The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “No,” I answered as he walked behind me and pushed me toward the counter, the snub of my gun at the base of my neck. “And right now I don’t care. My dog, Brontë, is in my truck. I hope you’ll release her before you push the truck into the canyon. If you don’t, she’ll be injured or killed. You once,” I said, turning to look him in the eyes as he shoved me against the counter, “took care of injured animals, nursed them. I’m asking you not to injure an animal. That’s all.”

  “I will free your dog,” he agreed, slamming my head down on the dusty, cracked Formica as he bent to tie one of my ankles to the counter’s rust-pocked chrome footrail with the nylon jacket. The knots were so tight I knew they could never be untied, but I could find a way to rip the fabric between my leg and the rail if I had a chance, I thought.

  There was nothing on the counter I could hit him with, no point in trying to fight in the few seconds it took him to secure my leg to the rail. If I did, he’d kill me.

  “Thank you for promising not to kill my dog,” I said.

  “You’re like my mother,” he mentioned seconds later. “That’s why I liked you. She took care of animals and things. You’re like her, living out here all alone. I guess you have your reasons, just like she did.”

  “I have my reasons,” I said inscrutably, trying to get a fix on what he was saying. It was fine with me if he thought I lived in the desert because I’d attempted to murder a husband. Just fine. As long as it kept me alive.

  “He beat her,” T. J. Eldridge said, again behind the counter as he unzipped a backpack he’d pulled from the floor. “My father beat my mother so hard her ears bled and once her eye popped out and hung down her face on its cord. He raped her, too. He did it in front of me once when I was six. He said in the Bible six is the age of reason and I was old enough to learn what women are for. He beat her unconscious and then propped her on her stomach over a chair. I hated him. I was glad when my mother stabbed him. We thought he was dead when we left. But then my mother saw in the newspapers that he didn’t die. She read it to me. She said he’d try to find us and so I had to wear dresses and pretend to be a girl so he couldn’t.”

  His voice was flat, emotionless. The sentences clear but simple, like a child’s. I couldn’t see his eyes.

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” I said as if I were standing near a casket at a funeral parlor back in Illinois. She looks so nice, is the next line in the heartland script for these occasions, but it wouldn’t do here.

  “You should be sorry about my father, too,” he replied. “Another woman killed him. He was going to rape her so she’d be ready to be my wife, but I untied her hands and she shot him.”

  He was looking at my hands on the counter as he spoke. We both wore laced athletic shoes. He could have tied my hands with shoelaces the way his father had tied the girl’s, but he didn’t.

  “T.J., why did you kill those women that way?” I asked. “Why did you hide little MAOI time bombs in their surgical incisions so days or weeks later they’d eat some salami or a handful of fava beans and die?”

  “Because I could,” he answered in that flat, tired voice as he took a plate and a large plastic Baggie from the backpack. “I took the pills from Isadora’s purse a long time ago, when I found out what Kara had done. Somebody has to do something, and yet nobody does. My father was a cruel and stupid man, but that doesn’t make the Bible wrong, Dr. McCarron. My father taught me the Bible. It’s all in there. It says the man must rule over the woman and the woman must be subservient to the man. It says any woman who refuses to be subservient, any woman who tries to have power like a man, is an abomination to the Lord. Women have forgotten their place and that’s what’s destroying this country. You do agree with that, don’t you, Dr. McCarron?”

  I could feel my heart pounding, the blood singing in the elegant road map of my circulatory system. I could taste oxygen molecules from that blood feeding my brain. In my brain the molecules tasted, I thought, the way ginger smells. The molecules tasted like being alive. I was determined to stay that way.

  “Of course I agree with that,” I lied, casting about for something to say in support of it. “I mean, look at what happened to Edom.”

  He was arranging chunks of cheddar cheese on the plate. Beneath the heavily scented orange cubes I could see three little figures fleeing over a bridge, a pagoda, a willow tree, two birds in the air.

