The Last Blue Plate Special (5 page)

“Hmm,” Roxie mumbled when he hung up the phone.

After Rathbone consumed half the angel food cake iced in chocolate sorbet I’d thrown together for dessert, he left, promising
to contact Roxie’s answering service on Monday with an almost-certain confirmation of our employment as consultants to the
San Diego Police Department. When he was gone Rox and I looked at each other in the moonlight spilling through my open Dutch
door.

“So whaddaya think?” I asked.

“I dunno. Looks like somebody called the Sword of Heaven informed police three weeks ago that Mary Harriet Grossinger and
Dixie Ross were going to die, and they’re dead.”

“A number of people have noticed that, Rox,” I said, more to the sky outside than to her. “And the data don’t lie. There
has
to be a missing piece, some common variable linking these two deaths. I’m not saying Sword has to be that missing piece;
the letter could just be an odd coincidence and the missing variable could be something else entirely. But for the sake of
argument, what if Sword
is
the missing piece? What if somebody out there found a way to kill a state senator and an assembly-woman?”

Roxie pursed her lips and paced thoughtfully around my office/living room.

“Well, there isn’t much to go on,” she said, shrugging. “If it’s what it looks like, then what we’ve got is a serial cerebral
hemorrhage killer.” She grinned at my computer monitor and then went on. “It’s not possible, Blue. It’s ridiculous. There’s
no way… well there’s no
easy
way to manipulate blood pressure like that, jack it up enough to blow a vessel in the brain. It could be done, of course,
but only by someone with medical training. An injection, most likely. The wrong stuff and death would occur within seconds.
But Dixie was alone in her car, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah.”

“So what you’re suggesting is that somebody was with her in the car, that she allowed this person to inject her with something
as she was driving, and then she politely dropped the person off at a corner a few seconds before her brain exploded?”

“What about a pill of some kind?” I was pacing behind Rox now, following her. “What about something in her food, something
that would force her blood pressure through the roof but not until it was digested and in her bloodstream? Could somebody
do that?”

“It’s possible, but not likely, Blue. And it would have turned up in the autopsy. They always check stomach contents. Rathbone
didn’t say anything about any lethal chemicals turning up in her stomach.”

“But just for the sake of argument,” I pushed on, “what if somebody
did
slip something into Dixie Ross’s food? Then what’ve we got?”

“They
didn’t,
Blue, or the substance would have showed up. And what we’d have would be a poisoner.”

“And who kills with poison?” I concluded.

“Almost always women,” Rox acknowledged, walking into the kitchen and gesturing at the remains of a meal we’d prepared and
shared with a stranger. The room smelled like poultry seasoning and tropical fruit. Homey.

“Breast identity,” I filled in, sighing. “Women constantly nurturing, feeding everybody, keeping life going. But when that
instinct gets turned inside out, when it goes bad, women using the same method to kill. Why does the damned hormonal chemistry
have to be such a trap?”

“It just is,” she murmured. “That’s why nobody ever talks about it. It’s not politically correct to acknowledge how much of
what we are is controlled by wiring and chemistry we don’t even know is there.”

Something happened then, as evening shadows fell heavily across the room. A boundary crossed. A moment of truth, of dead-certain
understanding. The deepest bonds are made of these moments, I think, not of passion. Rox and I understood each other, were
alike
in that moment, and it felt like doors and windows all opening at once. A rush of air and a sense of being drawn somewhere.
Just two women in a kitchen, saying things no one wants to face. Like that, when pushed too far, the girl next door can become
absolutely deadly.

After a while Roxie looked me in the eyes. “So should we work on this case, track down what may well turn out to be a woman?”

“Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger were women,” I said, looking straight back. “Whatever we find out may not be easy
to take, but it can’t be as bad as what’s already been done, right?”

Roxie merely nodded and turned to brace her hands on the edge of my stainless steel sink. Her gaze roamed the desert landscape
beyond the window as if she were searching for something lost. I could see her brown knuckles turning beige as she gripped
the edge of the sink hard. Too hard.

