The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  Something else about the message had captured my attention. Buttons. Little circles used in creating Web pages, you can download them free from hundreds of Web sites featuring buttons, bars, and background screen designs called wallpaper. Bars and buttons are just designators for where you click a mouse to go somewhere else in the Web page or to links to other sites. There must be thousands available in every color and texture, some of which look like actual buttons. The message before me had two buttons, one preceding each line. I clicked on them and nothing happened. They didn’t go anywhere, but were merely decorative. They were also unusual.

  Roxie has a real nine-to-five job as staff psychiatrist at a local state prison, after which she also maintains a private practice from an office she shares with another psychiatrist who’s only there during the day. As a result, she hasn’t spent the hours I have cruising around the Internet for no particular reason. I was sure she wouldn’t grasp the significance of the buttons.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” I asked.

  “Like what?”

  “These buttons.”

  “I’ve never seen them in e-mails,” she said, catching something I’d missed.

  There are no buttons in e-mail programs. To get them there would require work—a customized message. Sword was no novice with computers.

  “Good point,” I said, “but look at them closely. See?”

  “They’re plates. Little blue and white plates.”

  And they were. They were, in fact, photographs of ordinary dinner plates in a pattern called blue willow. The skill necessary to scan, tint, and size a photo and then file it to an e-mail program as a button was impressive. But why bother? Hours of work for what? So a threatening letter riddled with misspellings would look good? There was something peculiar about that, I thought, something ominous.

  I made color duplicates of the letter on Roxie’s printer, then forwarded it to Wes Rathbone’s e-mail address at police headquarters with a note explaining exactly when I’d received it and how. Then I took Brontë out while Rox made coffee. When I got back we looked at the letter.

  “Well, the concern over gender issues is consistent,” Rox began. “It may even be escalating. Your name was apparently confusing. ‘Blue’ as a name is not a gender marker. Could be a male or a female. Not knowing seems to have caused some anxiety. I’m leaning toward male here, Blue. I think Sword is a man.”

  I inhaled the steam from my coffee as Brontë noisily crunched kibble from a bowl on Roxie’s kitchen floor. I thought about the use of blue willow plates as buttons on a computer screen. Buttons that went nowhere but were just there.

  “Because women don’t typically experience anxiety over gender, right?” I asked.

  “You rarely see pathological conditions in women related to it,” Rox said, yawning. “Sure, there are a few female-to-male transsexuals, and women who simply prefer for any number of reasons to dress in men’s clothing or even live as men. These women may be conflicted about gender, but not pathologically so. They know what they are. Menstruation is an inescapable reminder.

  “But this is different,” she went on. “Sword is made so anxious by gender ambiguity that it feels life-threatening. Unless a balance is restored, unless all references to gender fit into rigid categories, some kind of meltdown will occur. That’s probably how it feels. Sword is nearly out of control with anxiety over this, trying to maintain equilibrium by single-handedly restoring the balance, the rigid gender categories. It would seem that this involves threatening or even killing women who have strayed beyond those categories. What I don’t understand is how Sword knew you were working on the case.”

  I heard the thump of Roxie’s newspaper hitting the door of her condo. Then lesser thumps as more papers hit subsequent doors.

  “You’re working on the case, too,” I said. “Maybe you got the same message.”

  I retrieved the day’s news as Rox went to check her e-mail.

  “Nothing,” she said when I returned with the paper in its plastic bag. “I don’t get it. Why are you the target? And how did Sword get your e-mail address?”

  “It’s not that difficult. All the servers maintain directories, listings of subscribers under their real names. There are ways of protecting identity—all kinds of Web services through which you can send e-mail anonymously or even have your own Web page without anybody being able to find out who you are. I didn’t do that, although from the e-mail address I’d guess Sword did.”

  “Anybody could find my e-mail address in five minutes,” I continued. “What I don’t understand is how Sword knows I’m working on this thing.”

  “Maybe he works for the paper. Look.” She’d unfolded the paper to the front page.

