The Last Blue Plate Special Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2001 by Abigail Padgett

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in hardcover by Mysterious Press

  Hachette Book Group,

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.

  First eBook Edition: June 2009

  ISBN: 978-0-446-56252-2

  Contents

  Copyright

  1: “Greave”

  2: Women Who Die Too Much

  3: A Habitation of Dragons

  4: The Haunt of Jackals

  5: Profiles in Deadliness

  6: A Green Paper

  7: The Land of Oz

  8: Those Turkey Neck Blues

  9: Blue Plates

  10: The Cheese Blintz Connection

  11: Dog Art

  12: Chocolate Chips at Dawn

  13: The Library Girl

  14: Real Art, No Art

  15: Shadows

  16: Hangdog

  17: Saints Fallen and Intact

  18: The Roadkill Connection

  19: A Habitation of Termites

  20: Pirates, Diners, and Desert Rats

  21: Bones

  22: One for the Books

  23: Pieter, Pieter, Pumpkin Eater

  24: The Sagebrush Resort

  25: The Dessert (sic) Diner

  26: Edom Revisited

  27: The Dance

  Acknowledgments

  NOVELS BY ABIGAIL PADGETT

  Child of Silence

  Strawgirl

  Turtle Baby

  Moonbird Boy

  The Dollmaker’s Daughters

  Blue

  The Last Blue Plate Special

  For Iris Rochelle Greer

  1

  “Greave”

  At 7:05 P.M. on Friday, October 22, California State Assembly-woman Dixie Ross drove through a red light at the corner of Tenth Street and University Avenue in San Diego’s Uptown District. The medical examiner’s office would later release a report stating that when Dixie Ross ran that light, she was already dead.

  Ross had left a dinner rally half an hour earlier and was five blocks from her destination, a political fundraiser at an art gallery called Aphid. The San Diego Union-Tribune would describe her in its Sunday edition as “a trailblazer for women in politics and a clear-eyed liberal who wasn’t afraid of the boys in the back room,” whatever that means. The local political scene, the paper would conclude, was already in sad disarray after the death of State Senator Mary Harriet Grossinger, sixty-three, of a massive stroke only two weeks earlier.

  The paper did not point out that the statistical likelihood of two politicians from the same congressional district dying of natural causes within fourteen days of each other was not great. Almost nonexistent, really. But then most people, even journalists, don’t run around incessantly thinking about statistics like I do.

  At 7:05 when a dead body ran a light, I was grazing the Aphid Gallery’s appetizer table wearing a trendy little black and tan suit and a name tag that merely read BLUE MCCARRON. I hate those name tags that read HELLO, MY NAME IS … In real life, anyone approaching you with that phrase has something to sell. Usually a diet program involving all-natural vitamins at hugely inflated prices.

  I also hate that trendy little suit. The skirt’s too short and makes me look bow-legged even though, at a gangly five-six and 133 pounds, I’m not. And the jacket, with its black and tan triangles each ending in a gold button, reminds me of court jesters. Wearing it, I feel a need to juggle oranges while asking riddles of kings. But I’ve been trying to shed my desert rat image and I was supposed to look like a political staffer for the fundraiser, so I wore my jester outfit. Also big ugly earrings and a pair of bizarre shoes I would later bury in the desert, where I live.

  Burying uncomfortable clothing in the desert is one of my hobbies, but then so is the investigation of murder, lately. The San Diego County Sheriff’s Department had just officially closed the Muffin Crandall case, in which I came close to getting myself killed, when I took this job designing political polls for a San Diego City Council candidate named Kate Van Der Elst. The job had seemed safe enough, but my track record for picking safe jobs hasn’t been great lately.

