The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  For a split second I felt shrewd. The author of the Sword letters was a rotten speller. I wished I’d done this with the others. Jeffrey Pond switched the Silly Putty to his left hand and spelled “encyclopedia” correctly. I no longer felt shrewd.

  “I think it can also be ‘p-a-e-d’ in the old spellings,” he noted. “Is this a trick?”

  “No. Why are you squashing Silly Putty in your hands?”

  “Bodybuilding. Got a competition coming up. Builds the forearm.”

  I remembered Roxie mentioning that the killer, if male, might have a super-macho hobby. Did bodybuilding qualify? I couldn’t quite see posing, oiled, in a thong as macho. John Wayne wouldn’t have done it, I was certain. Jeffrey Pond’s bright blue eyes were as guileless as a puppy’s, but not unintelligent.

  “You want some o.j. or something?” he asked. “I’ve got some mango-guava juice, too.”

  “Thank you, but we don’t have much time. Do you have a computer, Mr. Pond?”

  “Jeff,” he answered. “You can call me Jeff. And I haven’t killed anybody. Sure, I’ve got a computer. You wanna look around? I don’t care. Come on.”

  With that he launched himself out of the desk chair and led us through the small, tidy apartment. Dining area, kitchen, half bath. Then the hall, a full bath done in tan ceramic tile still steamy and littered with body oils, and two bedrooms. The smaller bedroom contained a double bed and matching dresser. The larger one held weight-lifting equipment and a computer on an inexpensive student’s desk.

  “Lotta bodybuilding sites on the Web,” he said. “Good place to find out about competitions. And my son downloads games when he’s here on weekends. I’m divorced. My son visits on weekends. Steve. He’s fourteen.”

  The information was presented casually, but I hadn’t asked for it. So what did that mean? Jeffrey Pond seemed to have nothing to hide. In fact, Jeffrey Pond seemed to be dying to talk.

  “You were arrested on suspicion of rape in 1997,” I mentioned as we moved back into the living room. “I am not a law enforcement officer, but a social psychologist consulting with the police department on this investigation. And even if I were an officer, you wouldn’t have to discuss that arrest without an attorney present.”

  He flung himself into the upholstered chair again as I resumed my seat on the couch.

  “It was the divorce,” he answered, grabbing the Silly Putty again. “I really got screwed. My ex-wife wanted custody of Stevie and my little girl, Beth. She wanted to make me look bad in court. So she had this friend of hers claim I’d tried to rape her. Cops came and took me downtown, interrogated me, the whole nine yards. Only thing is, the night this woman said I’d tried to date-rape her after taking her home from a club, I was at an all-night gym working out. I mean, I did give her a ride home from this place we all used to hang out on weekends sometimes, but I didn’t even go in. Just dropped her off and went to the gym.

  “Gwen, that’s my ex, didn’t know I’d started working out. At first lifting weights was just a way of dealing with the stress, you know? But then I really got into it—bodybuilding, I mean. Anyway, they’d set this whole thing up, Gwen and her pal Jeri. But five guys told the cops I was at the gym from ten-thirty to one o’clock that night. This woman said I jumped her at eleven-thirty after drinking up her flavored vodka. Shit, all I had that night was one beer at the club. I don’t even like vodka, especially if it has flowers in the bottle.

  “After that Jeri admitted it was a setup and dropped the charges. But you know what? It’s on my record now, ‘suspicion of rape,’ and the damn judge won’t let me have Beth here overnight. Never. I can only have my daughter with me during the day unless we stay over at my parents’ so there’s ‘supervision.’ My daughter is eight!”

  BB and I watched as Silly Putty squirted in four explosive arcs from between the fingers of Jeffrey Pond’s clenched fist. I had no idea what to say next.

  “Did you get your r.n. training in the Navy?” I ventured.

  “Some of it,” he answered without interest. “I’d gotten a job as an orderly at a state psych hospital right out of high school. They provided training and then paid half your tuition if you wanted to go to a community college at night for more medical training, so I did and then I went into the service as a registered practical nurse. Finished my r.n. in the Navy. Wanted to go back to school on the G.I. Bill when I got out, become a doctor’s assistant. But by then Gwen and I were a thing, and then she got pregnant, or she said she did, and we got married, but she lost the baby in her second month. At least that’s what she said. I don’t think I believe it now. I think she just wanted to get married, and there I was, this dumb stooge who thought that was the Christian thing, you know? Marry the woman if you loved her enough to knock her up. But everything was okay for a long time. We had Steve, and then Beth. I thought everything was okay. Right.”