“Oh, Rox!” I whispered as I remembered something she’d told me. “Your mother. You’re afraid we might be going after somebody
… somebody like that, aren’t you? We don’t have to do this. Let’s forget it. The cops will … We don’t have to be involved,
Roxie. I don’t want …”

She’d told me about her mother when I asked, with a characteristic absence of subtlety, why on earth she’d wanted to be a
psychiatrist. Med school, then specializing, the diplomates and certifications. These things were all difficult and prohibitively
expensive for a young woman raised in poverty by a grandmother whose only source of income was a welfare check and whatever
she could earn on the side cleaning houses or cooking. But Rox and her grandma hadn’t let anything get in the way of their
dream, that one day Roxie could help people like the one they
couldn’t
help. Roxie’s mother. Stricken by schizophrenia as a young woman, terrifying to a little daughter who hid in a closet when
her mother came ragged and incoherent from the streets, begging for food. Dead in a psychiatric hospital fifteen years in
the past, when Roxie was twenty.

“No, Blue,” Roxie said softly. “I can guarantee that if, in fact, anybody’s behind these deaths, it isn’t somebody with schizophrenia.
That’s a stupid Hollywood myth and you know it. Somebody with untreated paranoid schizophrenia
might,
in a crisis, harm somebody. It rarely happens and the person is usually easily apprehended. These crimes we’re looking at
aren’t the result of delusion-driven impulse but are carefully planned and executed. Nobody with active schizophrenia could
even
begin
to organize crimes of this complexity, involving, apparently, mysterious drugs, prominent people, no immediate suspects or
motive. That’s not what—”

“Then what’s wrong? You’re about to make a modernist sculpture out of my sink.”

She tossed her head in the general direction of where we’d just been standing in my kitchen. The gesture managed to create
us again as we were in that moment, ghosts from seconds past hovering inches away, almost visible.

“That,” she answered.

“That?”

“Blue, this thing keeps happening between us, like a minute ago.”

“I know,” I said without my usual attitude. “It’s like walls dissolving. We say something and it makes us closer to each other
because we understand what’s said. I don’t think it happens very often between people, do you?”

The turquoise beads in her hair were eerily silent as she turned to look out the kitchen window again. “No, it doesn’t. But
we can’t get too close, Blue,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She inspected the cuff of the turquoise-blue cotton cargo shirt I’d ordered for her from one of the twenty or thirty catalogues
I get every week. The shirt has lots of pockets and zippered compartments, and she loves it.

“It scares me.”

“Feeling close to me scares you?”

“When it’s like that,” she said, nodding again at our ghosts, “when we understand each other like that, it’s so comfortable
I want to stay there; I forget what I need to do with my life. It’s so seductive I forget about my work. And I can’t do that,
Blue. I can’t ever do that.”

Her voice was serious.

“And you won’t,” I chirped, stuffing my hands in the pockets of my shorts in an attempt to appear lighthearted. “We’re not
about mirror-sickness and terminal enmeshment. We’re women, but we’re not like that. It can’t happen.”

“Can’t it?” she answered somberly.

“No. We won’t let it.”

“Okay, Blue,” she said, grinning, “let’s catch us a killer, then.”

T
he Bible is not short on references to swords. Rox, raised as a Baptist, was sure the letter’s signature, “The Sword of Heaven,”
was biblical, but I wanted to look it up before calling my father, Father Jake, to get insider information on the phrase.
An Episcopal priest, dad would sew his tongue to his lower lip before spouting scripture at anyone. Episcopalians traditionally
refrain from spouting scripture. But when not shooting skeet with his collection of rifles, my father does savor the odd bit
of biblical research. I’d looked up five of the thirty-four references to “sword” in the concordance to my old King James
Bible when I gave up and called him in St. Louis, where he’s supposed to be retired. In reality, he works just as hard as
ever.

“Betsy Blue!” he said, happily calling me by a childhood name. “I’m so glad you called. Your brother’s parole hearing is scheduled
for early December and I know you’ll want to be here. December tenth. Make your plane reservations now. And how’s Roxie? Is
everything going all right? I’m dying to hear.”

