Burning Garbo

by Robert Eversz

  “He did?”

  “No.” She laughed, happy to have fooled me. “But that’s what I’m going to tell the police when I call them. Will you coach me?”

  I didn’t until then realize her talent for scheming. We walked toward her car, parked at the bottom of the drive.

  “If we find Ray Belgard,” she said, “maybe we’ll find out what happened to the diamond?, too.”

  The Malibu Beach Inn perched across the point from Malibu Colony, the exclusive gated enclave of celebrity homes that was to paparazzi like me the Holy Grail: eternally pursued and never captured. The inn had been built on the beach side of Pacific Coast Highway a two-story hacienda-style structure with an arched entry flanked by palm trees. The rooms came standard with ocean-view balconies and fireplaces and rented for two hundred fifty bucks a night. Arlanda was rapidly becoming accustomed to the prospect of having money, even if the money was not yet hers. Judging by the shopping bags next to the bed, she’d found time to stop at Beverly Hills before visiting Ben that morning.

  I called Doubleday’s accountant while Arlanda showered off the soot and ash. To keep the mirror from steaming up she left the bathroom door open, and I could hear her singing, tunelessly, amid the splashing water. The accountant gave me the name and number of Doubleday’s dentist, his voice brusque in the habit of men who bill by the quarter hour. I called the dentist’s office and explained to the receptionist that I needed to make an emergency appointment for the niece of Angela Doubleday. My gaze drifted while I waited for her to check the appointment calendar. The receptionist asked if we could be there within the hour. I cupped the phone to my breast. “Can you be ready in thirty minutes?”

  Arlanda looked at me over her shoulder and nodded. I noticed that two children hadn’t distorted the curves of her body. She’d had the children young. She was two years younger than I.

  I told the receptionist to expect us and hung up the phone.

  Arlanda lifted a towel from the rack and turned to me, rubbing her hair. “Why are we seeing Aunt Angela’s dentist?”

  “I want to talk about your aunt’s file.”

  “What about it?”

  I wanted to think she was as unconscious of her nudity as a sister accustomed to sharing a bathroom, but the eyes that riveted mine were less than completely ignorant of the power of her body. I wondered if she was attempting, consciously or not, to manipulate me. “Ray Belgard’s brother studied dentistry at the University of Miami.”

  She nodded, as though understanding what that might mean, then said, “Why’s that so important?”

  “That’s what I want to ask your aunt’s dentist.”

  “What will she tell us?”

  I knew what she wanted to hear, so I said it. “Maybe something that will lead us to the diamonds.”

  Though intimately familiar with some of the most famous mouths in film and television, Elaine Scarpers, DDS, looked nothing like a movie star herself. A tall and thin woman with an angular face, her eyes were abnormally magnified by thick, black-framed glasses, so that when she rested her elbows on the desk in her Beverly Hills office and gently pressed the tips of her fingers together directly under her chin, she resembled a giant praying mantis. “I was terribly shocked and saddened to hear of the death of your aunt,” she said to Arlanda. “She had been my patient for twenty years. Sending her file to the coroner’s office was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.”

  Arlanda nodded her thanks, said, “It’s very kind of you to see us on such short notice.”

  “No problem. What can I do for you?”

  “We have some questions?” Arlanda turned to me, oddly nervous, her fingers twisting the straps to the purse on her lap.

  “What kind of stuff goes into a patient’s file?” I asked.

  “Stuff?” Dr. Scarpers’ smile patronized me. “It’s all pretty standard, no matter who the patient.”

  I was too ignorant to articulate the dread I felt in my gut, which had as much to do with the smell of disinfectant and the imagined screams of patients being prepared for root-canal surgery as it did my Suspicions. I’m a coward in dental offices, the kind of person who, before any dental work can be done, needs something stronger than Novocain or nitrous oxide, like general anaesthesia and a big hammer. I said, “Educate me.”

  Few people can resist the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, and Dr. Scarpers was not one of the few. “The most important items in any patient file are the X rays. We follow the American Dental Association standard of care, which requires one full set of X rays be taken every three years, supplemented in off years by bitewing X rays.”

