B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (11 page)

Chapter 19

In staring at
the dancers, Hester had inadvertently caught Linda’s attention. Sometime in the
evening’s revelries, Hester noted with mild alarm, her diminutive colleague had
topped off her sailor outfit with an oversize sombrero embroidered with, “Hola,
my name is Jorge.”

 Linda veered
the conga line over to Hester’s potted palm and refused to continue until
Hester joined them, cutting in a few people behind the Wiener Dog proprietor.

Another jolt
came when Hester realized she recognized the wavy-haired, twenty-something
young man, his biceps bulging the sleeves of a salmon-pink polo shirt, whose
trim waist she now gripped.

 “Say, didn’t I
see you on TV?” she shouted into his ear. “Didn’t you find the Rose Medallion?”

He turned his
flushed face back to her and smiled with perfect white teeth. “Yes! We’re
celebrating tonight!”

At that moment,
the conga line was passing a cocktail table where Karen White was doing her
best to fend off Bert Parks. Spying Hester and the young hunk exchanging words,
Karen caught Hester’s eye and gave her two enthusiastic thumbs up and a
suggestive leer. Hester stuck out her tongue in reply.

After the conga
line had finally broken up and the dancers had descended on the buffet now
filled with a fresh assortment of Latin-inspired desserts, a curious Hester
noticed that her buff dance partner and the nubile young blonde who had been
ahead of him in the lineup had joined Gerbils and a knot of others, many of
whom looked like family.

Hester grabbed a
spoon and a small flan garnished with strawberries and quickly found a seat at
an adjoining table facing away from the group, with a view of the churning
paddlewheel at the stern of the ship.

A loud pop of a
cork and a cry of “Cava!” told her that Gerbils and his family weren’t ready to
stop celebrating just yet.

At the sound of
“tinga, tinga, tinga” as someone behind her tapped a spoon against a glass to
silence the group, Hester cocked an ear that way.

When the happy
chatter around the table had ceased, it was the Wiener Dog proprietor who
spoke.

“I want to once
again congratulate young Tony, our talented chef, on his good fortune this week.
And besides his happy plans which most of you already know – to wed our lovely
Greta next month – I have some more wonderful news!”

Gerbils’ booming
baritone voice dripped with bonhomie and familial spirit, inspired by more than
a few piña coladas, Hester guessed.

“I want our
family and friends to be the first to know that I have offered, and Tony has
enthusiastically accepted, a partnership in Wiener Dog Incorporated!”

Happy cries, a
smattering of applause and the clink of glasses ensued, along with words of
congratulation. The chatter resumed at full volume, just as the sternwheeler’s haunting
whistle announced they were arriving back at the dock.

“Hmmm,” Hester wondered
to herself as she gobbled a final strawberry and plopped her spoon down, ready
to track down her friends and call it a night. “I wonder just how much of that
$50,000 young Mr. Biceps will ever see!”

Chapter 20

Nate Darrow had
spent long hours the previous afternoon interviewing Pomp Charbonneau in the
Washington County Jail in Hillsboro, just west of Portland.

Unless and until
Portland filed a murder charge that would take precedence over the reckless
endangerment and property damage charges on which Wayne Jordan arrested him,
protocol dictated that Charbonneau would remain in the Hillsboro lockup.

So far, the
winemaker hadn’t fessed up to much. To Darrow’s relief, a bail hearing was delayed
until Monday afternoon.

Saturday, Darrow
welcomed the sunny weather as he’d headed north to Vancouver Lake, tucked
inside a bend of the Columbia, where he’d taken the first in a series of
windsurfing lessons for which he’d signed up.

That afternoon
he’d taken Sven in for some service at the local Volvo mechanic, then picked up
some supplies from the do-it-yourself brewer’s warehouse and went back to the
Luxor to run a load of wash. In the laundry room, he spent 20 minutes fending
off the attentions of Mrs. Kleinholtz from 419, who wanted to debate whether
Glock or Smith & Wesson made the better police revolver.

He’d planned a
quiet night with some Thai takeout and an old favorite video. It was after 10 p.m.
and Darrow was on his third beer when someone buzzed at his door.

Like many
apartments in the Pacific Northwest, the Luxor had no air conditioning. And
Darrow had swung the door wide before he remembered he’d stripped down to just
his sheerest nylon running shorts to try to beat the heat.

“Oh!” Hester
exclaimed, her eyes doing a quick up and down of his lean frame before she
stopped to stare at the floor.

“Oh,” Darrow
said, holding a forefinger up to ask her to wait while he ducked back into the
recesses of his apartment. In a moment, he reappeared wrapped in a white terry
robe.

