Somebody was thinking about blue plates, though. Or thinking about blue willow plates, if Hutton Pierce’s definition of “blue plate” was correct. But why? And who? I remembered the wall of plates in the surgical waiting room at the Rainer Clinic. One of them had been an antique blue willow design. Two women and three men comprised the medical staff at Rainer. Two women and three men who might be assumed to possess sufficient medical savvy to cause cerebral hemorrhages in patients through the deliberate manipulation of blood pressure. And if one of these five people really was a killer, it would be the one with a significant psychological link to plates.
I thought about that while holding the framed photograph against different areas on my living room walls. Beside the front Dutch door the photo was obscured in shadow, and the same problem applied when I held it against the wall on both sides of a picture window framing a desert corridor of broken hills. The photo needed its own wall and no textural competition. As I rearranged furniture in order to hang it to dramatic advantage, I tried to think about plates and got nowhere.
They’re just there. Flat, round, slightly concave objects used for serving food. Descendants of the earlier bowl, I assumed. Somewhere I’d read that lead used in the manufacture of metal plates had probably contributed to the madness of countless kings and others privileged to eat acidic foodstuffs from metal tableware. Peasants, mopping their gravy from wooden plates throughout the ages, were presumably spared the inconvenience of lead poisoning. And so what? Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross hadn’t died from lead poisoning.
I don’t like artwork in an eye-level band around rooms. I like it in odd places that force you to look up or down or into places you’d never look. The photograph of a light-blasted desert building looked best, I decided, below waist level. After hauling in one shelf of an old set of stackable shelves from my storeroom, I pushed it against the wall and set a lamp on it. The light from the lamp illuminated the photo perfectly after I’d fastened it to the wall.
The entire arrangement was at Brontë’s eye level, and she seemed to enjoy it. It occurred to me that nobody gives any thought to the possible esthetic needs of domestic animals. Maybe the artless and ill-lit realm below our line of sight is a psychological wasteland for our pets. After all, cats are always looking out windows, aren’t they? I decided to research an article on the responses of animals to lighting and visual stimulation after this peculiar case was solved. If this peculiar case was solved, I reminded myself. Back to plates.
As a social psychologist I don’t analyze the subconscious motivations and personal symbol systems of individuals. Clinical psychologists do that. A clinical psychologist can tell you what the American flag means to an individual. I can tell you what the American flag is likely to mean to members of various social populations (Veterans of Foreign Wars members, for example, as opposed to members of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.) Additionally, I can predict flag-buying and flag-displaying behaviors broken down any way you like. Want to know how many American flags are likely to be purchased by Presbyterian Korean females between thirty-five and sixty-five in Seattle during August? No problem. What I can’t tell you is why Sharon Li, a fifty-three-year-old Korean grandmother who teaches Sunday school at Seattle Community Presbyterian, will buy that flag in August. Her personal motivations are not the concern of my discipline. And plates are more difficult to track than flags.
But I was getting paid a lot to do this, so I booted up the computer and went for the current sales reports of five U.S. china manufacturers who sell versions of the blue willow pattern. In half an hour I knew that sales of blue willow were evenly distributed all over the country, with predictable peaks in areas saturated with mail-order catalogues featuring blue willow items. I learned that a brisk mail-order business in blue willow accessories such as wall clocks, jewelry, table linen, and drawer pulls resulted in annual profits in the six-figure range, spread over the five manufacturers.
Clicking on another link, I wound up at the Web site of a restaurant in Georgia called the Blue Willow Inn. This is the problem with Internet research. It’s so easy to get sidetracked. But the Blue Willow Inn was willing to share its recipe for fried green tomatoes, so I copied the page. I’d make fried green tomatoes for Rox, I decided. She’d never been in the South and it would be a treat. Although where was I going to find green tomatoes in the middle of the California desert in October? A challenge.
