The Last Blue Plate Special (34 page)

“You don’t think Grecchi is Sword, do you?” I asked, giving Brontë a piece of hazelnut biscotti.

“She could be. Everything points to that. I don’t know, but if she isn’t—”

“Then somebody else is going to try to kill a vice presidential candidate tomorrow morning,” I finished the thought. “But
who?”

“That problem must be handled by the FBI and the Secret Service,” she said flatly. “I’m going back to the hospital, where
I will explain my concerns about Grecchi to Rathbone and that FBI control freak my federal tax dollars are paying. Then I’m
going home. This has been difficult for me, Blue. It’s hard listening to a guy with a phone in his ear tell you your profession
is a pansy-assed joke, which is what I was doing when you called about Grecchi. Even Rathbone winced when the jerk told me
to ‘stop using such big words.’”

She bent the plastic straw and then twisted it until it broke into two pieces.

“Wanna know what ‘big word’ scared him?” she went on. “‘Chronic.’ Two whole syllables, twenty million Americans hear it every
day in TV aspirin commercials, but real men don’t say ‘chronic.’ It’s not guy-speak, so it’s sissy-speak by default. And so,
according to him, is the entire language of psychiatry.

“Blue, when the FBI takes over the world, there will be only them on one side, ‘bad’ people on the other, and between them
an average vocabulary of eighteen one-syllable words, twelve of which will refer to bodily functions.”

“As long as one of the words is ‘dude,’ they’ll get along fine,” I replied, remembering the communication between BB and Jeffrey
Pond. “I’ve been thinking about researching a paper on the contemporary male’s rejection of speech as a means of communication.
It’s curious.”

“Posturing and chest-beating are so much more eloquent,” she said with a laugh, pounding her chest. “Ouch.”

“Always a problem.” I giggled with her. “Don’t worry, Rox, the FBI hasn’t even seized a major city yet. There’s still time
to talk, which reminds me—”

“I know, Philadelphia,” she said. “But not now, Blue. And not tonight. I need some time to think. See, I just realized that
while I’m trying to figure out why a few thousand guys rob and rape and kill every day, the real power’s all in the hands
of an identical set of guys who get off on chasing the first bunch. They don’t care about why. All they care about is ‘Go
Directly to Jail.’ That’s the end of the game for them. They get to be heroes. Caring about why is girl stuff.”

“Most people would agree with them, you know,” I said.

“Yeah, and listen to those same people weep and wail when it happens again and again. Another mass murder in a public building,
another serial killer with twenty-three graves in his backyard, another few hundred children raped and scarred for life, more
and more prisons and no end in sight. That’s what you get for not caring why.”

“Do you want to be a hero, Rox?” I asked as we started back toward the hospital.

“Damn right,” she said, leaning to pet Brontë fiercely. “But I want to do it by trying to understand things, not by eliminating
understanding as an option.”

“Stay out of law enforcement,” I said.

“I work in corrections, Blue. What do you think that is?”

“Oh.”

I could see where this was going and that I might have the FBI to thank if Roxie took the new job in Philadelphia. She wanted
to figure things out, make a difference. She could do that directing a research project on head injuries and genetic psychiatric
proclivities. She couldn’t do that working for the man. The two systems were incompatible.

“I might call you later tonight,” she said as Brontë and I got into my truck.

“Okay, here’s my cell phone number in case I’m still out,” I said, trying to be cool about leaving her alone. “I think I’ll
start carrying the phone when Brontë and I are out hiking in the desert. Might come in handy.”

“Yeah.” She was gone already.

I watched her leave the hospital parking lot, her bright blouse like a determined sun threading between the cars. She’d tell
Rathbone and the FBI about her unease over assumptions of Grecchi’s guilt and then go home to brood over the fate of psychiatry
in a culture addicted to quick and simple answers. Brontë’s quizzical expression reminded me that I had no idea what
I
was going to do.

“Kate Van Der Elst should be informed of what’s happened,” I told my dog. It sounded reasonable.