  Christian thing.

  “So you trained as an r.n. instead of as a doctor’s assistant?”

  “Yeah.”

  Jeffrey Pond seemed to have very little interest in discussing his work. And a lot of interest in discussing his ex-wife.

  “How did you come to work at the Rainer Clinic?”

  “Answered an ad in the paper ten years ago, liked the hours. I’m off at two. Gave me time to do some temp jobs at night out of the nursing registry. Made enough to buy us a nice house, get Gwen the things she wanted. Furniture, new carpeting, her own car. So now she’s got the house and the furniture and the car, and I’m still paying for all of it plus child-support payments and alimony. Hell, I can barely afford this place, which you’ve probably noticed is a dump.”

  “Do you—” I began, but was interrupted.

  “You know what I’d like to do?” he said, mashing the Silly Putty flat between both palms. “I’d like to just leave, take off and start all over again someplace else with a new identity and a clean slate. Someplace away from Gwen. But I can’t. My parents are getting old. Dad’s not doing too well. Emphysema. Heart problems, too. I have to do things for them. Supposed to honor thy father and thy mother, you know? And how would I ever get a job? All I know is nursing, and it could be traced if I got a job in any hospital. Gwen could find me, track me down. And the kids. They’re my kids. I can’t just leave my parents and my kids. I’m stuck, as in stuck pig, you know?”

  His jaw was clenched in what looked like anger, but I was afraid he was going to start crying. Again, I had no idea what to say, but BB leaped to the rescue.

  “Dude,” he said, somehow communicating masculine sympathy. The single, meaningless syllable seemed to help Pond, who relaxed and stood up.

  “So anyway, I don’t know anything about threatening letters or what happened to those patients who died of cerebral hemorrhages,” he said. “I wish I could help you, but I can’t.”

  Our fifteen minutes were up.

  “Thank you,” I said as BB halfheartedly placed himself between me and Pond as I walked out the door.

  In the truck he said, “One miserable dude. Kind of makes you glad to be gay, never have to do all that divorce business.”

  “Did you hear him say ‘the Christian thing’ about marrying Gwen after she said she was pregnant?” I asked. “And quoting the Ten Commandments about honoring thy father and mother? Biblical language, like Sword’s letters.”

  “Blue, lotta people talk about Christian this and Christian that. Say ‘thy’ and ‘thou,’ too, if they raised to know the Ten Commandments. Didn’t you have to memorize all that when you was a kid? I did, in Sunday school. Still know ’em, too. ‘I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make any graven image—”

  “BB, please,” I interrupted. “My father is a clergyman and you’re black. We’re both from backgrounds where we’d memorized the Ten Commandments as children. But Pond’s the first Rainer employee so far who’s used biblical language.”

  “Don’t mean nuthin’. Fact he been screwed by his wife maybe do, though. Du
de’s hurtin’ and he’s mad.”

  “And talking,” I said. “Surely he wouldn’t talk so much if he knew how suspicious it makes him look. He can’t seem to stop, though. I always get stuck on airplanes next to somebody like that who insists on telling me boring personal stories. It’s some kind of syndrome.”

  “All you supposed to do is remember and tell Roxie,” BB said. “All I supposed to do is scare white folks. Didn’t scare this dude, though. Shit, he didn’t even know I was there once he got goin’ on how baaad his wife be.”

  “That does seem to be his sole topic of conversation,” I agreed. “But I wonder how much of what he said is true.”

  It was time to visit Megan Rainer and her husband, Christopher Nugent. I’d have to drive through Julian, where they lived, on the way to my desert hideaway, so I dropped BB off at his shop before heading east on I-8. I let the truck idle as we sat outside for a few minutes.

  “I been locked up with a lotta killers,” he said, drawing X’s in the dust on my dashboard with the edge of his thumb. “Premeditated, manslaughter, drunken brawls, guys catchin’ back for some dude ballin’ their wife, all that. Course, they all act like they ain’t done nuthin’, they innocent, somebody else did it, and all that shit. But they did and you be knowin’ they did. Jus’ somethin’ you can tell, be around these guys all day and night for a year or two.”

