The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  I could see the muscles flexing in Roxie’s jaw.

  “You’d have nearly half the population of the United States on your list,” she said softly, but he didn’t hear her.

  “One for the books,” the agent said again. “They’re almost always white males, but not this time. This time it’s a crazy woman and it’s on my beat.”

  “I’m going to go home before I kill that man,” Roxie said through clenched teeth as the two men pushed open the emergency room doors and vanished inside. “Then I could take out a couple more of them and become the first black female serial killer in history.”

  “Really one for the books,” I replied, grinning. “But first let’s get some coffee. There’s something not right about what’s happened here, this thing with Grecchi.”

  “I been noticing that,” Rox said dismally. “Girl, I been noticing that.”

  23

  Pieter, Pieter, Pumpkin Eater

  I changed into my jeans in the truck and tossed the bloody skirt in a city trash receptacle as Rox and Brontë and I walked to a nearby Starbucks. We sat outside and I watched as Rox toyed with a cappuccino. At an adjoining table a couple in nearly identical business suits were discussing the presidential campaign.

  “You’re going to vote for the ticket just because the vice presidential candidate’s a woman,” the man said.

  “And you’re not going to vote for the ticket just because she’s not a man,” his companion answered. “You can’t stand the idea of women in positions of power.”

  “No, I can’t,” he agreed. “A woman vice president would be like a whale conducting a symphony. Ludicrous. Call me a retro pig.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it,” the woman said through a dazzling smile, standing to leave. “Pigs are intelligent.”

  Roxie and I applauded as she walked away, leaving him with the check.

  “So what do we do now?” I asked after relating the story of Grecchi’s life as Jennings Rainer had told it to me. “Rainer says she was at his place all night last night and so couldn’t have sent the spate of e-mails advertising Sword’s latest threat, but everything else that’s happened points to Grecchi as the killer. And yet something doesn’t feel right about it. I’d cross the street to avoid Isadora Grecchi; she’s rude and unpleasant. But when I saw her lying on the gurney, she looked so scared. I felt sorry for her, Rox. How could I feel sorry for a woman who—”

  “She could have loaded the e-mails in a program that automatically sends at a preselected time,” Rox interrupted. “You should know that, but Rainer wouldn’t. He’s computer-illiterate. Where Grecchi spent the night is irrelevant. What bothers me is the suicide attempt.”

  “But you said Sword might do that. She’s done just what you said.”

  “I don’t know what she’s done,” Roxie muttered, continuing to stir her cappuccino with a plastic straw. Her braids were adorned with bright yellow straw beads that day. They matched her silk blouse but made no sound as she moved her head. The absence of clacking made me feel deaf.

  “What do you mean? She sliced open her wrist.”

  “Blue,” Rox said, finally discarding the straw and sipping her coffee, “Grecchi is a doctor.”

  “So, many people are,” I replied. “This one’s a doctor with a childhood from hell and a depressive disorder who for some reason went ‘off,’ killed or attempted to kill prominent women in her care, and then tried to kill herself, just like you said. She’s even got the crackpot religious history from a foster home in Colorado Springs. That’s where she probably heard the Isaiah 34 stuff like my dad said, the Sword of Heaven. It’s all there.”

  “Yes, but any first-year med student knows that cutting the ventral side of the wrist is one of the least effective ways to die,” Rox went on. “There’s only one very small and easily missed artery and the veins are also tiny. The normal clotting action of the blood will seal both in a matter of minutes after an initial and dramatic bleed. The only way to lose enough blood even to faint from a wrist cut is to keep the wound submerged in hot, preferably running water, which prevents clotting. Grecchi knew that, and yet you didn’t say anything about hot water or any water. She was sitting on the bathroom floor next to the tub, but she wasn’t holding her arm under the faucet to facilitate a bleed-out. This was no suicide attempt.”

  The news made me feel good, for some reason.

  “What was it, then?” I asked. “People always say when this happens it’s a cry for help. Was she crying for help?”

