The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  The place was already filling up when I got there, and individual people are never popular with waiters during busy times. I was dyescorted to a small booth for two in the main room and handed a menu with the unstated expectation that I’d order something simple and then leave. From my vantage point I could see the entrance, and it wasn’t long before Megan Rainer arrived with a thickly built man in jeans and a blue shirt. He wore little round glasses and his frizzy dark brown hair hung in a heavy braid down his back. Megan was speaking about something with great enthusiasm, but his eyes kept straying to the menu he’d grabbed from a bin. They wore matching wedding rings.

  “I’ll have a cheese blintz and coffee,” I told the waiter as Megan and what was obviously her husband were seated in a booth diagonally across the aisle from mine. He faced in my direction, and I could hear parts of his half of the conversation. Things like, “Corned beef looks good” and “Love their matzo ball soup, but I think I’ll go with the Reuben.” I wondered why it is that TV sleuths in this position always stalk suspects who graciously discuss their crimes over lunch. “Have you tried the Caesar? And by the way, I hid the real emerald pendant in the casket lining beside the false birth certificate. Maybe we should split a dessert?”

  I nursed my cheese blintz long enough to learn a few things, though. For example, Josh, apparently their son, was going on a school field trip to the Scripps Aquarium and wanted to take his camera. This was a problem because the school had a rule against children taking easily lost or stolen items on field trips. It made sense to me.

  It also became clear that something was wrong with their dishwasher and some daffodil bulbs had been planted that nobody expected to grow. Megan Rainer and her husband laughed a lot. More than once I saw her touch his hand on the table. The only dissension involved something to which he kept saying things like, “It’s only two more years, hon. We planned it this way” and “Come on, you can do it!” After these remarks I could see Megan Rainer’s right hand curl to a fist around the handle of her fork. Then she’d wave the fork around while saying things I couldn’t hear. But I’d learned a little. Like, Megan Rainer and her husband, Chris, got along. They were concerned about their children’s activities. And they had some sort of agreement which meant Megan had to do something for two more years because they’d planned it that way.

  I would have eaten lunch anyway, I told myself. The time hadn’t been a total waste.

  After giving Brontë a saved sliver of blintz, I got on I-5 heading south toward the Hillcrest area of San Diego. Two sprawling medical complexes, the University of Southern California Medical Center and Mercy Hospital, contribute to Hillcrest’s patchwork ambience. A single block boasts two sushi bars, a body-piercing shop, three narrow bookstores specializing in cookbooks, used medical texts, and Russian erotic art, respectively, a landmark deli, and an abandoned movie theater under whose marquee the homeless now sit on folded sleeping bags.

  Some of the local merchants keep cans of dog food under their counters for the pets of the homeless population. Donations for this dog food are provided by Hillcrest’s shoppers, who include highly paid personnel from both hospitals. There is no shortage of dog food in Hillcrest, a fact which says something about the nature of complex human societies, although I’m not sure what. I found a parking spot on the street in front of the theater and promised Brontë I’d be back within half an hour. Then I walked up to Mercy Hospital and asked at the information desk for Ruby Emerald’s room number.

  Mercy is a Catholic hospital, and although wimpled nursing nuns in starched habits are a thing of the past, Mercy has compensated for the loss with an abundance of crucifixes. They’re everywhere. Brass and oak crucifix over a water fountain. Abstract stone and brushed-steel crucifix between rows of framed photos of hospital benefactors, all of whom look like corporate executives, which they are. The crucifix over Ruby Emerald’s bed was sixties modern, aluminum and black wood. Ruby was reading the Wall Street Journal and humming “Don’t Fall in Love with a Dreamer” with the radio when I walked in. Kenny Rogers again. I fought an urge to sing along.

  “My name is Dr. Blue McCarron,” I said, quickly adding, “I’m a social psychologist.”

  Ruby Emerald merely smiled brightly from her hospital bed and said, “I think you must be in the wrong room.”

