The Last Blue Plate Special

by Abigail Padgett

  Rox was still talking to Rathbone, so I checked out the bean growers’ Web site, which had a link to an article in a north county community paper about the dinner. “Growers Celebrate With All-Bean Feast,” the header announced. Among the dishes served were a fava-bean-pod bisque, pinto bean salad with tomato and garlic dressing, bean-thread noodles in peanut sauce, pineapple-orange Honolulu skillet beans, black bean and onion cornbread casserole, and Belgian chocolate cake baked with white bean flour and topped with soybean ice cream. All organic, of course.

  I highlighted the dishes from the article, copied them over to my file on Dixie Ross, and interrupted Roxie.

  “Take a look at this,” I said, pointing to the screen. “Dixie Ross was at this dinner Friday afternoon before her death, but I don’t see any fermented or dried foods.”

  “Just a minute, Wes,” she said. “Blue’s got something on the computer.”

  “It’s all beans, Rox.”

  “Beans are dried, Blue. Ever see them in bags at the grocery? And broadleaf beans like favas are high in tyramine whether they’re dried or fresh. The soup course alone could have killed her. Wes, Blue may have found your murder weapon for Dixie Ross. Beans. Yeah, I’ll explain that.”

  Rathbone’s interest in the details of Roxie’s theory was clearly greater than my own. She seemed to be providing a list of all the foods containing tyramine in quantities sufficient to be dangerous.

  “All kinds of liver,” she recited. “All pickled fish, meat, or vegetables. Caviar, snails, corned beef. Bean pods, Chinese pea pods, some beans, definitely fava beans, dried fruit, canned figs, red wine, champagne, sherry, brandy and cognac, all aged cheese….

  She stopped and looked at me quizzically. “What is it, Blue? You’ve got that spacey look again.”

  “Didn’t you say canned figs?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Rox, a deli tray was sent to Kate’s fundraiser. BB took it from a delivery service. He said the card had been lost. It had a liver pâté and a huge mound of domestic caviar with little toast rounds and a tiny spoon. The caviar was good. I ate a lot of it myself. But I remember BB telling Kate that there had been canned figs on the plate as well, and that he’d thrown them away because he didn’t like the way they looked. Roxie, nobody puts canned figs on an appetizer plate with caviar or anything else. It had to be deliberate. Sword meant that tray for Kate, Rox. Kate was supposed to eat pâté and canned figs and caviar and then die.”

  “You hear that, Wes?” Roxie asked. “Okay, here’s my guess. Somebody at Rainer introduced a quantity of MAOI, probably in a timed-release form, into the incisions of the victims while they were anesthetized. It wouldn’t be difficult to do. Traditional, not laser, cosmetic surgery on the head is bloody even though patients take a clotting agent the night before. Head injuries are just always bloody and Rainer’s old-fashioned, doesn’t use lasers for face-lifts. In the bloody mess any one of the medical staff could slip something under a muscle or loose flap of skin at any point in the four-hour surgery or the sewing-up. Something with a coating that would dissolve over time, releasing its contents to be absorbed into the bloodstream of the victim. In this case an MAOI.

  “Nothing would happen for days, even weeks, until the coating dissolved and the MAOI was released. Then if the victim ate the wrong thing or took another kind of antidepressant called an SSRI, or got a cold and took a decongestant or a sinus pill, a hypertensive crisis could occur. Right, did occur. And no, an MAOI wouldn’t show up in a blood analysis unless somebody knew to look for it specifically. Okay, Wes, we’ll get back to you.

  “Something came up,” she said to me. “A crisis, everybody yelling. He had to get off the phone. What we have to do is figure out which one of them did it.”

  I felt suddenly edgy and restless. It happens to me when I haven’t had time to process things that seem to be happening around me at cartoonlike speeds. And the evening had been like that. Rox and the job she might take in Philadelphia, a little-used antidepressant that kept people from digesting spoiled food and then killed them by blowing up their brains if they ate spoiled food. It occurred to me that I could have lived happily forever without knowing my body produces a chemical that will let me eat all the dead things I want. Then I thought about the things I do eat and realized they’re all dead. I hate it when this happens.

