The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “San Diego Police Department, Desk Sergeant John Garcia,” a young male voice answered seconds later.

  “Um, I’d like to report a statistical analysis,” I began. Dumb as a mud fence, as everyone used to say back in Waterloo, Illinois, where I grew up.

  “A what?”

  “It’s about the deaths of Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross. I’m a social psychologist,” I said, and then gave my name, address, phone number, and credentials. “These deaths are a statistical anomaly. What I mean is, if Dixie Ross also died of a cerebral hemorrhage, then the police should be aware that the likelihood of both these deaths occurring naturally is pretty much zero.”

  “You are aware that this call is being tape-recorded,” Garcia said over the every-ten-second beeping of a legal taping device.

  “Yes.”

  “I’ll make sure the information gets to the right department, Dr. McCarron. Thank you for calling.”

  The response wasn’t exactly a tribute to my skill with unusual data, but I felt that surge of self-righteousness you get when you’ve done the Right Thing. It’s a heartland concept, the dubious birthright of people born in a thousand little towns with a church at one end of Main Street and a grain depot at the other. Unfortunately, the Right Thing is almost always a gross oversimplification which will later reveal itself to have been the Wrong Thing. But its immediate, gooey glow is at times irresistible. I picked up the novel I was reading about incest within a religious cult in Nova Scotia and went outside to join Rox.

  “Were you a victim of incest?” I asked the woman about whom after a relationship of only two months I still knew not nearly enough.

  “Nah, my grandma wasn’t into kinky stuff,” she answered from beneath a bright blue beach umbrella. “You called the police department, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Why do you think there’s so much attention to themes of incest in contemporary fiction?”

  “Everything’s economics, Blue. Incest may be a metaphor for fears about not participating in the global marketplace, the ills inherent in keeping the money at home. Also, it gives you a feeble dodge from my question about calling the police. I can’t believe you did that. What did they say?”

  “That the information would be given to the right department.”

  “I take it they were deeply impressed, then?”

  “Rox, it was just a desk clerk. Want to drive up to Julian for the afternoon?”

  Roxie is easily distracted by desserts, and the little mining town just up a mountain from my place in Borrego Springs has become an apple-growing mecca. Julian offers the best apple pies in California. Besides, it’s always twenty degrees cooler up there.

  So we loaded Brontë into my truck cab and spent the afternoon gorging on apple pie à la mode and perusing Julian’s shops. I bought a quilted red bandanna for Brontë and Rox got a pretty inlaid wood kaleidoscope for her office at the prison. She said it might help some of her clients grasp the concept that there are different ways of looking at things. We were having such a good time I didn’t point out the fact that her clients were more likely to steal it than ponder its message.

  On the way back we stopped at a grocery and got ground turkey and veggies to grill outside by the pool. We’d listen to Rossini and Garth Brooks on my outside speakers, full blast, we decided. Then Sousa marches and Strauss waltzes and when it got dark, old Charles Aznavour songs, in French. It occurred to neither of us that the best-laid plans of mice and even women frequently run afoul of reality. And also the law.

  There was an unmarked car which nonetheless bore not-so-subtle marks of cop parked beside the locked gate to my property when we got home. Why don’t they ever get it that band radios, mikes, riot gun racks on the doors, and perforated metal plates separating front and back seats are dead giveaways? A fortyish guy with a sandy, graying crew cut, sunglasses, and a blue nylon windbreaker with SDPD across the chest unfolded his skinny six feet from the car and scowled at the sunset, then at us.

  Brontë growled from her seat on Roxie’s lap, clearly wishing she didn’t look so lapdoggy.

  “Looking for Dr. Emily McCarron. Police business. You her?” “She,” I countered. “It’s a nominative of address. Are you she. And yes, I am.”

  “Emily” is legally my name, but I never use it except on tax forms and other official paperwork. It sounded like an alias.

  “I hate it when this happens,” Roxie grumbled. “Next he’s going to show a badge, and there goes dinner.”

