B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (4 page)

Chapter 5

“So everyone’s
favorite Channel 3 reporter is convinced you’re part of the old Rajneeshee
commune because of your middle name,” Darrow told Hester two hours later in an
interrogation room at Portland Police Bureau headquarters.

“Oh my sainted
aunt!” said Hester, slapping her chest with a half-stifled snort. “Well,
actually, she
was
my sainted aunt, old Freelove Princetta McGarrigle, of
Nova Scotia, from whom my parents got my adorable middle name. As I’ve told
anyone who has ever asked, it’s one of the old-fashioned virtue names, like
Faith, Hope and Charity.”

“Yes, I remember,”
Darrow said, “and your first name comes from the writings of Nathaniel
Hawthorne, for whom I was named.” Their eyes locked for a long moment.

“You two gonna sing
a duet or something?” Pim asked, looking worriedly back and forth at them.

The moment’s
spell broken, Darrow handed Hester some coffee in a cracked red mug that he’d
brought in from the staff room, and handed a cracked blue mug to Pim, who sat
silently glowering at him from the other end of the table. The smell of
steaming Maxwell House competed with the room’s permanent aroma of old socks. “And
forgive me for not correcting Misty Day at the time, but my experience is that
you can always tell a TV reporter – ”

“But you can’t
tell them much,” Hester finished the old saying for him with a groan and a
grin. “My father says that about Scotsmen, which is allowed since he is one.”

“Yes, my dad
used to say it about Swedes, since we had a few in the family,” Darrow said,
leaning back in an orange plastic chair that reminded him of his high-school
cafeteria, and putting his feet up on the table as he used to do in his
high-school cafeteria.

 The table was
old, wooden and covered with scribbled graffiti. “Jim Bob + Mr. T, 1989,”
scrawled in black Sharpie, caught Hester’s eye.

 “So, as
enchanting as I find your workplace, Mr. Darrow, how soon can Pim and I be on
our way?” she asked.

“Yes, I’d like
to know that, too, Inspector, whenever you’re done with your screen test for ‘Fast
Times at Ridgemont High,’ ” added Pim, reverting to her favorite sarcastic name
for the policeman who had helped mistakenly send her to jail a few months
earlier as a suspect in Sara Duffy’s murder. She had never warmed to him.

Darrow gazed
silently at Pim for two beats, then gave her a wink before continuing.

“Well, I’m sorry
it took so long, but I just got word from the Medical Examiner confirming what
I suspected: that Mr. van Dyke had expired hours before the bookmobile ever
arrived this morning.”

“Oh, thank
goodness,” Hester blurted, then stopped. “I mean, that’s terrible, what
happened – but it means…”

“It means Ethel won’t
be charged with anything, because there’s not a lot of interest at the
prosecutor’s office in trying someone for manslaughter when the victim was
already dead,” Darrow finished her thought.

“Well, duh,” Pim
said. “So can we go now?”

Darrow held her
gaze again.

“Just tell me
this, both of you. Did you see
anything
unusual when you were backing
into that horseshoe pit this morning?”

Pim hung her
head as she searched her memory.

 “Fact is, it
was white-out fog down in that gully, probably as bad as I’ve ever seen fog
anytime, anywhere. So I was real careful and took it dead slow – oh, maybe that’s
a bad choice of words. But if you go too slowly in that darned bus it tends to
die on you – oh, oops again. And that infernal backup beeper was going, so loud
as to wake the dead – ”

Hester quickly
interrupted.

“What Pim is
saying is that she took all due diligence to carefully maneuver the bookmobile
into the new parking spot to which we’d been assigned, and we saw nothing out
of the ordinary considering the extraordinarily difficult conditions.”

She stopped,
with her chin in the air, before continuing hesitantly.

 “So, since it
thankfully wasn’t the bookmobile, what
was
the cause of death, may I
ask?”

Darrow glanced
at the two-way mirror on the wall, sipped at his own mug of coffee, and decided
he didn’t care if his partner – or even his impossible-to-please Capt. Myerson –
thought he was telling too much.

“Well, I’d say
it was the bullet hole right there,” he answered, putting his index finger over
his heart. “All the sand tended to obscure it at first.”

Hester and Pim
both gasped.

“But there’s
another weird thing about all this – besides the head of the library society
being shot and left spread-eagled in his undies in a city park’s horseshoe pit.
And that’s the Rose Medallion.”

