Death in the Dentist’s Chair: A Steve Raymond D.D.S. Mystery

By Eric B. Olsen

A Dental Probe . . .

Crime-solving dentist Steve Raymond is back in an all-new mystery. When a colleague brings disturbing news of a patient who has died in her chair, she calls on the Seattle dentist for help. Little does Dr. Raymond realize that his offer to treat the surviving family members will draw him into another murder investigation. At the same time, Steve is playing saxophone with the best band he’s ever been in. But the choice between music and dentistry is just one of the decisions Steve will have to make. Suspects abound, and time is running out, as death sits in a most unlikely place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781546278887

Eric B. Olsen

Eric B. Olsen is the author of six works of fiction in three different genres. He has written a medical thriller entitled Death’s Head, as well as the horror novel Dark Imaginings. He is also the author of three mystery novels, Proximal to Murder and Death in the Dentist’s Chair featuring amateur sleuth Steve Raymond, D.D.S., and The Seattle Changes featuring private detective Ray Neslowe. In addition, he is the author of If I Should Wake Before I Die, a collection of short horror fiction. Today Mr. Olsen writes primarily non-fiction, including The Death of Education, an exposé of the public school system in America, The Films of Jon Garcia: 2009-2013, an analysis of the work of the acclaimed Portland independent filmmaker, and a collection of essays entitled The Intellectual American. His most recent book is Ethan Frome: Analysis in Context, a contextual close reading of Edith Wharton’s classic novel. Mr. Olsen lives in the Pacific Northwest with his wife. Please visit the author’s web site at https://sites.google.com/site/ericbolsenauthor/home or contact by email at [e-mail].

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© 1994, 2003, 2019 . All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse  02/27/2019

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7889-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-7888-7 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images

are models, and such images are being used for illustrative

purposes only. Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

This is a work of fiction. Certain long-standing businesses, institutions, and public offices are mentioned, but the characters involved are wholly imaginary. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Introduction

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Till Death Do Us Part

About the Author

for Gary Lynn Vaughn,

Steve, Howard, Rick,

Tracy

and Patrick

Introduction

The genesis of Death in the Dentist’s Chair is probably the least interesting of all my novels. After finishing the final edit on my horror novel Dark Imaginings, I set that book aside without even submitting it to editors and agents. I still firmly believed at the time that my first Steve Raymond mystery was a good book, and that editors and agents just needed something else to make them see the potential in it that I did. On it’s own, they had unanimously decided to pass on Proximal to Murder. But with another book in the series completed, I felt the series itself would be much more marketable. So it was with that in mind in mid-October of 1993 that I embarked on the second book in my dental mystery series, finishing it just seven months later at the end of May 1994.

The inspiration for the story itself, however, is a little more compelling. The idea for the plot, as well as the title, originally came from a short story by Cornell Woolrich called Death Sits in the Dentist’s Chair. In that story a dentist kills a man by leaving the decay in his patient’s tooth, then placing poison in the prep and filling it over with an ugly looking chunk of amalgam. When the patient’s tooth continues to hurt days later he makes the obvious decision to go see another dentist, and it’s that dentist who sees the blatantly poor dental work and immediately goes to work drilling out the clunky looking filling. But when he gets down into the prep the poison in the patient’s tooth is suddenly released into his mouth and kills him in the chair almost instantly. Woolrich’s story begins with the second dentist appointment and then works its way backward to discover the true murderer.

I had already used the idea of poison in the cavity prep for Proximal to Murder, but the death itself reminded me of an event that happened in my father’s own dental office. It occurred during his second year of practice, after finishing his apprenticeship with another dentist and setting out on his own in a new building. The patient he was working on had a long history of heart trouble, and so it almost wasn’t a matter of if the patient was going to die of a heart attack, but when. Unfortunately it turned out to be in my father’s dental chair. Just out the back door of my dad’s office, across the alley, were a group of buildings where his own medical doctor practiced. So after he failed to resuscitate his patient—in a time before 911—Dad ran down and brought back our family physician to see what he could do. But it was too late. He never talked about the incident to me, but my mom says he felt pretty bad about the whole thing, which is understandable. The family didn’t blame him, though, because of the patient’s already fragile medical condition, and I’m sure that helped.

