehow the worst part; Ray Dominguez wrote alone w/ dog in a notebook and moved on. "Anybody call you? Text? Anything with a timestamp on it, Lila, I'm asking because I'd like there to be something."
There wasn't. I'd texted Nate at eight and he'd answered at eleven-forty, and eleven-forty was a fine timestamp and six to eleven-forty was not.
Then Serrano asked his one question of the evening, out of nowhere, in a completely neutral voice: "Doctor, on the Saturday — you saw some Luminous patients here? For free?"
"Nineteen people. Eleven from Luminous."
"Why free?"
"Because I said I would, in front of the Chamber." I could hear how it sounded as I said it. "Because their treatment plans were wrong."
"So you were gathering — what would you call that. Examples?" Serrano's pen didn't move. "Of the deceased's malpractice. Nine days after you accused him publicly. The day before he died."
The waiting room was very quiet. Ray Dominguez closed his notebook with a snap that made Floss lift her head.
"That's enough," he said. To Serrano, not to me.
Then to me, standing, hat back on: "Doc, you're not under arrest, you're not a suspect, you're a person who's got relevant information and a hell of a lot of it, and I'd be doing my job badly if I hadn't asked you every one of those questions.
Here's what I want from you. Don't leave the county.
Don't talk to the press. And do not — Lila, look at me — do not go across that street, do not call anybody who works over there, and do not do the thing you do. "
"What thing."
"The thing where you look at something nobody thinks to look at and then won't shut up about it," said Ray.
"I liked it fine last year. This year you're in the file.
" He put his card on the reception desk, which was absurd, since I have had his number for two years.
"And call me. If you think of anything, if anybody contacts you, if you get an idea at two in the morning — call me first."
They went. I locked the door behind them and stood in the dark of my own waiting room for a while.
The Independent ran it on Thursday. It was not a hit piece; that's what I tell people and it's true.
It was a perfectly professional local story about the death of a prominent new business owner, and it ran four paragraphs on the Chamber of Commerce mixer, and it quoted two witnesses accurately, and it used the phrase "a heated public confrontation with a competing dentist," and it named me, and it named Santa Barbara Smiles, and it ran a photograph of the forty-foot banner with my building visible across the street in the corner of the frame.
Kayla, my front-desk girl, took eleven cancellations on Thursday and nine on Friday.
Adele Whitcombe sent flowers from Palm Springs with a card that said DON'T YOU DARE. Walt Ostrander turned up Friday morning and sat in the waiting room reading a magazine for three hours, visibly, where people coming in could see him, and would not explain himself and would not leave.
And Nate did not come.