  “Police Investigate Revivalist Threat,” an article header told us. CBS had lost no time in disseminating news of the Bugs Bunny tape, but there was no mention of the previous letter threatening Grossinger and Ross or the green note pushed under the door of Kate Van Der Elst’s campaign headquarters. I assumed that was because the police, while not hesitating to reference in an interview “forensic consultants Dr. Roxanne Bouchie and Dr. Emily ‘Blue’ McCarron, retained to profile the offender,” had wisely chosen not to provide Sword any more publicity.

  “He got your name from the paper,” Roxie said. “And mine, although I don’t seem to bother him.”

  “Roxanne is a woman’s name,” I pointed out. “No gender ambiguity to rile him up.”

  “Or else he’s white.”

  “White?”

  Roxie shook her head. “As in Caucasian, honey. You know, folks who sunburn? They have hobbies like owning plantations and naming their children for plants that grow in the Scottish highlands. Our boy isn’t interested in me because I’m black. I could walk right up to him in a tux and introduce myself as Steven Spielberg and he wouldn’t notice. Only the behavior of his own, of people with whom he identifies, is of interest to him.”

  “Three things,” I said. “First, there’s no way he could know you’re black. Second, the e-mail was sent an hour and a half ago. It was still the middle of the night. The paper wasn’t available yet.”

  “And third?”

  “I sold the plantation in a leveraged buyout weeks ago, right after I legally changed my name from Calluna vulgaris, commonly known as heather, to the more serviceable ‘Blue.’ Rox, sometimes your racial jibes make me feel … I don’t know, like you think I’d run out and buy a slave if I could find one on sale.”

  “Girl,” she said in that way she knows is a guarantee of my total attention, “he could have read the paper on-line before it hit the streets and looked me up under the American Psychiatric Association membership roster for San Diego, found out I work at a state prison, and gotten the info off any of several different sites. Remember, I’m a government employee. Government agencies have to prove they don’t discriminate on the basis of race, so everybody’s race is documented in personnel data, which is all on the Internet. And I was just joking about the plantation. Sometimes I forget you aren’t black.”

  It was hard to reply through the braids falling across my face as she hugged me, but I felt compelled to make a point.

  “Nobody ever mentions that black plantation owners in the South also bought and sold black slaves,” I lectured into braids. “Greed and cruelty are options for everybody.”

  “Good point,” she said as she glanced at the kitchen clock.

  “Gotta handle an ethnic crisis this morning,” she yelled after dashing to the shower. “Need to be there early. The Latino prisoners want to have a memorial service for some bullfighter who finally got gored to death in Tijuana last week. The guy was a kind of cultural icon to them. You know, muy macho. An artist, too. He painted pictures in the blood of the bulls he tortured and killed. Blue … ?”

  I sensed a warning in the interrogatory use of my name.

  “I won’t,” I said.

  “Don’t go anywhere near the Rainer Clinic today. Let the police do it
and funnel information to us for analysis. That’s our job. You hear me?”

  “Huh?” I yelled back.

  After Roxie had left, Brontë and I headed straight for my truck and drove to the coastal San Diego community called La Jolla, which is pronounced “La Hoya” and means “the jewel” in Spanish. Once an idyllic resort community favored during winter months by such East Coast luminaries as Ulysses S. Grant and the author Helen Hunt Jackson, La Jolla later became a magnet for movie stars who wanted someplace quiet in which to purchase weekend homes. Now it’s the densely packed pinnacle of an area called the “golden triangle,” and not for no reason. The village’s rambling old streets are crammed with upscale shops, and a triangle of new office buildings, hotels, and shopping centers expands east toward its base at an inland freeway. Among those office buildings are numerous medical clinics, some of them featuring cosmetic surgery.

