“McCarron and Bouchie,” our business cards read. “Consulting.” I was already consulting with mall designers about how women shop, and Rox just added a new dimension. Jury selection. In the month or so since we set up business we’d gotten three jobs profiling juries for private attorneys in criminal cases. Good money and the work was interesting. Then Van Der Elst needed somebody to design polls and I took the job. After the election, I thought, I’d go back to malls and juries. After the election maybe Roxie and I would find a way to spend more time together. My life, I thought, was approaching perfect. The word itself is a warning, but I didn’t notice.
“Who died?” Roxie asked when BB and I joined her at a table. “You two look like Tales from the Crypt.”
“Two ladies,” BB answered succinctly before abandoning us for the dance floor and a wrenching ballad about trains.
“Dixie Ross died this evening, in her car on the way to Kate’s fundraiser,” I told the gorgeous black woman at whose touch my heart races, every time. Roxie has big ears and a spill of freckles across her face and wears her hair in a mop of beaded braids. The sound of those beads clacking together has become music to me. My own private symphony. Sometimes I think if Roxie knew how much I love her she’d leave town. I’ll never tell her, though, because not only are we of different races, but we imagine ourselves to be mature and deeply sophisticated lesbians who are acutely aware that our “lifestyle” is full of pitfalls we’re determined to avoid.
Of course, a psychiatrist and a social psychologist understand perfectly the female proclivity toward instant bonding, nesting, and total enmeshment. So quaint. We, of course, would avoid that ickiness by maintaining our separate lives, not moving in together, keeping boundaries. The result is astronomical phone bills and a lot of driving between my place out in the desert an hour and a half from San Diego if you drive like a bat out of hell, and Roxie’s uptown urban condo. Still, we feel confident that we’ve skirted the embarrassment of typicality, at least. Meanwhile, I hoard in my heart the fact that, really, total enmeshment doesn’t look all that bad to me. I have never told Roxie that sometimes I look at expensive flatware in department stores, although I have told Brontë. Hey, we all have secrets.
“Girl?” Rox asked, meaning I was supposed to tell her who Dixie Ross was and what her death might mean.
“State assemblywoman, Democrat, big on environmental issues, education, all the good stuff,” I began. “She wasn’t very old, fifty-three, I think. Had a chance at major office later, people say. Governor, maybe. She talked Kate Van Der Elst into running for city council after Kate and her husband moved back here from the Netherlands when he retired two years ago. Dixie had been at another political thing, a bean growers’ rally or something, and was on her way to Kate’s fundraiser when it happened. She just dropped dead. But what bothers me—”
“Wait a minute,” said Roxie the doctor. “People don’t ‘just drop dead.’ You need a disease, organ failure, trauma, something like that.”
“There will be an autopsy, Rox. We’ll know then. Meanwhile, she’s the second woman politician from San Diego to die in two weeks. It’s weird.”
Roxie swung her head, stretching her neck and setting off a soft rattle of beads. I had to lean over and kiss her cheek, which made her smile.
“Why weird?” she asked, looking at me in a way that suggested every politician from here to Cleveland could perish from gout without attracting her attention. Which was elsewhere.
“Weird statistically,” I answered. “Wanna dance?”
“Not here,” she said softly, as if I might not be feeling the same way.
Right.
So we managed to get to her condo before falling into each other with that unnerving hunger for which the word “love” seems less than adequate. Later I would bring up the deaths of Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger again.
“Grossinger died of a stroke,” I said into Roxie’s ear.
“Yeah?”
“What if Ross had a stroke, too?”
“What if she did?”
“Well, she’s dead,” I noted. “Both of them are dead. That’s really all we know. It’s only nine-thirty, Rox. I’m going to call Kate at home, see if she and Pieter have heard anything more.”
Roxie merely sighed and then began pulling on clothes.
“Why are you getting dressed?” I asked.
“Because we’re going to your place, of course. Blue, I know you, and I can see the handwriting on the wall. You’ll turn into a pumpkin if you can’t get to that computer of yours tonight and crank out three hundred charts showing why these two dead women shouldn’t be dead.”
She was right.
“I’ll bring you breakfast in bed tomorrow,” I offered. “Waffles, sunnysides, I’ll make strawberry syrup from scratch.”
“Deal,” she answered, grinning despite the fact that she isn’t exactly crazy about the desert. “It’s my turn to sleep at your place, anyway. Now where did I put the Guide to Western Poisonous Snakes ?”
“It’s under your scorpion coloring book,” I answered as I dialed the Van Der Elst home number.
“I don’t think the autopsy will be performed until Monday,” Pieter told me, “but a preliminary assessment suggests that Dixie died of a lethal stroke. We’re just devastated, Blue. She and Kate had known each other all their lives.”
“Um, did Kate mention any medical problems Dixie had?” I asked. “Anything that might point to this?”
“That’s what’s so strange.” He sighed. “Kate and Dixie played tennis almost daily, told each other everything. Dixie was so careful about her health, she had a physical before each campaign. Her last exam was six months ago. She told Kate the doctor said her heart was that of a thirty-year-old. Kate had been urging her to go on this diet Kate’s on, but Dixie said the medical exam proved she didn’t need it. This thing just doesn’t make any sense.”