Clicking on another link, I found myself at the home page of a Phoenix car club. Old cars, lovingly restored and driven by steely-eyed men in plaid shirts who stared proudly from a color photo of them and their cars. The photo had been taken in front of a diner, and the Web page also noted that the Phoenix Crankshaft Club’s Ladies Auxiliary filled its time while the men were retooling old combustion chambers by collecting blue willow china. Reading on, I learned that vintage car clubs across the country often meet at diners as a tribute to the old days when these very cars would have graced the parking lots of now-almost-vanished roadside Americana.
Out of desperation, it seemed, the wives of this particular club had decided to do something besides stand around pretending to admire corroded distributor caps. If they had to hang out at old diners, then they’d find something interesting to do about old diners. Eureka! Blue willow china.
The president of Crankshaft’s ladies’ auxiliary was listed as “Mrs. Ed Lauer,” with a Phoenix phone number. I didn’t know what I was looking for, but I called. Nothing ventured, etc. The woman who answered did not sound like somebody who hangs out in parking lots, which is the problem with assumptions based on group membership rather than on the individual. The practices of social psychology never work when applied to only one person.
Jackie Lauer, as she introduced herself, was sixty, had a Boston accent, and a Ph.D. in romance languages. She taught part-time at the University of Arizona, she said, but spent most of her time doing interesting stuff with her husband, Ed, a Vietnam vet who’d lost both feet to a land mine in 1968. Ed also suffered from depression, she mentioned, and fifteen years or so ago things had gotten really bad. Ed was sullen, then suicidal, wound up in a psych hospital. She’d left him during the sullen period, but went back during the hospitalization. They’d had to make some big changes. Medication for him, therapy and a different attitude for her.
I had that ice-water-on-the-neck feeling I get when total strangers insist on telling me after one minute of acquaintance things I would only tell my most intimate friend over a span of five years. This feeling approaches panic when the stranger seems to be heading toward some conclusion involving spiritual growth. Jackie Lauer, however, stopped mercifully short of that.
“What can I help you with?” she asked.
“I’m calling about blue willow plates,” I explained, and then for some reason told her the whole strange story. Tit for tat, I thought.
“Wow,” she said when I’d finished, “that’s interesting. You know, I had my eyes done eight years ago, never regretted it. I had these pouches. God, I looked like Winston Churchill. But they just snipped the sag and sucked out all that fat, and I have to tell you I loved it! Went out and got contacts, had my hair styled. Ed said I looked twenty years younger and the truth is, I did. So anyway, what can I tell you about blue willow? What is it you want to know?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “A link between these blue plates and somebody who hates women in positions of authority enough to threaten them with death, maybe actually kill them. Somebody with the medical know-how to cause lethal fluctuations in blood pressure. One of five people on the medical staff at a clinic specializing in cosmetic surgery.”
“Well,” Jackie Lauer said, “all I can talk about is the plates. The club’s been collecting and selling blue willow for years and I’ve noticed that people love these plates for two reasons. And I’m talking both men and women here. The first is when they get sort of drawn into the pattern. See, it’s a little world, a scene where there’s something happen
ing, only it’s frozen in time. It never changes. The little people are always running over the bridge, the birds are always flying above the pagoda, the willow is always there. Usually the people who get sucked into the pattern are women, and they’ll buy anything just to have it around, look at it.
“The other group of collectors is where you’ll find men as well as women. It’s a business thing. The old restaurant plates haven’t been made for fifty years or so, the ones divided into sections. They’re prized as an investment. Leave-’em-to-the-grand-kids sort of thing. In another fifty years they’ll be seriously rare. It’s like anything. Keep it long enough and it’s worth money.”
“So do people buy and sell these plates a lot?” I asked. “What’s an antique blue willow plate worth?”