  I’m fairly sure I was scooping domestic caviar onto tiny slices of bread with a spoon designed to fit the hands of mice when the corpse of Dixie Ross ran that light. I later learned that her dark green sports utility vehicle hit the left rear bumper of a water delivery truck at the intersection of Tenth and University. Then it spun to rest after shattering the side-window glass of a white Honda Accord parked at the curb. Dixie Ross was fifty-three, had been in good health, and was wearing a seat belt during these collisions, in which her vehicle’s airbags also inflated. She sustained no injuries. Nonetheless, when a teenage skateboarder reached into her car to feel for a pulse, he knew that Dixie Ross was dead.

  What was clear at the Aphid Gallery was merely that Dixie was unaccountably late. Invitations to the cocktail party fundraiser, printed on paper made from jade plant cuttings, had read 6:00―8:00 P.M. Kate Van Der Elst, the political candidate for whom funds were being raised, knew she couldn’t wait much longer. A speech was expected. Checks would be written. Then everybody could leave with just enough time to make their eight o’clock dinner reservations.

  “Blue,” Kate whispered as I watched the mayor of a wealthy suburban community neatly capture the last sturgeon egg from a blue willow plate with his little finger, “I can’t start without Dixie. She’s the shill!”

  It was a moment only a social psychologist could love. Since I am a social psychologist, I loved it. Kate Van Der Elst had been a successful commercial real estate broker prior to her marriage sixteen years ago to Pieter Van Der Elst, the Dutch pharmaceutical baron. Before that a blonde and savvy younger Kate had gone to Sarah Lawrence and then played tennis with old money all over Western Europe. Kate does not run in circles where people say “shill” even when they mean a shill. In Kate’s world the generic term “consultant” would be used, accompanied by slightly raised eyebrows suggesting a dollop of perfectly legal foul play.

  At political fundraisers like this one, the shill dramatically writes the first check while standing beside the richest guy in the room, who of course has to follow suit, starting a trend. I found the cultural slip amusing. Kate Van Der Elst, smoothing well-styled hair from her aristocratic face with both hands, didn’t.

  “Stop smiling like that,” she said. “This is serious. Where isDixie?”

  “Way down south in the land of cotton?” a deep voice suggested, causing both Kate and me to groan.

  It was Bernard Berryman, better known as BB, a gay excon hired by me to design the event. BB had hand-made the jade-plant invitation paper and sewed green tablecloths from awnings he got dirt cheap at a mortician’s bankruptcy auction. BB had also taught Kate Van Der Elst about shills. Everybody else in the room knew already.

  “Don’t know who donated that plate of liver paste and fish eggs, but they gone now,” BB noted, shooting the cuffs of a blue-and-white pinstriped Egyptian cotton shirt. “Wasn’t no note when they was delivered. Had a bunch of canned figs on the plate, too, but I threw ’em away. Looked like little blind wet mummy-eyes piled on some lettuce. Not somethin’ anybody’d eat.”

  The shirt flashed attractively beneath yellow suspenders every time he walked under any of the gallery’s hundred and fifteen high-density
track lights. His dark dreadlocks were conservatively fastened at the back of his neck with an antique brass napkin ring, and his brown skin gleamed like an ad for a Hershey’s product in the uneven light. At the bar across the main gallery I could see a prominent radical clergyman in aviator frames and a tie-dyed gray clerical shirt observing our conversation. BB responded by sliding his hands into the pockets of knife-pleated brown gabardines and doing an F. Scott Fitzgerald stroll toward the clergyman, who quickly ordered another drink.

  “I’m going to wait three minutes and then begin,” Kate said. “Do you think somebody else could begin the check-writing ritual in the event that Dixie just doesn’t make it?”

  Kate had a bit of an accent, the result of living in the Netherlands for fifteen years. I made a mental note to locate a speaking coach. Southern California voters prefer a John Wayne drawl to accents hinting of the Continent. In fact, many Southern California voters secretly believe there is only one continent, and it is North America, and it ends at the Mexican border. I knew that even before I started running polls for Kate Van Der Elst.

  “Sure,” I answered. “Any prominent wealthy person will do.”

  “But I don’t know any of these people,” Kate said, dismay coloring her alabaster cheeks a peach daiquiri color.