  “No, I don’t work here,” I explained as she adjusted the position of her awkwardly splinted left arm. It was propped upward at an angle to her body, making her look as if she were hailing a cab. “I’m working with the police.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know about the taped threat regarding you. I’m working on that investigation.”

  “I read about it in the paper is all,” she said. “They called it the Bugs Bunny Caper! I don’t think it means much of anything. As a psychologist you should know there are jealous, nasty people out there. I’ve gotten threats before.” A smile pulled at the corners of her lips. “But let’s face it, the dangerous guys are the ones you let in your bed.”

  “J. R. Jones. I was there when it happened, Reverend Emerald. It was horrible and I’m so glad your injuries weren’t worse than they are. And I’m not a clinical psychologist, I’m a social—”

  “You were there?” she interrupted. “What a disaster! And please call me Ruby. I should never have gotten involved with Jerry, but you know how it is. You don’t think he sent that stupid tape to the television station, do you? I can’t imagine Jerry doing that. He’s a sweet guy, really, but you know how they are. Marriage and all that. He wanted to plant a flag through my head saying ‘Property of …’ you know?”

  In the harsh California sunlight filtering through the window I could see that Ruby Emerald was not young. Pushing the outer edge of middle age in all likelihood. The skin of her arms was a mosaic of parched lines despite the expensive jar of herbal body cream on her nightstand. At her temples I could see that the blonde curls were gray at the roots. Early sixties, I guessed. But her brown eyes sparkled with an ageless exuberance that probably accounted for J. R. Jones’s murderous devotion to her.

  “No, I think someone else sent that tape,” I said. “Someone connected to the Rainer Clinic.”

  The brown eyes grew wide. “No! I can’t believe that. Everyone was so nice there, you have no idea. I mean, they’re really top-notch, just the best. And trust me, with what they get for a simple, old-fashioned face-lift, there’s no reason for anyone there to be jealous of what I’m making!”

  “The motivation might not be jealousy,” I mentioned with some hesitation. There was no reason to frighten her with bizarre theories about gender-maddened serial killers. “Could you tell me a little about what happened the night before the revival? I know you were hospitalized.”

  “Now, that was strange,” she answered, knitting her brow like a puzzled child. “That evening was very strange. Jerry was with me, very upset because I’d been trying to call it quits for months and finally I just told him, this is it. I let him think I’d met someone else, although I haven’t. It was just a way to get him to back off. And in the middle of this a delivery service brings a deli tray I hadn’t ordered, so I knew it must be from one of my followers. The card had been lost, but it was very nice. Red wine, caviar, several cheeses including my favorite English Stilton, a liver pâté with a little loaf of fresh bread, and beautiful imported chocolates all around the edge. Sometimes people send flowers and things, but this was really nice.”

  I wasn’t sure where this was going, but I smiled encouragement.

  “Well, Jerry was certain the goodies were a gift from this new sweetie I’d just made up because there wasn’t any card. He was furious, storming around. I just went on nibbling at this and that, especially the Stilton. It was quite good. And then he grabbed the tray and threw it against the wall! Can you believe it?”

  “Sounds like a waste of good food,” I volunteered, hoping I didn’t sound as dim as I thought I did. “So how did you wind up in the hospital that night?”

  S
he seemed chagrined. “I guess I was more upset by Jerry doing that than I realized, because all of a sudden I just felt terrible. My heart was pounding, I felt dizzy and sick, and I started sweating something awful. And the headache! Just this terrible headache. Jerry called 911. He said he was afraid he’d killed me. Guess I should’ve listened to that, huh?”

  “Do you remember the name of the delivery service that brought you the deli tray?” I asked.

  “No. I didn’t see the van. Just some guy at the door with the tray.”

  “What did the guy look like?”

  She shrugged. “Just some guy, short guy. A deliveryman. I don’t remember. Why? Do you think something on that tray was poisoned?”

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “But as a precaution, in the future—”

  “Don’t eat strange food? No problem, Dr. McCarron. But I still think I’d do better to keep the overly devoted types out of my bed.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.

  “Here’s my card,” I told her. “Please call me if you think of anything else.”