  “‘There shall the night hag alight,’” he quoted from what I thought was the Revised Standard Version of the Isaiah 34 text. “The night hag is Lilith, you know. The night hag is any woman who won’t obey the law of God. Would you like some cheese? It’s extra-extra sharp, pretty good. My mother always made cheese sandwiches here, you know. Have some. We’re going to be here all night. Eat something. You’ll get hungry.”

  “Take, eat …” I remembered the words from the sacrament of Holy Communion I’d heard every Sunday of my life as a child. Women’s words in the mouth of a man. So who had stolen the power from whom? I thought as a man named Thomas Joseph Eldridge wolfed down at least a pound of cheddar cheese in the gloom of a rotting adobe shack. Courteously, I nibbled at one of the squares.

  “How nice of Kara to make you a snack,” I mentioned, taking a risk. It was impossible to know what might set him off.

  “Kara is a disciple of Lilith now,” he said somberly. “She has been for two years, but I didn’t know. She lied to me. Before, when Mrs. Rainer was alive to show her the way, Kara was perfect. I thought Mrs. Rainer was like a mother-in-law to Kara, like Naomi in the Bible. That’s why I named my daughter Naomi. But Isadora lured Kara away from the right path and so my daughter couldn’t be called Naomi anymore and I had to call her by her middle name, Ann. It was Isadora who talked Kara into sneaking around behind my back and going to school, even gave her the money. Before that Kara was a natural woman and obeyed me. But then she sneaked off and went to school and even graduated. If she hadn’t done that, maybe she could have been all right. Of course, I killed Isadora. I have to be the Sword of Heaven. Somebody has to be.”

  He seemed overwhelmed by the task but determined to carry it out.

  “Of course,” I said, dipping my head as we do in high Episcopal churches when the crucifix is carried past in procession. It seemed to work even though I remembered Eldridge was a Methodist.

  “I’ve got a bottle of water down here,” he said, leaning beneath the counter. “Cheese is salty.”

  My gun lay on top of the counter, his left hand loosely over it but not holding it. My one chance and I took it, grabbed the base of the grip softly between my thumb and third finger and then ripped it from beneath his hand and into mine. Then I held the barrel hard against his neck where the carotid artery pulsed as he leaned over, both index fingers on the trigger as I began the careful, sure pull. There was no other option. I was going to have to kill him.

  27

  The Dance

  But I didn’t. Something happened. Everything slowed to a stop as I squeezed the trigger, or thought I did, and nothing happened. It was like trying to move inside clean, solid ice. Everything visible but frozen in place. Several conversations were taking place inside my head simultaneously as no time passed. Not a single second, not a heartbeat.

  “Thou shalt not kill,” a male voice boomed.

  “Okay, nice rule for large social control, but does it apply to this situation? No. Kill him before he has a chance to grab the gun and kill you, you idiot!”

  I guessed that voice was mine.

  Then another. “You can’t shoot someone who’s feeding you.”

  Dog-brain, I thought. We must be closer to dogs on the evolutionary tree than we thought.

  “Shoot, shoot, he’s a murderer and he’s going to murder you!”

  Me again. The survival thing.

  “But he could have killed you already and he hasn’t. He likesyou.”

  Female brain, I realized. We always think that. Probably a chemical effect of estrogen.

  They were a
ll me, I knew.

  Then time resumed and Eldridge moved his arms. Not toward me and the gun, but to his head. He seemed not to know I was there as he stood, heels of both hands pushing against his temples, his eyes bulging. Even in the dark I could see his face grow purple as his mouth made an open O. Then he fell.

  I stood on the footrail of the counter and leaned over it, the .38 trained on the body-shaped shadow below.

  “Don’t move!” I yelled, teeth chattering. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”

  But T. J. Eldridge didn’t move. Nor did I. I clenched my teeth to stop the racket and heard gurgling sounds from the form on the floor but no breathing. Still I held the gun and waited. A minute. Two minutes. Three. Nothing. Then an odor as his bowels evacuated. It happens shortly after death. I knew Thomas Joseph Eldridge was dead.

  I fired the Smith and Wesson once, into the sturdy fabric of the jacket tying me to the counter. The bullet hole in the jacket’s back gave me a weak spot from which to tear the nylon and free my leg. Brontë had begun to bark frantically at the sound of the shot, and I could hear her, although she sounded like a fake dog. She sounded like a cartoon. My foot seemed fake, too, dragging its tightly knotted nylon sleeve.