  Rox finished her cappuccino and ordered another, eyes narrow with concentration.

  “For the moment let’s assume Grecchi is innocent of the Sword murders but is depressed. It’s apparent from the several different antidepressants BB saw in her medicine chest that something wasn’t working and her psychiatrist has been trying her on different combinations, different meds. Eventually one of them will work and she knows that intellectually, but the depression makes her feel there’s no hope, so she wants to make that desperate gesture that signals a need for somebody to help her. She chooses the traditional wrist-cutting, but knows she isn’t really going to die. Which means she knows she’s going to be working again, using her dominant left hand. What are the odds she’d cut her left wrist, knowing as she does the risk of impaired mobility?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Aren’t people sort of irrational at that point? Not thinking clearly?”

  “Sometimes, not always. And if she weren’t thinking clearly and just acting out of despair, she’d automatically hold the knife in her dominant hand, cutting the nondominant wrist. More to the point, Grecchi’s fifty-one. From what Rainer said, she’s been dealing with clinical depression since she was fourteen. She’s experienced. Plus, she holds down a professional job, does volunteer work on the side, enjoys art as an avocation, maintains, from what you say, an attractive home, keeps herself presentable personally. She’s socially competent and successful. There’s been no break in this pattern. Then all of a sudden she falls apart overnight? It doesn’t work that way, Blue. It doesn’t happen that fast. There’s just something fishy about the way this happened.”

  “You don’t think Grecchi is Sword, do you?” I asked, giving Brontë a piece of hazelnut biscotti.

  “She could be. Everything points to that. I don’t know, but if she isn’t—”

  “Then somebody else is going to try to kill a vice presidential candidate tomorrow morning,” I finished the thought. “But who?”

  “That problem must be handled by the FBI and the Secret Service,” she said flatly. “I’m going back to the hospital, where I will explain my concerns about Grecchi to Rathbone and that FBI control freak my federal tax dollars are paying. Then I’m going home. This has been difficult for me, Blue. It’s hard listening to a guy with a phone in his ear tell you your profession is a pansy-assed joke, which is what I was doing when you called about Grecchi. Even Rathbone winced when the jerk told me to ‘stop using such big words.’”

  She bent the plastic straw and then twisted it until it broke into two pieces.

  “Wanna know what ‘big word’ scared him?” she went on. “‘Chronic.’ Two whole syllables, twenty million Americans hear it every day in TV aspirin commercials, but real men don’t say ‘chronic.’ It’s not guy-speak, so it’s sissy-speak by default. And so, according to him, is the entire language of psychiatry.

  “Blue, when the FBI takes over the world, there will be only them on one side, ‘bad’ people on the other, and between them an average vocabulary of eighteen one-syllable words, twelve of which will refer to bodily functions.”

  “As long as one of the words is ‘dude,’ they’ll get along fine,” I replied, remembering the communication between BB and Jeffrey Pond. “I’ve been thinking about researching a paper on the contemporary male’s rejection of speech as a means of communication. It’s curious.”

  “Posturing and chest-beating are so much more eloquent,” she said with a laugh, pounding her chest. “Ouch.”r />
  “Always a problem.” I giggled with her. “Don’t worry, Rox, the FBI hasn’t even seized a major city yet. There’s still time to talk, which reminds me—”

  “I know, Philadelphia,” she said. “But not now, Blue. And not tonight. I need some time to think. See, I just realized that while I’m trying to figure out why a few thousand guys rob and rape and kill every day, the real power’s all in the hands of an identical set of guys who get off on chasing the first bunch. They don’t care about why. All they care about is ‘Go Directly to Jail.’ That’s the end of the game for them. They get to be heroes. Caring about why is girl stuff.”

  “Most people would agree with them, you know,” I said.

  “Yeah, and listen to those same people weep and wail when it happens again and again. Another mass murder in a public building, another serial killer with twenty-three graves in his backyard, another few hundred children raped and scarred for life, more and more prisons and no end in sight. That’s what you get for not caring why.”