  “We have a package of ground turkey in this vehicle,” she addressed the cop, who I was certain was going to turn out to be a detective. “Excessive delays between here and the refrigerator could be life-threatening. Salmonella, E. coli, botulism, anthrax. Surely I don’t need to go on.”

  “Detective Rathbone.” He identified himself as if his surname had been a lifelong burden. Then he held up a badge in a leather wallet and lit a cigarette. Unfiltered. “Dr. McCarron, did you phone police headquarters earlier today with some information about the deaths of Senator Mary Harriet Grossinger and Assemblywoman Dixie Ross?”

  “Yes. I said these deaths could not have happened by chance. You drove all the way out here to confirm a statement you have on tape? And my calculations, as I said to your desk clerk, are based on the assumption that Ross also died of cerebral hemorrhage. We won’t know whether that’s true or not until Monday, after the autopsy.”

  “Oh, we know it’s true. The autopsy was performed this morning.” He pushed his Ray•Bans to rest across the top of his bristly hair, then pulled them to rest on his nose again. I suspected the gesture meant something coplike, maybe even threatening, but since I wasn’t sure, it seemed merely indecisive.

  “What we’d like to know,” he went on, trying for a knowledgeable sneer, “is how you knew it was true before anybody else did.” Here his tanned brow grew furrows as he gazed at the cigarette between his fingers. “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to come down into San Diego, to headquarters, answer a few questions. We’ve already got your ex-con friend, Berryman. Says he doesn’t know anything. They never do.”

  “You’ve got BB?” Rox and I said in unison.

  “Yup.” Bad John Wayne imitation.

  “He was at a fundraiser where Ross was expected yesterday evening, except she died before she got there. Apparently he got some kind of job at this fundraiser through some guy who calls himself a psychiatrist. Somebody named Bushy he met in prison. And you were at this fundraiser, McCarron. Since you seem to know more than anyone about what happened to Dixie Ross, we’d like to talk to you. Another detective is out looking for this so-called Dr. Bushy. We need to get to the bottom of this, fast. So why don’t you just turn around and head down to San Diego. I’ll meet you at—”

  “Wait a minute, Rathbone,” I began. “There’s more to this than an autopsy. You guys wouldn’t be running around harassing innocent citizens on a Saturday if—”

  “And I’m Dr. Roxanne Bouchie,” Rox snarled from beneath Brontë, who also was snarling, showing teeth. “That’s Boo-she, not Bushy. It sounds as though you’re detaining Mr. Berryman illegally, and you have no business detaining Dr. McCarron or me. You’re out of your jurisdiction here and you know it, so stop grandstanding. This is San Diego County Sheriff’s Department’s turf, not the city police department’s. What’s going on?”

  “You’re this bogus shrink Berryman met in prison?” Rathbone said, nodding over what was trying to be a snide grin. “Sure. Except Berryman was at Donovan. No women prisoners out there last time I checked.”

  Rox was grinding her teeth. I could see jaw muscles working in the left side of her face.

  “I’m the staff psychiatrist at Donovan Prison,” she said in a tone I don’t ever want directed at me. A tone that could turn ordinary cottage cheese to a tub of cinders. “What, exactly, do you want of Dr. McCarron and me?”

  To his credit the detective scuffed a black leather shoe against the bleached-out ground before answering. I had a sen
se that his tough-guy act was a skin he’s shed some time ago and now barely remembered.

  “I’m sorry,” he said finally, taking off his shades to look straight at Roxie. “Can you confirm your identity and vouch for Berry-man and McCarron here?”

  Rox sighed, a long sigh full of history. Then she took her wallet from her purse and showed Rathbone a lot of identification proving, among other things, that she outranked him and made a lot more money, too.

  “Mr. Berryman was employed to organize the political fundraiser for Kate Van Der Elst, who was a friend of the deceased, Dixie Ross,” she said in the petrified cottage cheese voice. “He is an ex-con and also African-American, but that doesn’t mean he had anything to do with whatever it is you’re investigating. I’ll vouch for him. Dr. McCarron scarcely needs my endorsement. You may not have noticed, but she’s white.”

