The Last Blue Plate Special (2 page)

“Something terrible has happened,” he said, his Dutch accent turning “something” into “somezing.” “Dixie Ross is dead.”

“What?”
I replied too loudly. “What happened?”

“I don’t know. We just got the call. There was an automobile accident, but they’re saying she was already… gone … by the time
of the accident. She’d been at some picnic rally in north county—an organic bean growers’ cooperative—and died while driving.
She was on her way to Kate at the gallery. Her death was sudden. I don’t know. Tell Kate I’m on my way over there.”

Some of the well-dressed crowd in the main room were watching me, curious about the phone call and its potential for political
intrigue. There is nothing more boring than a cocktail-hour political fundraiser, and I didn’t fault them for hoping this
oaf in a designer suit might provide some relief. Sadly, I was about to.

After penning the news of Dixie’s death on a one-hundred-percent recycled paper napkin, I waited five minutes or so for a
lag in Kate’s speech and then clomped toward her in my shoes-from-hell. BB noticed the look on my face and moved, pantherlike,
to the precise point along a wall where I would withdraw after handing Kate the note.

What’s going on?
his eyes asked as I realized for the hundredth time the sort of social awareness learned in prisons. After three years behind
bars for a youthful drug offense, BB misses nothing.

“Oh, my God!” Kate breathed into the microphone after I handed her the napkin, neatly capturing the full attention of all
seventy-five people present. “Dixie Ross has … has died.”

In the ensuing seconds there was an outburst of dismay, a few strangled sobs, and finally the voice of the radical clergyman
at the bar intoning, “Kate, what happened?”

“It isn’t clear,” Kate began as Pieter Van Der Elst burst through the door and hurried to stand at his wife’s side. “Dixie
was in an accident on her way here, but she wasn’t injured. It seems that …”

“The call just came in to our campaign office,” Pieter continued breathlessly, his pale blue eyes somber beneath a prematurely
white brush-cut that always makes him look like a Renaissance monk. “There are no details as yet, but it is believed Assemblywoman
Ross suffered some fatal event prior to losing control of her car. There will be an autopsy, of course. One scarcely knows
what to say. We lost Mary Harriet Grossinger only two weeks ago. Now Dixie. I’m afraid I just don’t know what to say.”

BB had approached the clergyman during this exchange, and the man quickly slipped a white plastic tab into the collar of his
shirt. Then he moved gracefully to stand before Kate’s microphone. If he’d been slightly drunk two minutes earlier, he wasn’t
now.

“Dear Lord,” he began softly as every head in the room bowed and the photographer ducked out the front door, “you have taken
another of our friends and we are saddened …”

At the end of the prayer he urged continued dedication to everything Dixie had stood for. Racial justice. Funding for schools.
The protection of our precious environment.

I was sorry that he left out the spadefoot toads.

Kate Van Der Elst was sobbing against her husband’s madras plaid shirt when the first check was written. After that there
were many, many more.

“Shee-it, who this dude?” BB said quietly, his mouth close to one of my grotesque earrings. “Sucker work a crowd like putty
in his hands!”

I had never seen sheer respect in BB’s face before, and it took a few seconds for me to identify the emotion.

“He’s a preacher, BB,” I said. “They’re expected to work crowds.”

“World fulla preachers, Blue,” he answered. “Half of ’em in prison. I seen preachers could talk a man down from hangin’ hisself
and I seen preachers could talk yo’ grandma outta her walker long enough to give him a little head, but this dude solid gold!”

“The crowd’s in shock, BB. And you don’t understand what’s happened. Two major political leaders dead within two weeks. It’s
very upsetting.”

“And they both ladies,” he replied before easing away to begin cleaning up.

I hadn’t thought of that. Another variable in a statistical setup that continued to nag. Liberal politicians are a minority
on the Southern California political scene. And liberal
women
politicians are a very small minority of a minority. I wondered exactly how odd was the coincidence of two of them dying
within weeks of each other. And of course it had to be coincidence, didn’t it?

