“Good work,” I said. “I’m heading there now.”
“Sergeant, Lieutenant Moriarity is looking for you big-time.”
“Is he there now?”
“No, sir. I’ll have him call you on the radio as soon as he gets back.”
“Thanks. Ten-four.”
By now, Moriarity probably had an APB out on me. I wanted to have as much evidence in hand as possible when he did reach me. I envisioned a hard time in his hot seat.
I headed straight for Dr. Tyler’s house instead of calling first, figuring a little charm and my ID would be harder to turn down than an impersonal phone call. Another thirty minutes and I was looking at street numbers. The house was a modest two-story stucco with a coral tiled roof and a flawless front lawn. The Saturday paper was on the front steps. I picked it up and rang the doorbell. A pretty woman in her late fifties opened the door.
“Hi,” I said cheerily, handing her the paper and showing her my best smile along with my credentials. “My name’s Bannon, L.A.P.D. Is Dr. Tyler in?”
“So you’re the mysterious Sergeant Bannon,” she said with a smile.
“Mysterious?”
“My son called us,” she said, stepping back and holding the door open for me. “He tends to be a little melodramatic, although I must say, invoking Wilma Thompson’s name raised my eyebrows. I’m Mary Tyler. I was Doc’s nurse when Wilma was his patient.”
“Then he did do some work on her?”
“Oh yes,” she said, leading me through the house. “A terrible man, Arnold Riker, had the gall to bring her into the office. He said she fell and hit her jaw on the car door. Wilma was terrified of him, but she finally admitted that Riker had beaten her up.”
“Did he pay for the work Dr. Tyler did?”
She nodded, then led me out the back door into the yard, a sprawling rose garden. The entire yard was ablaze in color, and the aroma, carried on a soft breeze, was intoxicating. Tyler was on his hands and knees in front of a rose bush, with a roll of tape in one hand, a small knife in the other, and a twig with a single pale mauve rose on it clasped between his teeth. He was using the knife to make a slit in the stem of the bush.
“Doc?” she called.
“Uh-huh,” he said without looking up from his work.
“That detective, Sergeant Bannon, is here.”
“Tell him to come on out,” he said without taking the twig from his mouth.
“Thanks,” I said to Mrs. Tyler, and made my way through the array of roses to his side.
“Hold this a minute, will you?” he asked, handing me a roll of tape, still without looking up. I watched as he trimmed the end of the twig to a flat edge, like the end of a screwdriver.
“I’m making a hybrid,” he said as he worked. “The main bush is the recipient. I’m grafting this cutting onto it, hopefully to produce a new strain of rose.” He traded the knife for the tape, carefully wrapped the incision, then got up, and looked down at his operation. Satisfied, he took off his gloves and looked at me for the first time, offering his hand.
“How do you do, Sergeant Bannon,” he said. “Thanks for the help.”
“My pleasure, Doctor.”
“Call me Doc, everybody does,” he said. Tyler was a cheerful man in his sixties, his brown hair just beginning to show a little gray. He was wearing a pair of baggy chinos and a faded Hawaiian shirt that probably had blinded people when it was new.
“Now what’s this about Wilma Thompson?” he said.
“I understand you did some dental work on her back in the early twenties.”
“I did,” he said, and nodded.
“Did it involve some bridgework?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Could you tell me about it, please?”
“You’re playing hell with my curiosity,” he said.
“I’ll get to the point in a minute.”
“When I came back from the war, I opened an office in San Luis Obispo, with a small clinic down in San Pietro,” he said. “I’d go down there once a week. One day a man named Riker brought Wilma in. He said she had fallen and hit the side of her face. I knew he was lying the minute I examined her. It was clear she had been beaten. The bruise on her jaw and the injuries to her mouth made that quite apparent. You could see the imprint of his knuckles in the bruise along her right jaw. Two of her lower teeth on that side were so badly damaged they had to be extracted. She also had a hairline fracture right along here,” he traced a four- or five-inch line across the jaw from his mouth toward the bottom of his ear, “and a chipped upper tooth on the same side.”
“When was this?”
“I’ll have to check the file. Nineteen twenty, as I recall.”
“You have a vivid memory of this event,” I said.
“Yes, I do,” he said. “Particularly after what followed. I felt really sorry for Wilma.”
“She told you that Riker struck her?”
He nodded. “The work was extensive, it spread out over a couple of weeks. She was obviously scared to death of Riker. With good cause, needless to say. I finally got her to admit that he had hit her-and it hadn’t been the first time. But she was afraid to leave him. She was just a kid, eighteen at the time. Dreamed of going to Hollywood and becoming a star. She was a sad young lady. Pretty in her way, but it was obvious to me that Hollywood was not going to rush to her door.”
“What exactly did you do?”
“I extracted the first molar and second bicuspid on the bottom. Then I made what we call a three-quarter crown on each side of the gap and bridged them with gold.”
“Gold?” I said with surprise.
“Gold is inert,” he said. “It doesn’t corrode-doesn’t react to anything in the mouth-and has the same consistency as a tooth. It was relatively inexpensive in those days. That’s the way it was done. I also filled the first molar on top with silver. And I used stainless wire to draw the hairline fracture shut.”
“Did you make any charts or reports on the work?”
“Of course. It’s part of the process. First you diagram and assess the damage, then you chart exactly what procedure you’re going to use to correct the problem. The charts are standard.”
“Do you still have the paperwork?”
He looked at me strangely for a long minute before nodding.
“I have all my records. The inactive ones are in the basement,” he said. “Why?”
“I have reason to suspect that Wilma Thompson wasn’t murdered. She came here in 1924 as Verna Hicks, moved into Pacific Meadows, married happily. Her husband was killed in an auto accident about four years ago, and she lived alone until last week, when she was murdered in her bathtub.”
He was genuinely shocked.
“That would mean she helped frame Riker?”
“So it would appear.”
“Then who killed her?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“My God. Little Wilma.” He shook his head. “Well, she got even with him, if it’s true. Believe me, I have no sympathy for Riker. He deserved everything he got. Is he still alive?”
I nodded. “He’s in Wesco. His sentence was commuted to life without parole. He saw that picture this morning and called me. He’s the one who told me about the work on her mouth. Could that be Wilma, Doc?”
He looked back at the picture. “She was a blonde back then,” he said. “And you can tell how much weight she put on. But…”
He stared some more. “I couldn’t swear to it, Sergeant.”
“But it’s possible?” I suggested.
He nodded. His shoulders slumped and he sat down on the steps. “Almost twenty years,” he said, shaking his head. “And all these years we thought she was dead.” Then the same thought that was burning a hole in me began to fester inside the doctor.
“You say you met Riker?”
“This morning. A nasty human being.”
“But this may end up freeing him?”
His comment hit a nerve. I thought again about Wilma, the same thoughts that had provoked my interest in her “accidental death” to begin with. A kid with dreams, abused by a psychotic mobster, who escaped and lived a normal, decent life until time caught up with her. Now it had come to me to free the ferret who had started the whole tragedy twenty years ago.