The Last Blue Plate Special (39 page)

I could feel my heart pounding, the blood singing in the elegant road map of my circulatory system. I could
taste
oxygen molecules from that blood feeding my brain. In my brain the molecules tasted, I thought, the way ginger smells. The
molecules tasted like being alive. I was determined to stay that way.

“Of course I agree with that,” I lied, casting about for something to say in support of it. “I mean, look at what happened
to Edom.”

He was arranging chunks of cheddar cheese on the plate. Beneath the heavily scented orange cubes I could see three little
figures fleeing over a bridge, a pagoda, a willow tree, two birds in the air.

“‘There shall the night hag alight,’” he quoted from what I thought was the Revised Standard Version of the Isaiah 34 text.
“The night hag is Lilith, you know. The night hag is any woman who won’t obey the law of God. Would you like some cheese?
It’s extra-extra sharp, pretty good. My mother always made cheese sandwiches here, you know. Have some. We’re going to be
here all night. Eat something. You’ll get hungry.”

“Take, eat …” I remembered the words from the sacrament of Holy Communion I’d heard every Sunday of my life as a child. Women’s
words in the mouth of a man. So who had stolen the power from whom? I thought as a man named Thomas Joseph Eldridge wolfed
down at least a pound of cheddar cheese in the gloom of a rotting adobe shack. Courteously, I nibbled at one of the squares.

“How nice of Kara to make you a snack,” I mentioned, taking a risk. It was impossible to know what might set him off.

“Kara is a disciple of Lilith now,” he said somberly. “She has been for two years, but I didn’t know. She lied to me. Before,
when Mrs. Rainer was alive to show her the way, Kara was perfect. I thought Mrs. Rainer was like a mother-in-law to Kara,
like Naomi in the Bible. That’s why I named my daughter Naomi. But Isadora lured Kara away from the right path and so my daughter
couldn’t be called Naomi anymore and I had to call her by her middle name, Ann. It was Isadora who talked Kara into sneaking
around behind my back and going to school, even gave her the money. Before that Kara was a natural woman and obeyed me. But
then she sneaked off and went to school and even
graduated.
If she hadn’t done that, maybe she could have been all right. Of course, I killed Isadora. I have to be the Sword of Heaven.
Somebody
has to be.”

He seemed overwhelmed by the task but determined to carry it out.

“Of course,” I said, dipping my head as we do in high Episcopal churches when the crucifix is carried past in procession.
It seemed to work even though I remembered Eldridge was a Methodist.

“I’ve got a bottle of water down here,” he said, leaning beneath the counter. “Cheese is salty.”

My gun lay on top of the counter, his left hand loosely over it but not holding it. My one chance and I took it, grabbed the
base of the grip softly between my thumb and third finger and then ripped it from beneath his hand and into mine. Then I held
the barrel hard against his neck where the carotid artery pulsed as he leaned over, both index fingers on the trigger as I
began the careful, sure pull. There was no other option. I was going to have to kill him.

B
ut I didn’t. Something happened. Everything slowed to a stop as I squeezed the trigger, or thought I did, and nothing happened.
It was like trying to move inside clean, solid ice. Everything visible but frozen in place. Several conversations were taking
place inside my head simultaneously as no time passed. Not a single second, not a heartbeat.

“Thou shalt not kill,” a male voice boomed.

“Okay, nice rule for large social control, but does it apply to this situation? No. Kill him before he has a chance to grab
the gun and kill you, you idiot!”

I guessed that voice was mine.

Then another. “You can’t shoot someone who’s feeding you.”

Dog-brain, I thought. We must be closer to dogs on the evolutionary tree than we thought.

“Shoot, shoot, he’s a murderer and he’s going to murder
you
!”

Me again. The survival thing.

“But he could have killed you already and he hasn’t. He
likes
you.”

Female brain, I realized. We always think that. Probably a chemical effect of estrogen.

They were all me, I knew.

Then time resumed and Eldridge moved his arms. Not toward me and the gun, but to his head. He seemed not to know I was there
as he stood, heels of both hands pushing against his temples, his eyes bulging. Even in the dark I could see his face grow
purple as his mouth made an open O. Then he fell.

I stood on the footrail of the counter and leaned over it, the .38 trained on the body-shaped shadow below.