Another incident about my dad’s practice came to me second hand, a decade after the book had been written, from the editor of our small-town newspaper after I moved back home in 2005. One afternoon he had come into the diner that was located directly behind my dad’s dental office, only to find my mom and dad and his new apprentice finishing lunch. The editor came over to say hello and could see that my dad’s recent dental school graduate looked pretty glum. According to the editor, a patient had died in the chair of the young dentist just that morning and the trauma was still evident on his face. After the waitress came over and took away their plates my dad apparently said, not quite with a smile on his face, something like, Okay, let’s get back in there. My mom doesn’t remember the incident, but the description of my dad’s behavior certainly feels genuine. After suffering something similar early in his career, he knew better than anyone how important it would be to get back to work and not let an event like that shake the confidence of a new dentist.

Though the dental portions of the novel required a lot of research the rest of the story came pretty easily, as Steve Raymond was little more than a fictionalized version of myself. In Proximal to Murder the music scenes happened to me almost exactly as they were written, but in Death in the Dentist’s Chair I took a lot of liberties with the truth, especially at the end. The character of Ted Aykroyd was based on a real blues guitarist I had briefly worked with in Seattle. He did try to recruit me to be in his band, but things never went past the planning stages—at least in terms of my participation. The band as it appears in the novel was created from an amalgam of players I had worked with in the past, and the gig in Westport is essentially a version of a similar one I played in Ocean Shores. The final concert performance, however, is based on an actual event. In the mid-1980s I had the very good fortune to play saxophone with a blues group called the Midnight Rhythm Band when I was living in Olympia. Most, if not all, of the members had gone to the Evergreen State College and were fairly unconventional guys in a lot of ways. More importantly, they were incredibly intelligent, far more than I was at the time. But they were also terrific musicians and it was a privilege to play with them.

One of our final gigs together was opening up for Albert Collins at the Evergreen Ballroom, which has since burned down. It was a fantastic way to end our partnership. One thing I’ll never forget from that night was meeting Coco Montoya backstage. He was playing in Albert’s band at the time, and we reconnected several years later when he was coming through Seattle with Walter Trout and sat in with our band playing my guitar. The reluctant leader of the Midnight Rhythm Band was Gary Vaughn. I say reluctant because none of us were really natural front men, but since he sang most of the lead vocals it sort of fell to him to assume the job of talking to the audience. While our drummer, Patrick, quickly became my best friend, the rest of the guys were fairly enigmatic, at least to me, and I never really got to know them all that well. Gary, however, was easily the most intriguing of the bunch for me. He looked essentially the way I describe him in the novel—which always reminded me of Waddy Wachtel. He was relaxed and easy going and liked to laugh, and he was involved in one of the other memorable moments I had in the band. One night we were playing for a private party out at a house in rural Thurston County somewhere. It wasn’t a paying gig but a jam session, which could often times be more fun because of the experimentation that it led to. Solos were longer, we tried out other songs that weren’t on our set list, and the playing was a lot looser and more free. I’ll never forget a moment I had with Gary during one of my extended solos. I suddenly found myself playing an ascending chromatic scale in quarter notes and decided to take it all the way up the horn. He smiled and looked over at me with a mixture of amusement and surprise because, while conventional in one respect, it was completely unexpected in a blues context and yet it still worked.

For the end of my novel I decided to make Gary a distant relative of Stevie Ray Vaughan—which he wasn’t, as his last name is actually spelled differently—and essentially replicate the Albert Collins show opening. The rest of the concert, however, is pure fiction, as I was going to school at the time and I’m pretty sure I left even before Albert Collins played. I was certainly never invited onstage with him. Gary’s band in the novel is actually based on David Lindley’s group, El Rayo-x, which I was fortunate enough to see on their final tour when they played at the Backstage in Ballard—also now defunct—around the time I was writing the manuscript. Back then I thought it would be a fun way of showing my appreciation for a guy whose playing and singing I had always admired, though I don’t think he ever knew he was in the book. It was in 2005 when Patrick gave me the sad news that Gary had died. He was married and had a small farm in Montana, and suffered a fatal heart attack during an operation to correct an arrhythmia. It was a real shock for me to have someone I had known and played with for several years die so young. But looking back now it makes me happy that I decided to put him in the book and I can always remember him in that way. So in producing this new edition I decided to re-dedicate the novel to him, as well as all the other members of the Midnight Rhythm Band.