  I had no intention of going in to the Rainer Clinic. In fact, my original plan had been merely to run Brontë along La Jolla’s famous Coast Walk, a path through wind-bent juniper and sea spray along the spectacular edge of the continent. And I did. Then I found the clinic’s address in a shell shop phone book and drove by. It was a new black-glass-and-steel monolith housing hundreds of discrete endeavors, none of which was obvious from the outside. I couldn’t stand it. And I thought my long black dress and sandals were the sort of thing one would wear while popping into the offices of the place where Kate Van Der Elst had allowed her face to be, as she described it, cut loose from her skull.

  The Rainer Clinic was on the ground floor of the building. The reason for this selection became apparent to me as I stood in the parking lot. From ambulance-bay doors emerged a young man with a thick bandage over his nose secured by gauze strips about his head. With him was an older woman who led him toward a tan Mercedes. The young man, really a teenager, seemed groggy. Then he doubled over to vomit beside the car.

  “It’s all right, Ian,” the older woman said. “It’s from the anesthesia. Let’s just get you home, and you can use one of those suppositories Dr. Rainer gave you to control the nausea. You’re fine, honey.”

  “Mo-om!” came the woozy response. “Don’t talk about suppositories !”

  Mother and son, I deduced. Rhinoplasty. The young man was being groomed for college and the marriage market. A Roman nose can be such a help.

  Skirting the ambulance-bay doors, I entered the building’s lobby from the front and looked around. Typical lobby. Black marble floor, textured walls, enormous flower arrangement on circular white marble table dead-center. The left rear door of four bore a brushed brass plate which read RAINER CLINIC. Pushing it open, I entered what seemed to be a small art museum.

  Modern art. Minimalist in the reception area, but slightly more daring in two anterooms flanking a black marble counter. The carpet was gunmetal-gray and so thickly voluptuous it was like walking on a cat. An aquarium beneath a painting of black sticks on a background of white contained no fish, but a school of flat metal ovals that moved through the water in patterns determined by an almost invisible magnet on a clear plastic wire. The furniture was all black leather brightened by very thin pillows in shades of red chenille.

  “May I help you?” asked an attractive woman behind the counter.

  She appeared to be in her late twenties and was flawless. Porcelain skin, gleaming dark hair fashionably cut, pouty lips that whispered the word “collagen.” Her suit, I noticed, was similar to the one I’d bought for Kate’s fundraiser. Except hers was all black, the better to emphasize those deep red lips.

  “Um, my husband has an appointment with an attorney on the seventh floor, going to be there for hours, I’m afraid, and the other car’s in the shop, so I dropped him off and was going to go shopping but …” I said, mucking through my purse for the parking stub, “I forgot to have them validate my parking ticket and I was hoping you’d …”

  “No problem,” she said, smiling redly as she leaned to reach for the parking stamp beneath the counter.

  Behind her I could see several glassed-in cubicles, each with what looked like a white Naugahyde dentist’s chair. Also visible were stainless steel sinks and waste receptacles. Trays of surgical instruments. Oxygen tanks against a wall.

  A woman in green surgical scrubs exited one of the cubicles, pulling a sterile mask from her face. About five-four, I guessed, ruddy and wholesome-looking. Cub Scout den-mother type. Wisps of straight, dust-colored hair drifted from the edges of her sterile green head covering. There was blood on the front of her scrub shirt. Megan Rainer, I thought. The daughter.

  “I’ll be meeting Chris for an early lunch at Samson’s,” she told the receptionist. “Think you can hold down the fort for an hour?”

  “Only if Mrs. Austin doesn’t show up,” the receptionist answered, bringing a laugh from the woman in scrubs. “Dr. Rainer, I don’t know how you keep from killing that woman, she’s such a pain in the—”

  At that point the receptionist remembered I was present and briskly stamped my parking ticket. Her look made it clear that I had no further business there, but I pretended to be searching for my keys as two men in scrubs identical to Megan Rainer’s opened a cubicle door. On the reclining white chair inside I saw a woman in knit slacks and a blouse that buttoned up the front. She didn’t move, and her entire head was wrapped in thick gauze bandages except for openings at the nose and mouth. Even her eyes were covered.

  “Bettina will be ready to go in about twenty minutes, Mr. Ashe,” I heard Megan Rainer say in another waiting room around a corner behind the counter. A door to this area stood slightly ajar to my right.

