14. The Ex-Wife
The Ex-Wife
Bettina Hale came to me because she wanted her teeth whitened, which is one of the great sentences of my professional life.
She called on a Tuesday and booked as a new patient under her own name, and when Kayla put it in the book Marisol looked at the screen for a full ten seconds and then came and stood in my doorway and said, "The wife's coming in."
"The ex-wife."
"The wife who inherits," said Marisol.
She swept in eleven minutes late in sunglasses she did not remove until she was in the chair, a woman of about fifty in the sort of expensive casual that takes three hours, with a Birkin she put on the counter rather than the floor and a new-car smell that came in with her from the street.
Ray Dominguez, I later learned, had interviewed her twice by then and liked her for it enormously, and half of Montecito was saying the word *alimony* at dinner parties.
She wanted whitening. She wanted it that day. She was, she explained, going to Cabo.
"I'm sorry for your loss," I said.
"Mm," said Bettina Hale.
I got her in the chair. And here's the thing about the chair, which I have said before and will say for the rest of my life: it is the most confessional room in America.
People lie to police officers. People lie to their priests.
Nobody lies to a dentist for ninety minutes, because a dentist is the only professional in your life who is both extremely close to your face and not remotely interested in you, and something about that combination opens people like a tin.
She talked for forty minutes. I did an exam she didn't need, slowly.
She talked about the divorce, which had gone through in March and had been "civilized, which is a word lawyers use when they mean expensive.
" She talked about Stanford tuition, and about the boat, and about a house in Carpinteria that was "underwater in every sense.
" She talked with real venom about the banner — "he was *mortified*, you know, he cried about that banner, a grown man" — and about the tile wall, and about how in twenty-two years of marriage Preston Hale had never once in his life had an original idea about money and had always, always needed somebody to tell him what he was worth.
"He was a very good dentist," she said, at one point, to the sea otter, and it came out of her sideways and surprised her.
"That's the thing nobody says. He was actually very good.
He could have had a little office like this one and been perfectly happy and I'd have been bored out of my mind and we'd probably still be married. "
I said, keeping my voice entirely flat, "Was he frightened of you?"
Bettina Hale laughed. It was a real laugh and it went on slightly too long.
"God, no. Is that what people are saying?
" She sat up on one elbow, which you should never do in a dental chair, and looked at me properly for the first time.
"Preston wasn't frightened of me. Preston wasn't frightened of anything for twenty-two years except his own mother and the number on the second page of a bank statement.
" The laugh went out of her face. "He was frightened this summer, though.
Since about July. That's true. He called me in August, which he had not done since the divorce, at eleven o'clock at night, to ask me whether I'd kept the file of our old tax returns. "
"Had you?"
"Of course I had, I keep everything, that's what the divorce was *about*.
" She lay back down. "He said he needed to see what he'd been paid in 'twenty-four and 'twenty-five, because the number in his head didn't match the number he'd been told.
And then he said — and this is the part I've told the police twice and they write it down and it goes nowhere —" she looked at the ceiling "— he said, 'Bett, I've signed something I shouldn't have signed and I can't get out of it, and if anything happens to me, the person you talk to is not Serena. '"
I did not move. I have never held so still in my life.
"He said that? Those words?"
"'The person you talk to is not Serena.' Yes." She shrugged, a woman who has said a thing to enough uninterested rooms that it has stopped meaning anything. "I assumed he meant she was a shark about the business and I should get my own lawyer. He was always dramatic at eleven at night."
"Bettina." I put the mirror down. "Did he say who the person *was*?"
"He said a name. I didn't write it down, and I've been over it, and it's gone.
" She shut her eyes. "It was a woman's name.
That's all I've got and it's driving me insane, and if you tell me one more time to think harder I'm going to scream, because a police officer has already said that to me twice. "
So I did not say think harder. I said, "How many syllables?"
Bettina Hale opened her eyes.
"...Two? Two, I think. Short."
"Was it a first name or a last name?"
"Last. It was a last name, he said it the way he says — said — people from work." She sat up again, and this time I let her. "Why is that a better question?"
"Because you're not remembering the name," I said. "You're remembering a sound, and sounds come back sideways. If I ask you to remember, you can't. If I ask you what it rhymed with, sometimes you can."
There was a long pause in my operatory.
"It had a K in it," said Bettina Hale.
It was not much. It was, as it turned out, the exact size of the hole in the case — because what Preston Hale had been trying to tell his ex-wife at eleven o'clock at night in August was that when the money and the billing and the twelve-year management agreement all came apart, the person you talk to is not Serena Locke, it's the woman who had done all of it once before in Arizona and who was, at that moment, on the payroll of the Luminous Santa Barbara LLC as a "regional clinical compliance coordinator. "
I didn't get that for another eleven days. What I got in the chair that Tuesday was two syllables and a K, and a woman going to Cabo, and one more thing, right at the end, with her sunglasses already back on.
"You know the stupidest part?" said Bettina Hale, at my reception desk, signing for a whitening kit.
"He was happy about it. At the end. The last time I talked to him — the Friday — he was so cheerful I thought he was drunk.
He said he'd worked out what he had to do and he'd got a box of something off to a man in Goleta and on Monday he was going to make a phone call that was going to cost him everything he had and he felt *wonderful*.
" She clicked the pen down. "Twenty-two years and I'd never once heard him sound like that.
And then somebody killed him on the Sunday. "
She left. Marisol closed the door behind her, turned around, put her back against it, and said: "Somebody knew about Monday."