I had spoken to my father only three days earlier and he sends e-mails daily, but he’s the sort of person who prefers frequent
updates. And given my family’s propensity for unusual disasters, his concern isn’t all that inappropriate. My mother, for
example, was killed by a drunk driver on her way home from a Sierra Club meeting when my twin brother, David, and I were thirteen.
Then five or six years later David began a descent into apelike behavior that would eventually earn him a stint in a Missouri
state prison for attempted armed robbery. David’s starting to shape up under the influence of his new wife, Lonnie, but I
can’t fault dad for maintaining eternal vigilance. Everything can change without notice, and my father knows it. What I know
is that his need to be in touch is a form of not blinking.

“Everything’s fine, dad,” I said. “What I’m calling about is swords. In the Bible. Rox and I are about to be retained by the
San Diego Police Department to profile somebody who wrote a letter three weeks ago threatening two women politicians. They’ve
since died under unusual circumstances. The letter-writer signed as ‘The Sword of Heaven.’ I can’t find it in the concordance.
Do you know where it is?”

“Isaiah!” my father answered with the enthusiasm of a hound for a treed raccoon. “The author of this letter will turn out
to wear white socks and a glow-in-the-dark cross lapel pin.”

“Why do you say that?” I asked, gesturing for Rox to pick up the phone in the bedroom and listen. “Rox is going to listen
in, okay?”

“Hi, Roxie,” my father said politely, and then jumped back to the topic. “You’ll find it at Isaiah 34, one of the early verses.
Except I think it refers to a sword
in
heaven in most of the translations, rather than a sword
of
heaven. What’s probably relevant to your inquiry is the nature of that particular text, however. I think you’ll find this
interesting, Blue.”

“I’m listening,” I told my father, who is professionally prone to the dramatic pause so common in sermons.

“It’s one of those blood-and-guts apocalyptic tales in which God has a tantrum and wipes out a small nation, in this case
a place called Edom. The author of this text was a poet, and the images of ruin are stunning. The stench of dead armies, mountains
melting with blood, streams turned to tar, and a choking black smoke covering everything. Only ravens and bitterns, dragons
and owls would live among Edom’s thorns once it was over. The poet called Edom after the destruction ‘an habitation of jackals.’
Oh, and one other thing would live there, Blue. One other entity.”

“What entity, dad?” I asked, giving the response after which he could go on.

His voice was at its basso-profundo pitch, and I could sense his enjoyment of the moment. “Lilith,” he pronounced.

“You’re kidding!” I whooped. “This text goes back that far? Wow! So don’t tell me, let me guess. Edom was on the big guy’s
hit list because the people hadn’t quite caught up with the times yet and were still worshiping the goddess, right?”

“Right. A number of pregnant female figures have been found in excavations there. Edom was in a territory south of the Dead
Sea along the Araba Wadi that runs to the Gulf of Aqaba. Now it would be in both Israel and Jordan. Excavations in both countries
have turned up these female figures worked in clay and stone, which certainly suggests—”

“Interesting,” I acknowledged, halting the flow of archaeological data. “So the place had to be blasted, turned into a nightmare,
and then the writer put Lilith there.”

“Had to do
something
with her, Blue,” he said with a chuckle. ”You know how difficult she was.”

“Wait a minute,” Roxie interrupted from the bedroom phone. “What is this ‘Lilith,’ and what have you all just said that will
tell us anything about who wrote this letter?”

“My daughter can tell you all about the significance of Lilith,” my father said proudly. “And at first glance what you’ve
learned about the letter-writer is that he or she has been exposed to some rather screwball religious ideas—classes, sermons,
the like. This passage isn’t used in traditional lectionaries—the predetermined series of scripture on which weekly sermons
are based in every denomination. What I’m saying is, Isaiah 34 isn’t in any Protestant or Catholic lectionary I’ve ever seen,
nor does it turn up in the Jewish
Haftarot.
It’s too ugly. But it is frequently used by crackpots who want a biblical basis for their hatred of women.”

“Are you saying you think the author of this letter is a woman? I mean, all we have is this one little phrase, this signature—‘The
Sword of Heaven.’”