“Don’t move!” I yelled, teeth chattering. “Don’t move or I’ll shoot.”

But T. J. Eldridge didn’t move. Nor did I. I clenched my teeth to stop the racket and heard gurgling sounds from the form
on the floor but no breathing. Still I held the gun and waited. A minute. Two minutes. Three. Nothing. Then an odor as his
bowels evacuated. It happens shortly after death. I knew Thomas Joseph Eldridge was dead.

I fired the Smith and Wesson once, into the sturdy fabric of the jacket tying me to the counter. The bullet hole in the jacket’s
back gave me a weak spot from which to tear the nylon and free my leg. Brontë had begun to bark frantically at the sound of
the shot, and I could hear her, although she sounded like a fake dog. She sounded like a cartoon. My foot seemed fake, too,
dragging its tightly knotted nylon sleeve.

A little psychological shock, I told myself. It would wear off. Meanwhile, I rounded the end of the counter where a woman
who called herself Lorene had once served coffee and sandwiches to sunburned ranchers while a boy in a dress played outside.
I hoped she wasn’t able to see what lay on the floor behind her counter now. This couldn’t have been what she had in mind
for her only child.

I felt his wrist and neck. There was no pulse. Then I walked out, leaving the rusted corrugated-metal sheet where I’d pushed
it away from the door. Behind me a dragon moved slightly in the air disturbed by my passage, and then was still.

The smell of death on me made Brontë frantic, so I had to drive back into Anza with the sound of howling. It seemed appropriate.
From a pay phone at the diner where I’d talked with Waddy Babbick I called Wes Rathbone at the hospital.

“Blue!” he erupted, “Damn your cell phone! Where are you? Nobody could reach you. Grecchi’s coherent now. It took longer than
it should have because Eldridge had sedated her before he cut her wrist, and it didn’t show up on the blood test they gave
her when she was brought in, so she was sedated again, and—”

“Wes,” I interrupted, “Eldridge is dead. His body is in an old adobe line shack where Coyote Canyon ends four miles east of
Anza. I didn’t kill him, he just died. I’m not going to stay with the body. I’m going home. Don’t ask me what happened. I
don’t know.”

“Blue … ?”

“Not now, Wes. Just let me go home. I’ll talk to you later.”

Before he could say anything else I hung up the phone and went into the ladies’ room to wash the smell of death and cordite
from my hands. In the car Brontë continued to whine, but we made it home without further howling. There were more people in
khaki shorts and FBI windbreakers outside my motel now. All of them had cell phones. In the distance over Coyote Canyon I
could hear a helicopter.

“The body of Thomas Eldridge has been secured,” a young agent informed me as I climbed out of my truck. “We’ll need to take
a statement from you.”

“Not now,” I said. “And I’m not the person who knows the whole story, anyway. In an hour or so I’ll talk to you, give you
the name of an informant who has the whole history, including newspaper clippings. Right now I insist on the right to a stiff
drink and a hot bath.”

“Roger,” the boy said efficiently. “And oh, yeah, your friend is inside.”

I wasn’t sure how I felt about seeing Roxie right then. I didn’t want to have to explain what couldn’t be explained. That
everything is part of a pattern that some of us see occasionally, and some of us never do. I was too tired to try, and she’d
never get it, anyway.

But it wasn’t Roxie sitting on the floor of my living room under a photograph I would later learn T. J. Eldridge had taken
of the line shack with a child’s box camera thirty years ago. It was BB.

“Been worried,” he said. “Nobody tell me what’s goin’ on, so I had Matt bring me out here. Figured I’d just wait. Oh, your
brother called. I accepted the call, talked to the dude for a while, tol’ him what I knew ’bout all this. He say you
always
up to you ass in some mess. I say, ‘Dude, who talkin’?’”

I had to laugh at that, which felt good. Laughing broke the skin of whatever state I’d been in since not pulling a trigger
and killing a man. I realized I wasn’t sure I was really still alive until BB made me laugh. I think I suspected T. J. Eldridge
had in reality jerked up, roaring, grabbed my gun from my hand and shot me through the head. That I was really lying on the
floor of the shack with my brains on the wall, and this was just the last little fantasy those shattered neural cells could
patch together before an absence of oxygen cloaked them in perfect, permanent darkness.