  “Rox, the Rainer Clinic is for all practical purposes closed,” I said. “There won’t be any more major surgeries there, so Sword can’t strike again. I don’t think I want to talk about this anymore right now. I need some time.”

  “Great,” she answered, rattling her beads ominously. “The Rainer staff are free to disperse all over the country now, get new jobs. Let’s just let the killer go and hope it doesn’t happen again because you’re feeling moody and can’t be bothered. Is that what you’re saying?”

  Her dark eyes had narrowed and I didn’t like what I heard in her voice. The beginning of contempt. Behind it was everything I knew about Roxie Bouchie. The sacrifices she’d made to get where she was, the years of grueling work in which she’d learned a self-discipline I admired but didn’t particularly want for myself. It’s not the way I operate and the truth is, I don’t have to.

  “Please, I don’t want to fight with you,” I said, looking around for the keys to my truck. “I’ve been up since four A.M. and spent the day running all over San Diego County trying to do psychological interviews for which I have no training and at which I’d be lousy even if I did because, as you say, I’m not rational. Then I damn near got blown off Yaqui Pass and came home to find Brontë half crazy because one of the people I interviewed, the one who’s been killing women with your MAOIs, was out here to leave me another of those stupid plates, which, incidentally, are the best clue we’ve got because that behavior is irrational and therefore a map to the real person. But you wouldn’t understand that. Next you show up to tell me you’re probably moving to Philadelphia and then spend hours talking about a drug. Why does it surprise you that I’m a little stressed ?”

  The last word, I realized, had been shrill, but I didn’t care. Roxie just stood there as I found the keys under a half-empty bag of corn chips on the counter and grabbed a jacket from an arm of the couch.

  “I’ll be back,” I said as I opened the Dutch door to gusting wind. “I don’t want you to leave and I know you don’t understand, but I just need some time.”

  Outside, I felt the characteristic ambivalence of these moments. My behavior was in one sense pointless melodrama. Where was I going to go this late at night? In another sense, however, my behavior was necessary, normal. And I didn’t care where I was going. Although I knew where I was going.

  Coyote Canyon. I could think there.

  19

  A Habitation of Termites

  Borrego Springs was quiet as I drove through on my way to Coyote Canyon Road. People were staying at home, out of the wind. Nothing on the streets but tumbleweeds. I watched one of them bouncing along in my headlights, the globe-shaped skeleton of a plant called Russian thistle. The biggest ones are six feet across, but even the little ones make people start humming the theme from Bonanza. Tumbleweeds have become a symbol of the American West, but in reality there weren’t any here until 1873 when the seeds of the first batch arrived mixed in with some flax seeds sent from Russia. Now they’re everywhere, breaking off from their taproots in autumn and rolling for hundreds of miles in the wind. I wondered if they were trying to roll back to Russia. And I wondered where I was trying to roll, too.

  Roxie would unquestionably take the project director job in Philadelphia, I told myself as the paved road ended and I felt my tires sink slightly in damp sand. The job would be a stepping-stone to more important things later. Rox had worked all her life for chances like this, chances to make a difference in the lives of the seriously mentally ill. My task would be to make it easy for her to go. Or at least not to make it impossible. I owed her that much simply because she was an honorable person.

  �
�I’ll do right by you, Roxie!” I yelled through tears as the truck lurched and banged down a wash and up the other side. Desert canyons are good for these moments of emotional wretchedness. You can scream your heart out, sob until you feel dry and empty as a shed snakeskin, and the rocks just loom anciently around you, absorbing it all. They aren’t indifferent; it’s just that after several million years they’ve refined patience to an art. This will pass, they croon as the wind sweeps over them. Everything does.

  The message falls short of sweetness and light, but it works for me.

  Rox and I had been honest with each other from the beginning. I knew her life was devoted to the practice of psychiatry before all else. She knew I was devoted to nothing except perhaps trying to figure out what, if anything, might be worth my devotion. So far nothing had seemed all that compelling, so I was devoting myself to making money. Call me old-fashioned, but I’ve got an aging father who exhausted his resources on lawyers while trying to keep my wayward twin brother from spending the rest of his life in prison. That same brother will probably get out of prison in a few months with no marketable job skills. David can’t even rob a bank successfully. And his new wife is expecting their baby next year. Money is going to be needed.

