The Last Blue Plate Special (19 page)

“Dude from the High Noon Boot Corral came in Auntie’s, hired me to do a belt display,” he said, eyeing my jester suit uneasily.
“Blue, that what you gonna wear to catch a killer?”

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked. “Other than the fact that I look like a bowlegged bit player from a Shakespearian touring
company?”

“That do it.”

“I hate to say it, BB, but the hip-hop pants and the low-rider undershirt you’re wearing don’t exactly say ‘fashion statement’
to me, either. They don’t even
go
together.”

“Ain’t seen my do-rag yet,” he said, grinning. “See, I be
knowin’
how to play this party. Give ’em what they want. Hey, criminal drag—it be
in.
”

What BB was calling “criminal drag” was baggy hip-hop pants in chino, popularized by black rap groups, worn low on the hips
with at least four inches of designer Y-fronts showing. These were topped by the heavy white cotton athletic T-shirt worn
by Latino gang members. With a ratty cloth “do-rag” on his head, the manner of its tying a mark of black gang membership in
Los Angeles, BB would be a walking billboard of multicultural threat. I wasn’t sure what the military-style boots meant, but
they looked dangerous, too.

“See, Blue,” he went on, “party like this, you need to distract these fools. Give ’em a picture.”

I could tell from the way he was circling me, eyes narrowed, that my jester outfit wouldn’t do. That was okay. I hated it,
anyway.

Grabbing a lump of black wool from a bag of used clothes BB buys by the pound at a distribution center down at the border,
he held it to the light and grinned. It appeared to be a skirt. In minutes he’d located a brown and black pinstriped men’s
suitcoat with wide lapels and an ungodly mustard-yellow polyester blouse that would have fit a cow. The kind with the floppy
bow at the neck. Something had chewed holes in the trailing ends of the bow. The blouse came to my knees.

“Just the thing,” BB said. “Do this first,” he added, trimming the blouse around me with pinking shears, then removing the
attached scarf pieces with what looked like a scalpel. He’d found thread in a mustard-yellow match and it hung from a needle
clenched between his teeth. A cut up the back of the blouse, five minutes of stitching, and the blouse fit perfectly, except
for the sleeves. These he bunched above my elbows and secured with ordinary tape.

Next, the black skirt was altered, and then the suit jacket, which took longer than anything else. When he was finished, he
steam-pressed everything and a greasy odor filled the air.

“Steam get some of the smell out,” he noted.

“That’s wonderful,” I said, “but BB, what are you doing?”

“Got to look like a cop,” he explained as he helped me into the freshly pressed jacket. “Scare ’em a little.”

I didn’t think I looked like a cop as much as like Mary Pop-pins. The black skirt grazed the tops of my shoes. All I needed
was an umbrella with a parrot-head handle. Although I did like the brown-and-black pinstriped jacket. Very k.d. lang. The
blouse was still hideous.

“Need somethin’ else,” he said.

Several scarves were rejected until he hit upon the idea of a string tie made of scraps from the jacket alterations. In seconds
my collarless blouse was accessorized by a wool string tie fastened at the neck with a big brown coat button. Then he approached
with a brown felt hat. A fedora, it looked as though very small mammals had lived in it. For years.

“No!” I said.

“Jus’ try—”

“No.”

We compromised on a brown corduroy tam he whipped up from an old pair of pants in the rag pile. I was afraid we were going
to be late for our appointment with Jennings Rainer, but BB insisted on sewing another brown coat button to the tam’s band.

“Now!” he said proudly.

I looked in all three mirrors and saw a combination of Annie Hall, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Cruella De Vil. In a newsboy’s tam
from 1920.

“If the idea is to frighten the people we’re interviewing, this works,” I told BB. “Now let’s go.”

In the car he fussed with his do-rag, a dirty black bandanna, all the way to La Jolla.

“Got to get the tie right,” he insisted. “Get it wrong, gonna look like I’m tryin’ to join the Aryan Nation.”

“BB, there’s no way,” I said as we pulled into Jennings Rainer’s gated condo parking lot. “It’s a closed club.”

The guard at the condo looked askance but let us in after phoning Rainer. It wouldn’t be the last time we’d get funny looks,
I thought. It’s not every day you see a Gibson girl with cropped hair running around trendy neighborhoods with a black gangbanger
whose entire life is probably devoted to selling your toddler drugs.

