“With pleasure, Doctor.”
“Isn’t it nice to see Tilda so enthusiastic about her work? Somehow your very presence encourages her so. What do you think it is, Victor?”
“Ehaeal?”
Dr. Bob laughed.
I was standing at the reception desk, waiting for Deirdre to return from the back room after maxing out my credit card, while Dr. Bob made his notations on my file. I absently took in the photographs in Dr. Pfeffer’s smile hall of fame on the wall.
“When this is over,” I said, “are you going to take a picture of my mouth for your wall?”
He looked up from the file, gave me an appraising stare before turning to face the array of photographs. “No,” he said.
“What would it require?”
“Massive reconstruction,” he said, turning his attention back to the file.
“You know, some of those smiles look awfully familiar.”
“I would hope so. You’re sleeping with one of them.”
“Excuse me?”
“We’ll call you to set up your next appointment. Sometimes the laboratory takes longer than we expect. Remember that you’ll be having a thorough cleaning, too. I can see you wince. Don’t worry, Victor, the procedure is relatively painless.”
“Relative to what?”
“That’s always the question, isn’t it?”
“What about Tanya?”
Dr. Bob put down his pen. “What about her?”
“I need to find her.”
“I suppose you do.”
“I could use some help.”
“Are you asking? Think a moment, Victor. Are you asking? Because a favor like this is not easily repaid.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“One never knows in advance, does one? But I like to be of assistance when I can, and sometime in the future, you might be of assistance to me.”
“Sort of like paying it forward.”
“Sort of, but without the swelling music and the tears.”
I thought for a moment. I felt like I was getting myself into something I didn’t quite understand, but I needed the help. Tanya needed the help. “Okay. Yes. I’ll repay you if I’m able.”
“All right, then. We have a deal. I’ll see if the Hotel Latimore takes reservations.” He chuckled as he folded the file, slapped it on the desk, and headed back toward the examination rooms.
I watched him go and then turned again to the wall of smiles. Healthy gums, shiny teeth, a certain arrogant joie de vivre. That one there, I figured, must be Carol Kingsly. Or maybe that one there, because I have to tell you, more than one looked awfully familiar. But it wasn’t only the strangeness of the smiles on the doctor’s wall that was preying on my mind, smiles hung like trophy heads in a hunting lodge. There was something else that puzzled me. I had come to the conclusion that Dr. Bob wasn’t one for idle chatter. All his stories had a purpose. And so what the hell was the purpose, I wondered, of the strange story of the doctor and his daughter and that little orange Gremlin?
I figured it out eventually, yes I did, even a dumb cluck finds the acorn now and then. And I figured it out, perversely, while staring at photographs of the dead body of Leesa Dubé.
53
Dr. Peasley was a tall, lugubrious man with pale skin and a very brown toupee. I sometimes think we develop our personalities by modeling behaviors from the people we come into contact with most often, which goes far, I think, to explain the testimonial style of the coroner. By the time he spelled his name and listed his qualifications, snores were being heard from the back of the courtroom.
Nothing like a slow monotone, with frequent inexplicable pauses, to keep things humming.
I had already read the report, I knew how Leesa Dubé had died, and Beth was responsible for objecting when necessary and for the cross-examination, and so as Dr. Peasley droned on and eyelids all over the courtroom started drooping, I let my mind wander. And where it wandered to was Dr. Bob.
For some reason I felt squirrelly about what the dentist had said while adjusting my new bridge. Why had he emphasized over and again the contingent nature of most murders? Why had he warned me so vociferously never to underestimate the effect of childhood trauma on the adult psyche? And most troubling of all, what the heck had that story of the doctor and the Gremlin and the girl in the back seat been all about?
Think of her, the daughter, and the scars she undoubtedly carries from a bullet that cut not her flesh, had said Dr. Bob. Think of how that brutal event still curses her life, affects her behavioral patterns in ways she doesn’t even recognize today.
How would the curse play out? I wondered. As Dalton passed to the jury certain photos from the autopsy and Dr. Peasley, in his slow, deep voice, explained how a gunshot at close range had torn apart Leesa Dubé’s neck and caused her to bleed to death, I considered the possibilities. Had she become a violent psychopath, the girl in the back seat of the Pontiac? Had she become a manic-depressive? A gun enthusiast? A peacenik? A taxi driver? What?
And why would the dentist be telling me the story if there wasn’t something I could do to help relieve her pain? Who could she be? I wondered. Was it Carol Kingsly, with whom he had set me up? Was it Julia Rose, the mother of both his patient Daniel and the girl of whose perilous fate I had just informed him? Or was it Dr. Bob himself, Dr. Bob before the sex change? That one I liked, that one I thought about for a while, let the possibilities simmer in my mind.
And then it came to me in a shiver. It came to me with the force of undiscovered truth, as if I had been born with the knowledge, as Plato believed, and was just waiting for Dr. Bob to act as my Socrates and pull the blindfold from my eyes. It came to me as Dalton reached the climax of her examination of Dr. Peasley.
“Now, Dr. Peasley, you put the time of death at approximately midnight, isn’t that right?”
“Yes,” said Dr. Peasley, in his slow, deep voice. “That is right.”
“And you saw her how much later?”
“She was brought to me at approximately noon the next day. So it was approximately twelve hours later.”
“And what condition was the body in then?”
“When a person dies,” said Peasley slowly, slowly, “the body goes through a number of specific stages of deterioration. At the very moment of death, the heart stops, the muscles relax, the bladder and bowels release. Depending on the environment, the body will begin to lose approximately one and a half degrees Fahrenheit each hour. This loss of temperature is referred to as algor mortis.”
“What happens after thirty minutes?”
“Under normal conditions, after thirty minutes blood begins to pool in the lower portions of the body, which is referred to as livor mortis. The skin turns purple and waxy. The hands and feet turn blue. The eyes begin to sink into the skull.”
“And after four hours?”
“At four hours, the pooling of the blood and the purpling of the skin continue. And rigor mortis begins to set in.”
“What exactly is rigor mortis, Doctor?”
“Rigor mortis is a rigidity of the body that occurs after death. It is effected by chemical changes in the muscle tissue and causes the joints to become so stiff it is almost impossible to move them without breaking the bone. This starts after about four hours, becomes full at twelve hours. After that, the body gradually returns to a limp state.”
François was listening to this testimony with a sense of bland detachment on his face, which didn’t surprise me. Testimony on the texture of dead muscle was no mystery to a four-star chef whose signature dish involved a rack of ribs, I figured, even if the dead muscle being testified to was that of his wife. But Beth’s emotionless reaction, as she sat between François and me at the defense table, was somewhat puzzling. She had a yellow legal pad before her, a line drawn down the middle of the page, and she bit her lip with concentration as she listened to the doleful responses of Dr. Peasley and took notes on the testimony in preparation for her cross. From her expression, the witness could have been talking about real estate valuations or a stock deal that went south, not describing the condition of a murder victim laid on his autopsy table or the stages of deterioration of the human body after death.