The Last Blue Plate Special (6 page)

“I have no ideas about the sex of the author,” dad went on. “I can only guess that whoever it is, he or she has been exposed
to some sort of religious experience in which a profoundly violent biblical text which fantasizes hideous punishment for a
goddess-worshiping culture was used. I’m telling you that a mainstream denomination would never emphasize or even use this
text, ever. A Lutheran auto mechanic or Methodist dentist would never have heard it from a pulpit. Your letter-writer either
is or has been proximate to some fringe religious sect or cult.”

“This is California, dad,” I said. “There’s a fringe sect on every corner.”

“This one will probably bill itself as ‘Christian’ and ‘Bible-based,’ Blue. It will appeal to lower-class whites with little
education. Probably it will be all-white, maybe even white supremacist. That sometimes goes with the woman-bashing.”

I could hear Rox’s snort of contempt. “We talkin’ pointy hats and sheets here? ’Cause if we is, ole Roxie jus’ remembered
a previous engagement, y’all hear what I’m sayin’?”

In the two months of our relationship I’d never heard Rox do that patois. My dad took it seriously.

“I think the sheets are outré these days, Roxie. But if anybody has to go near these goons, let Blue do it.”

“Oh, thanks, dad,” I replied. “Just send me to the lions.”

“Glad to help.” He chuckled as we said good night.

After buckling on my waist pack, which among other things contains the Smith and Wesson I bought after my nine-millimeter
Glock became a casualty of the Muffin Crandall case, I invited Rox to go with me on Brontë’s nightly hike. This event is not
a favorite of Roxie’s, but I knew she’d go because she wanted to talk about the case.

“So what’s this ‘Lilith’?” she asked as we tramped through the rocks which comprise my property into the rocks which comprise
the Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. A breeze moving across the desert floor made the spindly branches of an ocotillo writhe
and cast snakelike shadows at our feet. Brontë raced ahead, her black fur reflecting moonlight. The setting, I thought, couldn’t
have been more appropriate.

“The name is an ancient Sumerian word meaning ‘wind spirit,’” I began, smiling at my feet so Rox wouldn’t see how much I relished
this. There’s nothing like a good ghost story. Lowering my voice, I went on.

“The mythological Lilith was Adam’s first wife, but she didn’t stay long because she insisted on total equality with him,
including the right to be on top during sex. When Adam freaked, Lilith flew away and refused to return, preferring instead
the erotic companionship of ‘demons,’ to whom she bore a hundred children a day, all of whom were killed every day by a deity
annoyed at having to piece together another, more subservient wife for Adam.

“The word ‘lilith’ already meant a terrifying spirit that haunts wild places. After the Genesis story the word became a name,
an embodiment of the wildness lurking just beyond civilization’s control. Lilith became the ‘night hag,’ a woman whose beauty
was equaled by her power. She always lived in wild places and was believed to drive men mad with her unrestrained sexuality.
She’s regarded as demonic by the men who wrote the Old Testament, but she’s really the patron saint of every woman who won’t
be owned by
anything.
Her spirit is out here, Rox, in the wind and the rocks and the rattlers. She’s the howling wilderness.”

On cue, a gust of wind moaned as it moved through the shadows of a nearby slot canyon. I love the desert. Sometimes I think
it loves me back. Like now.

“How
do
you arrange these sound effects?” Rox asked, glaring into the canyon as if sheer attitude could intimidate the wind. “And
what does Lilith have to do with the Sword of Heaven?”

“Who knows? The sword is the destruction that wiped out Edom, and then the poet stuck Lilith there along with the jackals,
dragons, and owls just to show that’s where an untamable woman belongs. In a wasteland, a hell.”

“Owls?” Rox said as something swooshed above our heads.

“Owls were sacred to the old religions, so the biblical writers had to make them look bad,” I said. “But what you just felt
flying above us was no owl. That was a bat, Rox.”

Her ensuing silence was eloquent.

“From the size, I’d guess it was a western mastiff. Largest bat in the U.S.”

“You can’t know what this means to me,” she said in a voice that was beginning to replicate the one she’d first used on Rathbone.
The one that could cinderize cottage cheese. I know when to quit.