  “Do you want to be a hero, Rox?” I asked as we started back toward the hospital.

  “Damn right,” she said, leaning to pet Brontë fiercely. “But I want to do it by trying to understand things, not by eliminating understanding as an option.”

  “Stay out of law enforcement,” I said.

  “I work in corrections, Blue. What do you think that is?”

  “Oh.”

  I could see where this was going and that I might have the FBI to thank if Roxie took the new job in Philadelphia. She wanted to figure things out, make a difference. She could do that directing a research project on head injuries and genetic psychiatric proclivities. She couldn’t do that working for the man. The two systems were incompatible.

  “I might call you later tonight,” she said as Brontë and I got into my truck.

  “Okay, here’s my cell phone number in case I’m still out,” I said, trying to be cool about leaving her alone. “I think I’ll start carrying the phone when Brontë and I are out hiking in the desert. Might come in handy.”

  “Yeah.” She was gone already.

  I watched her leave the hospital parking lot, her bright blouse like a determined sun threading between the cars. She’d tell Rathbone and the FBI about her unease over assumptions of Grecchi’s guilt and then go home to brood over the fate of psychiatry in a culture addicted to quick and simple answers. Brontë’s quizzical expression reminded me that I had no idea what Iwas going to do.

  “Kate Van Der Elst should be informed of what’s happened,” I told my dog. It sounded reasonable.

  “Oh, Blue, I really appreciate your keeping me in the loop,” Kate said when I called her at home. “I’ve been so upset, you know, about everything. This makes me feel a little better. I do think it’s Grecchi, don’t you? It even makes a little sense when you look at the history you just told me about. She worked on all these privileged women who seem never to have suffered anything more heartbreaking than cellulite buildup on their thighs. We must have appeared despicable to her, superficial and narcissistic. Yet we had everything she could not—husbands, families, in some cases important public careers like Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie. Her funeral was, well, it was very sad. I missed Pieter, Blue. I can’t believe he didn’t come, if only out of respect for the Ross family. We’ve been married for sixteen years and he’s never … well, this isn’t the time to talk about Pieter. Thank you so much for calling, Blue. I’ll be at my campaign headquarters later. You will let me know if anything else happens.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I said, “Of course,” anyway and flipped my little phone shut. Then I drove downtown to the twin-towered Marriott overlooking San Diego Bay. No one said anything about dog exclusion as Brontë and I moved through the lobby crowd of tourists and multilingual participants in a convention that had something to do with international paint sales. A courtesy phone was visible on a table beside an arrangement of fresh flowers that wouldn’t have fit in my truck. I picked up the phone, asked to be connected to the room of Pieter Van Der Elst, and was.

  “It’s Blue McCarron, I’m in the lobby, and I must speak with you,” I told him.

  “No, we don’t think Kate is in any danger now, but she was, Pieter. She was one of those picked by Sword to die, but she was protected by her diet. It looks as though the anesthesiolo-gist, Isadora Grecchi, is the perp. Please, let me come to your room and explain what’s happened.”

  As I’d hoped, curiosity overcame his reluctance to lay eyes on me. Brontë seemed to share my sense of accomplishment, because her docked tail wagged happily as we rode an elevator to the fifteenth floor. Or else she was thrilled to be in surroundings opulent by comparison to my monkish digs in the desert. She likes opera. I should have known she’d have a taste for the finer things.

  “Okay,” I told her as we walked soundlessly along the carpeted fifteenth-floor hall, “I see your point. We could afford to live someplace with running water, at least. So here’s the deal. If we wind up going to Philadelphia for a while, I promise you we’ll stay someplace nice.”

  Conversations with dogs can be so useful when trying to identify your own intentions.

  Pieter Van Der Elst had lost five pounds since I last saw him, all five from his face. His skin was sallow, the pale blue eyes as dim as dusty glass. And despite a crisp blue oxford-cloth shirt and immaculately pressed khakis, he seemed tarnished. And ashamed.