“Oh, BB,” I said, slumping to the floor next to him. “Am I really here?”

“Look like it,” he said, draping an arm over my shoulders while I sobbed with relief.

Above our heads a photograph of an old adobe building was blasted with light and lost in shadow at the same time.

The following week’s edition of
Time
had Reed McCallister on the cover and an open letter from the vice presidential candidate thanking the police, the sheriff’s
department, the FBI, and everyone in Southern California for the speedy closure of this tragic and lethal case. Kate Van Der
Elst got a boost from the mention of her name all over the country as a targeted victim of the “Tummy-Tuck Killer,” as the
media named Eldridge, and handily won her seat on the city council, from which she announced her intention to “make San Diego
safe for women and children,” whatever that means. She and Pieter reconciled before the election, but they’re still circling
each other like boxers in a ring as they negotiate for a forgiveness both want and neither is quite ready to give.

At Kate’s victory celebration Pieter brought me a glass of generic champagne and said, “She wants to run for state assembly
next. If you hadn’t pointed out to me that my behavior was cowardly, I would have left her and wouldn’t be facing an eternity
of cheap white wine and soggy crackers. Thanks, Blue.” He was laughing, but not entirely.

Isadora Grecchi lost almost no mobility in her left hand and continued to be nearly as unpleasant after her ordeal as she
had been before. She was, however, planning to take an intensive art course in Italy during the spring semester and was furiously
learning Italian within twenty-four hours of leaving the hospital. She would fly to Florence the day after Christmas, and
Jennings Rainer planned to visit her with his grandchildren over their spring school break. She and I skirted each other warily
on the one occasion we were all together for a catered celebration at Rainer’s condo. We didn’t want to talk to each other,
and we both knew why.

Chris and Megan planned to relocate to Northern California on the same day Isadora left for Italy, having discovered that
moving two children and a houseful of books and furniture cannot be accomplished in two weeks. Megan gave up paint ball and
in fact won’t even talk about it. She will talk about her new plan to raise alpacas for their wool. I have been promised enough
homespun alpaca wool for a sweater, if I can find anybody to knit it. Courtesy precluded my pointing out that it’s never cold
enough for a wool sweater here, and besides, I might be able to use one in Philadelphia.

Jennings Rainer would keep his condo in San Diego but had contracted for the construction of a cottage on Chris and Megan’s
two-hundred-acre property up north.

“It’s my grampy flat,” he told everybody proudly. “Snuffy and I will fly back and forth, as I’ll still do the occasional surgery
here.”

Jeffrey Pond turned up at a Holiday Inn in Fresno the same night Eldridge died. The authorities easily found him because he’d
charged his motel room to his credit card and then made several phone calls to his mother both at her home and at the hospital
where his father seemed to be recovering nicely. He said he’d looked at his father on the hospital bed and seen himself in
the future, except at least his father had a wife to care for him and medical insurance. He said he’d just cracked under the
awareness that his life was a mess and had run, but that once on the road he realized he had no idea where to run
to
and was planning to come home the next day, anyway.

Roxie and I didn’t have a chance to talk until the night after Eldridge’s death. We met in town, at Auntie Buck’s, where we
sat at a table and stared at each other as Garth Brooks sang from the jukebox that missing the pain involves missing the dance,
too.

“Why didn’t you call me?” she asked, tears welling up in her brown eyes. “Why didn’t you come to my place to stay instead
of running up there alone?”

“I did call you,” I said, tears welling up in my goldish hazel ones. “You told me to leave you alone.”

“But I didn’t know what you’d found out from McCallister. I didn’t know what you were going to do. If I’d known, I wouldn’t
have said that. I would have told you to come on over, or I would have gone with you, or something.”

“How could I tell you something you’d just made it clear you didn’t want to hear?” I insisted. “You can’t have it both ways,
Rox. You’re either there for me or you aren’t. Yes or no, always, not just when it’s convenient.”

“Girl, there’s nothing
convenient
about you,” she replied, rattling the beads in her hair angrily. Wooden beads now, carved in African designs. “You can’t
live in town like other people live, no, you’ve got to be out there with your rocks and your damn Pergo floor. And you don’t
think
like other people think, and—”