  The detective appeared to be making a difficult decision as he stared at a clump of dried-out locoweed growing beside the road. A tea decocted from the leaves and stems of this plant, not to mention its particularly nasty flowers, affects the central nervous system and brain. Locoweed can cause madness, even death, in large mammals such as sheep, horses, and SDPD detectives.

  “Eat that plant!” I whispered, glaring at Rathbone, who didn’t hear me.

  “Look,” he said, reaching into his car and retrieving a manila folder, “I’m going to show you what’s going on. Then I’d really appreciate it if both of you would tell me what you think. We got this three weeks ago in the mail. Nobody took it seriously at the time. Now everybody does. I’m afraid we’ve got a situation on our hands.”

  Rox took the envelope, propped it on Brontë’s back, and opened it. Inside was a photocopy of a typed letter. Around two sentences of text its author had glued about fifty article headlines clipped from newspapers. All were about Dixie Ross or Mary Harriet Grossinger.

  “Ross Opposes Landfill Project” or “Grossinger Calls for Further Discussion on Term Limits.” Typical political headers.

  The message read simply, “These woman trying to be men and have to dye. There not the only one.”

  It was signed with the typed words, “The Sword of Heaven.”

  “Uh-oh,” Roxie said softly. “There goes dinner.”

  As Rathbone followed us in his car to my motel, I couldn’t help wondering about the presumed relationship between women in nontraditional lines of work and hair coloring. It was clear to me that, if nothing else, the letter’s author was a lousy speller.

  3

  A Habitation of Dragons

  The ‘Sword of Heaven’ reference is probably from the Bible,” Roxie said as Rathbone stood around in my bare dirt driveway trying to decide whether to help carry groceries in or remain coplike. Roxie handed him the two heaviest bags. “Of course anyone could assume that,” she went on. “What is it you want us to do with this letter, analyze it? And did I mention we charge a fee?”

  “Fee?”

  “Consulting. You want to know something about whoever wrote this, right?”

  Rathbone nodded, his clean-shaven jaw hidden behind the edge of a brown grocery bag that looked yellow in the late afternoon glare.

  “Well, we can probably tell you a few things, but we’d prefer to do so professionally.”

  “The department uses consultants all the time,” he said, standing to the side of the door so that Roxie and I could enter first. One of those moments. With both arms full of groceries, he couldn’t hold the new screen door I’d installed after ramming my truck through the old motel office door only months ago. Roxie had to go back outside to hold it open for him, after which they headed for the kitchen while I closed the bottom half of the custom steel-core Dutch interior door but left the top half open against the interior wall. I love Dutch doors. And when both halves are closed, this one can stop just about anything shot from a conventional weapon. You can’t be too careful.

  “But can the San Diego Police Department afford us?” Rox asked after mentioning an hourly fee nearly twice what we charge for polls and jury selections and interrogation protocols.

  “I guess so,” Rathbone answered, looking around. “You two live in a motel? Can’t imagine you get much business out here. Just a dirt road in the middle of nowhere. Suppose you could book conferences for hermits or something, right? Pa-hahm.”

  His laugh reminded me of the sound potatoes make in the microwave when you forget to punch holes in them with a fork and the steam inside bursts through the skin. That muffled popping. I didn’t want to explain my unusual choice of living arrangements to a detective right then. But his failure to go into shock at Roxie’s proposed fee for our services was alluring. We’d make a bundle if Rathbone recommended us as consultants to the SDPD. Besides, I was curious about the deaths of two women I’d already demonstrated couldn’t have died naturally when and where and for the reasons they presumably did.

  “This is my place,” I told him. “My dog and I live here alone. Dr. Bouchie lives in San Diego.”

  “You live out here by yourself? Some kind of hermit,” he answered, nodding thoughtfully at my kitchen floor. “This Pergo?”

  The reference was to my floor covering, a laminate manufactured in Sweden. He’d captured my attention.

  “Yeah. Travertine Stone. I thought it picked up the mood of the place, the way it sort of repeats that creamy yellow band in the sandstone boulders outside the kitchen window.”

  Rathbone considered the view and then the floor again. His hands hanging at his sides were cluttered with freckles and veins that stood out in tree limb patterns.