“No,” I told Pieter Van Der Elst, “it doesn’t.”
Slightly more than ninety minutes later I unlocked the gate to my desert Shangri-la, an abandoned motel I was able to get for a song because it has no piped-in water. Rox was yawning in the front seat beside me, humming the final bars along with Mary Chapin Carpenter on the tape deck.
“I’m dead,” she noted, heading straight for the queen-size bed in one of only two rooms actually furnished, the others unfinished and empty. It’s hard for one person to fill twelve motel rooms. The bedroom is off the area which would have been the motel office, now my office. I switched on the computer even before saying good night. Then I ran Brontë in the moonlight for a few minutes and buried those god-awful shoes in a shallow grave between two cholla cactuses before going back inside to check out stroke Web sites. The last thing I thought before leaving the starry outdoor silence was of a grainy black-and-white photo of an adobe building both blasted by light and hidden in shadow. The image left a taste of ozone on the back of my tongue.
2
Women Who Die Too Much
After draping my jester costume on its padded hanger I dropped the ugly earrings in my kitchen trash compactor. They would be smashed, along with a few soup cans, plastic bottles, and old newspapers, into a tidy rectangle I would eventually drive into Borrego Springs and toss in the dumpster behind a supermarket. Since I live two miles off a road that ultimately just stops at an unused horse camp in the middle of nowhere, there’s no trash collection here. In fact, there’s not much of anything here, which is why I like it. Just desert. Ocotillo and smoke trees, heat and silence, rocks.
Time expands in the desert, stretches and carries you along. Nothing much matters, which is why it’s easier to see it when something does. What was mattering to me was a mathematical problem. Two dead women politicians. Not one, which in any circumstance might be attributable to chance, but two. The odds had more than doubled. No longer chance. Something else.
From a bookcase I pulled the college text most likely to cause migraine headaches. Blalock’s Social Statis
tics, now in its umpteenth printing and impenetrable as ever. As a graduate student I studied Blalock, and later taught it. Nonetheless, the mere sight of it makes me clench my teeth.
Thus clenched, I turned to the chapter entitled “Probability” and forced my brain to ask the right question in the right way. Not, “What is the probability of two women politicians in the same town dying within weeks of each other?” Rather, “In an infinite progression of female politician-deaths, what proportion of them could be expected to occur within two weeks in the same town?” The difference between these two questions underlies all successful marketing projections, political polls, jury selections, strategies for disease control, urban planning, you name it. Still, it’s a difference not easily grasped. Especially by Americans, who traditionally despise generalizations and so never really understand what is meant by probability.
Americans believe in the concept of the individual and are therefore easy prey to schemes based on statistical estimations. Ask yourself why thousands of homes featuring grossly inadequate diets, parasite-infested children, and not a single book will nonetheless have cupboards full of chemically flavored petroleum by-products, ninety-channel cable TV, and a useless plastic contraption that was supposed to promote weight loss, except it broke. That’s what I mean. Fortunes are made every day by people who know how to calculate the proportion of an infinite series of, say, eighteen-year-old white males who will buy purple-sole athletic shoes at two hundred and fifty dollars a pair. The infinite series thing is the key.
And problematic for my purposes that night. There is no infinite series of dead women politicians, no database. In fact, the existence of women politicians is so recent a social artifact that even if there were a database it would be too small to be useful. I would have to spread my net more broadly. Plain “dead women,” then. Dead white women between forty-five and sixty-five, U.S. No problem.
On the Web I logged on to the Monthly Vital Statistics Report and learned that for every hundred thousand women in that age group, a little over five hundred tend to die every year, close to half of those from cancer. Of the remaining causes of death, only about twenty-two per hundred thousand may be expected to die of cerebrovascular events, of which “stroke” is only one. The odds in favor of Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger both dying of strokes had just dropped drastically, as I suspected.
Next I went to the San Diego Union-Tribune archives and read a ton of articles on both women. Neither smoked, although Grossinger had until she quit in 1987. Grossinger was the mother of three children, Ross childless. Both were committed to fitness, as is de rigeur in Southern California, Grossinger having been a jogger and Ross a tennis player. Grossinger had at one time admitted to being vegetarian but was later photographed eating fried chicken after a flare-up from the California Poultry-men’s Association. I suspected that the photo was staged for political reasons and included “vegetarian” in Grossinger’s health variables column. Ross had no food preferences known to the media. Grossinger’s sixty-eight-year-old brother was still alive and working full-time as the dean of a small private law school. Ross’s three siblings, two older and one younger, were also alive and apparently free of health problems. Grossinger’s official obituary named “cerebral hemorrhage” as the cause of death, citing her death certificate.
The American Heart Association’s Web site explained that of all four types of stroke, the type characterized by cerebral hemorrhage accounts for only ten percent. Another drop in the odds. For the purposes of my research, I decided to assume that Dixie Ross had also succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage even though Ross’s cause of death wouldn’t be available until after the autopsy.
