11. Who Drove Her
Who Drove Her
Walt Ostrander read his own handwriting for eleven minutes before he said anything, which is the longest I have ever seen a man take to read forty words.
"There," he said.
*w/ C.T. again. Waited in rm.*
"C.T. again," I said.
"Mm."
"Walt. 'Again.'"
"I know what it says, Lila." He took the glasses off and rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, and he looked, for a moment, ninety.
"I know what it says and I've known since Sunday what it was probably going to say, and I've had four days to sit with the fact that I wrote it down, in my own hand, in 1998, and then rang a desk sergeant and told him about a bruise. "
"Who's C.T.?"
"That's the thing I can't do," said Walt.
"That's the whole trouble with a private shorthand, isn't it — it's private.
C.T. in that margin means whoever I'd have called C.T.
in November of 1998 without needing to think about it.
" He put his glasses back on. "But there's an 'again.
' Which means I'd written it before. Which means it's in the card index. "
The card index lives in the far corner of the basement in a wooden cabinet with eleven drawers, and it is the single most eccentric object I own.
Walt maintained it by hand from 1984 to 2003.
It is not a patient index — the charts are the patient index.
It is Walt Ostrander's index of *people*, which is to say: a four-by-six card for every human being who ever walked into that practice in any capacity, patient or not, with a line of his handwriting for each occasion.
"Why," I had asked him once, in 2023.
"Because you can't chart a person who isn't your patient," Walt had said, "and sometimes the person who isn't your patient is the reason your patient's in the chair."
He went down the stairs ahead of me. He had not been in that basement in nearly three years and he went down the stairs like a man entering water, and at the bottom he stood with his hand on the newel post for a second, and Floss went past him and sat down in front of the wooden cabinet as though she had been told.
"T," he said.
I pulled the drawer.
TOMASETTI, CARL J. — Not a patient (see below). Prop. Cabrillo's, Stearns Wharf.
And then eleven lines, in blue ballpoint, going back to 1989, each one dated, each one four or five words long, the whole of it fitting on one card because Walt Ostrander was an economical man:
*6/91 — brought in D. Ruiz (dishwasher, #4 fx). Paid cash. Waited in rm.*
*8/92 — brought in C. Marsh (new pt, age 16). Paid cash.*
*3/94 — w/ C. Marsh. Waited in rm.*
*7/93 — brought in M. Okonkwo (cook). Paid cash. Waited in rm.*
*8/93 — w/ C. Marsh, UL2 fx. Paid cash. Waited in rm. Pt v. quiet.*
*11/95 — w/ C. Marsh. Waited in rm.*
*2/96 — w/ C. Marsh. Waited in rm.*
*4/97 — w/ C. Marsh. Waited in rm.*
*11/98 — w/ C. Marsh, UL2 fx (2nd). Waited in rm. Adv. f/u — DNA.*
DNA, in Walt's shorthand, means *did not attend*.
Nine entries over seven years. Every dental appointment Casey Marsh ever had, from the age of sixteen, her employer drove her to and sat in the room for.
I sat down on the basement floor.
"He waited in the room," I said.
"He waited in the room," said Walt Ostrander.
"Walt, you let him wait in the room."
"Yes," said Walt, and did not defend himself, and that is the moment in this book where I finally understood the whole of what had been eating a seventy-six-year-old man for twenty-eight years, because it was not the desk sergeant, and it was not the bruise, and it was not *pt anxious.*
It was that a man had sat in the corner of his operatory nine times over seven years while a girl who had started coming at sixteen had her mouth worked on, and Walt Ostrander had thought: *isn't that good of him.
Isn't that a good employer.* And had written it down, every single time, in the margin, because he wrote everything down — and had never once, in seven years, read his own card back.
"Nineteen ninety-three," I said. "The first fracture. August of 'ninety-three. Greaves said four to eight years before 'ninety-eight and it's on the 'ninety-four film."
"She'd have been seventeen."
"She told her mother a tray fell off a stack." I looked at the card in my hand. "Walt, what did she tell you?"
Walt Ostrander stood in the middle of his own basement under a bare bulb and said, "I don't remember. Lila, I genuinely don't remember, it was thirty-three years ago." And then, because he is the man he is, he added: "But I'd have written it."
We found it in the chart, of course. It was there the whole time, on the 1993 entry, above four years of cleanings, and it had been photocopied to the Santa Barbara Police Department in November 1998 along with everything else and had sat in a box in a basement four blocks from mine for twenty-eight years:
*8/93. UL2 fx incisal, oblique. Pt states tray. Composite placed. Pt 17. W/ employer. Pt anxious.*
I called Ray Dominguez from the basement floor at nine-forty at night and read him nine lines off an index card.
He didn't say anything for a while.
"Doc," he said. "That's a pattern of access. That is not a murder."
"I know."
"I want to be very clear with you, because you have done this to me twice now and both times it has ended with a dog sitting on somebody.
" His voice was tight. "Nine dental appointments over seven years is a man who drove an employee to the dentist. A jury is going to hear *he paid for her dental work out of his own pocket for seven years* and half of them are going to think that's the nicest thing they've heard all week. "
"And the other half are going to ask why he sat in the room."
"And a defense attorney is going to say he sat in the room because he was paying," said Ray.
"Lila. I believe you. I'm telling you what it is.
It's a shape. It's not evidence, and it's twenty-eight years old, and the man is seventy-one and has sponsored a children's charity run every June since 2003. "
"Ray."
"I'm not stopping." He exhaled. "I'm going to pull the whole file.
The real one — the forty pages that are missing.
And I'm going to find out why the owner of the restaurant she'd worked at for six years is not on the interview list for the first ten days.
" A pause. "And you are going to go to work and look at teeth and let me do this one, because if I do it right, it holds, and if you do it fast, it doesn't."
I went to work and looked at teeth.
It lasted nine days, which I consider growth.