  “What are those?”

  “The little ones you have to bite down on,” Arlanda said.

  I looked at her, surprised.

  “I thought everybody knew that.”

  “Not everybody, obviously,” Dr. Scarpers said with a deferential nod to Arlanda. “Bitewing X rays provide a view of several consecutive teeth, such as the molars on one side of the jaw. We use a panoramic X ray for the full set, where all thirty-two teeth appear on one set of film. I did a panoramic on Ms. Doubleday this past summer, so that would be her most recent X ray. Then each file includes a dental chart.”

  She lifted a photocopied chart from the drawer to her left and spread it flat on the desk. The photocopy depicted top views of the upper and lower teeth. From the holder beside her computer monitor she selected a red pencil. “When we examine a patient, we mark any problems that need to be corrected in red.” She drew a solid red circle on one of the molars and replaced the red pencil in favor of a blue one. “Then when we’ve finished the work, we mark blue over the red, to indicate the problem has been corrected. This lets us see at a glance what work we’ve done on any particular patient.”

  “Only your work? Not other dental work?”

  “Just what we’ve done. If we want to see her entire dental history, we consult the X rays. The file contains a few other items, such as the patient’s preferred method of payment, their health history—allergies, known problems, and so on—and we ask them to fill out a short form that asks certain questions which might be of importance to us, such as whether the patient has ever had an unpleasant dental experience.”

  “Hasn’t everybody?”

  She didn’t smile. “Some people love the dentist, and those who see their dentist regularly have fewer problems and thus little pain. If you don’t see the dentist for five years, I guarantee you will not have a fun time when you finally go. Imagine a person who doesn’t exercise. When she finally tries to work into shape, it’s going to hurt, isn’t it?”

  Whenever something hurt, it almost always turned out to be my fault. I asked, “Angela Doubleday’s file, did you send the whole thing or just part of it?”

  “The entire file.”

  “And the coroner looks at everything in the file?”

  “I wasn’t there during the autopsy, so I can’t tell you definitively what parts of the file he consulted and what he ignored, but I can tell you that he would have no reason to look at anything other than the most recent X ray.”

  “Why not?”

  “For the very reason that teeth are so accurate in identifying human remains. The first eight or so teeth examined are usually enough to eliminate everybody except the patient. Say a person has an MOD silver filling in tooth number two, number four has a crown, and another filling is in number five. The odds are greater than a hundred thousand to one that the same combination repeats in another patient in the same locations. All the coroner really needs is the most recent record of the patient’s teeth to make his identification, and he’ll find that in the X ray.”

  “Did you examine the file before you sent it off?”

  Dr. Scarpers leaned back and stared at me down the length of her nose. She had a long nose, and it was a long stare, as though she considered my question one of the oddest she’d heard in an odd lifetime. “I never even considered examining the file. Why should I d
o that?”

  “To make sure everything was there.”

  “My filing system is very precise. Of course everything was there. Where else would it be?”

  “I just thought, when your office was broken into, you would have opened it up, verified the contents.”

  Arlanda glanced at me, startled. It was the first she’d heard of it. First I’d heard of it, too.

  “No, that’s not true.” Dr. Scarpers shook her head to emphasize the denial. “We haven’t had any burglaries. Not this year and not last year. We’ve never been robbed. We have an alarm system, because of the drugs and equipment.”

  “I didn’t say you were robbed. I said someone broke in.”

  “Are you talking about the false alarm?”

  “I don’t know what I’m talking about, not really, but that’s never stopped me before.” I waited for a smile from Dr. Scarpers. I didn’t get one. “Of course I’m talking about the false alarm.”

  “One night the alarm went off. The security company responded, like they always do, to check the premises. Everything was locked tight. I checked my supplies the next morning. Nothing was stolen. They said it was a false alarm, happens every now and then.”

  “How long ago?”

  Dr. Scarpers flipped through a leather-bound appointment calendar on her desk. “Two weeks ago yesterday.”

