The Last Blue Plate Special (3 page)

Americans believe in the concept of the individual and are therefore easy prey to schemes based on statistical estimations.
Ask yourself why thousands of homes featuring grossly inadequate diets, parasite-infested children, and not a single book
will nonetheless have cupboards full of chemically flavored petroleum by-products, ninety-channel cable TV, and a useless
plastic contraption that was supposed to promote weight loss, except it broke. That’s what I mean. Fortunes are made every
day by people who know how to calculate the
proportion
of an infinite series of, say, eighteen-year-old white males who will buy purple-sole athletic shoes at two hundred and fifty
dollars a pair. The infinite series thing is the key.

And problematic for my purposes that night. There is no infinite series of dead women politicians, no database. In fact, the
existence of women politicians is so recent a social artifact that even if there were a database it would be too small to
be useful. I would have to spread my net more broadly. Plain “dead women,” then. Dead white women between forty-five and sixty-five,
U.S. No problem.

On the Web I logged on to the Monthly Vital Statistics Report and learned that for every hundred thousand women in that age
group, a little over five hundred tend to die every year, close to half of those from cancer. Of the remaining causes of death,
only about twenty-two per hundred thousand may be expected to die of cerebrovascular events, of which “stroke” is only one.
The odds in favor of Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger both dying of strokes had just dropped drastically, as I suspected.

Next I went to the
San Diego Union-Tribune
archives and read a ton of articles on both women. Neither smoked, although Grossinger had until she quit in 1987. Grossinger
was the mother of three children, Ross childless. Both were committed to fitness, as is de rigeur in Southern California,
Grossinger having been a jogger and Ross a tennis player. Grossinger had at one time admitted to being vegetarian but was
later photographed eating fried chicken after a flare-up from the California Poultry-men’s Association. I suspected that the
photo was staged for political reasons and included “vegetarian” in Grossinger’s health variables column. Ross had no food
preferences known to the media. Grossinger’s sixty-eight-year-old brother was still alive and working full-time as the dean
of a small private law school. Ross’s three siblings, two older and one younger, were also alive and apparently free of health
problems. Grossinger’s official obituary named “cerebral hemorrhage” as the cause of death, citing her death certificate.

The American Heart Association’s Web site explained that of all four types of stroke, the type characterized by cerebral hemorrhage
accounts for only ten percent. Another drop in the odds. For the purposes of my research, I decided to assume that Dixie Ross
had also succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage even though Ross’s cause of death wouldn’t be available until after the autopsy.

Brontë, asleep on the indoor-outdoor Berber carpet at my feet, growled amiably at some dog-dream phantom. Her paws paddled
at the carpet and a dog-smile twitched beneath her whiskers. Chasing something, I thought. She was chasing something in her
mind. And so was I.

“It’s called a single dubious assumption,” I whispered to my dog. “My hypothesis. Which is that there’s something peculiar
about these deaths.”

Hours later I’d keyed everything I had into a program I use to analyze factors presumed to be statistically independent of
each other. Like two dead women. The deaths either were independent of each other, with no causal connection or common variable,
or they weren’t. In minutes I had results. The probability of a healthy sixty-three-year-old white woman and a healthy fifty-three-year-old
white woman, both Americans with good medical care and no prior history of cardiovascular disease, succumbing to cerebral
hemorrhages within two weeks of each other in the same town was not statistically significant at .001. One-tenth of one percent,
odds of a thousand to one. That’s a significance level so tight it’s only used in life-and-death situations, like FDA approval
of new pharmaceuticals, things like that. In other words, at that level of significance it’s safe to say the thing you’re
looking at is so unlikely that it just really could not happen.

“But it did happen,” I said to the numbers on my computer screen. “Which means there’s a common variable we don’t know about.
Something Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger had in common. Something that, for all practical purposes, killed them.”

It was after two when I crawled into bed with Roxie.

“Don’t tell me,” she said, not really awake.

“It couldn’t have happened,” I answered. “That’s all.”

She sighed. “I told you not to tell me.”