Pim jumped as if
stricken. “Did someone find it?”

“Pim’s been hot
on the trail all week,” Hester confided.

It was Darrow’s
turn to be surprised.

“Oh, really? Well,
as you witnessed, we had a small army of medallion searchers out at the crime
scene this morning, and now
The Oregonian
has confirmed it: The Rose
Medallion was stuck to the logo on the Horseshoe Club sign.”

Pim swooned.

“Oh, no! You
mean I could have practically grabbed it from the window of the bookmobile this
morning?”

 Darrow gave her
a deadpan face. He took a sip of coffee and waited two beats before continuing.

“So neither of
you saw it?”

Pim raised her
eyes to the ceiling and clapped her hands with a loud pop. “Don’t you think I’d
be over at the Zeus Shoes headquarters claiming the $50,000 right now if I
had?”

Darrow curled
his lower lip as he rocked the old chair back and forth on two legs, then came
back down with a thump as he spoke.

“Well, the interesting
thing is, the medallion is gone.”

Chapter 6

Wednesday, June
12

Chief Charles
Morse came to the Portland Police Bureau by way of appointment by Mayor Buzz
Brinkley, the so-called “People’s Mayor,” the handlebar-mustachioed owner of a
Hawthorne-district brewpub who rode his old balloon-tire bicycle to City Hall
every day.

Morse, a
potato-nosed, acne-scarred bureaucratic tyrant whose political bent was more
NRA than ACLU, was Mayor Buzz’s attempt to succor the law-and-order crowd.

Early Wednesday morning
Morse was standing at the mahogany dais in the Police Bureau’s auditorium at Second
Avenue and Main Street and briefing the press on the investigation of Pieter
van Dyke’s murder.

A former chief
in the Columbia Gorge city of The Dalles, Oregon, Morse had spent much of his
career focused on – some said obsessed with – the 1980s takeover of parts of
Central Oregon by the followers of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Among other
misadventures, the Rajneeshees had infamously poisoned more than 700 people in The
Dalles by tainting salad bars with salmonella in an effort to reduce voter
turnout in a local election in which the cult was trying to pack the county
courthouse with its own members. (The scheme also involved spreading pathogens
on the handles of courthouse urinals.)

The election
ploy flopped. But Charles Morse never again trusted anyone in water-buffalo
sandals.  

“With this
horrendous, ritualistic murder of one of Portland’s finest citizens, we will
look very closely at cults and anyone who practices strange and godless
rituals,” Morse said, a droplet of perspiration on his ruddy cheek suggesting that
his woolen dress uniform with the stiff shoulder-boards and “scrambled eggs” on
its brimmed hat was perhaps not the best choice for a heavyset man in a crowded,
poorly ventilated room full of klieg lights.

“Chief, is it
not correct that the former Rajneeshees at Downward Dog Farm on Sauvie Island
are the focus of your investigation?” asked Misty Day, whose tightly
French-knotted hair today seemed to pull the darkly tanned skin on her temples even
tauter than her plastic surgeon had intended.

Morse squared
his jaw and nodded.

“Any group whose
history shows a blatant disregard for the health of the Oregon public will
certainly be spotlighted by our intensive investigation, and this particular community
has recently been involved in a series of shoplifting incidents in Northwest Portland,
along with aggressive panhandling involving threatening use of finger cymbals.”

Nate Darrow,
leaning against a doorjamb at the back of the room, ground his teeth over the
chief’s blind-spot on anything remotely related to the Rajneeshees. And this
blond bimbo from Channel 3 was just making things worse.

Morse, after
pausing to take a long gulp from a glass of ice water, continued.

“Now I’d like to
allow a representative from the victim’s law firm to say a word.”

Today, Gerhard
Gerbils’ gray pinstripe suit cast him in a more businesslike demeanor than
Saturday’s outfit from the “Sound of Music” costume closet. But the serious
image didn’t last long: Rising from a side table, Gerbils tripped over one of
the 15 microphone cords leading to the dais and, grasping to catch himself, knocked
over the chief’s water pitcher. With a flash of sparks and a painful popping
noise, the amplifier went dead. Behind Gerbils, DeWitt Vanderpol slapped a hand
over his eyes.

Gerbils, his
eyes popping from his round, nearly hairless head, cleared his throat, gave a
solicitous nod to van Dyke’s black-veiled widow, standing in an alcove, and spoke
into the microphones as if nothing had happened.