In terms of the book itself, Death in the Dentist’s Chair is the first novel I wrote completely on my own—for better or for worse. The only help I received on it was from mystery author Stephen Greenleaf, who was living in Seattle at the time. He was teaching a class on mystery writing through the University of Washington extension school, and so I decided to sign up for it that fall. He read the first few chapters and it was his idea to alter the cooking scene at the beginning by adding two words in order to create a subtle undercurrent of tension between Steve and Janet, an idea which I then happily returned to later as a way to end the story. This book is also the culmination of a five-year period in which I was able to write four novels—an accomplishment I’m justifiably proud of. That intense period of writing also allowed me to indulge in my desire to interconnect all of my fiction into a single, unified world. While this was the third novel to feature Steve and Janet Raymond, Janet also had a small role in my horror novel, Dark Imaginings. Other characters from that book that appeared in this one are Paige and Giles Barrett, as well as Dan Lasky, Ray Brooke, and my fictional hometown of Hallowell, Washington. But when even my pair of dental mysteries failed to sell I eventually moved on to other things, and I wouldn’t write another novel for ten years.

My first self-published version of Proximal to Murder came out in 2000, and Death in the Dentist’s Chair followed three years later. It received positive comments from readers, just like its predecessor, and the same honorable mention in the Writer’s Digest self-publishing contest, but ultimately self-publishing is a dead-end field. There’s just too much self-published mediocrity flooding the market to be able to get noticed. The goal then for publishing my fiction this time around is not profit, but preservation and posterity. Regardless of its relative quality, this series of unpublished manuscripts represents a tremendous amount of artistic toil that is not without some measure of worth. And so to see them all published within a few years of each other, in the order they were written, has been a satisfying process. With any luck, they will be equally satisfying to read.

Eric B. Olsen

January 24, 2019

You’ll use Novocain this time. No tricks.

                        --- Ridley Pearson

           Hard Fall

No Novocain. It dulls the senses.

                        --- Jack Nicholson

Little Shop of Horrors, 1960.

1

Dr. Paige Barrett bit her lower lip nervously and then started back in. That was the first time I’d ever seen him, she said. "That day in the office. I recognize all of our patients, and I’d never seen him before.

Connie had made up a new file—I could tell because we use these color-coded tabs to distinguish between new patients, regulars, and ones who haven’t been back in a couple of years. Then she nodded to emphasize the fact. He was new.

She took her mug off the desk, fidgeted with it, and looked down into the coffee as if it might hold an answer, but she didn’t take a drink.

Dr. Barrett’s shoulder-length blond hair curled slightly in at the ends, framing a face that was free of makeup. She wore dark-green slacks and a matching scarf, tied like a necktie, over a charcoal-gray blouse. It was a warm day in August and she wasn’t wearing a jacket. On her feet were brown penny loafers over white ankle socks, and on her ears, tiny emerald earrings.

She took a breath, re-crossed her legs, and continued. God, he was such a nice man, my age, forty or forty-one, I think. Delicate eyebrows furrowed over her brown eyes for a moment and then she put her coffee cup back on the desk. This thing is killing me.

She pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of her slacks as tears welled in her eyes. "First I looked at his medical history—I always do that with a new patient. Connie circles and highlights anything that isn’t checked no, so I won’t miss it. He’d had a broken arm a couple of years before, but nothing else. On the line where it asked for allergies he’d written NONE.

He was from Latvia or Lithuania, one of the Baltic States, and he could barely speak any English. His name was Andre Matulis.

Paige smiled bravely. "It was kind of fun in the operatory trying to communicate with him. We used hand signals, pantomime, and with the few English words that he recognized we managed to get out of him that he was having some temperature sensitivity in one of his teeth.

"When I examined him I found a lot of decay in one of his molars, number eighteen. My explorer stuck so deep it almost wouldn’t come out. That was it, though. He really looked pretty good otherwise. I had Vi ready a syringe of Novocaine and after the injection he seemed fine, so I went to look in on another patient while I waited for the anesthetic to take effect. I hadn’t even washed my hands when Vi yelled from the other room. I was so glad she hadn’t screamed.