Brontë, asleep on the indoor-outdoor Berber carpet at my feet, growled amiably at some dog-dream phantom. Her paws paddled at the carpet and a dog-smile twitched beneath her whiskers. Chasing something, I thought. She was chasing something in her mind. And so was I.
“It’s called a single dubious assumption,” I whispered to my dog. “My hypothesis. Which is that there’s something peculiar about these deaths.”
Hours later I’d keyed everything I had into a program I use to analyze factors presumed to be statistically independent of each other. Like two dead women. The deaths either were independent of each other, with no causal connection or common variable, or they weren’t. In minutes I had results. The probability of a healthy sixty-three-year-old white woman and a healthy fifty-three-year-old white woman, both Americans with good medical care and no prior history of cardiovascular disease, succumbing to cerebral hemorrhages within two weeks of each other in the same town was not statistically significant at .001. One-tenth of one percent, odds of a thousand to one. That’s a significance level so tight it’s only used in life-and-death situations, like FDA approval of new pharmaceuticals, things like that. In other words, at that level of significance it’s safe to say the thing you’re looking at is so unlikely that it just really could not happen.
“But it did happen,” I said to the numbers on my computer screen. “Which means there’s a common variable we don’t know about. Something Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger had in common. Something that, for all practical purposes, killed them.”
It was after two when I crawled into bed with Roxie.
“Don’t tell me,” she said, not really awake.
“It couldn’t have happened,” I answered. “That’s all.”
She sighed. “I told you not to tell me.”
In the morning we swam in the motel pool, I made waffles, and we swam some more. Rox had never learned to swim growing up in Gary, Indiana, despite the town’s proximity to Lake Michigan.
“Blue,” she’d explained two months earlier, “there are certain cultural differences between us. I’m black; you’re white.”
“What’s that got to do with swimming?” I’d asked in full idiot-jacket.
“I’ve never thought about it, but it probably has something to do with cars.”
“Cars?”
“Yeah. As in transportation. Not many folks in my neighborhood had cars, and you had to drive to get to the lake. On really hot days sometimes the fire department would send a guy around to open a hydrant so we color-challenged kids could cool off in the water. Not much chance to learn the backstroke.”
Actually, Roxie didn’t feel her life was a total waste in the absence of swimming. She’d done just fine, she pointed out, managing college, medical school, a psychiatric residency, and forensic board certifications in two states without swimming to them. She had a secure job at Donovan State Prison, a lucrative private practice, and now our little consulting business, which was pulling in impressive fees. From time to time she got job offers from hospitals and universities all over the country, but so far none had appealed to her.
I was so mortified at my own lack of social awareness, however, that I felt compelled to right the wrong. I would teach Roxie to swim or die trying. In the first few lessons I thought I really might die trying, until I bought a book on swimming instruction. It suggested starting with a kickboard, and that did the trick. Lacking supervision, Rox could still probably drown in a wading pool, but she loves that kickboard. Brontë does, too. The two of them were splashing up and down the pool, Brontë on the board in her teal-blue life jacket with Rox hanging on and kicking, when I first mentioned what I thought should be done next.
“Probably ought to call the FBI, don’t you think?” I said casually.
“Why FBI?” Rox answered from churning blue water, not looking at me.
“Well, two elected officials dead under statistically impossible circumstances. The FBI should be informed, shouldn’t it?”
“Why?”
“Doesn’t the FBI investigate suspicious deaths of elected officials?”
“No,” Roxie answered, clearly hoping her firm, businesslike tone would end the discussion.
I sat on the edge of the pool and remembered my mother trying the same ploy. No dice then, no dice now. At thirty-five
, I realized, I still have characteristics of a second-grader.
“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I asked.
“Tell me the part you don’t understand,” she said, giving up and paddling dog and board to my side of the pool.
Brontë climbed out and I took off her life jacket so she could shake the water from her fur. Rox stayed in the pool, every one of her beaded braids sparkling in sunlight. I hated to be tedious about this, but I had to know.
“The part about the FBI not investigating suspicious deaths of elected officials,” I said.
“What does the F in FBI stand for, Blue?” Rox the professor.
“Federal.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning the national government. What’s your point?”
Roxie rested her chin on the pool edge and spoke into the splash gutter. “The FBI would only investigate the suspicious death of a federal official, Blue,” she explained. “Also espionage, terrorism, bank robbery, kidnapping, bribery, crimes which cross state lines, and those especially mandated by law. Police brutality, for example. That’s a relatively new one. But not deaths of state or local elected officials unless local law enforcement authorities request FBI help.”
“Oh,” I thought out loud as I stood to pull on a baggy T-shirt and shorts I’d thrown on a chaise. “Then I should call the San Diego Police Department, right?”
“Wrong. You shouldn’t call anybody because you don’t really know anything. Your numbers are based on guesses. Dixie Ross hasn’t even been autopsied yet. Wait until Monday, and then if the autopsy finds cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death you might offer your statistical analysis to the local police as a courtesy, nothing more. They won’t read it anyway.”
Rox kicked off to the steps at the shallow end of the pool and climbed out to sit in the shade and read. I went into my office/living room to get a book for myself and stared at the phone. It seemed a shame to let all that research wait.
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 2