Hester declined
his offer of beer but gratefully accepted an iced tea, then sat at her neighbor’s
old pastel green Formica kitchen table as she told Darrow of her strange
encounters aboard the Portland Rose earlier in the evening.

“First the
Rajneeshee waiter, then Gerbils and his son-in-law-to-be and a whole gaggle of
happy family – I kept looking underfoot for Schnitzel the Wonder Dog!”

Darrow, in a
beery haze, looked as if he was digesting the story and about to say something
profound, but instead stifled a small hiccup and announced, “In third grade we
had a gerbil in our classroom – you know, one of those little ratty, hamster
kind of animals? And we took turns taking it home for the weekend, to take care
of it. Name was Cindy. But when I took it home, it escaped from its little cage
somehow. For months, my mother kept finding little nests of shredded newspaper
in the back of closets, but we never did find Cindy.”

He concluded
with a tiny burp and a melancholy smile.

Hester rolled
her eyes. “Has anybody ever told you you’re a big help?”

He looked at her
with watery eyes and offered a bowl of pretzels from which he’d been snacking.
Hester, shaking her head, rose and gathered empty takeout cartons from the
table, tossed them in a trash bin under the sink and grabbed a wet sponge to
wipe a puddle of congealed peanut sauce from the table.

“You know that
we picked up Charbonneau, right?” Darrow asked, hoisting his now-warm third
beer and rocking back on two legs of the kitchen chair. “Dumb bastard made a
royal mess of a nice vineyard out in the West Valley.”

He paused to sip
at the beer as Hester, spying a lemon in a fruit bowl on the counter, grabbed a
knife and cut a slice to squeeze into her iced tea.

“Well, he admits
he printed the faked postage-stamp and envelope, but he says he was hired to do
it by Pieter van Dyke, who wanted a replica of his father’s most-prized possession.
For sentimental reasons.”  

Hester, swirling
the ice cubes in her tea, tried not to peer at Darrow’s curly brown chest
hairs, clearly visible where his robe was now gaping open. From the living room
TV, she could hear muffled snatches of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson
chatting in an old spy caper that Darrow hadn’t turned off. On the kitchen
counter, a small electric fan rotated on its stand with a redundant clicking
and whirring that stirred the air briefly every time it turned her way.

Nate, finding
solace in venting his frustrations, wasn’t finished.

“The heck of it
is that by putting his great-granddaddy in the canoe and signing his own name, he
probably skates around a counterfeiting charge because the law applies only if
you make a copy that can’t be readily told apart from the real thing,” Nate
said with a chuckle of grudging admiration.

Hester sighed
and shook her head. “And even Eldon Purdy, my most annoying library patron,
declared it a laughable fake!”

They shared
ironic smiles. Then another thought crossed Hester’s face.

“But if he made
the replica as a keepsake for Pieter, what was the copy doing in the McLoughlin
Collection? There’s no denying that a collector’s item potentially worth a
small fortune is missing!”

 Darrow cocked
his forefinger at her like he was firing a pistol. “Exactly, Miss Marple!”

Hester gave him
her best scowl and backhanded Darrow on the shoulder as he did a grinning duck
and cover. Jumping from his chair, pouring the warm beer into the sink, then
grabbing a cold one from the fridge and popping the cap in one swift move, he
elaborated.

“Get this. Our
Francophile friend claims van Dyke was the scheming crook in the whole affair.
He tells a cockamamie story about how the library president had sold the real first-day
cover to a deep-pockets Japanese collector, banked the money and just wanted
the copy as a substitute in the library collection.”

Hester gasped at
the suggestion. “Oh, dear, does he have any way to prove that?”

“Well, we’re
looking at van Dyke’s bank records, but if it’s true and he had any sense at
all it probably went to someplace in the Cayman Islands where they aren’t too
fussy about reporting to the IRS.”

“Oh – what about
the whole thing with the French pistol?” Hester interjected.

“That I haven’t
worn him down on yet. He’s trying to play it innocent. I thought I’d give him
today to stew about it and then drop in on him tomorrow for another chat, and I’m
taking my thumbscrews.” He gave a diabolical leer.

“It’s a shame
you have to work on a Sunday, Mr. de Sade, and with the weather so lovely,”
Hester riposted.

She paused in
thought for a moment, then continued with a shy grin.

“If you have to
spend the day at the salt mines, why don’t you give yourself a break in the
evening and have dinner at my place. I’m making chicken curry – nice and spicy;
it’s a strangely satisfying thing for a hot day. And I like to do a giant platter
of chilled watermelon, fresh pineapple and kiwi fruit on the side. It’s the
perfect complement.”

