The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  “But I don’t do ‘in-depth’ interviews,” I insisted. “I don’t even do shallow interviews. I don’t do interviews ! That’s Roxie’s thing. I do data. Is there some reason nobody understands this?”

  “We understand,” Rox said. “You’re terrible at interviews. But you’re not terrible at picking up details, thousands of them, and then fitting them into patterns and drawing conclusions. Look what you did with the fact that two politicians died within weeks of each other. What we want you to do is just talk to these people, go into their homes, look for those details. It doesn’t matter what you say to them.”

  “Here’s the setup,” Rathbone went on. “The department has arranged interviews with individual medical staff members from Rainer for today. They are to be held in the homes of the subjects, fifteen minutes apiece. I have a list of appointment times and addresses for you. The idea is that these in-home interviews are a convenience to them, a courtesy.”

  “So what am I looking for?” I asked.

  “Whatever it is you look for,” Roxie answered briskly. “And BB’s going with you.”

  “Okay, but why?”

  Rathbone beamed at Roxie. “Her idea,” he said. “The subjects are all white professionals. Your friend Berryman can make them uncomfortable simply by being present, throw ’em off. You’ll introduce him as your bodyguard and then ignore him. But they won’t. His presence, if Roxie’s right, will make ’em nervous and give you an edge.”

  Annie was eyeing a wall clock featuring Betty Boop in biker gear. Seven-fifteen.

  “Wes learned the surgery schedule yesterday,” Annie said. “They’re doing it right now. All the major surgeries are done early in the morning, the ones requiring an anesthesiologist. Every weekday they’re all there at six A.M. Afternoons are the simple stuff that can be done with a little shot of local anesthesia any r.n. can administer—wart and mole removal kinds of things. So the anesthesiologist leaves around noon, and everybody else is finished by two. After that there’s nobody there except the receptionist, unless one of the doctors is interviewing prospective clients. The office closes at four. Hard to believe enough women are having face-lifts to keep them busy five mornings a week, isn’t it?”

  “Rainer told me about ten percent of the face-lifts are for men, and maybe twenty percent of the liposuction,” Wes noted.

  Now he was blushing. “I didn’t ask him about this phalloplasty thing, but I assume that’s one of the ones they do in the morning.”

  “Really, hon?” Annie said with an impish grin. “And here I thought that was something they could handle with a little local anesthesia. You know, novocaine, big shiny syringe like at the dentist, long needle….”

  Wes Rathbone was turning gray. “Stop!” he begged, trying to laugh. “Gonna lose my pancakes otherwise.”

  “Ycchh!” the rest of us said in unison.

  I hung around to look at flooring samples with Annie after Roxie and Wes had gone to work, Wes taking my blue willow plate in its bag for fingerprinting. Annie and I agreed that planked natural pine was the best choice, since its light color wouldn’t diminish the effect of the large room. Over a third cup of coffee she asked me something.

  “How do you think these medical people feel about doing plastic surgery?” she said. “I mean, wouldn’t you think they’d feel like a joke compared to other doctors and nurses who’re saving lives every day? All they do is tuck up sagging chins and suck fat off stomachs.”

  “Rox says there’s a lot of money in it, Annie. And I don’t think it’s all face-lifts. They do reconstructive surgery for people who’ve been burned or gone through windshields, that kind of thing. And I don’t know how I feel about cosmetic surgery, but basically I guess my view is—why not? I wouldn’t hesitate to do it if I wanted to. Would you?”

  As she walked to the sink and began rinsing her cup I noticed that she kept her left arm tucked close to her body, across her chest.

  “I guess I’m asking for an opinion, really,” she said nervously. “See, I’m thinking about having something … some surgery like that. The insurance will pay for most of it, and the rest, well, it’s either that or a new floor. I know it’s silly, but …”

  After drying the cup more thoroughly than was necessary, she turned around. Wes Rathbone’s Annie, who had changed his life, he said. Her arms were at her sides and I could see that one side of her chest was flat.

