Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (48 page)

“Chief of detectives asked for you personally.”

“He doesn’t have a clue who I am, does he?” At the time, I had been working in uniform for two years, assigned to a patrol
car on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“Not really. But when I told him you’d been moaning all over the station house about your abscessed wisdom tooth, he smiled
for the first time in half a year.”

I pushed away from the table. A week of evening shifts, 4:00 p.m. to midnight, had exhausted me completely and drained me
of my normal good humor. I had spent most of this tour handling a domestic dispute in a high-rise on Riverside Drive, trying
to determine which of the two intoxicated combatants had wielded the first broomstick. The last thing I needed to find when
I got back to the command on West 82nd Street was Chapman, who waited for me while I showered and changed into jeans and a
sweater. We had walked to a bar on the corner of Amsterdam Avenue, where I nursed a drink while he made me the offer he knew
I couldn’t refuse.

“What’s the deal, exactly?” I asked.

“Lieutenant Borelli says the chief has promised a promotion to whoever agrees to go undercover on this one. Two weeks from
today, you could be a third-grade detective. You wouldn’t pass up a shot at
that,
would you?”

Chapman worked in the detective squad at the same precinct. He knew I was hungry to get out of uniform and start doing real
investigative work, but he also knew that my chances of doing that any time soon—barring some serendipitous arrest of a notorious
serial killer—were slim or none.

“I’ve got principles, Mike. I just can’t see myself saying yes to letting some pervert—”

“No problem, pal,” he answered, paying our tab at the bar. “I respect you for that. Sandy Denman’s been begging me for the
case, anyway. She’ll be thrilled you don’t want to step up to the plate on this one.”

“What time tomorrow does Borelli want to see me?” I hated Sandy Denman. She’d been on the job only half as long as I had,
but Denman had grabbed the commissioner’s attention by talking two jumpers in a suicide pact down off the Brooklyn Bridge.
One week before that, she had interrupted a robbery in progress at the back door of City Hall, an hour before the mayor’s
scheduled press conference on the latest figures confirming reduced crime rates in the Big Apple. I’d be damned if I would
let Sandy get the shield before I did. “And exactly what do I have to let this dentist do to me, anyway?”

____

T
HREE DAYS LATER
, on Tuesday morning, I sat in the reception area of the office of Melvin Trichner, DDS, filling out his patient information
form using my real name, Samantha Atwell. When I completed the paperwork, I was ushered into one of the rooms at the end of
a long corridor and invited to sit back in his reclining chair and relax.

“This is an awfully thick book, young lady,” Trichner said, grinning at me through his bonded, bleached teeth, as he lifted
Poe’s
Tales of Mystery and Imagination
from my lap and placed it on the counter behind him. “Do you like the macabre?”

Somehow, I had thought the heavy tome would hold my short denim skirt in place throughout the examination, but I didn’t protest
when Trichner removed it and leaned in to inspect my mouth. “I love thrillers,” I answered, before he spread my jaws, hooked
his little round mirror on my tender gum, and peered at the lower left quadrant, which had been throbbing madly all week.

My hands gripped the arms of the chair as he poked around at the impacted tooth, and I tried to distract myself by staring
at the garish assortment of neon-colored flowers and tropical birds which decorated his Hawaiian-style shirt.

“Yes, that baby has got to come out,” Trichner announced, rolling away from me on his four-wheeled stool. “How’s Thursday
morning?” He picked up my chart and studied it to make sure I had answered all the questions about current medications and
physical history.

“I’m terrified about the pain,” I murmured to him in my whiniest voice.

“I’ll give you some pills to hold you over these couple of days.”

“Not that pain. I mean, I’m worried about how much it will hurt when you pull my tooth.”

Back came a flash of the phony smile, as he clasped his hands on top of mine and rubbed them together several times. “I’m
absolutely painless. Some Valium before the Novocain,” Trichner offered, “and you’ll have nothing but pleasant dreams. Have
you got a friend who can take you home afterward? You’ll be a bit woozy for a few hours.”

“Yeah,” I said. “My boyfriend can do that.”

