The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “God loves you,” she said, revealing several thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontic work in a Glinda, Good Witch of the North smile. “And God wants you to PROSPER!”

  I guessed she was between forty and forty-five, from anywhere except the Deep South, and in this line of work because it beat her last job as a receptionist for a large law firm.

  As the choir hummed “Amazing Grace,” she raised her arms and began a prayer that seemed to touch on issues of concern to the crowd.

  “… lead us to Your kingdom …”

  “Amen.”

  “… where we enjoy the riches You have placed here for us…”

  “Yes!”

  “… because God’s people are His emissaries of pure joy and great prosperity …”

  “AmenYesss!”

  I was beginning to get the picture, and it wasn’t the one I’d expected.

  “BB,” I whispered, “is this the sort of thing you usually hear at revivals? This prosperity business?”

  “No, but don’t matter,” he answered. “Idea is to get folks worked up. These folks wanna get worked up over gettin’ rich instead a gettin’ saved. Still the same. Look at ’em.”

  The crowd was predominantly white, although there were noticeable groups of Latinos and Asians. All were comfortably dressed in shorts, little denim dresses, sandals, and athletic shoes. Attractive, casual Southern California people accustomed to fast food and the fast lane. I didn’t see anybody who looked capable of listening to Isaiah’s tale of epic destruction. They didn’t want to hear about dead armies rotting in heaps as streams turned to pitch. They wanted to hear that God’s plan for them included a recreational vehicle, new PC complete with Photo-Shop and digital camera, and maybe a cruise to Guam or something. They wanted to hear that it was okay to be who they were. They wanted to hear it so much their eyes were glazing over.

  After a sermon about accepting blessings, it became apparent that God would be particularly generous in the bestowing of worldly treasures to those who signaled their interest by giving money to Ruby Emerald. As the singers and musicians performed a medley of religious and secular numbers made popular in movies, cheerful teenagers collected checks. Apparently there was some kind of giveaway connected to the “offering” because from time to time someone would jump up and yell, “Microwave! I won a microwave!” or “Hey, got me a camcorder!”

  “Here it come,” BB said after the collecting of money. “Gonna get down an’ dirty now.”

  Even in the bright afternoon sunlight the stage became different, darker. Like the turning down of lights in a theater. You know when that happens you’re heading into an altered state, something better than usual, more interesting. Something more extreme than your own life. Ruby Emerald’s head was bowed, a single white high-intensity pinlight illuminating her hair. The choir hummed chords in C minor.

  “The Lord knows you have needs,” she whispered after raising her head and flinging back her hair. “The Lord gave you those needs.”

  “Yes.”

  “So why shouldn’t you meet those needs and prosper?”

  She was saying absolutely nothing, but the staging and music were evocative. I could feel the hair on my forearms rise as the minor humming increased in volume. From the audience an older man stood and said something nobody could hear until out of nowhere one of the teenagers appeared with a clip mike and power pack. After attaching these to the speaker, the smiling boy dropped to one knee in the aisle and listened with rapt attention as the older man delivered in Shakespearian tones a tale of accepting God and then doing really well in a real estate deal. The proceeds, carefully leveraged, had enabled him to retire and devote himself to his ailing wife. Who had always dreamed of cruising to Mexico on their own yacht … which they’d been able to do … before she died of whatever it was. Praise God.

  Emerald solicited more testimonials, and got them. At least half were scripted and performed by professional actors, I realized. The scripts had all been written by the same person. A person overly fond of the word “succor,” which rarely occurs in the normal speech of anybody. The rest of the testimonials seemed real and involved less dramatic tales of success and financial reward. Not one of the real ones included “succor” of any kind.

  And every time somebody near the stage stood to speak, the same three men and two women would position themselves along the stage apron, crouch, and watch.

  “Cops,” BB said without interest.

  “The children of God have a right to happiness,” Emerald insisted, pacing up and down now. “The righteous receive their reward.”

  “Yes.”