  He quit drawing in dust and stared through my windshield into the distance.

  “Don’t nobody talk about it. Nobody ever say, ‘Oh yeah, I’m in this shithole for thirty years ’cause I s’posed to kill my old lady with a baseball bat, only I didn’t kill nobody, y’see. I got framed, man!’ Nobody ever say nuthin’, but after a while you kinda know. It’s like you can see it, how this guy would do some crime, and this other guy would do another. It’s like the crime leave a shadow on ’em, y’know?”

  BB rarely says that much at one time, so I knew he’d been thinking about it. I also knew he had a sixth sense about crime and criminals you can only get in prison.

  “So what do you think?” I asked. “Of the people we’ve seen today, who’s got a shadow that looks like murder?”

  “That’s what so funky,” he answered as he opened the door. “ ’Cept for the old doctor, they all do.”

  I thought about that as I drove up from San Diego’s coastal basin and into the mountains. Isadora Grecchi was angry at the world about something I suspected would turn out to involve rape … but angry enough to betray her oath as a physician and “do harm” to her patients? And if she was a rape victim, why would she victimize women? The nurse, Thomas Eldridge, hadn’t seemed murderous to me, merely stuffy and rigid. A world-class bore. But that might be a facade covering something else. And while Jeff Pond was obviously angry at his ex-wife over a messy divorce, did that mean he was taking out his anger by killing prominent women clients of the Rainer Clinic?

  BB had said he didn’t see the shadow on Jennings Rainer, but maybe he’d been blinded by the older man’s grief as I had. Or by adorable Snuffy, the schnauzer. What if Rainer was really the killer? After years of working with the same staff, he’d know them intimately. He’d know all their personal problems and how suspicious each one might look to someone seeking motivation for this strange sequence of murders. And Jennings Rainer had plenty of time to construct a presentation that would make him appear as harmless as Gandhi.

  All of them, I realized, had plenty of time to construct such a facade. None of them was stupid. All possessed sufficient medical training to manipulate blood pressure. All had opportunity to do things to the bodies of anesthetized patients. But what “things”? If one of these people was killing Rainer Clinic patients, how was he or she doing it?

  I kept driving and wondered how I’d gotten into this. Nobody is worse at interviews than I am, and nobody knows less about blood pressure.

  The home of Megan Rainer and Christopher Nugent looked like a “before” illustration from a manual on restoring quaint old houses. A little outside the village of Julian but visible from the road, it sat about a quarter of the way up a steep, rocky hill. Once a cream color with navy blue shutters and porch railings, the two-story frame house now seemed merely a two-tone gray. Curls of peeling paint shivered along its eaves in a wind I was afraid meant rain. I wanted to get down the eastern slope of the mountain before it hit.

  “Hi, I’m Chris Nugent,” Megan’s husband greeted me in the pool of yellow light spilling from the front door as he opened it. I could smell pizza baking. “Jenna, that’s our daughter, had an accident with a neighbor’s horse and Megan took her down the hill for an X ray. Horse stepped on Jenna’s foot. I’m afraid Megan won’t be back in time for you to interview her, but I’ll be happy to answer any questions I can. Why don’t we go in the kitchen, have some coffee while we talk.”

  Unlike the forbidding exterior of the house, the interior was bright and pleasant with overflowing bookcases, a huge braided rug, and a stone fireplace in which a small blaze flourished. A doorway to the right of the fireplace led to a large kitchen in which a small boy who looked like Jennings Rainer was washing and tearing romaine lettuce for a salad.

  “Joshua, this is Dr. McCarron, who’s a social psychologist. What they do is predict things. Dr. McCarron, Joshua.”

  “Hi,” he said, jumping down from the stepstool where he’d been standing to work at the sink, and holding a dripping wet hand in my direction. “Can you predict stuff like when asteroids will crash into earth?”

  “Um, no,” I said, shaking his wet hand. “But I can probably predict how many people in Fresno will think the asteroid is really a robot spaceship sent by aliens from another galaxy when it does hit,” I offered.

  He wiped his hands on his jeans and grinned, revealing the absence of a front tooth.

  “Wow!” he said. “Guess you could write some great stories.”

  “As long as they’re written in numbers,” I agreed.

  “I’ll finish making the salad,” his father said. “You and Elsa can go play until the pizza’s ready. Dr. McCarron and I have some things to talk about.”

