The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “Could mean she’d just run for twenty minutes up a steep incline while drinking strong coffee and smoking,” Rox answered. “Or any of a thousand other things. Drugs, allergic reactions, anything. The levels are dangerous, though. Very dangerous.”

  “Did the ambulance guys think she was druggy?” Rathbone said into my phone, the light from a floor lamp painting one side of his face in pale yellow glare and leaving the other in shadow. I thought about the photo I’d seen at the Aphid Gallery the night before, one side of a simple rectangular building exploding in light while the other side was buried in darkness.

  “She denied any drug use,” he said moments later. “Paramedics said it was probably a stress headache, said they’d seen it before in rock stars and people like that, performers. They get jumpy before a big show, get these headaches. At the hospital they’ll just give her some tranquilizers, calm her down. The paramedics said she’ll probably be okay by tomorrow.”

  “Hmm,” Roxie mumbled when he hung up the phone.

  After Rathbone consumed half the angel food cake iced in chocolate sorbet I’d thrown together for dessert, he left, promising to contact Roxie’s answering service on Monday with an almost-certain confirmation of our employment as consultants to the San Diego Police Department. When he was gone Rox and I looked at each other in the moonlight spilling through my open Dutch door.

  “So whaddaya think?” I asked.

  “I dunno. Looks like somebody called the Sword of Heaven informed police three weeks ago that Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross were going to die, and they’re dead.”

  “A number of people have noticed that, Rox,” I said, more to the sky outside than to her. “And the data don’t lie. There has to be a missing piece, some common variable linking these two deaths. I’m not saying Sword has to be that missing piece; the letter could just be an odd coincidence and the missing variable could be something else entirely. But for the sake of argument, what if Sword is the missing piece? What if somebody out there found a way to kill a state senator and an assembly-woman?”

  Roxie pursed her lips and paced thoughtfully around my office/living room.

  “Well, there isn’t much to go on,” she said, shrugging. “If it’s what it looks like, then what we’ve got is a serial cerebral hemorrhage killer.” She grinned at my computer monitor and then went on. “It’s not possible, Blue. It’s ridiculous. There’s no way… well there’s no easy way to manipulate blood pressure like that, jack it up enough to blow a vessel in the brain. It could be done, of course, but only by someone with medical training. An injection, most likely. The wrong stuff and death would occur within seconds. But Dixie was alone in her car, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So what you’re suggesting is that somebody was with her in the car, that she allowed this person to inject her with something as she was driving, and then she politely dropped the person off at a corner a few seconds before her brain exploded?”

  “What about a pill of some kind?” I was pacing behind Rox now, following her. “What about something in her food, something that would force her blood pressure through the roof but not until it was digested and in her bloodstream? Could somebody do that?”

  “It’s possible, but not likely, Blue. And it would have turned up in the autopsy. They always check stomach contents. Rathbone didn’t say anything about any lethal chemicals turning up in her stomach.”

  “But just for the sake of argument,” I pushed on, “what if somebody did slip something into Dixie Ross’s food? Then what’ve we got?”

  “They didn’t, Blue, or the substance would have showed up. And what we’d have would be a poisoner.”

  “And who kills with poison?” I concluded.

  “Almost always women,” Rox acknowledged, walking into the kitchen and gesturing at the remains of a meal we’d prepared and shared with a stranger. The room smelled like poultry seasoning and tropical fruit. Homey.

  “Breast identity,” I filled in, sighing. “Women constantly nurturing, feeding everybody, keeping life going. But when that instinct gets turned inside out, when it goes bad, women using the same method to kill. Why does the damned hormonal chemistry have to be such a trap?”

  “It just is,” she murmured. “That’s why nobody ever talks about it. It’s not politically correct to acknowledge how much of what we are is controlled by wiring and chemistry we don’t even know is there.”