  “So, I can make money in Philadelphia,” I said aloud, slowing as the dirt jeep track through Coyote Canyon narrowed to a rock-strewn path just wide enough for my truck.

  But I didn’t believe my words. What Roxie calls irrationality in me is to some extent just the long view social psychologists tend to take. It’s a perspective born in statistical analyses, where predictions are based on vast numbers. But not everything can be analyzed or predicted. Social psychologists know that better than anyone else. So the perspective is one from which it becomes obvious that not everything can be understood. That many things are fragments of a larger pattern which remains forever out of view. Also obvious is that the only choice we have is to hang on for the ride or get off and hide.

  I’d hang on, I knew. I might even go back East with Roxie for a while to get her settled, but I wouldn’t stay. The pattern cast by that phone call from Philadelphia was hers, not mine. Part of a path chosen long ago by Rox and her grandma when there was nothing they could do to help an ill and terrified woman they wanted to love. Roxie’s mother, lost to them in the shadows of an illness called schizophrenia. I might have no place on that path, but I could, and would, respect it. That is, I would as soon as I stopped crying.

  Which apparently wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. But the canyon walls were there to hold me, so I kept sobbing and driving. Deeper into granite rubble and resinous plants that filled the dark with scents. After a rain the desert smells like wet chalk and iron and sage. I rolled the driver’s-side window all the way down and let the cool air blow across my face. It wasn’t Roxie’s beaded braids, I thought, but it was enough. It would have to be.

  About then I realized what I was doing. In the rational sense, that is. I had hiked most of the way through Coyote Canyon in the past, but I’d never gone all the way to the end. And I’d never driven it. Now I was, and the result would be a smashed oil pan and differential housing, unaligned tires, scratched paint, and, with truly rotten luck, a broken axle. That is, if I didn’t get stuck in the wet sand first, which I undoubtedly would if I tried to go all the way through.

  Coyote Canyon splits at its northwestern end into Horse Canyon, which goes nowhere, and Nance Canyon, which comes out near the tiny town of Anza. Neither is really a canyon, but just a long wash. The climb up out of Nance is a nightmare even with four-wheel drive, which my truck doesn’t have. The road’s just a boulder-riddled sheep path that seems to go straight up. Now muddy and impassable. I’d turn around in relatively flat Figtree Valley at the base of Nance Canyon and go back, I decided. When I got there I stopped and breathed sage-scented air for a while. But the journey seemed incomplete. And Nance would be easy enough on foot, I thought. Imperative to finish this, go all the way. Who knows why, but I had to do it.

  So I locked the truck and stumbled up the rocky trail out of canyon shadows to the desert surface, falling enough times to get bruised and muddy, not caring. Something pulling at me. Something I had to prove in the dark, alone. Okay, irrational, but I did it. Panting and staggering at the top, I could see a few lights from Anza four miles away, just yellow bubbles shimmering in the wind. Nearby were empty sheep and cattle pens, a few darkened ranch houses. And something else beside me just off the road to my right.

  A ruin of some kind, half buried in creosote bushes and darkness. An old adobe line shack, I thought. Built long ago to house the crews who set up poles and brought electricity to Anza and the handful of other tiny communities out here. Communities of sheepherders and cattlemen who rode horses until 1956, when the first paved roads were laid and a way of life died overnight. I squinted against the wind at the crumbling adobe building. There was something oddly familiar about it.

  Set at the top of Nance Canyon, it faced Coyote Road, which at the lip of the canyon ceased being a road and became again the rugged trail I’d just climbed on foot. The building also faced a ridge that cast half its facade in impenetrable gloom. Curious, I moved closer, wishing for a flashlight. I’d never climbed Nance Canyon, never been there before, and yet I was sure I’d seen the old shack, was familiar with it. But I couldn’t place it, couldn’t pull up an identity for it. An adobe line shack, desolate and abandoned.