“They eat moths and sip nectar from desert flowers,” I explained quickly. “Think of them as flying mice with elegant food
preferences.”

“I think of them as miniature vampires who carry rabies,” Rox answered through clenched teeth.

“Myth,” I said definitively, hanging a comforting arm over her shoulders. “There are only about five cases of rabies in the
entire United States per year, and those cases are usually from skunk bites, not bats. I took some classes from the rangers
when I moved out here from San Diego. That’s where I learned to love them.”

“The bats or the rangers?”

“The bats.”

Rox cast her eyes dramatically toward the sky and rattled the beads in her hair. ”What am I doing with a woman who loves bats?”
she whispered.

I smiled to demonstrate my enormous tolerance for people who don’t like bats and then ran a few hundred yards up a dry wash
where Brontë was snuffing at something wedged in a crevice between two boulders. In the beam of the penlight I’d pulled from
my waist pack I saw a small dark eye beneath a scaly brow ridge. An equally scaly five-fingered hand was pushing against the
ground as the creature inflated one side of its body in order to push the other side farther into the crevice.

“It’s a chuckwalla, Brontë,” I told my Doberman. The bloated lizard looked like a small hot-water bottle with scales, trying
to cram itself into the sort of thin box smoked salmon comes in. “Let’s go. Leave it alone.”

As I distracted Brontë by throwing a palo verde twig for her to chase, something occurred to me.

“Rox,” I began after scrambling back down the wash, “what if Rathbone’s hunch is right and there’s some connection between
this evangelist, Ruby Emerald, who wound up in the hospital tonight, and the deaths of Grossinger and Ross? What if Sword
of Heaven did something to Emerald as well?”

“Rathbone’s looking for pattern, Blue,” she said. “It’s what cops do, what we all do in one way or another. He’s looking for
m.o. in the same way I might look for diagnostic criteria or you for statistical similarities. Three prominent women on his
beat dead or hospitalized with similar symptoms within weeks, followed by a threat against two of them would seem significant
to him. That doesn’t mean it
is
significant. Probably this Emerald woman just came down with a case of stage fright like the paramedics suggested. It’s not
unusual. Anxiety attacks in performers, I mean. Pretty common. Some of them say it’s anxiety that gives them their edge, boosts
their ability to project themselves to an audience. So what’s your idea?”

“Just that dad said Sword has probably been around some fringe religious group. Maybe Emerald’s revivals qualify as fringe.”

“So Emerald’s preaching this stuff from Isaiah about swords from heaven demolishing little countries because the little countries
make statues of pregnant women,” Rox began. “And somebody hears this and decides to start murdering women in a nearly impossible
way, also announcing this decision to the police. This same person then decides to kill the preacher who’s preaching the message
in the first place. Blue, it doesn’t make sense.”

And it didn’t. Although, I was sure, it would.

When we got back there was a message from BB on my machine, describing perhaps more colorfully than was necessary his thoughts
on the appropriate fate of police in general and Detective Sergeant Wes Rathbone in particular. Incendiary devices and bodily
orifices figured largely in the narrative. It seems he’d planned to meet the radical preacher from Kate’s fundraiser for coffee,
and Rathbone had left him in a holding cell at the police station for three hours until two other detectives interrogated
him for another hour before allowing him to go. He’d missed meeting the preacher at the appointed time and was embarrassed
to call and explain why the police could pick him up and hold him whenever they wanted to.

“What’s the dude gonna think?” his voice growled from my answering machine. “Jus’ the thing, right? Coffee with some nigga
ex-con that don’t show up ’cause he sittin’ in some piss-smellin’ tank with three winos and a crack pimp and ain’t nuthin’
he can do about it. Shee-it!”

Roxie had met BB when he was still in prison at Donovan on a drug charge. He’d been processed through her office for a routine
psychiatric evaluation, but the two had connected in some way I never quite understood. They’d become friends, but despite
that Rox never stepped outside appropriate professional boundaries with him. When he was released from prison she helped him
find a job, which was where I came in. I was consulting on the redesign of a strip mall in a bad area plagued with crime and
I needed a mall manager. Rox answered my ad and offered BB, who opened a resale clothing boutique called Death Row and policed
the turf with an ex-con’s edge. It was an experiment, but it worked. At least until tonight.

