18. Stearns Wharf
Stearns Wharf
Here is what I want understood about the morning of the twentieth of June, because it has been told wrong in this town for years and I am the only person who can correct it: I did not go down to that wharf to confront Carl Tomasetti.
I went to watch my — I did not have a word for him yet — I went to watch Nate run three miles in a ridiculous jacket.
That is the entire truth. Ray Dominguez had told me on the Thursday that the arrest was Monday, and had told me in terms that a person of ordinary intelligence could not misconstrue: *stay away from him, stay away from the wharf, do not so much as look at that man until Tuesday.
* And I had agreed. I had meant it. I had gone eleven days without doing a single thing except look at teeth, which by my standards is a monastic retreat.
But the 5K starts at East Beach and finishes at the foot of Stearns Wharf, and the finish line is directly in front of the Anchor Room, because the Anchor Room sponsors it, and there is one place in the entire county where a person can stand and see the last two hundred yards of that race, and it is the wharf apron.
So that is where I was at eight-forty in the morning on the longest Saturday of the year, in a sun hat, with a golden retriever on a lead, with Tess on one side and Marisol on the other and Walt Ostrander in a folding chair we had carried down for him, and Rosalind Marsh — who had said yes when Tess asked her, and who had brought her own chair — on the other side of Walt, with a paper cup of coffee, four hundred yards from where her daughter had worked for six years.
None of us knew Carl Tomasetti would be standing at the finish line with a microphone.
I want to be fair even now: of course he was.
He had been handing out the medals at that finish line every June since 2003.
It was in the program. If I had read the program I would have known, and if I had known I would have stayed home, and Ray Dominguez would have arrested him quietly on a Monday morning in his own driveway and Rosalind Marsh would have read about it in the paper.
I have been told, by people who love me, that it worked out for the best. I don't know. I've never been sure.
He came on at eight-fifty to welcome everybody.
Seventy-one years old, white hair, deeply tanned, in a blue apron with ANCHOR ROOM on it because that is his thing, that is his whole civic personality, the man in the apron.
He thanked the police. He thanked the kids.
He said that this year, as every year, every dollar went to the Police Activities League, and that he'd been feeding this town since 1971 and there was nothing he wouldn't do for it, and four hundred people applauded a man who had been standing on Casey Marsh's grave for twenty-eight Junes.
Rosalind Marsh did not move. She sat in a folding chair with a paper cup of coffee and watched him with an expression I will not attempt to describe, and Floss got up from my feet, walked four steps, and lay down across Rosalind's shoes.
The race went off at nine.
Nate finished in twenty-four minutes and eleven seconds, which he is unbearable about to this day, in a navy jacket with PEOPLE PROTECT POSSIBILITIES across the back, and he came up the apron scanning for me the way he does, and I lifted a hand, and he grinned — and then he saw who was standing eleven feet from us at a folding table full of medals, and the grin went off his face like a light.
He came straight over. He did not run; he walked, unhurried, and put himself at my shoulder.
"Tell me you didn't know he'd be here," he said, quietly.
"I didn't know he'd be here."
"Okay." He was breathing hard. "Okay. We're going. I'm going to say hello to Walt and then we are all going to leave, right now, and I'll square it with Ray on the way."
And we would have. I want that on the record. We were leaving.
And then Carl Tomasetti saw Rosalind Marsh.
He had been handing medals to eleven-year-olds for a quarter of an hour, and he looked up between one child and the next, out across the apron, and he saw a small upright woman of seventy-nine in a folding chair with a golden retriever across her feet, and his face — which had been a public face, a professional face, the warmest face on the waterfront —
His face did something.
And then he did the thing that finished him, which was that he put the medals down, and he came over.
He came over with both hands out, the way that kind of man always does — I have watched three of them do it now — with his face full of a decent grief, and he said:
"Roz. Roz Marsh. Oh, honey."
Rosalind Marsh did not stand up.
"Carl," she said.
"I've been thinking about you every day since they — since the news." He crouched down in front of her chair, which put him below her, which is a very skillful thing to do. "Every day. I should've called. I didn't know what a person says. Twenty-eight years and I never stopped—"
"Carl," said Rosalind Marsh, "who told the police my daughter took money out of her savings account?"
The wharf apron is a loud place on a race morning. There was a PA playing something. There were four hundred people and about ninety dogs.
I heard it perfectly, and so did Nate, and so did Marisol, and so did a detective named Serrano who was working the event in a polo shirt eleven feet away and who I did not know was there and who, thank God, had been Ray Dominguez's partner for four years.