“I can’t imagine why this is necessary, Dr. McCarron,” Jennings Rainer said as he opened the door to a seventh-floor condo
with a view of other condos. “And who is this?”

“Mr. Berryman is my bodyguard,” I said in somber tones. “The police are concerned with their liability in this case. As an
outside consultant, if I were to be hurt …”

“Ah,” he said.

Doctors understand anything involving insurance.

BB stood conspicuously just inside the door and scoured Rainer’s living room with his eyes as if assassins lurked behind every
piece of furniture. Not that there was that much furniture.

Rainer’s condo had obviously been done by a decorator who felt strongly about chrome. The glass-topped coffee table had a
chrome frame, as did black leather director’s chairs flanking a white leather couch on which I was sure nobody had ever sat.
The railing of a small balcony beyond sliding glass doors was woven with chicken wire. I could see that each honeycomb was
snugly fastened to the bottom of the rail with baling wire. There was no furniture on the balcony, but there was a double
dog dish, one of those plastic igloo-shaped doghouses called Dogloos, and a cat-litter box containing two squares of grass
turf.

“What’s your dog’s name?” I asked as Rainer and I sat in the black chairs.

“Um, Snuffy,” he answered, tugging at the red plaid vest he wore over gray flannel slacks with a navy blazer. “He’s upstairs.
May I offer you something to drink—you and Mr. Berryman, of course?”

Jennings Rainer had well-trimmed white hair and the look of a very old choirboy. A few broken capillaries across his nose
and cheeks might mean a drinking problem, or might mean he’d spent a lot of time crying. Hard. On a black enamel sofa table
I saw a silver-framed photo of Rainer and a pleasant-looking woman with tinted red hair. The photo seemed fairly recent, and
the woman did not appear to be well. The red hair was sparse and much shorter than that particular woman would ever wear it.
Chemotherapy.

“No, thank you,” I answered. “And I’m so sorry you have to go through this unpleasantness, but it has to be done. I’m aware
that you lost your wife only two years ago. What a difficult time for you. We’ll make this as brief as possible.”

“I don’t know what the police are talking about, Dr. McCarron,” he began. “All my medical staff have been with me for years.
No one at my clinic is sending these letters, and certainly no one at my clinic is killing our patients by somehow causing
them to have cerebral hemorrhages. I do understand that the only common denominator among these women is that they’ve been
our clients, but that is coincidence. What more can I say?”

At the top of carpeted stairs there was a
whuffing
sound.

“Snuffy,” Jennings Rainer explained. “Do you mind?”

In a minute he returned holding a young schnauzer in his arms. The dog regarded me and then BB with interest but didn’t bark.
Instead, he licked Rainer’s face and cocked his head as if expecting something.

“His walk,” Rainer explained. “We always have ourselves a nice long walk when I get home, don’t we, boy?”

“Snuff was Mar’s dog, that’s my wife, Marlis,” he went on. “I got him for her when we knew, well, when the cancer came back.
She adored him. Snuff was right there on the bed with her when she …”

“I’m so sorry, Dr. Rainer,” I said, and I was.

In the remaining fifteen minutes he gave me thumbnail sketches of the rest of the medical staff. Megan, of course, had been
expected to take over the clinic. But she and her husband, Chris, had bought some land in Northern California and wanted to
move there, build a house, raise the kids in a small community. Chris had some ideas about land management, tree farming,
sustainable agriculture. He wanted to grow trees and herbs, Rainer said with disbelief. Organic herbs. Her father was sure
Megan was neither threatening nor murdering their patients.

“Jeff and T.J.,” he went on, “both have been with me for years. Both r.n.’s, trained in the service. Jeff’s my operating room
manager, Jeff Pond. He was Navy. T. J. Eldridge is the surgical assistant, came out of the Army.”

His eyes crinkled a little at the edges as he smiled. “Now, you’re going to find both of these boys a little out of the ordinary,
but they’re not killers.”

“Out of the ordinary?” I said as BB moved quickly to the kitchen door for no apparent reason and glared at a microwave oven.
Rainer watched him, puzzled.

“Um, yes,” he went on. “Pond’s a weight-lifter, what do you call them? Bodybuilder. Good-looking man, though. And excellent
in a crisis. Pond’s got nerves of steel, just like those beefy arms of his.