  The choir was loud now, the orchestra gradually joining. First the strings, then woodwinds, then brass and percussion. People were standing, holding their arms aloft as if they expected something to drop from the sky. Emerald continued to pace and shout, but I couldn’t hear her over the music and the crowd, who seemed to be chanting, “Manna,” over and over.

  I didn’t hear the shot.

  But BB did. In one motion he pulled me to the ground, stuffing my head under the seat of the folding chair in front of me. I could hear a roar from the crowd as I hit my head on the chair seat trying to get up.

  “BB, dammit!” I yelled. “We’re supposed to see what’s going on here. Let me go!”

  “Roxie fry my oysters in hot lard, I let her lady get hurt at some honky revival,” he noted. “Look like somebody shoot the preacher.”

  “Oh, God, it’s Sword. And BB, nobody’s said ‘honky’ in at least fifteen years.”

  “Jus’ stayin’ in character,” he said as he scouted the scene. “Look like they got the dude already.”

  Waving my press pass with its police franking on it above my head, I made my way to the stage apron. Ruby Emerald was lying on the boards at the edge of the portable stage, surrounded by people. To the left, one of the women cops was snapping handcuffs on a man in a tight black suit. J. R. Jones, I remembered. The emotional emcee. He’d introduced Ruby Emerald through a flood of tears. Beside him one of the male cops was holding a small-caliber handgun wrapped in his shirt-tail as he dropped it into a plastic evidence bag. The smell of cordite hung in a cloud over the scene.

  There was already a doctor tending Ruby Emerald, or somebody with medical training anyway, because I could see him directing members of the choir to apply pressure to the side of Emerald’s neck as he clasped her wrist and nodded.

  “Good, good,” he said in a husky voice. “Paramedics should be here any minute. There’s a hospital five minutes away. I don’t think this is fatal if we keep the pressure on that artery.”

  His crouched stance and calm attitude seemed military. But with his free hand he smoothed the hair from Emerald’s face and tucked it in back of her ear. The gesture was loving, maternal. And revealing.

  Behind Ruby Emerald’s ear and running along the base of her hairline was a fading reddish purple scar. I could see stitch marks where the long incision had been sutured. At the ear the scar literally ran inside, vanishing into folds of cartilage. The medical person supervising Emerald’s emergency care seemed to notice as well and ran a finger along the healing wound.

  “BB, somebody’s tried to kill this woman before,” I said. “Tried to cut her head off or something. Did you see that scar?”

  “Blue, you dumber than soap. Ain’t nobody try to kill you by cuttin’ the back of your neck. Knife just run into bone. Take a meat cleaver and a mighty strong man, get the job done. That scar ain’t from nobody tryin’ to hurt her, no way. Too straight and clean.”

  Sirens, close by. Abruptly the person supervising Emerald’s care stood and walked away, vanishing into the crowd. I hadn’t paid much attention to him except to note that he seemed short for a man. I remembered dark glasses and a baseball cap. It seemed strange that he’d walk off just before the paramedics arrived.

  One of the female cops planted her serviceable shoes directly in my line of view and barked, ”Who are you?”

 
; “Dr. McCarron,” I barked back, using an academic title rarely useful for more than getting a decent table in restaurants. “The psychologist working with Wes Rathbone on the Sword of Heaven business.”

  Few people understand the difference between psychology and social psychology and I didn’t see any point in confusing her.

  “This is Bernard Berryman, who’s working with me,” I went on. “What happened?”

  “What Sword of Heaven business, and why is Berryman in cheerleader drag?” she asked as BB shook his dreadlocks and scowled at her.

  “My associate, Dr. Bouchie, a forensic psychiatrist, and I are on your payroll as consultants,” I explained. “Somebody is sending threats that seem to result in death. Ruby Emerald is on the list. But it looks like you’ve got our man. So who is he?”

  She looked over her shoulder at the man called J. R. Jones, who was crying again. One of the male cops was trying to take a statement from him and getting nowhere.

  “Says he’s in love with her. Says she was leaving him,” the cop explained.