“I just wanted
to say…I just wanted to tell all of Portland that Pieter van Dyke was not only
our inspirational and hardworking colleague, he was our friend,” he said in a
quavering voice with a slight German accent that came out only when the
Oregon-born lawyer was under stress. German was the language in the Gerbils
home when Gerhard was a young child and his grandfather lived with them.

“Can you speak
up, the mike isn’t working!” came a cry from the back row.

Gerbils’ eyes
darted around the room as if looking for a savior, but no tech-savvy amplifier
expert stepped forward. He tried again, with his family heritage asserting
itself even more in his speech.

“I chust wanted
to say that Pieter was not only our colleague, but our friend,” he repeated.

 “LOUDER,
PLEASE!” came another call from the back.

“PIETER WAS NOT
CHUST A COLLEAGUE, HE VAS OUR FRIEND!” Gerbils said, turning red and almost
shouting now. “He is…that is, he
vas
our friend and colleague, and a
high-minded civic hero in der community!”

As if surprised
at his own vehemence, Gerbils paused and cocked his head, then continued,
articulating more carefully now.

“We are shocked
at the heinous crime that has taken this God-fearing, public-spirited leader
from our midst, and while my friend DeWitt Vanderpol and I will soldier bravely
on in Pieter’s tradition, we vow to work within the legal community to ensure
that no effort is spared to bring to justice whomever is responsible!” Now he
was hitting his stride, the round little man thought to himself.

“And let me just
say, that if that determination and vigilance leads to the godless pagans to
whom our police chief refers, I say this: BRING. ZEM. ON!”

A stunned hush
filled the room.

At the back,
leaning in an unlit corner where they seemed to have been corralled by snaking TV
cables, Nate Darrow shook his head and muttered into Harry Harrington’s ear, “Oh,
goody, sounds like we’re paying a social call on the tie-dye terrorists of Sauvie
Island.”

Chapter 7

With the
bookmobile sidelined until a police forensics team finished gathering evidence,
Hester reported Wednesday morning to a temporary reassignment at Portland’s
Grand Central Library, downtown on Tenth Avenue.

She’d been
instructed to divide her time over the next few days between two assignments:
taking inventory of the library’s prized McLoughlin Collection, eclectic holdings
of art and artifacts donated over many decades by Portland’s wealthiest
benefactors, and filling in for vacation absences on Reference Line, the
library’s ask-us-anything telephone information service. 

While the
McLoughlin assignment spoke of the administration’s high regard for her
competence, the Reference Line gig was more Hester’s idea of fun. The eight-member
“Answer Crew” was not only smart and quick witted, but their morning ritual of
racing in teams to complete the daily New York Times crossword puzzle – the
losers bought muffins – appealed to Hester’s competitive nature.

She’d subbed
there before, so there was little preamble as she plopped down in front of the
bank of phones. To perk up her mood, she was wearing the lavender sundress with
hand-stitching by her aunt that she wore only in warm weather.

“Hester! What’s
a four-letter word starting with ‘g’ for ‘trivia-loving oaf in eyeglasses,’ ”
called out young Sean Archer, whose amazing knowledge of minutiae made him the
unchallenged Reference Line whiz kid, a proud status reflected in a glint in his
eye, easily seen even through his horn-rimmed spectacles.  

“That would be ‘geek,’
Sean,” Hester cooed, with a pat on the curly blond head of her favorite
crossword partner.

“So sorry about
what happened with you guys and the bookmobile, Hester!” commiserated Holly
Fontana, another phone specialist, whose matronly figure was a testimonial to
the wonderful cookies she baked and often shared with her cohorts. “Why on
earth would anyone do that to Pieter?”

Her use of van Dyke’s
first name wasn’t uncommon; his social whirl brought him in contact with people
of every stratum, even if just for a holiday-time “meet and greet” in the
library lobby. Many in Grand Central felt as if they’d lost a friend.

“Oh, goodness, I
can’t begin to guess,” Hester responded, puffing out her cheeks in bewilderment
over the previous day’s events. “Some people are hinting at a Rajneeshee
connection, but that sounds pretty loony, doesn’t it? I think those poisoned
salad bars made our police chief a little paranoid.”

Phones started
ringing then, precluding further discussion. Hester soon found herself paging
through almanacs in search of the weight of an average housefly. You never knew
what callers would ask, which is why Reference Line was rarely boring.