In the morning we swam in the motel pool, I made waffles, and we swam some more. Rox had never learned to swim growing up
in Gary, Indiana, despite the town’s proximity to Lake Michigan.

“Blue,” she’d explained two months earlier, “there are certain cultural differences between us. I’m black; you’re white.”

“What’s that got to do with swimming?” I’d asked in full idiot-jacket.

“I’ve never thought about it, but it probably has something to do with cars.”

“Cars?”

“Yeah. As in transportation. Not many folks in my neighborhood had cars, and you had to drive to get to the lake. On really
hot days sometimes the fire department would send a guy around to open a hydrant so we color-challenged kids could cool off
in the water. Not much chance to learn the backstroke.”

Actually, Roxie didn’t feel her life was a total waste in the absence of swimming. She’d done just fine, she pointed out,
managing college, medical school, a psychiatric residency, and forensic board certifications in two states without swimming
to them. She had a secure job at Donovan State Prison, a lucrative private practice, and now our little consulting business,
which was pulling in impressive fees. From time to time she got job offers from hospitals and universities all over the country,
but so far none had appealed to her.

I was so mortified at my own lack of social awareness, however, that I felt compelled to right the wrong. I would teach Roxie
to swim or die trying. In the first few lessons I thought I really
might
die trying, until I bought a book on swimming instruction. It suggested starting with a kickboard, and that did the trick.
Lacking supervision, Rox could still probably drown in a wading pool, but she loves that kickboard. Brontë does, too. The
two of them were splashing up and down the pool, Brontë on the board in her teal-blue life jacket with Rox hanging on and
kicking, when I first mentioned what I thought should be done next.

“Probably ought to call the FBI, don’t you think?” I said casually.

“Why FBI?” Rox answered from churning blue water, not looking at me.

“Well, two elected officials dead under statistically impossible circumstances. The FBI should be informed, shouldn’t it?”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t the FBI investigate suspicious deaths of elected officials?”

“No,” Roxie answered, clearly hoping her firm, businesslike tone would end the discussion.

I sat on the edge of the pool and remembered my mother trying the same ploy. No dice then, no dice now. At thirty-five, I
realized, I still have characteristics of a second-grader.

“What do you mean, ‘no’?” I asked.

“Tell me the part you don’t understand,” she said, giving up and paddling dog and board to my side of the pool.

Brontë climbed out and I took off her life jacket so she could shake the water from her fur. Rox stayed in the pool, every
one of her beaded braids sparkling in sunlight. I hated to be tedious about this, but I had to know.

“The part about the FBI
not
investigating suspicious deaths of elected officials,” I said.

“What does the
F
in FBI stand for, Blue?” Rox the professor.

“Federal.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning the national government. What’s your point?”

Roxie rested her chin on the pool edge and spoke into the splash gutter. “The FBI would only investigate the suspicious death
of a
federal
official, Blue,” she explained. “Also espionage, terrorism, bank robbery, kidnapping, bribery, crimes which cross state lines,
and those especially mandated by law. Police brutality, for example. That’s a relatively new one. But not deaths of state
or local elected officials unless local law enforcement authorities request FBI help.”

“Oh,” I thought out loud as I stood to pull on a baggy T-shirt and shorts I’d thrown on a chaise. “Then I should call the
San Diego Police Department, right?”

“Wrong. You shouldn’t call anybody because you don’t really know anything. Your numbers are based on guesses. Dixie Ross hasn’t
even been autopsied yet. Wait until Monday, and then if the autopsy finds cerebral hemorrhage as the cause of death you might
offer your statistical analysis to the local police as a courtesy, nothing more. They won’t read it anyway.”

Rox kicked off to the steps at the shallow end of the pool and climbed out to sit in the shade and read. I went into my office/living
room to get a book for myself and stared at the phone. It seemed a shame to let all that research wait.

“San Diego Police Department, Desk Sergeant John Garcia,” a young male voice answered seconds later.

“Um, I’d like to report a statistical analysis,” I began. Dumb as a mud fence, as everyone used to say back in Waterloo, Illinois,
where I grew up.