  Something happened then, as evening shadows fell heavily across the room. A boundary crossed. A moment of truth, of dead-certain understanding. The deepest bonds are made of these moments, I think, not of passion. Rox and I understood each other, were alike in that moment, and it felt like doors and windows all opening at once. A rush of air and a sense of being drawn somewhere. Just two women in a kitchen, saying things no one wants to face. Like that, when pushed too far, the girl next door can become absolutely deadly.

  After a while Roxie looked me in the eyes. “So should we work on this case, track down what may well turn out to be a woman?”

  “Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger were women,” I said, looking straight back. “Whatever we find out may not be easy to take, but it can’t be as bad as what’s already been done, right?”

  Roxie merely nodded and turned to brace her hands on the edge of my stainless steel sink. Her gaze roamed the desert landscape beyond the window as if she were searching for something lost. I could see her brown knuckles turning beige as she gripped the edge of the sink hard. Too hard.

  “Oh, Rox!” I whispered as I remembered something she’d told me. “Your mother. You’re afraid we might be going after somebody … somebody like that, aren’t you? We don’t have to do this. Let’s forget it. The cops will … We don’t have to be involved, Roxie. I don’t want …”

  She’d told me about her mother when I asked, with a characteristic absence of subtlety, why on earth she’d wanted to be a psychiatrist. Med school, then specializing, the diplomates and certifications. These things were all difficult and prohibitively expensive for a young woman raised in poverty by a grandmother whose only source of income was a welfare check and whatever she could earn on the side cleaning houses or cooking. But Rox and her grandma hadn’t let anything get in the way of their dream, that one day Roxie could help people like the one they couldn’t help. Roxie’s mother. Stricken by schizophrenia as a young woman, terrifying to a little daughter who hid in a closet when her mother came ragged and incoherent from the streets, begging for food. Dead in a psychiatric hospital fifteen years in the past, when Roxie was twenty.

  “No, Blue,” Roxie said softly. “I can guarantee that if, in fact, anybody’s behind these deaths, it isn’t somebody with schizophrenia. That’s a stupid Hollywood myth and you know it. Somebody with untreated paranoid schizophrenia might, in a crisis, harm somebody. It rarely happens and the person is usually easily apprehended. These crimes we’re looking at aren’t the result of delusion-driven impulse but are carefully planned and executed. Nobody with active schizophrenia could even beginto organize crimes of this complexity, involving, apparently, mysterious drugs, prominent people, no immediate suspects or motive. That’s not what—”

  “Then what’s wrong? You’re about to make a modernist sculpture out of my sink.”

  She tossed her head in the general direction of where we’d just been standing in my kitchen. The gesture managed to create us again as we were in that moment, ghosts from seconds past hovering inches away, almost visible.

  “That,” she answered.

  “That?”

  “Blue, this thing keeps happening between us, like a minute ago.”

  “I know,” I said without my usual attitude. “It’s like walls dissolving. We say something and it makes us closer to each other because we understand what’s said. I don’t think it happens very often between people, do you?”

  The turquoise beads in her hair were eerily silent as she turned to look out the kitchen window again. “No, it doesn’t. But
we can’t get too close, Blue,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She inspected the cuff of the turquoise-blue cotton cargo shirt I’d ordered for her from one of the twenty or thirty catalogues I get every week. The shirt has lots of pockets and zippered compartments, and she loves it.

  “It scares me.”

  “Feeling close to me scares you?”

  “When it’s like that,” she said, nodding again at our ghosts, “when we understand each other like that, it’s so comfortable I want to stay there; I forget what I need to do with my life. It’s so seductive I forget about my work. And I can’t do that, Blue. I can’t ever do that.”

  Her voice was serious.

  “And you won’t,” I chirped, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my shorts in an attempt to appear lighthearted. “We’re not about mirror-sickness and terminal enmeshment. We’re women, but we’re not like that. It can’t happen.”

  “Can’t it?” she answered somberly.

  “No. We won’t let it.”

  “Okay, Blue,” she said, grinning, “let’s catch us a killer, then.”

