12. What Hale Knew
What Hale Knew
Robin Salas gave me the thread and Bettina Hale, God help us all, gave me the spool — but that comes two chapters from now, and what happened first was that I did something I should have done in September and went to see a dentist.
Dr. Marcus Oyelaran has an office in Goleta and has been the treasurer of the tri-county dental society for nine years, which means that if a piece of paper exists about dentistry in this county, Marcus has been cc'd on it.
He is sixty, enormous, and speaks so slowly that people mistake it for stupidity exactly once.
I called him on a Monday and he said come at seven, after hours, and bring your own coffee because I don't have any.
I told him everything. Twenty-three mouths. The crowns that aren't there. The block on Ruben Obregón for nothing. The missing hygiene suite. The plan for nine crowns on the best molars in the county.
Marcus Oyelaran listened without saying a word for twenty-two minutes.
"You know what the board's going to do with that," he said finally.
"Take four years."
"Take four years." He turned his coffee cup around.
"That's not cynicism, that's arithmetic.
They're understaffed and every case is a hearing and every hearing is a lawyer.
Four years, and at the end of it a license gets surrendered and a management company dissolves and reconstitutes in Nevada.
" He looked at me. "That's if it's a dentist. That's the board's whole jurisdiction — they can take a license.
Can't do anything to a person who hasn't got one. "
"Marcus, that's what I keep—"
"I know." He reached over and took a file box off the shelf behind him, which he had clearly had out on the desk before I ever arrived, and I understood that I had been summoned rather than received.
"Preston Hale joined the society in March.
Paid his dues, came to one dinner, sat next to me, talked about a milling unit for an hour.
" He put his hand flat on the box. "In August he called me.
And in September he called me four times. "
The room went very still.
"He wanted to know," said Marcus Oyelaran slowly, "what a dentist's legal exposure is when the billing is done by a management company under his provider number, and he doesn't do the billing, and he can't see the submissions."
"Can't see them?"
"Can't see them. That's what he said. He said the practice-management software had two layers — a clinical layer he worked in, and a billing layer he had no credentials for, because 'the doctor shouldn't be burdened with the business side.
'" Marcus's voice did not change at all, which somehow made it worse.
"He'd gone looking, Lila. In July or thereabouts.
He'd started pulling up his own patients' charts on his own screen and reading them back against what was in his head, and he found work in the ledger he had no memory of doing, and he could not get to the billing layer to find out what had been submitted under his own provider number. "
"His provider number," I said. "It's all under his number."
"Every claim in that building, most likely.
Two associates, probably a supervising arrangement, but the big numbers under the doctor of record.
Which is him." Marcus opened the box. "He asked me whether he should self-report to the board.
I said yes. He asked me what happens to a dentist who self-reports two million dollars of fraud committed under his own number by a company he signed a twelve-year management agreement with.
" He shook his head very slowly. "I said, Preston, you will probably lose your license, you will certainly be sued into the ground, and it is still the right thing and you should do it Monday. "
"What did he say?"
"He said, 'I have a daughter at Stanford and I've got nine hundred tiles on a wall with people's names on them.
'" Marcus Oyelaran looked up. "And then he said something I've thought about every day since.
He said: 'It's not the money, Marcus. I can take the money being gone.
It's that they've been putting needles in people. '"
I put my coffee down because my hand wasn't reliable.
"He knew about the blocks."
"He knew about the blocks." Marcus turned the box toward me.
Inside were three ring binders and a manila envelope.
"On the twenty-ninth of September, Preston Hale drove up here after hours and gave me this and asked me to keep it somewhere that wasn't his building.
He said he was going to do it properly — get a lawyer, self-report, and hand the whole thing to the state on a Monday.
He was going to call me back and tell me which Monday. "
The twenty-ninth of September was the Sunday before he died.
No. The twenty-ninth was a Sunday. He died on the Sunday night.
"Marcus," I said. "What time on the twenty-ninth?"
"Six in the evening. He was here till about seven-thirty.
" The big man's face finally moved. "And he was dead by midnight, and I have been sitting in this office with this box for six weeks because I am sixty years old and I have three children and I did not know one single solitary person in this world I could hand it to. "
"You could have gone to the police."
"I went to the police," said Marcus Oyelaran.
"On the second of October. I sat in the Santa Barbara Police Department for two hours and I told a detective that I had documents and he wrote it down and he was perfectly polite, and then on the fourth of October the newspaper printed that the dentist across the street had accused Preston Hale of fraud at a Chamber of Commerce mixer nine days before he died.
" He held my eye. "And I thought: if I hand this over now, the first thing any lawyer does with it is point at her.
She's the one making the accusation. Here's her accusation in a binder.
And I sat down, Lila, and I kept it, and I have felt like a coward every day since, and when you called me on Monday I said come at seven because I have been waiting six weeks for the one person in this county who could look at that box and know what it means. "
I looked at the binders.
"Marcus," I said. "What's in it?"
"Ledgers," said Marcus Oyelaran. "Printed off his clinical layer, one patient at a time, by hand, at night, for eight weeks.
Four hundred and some patients. Every single one annotated in his own writing.
" He turned the first binder around and opened it, and there it was, page after page, a dead man's handwriting in the margin next to line after line of procedure codes.
Next to about a third of them, over and over, in blue ballpoint, was a single word.
NO.