17. The Appointment
The Appointment
Diane Kessler is a small, gray, exact woman of about fifty-five who drinks tea, not coffee, and who sat in my waiting room under the sea otter for two hours and eleven minutes and said perhaps forty words, of which nine were: "How did you know to ask about the syllables?"
She took the file box. She took the releases, and Marisol's legal pad, and the Yuma photograph, and she asked me eleven questions about Dana Kirsch, and at the end of it she stood up, and straightened her jacket, and said:
"Dr. Bennett, you are the best-documented civilian witness I have had in nineteen years and you are also the reason I have spent five weeks managing an agent who is one of the two best I've got and who has been, throughout, approximately as much use as a chair.
" She put her card on the reception desk, next to Ray's.
"The appointment on Tuesday is cancelled. We'll have someone call her."
"No," I said.
Everyone in the room turned around.
Let me lay out what I said, because I have had to defend it since, to Nate, to Ray, to Kessler, to my own conscience at four in the morning, and the defense hasn't changed.
"She's coming here because she's frightened," I said.
"She's been sitting across that street for six weeks watching a line of her own patients go in and out of my building on Saturdays and she does not know what I've got.
She offered to buy me in October and I took two weeks and then I went quiet on her, which she will have read as a decision, and now she needs to know whether the dentist across the road is a problem she can manage or a problem she has to solve.
That's why she booked. It's the only reason anybody like that walks into a room they don't control. "
"Which is precisely why she isn't going to," said Kessler.
"If you cancel that appointment she knows," I said.
"Not suspects. Knows. A new patient books on Thursday and the office calls her back on Friday and cancels — from a practice that has been doing free walk-ins for six weeks and has never turned anybody away in its life?
She'll be in a car to Nevada by Saturday and Dana Kirsch will be a name on a dissolved LLC, and you will spend three years on this, and Wendell Park will still have gone off the road on the 87 for nothing. "
Nate said, quietly, "Lila."
"And here's the rest of it." I looked at Kessler and not at him, because if I'd looked at him I'd have stopped.
"You need something from her that isn't paper.
You've got four hundred ledgers and my twenty-three mouths and an insurance trail — that's fraud, that's clean, you'll get it.
You do not have one single thing that puts a person in a room with Preston Hale on the twenty-ninth of September.
And she is about to sit down in a chair, alone, in a building she thinks is a dental office, and ask me what I know. "
"And say what, exactly?" said Kessler. "You think she's going to confess to a homicide during a new-patient exam?"
"No," I said. "I think she's going to try to find out what I've got, and to find that out she has to describe it.
And I think she's going to offer me something, because that's what she does — she came to me in October with a number and a gag, and this time she'll come with a bigger number and a better gag, and she cannot make that offer without telling me what she's paying me not to say. "
The waiting room was very quiet.
"And the one thing I'd add," I said, "is that in this building I am the person who knows more than she does.
I know what's in every mouth on that list and she doesn't. I know about Marcus Oyelaran's file box and she doesn't. I know the name Dana Kirsch and she has no idea on God's earth how I'd have got it.
She is coming in here to assess a frightened small-town dentist with a loan, and that is exactly who I'm going to be. "
Diane Kessler looked at me for a long moment.
"Consent to record," she said. "One-party.
California's a two-party state for private communication but a dental operatory with a recording notice at the door is a different animal and I'd rather have both — you'll sign, and there'll be a sign on the door, small, where it always is, and if she reads it and objects you stop.
" She was already taking out her phone. "Two agents in the building as patients.
One in the courtyard. Corrigan is not in the building. "
"I'm in the building," said Nate.
"You are in the building across the street," said Diane Kessler, "with the dog, where you will be extremely useful and entirely invisible, and if you say one more word to me about it in front of a civilian I will assign you to Bakersfield.
" She didn't look up from her phone. "Dr. Bennett.
If at any point she puts a hand on you, or stands between you and that door, or says anything that sounds like a plan rather than a past tense — you say the word and it's over. Pick a word."
I thought about it.
"Floss," I said. "I'll say 'Floss, out.' I'd never say it. She sleeps in that room."
"Fine." Kessler put her phone away. "And the dog?"
"The dog," I said, "stays."