“Oh, say one of the old English ones, circa early 1800s in fairly good condition with a potter’s mark, you’d get up to two thousand in the right places. The mass-produced American ones, well, maybe five or ten dollars a plate with a manufacturer’s mark on the bottom. But see, that’s gonna go up, that amount. It’s not a bad long-term investment. The club’s made some good money selling these things. We support a battered women’s shelter with the proceeds. Stock a nice children’s library for the kids there, too.”
“A women’s shelter?” I said. “I thought this was a car club.”
“Get real,” Jackie Lauer told me, laughing. “That’s what the guy’s do. We provide the club with a ‘community service’ that allows it to have tax-free status. Boys and girls don’t play well together, haven’t you noticed? Only works if they play different games side by side. The boys strut around preening their cars and we ooh and ahh over dishes. But the guys are coming up with some mechanical innovations that have been useful, for example, to groups trying to help impoverished Mexican communities. A couple of our guys have gone down there to show people how to retool parts for old cars. Sometimes one car in a village can make a big difference in things like access to medical care, maybe even save a life or two. We do the same thing with our support of the women’s shelter. It’s just different, is all.”
I was beginning to think of Jackie Lauer as a sort of pop-psychology encyclopedia. She was right about everything, but put a chipper, airy spin on it that was bewildering.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been much help,” she said cheerily. “But good luck with your serial killer.”
Only Jackie could have said that.
Brontë was milling around near her dinner bowl, watching me impatiently. Past her dinnertime. I opened a can of Science Diet Beef and Chicken for her and shaved some cheddar over corn chips for me. Microwaving nachos requires split-second timing in order to melt the cheese before the chips get soggy, but I managed. Then I made myself a giant chocolate shake with a raw egg in it and sat at a counter stool to eat. One of the perks of living alone, I acknowledged, is the absence of someone pointing out that your food habits are weird.
After dinner I went for a swim in the pool and then phoned Kate Van Der Elst at home.
“I don’t want to alarm you, but something’s come up that may be significant,” I began.
Her voice was strained. “What is it, Blue?”
“Ruby Emerald received a deli tray on Saturday night. It may be nothing, because there were a number of upsetting things happening around her that night, but she did develop symptoms and was taken to a hospital. She said she often gets gifts from her followers, so she assumed the tray was such a gift, although the card had apparently been lost. What we know is that a deli tray of rather exotic food arrived with no card. She ate some of the food, but her companion did not. She developed symptoms, and he did not. What I’m suggesting is—”
“Blue, somebody sent a tray with pâté and caviar and elegant little breads to my fundraiser! Remember? BB said a delivery service brought it to the gallery shortly before six. He asked me about it and I told him to just put it on the table with the other snacks. As I recall, the caviar was a hit, although BB thought the garnish of canned figs was odd and threw the figs away. Do you think somebody’s sending poisoned food in these trays? Nobody got sick at my fundraiser, did they? It’s so farfetched.”
I remembered watching the mayor of a suburban community scarfing up the last sturgeon egg from a blue willow plate with his finger. As far as I knew, he hadn’t suffered any ill effects. For that matter, I remembered, I’d enjoyed a good bit of the caviar myself and I felt fine. Then it hit me. The blue willow plate.
“Something extremely unusual is going on,” I told Kate as a small chill crept up the sides of my face. “This is going to sound strange, but it involves blue plates, anything with a blue willow design. You probably don’t remember, but in the surgical waiting room of the Rainer Clinic is a wall of decorative plates. One of them is an antique blue willow.”
“I remember,” Pieter Van Der Elst’s somber baritone interrupted. I hadn’t known he was on the line. “I saw the plates as I sat there waiting to bring Kate home. What does this mean, Blue?”
“I still don’t know,” I said. “But Kate …”
“Yes?” Her voice was tight with anger now, and not at me. “Don’t eat anything at public gatherings between now and the election. Bring your own food, claim you’re allergic to wine and cheese, it doesn’t matter. Just avoid eating anything from deli trays at public gatherings.”