  4

  The Haunt of Jackals

  The Bible is not short on references to swords. Rox, raised as a Baptist, was sure the letter’s signature, “The Sword of Heaven,” was biblical, but I wanted to look it up before calling my father, Father Jake, to get insider information on the phrase. An Episcopal priest, dad would sew his tongue to his lower lip before spouting scripture at anyone. Episcopalians traditionally refrain from spouting scripture. But when not shooting skeet with his collection of rifles, my father does savor the odd bit of biblical research. I’d looked up five of the thirty-four references to “sword” in the concordance to my old King James Bible when I gave up and called him in St. Louis, where he’s supposed to be retired. In reality, he works just as hard as ever.

  “Betsy Blue!” he said, happily calling me by a childhood name. “I’m so glad you called. Your brother’s parole hearing is scheduled for early December and I know you’ll want to be here. December tenth. Make your plane reservations now. And how’s Roxie? Is everything going all right? I’m dying to hear.”

  I had spoken to my father only three days earlier and he sends e-mails daily, but he’s the sort of person who prefers frequent updates. And given my family’s propensity for unusual disasters, his concern isn’t all that inappropriate. My mother, for example, was killed by a drunk driver on her way home from a Sierra Club meeting when my twin brother, David, and I were thirteen. Then five or six years later David began a descent into apelike behavior that would eventually earn him a stint in a Missouri state prison for attempted armed robbery. David’s starting to shape up under the influence of his new wife, Lonnie, but I can’t fault dad for maintaining eternal vigilance. Everything can change without notice, and my father knows it. What I know is that his need to be in touch is a form of not blinking.

  “Everything’s fine, dad,” I said. “What I’m calling about is swords. In the Bible. Rox and I are about to be retained by the San Diego Police Department to profile somebody who wrote a letter three weeks ago threatening two women politicians. They’ve since died under unusual circumstances. The letter-writer signed as ‘The Sword of Heaven.’ I can’t find it in the concordance. Do you know where it is?”

  “Isaiah!” my father answered with the enthusiasm of a hound for a treed raccoon. “The author of this letter will turn out to wear white socks and a glow-in-the-dark cross lapel pin.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked, gesturing for Rox to pick up the phone in the bedroom and listen. “Rox is going to listen in, okay?”

  “Hi, Roxie,” my father said politely, and then jumped back to the topic. “You’ll find it at Isaiah 34, one of the early verses. Except I think it refers to a sword in heaven in most of the translations, rather than a sword of heaven. What’s probably relevant to your inquiry is the nature of that particular text, however. I think you’ll find this interesting, Blue.”

  “I’m listening,” I told my father, who is professionally prone to the dramatic pause so common in sermons.

  “It’s one of those blood-and-guts apocalyptic tales in which God has a tantrum and wipes out a small nation, in this case a place called Edom. The author of this text was a poet, and the images of ruin are stunning. The stench of dead armies, mountains melting with blood, streams turned to tar, and a choking black smoke covering everything. Only ravens and bitterns, dragons and owls would live among Edom’s thorns once it was over. The poet called Edom after the destruction ‘an habitation of jackals.’ Oh, and one other thing would live there, Blue. One other entity.”

  “What entity, dad?” I asked, giving the response after which he could go on.

  His voice was at its basso-profundo pitch, and I could sense his enjoyment of the moment. “Lilith,” he pronounced.

  “You’re kidding!” I whooped. “This text goes back that far? Wow! So don’t tell me, let me guess. Edom was on the big guy’s hit list because the people hadn’t quite caught up with the times yet and were still worshiping the goddess, right?”

  “Right. A number of pregnant female figures have been found in excavations there. Edom was in a territory south of the Dead Sea along the Araba Wadi that runs to the Gulf of Aqaba. Now it would be in both Israel and Jordan. Excavations in both countries have turned up these female figures worked in clay and stone, which certainly suggests—”

  “Interesting,” I acknowledged, halting the flow of archaeological data. “So the place had to be blasted, turned into a nightmare, and then the writer put Lilith there.”