  A little psychological shock, I told myself. It would wear off. Meanwhile, I rounded the end of the counter where a woman who called herself Lorene had once served coffee and sandwiches to sunburned ranchers while a boy in a dress played outside. I hoped she wasn’t able to see what lay on the floor behind her counter now. This couldn’t have been what she had in mind for her only child.

  I felt his wrist and neck. There was no pulse. Then I walked out, leaving the rusted corrugated-metal sheet where I’d pushed it away from the door. Behind me a dragon moved slightly in the air disturbed by my passage, and then was still.

  The smell of death on me made Brontë frantic, so I had to drive back into Anza with the sound of howling. It seemed appropriate. From a pay phone at the diner where I’d talked with Waddy Babbick I called Wes Rathbone at the hospital.

  “Blue!” he erupted, “Damn your cell phone! Where are you? Nobody could reach you. Grecchi’s coherent now. It took longer than it should have because Eldridge had sedated her before he cut her wrist, and it didn’t show up on the blood test they gave her when she was brought in, so she was sedated again, and—”

  “Wes,” I interrupted, “Eldridge is dead. His body is in an old adobe line shack where Coyote Canyon ends four miles east of Anza. I didn’t kill him, he just died. I’m not going to stay with the body. I’m going home. Don’t ask me what happened. I don’t know.”

  “Blue … ?”

  “Not now, Wes. Just let me go home. I’ll talk to you later.”

  Before he could say anything else I hung up the phone and went into the ladies’ room to wash the smell of death and cordite from my hands. In the car Brontë continued to whine, but we made it home without further howling. There were more people in khaki shorts and FBI windbreakers outside my motel now. All of them had cell phones. In the distance over Coyote Canyon I could hear a helicopter.

  “The body of Thomas Eldridge has been secured,” a young agent informed me as I climbed out of my truck. “We’ll need to take a statement from you.”

  “Not now,” I said. “And I’m not the person who knows the whole story, anyway. In an hour or so I’ll talk to you, give you the name of an informant who has the whole history, including newspaper clippings. Right now I insist on the right to a stiff drink and a hot bath.”

  “Roger,” the boy said efficiently. “And oh, yeah, your friend is inside.”

  I wasn’t sure how I felt about seeing Roxie right then. I didn’t want to have to explain what couldn’t be explained. That everything is part of a pattern that some of us see occasionally, and some of us never do. I was too tired to try, and she’d never get it, anyway.

  But it wasn’t Roxie sitting on the floor of my living room under a photograph I would later learn T. J. Eldridge had taken of the line shack with a child’s box camera thirty years ago. It was BB.

  “Been worried,” he said. “Nobody tell me what’s goin’ on, so I had Matt bring me out here. Figured I’d just wait. Oh, your brother called. I accepted the call, talked to the dude for a while, tol’ him what I knew ’bout all this. He say you alwaysup to you ass in some mess. I say, ‘Dude, who talkin’?’”

  I had to laugh at that, which felt good. Laughing broke the skin of whatever state I’d been in since not pulling a trigger and killing a man. I realized I wasn’t sure I was really still alive until BB made me laugh. I think I suspected T. J. Eldridge had in reality jerked up, roaring, grabbed my gun from my hand and shot me through the head. That I was really lying on the floor of the shack with my brains on the wall, and this was just the last little fantasy those shattered neural cells could patch together before an absence of oxygen cloaked them in perfect, permanent darkness.

  “Oh, BB,” I said, slumping to the floor next to him. “Am I really here?”

  “Look like it,” he said, draping an arm over my shoulders while I sobbed with relief.

  Above our heads a photograph of an old adobe building was blasted with light and lost in shadow at the same time.