  “My wife, Annie, she’s got a bug about getting this flooring for the kitchen and the hallway, keeps showing me samples. I kind of like Rustic Oak. Did you see that one?”

  “Too dark for here,” I answered. “But I liked it.”

  “Annie’s pushing for a lighter one, too. Planked Natural Pine.”

  “I almost went with that one, but then the stone look just seemed—”

  “I don’t believe this,” Roxie muttered to a cluster of cherry tomatoes she was rinsing in the sink. “This isn’t happening. Two complete strangers are not standing around in a desert bonding over a vinyl floor.”

  “It’s not vinyl,” Rathbone and I said in unison, bonding over a laminate floor. It was clear that we were probably going to get along. An interest in floor covering can do that.

  “You might as well stay for dinner,” Roxie told the detective, smiling and shaking her head. Rox’s braids were done in turquoise that week, and Rathbone cocked his head at their pleasant rattling.

  “My sister-in-law, Annie’s younger sister, keeps trying to do her hair like that,” Rathbone said with interest. “I don’t think it works if you’re not black. She’s a lawyer up in the Bay Area. International law. Travels a lot. And sure, that’d be fine. I need to call Annie and tell her I won’t be home. Mind if I use your phone?”

  “Only if you call and make sure they’re not holding our friend BB,” I told him. “Can you do that first?”

  “You mean Berryman? Sure.”

  I showed Rathbone to the phone in my office/living room and flipped on the TV to muffle his conversation. We Midwesterners are nothing if not sensitive to the privacy of others.

  Back in the kitchen I fed Brontë and skewered turkey meat-balls with the cherry tomatoes, mushrooms, and bits of red onion and pineapple until Rathbone yelled, “Berryman’s free, but look at this!”

  Rox and I rounded the wall separating my miniature kitchen from where he was and followed his rapt gaze to the TV. A woman announcer in a red silk Bijou jacket was wrapping up a story about the cancellation of a religious revival apparently scheduled for the next day, Sunday. On the right side of the split screen was a photo of what looked like a Christmas tree angel wearing too much makeup. On second glance it appeared to be a woman with sparkling blonde curls in a pale green choir robe. The photo had been shot through a heavy scrim and looked fuzzy.

  “A spokesman for the Reveren
d Ruby Emerald urges her followers to organize prayer gardens for the charismatic revivalist. Ticketholders for tomorrow’s sold-out event are assured that refunds will be available at the box office as well as all Ticket-store locations in the event of a cancellation tomorrow. Now here’s Martin McGuire with a look at the weather….”

  “What?” Roxie asked. “Look at what?”

  Rathbone was scowling and jabbing a freckled finger at the TV.

  “Just a feeling,” he muttered. “This revival preacher has a sold-out show for close to fifteen thousand at forty bucks a person and she winds up in a hospital the night before? We’re talking some big money in the toilet if the thing is canceled. I’ve just got a feeling about this. Mind if I use the phone again? Wanna check something out.”

  Rox and I listened as he talked to another detective at San Diego’s police headquarters.

  “She was taken from her home to the hospital in an ambulance? Good. See if you can talk up the paramedics, find out what was wrong with her. I think there’s something fishy here. Call me back.”

  We were sitting by the pool watching Rathbone, who told us his first name was Wesley but that he preferred being called Wes, finish his fifth turkey kabob when the phone rang. Abandoning all pretense of courtesy, we all jumped up and dashed inside at once, Rathbone only at the last second deferring to my right to answer my own phone.

  “Just a moment, he’s right here,” I said, and handed him the cordless.

  “Paramedics said headache,” he repeated. “She had a killer headache, a lot of pain, sweating like a pig, shaking all over.”

  “What about blood pressure?” Roxie asked, her brown eyes interested, professional now. I realized I was watching a cop and a doctor at work in my living room, only there was no crime, no patient. It seemed strange, as if we were characters in a play that made no sense and nobody was watching it, anyway.

  “Um, high,” Rathbone repeated after asking. “One-ninety-something over one-twenty-something. Mean anything?”