“Great. You just dream about him while I put you under. I promise, it’ll be an erotic experience.”

____

“B
INGO
. T
HAT’S JUST
the language he used to describe what would happen to each of the other victims. This is a ‘go.’” Chapman was pumped as he
drove me back to the station house from the dental office on Central Park West and 81st Street.

While Borelli and his men plotted the technical procedures for the video surveillance that would monitor our encounter, I
sat in the squad room reading the case reports on the first three complaints.

Victim number one was a student at Barnard College when she had visited Trichner eighteen months earlier. She had awakened
from the anesthesia in his office after an extraction, certain that he had been kissing and caressing her. She went straight
back to her dorm and told her roommate, who brought the young woman downtown to make a police report. Like most professionals,
Trichner benefited from people’s perception that they are unlikely to be criminals. Instead of arresting the dentist, Detective
Conrad Sully had asked him if he could think of any reason for his patient’s bizarre recollection.

“Of course I can,” Trichner said, calmly handing the veteran investigator a brochure that described the sedative he had used.
“If you read this, you’ll see it cautions that the drug is hallucinogenic. What that means is that sexual fantasies are a
frequent side effect when we use it.”

Sully took the pamphlet back to his office, called the student to tell her that she had imagined the entire experience, and
closed the case out by writing the word “Unfounded” at the end of his report.

When the second witness showed up in the same squad room eight months later, the lieutenant referred her complaint to his
expert, Detective Sully. This time he didn’t even have to leave his desk. The nineteen-year-old hairdresser, who reported
that she woke up with her clothing in disarray and a faint memory of being fondled and kissed, read the literature herself
before Sully replaced it in his case folder. She left the precinct believing that she had falsely accused poor Dr. Trichner
because of her drug-induced intoxication. Sully’s brain was sometimes thicker than his brogue.

Mike Chapman was working with Sully when the third victim walked into the station house the week before last. She was an ingénue
who had played in a few television soaps and had been referred to Trichner by her brother when she needed a root canal.

“This gotta be some kind of wonder drug,” Chapman remarked. “No other dentist in town has this problem, but all Melvin’s patients
are dreaming that he’s slobbering over’em.”

The circumstances were unique, and no one in the department had ever investigated a matter like this before. Lieutenant Borelli
wanted to explore a way to get evidence against Trichner that couldn’t be attacked in a courtroom as the product of a witness’s
imagination. He took his idea to the chief of detectives for approval.

“Borelli asked the chief if he could send in an undercover policewoman and apply for a court order to conceal a video camera
in Trichner’s office, both to protect the patient and to secure the evidence,” Mike said.

“That’s legal?” I asked.

“You’ll make history, kid,” Chapman said. “First time it’s ever been done. The chief had to call the district attorney’s office
to draft the order. They analogized it to a wiretap. The prosecutor told the judge that an audio bugging device like they
use in taps wouldn’t do any good in a situation like this. This bum doesn’t need to utter a word to these women. You could
send a dozen undercover cops in, but they’ll be sedated too. Without a camera, we don’t have any way to prove what’s going
on inside. We don’t even know what crime he’s committing.”

“What makes you think he’ll hit on
me?
”

Chapman gave me the once-over. “You’re his type, Atwell. Long and lean, dark hair, mid-twenties. And a little bit flaky. I’m
betting he’ll want to touch, Sam.”

“What’ll you charge him with? I mean, what does he do, exactly?”

“That’s the mystery, Sam. Nobody remembers, nobody knows.”

____

I
GOT TO
the precinct at six a.m. on Thursday. It was a steaming hot summer day, so my tank top and tube skirt looked appropriate
to the season and didn’t leave much to the imagination. The tech guys from the department had broken into Trichner’s office
the night before—a court-authorized burglary—and hidden their camera behind the louvered air-conditioning duct, which was
perched conveniently above the dental chair. A video monitor was set up in the basement of the building and wired through
to the recording device, so Borelli could supervise the operation from underground. In the bottom of my shoulder bag, a Kel
transmitter had been secreted, so that the backup team could hear all the conversation between Trichner and me, and I could
summon them at any moment if I was aware of trouble.