  We were even. I didn’t know any of them, either.

  “Just begin your speech,” I said with fake gusto. “BB and I will arrange something if Dixie doesn’t show within ten minutes. She’s probably just stuck in traffic.”

  So Kate launched into her speech about saving San Diego from urban sprawl while protecting endangered things like wild button celery and spadefoot toads from imminent extinction. Somebody was taking flash photographs of her, and periodically the room froze in light. I staggered in my atrocious shoes toward one of several pocket galleries off the rear of the main room. It looked like a good place to think about what to do next.

  Of course, it wasn’t. It was dim and small with pinlights illuminating a strange collection of grainy, overdeveloped black-and-white photos that might have been taken by a child with a simple box camera. Some were of mountain shacks, some of dilapidated houses on concrete blocks. Others featured abandoned cars and trucks half buried in tumbleweeds or disinte-grating in gullies. Some were photos of unidentifiable structures taken from odd angles, like toys left on a carpet and seen from the perspective of a passing insect. Something about the photos made me forget Kate Van Der Elst and the spadefoot toads even though I could hear her voice in the room behind me. Something about one photo in particular.

  It was one of the unidentifiable structures. Just a crumbling adobe building beside a road, half its length obscured by an immense shadow. The terrain had a California high desert look, with scrubby vegetation and lots of rocks. That desert sense of things known but never revealed. I guessed that the shadow had been cast by a hill or mountain ridge behind the photographer, to the west. Lights were visible through two windows in the shadowed half of the structure, and blurry figures. The other side, illuminated by a setting sun, seemed blasted by light. Bombed. As if the photographer had captured the precise moment of some deadly explosion. In the lower right corner of the photo was a signature in spidery black ink. “Greave,” it said.

  The name meant nothing to me, but my reaction to the photo did. My reaction was visceral and made me shaky. Fascination. And fear. Something frightening in that scene, something terrible and close. It didn’t make any sense, but these creepy little recognitions never do. Which is why I rarely talk about them. They aren’t rational, and irrationality scares people. What’s the point? You either understand how these things happen or you don’t.

  Yeah, what? I mouthed toward the ceiling and my concept of the universe beyond it. A universe which in my mind is a curved grid on which everything moves at intense speeds. The past, the future, everything in between, and more. Sometimes it crosses the little band of reality in which we live and there’s a buzzing sound, a scent of ozone, and some completely irrelevant thing is suddenly fraught with relevance. Usually these events are meaningless to us. I was sure this one with the photo had achieved new heights in that regard. It was pointless. But I couldn’t stop staring at that photograph until the cell phone in my purse began to ring.

  I should probably explain that I am not one of those people who talk on cell phones in grocery checkout lines in order to impress total strangers with my importance. I didn’t even own a cell phone at that point. The one in my purse was Kate Van Der Elst’s, handed to me just in case somebody called during her speech. I was also carrying a Ziploc bag holding Kate’s snack—half an apple, a stick of low-fat string cheese, and two macadamia nuts. She was on one of the fad diets that regularly sweep the country, so I had to dig the phone out from under a bag of food which was making my purse smell like an apple. The voice answering when I whispered, “This is Blue McCarron,” was that of Pieter Van Der Elst, Kate’s husband. He was calling from her storefront campaign headquarters a few blocks away. And his voice was strained.

  “Something terrible has happened,” he said, his Dutch accent turning “something” into “somezing.” “Dixie Ross is dead.”

  “What?” I replied too loudly. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. We just got the call. There was an automobile accident, but they’re saying she was already… gone … by the time of the accident. She’d been at some picnic rally in north county—an organic bean growers’ cooperative—and died while driving. She was on her way to Kate at the gallery. Her death was sudden. I don’t know. Tell Kate I’m on my way over there.”