  “Cancer. A mastectomy,” she announced. “What I’m talking about is breast reconstruction. I’ve read all about it, seen pictures, everything. My friends say do it, but all they care about is men and they think, you know, I’d be doing it for Wes. But Wes never cared. I’d already had the mastectomy when we met. He says it’s my heart he loves, not my breasts. So I was wondering what you think.”

  She was folding and unfolding a dish towel and her blue eyes were shy.

  “You want my opinion because I’m gay and therefore not obsessed with men?” I had to ask.

  “Well, yeah. I did talk it over with my younger sister. And I liked what she said, but maybe that was just because she’s my sister. So I thought …”

  She was so sweet about it and so miserable I felt I had to come up with an answer, but I’m not much good before ten A.M. and it wasn’t quite eight.

  “I guess what it comes down to is what you really want more,” I blundered gamely, “a breast or a floor.”

  Attila the Hun would probably have been more subtle. After a second of dead silence we both laughed.

  “So what did your sister say?”

  “She said it’s just about me, nothing else. If I feel like I need a reconstructed breast, then that’s what I need and I should go for it. She said women have a relationship to their bodies that has nothing to do with men, and that a lot of women just use the man thing as an excuse to look the way they want. She said what’s important is that I feel attractive to myself.”

  “So then what’s the problem?”

  Annie Rathbone held out the flooring flyer, doubled over with laughter now. “I’m not sure I wouldn’t feel more attractive to myself standing on this than I would filling out a bra again,” she said.

  It was a difficult call, and I had a feeling the floor was going to win.

  “Annie,” I said, giggling along with her, “Wesley Rathbone is one lucky cop.”

  “I’m lucky, too.” She grinned. “Not only do I adore him, but he knows how to lay flooring.”

  Some marriages are made in heaven.

  13

  The Library Girl

  In my truck I looked at the list of Rainer medical staff appointments. The first was at twelve-thirty with Jennings Rainer at his condo near the clinic. I was supposed to pick BB up at his shop at twelve. Since it was only about eight-fifteen, I couldn’t decide what to do. Sleeping for a few hours at Roxie’s was an option, but I wasn’t tired. I’d left Brontë at home in her rarely used chain-link run, so a romp along the beach with a Doberman wasn’t possible. The library, then, I decided. I love libraries on principle, and besides, I could do a little research.

  San Diego’s downtown Central Library was built in 1954 and it shows. The flat facade of rectangular Santa Maria limestone slabs looks from a distance like old yellow and brown siding. The kind you see on the backs of houses in the Midwest as you watch from a train window. But I’ve always liked the two Donal Hord cast-cement bas-reliefs decorating the California limestone. Intellectual traditions from East and West. Each sculpture portrays three figures above a presumably American youth, reading.

  The “East” sculpture depicts a Chinese Mandarin holding a scroll, a Persian holding a harp, and a nude tattooed figure representing India holding a palm-leaf book. Beneath these is a lotus blossom, a duck, and an American girl with those defined abdominal muscles that are only possible if you’re a statue. She sits cross-legged forever, ignoring the parking problems on E Street, reading a book. Say what you will about Southern California, even in 1954 it was understood here that women account for more tha
n fifty percent of the world’s population and therefore should not be overlooked when commissioning sculpture for public buildings. I also like the duck.

  But for the moment I was interested in the two women on Rainer’s medical staff, both doctors. Few medical schools admitted women students until the middle of the twentieth century, and for years the experience for women was harrowing. Med schools, like law schools, were boys’ clubs, and women had to work doubly hard to prove themselves while enduring incessant harassment, sometimes outright psychological torture, from male peers during their residencies. Those who survived were often permanently scarred by it.

  Rainer’s anesthesiologist, Isadora Grecchi, was fifty-one. That meant she would have been in med school in the early seventies. Still a dicey time for women. I looked at Grecchi’s bio in the folder Rathbone had given me as I sat down at one of the library’s computers and typed in “Ohio State University College of Medicine,” where Grecchi had gotten her medical degree. Nothing. At least nothing to support my feeble hypothesis that a woman brutalized by her experiences as a medical student had thirty years later decided to retaliate by killing her patients.