  “Please come in,” he said, gesturing to the living room of his suite. “And who is this?”

  “My dog, Brontë,” I explained. “There’s an FBI stakeout at my place, or there was, and I couldn’t leave her alone all day. She’d have done nothing but bark.”

  “Ah, Brontë,” he said, toying with another arrangement of fresh flowers on the coffee table. “‘Life is a passing sleep, / Its deeds a troubled dream…”

  “Charlotte or Emily?” I asked of the quotation, probably from a Brontë poem.

  “Branwell,” he answered. “The profligate, failed brother.”

  “‘Shall Earth no more inspire thee, / Thou lonely dreamer now?’” I answered in kind, also meaning it as a question.

  “Emily.” He identified the author but didn’t answer the question. “All of them so passionate, and yet—”

  “Pieter, you seem ill,” I interrupted, moving to the window to pull open the heavy drapes. The darkened space with its flowered maroon fabrics felt like the terrible “red room” scene from Jane Eyre. A focus on the doomed Brontës seemed unnecessarily morbid.

  “I’m fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Please, tell me about Kate.” When I had finished, he merely said, “Ah.”

  “Pieter, I don’t want to be intrusive, but I don’t think you understand why Kate refused to drop out of the race,” I said, feeling intrusive. “Maybe it’s a cultural thing. American women aren’t—”

  “The Netherlands is one of the most egalitarian cultures on earth, Blue,” he said, stopping me before I blundered further. “I didn’t do what I did because I felt I had a right to control Kate. I simply couldn’t bear the thought of harm to her. I couldn’t bear the thought of her … death. I was out of my mind with fear, and I—”

  “But Pieter, Kate must understand that,” I went on. “And she needs you. She’s tried to reach you, but you won’t talk to her. Look, I know this is none of my business, but you can’t just abandon her now because she didn’t do what you wanted. It’s not right.”

  The last remark, I knew, had come straight out of Waterloo, Illinois, where everybody knows exactly what it means. Which is that “doing right” is the magnetic axis around which everything spins and the only standard against which everything must be measured, sooner or later. You can run from it to the far corners of the earth, but it will pull you back as inexorably as if you were bound to it by huge rubber bands. All of Middle America from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico understands this perfectly. But I doubted that the worldly foreigner petting my dog in an expensive hotel room would quite gras
p the homespun concept. And I was wrong.

  He looked up from Brontë on the floor at his feet and regarded me somberly. “You don’t know what I mean by ‘what I did,’” he said. “And what I did was despicable. I tried to frighten Kate into quitting. I didn’t care that it might have destroyed her to do so. I didn’t care that only a hollow facsimile of Kate might be left, as long as that facsimile was alive.”

  “Pieter, what are you talking about?”

  He drew a shuddering breath and squared his shoulders.

  “I created the threatening letter, the one on green paper, Blue. I made it and said I’d found it slipped under the door of Kate’s campaign office. I lied to Kate, as well as to you and the police. Now you’ve told me this poison was in Kate’s body all the while, that I betrayed her trust pointlessly, that even if I’d been successful I couldn’t have protected her. It’s ironic, isn’t it?”

  His prematurely white hair shone like feathery metal in the sunlight from the window.

  “Don’t get me started on irony,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Let’s just say it was time for you to learn something, and you did. Flying off to Rio won’t change that.”

  “Amsterdam,” he corrected the awkward attempt at levity. “Kate can never trust me again. That’s what I can’t face. Leaving her seems the only thing to do.”

  I wished my father were sitting there instead of me. He’s good at that sort of thing, but then, it’s his job. I made gestures indicating an intent to go. Leaning forward, digging car keys from purse. The usual.

  “I think trust is overrated,” I said. “It assumes an impossibly identical reality shared by two distinctly different people. Ultimately, it can’t work. What works is honesty, if you’ve got the guts for it. Only a coward would get on that plane tomorrow, Pieter. Only cowards run and hide.”