The Last Blue Plate Special
Read The Last Blue Plate Special Online
Authors: Abigail Padgett
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
10: The Cheese Blintz Connection
20: Pirates, Diners, and Desert Rats
23: Pieter, Pieter, Pumpkin Eater
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
“Greave”
A
t 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 B
LUE
MCC
ARRON.
I hate those name tags that read H
ELLO
, M
Y
N
AME
I
S
… 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
is
Dixie?”
“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.