  The following week’s edition of Time had Reed McCallister on the cover and an open letter from the vice presidential candidate thanking the police, the sheriff’s department, the FBI, and everyone in Southern California for the speedy closure of this tragic and lethal case. Kate Van Der Elst got a boost from the mention of her name all over the country as a targeted victim of the “Tummy-Tuck Killer,” as the media named Eldridge, and handily won her seat on the city council, from which she announced her intention to “make San Diego safe for women and children,” whatever that means. She and Pieter reconciled before the election, but they’re still circling each other like boxers in a ring as they negotiate for a forgiveness both want and neither is quite ready to give.

  At Kate’s victory celebration Pieter brought me a glass of generic champagne and said, “She wants to run for state assembly next. If you hadn’t pointed out to me that my behavior was cowardly, I would have left her and wouldn’t be facing an eternity of cheap white wine and soggy crackers. Thanks, Blue.” He was laughing, but not entirely.

  Isadora Grecchi lost almost no mobility in her left hand and continued to be nearly as unpleasant after her ordeal as she had been before. She was, however, planning to take an intensive art course in Italy during the spring semester and was furiously learning Italian within twenty-four hours of leaving the hospital. She would fly to Florence the day after Christmas, and Jennings Rainer planned to visit her with his grandchildren over their spring school break. She and I skirted each other warily on the one occasion we were all together for a catered celebration at Rainer’s condo. We didn’t want to talk to each other, and we both knew why.

  Chris and Megan planned to relocate to Northern California on the same day Isadora left for Italy, having discovered that moving two children and a houseful of books and furniture cannot be accomplished in two weeks. Megan gave up paint ball and in fact won’t even talk about it. She will talk about her new plan to raise alpacas for their wool. I have been promised enough homespun alpaca wool for a sweater, if I can find anybody to knit it. Courtesy precluded my pointing out that it’s never cold enough for a wool sweater here, and besides, I might be able to use one in Philadelphia.

  Jennings Rainer would keep his condo in San Diego but had contracted for the construction of a cottage on Chris and Megan’s two-hundred-acre property up north.

  “It’s my grampy flat,” he told everybody proudly. “Snuffy and I will fly back and forth, as I’ll still do the occasional surgery here.”

  Jeffrey Pond turned up at a Holiday Inn in Fresno the same night Eldridge died. The authorities easily found him because he’d charged his motel room to his credit card and then made several phone calls to his mother both at her home and at the hospital where his father seemed to be recovering nicely. He said he�
��d looked at his father on the hospital bed and seen himself in the future, except at least his father had a wife to care for him and medical insurance. He said he’d just cracked under the awareness that his life was a mess and had run, but that once on the road he realized he had no idea where to run toand was planning to come home the next day, anyway.

  Roxie and I didn’t have a chance to talk until the night after Eldridge’s death. We met in town, at Auntie Buck’s, where we sat at a table and stared at each other as Garth Brooks sang from the jukebox that missing the pain involves missing the dance, too.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” she asked, tears welling up in her brown eyes. “Why didn’t you come to my place to stay instead of running up there alone?”

  “I did call you,” I said, tears welling up in my goldish hazel ones. “You told me to leave you alone.”

  “But I didn’t know what you’d found out from McCallister. I didn’t know what you were going to do. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have said that. I would have told you to come on over, or I would have gone with you, or something.”

  “How could I tell you something you’d just made it clear you didn’t want to hear?” I insisted. “You can’t have it both ways, Rox. You’re either there for me or you aren’t. Yes or no, always, not just when it’s convenient.”

  “Girl, there’s nothing convenient about you,” she replied, rattling the beads in her hair angrily. Wooden beads now, carved in African designs. “You can’t live in town like other people live, no, you’ve got to be out there with your rocks and your damn Pergo floor. And you don’t think like other people think, and—”

  “And I don’t want to,” I finished the litany. “Not even for you, Roxie.”

  Her hand clamped over my wrist then, hard.

  “I want to dance with you,” she whispered, and I said okay, and we did. Roxie leading, the whole dance floor to ourselves, Garth telling the truth from a jukebox. Not a step missed, not a turn two degrees short, no failure to anticipate each move exactly, and the next, and the next. Sometimes words only snarl like thread. We went home to her place after that, saying nothing. She walked Brontë and came back, and we didn’t talk, the dance still in us, all night.