Darrow gave her
a long and appreciative gaze, then self-consciously pulled his robe tighter.

“That sounds
like a wonderful way to end a long day after slaving over medieval torture
devices, Ms. McGarrigle. Count me in.”

Chapter 21

Sunday, June 16

Sunday dawned
without a cloud. A laser-like sunbeam streaming through a crack in the bedroom
curtains awakened Hester early.

She took a
moment to come out of a dream in which she’d been swimming in Diamond Lake, up
in the Cascade Mountains, where her family used to vacation. In her dream, she’d
gotten a stitch in her side and was sinking into the water, with pressure
building and building in her chest. It wasn’t pleasant but somehow it wasn’t
frightening because in her dream she somehow knew she could wake up and it
would just be a dream.

Her eyes popped
open.

“Oh, it’s you. I
should have known.”

Bingle T. was
perched high on Hester’s chest, his big green eyes gazing unblinkingly into
hers. Somehow, it seemed, he could will her awake. And the weight of the big
Maine Coon had given her the drowning dream more than once.

The cat made no
sound but calmly reached out a tufted paw and gently poked Hester’s forehead.

“Yes, it’s after
dawn so it must be breakfast time, I know how you think, fishbreath,” she murmured.

Slipping out
from under the puffy white comforter that was her only bedding in the summer
months and pulling on her fuzzy pink slippers, Hester parted the chrysanthemum-print
curtains and sucked in a breath at the morning’s brilliance. She pushed the window
wider and took a deep lungful of the sweet morning air.

 No cars yet
buzzed up Everett Street. The only sound was the call of a sparrow in one of
the big-leaf maples lining the street and the cheerful ring of a bicycle bell.
Hester looked down and waved as Mr. Manicotti from Apartment 302 pushed his old
three-wheeled Schwinn out to the sidewalk and pedaled off toward a favorite coffee
shop.

“This is it!”
Hester exclaimed, turning back to Bingle T. “It’s Rose Garden Breakfast Day!”

Hester’s mother
had started the tradition years ago as a mother-daughter outing that had turned
into a happy annual event. Once school was out, they’d wait for the first
cloudless June day and take a breakfast picnic up the hill to Portland’s famous
International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park.

They’d get there
early, long before the crowds, spread a blanket and have the garden all to
themselves, with the roses at peak bloom scenting the morning air with every
imaginable variation of sweet aroma. 

Now that her
parents had retired to a comfy cottage on the Oregon Coast, Hester occasionally
invited a friend. But spontaneity was part of the pleasure, so usually she just
took Bingle T.

It was barely 8
a.m. when she parked in an empty hillside lot and looked out with pleasure over
the sprawling rows of flowering rose bushes and the view beyond of the city
skyline and snowy Mount Hood.

Bingle T.
appeared out from under a seat, where he usually hid while the car was in
motion. Hester clipped a line on to the small dog harness the big cat wore for
such outings, though Hester never used the “d” word when squeezing him into it.

Wearing some old
black jeans and a favorite tie-dyed T-shirt, she gathered up her wicker picnic
basket, stocked with a Thermos of coffee, a fresh orange, slices of Granny
Smith apple, and the main course: a footlong maple bar she’d picked from the
bakery case at Rose’s, a 23
^rd
Avenue legend specializing in Paul
Bunyan-sized baked goods. As the
Oregonian’s
food critic had once put
it, a shipment of Rose’s cinnamon rolls could “solve the problem of Third World
hunger in one swell foop.”

  “I don’t know
about foops, but the baked goods
are
pretty swell,” Hester told Bingle T.
as she broke off a corner of maple-glazed pastry and dunked it in coffee.

From answering
questions on Reference Line, Hester knew that Portland’s fascination with roses
reached back to the highbrow tastes of the city’s upper classes in the 1890s.
By 1905, Portland had 200 miles of rose-bordered city streets, which helped
attract visitors to the Lewis and Clark Centennial celebration that year.
Washington Park’s rose garden originated with a World War I effort to save the
finest strains of hybrid roses grown in Europe lest they be lost in the
bombing.

As was
tradition, Hester had spread her blanket on the grass next to a planting of the
current year’s All-America Rose Selections. For 1996, that included, appropriately,
a rose named Mount Hood – a grandiflora that sprawled like a snowdrift of
perfect, cone-shaped white blooms. 