  It was close to two when I picked up the copy of the Rainer Clinic file Wes Rathbone had left at the front desk of police headquarters for me. After grabbing an amaretto chocolate gelato at a drive-in, I took Brontë to Balboa Park and sat in the empty organ pavilion to eat it. Rathbone’s file told me that Jennings Rainer, sixty-seven, had opened the Rainer Clinic twenty-five years ago at a different address and moved to the current location eleven years ago. Prior to opening his own clinic he’d practiced with a medical group and been on staff at a prestigious hospital in Boulder, Colorado. Rainer had been married for forty-five years to the former Marlis Hutchins at the time of her death from cancer two years ago.

  I walked Brontë around the pavilion and along the wide pedestrian avenue which is the park’s backbone. At the avenue’s end a stream of water shot twenty feet into the dry autumn air and then fell into a pool at this base. When we got to the fountain I let Brontë splash in the water as I read on.

  Jennings’s daughter, Megan Rainer, forty-one, was his partner in the business. Also a plastic surgeon, she’d graduated from a California university and done her residency in San Francisco. Married ten years ago to Christopher Nugent, also forty-one, Megan Rainer was the mother of two children, Jenna, eight, and Joshua, six. Christopher Nugent wrote abstracts for scientific journals for a living and stayed at home with the two children. The file noted that Nugent was involved in several local ecology organizations.

  The other medical employees of the clinic were Jeffrey Pond, forty-two, the clinic operating room manager, a registered nurse; Thomas Joseph Eldridge, forty, a surgical assistant and also an r.n.; and Dr. Isadora Grecchi, fifty-one, an anesthesiologist. All of which told me nothing except that the Rainer Clinic employed a lot of middle-aged people. In a small setting such as this, what that usually means is that the same professional staff have been employees for a long time. My guess was that all of these people had been with Jennings Rainer for years, which would suggest that they were well paid, well treated, and knew one another in the way that lifelong friends do. Scarcely a population from which to expect the eruption of a pathological killer.

  “Maybe,” I told Brontë as she shook water from her fur all over my black dress, “the person sending these threats is an ex-patient who wants to make us think somebody connected to the clinic is sending them. Maybe somebody who wasn’t happy with a service performed there?”

  Brontë was sniffing a breeze from the direction of a wheeled hot dog vendor and showed no interest in my suggestion.

  A few people die each year from complications related to cosmetic surgery. These are invariably people who have tried to economize by turning themselves over to surgeons who lack board certification or have lost their licenses and are practicing illegally. You have to wonder about that sort of frugality. But all the medical personnel at Rainer were licensed. I didn’t think the grieving spouse of a lethal face-lift sometime in the past was behind the threats. But I didn’t dismiss the idea, either. Nor did I dismiss the possibility that a dissatisfied patient who’d wanted to look more like Leonardo DiCaprio than is possible might be behind them. In fact, I didn’t dismiss anything. And I had an idea about what to do next.

  Balboa Park is home to a number of museums and, I told myself, I was already there. Among other things, museums house curators, and curators often know a great deal about obscure things. Like china. As in plates. A curator might be just what I needed.

  The Mingei International Museum specializes in folk art, but I started there anyway because I love the gift shop. A seventy-ish, deeply tanned docent wearing a gorgeous hand-woven dashiki in beiges and ecrus told me nobody at the Mingei would be able to answer my questions about blue willow plates, which do not qualify as folk art. But somebody across the park’s carriageway at the San Diego Museum of Art probably would, she said.

  She also told me that the dashiki was one of a collection for sale in the gift shop. I had tied Brontë to the wrought-iron railing outside the museum shop, and she watched through the floor-to-ceiling windows as I admired a rack of dashikis. One, a broad weave of deep purples and reds highlighted by bands of gold satin, just was Roxie. Christmas, I thought when I saw the price tag. I’d give it to her for Christmas.

  After the Mingei shop staff happily took my credit card, Brontë and I and the dashiki crossed the old park street to the art museum.

  “Of course,” said a uniformed guard who looked like Santa Claus without the beard. “Just wait here and I’ll get someone who can answer your questions.”