  “Three days before the fire,” I said, counting the days in my head.

  “Are you suggesting there’s a problem with the identification?”

  “Let’s assume that the teeth identified as Angela Doubleday’s aren’t hers at all, but those of somebody else. How could the coroner have possibly misidentified them as her teeth?”

  “Wait a minute,” Arlarida’s voice cracked. “Aunt Angela is dead, right? I mean, the police say she’s dead, the coroner says she’s dead, the newspapers say she’s dead, the entire town of Douglas showed up at Calvary Cemetery to bury her, minister, mayor, and all, and you’re trying to tell me that you don’t think it was her we buried?”

  “I’m not trying to tell you anything yet, okay?” In fact I was trying to tell her something and dreaded it, because if Angela Doubleday wasn’t buried in the crypt bearing her name, she might still be alive. “The man I saw inside Doubleday’s house the day of the fire, his brother studied dentistry. The brother, they expelled him before the end of his second year, but he took enough courses to know his way around a set of teeth. Maybe he’s the guy who shot me, the dark-haired one in the sketches we had made. Maybe he’s not. But I want to look again at what happened, this time with a different set of assumptions, only I’m too ignorant about dentistry to figure things out myself.”

  Dr. Scarpers leaned back in her chair. She was not a woman given to smiles, and when she did, it nearly unhinged her jaw. “When I first began in practice my partner and I had an idea about that. We plotted and schemed like a couple of real criminals. If you give me the right person and a long day of work, I can make two people’s teeth match on X ray exactly.”

  “Any two people?”

  “You’d want two people of similar age and dental condition, to save yourself a lot of work. What you need to do is examine each set of teeth and match the work tooth by tooth. If the first person has a crown on tooth number four, you put a crown in number four on the second person. If the second person has a filling in number fifteen, then you drill number fifteen in the first person, too. Understand? You cross-reference and duplicate the work found in both sets of teeth, so they line up exactly. On the X ray, nobody would be able to tell the two apart. My partner and I fantasized about staging a fake murder and running away to South America on the insurance money.”

  “Sounds like you have a fun partner.”

  “I did, once. She committed suicide.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She shrugged, the gesture of a survivor past caring why she was the one who survived. “You’d need a corpse, of course, or someone you plan to make the corpse. That was the major sticking point in our plan, the need to kill someone, though I suppose we could have stolen a cadaver from somewhere.”

  “It sounds a little complicated. If I understand you right, the killer would need not only to match somebody’s teeth to Angela Doubleday’s but drill and X ray Doubleday too, to match the work done in the cadaver’s mouth. Then he’d have to break into the office and replace the latest X ray in Doubleday’s file with the new X ray.”

  “This conversation is making me nauseous,” Arlanda said.

  Dr. Scarpers searched a drawer to her left, pulled out a white paper sack, and offered it across the desk.

  Arlanda stared at it, confused.

  “In the event you can’t make it to the bathroom in time.”

  She took the bag and clutched it against her lap.

  I said, “Wouldn’t it be easier to bypass all that work and just switch files?”

  The magnified eyes behind the big black-framed glasses stilled, and after a moment, Dr. Scarpers pursed her mouth, as though sucking on a pleasantly sour lozenge. “The date and patient’s name are hand-labeled on the X rays, so you’re right, those could be easily switched, because there’s nothing in the X ray itself that would identify the patient, except for the teeth. The chart could be forged, too. All dentists use a similar system for marking work done, so any perpetrator with basic knowledge of dentistry and practice could forge one.” She smiled at the word perpetrator as though, having waited for years to use it in conversation, she was proud to have used it appropriately. “The chart and labeling are done by my assistants, and I’ve had several over the years, so it’s not easy to identify whose handwriting is whose, either. And nobody would have to break in, though they’d need to break out.”

  “Break out?”

  “I don’t employ a full-time receptionist. Someone could stroll into the office near closing time and hide in one of the rooms until we’ve left. Once inside and alone, they could switch items in any file they chose. That might explain the so-called false alarm, too.”

