16. The Family Business
The Family Business
Iwent to the Anchor Room on the fourth of June for lunch, with my dog, in daylight, and I want to be honest about why: I wanted to see him.
So I took Floss and I walked up the wharf at one o'clock on a Wednesday and got a table on the deck.
He came out of the kitchen at twenty past, in the blue apron, and did the floor.
I have to describe this properly because it is the only thing in three books I have not been able to make sit still.
Carl Tomasetti worked that dining room like a man with a genuine gift for it.
Forty covers, and he got to every one. He crouched — always crouched, never leaned — beside a table of four and asked them where they were from and remembered.
He took a photograph for a couple on their anniversary and made a joke about the lighting that got a real laugh out of a woman in her sixties.
He sent a plate of something to a table with a child at it and did not tell them he'd done it.
He called two of his servers by nicknames and both of them lit up.
He was, and I want the word on the page because the word is the whole problem: lovely.
He got to me at about a quarter to two.
"That is a beautiful dog," he said.
"Thank you."
"Golden?" He was already crouching — the crouch, the one that puts him below you — and he held out the back of his hand, and Floss, lying under my chair with her chin on her paws, looked at it.
She did not get up. She did not growl. She looked at the hand and then she looked away, out at the water, and put her head down.
"Huh," said Carl Tomasetti, pleasantly, and stood up, and the pleasantness did not move by a millimeter. "Well, she's working, isn't she. Service dog?"
"Therapy. She comes to the office with me."
"What's the office?"
"I'm a dentist. Anacapa Street."
"Anacapa," he said. "Which one — not Ostrander's place? The one with the tooth on the sign?"
"That's the one. I bought it from him."
And nothing happened.
That is what I came away with, and it took me eleven days to understand that it was the most frightening thing I have ever collected.
Nothing happened. His face did not change, his voice did not change, he did not pause, he did not look at the door.
He said, "Walt Ostrander! How is that old bandit, is he still alive?
" — cheerfully, warmly, with a laugh in it — and then he told me a story about a dinner in 1994 where Walt had done a card trick badly, and it was a good story, and he told it well, and he waited for me to laugh and I did laugh, because I am a human being with a face and it is very hard not to.
Then he asked how business was, and said the wharf was dying, and said the thing that everyone in this town says about parking.
And then he put his hand — lightly, briefly, as he stood — on my shoulder, and said, "You bring that dog back, we'll do better than a crab roll for her," and moved on to table nine.
I sat there for about four minutes without moving.
Because I had come up that pier with a theory that a man who had killed a twenty-two-year-old woman and buried her on his family's land and then stood on top of her every June handing medals to children would have something wrong with him that a person could see.
Some flatness. Some tell. I had genuinely believed that, the way you believe a thing you have never had to test.
And the answer is that there is nothing to see.
There is no flatness. He remembered where people were from.
He sent a plate to a child. And when a woman he had never met said the name of the dentist who had charted his employee's broken teeth twice in five years and written *pt anxious* underneath both of them, Carl Tomasetti's entire body said, without one moment's hesitation, *how is that old bandit. *
I got out my phone in the parking lot at the foot of the wharf and I texted Ray Dominguez three words, which were: *He's not worried.*
Ray called me back inside a minute.
"Where are you."
"Parking lot. I had lunch. I didn't talk to him about anything, Ray, I had a crab roll and he told me a story about Walt doing a card trick."
There was a long breath on the other end.
"Doc," said Ray Dominguez, "do you know what twenty-eight years does to a man like that?"
"Tell me."
"It makes him right." I could hear him driving.
"Every morning for twenty-eight years he has woken up and not been arrested, and every one of those mornings is a small piece of evidence that he was correct about himself.
By year five he's stopped being frightened.
By year ten it's not a thing he did, it's a thing that happened.
By year twenty-eight he has sold the land to the county and got a plaque for it and handed out ten thousand medals and he is not managing a secret anymore, Lila, he's just a guy who runs a restaurant.
" A pause. "That's what you had lunch with.
Not a man hiding it. A man who has finished hiding it. "
"Then how do you get him?"
"You don't get him," said Ray. "You get the geology and the phone records and the passbook and you put them in front of twelve people.
And then one day somebody says the thing out loud in front of him and you watch what his face does, and you will get about one second of it, and it will not be what you expect. "
He was right about that. I got my second, on the twentieth of June, on the wharf apron. And it was not what I expected at all.