I stayed to help BB clean up after the crowd’s somber exodus. Then we locked up, dropped the gallery keys through the mail
slot, retrieved my Doberman, Brontë, from my truck, and walked her through the residential streets behind University Avenue.
When Brontë was sufficiently exercised we headed over to Auntie Buck’s Country and Western Bistro to meet Roxie, my significant
other, who has no interest in politics. Not that I do, either. What I have interest in is making money, and Kate Van Der Elst
was paying me well to design polls for her. Meanwhile, Dr. Roxanne Bouchie, forensic psychiatrist and line-dance coach at
Auntie’s, had followed through on her earlier suggestion that we work together.

“McCarron and Bouchie,” our business cards read. “Consulting.” I was already consulting with mall designers about how women
shop, and Rox just added a new dimension. Jury selection. In the month or so since we set up business we’d gotten three jobs
profiling juries for private attorneys in criminal cases. Good money and the work was interesting. Then Van Der Elst needed
somebody to design polls and I took the job. After the election, I thought, I’d go back to malls and juries. After the election
maybe Roxie and I would find a way to spend more time together. My life, I thought, was approaching perfect. The word itself
is a warning, but I didn’t notice.

“Who died?” Roxie asked when BB and I joined her at a table. “You two look like
Tales from the Crypt.
”

“Two ladies,” BB answered succinctly before abandoning us for the dance floor and a wrenching ballad about trains.

“Dixie Ross died this evening, in her car on the way to Kate’s fundraiser,” I told the gorgeous black woman at whose touch
my heart races, every time. Roxie has big ears and a spill of freckles across her face and wears her hair in a mop of beaded
braids. The sound of those beads clacking together has become music to me. My own private symphony. Sometimes I think if Roxie
knew how much I love her she’d leave town. I’ll never tell her, though, because not only are we of different races, but we
imagine ourselves to be mature and deeply sophisticated lesbians who are acutely aware that our “lifestyle” is full of pitfalls
we’re determined to avoid.

Of course, a psychiatrist and a social psychologist understand perfectly the female proclivity toward instant bonding, nesting,
and total enmeshment. So quaint. We, of course, would avoid that ickiness by maintaining our separate lives, not moving in
together, keeping boundaries. The result is astronomical phone bills and a lot of driving between my place out in the desert
an hour and a half from San Diego if you drive like a bat out of hell, and Roxie’s uptown urban condo. Still, we feel confident
that we’ve skirted the embarrassment of typicality, at least. Meanwhile, I hoard in my heart the fact that, really, total
enmeshment doesn’t look all that bad to me. I have never told Roxie that sometimes I look at expensive flatware in department
stores, although I have told Brontë. Hey, we all have secrets.

“Girl?” Rox asked, meaning I was supposed to tell her who Dixie Ross was and what her death might mean.

“State assemblywoman, Democrat, big on environmental issues, education, all the good stuff,” I began. “She wasn’t very old,
fifty-three, I think. Had a chance at major office later, people say. Governor, maybe. She talked Kate Van Der Elst into running
for city council after Kate and her husband moved back here from the Netherlands when he retired two years ago. Dixie had
been at another political thing, a bean growers’ rally or something, and was on her way to Kate’s fundraiser when it happened.
She just dropped dead. But what bothers me—”

“Wait a minute,” said Roxie the doctor. “People don’t ‘just drop dead.’ You need a disease, organ failure, trauma, something
like that.”

“There will be an autopsy, Rox. We’ll know then. Meanwhile, she’s the second woman politician from San Diego to die in two
weeks. It’s weird.”

Roxie swung her head, stretching her neck and setting off a soft rattle of beads. I had to lean over and kiss her cheek, which
made her smile.

“Why weird?” she asked, looking at me in a way that suggested every politician from here to Cleveland could perish from gout
without attracting her attention. Which was elsewhere.

“Weird statistically,” I answered. “Wanna dance?”

“Not here,” she said softly, as if I might not be feeling the same way.

Right.

So we managed to get to her condo before falling into each other with that unnerving hunger for which the word “love” seems
less than adequate. Later I would bring up the deaths of Dixie Ross and Mary Harriet Grossinger again.

“Grossinger died of a stroke,” I said into Roxie’s ear.

“Yeah?”

“What if Ross had a stroke, too?”

“What if she did?”