“Oh, Blue, I really appreciate your keeping me in the loop,” Kate said when I called her at home. “I’ve been so upset, you
know, about
everything.
This makes me feel a little better. I do think it’s Grecchi, don’t you? It even makes a little sense when you look at the
history you just told me about. She worked on all these privileged women who seem never to have suffered anything more heartbreaking
than cellulite buildup on their thighs. We must have appeared despicable to her, superficial and narcissistic. Yet we had
everything she could not—husbands, families, in some cases important public careers like Mary Harriet Grossinger and Dixie.
Her funeral was, well, it was very sad. I missed Pieter, Blue. I can’t believe he didn’t come, if only out of respect for
the Ross family. We’ve been married for sixteen years and he’s never … well, this isn’t the time to talk about Pieter. Thank
you so much for calling, Blue. I’ll be at my campaign headquarters later. You will let me know if anything else happens.”

It wasn’t a question, but I said, “Of course,” anyway and flipped my little phone shut. Then I drove downtown to the twin-towered
Marriott overlooking San Diego Bay. No one said anything about dog exclusion as Brontë and I moved through the lobby crowd
of tourists and multilingual participants in a convention that had something to do with international paint sales. A courtesy
phone was visible on a table beside an arrangement of fresh flowers that wouldn’t have fit in my truck. I picked up the phone,
asked to be connected to the room of Pieter Van Der Elst, and was.

“It’s Blue McCarron, I’m in the lobby, and I must speak with you,” I told him.

“No, we don’t think Kate is in any danger now, but she was, Pieter. She was one of those picked by Sword to die, but she was
protected by her diet. It looks as though the anesthesiolo-gist, Isadora Grecchi, is the perp. Please, let me come to your
room and explain what’s happened.”

As I’d hoped, curiosity overcame his reluctance to lay eyes on me. Brontë seemed to share my sense of accomplishment, because
her docked tail wagged happily as we rode an elevator to the fifteenth floor. Or else she was thrilled to be in surroundings
opulent by comparison to my monkish digs in the desert. She likes opera. I should have known she’d have a taste for the finer
things.

“Okay,” I told her as we walked soundlessly along the carpeted fifteenth-floor hall, “I see your point. We
could
afford to live someplace with running water, at least. So here’s the deal. If we wind up going to Philadelphia for a while,
I promise you we’ll stay someplace nice.”

Conversations with dogs can be so useful when trying to identify your own intentions.

Pieter Van Der Elst had lost five pounds since I last saw him, all five from his face. His skin was sallow, the pale blue
eyes as dim as dusty glass. And despite a crisp blue oxford-cloth shirt and immaculately pressed khakis, he seemed tarnished.
And ashamed.

“Please come in,” he said, gesturing to the living room of his suite. “And who is this?”

“My dog, Brontë,” I explained. “There’s an FBI stakeout at my place, or there was, and I couldn’t leave her alone all day.
She’d have done nothing but bark.”

“Ah, Brontë,” he said, toying with another arrangement of fresh flowers on the coffee table. “‘Life is a passing sleep, /
Its deeds a troubled dream…”

“Charlotte or Emily?” I asked of the quotation, probably from a Brontë poem.

“Branwell,” he answered. “The profligate, failed brother.”

“‘Shall Earth no more inspire thee, / Thou lonely dreamer now?’” I answered in kind, also meaning it as a question.

“Emily.” He identified the author but didn’t answer the question. “All of them so passionate, and yet—”

“Pieter, you seem ill,” I interrupted, moving to the window to pull open the heavy drapes. The darkened space with its flowered
maroon fabrics felt like the terrible “red room” scene from
Jane Eyre.
A focus on the doomed Brontës seemed unnecessarily morbid.

“I’m fine,” he said unconvincingly. “Please, tell me about Kate.” When I had finished, he merely said, “Ah.”

“Pieter, I don’t want to be intrusive, but I don’t think you understand why Kate refused to drop out of the race,” I said,
feeling intrusive. “Maybe it’s a cultural thing. American women aren’t—”

“The Netherlands is one of the most egalitarian cultures on earth, Blue,” he said, stopping me before I blundered further.
“I didn’t do what I did because I felt I had a right to control Kate. I simply couldn’t bear the thought of harm to her. I
couldn’t bear the thought of her … death. I was out of my mind with fear, and I—”

“But Pieter, Kate must understand that,” I went on. “And she needs you. She’s tried to reach you, but you won’t talk to her.
Look, I know this is none of my business, but you can’t just abandon her now because she didn’t do what you wanted. It’s not
right.”