"When I came back to the operatory I could see he was breathing rapidly and sweating. He looked so frightened. I could tell he wasn’t getting enough oxygen, and when I felt for a pulse there wasn’t one. Jesus, that scared the living hell out of me. I knew then that it was anaphylactic shock. I asked Vi if she’d called an ambulance and she said that Connie already had. Then he stopped breathing altogether.

"While I was trying to get a syringe of epinephrine ready he jumped out of the chair. He was in a panic. Luckily, Marcy came in a second later, and between her and Vi they were able to get him to sit back down. But before I could even inject him he grabbed for his chest and passed out. He had a heart attack.

"I gave him the epinephrine anyway, and then we lowered the chair all the way back and I started CPR. Marcy was doing the breathing, but she wasn’t able to get any air down his windpipe. We were about to do an emergency tracheotomy when the paramedics finally arrived. They did what they could but I’m pretty sure that he was already dead.

Ten minutes, she said, and the tears started again. "The fucking hospital’s right next door and it took them ten minutes to get here.

"The medical examiner said that the heart attack was brought on by stress, and that’s what he listed as the cause of death, secondary to the allergic reaction. The inquest was yesterday. The police had taken the medical history as evidence—it had Mr. Matulis’s signature on the bottom, and on that basis I was exonerated. Now I’m just waiting for the malpractice suit.

He had a family, you know, a wife—I don’t know how many kids. He worked at a bottling plant. He was an electrical engineer. He was taking English lessons so he could get on at Boeing. God, I feel like shit.

Paige used the fingers of both hands to pinch the bridge of her nose. More tears came, and she dried them.

I’m so sorry, Paige, I said. I wish there was something I could do.

There is. She looked across the desk at me through red-rimmed eyes. His whole family had appointments. They hadn’t had dental treatment in years. Needless to say, they won’t come near my office now—not even to see Marcy or Jeanette, but I have their phone number. Is there any way you could call them up and offer your services? I don’t want them to have to go without.

Sure, I said, as she slid me a folded piece of white paper. I’d be glad to.

I’d only met Paige Barrett once before that day, even though I’d seen her a thousand times. It had been at least two years earlier, at a Washington State Dental Society function held at the Sheraton in downtown Seattle. I was late getting there that night, and as a pleasant consequence I found myself seated at a table with three female dentists, Paige Barrett and her two partners, Jeanette Burke and Marcy Miller.

I recognized them all, of course, because our offices are in the same building. In addition to our two general dentistry practices, the Elliott Bay Dental Health Center is home to two orthodontists, an endodontist, two oral surgeons, and a pedodontist.

The scramble for patients, sometimes the very same ones, is the only drawback I’ve encountered in my five years of working there. Paige and her partners were in the building several years ahead of me, so I still haven’t been able to fill up my appointment book every day. But that aside, it’s a nice building to be in.

With Marcy and Jeanette on the other side of the table, I spent nearly the entire evening of the Dental Society meeting talking with Paige. In the beginning our conversation was mostly about work, but after dinner and the program we ventured into more personal territory. She told me about her divorce several years earlier, that her husband had been a writer and was now living somewhere in Grays Harbor. My family life was considerably better off, and I showed her pictures of my wife, Janet, and my two kids, Cathie, now nine, and Timmy, now seven.

Though we had exchanged greetings going to and from the parking lot many times since then, this was only the second time we’d ever had an extended conversation. I felt awful that it had to be under these circumstances. I’d had my share of dental emergencies in my five years of practice, but no one had ever died in my chair before. I wanted to do whatever I could for her, and told her as much now.

Thank you, Steve. This really means a lot to me.

Don’t even mention it. Are you going to be taking some time off?

She nodded. My hands shake at just the thought of picking up a syringe. I’ll be spending the next couple of weeks down on the coast. Ocean Shores. I have a summer place there.

That sounds like a good idea, I said, and with that the conversation seemed to wind to a close.

Paige Barrett wasn’t what you’d call a classical beauty, but she was beautiful nevertheless. The tiny wrinkles around