  The someone, an elegant gentleman whose name tag read HUTTON PIERCE materialized from behind a stone pillar and said, “Blue willow, of course!” He was wearing a three-piece suit and an expensive toupee which sat an eighth of an inch askew above his gold-framed granny glasses. I was sure he wasn’t a day under eighty-five, and his aqua-blue eyes flamed with intelligence.

  “Anyone referencing a ‘blue plate’ is talking about blue willow,” he went on as if we were discussing one of the great verities. “Please, follow me to the museum library.”

  “You see,” he said after pulling a forty-five-pound book from a shelf and opening it reverently on an oak table, “here it is, the most popular china pattern in the world !”

  “In the world,” I repeated, trying to seem impressed as I looked at a picture of a plate.

  “Absolutely! Look. Do you see the story? The pattern is always the same—a pagoda, a fence, three figures fleeing across a bridge beneath a weeping willow, a mysterious boat in the distance, and two birds hovering above. The fleeing figures are doomed lovers pursued by the girl’s father or else by the wealthy old man to whom her father had promised her in marriage, depending on which version of the story you read. Captured and imprisoned in the pagoda by her father, the lovers become lost in the maze beneath it and tragically die. But so great is their love that they’re transformed in death into the two birds flying above the scene.

  “The tale is Chinese, but an English potter named Thomas Turner was the first to create blue willow dishes in 1780. The design was enormously popular, and as pottery began to be mass-produced in England, so did the design. It has since been reproduced in almost every country and continues to be popular today.”

  “But these plates aren’t entirely blue,” I insisted politely. “The design is blue, but the plate itself is white. Why are they called ‘blue plate’?”

  “I have explained,” Hutton Pierce said as if speaking to someone who would never actually get it, “that this pattern is what is meant by ‘blue plate.’ You see, for a period of some two decades in the United States, roughly 1925 to the end of World War II in 1945, numerous manufacturers produced heavy porcelain plates in the blue willow pattern specifically for use in restaurants. The plates were divided into sections like this,” he said, pointing to another illustration of a plate. This one was divided into three sections like a child’s dish.

 
; “There are minor variations in pattern depending on the manufacturer, of course. Some mistakenly included only two figures crossing the bridge. But such plates were quite commonly used in American restaurants from the 1920s through the 1950s,” he continued. “They gave rise to the phrase ‘blue plate special,’ a term used to denote an inexpensive meal in which all courses are served together on one plate. The plate was this one, the divided blue willow. A collector’s item now.”

  With that he snapped the book shut and returned it to the shelf. The gesture seemed definitive. Also final.

  “Thank you,” I said, walking backward through the museum library’s double glass doors. I’ve seen people do this in movies when leaving the presence of royalty. It seemed appropriate.

  Outside, Brontë wagged her stub of a tail beneath the plaster frescoes adorning the museum’s facade.

  “Somebody’s playing a game,” I told her as we walked to my truck. “And the pieces are blue plates.”

  11

  Dog Art

  When I got home I brought the framed photograph from the Aphid Gallery in and then went straight to the kitchen to look at my plates. Misha, an earlier love, and I had bought them at a pottery shop in Laguna Beach one weekend years ago. One of those weekends in the beginning of a love affair when you think something like dishes will make it last forever. Women are trained to equate things-that-can-be-bought with everlasting love by an advertising industry which, unlike Sigmund Freud, knows exactly what women want. Undying emotional and erotic bliss in a context of total security. Impossible. And for that reason a wish easily manipulated, over and over. Got a warehouse full of hideous orange birdcages you want to unload? Find a way to associate orange birdcages with enduring passion, and three out of twenty women will buy one. It’s just the way we are.

  Misha and I had been in an earth-tone mood that day and had gone for spatterware in a cream background with cocoa-colored spatters. I looked at the plates and tried to imagine attaching any significance to them beyond my memories of Misha. There was none. Without the memories, they were just plates. Also coffee mugs and a few serving pieces. I still liked them and they went well in my desert decor, but I never thoughtabout them.