8. The Councilman
The Councilman
Idid not ambush Gavin Reyes. I want that established. I have ambushed exactly one person in my life and he had a boat hook.
What I did was write to him.
I wrote a letter — on practice letterhead, which in retrospect is funny — that said I was assisting the Santa Barbara Police Department informally with the dental identification in the Casey Marsh matter, that I understood he had known her, and that I would be grateful for twenty minutes at his convenience.
I signed it and sent it to his council office and I told Ray I'd sent it before I sent it, which I want noted in the record of my personal growth.
He called me himself. Four days later, at nine at night, on my cell, which meant he had asked somebody for the number.
"Dr. Bennett? Gavin Reyes." A pause. "Is this a police thing?"
"No, sir. This is a dentist with a chart."
"...Okay," said Gavin Reyes, and then, after a silence long enough that I checked the screen: "Is it true they had her records? In a box?"
"Yes."
"Jesus Christ," said the councilman, and it did not sound like a politician. "Where do you want to meet?"
We met at the sunken gardens behind the courthouse at seven in the morning, which was his idea, and which told me a good deal.
He came alone, in running clothes, without a phone in his hand.
He was fifty-four, gray, fit, with the smooth surface that fourteen years of local politics puts on a person and a face underneath it that had not slept.
Floss lay down on the grass between us, which is where she always is.
"I'm going to tell you the truth," he said, before I'd asked anything, "and then I'm going to ask you what happens to me."
"I can't answer that."
"I know. Tell me anyway when I'm done." He sat forward with his elbows on his knees, looking at the courthouse, that ridiculous beautiful white confection of a building with the tower and the tiles.
"Casey and I were together from March of 'ninety-eight until she disappeared.
Eight months. Nobody knew, or — people knew.
The restaurant knew. My friends knew. My family did not know, and I told the police in 1998 that she was a girl I knew from the bar, and I have never corrected that, in twenty-eight years, and it is the single worst thing I have ever done. "
"Why did you lie?"
"Because I was twenty-six and my father was Ernesto Reyes.
" He said it flatly. "You won't know what that means.
He was a general contractor and he did half the tile work in Montecito and he was a bully, and the plan was that I would marry a girl he picked and take the business, and the plan was working.
" He rubbed his face. "And I was in love with a waitress.
And when she went missing, I was twenty-six years old and terrified, and a detective asked me how I knew her, and I said she served me at the bar.
And then it was in a statement, in writing, with my name under it.
And after that every year that went by made it harder to say the other thing. "
"Did you kill her?"
Gavin Reyes turned his head and looked at me.
"No," he said.
"Where were you on the fourteenth of November?"
"In Las Vegas at a tile trade show with my father and eleven other men, and I have said that four times in twenty-eight years and it has been checked twice, and it is the only part of this that has ever protected me.
" His jaw worked. "And Dr. Bennett, I want you to understand the shape of my life.
I have an alibi for the worst thing that ever happened to me.
So for twenty-eight years I have known that I could not have done it, and that I also could not say I loved her, and I have gone to a lot of city council meetings. "
Floss got up, walked over, and put her chin on his knee.
He put his hand on her head and made a sound and stopped talking for a while.
"You said you'd tell me the truth," I said, when he could. "That's not all of it."
"No." He was still looking at the dog. "The rest of it is the thing I saw, and I've never said it out loud, because saying it means saying I was there."
"There where?"
"At her apartment. On the seventh of November.
" He took a breath. "A week before. We had a fight — a stupid one, about Thanksgiving, about whether she was coming to my aunt's, which she wasn't, because my father.
And I drove over there at ten at night to apologize, and I parked up the block because I always parked up the block, because that was the whole arrangement.
" His voice went thin. "And there was a car in front of her building with its lights off and somebody in it.
And after about ten minutes Casey came out of the building and got in the passenger side and they sat there. "
"Did you see who?"
"No. I saw the car." He looked up. "It was a green Wagoneer. The old kind, with the wood on the side. And I know whose it was, because there were two of them in this town and one belonged to a woman who taught at Roosevelt."
"Whose?"
"Carl Tomasetti's," said Gavin Reyes. "Her boss."
A gardener started a leaf blower somewhere on the other side of the sunken gardens.
"I sat in my truck for forty minutes and watched the two of them sit in that car," he said.
"And then she got out and went inside and he drove off, and I drove home, and I didn't apologize, and I never asked her about it, because I was twenty-six and I decided it was what it looked like and I was too proud to ask.
" He was crying now, quite openly, on a bench, in running clothes.
"And a week later she was gone, and the first thing I thought — the *first thing*, Dr. Bennett, before I was even frightened — was: she went with him.
She went to LA with Carl, or with somebody, and she didn't tell me.
" He wiped his face with the heel of his hand.
"And I never told the police about the car.
Because telling them meant telling them I was parked up the block outside her apartment at ten at night, and that meant telling them who I was to her, and I had already signed a statement saying she served me at the bar. "
I did not say anything for a long time. Floss did not move.
"Councilman," I said finally. "Can I ask you a completely different question?"
"Sure."
"Cabrillo's. The restaurant. Who had keys?"
"Carl. The chef, Mando. And Casey." He frowned. "Why?"
"Because she was twenty-two and she'd been there six years and she had keys and did the floor schedule," I said. "That's not a waitress. That's a person being trained to run a restaurant."
Gavin Reyes looked at me.
"Yeah," he said slowly. "That was the plan.
She told me that in about June — that Carl had said when he expanded, when he took the Anchor Room, she'd run Cabrillo's.
" He shook his head. "I remember I was — God help me, I was jealous of the restaurant.
I thought it was the thing keeping her here and keeping her from me. "
"Was she happy about it?"
And the councilman opened his mouth, and stopped, and something went across his face that I recognized instantly and have seen a hundred times in a dental chair, which is the look of a person discovering that a memory they have carried smooth for decades has an edge on it they never noticed.
"No," said Gavin Reyes. "No, she wasn't."