Lawrence Block: The Burglar In The Closet

To no avail.

Whoever killed Crystal Sheldrake had taken her jewelry home with him.

It never fails. I open my mouth and I wind up in hot water. But in this case the circumstances were special. After all, I was only following orders.

“Open, Bern. A little wider, huh? That’s right. That’s fine. Perfect. Just beautiful.”

Beautiful? Well, they tell me it’s in the eye of the beholder and I guess they’re right. If Craig Sheldrake wanted to believe there was beauty in a gaping mouthful of teeth, that was his privilege and more power to him. They weren’t the worst teeth in the world, I don’t suppose. Twenty-some years ago a grinning orthodontist had wired them with braces, enabling me to shoot those little rubber bands at my classmates, so at least they were straight. And since I’d given up smoking and switched to one of those whiter-than-white toothpastes, I looked somewhat less like a supporting player in The Curse of the Yellow Fangs. But all of the molars and bicuspids sported fillings, and one of the wisdom teeth was but a memory, and I’d had a wee bit of root-canal work on the upper left canine. They were respectable teeth for one as long in the tooth as I, perhaps, and they’d given me relatively little trouble over the years, but it would be an exaggeration to call them either a thing of beauty or a joy forever.

A stainless-steel probe touched a nerve. I twitched a little and made the sort of sound of which one is capable when one’s mouth is full of fingers. The probe, relentless, touched the nerve again.

“You feel that?”

“Urg.”

“Little cavity, Bern. Nothing serious but we’ll tend to it right now. That’s the importance of coming in for a cleaning three or four times a year. You come in, we shoot a quick set of X-rays just as a routine measure, we have a look around, poke the old molars a bit, and we catch those little cavities before they can grow up into big cavities. Am I right or am I right, keed?”

“Urg.”

“All this panic about X-rays. Well, if you’re pregnant I suppose it’s a different story, but you’re not pregnant, are you, Bernie?” He laughed at this. I’ve no idea why. When you’re a dentist you have to laugh at your own jokes, which might be a hardship but I suspect it’s more than balanced by the fact that you remain blissfully unaware of it when your precious wit goes over like a brass blimp. Since the patient can’t laugh anyway, his silence needn’t be interpreted as a reprimand.

“Well, we’ll just take care of it right away before I turn you over to Jillian for a cleaning. First molar, lower right jaw, that’s a cinch, we can block the pain with Novocaine without numbing half your head in the process. Of course some practitioners of the gentle art would wind up depriving you of sensation in half your tongue for six or eight hours, but you’re in luck, Bern. You’re in the hands of the World’s Greatest Dentist and you have nothing to worry about.” Chuckle. “Except paying the bill, that is.” Full-fledged laugh.

“Urg.”

“Open a little wider? Perfect. Beautiful.” His fingers, tasting as though they’d been boiled, deftly packed my mouth with cylinders of cotton. Then he took a curved piece of plastic tubing attached to a long rubber tube and propped it at the root of my tongue, where it commenced to make slurping noises.

“This is Mr. Thirsty,” he explained. “That’s what I tell the kids. Mr. Thirsty, come to suck up all your spit so it doesn’t gum up the works. Of course I don’t put it quite so crudely for the little tykes.”

“Urg.”

“Anyway, I tell the kids this here is Mr. Thirsty, and when I whack ’em out with nitrous oxide I tell ’em they’re going for a ride in Dr. Sheldrake’s Rocket Ship. That’s ’cause it gets ’em so spacy.”

“Urg.”

“Now we’ll just dry off that gum there,” he said, peeling back my lower lip and blotting the gum with a wad of cotton. “And now we’ll give you a dab of benzocaine, that’s a local that’ll keep you from feeling the needle when we jab a quart of Novocaine into your unsuspecting tissue.” Chortle. “Just kiddin’, Bernie. No, you don’t have to give a patient a liter of the stuff if you have the skill to slip the old needle into the right spot. Oh, thank your lucky stars you’ve got the World’s Greatest Dentist on your team.”

The World’s Greatest Dentist shot me painlessly with Novocaine, readied his high-speed drill, and began doing his part in the endless fight against tooth decay. None of this hurt. What was painful, albeit not physically, was the patter of conversation he directed my way.

Not at first, though. At first everything was fine.

“I’ll tell you something, Bernie. You’re a lucky man to have me for a dentist. But that’s nothing compared to how lucky I am. You know why? I’m lucky to be a dentist.”

“Urg.”

“Not just because I make a decent living. Hell, I don’t have any guilt on that score. I work hard for my money and my charges are fair. I give value for value received. The thing about dentistry is it’s very rewarding in other ways. You know, most of the dentists I know started off wanting to be doctors. I don’t know that they had any big longing for medicine. I think half the time the attraction was that their parents thought it was a great life. Money, prestige, and the idea that you’re helping humanity. Anybody’d be happy to help humanity with all that money and prestige there as an added incentive, right?”

“Urg.”

“Speak up, Bern, I can’t hear you.” Chuckle. “Just joking, of course. How we doing? You in any pain?”

“Urg.”

“Of course you’re not. The WGD strikes again. Well, all these guys went to dental school instead. Maybe they couldn’t get accepted at medical school. A lot of bright guys can’t. Or maybe they looked at all that education and training stretching out in front of them, four years of med school and two years internship and then a residency, and when you’re a kid a few years looks like a lifetime. Your perspective on time changes when you get to be our age, but by then it’s too late, right?”

I guess we were about the same age, getting a little closer to forty than thirty but not quite close enough to panic about it. He was a big guy, taller than me, maybe six-two or six-three. His hair was a medium brown with red highlights, and he wore it fairly short in a deliberately tousled fashion. He had an open honest face, long and narrow, marked by warm brown eyes and a long down-curving nose and sprinkled with freckles. A year or two back he’d grown a mustache of the macho variety sported by male models in men’s cologne ads. It was redder than his hair and didn’t look quite bad enough for me to counsel him to shave it off, but I sort of wished he would. Beneath the mustache was a full mouth overflowing with the nicest teeth you could possibly imagine.

“Anyway, here you’ve got a load of dentists who secretly wish they were doctors. Some of them don’t even keep it a secret. And you’ve got others who went into dentistry because, hell, a man has to go into something unless he wants to go on welfare, and it looked like a decent deal, set your own hours, a steady buck, no boss over you, some prestige, and all the rest of it. I was one of this group, Bern, but in my case something wonderful happened. Know what it was?”

“Urg?”

“I fell in love with my work. Yep, that’s what happened. One thing I recognized right off the bat is dentistry’s about solving problems. Now they’re not problems of life and death, and I’ll tell you, that’s fine with me. I sure as hell don’t want patients dying on me. The doctors are welcome to all that drama. I’d rather deal with smaller life questions, like Can This Tooth Be Saved? But a man comes in here, or a woman, and I look around and take X-rays, and there’s a problem and we deal with it then and there.”