Bingle T. didn’t
particularly like being on a leash. He usually did his best to discourage
Hester from taking him on what she called “walkies” by constantly wrapping his
line around fence posts, parking meters, or, in this case, rose bushes. On one
memorable outing to a park that had peacocks, a peacock’s sudden bugling call
sent the big cat rocketing 15 feet up a Douglas fir until he reached the end of
his leash. Hester had no alternative but to yank him back down, inch by inch, as
if she was hauling in a boat anchor. The term “like herding cats” held a
special poignancy for her.

 But her feline
companion, his leash tied to a nearby stair railing, had now settled down under
a planting of crimson-red Chrysler Imperial, the All-America Rose of 1953. He alternately
nibbled grass and chewed on his own special breakfast of Kitty Snax while
Hester sipped her coffee and pondered the mystery of Pieter van Dyke.

Did his murder really
have something to do with shady dealings at the library? The business with the
faked first-day cover sounded awfully fishy. And the fact that the murder
weapon was a replica of a pistol owned by this Charbonneau character didn’t do
anything to steer suspicion away from him.

Hester also
realized that if the pistol replica had been kept at Fort Vancouver, Charbonneau
might easily have had access to it – and, unlike many people, would have known
how to use it.

“But why use a
weapon that would so easily point to him?” she asked her furry breakfast
partner, pausing only to yank him away from digging under an orange hybrid tea
rose called – coincidentally – Bing Crosby (All-America Rose, 1981).

As she watched a
jet contrail tracking into the blue sky from the direction of Portland
International Airport, Hester’s wandering mind also flashed back to Dabney
Pensler’s stress attack that had conveniently sent him home when the first-day
cover fraud was discovered. Nobody had better access to the McLoughlin
Collection. Could the fussy pince nez conceal the face of a criminal? 

Pausing from her
breakfast, Hester dug into her bag for the old Pentax Spotmatic that used to be
her father’s favorite camera. Over the years, roses at their peak of bloom had
become one of Hester’s sentimental favorite photo subjects. She’d shoot the
flowers in black-and-white, make prints at the public lab at Portland State
University and then hand-color them, giving an arty 1920s look. They would be cards
and framed gifts to friends and family through the year. Her mother kept
prodding her to stage a gallery show.

As she happily
focused and snapped her way along a row, her mind kept mulling the mystery.

There’s the
whole question of the weird ritualistic way van Dyke was killed. Was there
really some cult involved?     

“It sure seems
like the Rajneeshees keep cropping up!” she said aloud, her cheeks pinking when
she realized she’d caught the attention of an early-rising pair of
octogenarians who now peered at her over a nearby row of coppery-orange
blossoms called Singin’ in the Rain (1995).

 “Come along,
Horace, it’s when they start talking to themselves that they become dangerous,”
said the sweater-wrapped female half of the duo, whose blue-rinsed pincurls
closely matched a lavender-hued floribunda behind her.

But was there
really a ritual involved here, Hester wondered? Maybe someone just held a
terrible grudge against van Dyke and didn’t just want him dead but wanted him
dead
and
humiliated. Staking out a pasty, somewhat potbellied
middle-aged man in a spread-eagled pose in his underpants was certainly
humiliating.

Or maybe it wasn’t
just a humiliating pose. Hester’s mind reeled as she thought back to her Art
History classes at the University of Washington, where one of her professors
was a Leonardo da Vinci nut. What if Pieter van Dyke had been posed like
Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, in some strange message only a master of symbology
might understand?

“No, that sounds
too much like the plot of a bad novel where the answer can be found only by
holding ‘The Last Supper’ up to a mirror and counting the disciples,” Hester admitted
sheepishly to herself.

As she put away
her camera, Hester realized that she hoped, somehow, the murderer wasn’t Pim’s
friend Charbonneau. She felt an inexplicable need for Pim to forgive Nate
Darrow.

“Why do people
always feel the need for one friend to like another friend?” she groaned aloud,
turning just in time to see Lavender Pincurls looking owlishly back her way
while poking her finger in Horace’s back to prod him to move faster toward
their Buick in the nearby lot.

Of course, there
was also the strange coincidence about the Rose Medallion being found by
someone linked to one of Pieter van Dyke’s law partners. And was there really
anything to learn from the medallion, evidence-wise? She made a mental note to
quiz Nate Darrow about that.

Also not to be
forgotten was Gerhard Gerbils’ mysterious admonishment to Darrow at the Wiener
Dog. Did van Dyke have any enemies who were recently released from prison?

Too many
questions. And too big a maple bar. Hester wrapped up the leftovers, stashed
everything in her picnic basket, untied her cat and headed for home.