  “Same ole, same ole,” BB said, shaking his head. “Hard-hearted woman be the death of a softhearted man.”

  “BB, it’s not the man who just got shot here,” I pointed out.

  Then to the woman cop I said, “Would you radio Detective Rathbone that I’ll meet him at the station? He’ll want Dr. Bouchie and me there for the interrogation, I’m sure.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I was curious.

  After calling Roxie at Auntie’s from a pay phone, I dropped BB off at his shop and headed for police headquarters. He’d had enough of police stations, he said. On the phone Rox had confirmed what I suspected to be the usual reason for surgical scars along ventral scalp hairlines. Rathbone was already at police headquarters when I arrived.

  “This is not our man,” he said, ushering me to an interrogation room where J. R. Jones was drinking coffee from a foam cup in the company of three detectives.

  “I keep telling you I don’t know anything about swords of heaven,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  There was a smell in the room, metallic and musty at the same time. I’d noticed it before in the past. In prisons. Alleys where drunks sleep in cardboard boxes. Nursing homes where nobody ever visits. The smell of despair. It was drifting from J. R. Jones.

  “This is Dr. Blue McCarron,” Rathbone introduced me. “She’s working with us on the Sword of Heaven situation.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” he said again. “Just leave me alone. I don’t care what you do to me. My life is over. Just leave me alone.”

  Up close I could see that his gray hair was heavily moussed and that contact lenses accounted for the startling blue of his eyes. His jawline showed no jowls or neck paunch above the starched white of his collar, but the hand holding the coffee cup was speckled with liver spots. J. R. Jones was a lot older than he looked.

  “You must have been worried last night when Ruby was in the hospital,” I said. “If you’re not Sword, then you wouldn’t have known what happened to her.”

  “I didn’t know,” he said softly. “She was so sick, her heart pounding like a little animal’s. Like a bird. I’d kill anybody who hurt her.”

  Jones wasn’t a big man, but he took up a lot of space. Some people are like that, like what’s inside them spills over the boundaries of their bodies. People who know too much are often like that. And people who feel too much. I pegged Jones for category two.

  “She’s a beautiful woman,” I went on. “And a charismatic messenger.”

  Rathbone was watching me, signaling the other cops with an imperceptible shake of the head to stay out of it and let me run with this.

  “She’s an angel, and anyone who would harm her should be put to death,” Jones said with feeling. He seemed to have forgotten that he’d just shot the aforementioned angel with a .22 handgun.

  “Have you been married before?” I asked softly, as if speaking of the dead.

  “Thirty-five years. My wife, Crystal … the boys … well, the boys were grown when I left, when I first met Ruby and knew I loved her. She came to Indianapolis—Indianapolis, Indiana— did a revival. That’s where we lived … I lived. I fell for her. She’s so beautiful. I’ve been with her for six years now. I wanted to marry her as soon as Crystal gave me the divorce. But Ruby wouldn’t, and then someone else … I’m sure there’s someone else. She was dumping me. Today was going to be my last day introducing her, and I thought maybe, you know, I could just die up there onstage. I had this gun and I was going to do it, kill myself, but I wanted her with me. I couldn’t go without her.”

  BB was right. Revivals are always about sex. The too-blue eyes were crying again, and I felt like a snake. He crossed his arms on the table and lay his head on them, sobbing. End-of-the-line despair. I hated seeing it because I have some idea of how it feels. Most people do.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, walking around the table to put a hand on his shoulder. And that’s when I saw it. A pale, thin scar running along his hairline in back and vanishing behind his ears. It explained the tight jaw, the absence of jowls.

  “You probably even helped her pick out a plastic surgeon, didn’t you?” I asked. “Everybody’s doing it, but it’s so hard to find somebody top-notch.”

  I don’t think I’ve used the term “top-notch” in my entire life, but I had a sense Jones would find it appropriate.