  “Had to do something with her, Blue,” he said with a chuckle. ”You know how difficult she was.”

  “Wait a minute,” Roxie interrupted from the bedroom phone. “What is this ‘Lilith,’ and what have you all just said that will tell us anything about who wrote this letter?”

  “My daughter can tell you all about the significance of Lilith,” my father said proudly. “And at first glance what you’ve learned about the letter-writer is that he or she has been exposed to some rather screwball religious ideas—classes, sermons, the like. This passage isn’t used in traditional lectionaries—the predetermined series of scripture on which weekly sermons are based in every denomination. What I’m saying is, Isaiah 34 isn’t in any Protestant or Catholic lectionary I’ve ever seen, nor does it turn up in the Jewish Haftarot. It’s too ugly. But it is frequently used by crackpots who want a biblical basis for their hatred of women.”

  “Are you saying you think the author of this letter is a woman? I mean, all we have is this one little phrase, this signature—‘The Sword of Heaven.’”

  “I have no ideas about the sex of the author,” dad went on. “I can only guess that whoever it is, he or she has been exposed to some sort of religious experience in which a profoundly violent biblical text which fantasizes hideous punishment for a goddess-worshiping culture was used. I’m telling you that a mainstream denomination would never emphasize or even use this text, ever. A Lutheran auto mechanic or Methodist dentist would never have heard it from a pulpit. Your letter-writer either is or has been proximate to some fringe religious sect or cult.”

  “This is California, dad,” I said. “There’s a fringe sect on every corner.”

  “This one will probably bill itself as ‘Christian’ and ‘Bible-based,’ Blue. It will appeal to lower-class whites with little education. Probably it will be all-white, maybe even white supremacist. That sometimes goes with the woman-bashing.”

  I could hear Rox’s snort of contempt. “We talkin’ pointy hats and sheets here? ’Cause if we is, ole Roxie jus’ remembered a previous engagement, y’all hear what I’m sayin’?”

  In the two months of our relationship I’d never heard Rox do that patois. My dad took it seriously.

  “I think the sheets are outré these days, Roxie. But if anybody has to go near these goons, let Blue do it.”

  “Oh, thanks, dad,” I replied. “Just
send me to the lions.”

  “Glad to help.” He chuckled as we said good night.

  After buckling on my waist pack, which among other things contains the Smith and Wesson I bought after my nine-millimeter Glock became a casualty of the Muffin Crandall case, I invited Rox to go with me on Brontë’s nightly hike. This event is not a favorite of Roxie’s, but I knew she’d go because she wanted to talk about the case.

  “So what’s this ‘Lilith’?” she asked as we tramped through the rocks which comprise my property into the rocks which comprise the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. A breeze moving across the desert floor made the spindly branches of an ocotillo writhe and cast snakelike shadows at our feet. Brontë raced ahead, her black fur reflecting moonlight. The setting, I thought, couldn’t have been more appropriate.

  “The name is an ancient Sumerian word meaning ‘wind spirit,’” I began, smiling at my feet so Rox wouldn’t see how much I relished this. There’s nothing like a good ghost story. Lowering my voice, I went on.

  “The mythological Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but she didn’t stay long because she insisted on total equality with him, including the right to be on top during sex. When Adam freaked, Lilith flew away and refused to return, preferring instead the erotic companionship of ‘demons,’ to whom she bore a hundred children a day, all of whom were killed every day by a deity annoyed at having to piece together another, more subservient wife for Adam.

  “The word ‘lilith’ already meant a terrifying spirit that haunts wild places. After the Genesis story the word became a name, an embodiment of the wildness lurking just beyond civilization’s control. Lilith became the ‘night hag,’ a woman whose beauty was equaled by her power. She always lived in wild places and was believed to drive men mad with her unrestrained sexuality. She’s regarded as demonic by the men who wrote the Old Testament, but she’s really the patron saint of every woman who won’t be owned by anything. Her spirit is out here, Rox, in the wind and the rocks and the rattlers. She’s the howling wilderness.”