7. Nineteen Ninety-Eight
Nineteen Ninety-Eight
I gave her the twenty minutes. Then I went in.
"You knew her."
"Marisol."
"She had a laugh you could hear through the wall," said Marisol Vega.
"That's what I remember. That's all I remember and I have felt sick since Sunday because that is genuinely all I remember about a girl who came into my work every week for two years and then stopped, and I noticed she stopped, and I thought she'd moved. "
She stood with her back to me for a moment.
"Everybody thought she'd moved," she said.
"That's the part nobody will believe now.
The paper said she talked about leaving and then everybody remembered that she'd talked about leaving.
I have thought about that all week. I'd swear on my mother that in 1999 I'd have told you Casey from Cabrillo's went to LA, and I'd have believed it, and I never heard her say one single word about Los Angeles in my life. "
That is what 1998 was, and it took me about ten days to understand it properly, and it is the reason this case had sat for twenty-eight years with nobody looking at it.
The town had a story. The story was *she went to LA*.
And the story had been installed by three paragraphs in a newspaper in February 1999 attributed to a police spokesman, and then it had been maintained, for twenty-eight years, by ordinary people repeating it in good faith at dinner tables, until it stopped being something the police had said and became something everybody simply knew.
There was no conspiracy. That's what I want to be clear about, because a cozy mystery wants there to be one and there wasn't. There was a detective with a caseload who made a judgment call in February, and a newspaper that printed what he told them, and ninety thousand people who had no reason to doubt either.
So Floss and I went and walked 1998.
Here is what the Santa Barbara waterfront was in November of that year, reconstructed from Rosalind's boxes, the Independent's morgue, the Historical Museum's photograph collection, and eleven conversations with people over sixty who still work down there:
Stearns Wharf had four restaurants and a bait shop.
Cabrillo's was the middle one, the second-oldest, sixty covers, white tablecloths at dinner and paper mats at lunch, famous for a cioppino that was on the menu from 1971 to 2019.
It ran a staff of about twenty-two: a kitchen that was largely the same eight men for fifteen years, and a floor staff that turned over the way floor staff does, except for the ones who didn't.
Casey Marsh started there at sixteen, as a busser, in 1992.
That is the single most important fact in this book and I walked past it four times.
She was there six years. She went from busser to hostess to server to — by 1997 — the person who did the floor schedule, which at a sixty-cover restaurant is the job you give to the one person you trust. She worked lunches and dinners. She had keys.
And the circle around her, in 1998, was the circle around any young woman who works on a waterfront in a rich town: the cooks, who adored her; the other servers, who are all now in their fifties and scattered; the regulars; the harbor crowd; and a loose, glossy group of young men with boats and money and fathers, five or six of them, who drank at the bar on Friday nights and who are now, without exception, prominent.
One of them was Gavin Reyes, twenty-six in 1998, now in his second term on the Santa Barbara City Council.
"He's who everybody's going to look at," said Nate.
We were on the floor of my apartment with paper everywhere, eating takeout, ten days home.
Things were — I want to be honest about the temperature — things were fine.
Warm, even. He came over most nights. We had not said the word *September* once since an orchid room, and I had constructed an entire private theology about how that was fine and correct and generous.
"He's who I'm looking at," I said.
"Yeah. That's my point." He had the 1998 file photocopies fanned out in front of him and he was reading them the way he reads, which is slowly and twice.
"Lila, he's the obvious answer. He's a man with power who lied about a relationship with a woman who disappeared.
Which is either the answer or it's a wall that everybody hits and stops at, and you have to decide in advance which one you think it is, because if you start with him you will find something, and whatever you find will feel like the end. "
"Why does he have to be a wall?"
"Because a man who's lied about something for twenty-eight years is a man who will do almost anything rather than stop lying," said Nate, "and that includes confessing to the smaller thing very convincingly."
I looked at him over a container of pad thai.
"Have you got an opinion?"
"I've got a question." He turned a page around.
It was a photocopy of a page from the 1998 file — a list, in a detective's handwriting, of people interviewed in the first ten days.
"Twenty-one names. Eleven from the restaurant.
Every server, both hostesses, four cooks, the dishwasher. " He tapped it. "Where's the owner?"
I took it and looked. He was right. There was no owner on the list.
"He was interviewed," I said. "He must have been."
"He's not on the list of interviews in the first ten days," said Nate Corrigan, "and that's not an accusation, that's a hole.
He might be on a later list. There's forty pages missing out of this file and Ray's been shouting at a records clerk about it all week.
" He reached over and took the paper back. "Who is he?"
"Carl Tomasetti," I said. "He's still there. Cabrillo's closed in 'nineteen but he owns the Anchor Room now, up on the wharf. He's — Nate, everybody knows Carl. He does the Little League. He's been citizen of the year twice, maybe three times."
"Okay," said Nate, and wrote nothing down, and moved on, and I did not think about it again for five weeks.