  “Oh, yes, she went to my surgeon for that,” he said, half smiling blearily as he lifted his head. “Her base of operations is right here in San Diego, and so is the surgeon. She loved the way I looked and wouldn’t have gone to anyone else. She just had it done three weeks ago, too. A whole face-lift. Just in time for this tour.”

  Just in time for this fill-in-the-blank. Tour, campaign, election.I remembered Kate Van Der Elst rubbing at her neck as she talked to me earlier. Remembered her little twitch when I asked if she and Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger went to the same dentist. My bet was it wasn’t a dentist.

  “I’ve been thinking of having a mole removed from my neck,” I told J. R. Jones. “I’d love it if you’d give me the name of your surgeon.”

  “Rainer,” he answered. “Dr. Jennings Rainer at the Rainer Clinic. They’re top-notch. Everybody at Rainer is top-notch.”

  “Wes,” I said to Rathbone in the hall, “I’m not sure, but I think I know where to find the Sword of Heaven.”

  8

  Those Turkey Neck Blues

  Rathbone and I agreed to meet at Auntie’s, where Rox’s linedance team would be finishing rehearsal by the time we arrived. At this point, Rathbone said, the opinions of a forensic psychiatrist became critical. Not that my assessments leading to this point hadn’t been brilliant, he hastened to add. But if I was right, the police would need special guidelines for continuing the investigation. Because it didn’t look like any serial killer the police had seen before. It didn’t even look like anything the police had seen before. He wanted Roxie’s opinion before taking the next step.

  When Brontë and I arrived he was already there, and if he felt the slightest discomfort at being in a gay bar, he didn’t show it.

  “Hey,” he said, leaning comfortably on the rail surrounding Auntie’s dance floor, “they’re pretty good!”

  Rox and the team were concluding a tricky routine that combined elements of both the tango and traditional square dancing. The choreography was Rox’s creation, and I knew she had an eye on first prize at a big rodeo line-dance competition in New Mexico right after Christmas. Her fringed satin blouse was drenched with sweat and all two hundred of her beaded braids flew out from her head as she executed the stomps and turns of the dance.

  I thought she looked like magic out there under a strobing gold light. An image of everything bright and lively and warm. Her cowboy boots didn’t miss a step when she saw me and smiled. I, on the other hand, managed to trip while standing perfectly still and wound up sitting on a stool I’d never intended
to sit on. Sometimes just looking at Roxie causes me to lose track of basic things. Like maintaining sufficient muscle tension in my legs to keep from falling over.

  Rathbone grinned.

  “I get that way around Annie sometimes,” he said. “It’s ridiculous, but it keeps me from getting all wrapped up any more in the crap at work. I’m lucky.”

  “Um,” I answered, embarrassed. “How long have you and Annie been married?”

  “Almost a year. Surprised? Thought I was gonna say ‘since high school’ or something, didn’t you?”

  He seemed pleased with himself. I sensed a squadron of insights flying my way.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “This thing with Annie, it changed the inside of my head. Used to be, I thought everything had to be one way. Cops are like that. But with Annie, well, she just loosened me up.”

  “That’s great,” I said, hoping not to hear more. “Looks like the rehearsal’s over. Rox will join us just as soon as she changes her blouse. Do you two-step?”

  I wouldn’t have asked, but somebody had just put Mary Chapin Carpenter’s “Down at the Twist and Shout” on the CD player. Impossible to sit still. There weren’t many people around at dinnertime on a Sunday, but everybody who was there was on the floor.

  “No, but I’m game to learn.”

  So while Roxie changed her sweaty blouse I led Wes Rathbone onto the dance floor and showed him how to do the simple steps shadow-style, both of us facing the same way. He caught on instantly and before the second chorus was able to lead from the traditional stance as well. By the song’s end he was trying spins. Rox had changed to a pumpkin-colored sweatshirt and was watching from a table where she’d ordered iced tea for everybody.

  “You’re a natural,” she told Rathbone when we joined her. “You’d be great for the line-dance team.”

  I was afraid he was going to say something like, Aw, shucks, ma’am, but instead he asked Rox if the invitation included his wife.