“Well, she’s dead,” I noted. “Both of them are dead. That’s really all we know. It’s only nine-thirty, Rox. I’m going to call
Kate at home, see if she and Pieter have heard anything more.”

Roxie merely sighed and then began pulling on clothes.

“Why are you getting dressed?” I asked.

“Because we’re going to your place, of course. Blue, I know you, and I can see the handwriting on the wall. You’ll turn into
a pumpkin if you can’t get to that computer of yours tonight and crank out three hundred charts showing why these two dead
women shouldn’t be dead.”

She was right.

“I’ll bring you breakfast in bed tomorrow,” I offered. “Waffles, sunnysides, I’ll make strawberry syrup from scratch.”

“Deal,” she answered, grinning despite the fact that she isn’t exactly crazy about the desert. “It’s my turn to sleep at your
place, anyway. Now where did I put the
Guide to Western Poisonous Snakes
?”

“It’s under your scorpion coloring book,” I answered as I dialed the Van Der Elst home number.

“I don’t think the autopsy will be performed until Monday,” Pieter told me, “but a preliminary assessment suggests that Dixie
died of a lethal stroke. We’re just devastated, Blue. She and Kate had known each other all their lives.”

“Um, did Kate mention any medical problems Dixie had?” I asked. “Anything that might point to this?”

“That’s what’s so strange.” He sighed. “Kate and Dixie played tennis almost daily, told each other everything. Dixie was so
careful about her health, she had a physical before each campaign. Her last exam was six months ago. She told Kate the doctor
said her heart was that of a thirty-year-old. Kate had been urging her to go on this diet Kate’s on, but Dixie said the medical
exam proved she didn’t need it. This thing just doesn’t make any sense.”

“No,” I told Pieter Van Der Elst, “it doesn’t.”

Slightly more than ninety minutes later I unlocked the gate to my desert Shangri-la, an abandoned motel I was able to get
for a song because it has no piped-in water. Rox was yawning in the front seat beside me, humming the final bars along with
Mary Chapin Carpenter on the tape deck.

“I’m dead,” she noted, heading straight for the queen-size bed in one of only two rooms actually furnished, the others unfinished
and empty. It’s hard for one person to fill twelve motel rooms. The bedroom is off the area which would have been the motel
office, now my office. I switched on the computer even before saying good night. Then I ran Brontë in the moonlight for a
few minutes and buried those god-awful shoes in a shallow grave between two cholla cactuses before going back inside to check
out stroke Web sites. The last thing I thought before leaving the starry outdoor silence was of a grainy black-and-white photo
of an adobe building both blasted by light and hidden in shadow. The image left a taste of ozone on the back of my tongue.

A
fter draping my jester costume on its padded hanger I dropped the ugly earrings in my kitchen trash compactor. They would
be smashed, along with a few soup cans, plastic bottles, and old newspapers, into a tidy rectangle I would eventually drive
into Borrego Springs and toss in the dumpster behind a supermarket. Since I live two miles off a road that ultimately just
stops at an unused horse camp in the middle of nowhere, there’s no trash collection here. In fact, there’s not much of anything
here, which is why I like it. Just desert. Ocotillo and smoke trees, heat and silence, rocks.

Time expands in the desert, stretches and carries you along. Nothing much matters, which is why it’s easier to see it when
something does. What was mattering to me was a mathematical problem. Two dead women politicians. Not one, which in any circumstance
might be attributable to chance, but two. The odds had more than doubled. No longer chance. Something else.

From a bookcase I pulled the college text most likely to cause migraine headaches. Blalock’s
Social Statistics,
now in its umpteenth printing and impenetrable as ever. As a graduate student I studied Blalock, and later taught it. Nonetheless,
the mere sight of it makes me clench my teeth.

Thus clenched, I turned to the chapter entitled “Probability” and forced my brain to ask the right question in the right way.
Not, “What is the probability of two women politicians in the same town dying within weeks of each other?” Rather, “In an
infinite progression of female politician-deaths, what proportion of them could be expected to occur within two weeks in the
same town?” The difference between these two questions underlies all successful marketing projections, political polls, jury
selections, strategies for disease control, urban planning, you name it. Still, it’s a difference not easily grasped. Especially
by Americans, who traditionally despise generalizations and so never really understand what is meant by probability.