“A what?”

“It’s about the deaths of Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie Ross. I’m a social psychologist,” I said, and then gave my name,
address, phone number, and credentials. “These deaths are a statistical anomaly. What I mean is, if Dixie Ross also died of
a cerebral hemorrhage, then the police should be aware that the likelihood of both these deaths occurring naturally is pretty
much zero.”

“You are aware that this call is being tape-recorded,” Garcia said over the every-ten-second beeping of a legal taping device.

“Yes.”

“I’ll make sure the information gets to the right department, Dr. McCarron. Thank you for calling.”

The response wasn’t exactly a tribute to my skill with unusual data, but I felt that surge of self-righteousness you get when
you’ve done the Right Thing. It’s a heartland concept, the dubious birthright of people born in a thousand little towns with
a church at one end of Main Street and a grain depot at the other. Unfortunately, the Right Thing is almost always a gross
oversimplification which will later reveal itself to have been the Wrong Thing. But its immediate, gooey glow is at times
irresistible. I picked up the novel I was reading about incest within a religious cult in Nova Scotia and went outside to
join Rox.

“Were you a victim of incest?” I asked the woman about whom after a relationship of only two months I still knew not nearly
enough.

“Nah, my grandma wasn’t into kinky stuff,” she answered from beneath a bright blue beach umbrella. “You called the police
department, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Why do you think there’s so much attention to themes of incest in contemporary fiction?”

“Everything’s economics, Blue. Incest may be a metaphor for fears about not participating in the global marketplace, the ills
inherent in keeping the money at home. Also, it gives you a feeble dodge from my question about calling the police. I can’t
believe you did that. What did they say?”

“That the information would be given to the right department.”

“I take it they were deeply impressed, then?”

“Rox, it was just a desk clerk. Want to drive up to Julian for the afternoon?”

Roxie is easily distracted by desserts, and the little mining town just up a mountain from my place in Borrego Springs has
become an apple-growing mecca. Julian offers the best apple pies in California. Besides, it’s always twenty degrees cooler
up there.

So we loaded Brontë into my truck cab and spent the afternoon gorging on apple pie à la mode and perusing Julian’s shops.
I bought a quilted red bandanna for Brontë and Rox got a pretty inlaid wood kaleidoscope for her office at the prison. She
said it might help some of her clients grasp the concept that there are different ways of looking at things. We were having
such a good time I didn’t point out the fact that her clients were more likely to steal it than ponder its message.

On the way back we stopped at a grocery and got ground turkey and veggies to grill outside by the pool. We’d listen to Rossini
and Garth Brooks on my outside speakers, full blast, we decided. Then Sousa marches and Strauss waltzes and when it got dark,
old Charles Aznavour songs, in French. It occurred to neither of us that the best-laid plans of mice and even women frequently
run afoul of reality. And also the law.

There was an unmarked car which nonetheless bore not-so-subtle marks of cop parked beside the locked gate to my property when
we got home. Why don’t they ever get it that band radios, mikes, riot gun racks on the doors, and perforated metal plates
separating front and back seats are dead giveaways? A fortyish guy with a sandy, graying crew cut, sunglasses, and a blue
nylon windbreaker with SDPD across the chest unfolded his skinny six feet from the car and scowled at the sunset, then at
us.

Brontë growled from her seat on Roxie’s lap, clearly wishing she didn’t look so lapdoggy.

“Looking for Dr. Emily McCarron. Police business. You her?” “She,” I countered. “It’s a nominative of address. Are you she.
And yes, I am.”

“Emily” is legally my name, but I never use it except on tax forms and other official paperwork. It sounded like an alias.

“I hate it when this happens,” Roxie grumbled. “Next he’s going to show a badge, and there goes dinner.”

“We have a package of ground turkey in this vehicle,” she addressed the cop, who I was certain was going to turn out to be
a detective. “Excessive delays between here and the refrigerator could be life-threatening. Salmonella, E. coli, botulism,
anthrax. Surely I don’t need to go on.”