Mike was to accompany me to the office and pose as my boyfriend. The minute Borelli observed any improper conduct while I
was sedated, he would beep Chapman so he could race down the hallway, open the door to the examining room, and interrupt Trichner
in the act. I had signed on for a little bit of sexual abuse—caressing and kissing at worst—but not for anything more invasive
than that.

The Muzak was piping in a soulless orchestral rendition of Diana Ross’s “Touch Me in the Morning” when the receptionist waved
me into the rear of the office to begin the procedure. Mike was singing the lyrics as he watched me walk away. A routine teeth-cleaning
appointment makes me tremble under the best of circumstances. My anxiety about the procedure seemed palpable as I entered
the narrow corridor to surrender myself to Trichner’s wandering hands.

Melvin, as he told me to call him, closed the door of the small room after he entered and flipped on the light switch, unknowingly
starting up the camera as he gave it the juice. He chattered with me about my personal life as he scooted around on his stool,
setting his tools in place for the extraction. Then he lifted my shirt and put the stethoscope against my chest, announcing
to me that I had a good, strong heartbeat.

“Think loving thoughts,” Trichner told me, stroking my arm as he wrapped the tourniquet in place before he gave me the injection.
“You look nervous—they’ll calm you down.”

The last things I remember before going under were the sound of the Boston Pops segueing into a syrupy version of “Feelings,”
the sight of a flock of shocking-pink flamingos on Trichner’s shirt, and the warm whoosh of the sedative as he pumped it into
my slender arm.

____

I
WAS LOST
in a thick fog. Somewhere off in the distance, I could hear the scraping noise of the door pulling open along its metal tracking,
the sound of a familiar voice, the scuffling of several feet, and the words “You’re under arrest, Doc.”

The fog thickened and my head rolled from side to side. Someone lowered the headrest on the dental chair and leaned me backward.
My eyes flickered open to a display of the pink flamingos, swaying now against a turquoise landscape that was moving with
them in undulating waves. The lids closed again, as I continued fighting the nausea.

The noise was gone, and this time there was only a woman in a nurse’s uniform, holding my shoulder back against the chair.
When I tried to move, she explained that I needed to rest in that position, to increase the supply of oxygen flowing to my
brain. I was awake, and conscious only of the intense pain in my jaw.

Lieutenant Borelli insisted that Chapman drive me to Roosevelt Hospital, in order for a physician to draw blood so that we
could be certain of what drugs Trichner had administered to me. On the way over there, I asked what had happened while I was
under.

“Melvin went right to work extracting your tooth. The moment he finished, he pushed the tray which was holding all the dental
equipment out of the way. Then he actually lifted you out of the chair and propped you up against his body, holding you in
place by wrapping his legs around you.”

“But didn’t I do—?”

“Do anything? You were in the twilight zone, pal. You were as limp as a rag doll.”

“Do I want to know the rest?”

“He lifted the back of your shirt and unhooked your bra. Then he started to caress you, moving his hands around in front,
to touch your breasts.”

“Didn’t I feel that? Didn’t I try to stop him?”

“Are you kidding? It’s like necrophilia, Sam, only your body was still warm. No wonder these women can’t remember anything.
None of them even realized he pulled them out of the chair.”

“How could he take the chance that I wouldn’t come to in the middle of all this and just start screaming at him?” I asked.

“Not a chance. By standing you up, he makes sure the oxygen doesn’t flow to your brain fast enough. You’re not gonna regain
consciousness until he settles you back in the proper position. You’d never know what happened, as all these complaints prove.”

“How long did you let it go on?”

“The guys beeped me as soon as he started to fondle you. Sexual abuse in the first degree. We had our felony—didn’t need another
thing. When I pulled open the door, he had his hands on your rear end, squeezing it and rubbing himself against you. That’s
where I stopped him.”

“Did he say anything when you burst in?”

“Yeah,” Mike answered. “Trichner told me he was just trying to resuscitate you. That you had gone into respiratory distress
and he was trying to help you breathe. Cool as a cucumber.”