  “She’ll be woozy and will want to sleep as soon as she gets home. She’ll probably sleep straight through until tomorrow morning once the nausea’s controlled. We’ll send some suppositories for that home with her, as well as antibiotics. Just help her through those double doors and out into the parking lot. It’s not visible from the street. Nobody will see.”

  The name, Bettina Ashe, was familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

  “I’ll just duck out this way,” I told the receptionist, who nodded absently. I had ceased to exist in her mind, which was convenient. The closed waiting room, meant for those who would transport patients home after surgery, was also artfully decorated. In blue.

  A lush quilt in shades of blue velvet, maroon satin, and gold lamé covered one wall, illuminated by gallery lights. On the opposite wall was an unusual collection. Plates. An antique blue willow design, a terra-cotta under an exquisite glaze the color of midnight. A Grecian key design in a mosaic of teal and sapphire bits of glass. A plate made of inlaid wood like a Chinese puzzle, every other piece a shade of blue.

  I exited through the double ambulance doors to the parking lot without attracting further attention, blue circles haunting my field of vision.

  10

  The Cheese Blintz Connection

  I was dying to get out of that black dress, but I knew once I got home I wouldn’t drive back over the mountains into San Diego. And there was much to be done before I could afford the luxury of a swim in my pool. After stopping again to call Rathbone from a pay phone I began to see the value in having a cell phone.

  “Did you get the employee roster and bios for the Rainer Clinic?” I asked.

  “On my desk,” he said. “Haven’t had a chance to look at them. Where are you? I can fax them to you right now.”

  “I’m in a 7-Eleven parking lot in La Jolla where three Pacific Bell workers in a truck are blasting their radio so loud I can’t hear you. Kenny Rogers’s ‘Ruby.’ I’m going to buy a cell phone even though I think they’re pretentious.”

  “Annie got one and loves it,” he noted. “So where should I fax this file?”

  “I’ll just drive downtown and get it, Wes. Have there been any more threats?”

  “Not that we know of. I’m on my way to the Rainer Clinic right now. This thing isn’t a high priority with the department as of last night, Blue. After this morni
ng I’m not going to be able to spend much time on it. Threats are a dime a dozen, but with the newspaper coverage on the Emerald tape today we’re under some pressure to investigate. Truth is, until we have some evidence that this guy’s really killing people, he just goes in the kook file. I know you think the deaths of Grossinger and Ross weren’t natural, but there’s no medical evidence to support that. All we have is one letter and a tape that sounds like Bugs Bunny. I can’t justify—”

  “What do you mean, ‘one letter’?” I interrupted. “What about the one on green paper shoved under Kate Van Der Elst’s office door? Are you counting that one?”

  “It’s in a separate file,” he explained. “Lab test showed the glue used wasn’t the same as the glue in the first Sword letter. That was Super Glue and the green letter was Elmer’s.”

  “So?”

  “So they’re not from the same guy. Van Der Elst’s letter was probably just some local, like her husband said.”

  “You deduced this from glue ?” I asked. It seemed silly. Most people keep more than one kind of glue around.

  “Blue, there was a shoot-out just this side of Tijuana early this morning and a border agent was seriously injured. Looks like he’s gonna make it, but he may never walk again. The perp fled into San Diego. We’ve got every available officer working on it. This letter-threat thing, it’s just a minor felony—Section 422 of the California Penal Code, ‘Threats to Commit Crime Resulting in Death or Great Bodily Injury.’ A first offender would walk away with a few weeks of community service. We just don’t have the manpower for a thorough investigation. But you and Roxie are still on the payroll. I agree with you that there’s more going on here than meets the eye. Do what you can.”

  “Wes, what hospital is Ruby Emerald in?”

  “Mercy.”

  After hanging up I headed toward the shopping center where the restaurant called Samson’s is located, the restaurant where Dr. Megan Rainer had told a receptionist she would meet someone named Chris for lunch.