The last remark, I knew, had come straight out of Waterloo, Illinois, where everybody knows
exactly
what it means. Which is that “doing right” is the magnetic axis around which everything spins and the only standard against
which everything must be measured, sooner or later. You can run from it to the far corners of the earth, but it will pull
you back as inexorably as if you were bound to it by huge rubber bands. All of Middle America from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico
understands this perfectly. But I doubted that the worldly foreigner petting my dog in an expensive hotel room would quite
grasp the homespun concept. And I was wrong.

He looked up from Brontë on the floor at his feet and regarded me somberly. “You don’t know what I mean by ‘what I did,’”
he said. “And what I did was despicable. I tried to frighten Kate into quitting. I didn’t care that it might have destroyed
her to do so. I didn’t care that only a hollow facsimile of Kate might be left, as long as that facsimile was alive.”

“Pieter, what are you talking about?”

He drew a shuddering breath and squared his shoulders.

“I created the threatening letter, the one on green paper, Blue. I made it and said I’d found it slipped under the door of
Kate’s campaign office. I lied to Kate, as well as to you and the police. Now you’ve told me this poison was in Kate’s body
all the while, that I betrayed her trust pointlessly, that even if I’d been successful I couldn’t have protected her. It’s
ironic, isn’t it?”

His prematurely white hair shone like feathery metal in the sunlight from the window.

“Don’t get me started on irony,” I said, trying to lighten the mood. “Let’s just say it was time for you to learn something,
and you did. Flying off to Rio won’t change that.”

“Amsterdam,” he corrected the awkward attempt at levity. “Kate can never trust me again. That’s what I can’t face. Leaving
her seems the only thing to do.”

I wished my father were sitting there instead of me. He’s good at that sort of thing, but then, it’s his job. I made gestures
indicating an intent to go. Leaning forward, digging car keys from purse. The usual.

“I think trust is overrated,” I said. “It assumes an impossibly identical reality shared by two distinctly different people.
Ultimately, it can’t work. What works is honesty, if you’ve got the guts for it. Only a coward would get on that plane tomorrow,
Pieter. Only cowards run and hide.”

He didn’t say anything as Brontë and I left, merely closed the door firmly behind us.

In the silent hall I contemplated the fact that I’d been insufferably arrogant and insensitive as well as rude. It felt good.
Then I realized that my pompous little lecture to Pieter Van Der Elst had even more relevance when applied to myself. That
didn’t feel good. It meant I had to face the fact that hiding out in the desert was just another way of running and hiding.
And it would have to stop now. There was sufficient reason for it to stop. The path Roxie Bouchie had chosen for herself was
not my path, but that didn’t mean my own path couldn’t run beside it.

“Okay, here’s what I know about Pennsylvania,” I said to Brontë in the elevator. “There are Amish quilts and hex signs painted
on barns.”

It wasn’t much, but it would do. Maybe I could find a place with a shed and paint a hex sign on it. The thought was like an
anchor and made me smile.

T
he phone in my purse started ringing as we loped through the lobby, causing a basset-eyed French tourist to whisper “
Madame, a sonne
?” preparatory to inviting me and presumably my dog for a drink.

“No, I didn’t ring,” I told him, tapping my ear and shaking my head. “It must be
retard de jet.
Jet lag. They say drinking a lot of water helps.”

It was Wes Rathbone on the cell phone.

“Got your number from Roxie,” he told me. “Look, I need to stay at the hospital until we can get a statement from Grecchi,
and that may take hours. She’s in surgery. No telling how long. But both Thomas Eldridge and Megan Rainer’s husband, Christopher
Nugent, have called downtown demanding to know what’s going on. Apparently Megan became upset when she couldn’t reach her
father on the phone, and Kara Eldridge got scared when she tried to call Grecchi and heard a tape saying the service was disconnected.
Everybody’s got the jitters. The desk sergeant told both of them somebody would be around shortly to bring them up to date,
except there isn’t anybody to do it. Would you mind? You’re still on the payroll, you know.”

“No problem, Wes,” I agreed. “By the way, are the Power Rangers still camped out at my place?”