  After the boy and a sedate Boston terrier I hadn’t seen curled in a basket by the back door were gone, Chris Nugent poured coffee into brown pottery mugs for us both and then continued to wash romaine lettuce as I sat at the table. The dishes I could see through glass cabinet doors were Fiestaware in various colors. No blue willow.

  “Megan has told me about these threats to Rainer patients, and the two deaths,” he said. “Of course Jennings will have no choice but to close the clinic. What’s your take on it?”

  I hadn’t expected to be interviewed, but he seemed genuinely interested.

  “I think it’s possible, even likely, that one of the medical staff at the Rainer Clinic is killing patients,” I answered. “You must know these people from social events over the years. Have you seen anything that would indicate—”

  “—the presence of a maddened serial killer?” he finished for me. “It’s ridiculous. It would have to be Megan, her father, Isadora Grecchi, Jeff Pond, or T. J. Eldridge. The receptionist and clerical staff have no contact with the patients. And I can assure you that my wife doesn’t run around killing people. I can also assure you—”

  “Your wife has been arrested on charges of carrying a concealed weapon,” I mentioned.

  He let the romaine fall into the sink and spun to face me so fast that his long braid whipped over his shoulder and fell across the front of his blue shirt.

  “For crying out loud, Dr. McCarron,” he said angrily, “surely you know how much credibility to put in arrest reports! I want to show you something.”

  He walked to a third door in a far wall of the kitchen and opened it, gesturing for me to follow. After he turned on the light I could see that the room was an office, obviously his. The clean smell of new textbooks was evident, and the books themselves were stacked everywhere. On a desk which was really a door on sawhorses sat a computer. I could see the modem wire running to
a wall jack.

  “I have a Ph.D. in comparative physics and write abstracts for professional journals,” he explained. “But this is what I want to show you.”

  He unlocked a closet, reached to its top shelf, and withdrew what looked like a big plastic jar of red bath oil beads. The kind that are usually egg-shaped. The waxy shell melts in hot water, releasing the bath oil inside. These weren’t egg-shaped, but round. He threw the jar on a battered plaid couch.

  “Know what those are?” he asked.

  “Bath oil beads?”

  “I didn’t think you’d know. Now look at this.”

  I wasn’t expecting to see a gun, but that’s what he pulled from the closet next. It looked like an odd semiautomatic rifle. Lightweight and black with a rectangular bin where a scope would go. It looked real, but there was also something about it that said toy. The cozy room suddenly felt cold.

  “I am unfortunately not armed,” I said, backing toward the kitchen door and wishing I’d brought the Smith and Wesson. “The San Diego police arranged this interview and know I’m here. Put that thing down.”

  Chris Nugent shook his head the way people do when confronted with hopeless idiocy. He also put the gun on the couch beside the plastic jar of red balls.

  “It’s a paint ball gun,” he said. “Those are paint balls in the jar. At point-blank range that gun will produce a sharp sting and maybe a bruise, but the paint ball won’t even break your skin. The police who stopped Megan for going thirty in a twenty-five-mile-per-hour zone in Riverside felt compelled to open her trunk, saw the paint ball gun, and made the same mistake you’ve just made. She was on her way home from a competition. This was the ‘concealed weapon.’”

  “It looks like a gun,” I said. “And what is your wife, a doctor, for crying out loud, doing running around with a bunch of dimwit survivalists in camo gear who play soldier by shooting each other with paint?”

  “You surprise me, Dr. McCarron.”

  “In what way, Dr. Nugent?” I replied. We were playing doctor.

  “It shouldn’t, but prejudice in educated people always surprises me,” he said. “You don’t know anything about this sport or the people who engage in it, but you think you do. For the record, I tried it once and found it utterly pointless. But Megan and a lot of other people who thrive on competition and at least the illusion of risk enjoy it. They aren’t a ‘bunch of dimwit survivalists,’ as you say, but a mix of all sorts of people. Young men, of course, but also bored account executives and sixty-five-year-old housewives. One of Megan’s paint ball teams even includes a nun who just retired after a missionary stint in Guatemala. We had her over for dinner. She said paint ball gives her a way to get rid of her aggression. She was, incidentally, the only survivor of a political raid on a mission school twelve years ago. Two other nuns and twelve students, both adults and children, were murdered.”