  Isolated places always harbor these structures—miners’ shacks, solitary chimneys rising from bare dirt, a fire ring of stones where someone unaccountably tried to burn a wall clock and one tennis shoe. Evidence that people have come and then vanished, both for unknowable reasons. Nothing unusual. I’d probably seen a hundred crumbling adobe buildings since moving to California, I told myself. This one just looked like the others.

  The building’s door and three front windows had been covered with sheets of corrugated steel, rusted long ago. One kick from my foot and the flaking orange metal behind the door-frame fell inward, raising whirlpools of dust that immediately caught the wind and blew away. The sheet metal had at one time been nailed to the doorframe but now merely leaned there. Invading teenagers, I thought.

  Beneath my boots the doorsill crunched softly and turned to wooden crumbs as I stepped inside. Termites had done their work and then left, like everybody else. The interior smelled of dry rot, animal scat, and a medicinal odor I associate with wasps. From the door a gray rectangle of moonlight struggled to illuminate the dark corners and failed. I could see the dim outline of an overturned table, some seatless chairs with rusty chrome legs, and a bar or counter against the far wall. The place had been a saloon or eating place at one time, I assumed. Maybe after the line crews left it had been used as a watering hole for local ranchers and the occasional prospector still combing nearby canyons for overlooked caches of gold.

  In the interim it must have been a hangout for teenagers with a satanic bent, I assumed, since the walls had been decorated fairly recently with pictures torn from magazines. Most of them were obscured by darkness, but near the door I could make out several pictures of owls and one of a dragon I suspected was the logo for a popular teen rock group.

  Even so, the place felt so empty it seemed to swallow light. I pulled the corrugated metal against the doorframe again and stepped back outside. On the ground beneath a clump of bur sage, half buried in sand, I saw a hand-painted sign fallen from above the door. DESSERT Something-or-Other, it had once announced in dark paint on a whitewashed board. Apparently someone had once provided desserts here, like the apple pies that now drew people to Julian. The second word had been obscured by time. When I picked it up the board was as light as balsa wood, just a fragile shell left by termites.

  Time to go home, I told myself. Go home to Brontë, who would stay at my side until her death, and Roxie, who wouldn’t. And shouldn’t, my Midwestern ethic insisted. Roxie should be helped along her path by me and then let go. It was true and it’s the hardest thing
in the world to do.

  “Dammit, I hate this!” I yelled into a wind that blew my voice away like smoke.

  At the top of the trail I turned to look back at the strange place which I would remember, I thought, as the scene of my personal despair that night. And I’d take the old sign with me, I decided. Take it home and patch it together and hang it over my door. A symbol for the passage of time which would eventually make of Roxie Bouchie just such a forgotten place in my heart.

  It’s how I operate, the deliberate imposition of images on my mind. It’s how I don’t forget what’s happened to me, how I don’t forget my life. Later I’d provide a sound track for the scene in my mind. Something unbearably sad. Paganini’s Variations on a Theme, maybe. That haunting melancholy. I liked the mental composition I was creating. It meant I’d survive.

  I felt valiant and wise as I tucked the old sign under my arm and loped toward the jeep trail and my truck below, turning to look back one last time. That’s when I saw it. That’s when I saw why the place had seemed familiar. From that angle it wasfamiliar. There was a picture of it on my living room wall! A black-and-white photograph of the building as it once had looked at dusk. Half of it darkened by the shadow of the ridge behind me, the other half blasted by light from a setting sun. The same photograph in moonlight.

  “Oh, my God,” I said so softly the wind took my words before I heard them. I don’t usually believe in coincidence, as I’ve said, although there are coincidences. They’re meaningless. Running into your next-door neighbor at a movie theater three miles from your house is a coincidence. Noticing that the woman sitting in front of you at that movie is your high school English teacher from twenty years ago and fifteen hundred miles away isn’t. What it is, is something for which there is no word. Even if the English teacher died in Ethiopia with the Peace Corps three years after you graduated and the woman in front of you is just a body-double, it’s not a coincidence. The world is divided into people who understand this and people who don’t.