“I never eat snacks like that,” she said. “I’m on the Zone diet, carry my own snacks with me everywhere. It all has to be balanced, protein, carbohydrate, fat. I’d weigh three hundred pounds if I didn’t stick to it. But if there’s poisoned food, why aren’t lots of people getting sick?”
The question was reasonable.
Pieter’s voice answered. “This is insane,” he said. “Kate, Blue has uncovered something important and you refuse to listen to her! This Emerald woman did get sick. She was hospitalized. Mary Harriet and Dixie are dead. Something horrible is happening and you’re too selfish to care about anything except yourself and this city council nonsense. I’m going to have to …”
“You’re going to have to what, Pieter?” she replied icily.
Even though we were on the phone I felt as though I were standing in the middle of their bedroom, an intruder in a bitter marital conflict.
“I didn’t call to cause trouble or to become involved in your disagreement over Kate’s candidacy,” I spelled it out. “I called to provide Kate with some information she needs to have. That’s all. Good night.”
I hung up without engaging in further conversation, hoping I’d embarrassed them sufficiently that they didn’t carry their dispute into public situations where it would be a detriment to Kate. There’s nothing more damaging to a politician than the slightest hint of domestic turmoil. Nobody wants to see it. It’s too close to home.
Roxie called as I was fastening on my waist pack prior to running Brontë.
“Long day.” She sighed. “What’ve you been up to?”
I told her about Ruby Emerald’s deli tray and my exhaustive research into blue willow plates, including my morning visit to the Rainer Clinic.
“Blue, didn’t I specifically tell you not to—”
“I’m your partner, not your employee,” I interrupted, echoing the spirit of Kate and Pieter’s conflict. “I needed to see what was there.”
The silence at Roxie’s end was long, broken at last by another sigh.
“You’re right,” she finally said, “you have to do things the way you do them. I was out of line.”
My heart melted. So few people ever listen. To anything.
“I got your Christmas gift today,” I said, wanting to bridge the gap.
“What is it?”
“You’ll like it,” I went on. “Rox, let’s do something special for Christmas. Let’s go someplace.”
“We are going someplace,” she said. “We’re going to St. Louis to spend Christmas with your dad and your godmother and your brother if he’s out of prison by then, and your brother’s wife, Lonnie. We’re go
ing to stay at some inn that has fireplaces in the rooms and fantastic steaks in the dining room. What do you mean, ‘let’s go someplace’?”
When Rox is tired she becomes incapable of anything but the most concrete ideation.
“I was just fantasizing, thinking maybe Vienna, the opera, you know.”
“St. Louis and a few blues bars will suit me just fine,” she said. “Have you talked to Rathbone?”
“Not since this morning. I got the Rainer employee profiles from him, though. Haven’t had a chance to look at all of them thoroughly.”
“Well, look at them. We’re having breakfast at Rathbone’s place tomorrow morning. Six-thirty. The idea is to plan interview strategy. The department’s keeping us on to profile all the medical employees.”
She didn’t sound happy about this.
“Why, Rox? Rathbone told me this case isn’t a high priority. Something about a border patrol agent who got shot over the weekend. That’s their priority.”
“There’s been another threat, another Sword of Heaven letter. Rathbone got it in his e-mail. Same format as yours. It had those little plates.” Her voice was tired, ominous.
“Who is it this time, Rox?” I asked.
“Bettina Ashe.”
The name was familiar, but it took me a few seconds to remember.
“Oh God, Roxie, she was there this morning! Bettina Ashe was the woman on the white chair in the operating cubicle with bandages all over her head. Her husband was in the surgical waiting room. I heard Megan Rainer talking to him.”
“But do you know who she is?”
I’d heard the name. Bettina Ashe. Betsy. The Ashe Foundation. Charitable contributions everywhere.
”Not exactly,” I admitted. “But it’s her husband who’s the bigwig, right? I heard Megan Rainer call him ‘Mr. Ashe’ this morning.”
The Last Blue Plate Special Page 12