  If anything, the medical college looked like heaven. Its faculty director wrote books for women about how to get decent health care in a medical system designed by and for men. On the other hand, only seven of the college’s thirty-eight faculty members were women. Numbers don’t lie. The nice faculty director might be window dressing behind which lay a mined field of male supremacy. And what was it like in 1971 when Isadora Grecchi in bell-bottoms first practiced sticking needles in cadavers? My hypothesis was still intact, but I wasn’t getting anywhere.

  From the shelves I took five or six books on Columbus, Ohio, and continued to learn nothing useful. It seemed like a nice town. The capital and largest city in the state, it had the requisite schools, art museums, a symphony. Smack in the middle of Ohio.

  I gave up and went for a glass of iced tea at a diner up the street with fading place-mat art on its grimy walls. And a lot of men coming in to buy something at the cash register and then leaving. Off-track betting on horse races is illegal in San Diego County, but I didn’t mention that as I ordered my iced tea and a bag of chips. One crime at a time.

  The diner was called Becky’s, and might actually have been the pride and joy of somebody named Becky a half century ago. Now her name in a once-black script across the front window was so chipped and faded that the old-fashioned lettering seemed nothing more than a discoloration in the glass. The place was a storefront, long and dark inside. In the wall behind the counter were round window frames, some still holding jagged bits of mirror. Where the maroon and black asphalt floor tiles had worn through I could see the old plank flooring, probably salvaged from a no-longer-seaworthy ship, as was the custom here. San Diego has always had to scrounge for its lumber.

  With my canned tea I was given a scratched red plastic glass half full of melting chipped ice and a straw in a paper wrapper. A very old woman in a long green coat and orange gloves sat at the counter drinking coffee from a thick white cup and talking to herself. The coat was worn and grimy at the cuffs, and most of the gloves’ fingers had come unstitched. She didn’t take the gloves off, even when she lifted the saucer to pour an ounce of spilled coffee back into her cup. The saucer didn’t match the cup. The saucer had a blue design. Pagoda, willow, three little figures on a bridge.

  I was at her side in two seconds.

  “Isn’t that the blue willow design?” I asked. “Do you remember this place from the old days? Did they use the blue willow restaurant plates here?”

  The woman’s wispy white hair was dyed a pinkish orange and she wore a musty sailor’s watch cap. Her old eyes regarded me with curiosity, but I could see that I’d scared her. Her hands were shaking.

  “You see,” she said as if we’d been talking all along, “they always do that. They always say they’ll get you the best deal and then just you wait. Then’s when, then’s when …” Her eyes grew cloudy. I could see it happen, like a shadow cast from inside her head.

  “Fuckers fuckers,” she mumbled. “Goddamn fucking fuckersfuckersfuckers.”

  In her orange hands the coffee cup rattled against an old blue willow saucer.

  “Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” I whispered. I’d upset her, shattered her fragile space with my blundering. She hadn’t been bothering me. It was I who bothered her. I was bothering one of the army of mentally ill people who just barely exist on the streets of any city. I thought she probably lived on Social Security in one of the nearby old hotels converted to “Single Room Occupancies” for just such unwanted people. And even though the skin of her face was so pale I could see through it to the veins and capillaries below, I couldn’t help thinking of Roxie’s mother.

  “Here,” I said, slipping two ten-dollar bills into her coat pocket. “You go to a movie and have dinner. Whatever you want. I’m so sorry I upset you.”

  “Fuckers!” she replied, glaring into one of the empty round windows behind the counter as her lower lip began to tremble and tears filled her eyes.

  She’d just lose the money or somebody would steal it from her, I knew. I wanted to shoot myself.

  Instead I went back to the library and bombed completely in my attempt to identify the origins of the term “blue plate special.” A good library, it would have held the information I wanted if the information existed. But the four highly trained librarians found nothing about blue plate specials.