  “They’re already inside the office, they open the door to leave …”

  “And the alarm goes off.”

  “Your rent-a-cops investigate, but no broken glass, no obvious sign of entry, so everybody assumes the system malfunctioned.”

  “This is all terribly clever. Someone could very well have switched the files, and I wouldn’t have noticed.”

  Arlanda stood so rapidly her chair squealed on the linoleum. “This is too much. I need some air.” The white bag fluttered to the floor and she was gone, brand new heels tapping down the corridor.

  Dr. Scarpers allowed a moment of polite silence to pass before she asked, “She’s Ms. Doubleday’s sole surviving relative?”

  I confirmed that she was.

  “Then she must be very upset right now.”

  “Very. But her feelings are secondary.”

  Dr. Scarpers didn’t need much encouragement to continue. The puzzle intrigued her. “You’d still need a cadaver to work with, and a single X ray probably wouldn’t be. enough,” she said. “What if the coroner picks up the wrong X ray to start? If you’re going to the trouble of making the switch, you might as well take several sets of X rays. Each one requires no more than a few minutes. Ms. Doubleday was my patient for twenty years, so she’d have seven full sets of X rays in her file. A couple of hours of work.”

  “That way, the coroner picks up any of the other X rays, at least he’s looking at the same set of teeth.”

  “Correct. I guarantee you he will not check each X ray, but he might glance through them, and if they’re not the same mouth, he’d notice.”

  “Then how do we prove a switch has been made?”

  “By the time line.”

  “You mean the time line in the X rays, from the first to last?”

  She nodded, waited for me to figure it out.

  “But each X ray is the’same,” I said. “So there is no time line.”

  “And that’s how you prove the fi
le has been tampered with. If every X ray is the same, that means she hasn’t had any dental work done in the twenty years she has been in my care. I know I’ve worked on Ms. Doubleday’s teeth in the last twenty years, and my billing records will prove it. The coroner can also compare the X rays against the dental chart.”

  “Because the dental chart might show work that the X rays wouldn’t confirm?”

  “Exactly. And let’s say whoever may have done this—” She raised a cautionary finger. “And I stress may have, because this is speculation, not fact—let’s say he went to the trouble to drill and fill randomly between sets of X rays, to show a progression of work. I’d still be able to nail him with the billing records, which document precisely when I performed each procedure.”

  “So no matter how it was done, you’d know.”

  “He’d need to be working from an exact copy of Doubleday’s mouth to fool me.”

  “That’s not likely,” I said.

  “Not likely at all. But proving something could have happened isn’t the same as proving it did. Have you voiced your suspicions to the coroner?”

  “Why would the coroner listen to me?”

  “You’re right.” Her eyebrows arched and dipped above her glasses. “He wouldn’t. But he’ll listen to me. If there’s even a remote chance that he incorrectly identified the remains, it means Angela Doubleday could still be alive. I imagine the coroner would like to be the one to break that news, rather than have the news break him.”

  On the western edge of Beverly Hills, Sunset Boulevard turns serpentine, dipping and rolling through Bel Air on its way to the sea. It’s a beautiful drive in a convertible, the verdant landscapes of multi-million-dollar estates fringing the boulevard north and south, and the closest to wealth I’d ever get. Behind the wind-flicked tendrils of her hair Arlanda’s eyes were veined from the effort of crying. “You must think I’m horrible!” she shouted above the wind and engine. The Rott sat on the floor at her feet, his head cradled mournfully in her lap.

  “I know some people who’d kill to be in your situation. On one hand, you have a sizable inheritance, and on the other …” I straightened the Caddy out of a curve and looked at her for as long as I dared in traffic. Her eyes were huge with anticipation. “On the other hand you have an aunt you’ve seen a dozen times in your life. I don’t think you’re horrible. Not at all. I do think you’re confused. I’ll admit to that. But anybody would be confused. And I think most of us would admit in the darkest corner of our heart we’d take the money, no question.”