“Uh-oh,” she said after hearing the rage in his voice. “Trouble.”

“You’d better call him,” I thought aloud. “BB’s only twenty-seven. His testosterone levels are still too high for anything
resembling rational behavior when he’s humiliated and angry, given his history. He’s likely to do something stupid and wind
up back in prison.”

Roxie gave me a look that suggested I shut up.

“Girl,” she said with a vicious sweetness, “what did you think I meant by ‘trouble’? That he might say something naughty over
tea with the vicar?”

“Look, I care about BB, too,” I snapped back. “You think I don’t feel bad about what the police did to him? I do. But it’s
not my fault, Rox. And I can’t always say things in just the way you’d like. I’m not black, but I’m not blind, either. I can
see what’s happened, how he must feel, and I hate it. All I said was call him. That’s all I said.”

With that I stormed into the inadequate bathroom off my bedroom and drained three inches of lukewarm water from the tank behind
the motel into the tub. It’s difficult to make dramatic gestures in the space of only two rooms without breaking something.
In the tub I tried to compensate for that by elaborate splashing, an endeavor also doomed by the need to conserve water.

The reason I live in a half-built motel is that it has no piped-in water and so I was able to buy it for practically nothing.
But trucked-in water is expensive, hence the three-inch bath limit. I felt like a giraffe in a wading pool as I strained to
hear whether or not Rox was talking to BB. A miserable giraffe. This was our first real fight, and I wasn’t even sure what
it was about.

As I was drying off, Roxie knocked on the bathroom door.

“It’s okay, I talked to him,” she said. “He’s not going to blow up any cops, although not because I called. Reverend Tie-Die
called first. Wanna hear?”

“What I want to hear is what we’re fighting about,” I said after opening the bathroom door as if it were made of nitroglycerin.
“Then I want to hear about BB.”

Roxie looked equally miserable as she gestured toward the window and the tumble of moonlit boulders outside. She also looked
lost.

“We’re different, Blue,” she said. “Do you know how weird this place feels to me, how scared I am of you sometimes? You’re
like mercury, like electricity or something. The way you think is intuitive, not rational, and even though you’re usually
on target, the way you put things sounds arrogant. You just talk and move around in life, any way or anywhere you want, and
it works for you because you’re marching to your own drum anyway. But it’s not like that for me and never can be. Before I
met you I thought my world, my way of thinking, was all there was. It isn’t, but it’s still my world, and sometimes you just
barge into it like tonight with your half-baked analysis of BB. You weren’t wrong, but you came
at
it wrong. Uppity. Do you know how many young black men are either in prison or on parole right now in this country, how many
lives wasted?”

She was standing in darkness snapping and unsnapping one of the pockets of her bright blue cargo shirt, which looked gray
in the gloom. Just a large, dark woman with big ears and beads in her braided hair. For a moment she seemed distant and two-dimensional,
like a photo accompanying a newspaper article about black people doing something political. “Minority Business Leaders Launch
Scholarship Effort.” That sort of article. The sort you never actually read.

“Over forty percent of young black men in the U.S. are in prison or on parole right now,” I answered her question. “But my
brother’s in prison, too, and he isn’t black, and I’m not responsible for any of this, but I’m doing the best I can with him
and BB, and I don’t know if I can stop sounding arrogant to you, but I’ll try, Rox. I’ll let you teach me things I could easily
live without ever knowing. Will you do the same for me?”

“I am letting you teach me. I am all the time,” she answered as it happened again. That sense of walls dissolving and the
slow, magnetic leaning toward something unknown. We stood that way in the dark for a long time, just looking at each other,
not fighting it, rocking a little with the spin from a journey happening only inside our heads.

“Oh, shit,” we said in unison as the phone rang.

It was Wes Rathbone.

“Sorry to call this late, but you’re on the payroll now so get used to it,” he said to my mumbled hello. “You’re consultants
now. It’s approved as of tonight. This thing’s blowing up, Blue. Get Dr. Bouchie on the other phone, please.”

It was apparent from his tone that waiting until tomorrow wasn’t an option.