Carl Tomasetti stayed crouched on the boards for about two seconds longer than a man hears an ordinary question.
"I don't — Roz, I don't know what—"
"She had eleven thousand four hundred dollars," said Rosalind Marsh, "and she showed me that book in August of 1998 and there was not one withdrawal in it, and in November you told a detective she'd taken out forty-five hundred dollars.
And I have been trying for twenty-eight years to work out how you knew a number that was in a book in my daughter's kitchen drawer.
" Her hands were flat on the arms of the chair.
"And then a dentist told me you sat in the room. "
And Carl Tomasetti stood up.
That's all. He stood up out of a crouch in front of a seventy-nine-year-old woman and did not answer, and the decency came off his face in one piece, like a plate sliding off a stack, and what was underneath it was not rage and was not fear.
It was irritation.
I have thought about that more than anything else in three years of this.
Not guilt. Not panic. A flash of pure, domestic, familiar irritation — the face of a man whose wife has brought something up again — and it was on him for less than a second and then the apron was back, and he said, "Roz, you're upset, you've had a terrible—"
"I'm not upset," said Rosalind Marsh. "I'm seventy-nine."
And then I said the only thing I said that morning, and I said it because a detective in a polo shirt eleven feet away had already begun to move and because a man was about to walk away and be arrested on a Monday in a driveway with nobody watching, and because a woman in a folding chair had told me in a doorway in April exactly what she wanted and it was not a trial and it was not a prison.
"Mr. Tomasetti," I said. "I'm Lila Bennett. I bought Walt Ostrander's practice on Anacapa Street."
He turned around.
"Casey Marsh was a patient there from 1992," I said.
"There's a card in that basement with your name on it.
Nine entries, seven years. You drove her to every appointment she ever had from the age of sixteen and you sat in the room for all of them, and Dr. Ostrander wrote that down every single time, because that's what he does.
" My voice was doing something I did not authorize but I kept going.
"In August of 1993 she was seventeen years old and she came in with the corner broken off her upper left lateral incisor and she said a tray fell on her.
In November of 1998 she came in with the same tooth broken again, in the same direction, from the same angle, with a four-day-old bruise along her jaw, and she said she fell down some stairs.
And there's a forensic odontologist in Ventura who has both films and who will stand up in a courtroom and say that those two fractures were made by the same hand five years apart. "
Four hundred people on a wharf. Somebody's PA. A child crying about a medal.
"She was leaving," I said. "Not the area.
You. She put two thousand dollars down on an apartment in Goleta on the fourteenth of September and she bought a car in Oxnard on the second of November and she never collected either of them, and you knew about the second withdrawal because you were the only person alive who could have known, and you took it to a police detective ten days after you killed her and used it to make her a girl who ran away. "
Carl Tomasetti looked at me.
And Walt Ostrander — seventy-six years old, in a folding chair, in a parrot shirt, who had said nothing for twenty minutes — put both hands on the arms of that chair and pushed himself up onto his feet.
"Carl," he said. "You sat in my operatory."
That was all he said. One sentence, from an old man who had to stand up to say it.
Detective Serrano was at my elbow. There was another officer coming up the apron. Floss had got up off Rosalind Marsh's feet and was standing, silent, hackles flat, watching a man in an apron the way she had watched exactly two other people in her life.
"I'd like you to come with me, sir," said Serrano.
"I'm handing out medals," said Carl Tomasetti.
"No, sir," said Detective Serrano. "You're not."
They took him off the wharf at ten past ten in the morning on the longest day of the year, through four hundred people in running shoes, past a table of medals, and Ray Dominguez met them at the foot of the pier having driven from his daughter's soccer game with his phone in his hand and his shirt untucked, and the first thing Ray did — before the car, before anything — was come up the apron to a folding chair and crouch down in front of Rosalind Marsh, exactly where Tomasetti had crouched eleven minutes earlier, and say:
"Mrs. Marsh. Ray Dominguez, Santa Barbara Police Department. We're arresting Carl Tomasetti for the murder of your daughter Casey."
"Thank you," said Rosalind Marsh.
And then she said, "Would somebody take this dog off my feet, I need to stand up," and about six of us tried at once, and Floss would not move, and in the end Rosalind Marsh stood up out of a folding chair on Stearns Wharf with one hand on my arm and one hand on a golden retriever's head, and looked out at the water for a while, and did not cry, and said:
"She liked it down here. That's the thing nobody understands. She liked it down here."