  Some of the well-dressed crowd in the main room were watching me, curious about the phone call and its potential for political intrigue. There is nothing more boring than a cocktail-hour political fundraiser, and I didn’t fault them for hoping this oaf in a designer suit might provide some relief. Sadly, I was about to.

  After penning the news of Dixie’s death on a one-hundred-percent recycled paper napkin, I waited five minutes or so for a lag in Kate’s speech and then clomped toward her in my shoes-from-hell. BB noticed the look on my face and moved, pantherlike, to the precise point along a wall where I would withdraw after handing Kate the note.

  What’s going on? his eyes asked as I realized for the hundredth time the sort of social awareness learned in prisons. After three years behind bars for a youthful drug offense, BB misses nothing.

  “Oh, my God!” Kate breathed into the microphone after I handed her the napkin, neatly capturing the full attention of all seventy-five people present. “Dixie Ross has … has died.”

  In the ensuing seconds there was an outburst of dismay, a few strangled sobs, and finally the voice of the radical clergyman at the bar intoning, “Kate, what happened?”

  “It isn’t clear,” Kate began as Pieter Van Der Elst burst through the door and hurried to stand at his wife’s side. “Dixie was in an accident on her way here, but she wasn’t injured. It seems that …”

  “The call just came in to our campaign office,” Pieter continued breathlessly, his pale blue eyes somber beneath a prematurely white brush-cut that always makes him look like a Renaissance monk. “There are no details as yet, but it is believed Assemblywoman Ross suffered some fatal event prior to losing control of her car. There will be an autopsy, of course. One scarcely knows what to say. We lost Mary Harriet Grossinger only two weeks ago. Now Dixie. I’m afraid I just don’t know what to say.”

  BB had approached the clergyman during this exchange, and the man quickly slipped a white plastic tab into the collar of his shirt. Then he moved gracefully to stand before Kate’s microphone. If he’d been slightly drunk two minutes earlier, he wasn’t now.

  “Dear Lord,” he began softly as every head in the room bowed and the photographer ducked out the front door, “you have taken another of our friends and we are saddened …”

  At the end of the prayer he urged continued dedication to everything Dixie had stood for. Racial justice. Funding for sc
hools. The protection of our precious environment.

  I was sorry that he left out the spadefoot toads.

  Kate Van Der Elst was sobbing against her husband’s madras plaid shirt when the first check was written. After that there were many, many more.

  “Shee-it, who this dude?” BB said quietly, his mouth close to one of my grotesque earrings. “Sucker work a crowd like putty in his hands!”

  I had never seen sheer respect in BB’s face before, and it took a few seconds for me to identify the emotion.

  “He’s a preacher, BB,” I said. “They’re expected to work crowds.”

  “World fulla preachers, Blue,” he answered. “Half of ’em in prison. I seen preachers could talk a man down from hangin’ hisself and I seen preachers could talk yo’ grandma outta her walker long enough to give him a little head, but this dude solid gold!”

  “The crowd’s in shock, BB. And you don’t understand what’s happened. Two major political leaders dead within two weeks. It’s very upsetting.”

  “And they both ladies,” he replied before easing away to begin cleaning up.

  I hadn’t thought of that. Another variable in a statistical setup that continued to nag. Liberal politicians are a minority on the Southern California political scene. And liberal women politicians are a very small minority of a minority. I wondered exactly how odd was the coincidence of two of them dying within weeks of each other. And of course it had to be coincidence, didn’t it?

  I stayed to help BB clean up after the crowd’s somber exodus. Then we locked up, dropped the gallery keys through the mail slot, retrieved my Doberman, Brontë, from my truck, and walked her through the residential streets behind University Avenue. When Brontë was sufficiently exercised we headed over to Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro to meet Roxie, my significant other, who has no interest in politics. Not that I do, either. What I have interest in is making money, and Kate Van Der Elst was paying me well to design polls for her. Meanwhile, Dr. Roxanne Bouchie, forensic psychiatrist and line-dance coach at Auntie’s, had followed through on her earlier suggestion that we work together.