“As long as they
don’t ask how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, we’re happy,” Sean
confided in her at lunch break. “As often as not, we’re probably just settling
somebody’s bar bet.”

After lunch,
Hester climbed the grandly curving marble staircase that ascended from the
lobby, past stone columns reaching four stories high to a gilded ceiling, and
made her way to the McLoughlin Room.

By 3 p.m. her
eyes were already crossing as she carefully checked off items on a spreadsheet.
The paintings were easy to account for: Big 19
^th
-century Rubenesque
nudes by a Dutch painter who might have been Pieter van Dyke’s great uncle crowded
the walls. If a painting was missing, the bare spot on the wall would be a
giveaway.

But the scores
of other artifacts took more attention. Until she’d gone through a big album of
them, Hester had never heard of first-day covers, fine-stationery mailing
envelopes embossed with historical illustrations related to the subject of a
new postage stamp that was affixed to the envelope and custom-canceled on the
first day the stamp was issued. The McLoughlin Collection included what was
apparently a valuable trove of them, donated – incidentally – by Pieter Van Dyke’s
father.

“So how’s it
going, Miss McGarrigle?” asked Dabney Pensler, the McLoughlin Collection
archivist, striding in as Hester was finishing her day and pulling off a sweater
she’d brought to wear in these over-air-conditioned cloisters.

 A tall and high-strung
man who reminded Hester of Ichabod Crane, Pensler was the only real human being
she’d ever met who actually wore pince nez, through which he delighted in
peering at you down his beaklike nose. Rarely did anyone introduced to him go
five minutes before they’d learned not only that he was a member of Mensa, but that
he was only in Portland  “on special loan” from the prestigious Martinbury
Institute in Philadelphia. His “special loan” was stretching on toward 15 years
now.

“Oh, Dabney. It’s
a big job, isn’t it?” Hester replied, stacking her sheets of work into a big
manila envelope.

“Oh, yes, it’s a
tremendous responsibility,” he said, preening at his thick, gray hair, swept
back in a Paul Revere pony tail.

“I’m glad you
stopped by, because I did find one problem, and it’s kind of a big one,” Hester
continued. “All I found was an empty box for the Charbonneau pistol replica. Do
you know anything about that?”

The lanky man’s
eyebrows rose toward the ceiling and his pince nez fell from his nose and swung
like a pendulum on a burgundy sateen ribbon that circled his collar.

“The
Charbonneau? Missing? What on earth do you mean?”

“Well, I mean it’s
not there. There’s a nice archival box with all the detailed labels and the
provenance record, but nothing inside but velvet wrappings. It appears from the
paperwork that we loaned it to Fort Vancouver for a special event in May and apparently
it was never returned.”

The
rosewood-handled pistol with steel barrel and handsome brass fittings was an
exact copy of the 1801 French flintlock cavalry pistol carried on the Lewis and
Clark expedition by French trapper and guide Toussaint Charbonneau. The replica
was made in 1905 for the McLoughlin family by the same French gunsmithery as
the original, to help mark the 100
^th
anniversary of the famous Corps
of Discovery exploration. Even as a replica, it was worth thousands for its
authenticity and antiquity.

Hester had never
seen a man wring his hands as vigorously, in true praying mantis style.

 “Well, they
must still have it!” Pensler croaked. “We must call them immediately! I’m sure
the National Park Service has taken proper care with it, but it was to be
returned within a week. This is inexcusable!”

“Dabney, I’ve
already left an urgent message for their curator to get back to me,” Hester
said in her most soothing voice. “And it happens I’m going up there tomorrow on
another errand. My colleague Ethel Pimala is there helping with a re-enactment
and we’re meeting for lunch – remember I told you I’d just be in for the
afternoon? So I’ll be sure to track down the pistol and escort it back here
personally.”

Pensler pulled
out a linen handkerchief monogrammed with “DP” in old English letters and
mopped the dripping sweat from his forehead. With Hester’s calming words he
quickly composed himself.

“Well, that will
be fine then.” He sniffed, replaced his pince nez, and peered down his nose at
Hester. “You’ll keep me informed?”

“Of course. I’ll
talk to you tomorrow.”

Hester sighed as
the storklike man strode through the room’s carved oak doors.

“My, I’ve earned
my little paycheck today,” she whispered as she gathered her purse and followed
him out.