  Then I spent two solid hours researching diners in the home-towns of all the Rainer Clinic staff. There were hundreds of diners in Denver, where Isadora Grecchi grew up. Also hundreds in San Diego, where Megan Rainer grew up. Jennings Rainer had spent his early years in Chicago, also hundreds. The two Rainer r.n.’s, Jeffrey Pond and Thomas Eldridge, were children in Bakersfield and Riverside, respectively. Plenty of diners in both places. I made notes of some diner names and street addresses in each locale. It was a shot in the dark. Blue willow plates, diners, death. There would be a connection. And it would exist in the mind of one of the people BB and I were about to visit.

  He was in his shop, Death Row, when I arrived an hour early, working on a wall hanging which seemed to be swags of ordinary burlap fastened by tooled leather belts.

  “Dude from the High Noon Boot Corral came in Auntie’s, hired me to do a belt display,” he said, eyeing my jester suit uneasily. “Blue, that what you gonna wear to catch a killer?”

  “What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “Other than the fact that I look like a bowlegged bit player from a Shakespearian touring company?”

  “That do it.”

  “I hate to say it, BB, but the hip-hop pants and the low-rider undershirt you’re wearing don’t exactly say ‘fashion statement’ to me, either. They don’t even go together.”

  “Ain’t seen my do-rag yet,” he said, grinning. “See, I be knowin’how to play this party. Give ’em what they want. Hey, criminal drag—it be in.”

  What BB was calling “criminal drag” was baggy hip-hop pants in chino, popularized by black rap groups, worn low on the hips with at least four inches of designer Y-fronts showing. These were topped by the heavy white cotton athletic T-shirt worn by Latino gang members. With a ratty cloth “do-rag” on his head, the manner of its tying a mark of black gang membership in Los Angeles, BB would be a walking billboard of multicultural threat. I wasn’t sure what the military-style boots meant, but they looked dangerous, too.

  “See, Blue,” he went on, “party like this, you need to distract these fools. Give ’em a picture.”

  I could tell from the way he was circling me, eyes narrowed, that my jester outfit wouldn’t do. That was okay. I hated it, anyway.

  Grabbing a lump of black wool from a bag of used clothes BB buys by the pound at a distribution center down at the border, he held it to the light and grinned. It appeared to be a skirt. In minutes he’d located a brown and black pinstriped men’s suitcoat with wide lapels and an ungodly mustard-yell
ow polyester blouse that would have fit a cow. The kind with the floppy bow at the neck. Something had chewed holes in the trailing ends of the bow. The blouse came to my knees.

  “Just the thing,” BB said. “Do this first,” he added, trimming the blouse around me with pinking shears, then removing the attached scarf pieces with what looked like a scalpel. He’d found thread in a mustard-yellow match and it hung from a needle clenched between his teeth. A cut up the back of the blouse, five minutes of stitching, and the blouse fit perfectly, except for the sleeves. These he bunched above my elbows and secured with ordinary tape.

  Next, the black skirt was altered, and then the suit jacket, which took longer than anything else. When he was finished, he steam-pressed everything and a greasy odor filled the air.

  “Steam get some of the smell out,” he noted.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said, “but BB, what are you doing?”

  “Got to look like a cop,” he explained as he helped me into the freshly pressed jacket. “Scare ’em a little.”

  I didn’t think I looked like a cop as much as like Mary Pop-pins. The black skirt grazed the tops of my shoes. All I needed was an umbrella with a parrot-head handle. Although I did like the brown-and-black pinstriped jacket. Very k.d. lang. The blouse was still hideous.

  “Need somethin’ else,” he said.

  Several scarves were rejected until he hit upon the idea of a string tie made of scraps from the jacket alterations. In seconds my collarless blouse was accessorized by a wool string tie fastened at the neck with a big brown coat button. Then he approached with a brown felt hat. A fedora, it looked as though very small mammals had lived in it. For years.

  “No!” I said.

  “Jus’ try—”

  “No.”

  We compromised on a brown corduroy tam he whipped up from an old pair of pants in the rag pile. I was afraid we were going to be late for our appointment with Jennings Rainer, but BB insisted on sewing another brown coat button to the tam’s band.