“Now, T.J., he’s a family man, a little old-fashioned like me. Completely dependable. Got two of the cutest little towheaded
kids you ever saw. Mar always thought his wife was kind of ‘slow,’ if you know what I mean, and tried to help her out at clinic
parties and what have you. Then come to find out Kara Eldridge has been going to school during the day without telling anybody
and gotten herself a two-year degree in computer programming from a community college! Apparently she just finished her course
of study a few months ago. She’d be so surprised, Mar would.”

“Do you have a computer here?” I asked.

“It’s my wife’s,” he said sheepishly. “To tell the truth, I meant to learn to use it, but I just haven’t gotten around to
it.”

“Do you mind if I look at it?”

Upstairs the second bedroom had been made into a sort of office. The antiqued pine desk and chair had been his wife’s, I thought,
brought here from a house where they had lived and raised a little girl. As I booted up Marlis Rainer’s old Macintosh computer,
BB stood at the door and dramatically glanced back and forth through both windows as if snipers were stationed on every balcony
in the facing building. Under his right sock was a gun-shaped bulge. As a parolee BB couldn’t carry any weapon, much less
a concealed one. But we figured the transparent green plastic squirt gun in his ankle holster wouldn’t really qualify as a
weapon or even an equally illegal facsimile. Rainer didn’t seem to notice it.

The computer revealed that Marlis Rainer had collected recipes from the Internet, maintained interests in counted cross-stitch
embroidery, organic container gardening, and child portrait photography, and spent a lot of time e-mailing friends, none of
whom lived out of town. The last message, written over two years in the past, was to someone with the e-mail name “betty-bun.”

“I want you to have my mother’s recipe for creamed chipped beef,” it said. “Megan and Chris are vegetarian and will never
use it. Enjoy!”

Before the final stages of her illness, Rainer’s wife had given away her recipes.

The computer’s modem wasn’t connected to any Internet service provider here, where Rainer had moved after his wife’s death.
There wasn’t even a phone jack in the room. I turned Marlis Rainer’s computer off. Quickly.

“And what about your anesthesiologist, Isadora Grecchi?” I said too loudly in the quiet little room.

Jennings Rainer had been watching as I invaded the now-lost world of his wife’s days.

“Mar’s creamed chipped beef was the best in the world,” he said, sighing. “I suppose I should get rid of her old computer,
get a new one for myself, learn all the things you can do on them. But you see, it’s as if some part of her is still in there,
in that wiring. Parts of her life, things she said to her friends, all her interests. I know she’s gone, but part of her isn’t.
It’s in there. So I just keep it, let it sit there.”

He turned to face me, shoulders back.

“Dr. McCarron, I’m aware that the grieving process can be dangerous if it goes on too long. I’m thinking of seeing someone,
a professional. This nonsense you’re investigating has nothing to do with my clinic, but we’re going to be ruined by it. I’ve
already decided to close. And do you know? I don’t care. Megan was not going to take over, anyway. My career is finished,
my wife is dead, and I’m afraid to get rid of her computer. Can you recommend someone? I assume that in your line of work
you have occasion to meet psychiatrists and other psychologists.”

I didn’t even bother to explain the difference between clinical and social psychology.

“The best person I know is a forensic psychiatrist,” I said. “She’s the staff psychiatrist at a state prison, but she has
a private practice as well. She’s also my partner in a consulting business. Let me give you her number.”

“Forensics?” Rainer said, smiling for the first time. “That sounds rather interesting.”

“I think you’ll like her,” I said. “I do.”

As we made our way soundlessly back down the heavily carpeted stairs, Rainer said, “Oh, yes, you asked about Isadora. She’s
quite competent, has a number of interests outside work. Art, volunteering, that sort of thing. Isadora became a sort of mentor
for Kara Eldridge after Mar’s death, tried to help her as Mar had done. Isadora never married, seems quite content to live
alone.”

BB was listening, intently.

“She’s quite involved in women’s health issues,” Rainer concluded.

“Uh-HUH,” BB said softly as I nudged him out the door.

C
an’t believe you send that dude to Roxie,” BB said in my truck after he’d stopped giggling over Rainer’s finding a woman who
never married unusual.