B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (8 page)

 As she brooded
on Karen’s goading, something else niggled at Hester’s consciousness. A tinny
sound came and went from down toward the river, and then got louder, finally
transforming into music with a heavy Latin beat.

Karen, too, was
peering toward the Willamette when finally the source of the music appeared
through a break in the bigleaf maples. At first, it was like a mirage: an old
riverboat, like something from a Mark Twain story.

Then it came to
them both in a flash.

“It’s the Rose!
The old stern-wheeler that gives river tours,” Karen exclaimed. “Oh, I’ve heard
about this, they’re doing Sunset Macarena Cruises.”

The Latin song
and dance craze, the Macarena, had been sweeping the world in recent months.
Suddenly, Karen’s eyes narrowed.

“That’s it! It’s
exactly what you need! I’m brilliant!”

Hester shot a
veiled look at her friend. “Oh, Karen, I couldn’t – ”

“Of course you
could!” Karen shot back. “And in this summery weather, that boat is going to be
crawling with hot men! Hester, sweetie, I’m booking us a cruise!”

Chapter 14

An hour later, Hester
had lucked into an easy parking space on maple-lined Everett Street and was
trying to remember if she had any food in her fridge as she trudged up the
front steps of the Luxor, her Egyptian-themed apartment house in the Northwest
neighborhood.

“Good evening,
Ramses,” she called out, a habit she had picked up from watching too many old
movies in which New York socialites greeted their uniformed doormen as they
came and went. But in Hester’s case, her greeting was to the cement Egyptian
pharaoh figure over the doorway.

As she ducked through
the front door and past the potted palm in the elephant-foot planter, the elevator’s
door was just swinging closed.

“Hold the
elevator!” Hester called, knowing she was taking a chance that there was only
one occupant. The Luxor’s tiny, elderly elevator, with its manually operated
accordion-cage safety gate and outer door that swung out instead of sliding
together in the middle, could hold only two passengers. “And even those had
better be of compatible body-mass ratio,” she often warned friends.

 The inner door ratcheted
open – there must be room! – and the outer door swung out toward her. Hester
ducked in.

The signature
aroma of bay rum and hot pepperoni told her who it was before she’d even looked
up to meet the eyes of Nate Darrow.

“Gosh! We meet
again,” Hester grinned self-consciously, twisting her body sideways so Darrow
could hold his big pizza box close to horizontal while she punched the button
for “three.”

Pizza was his
all-too-usual dinner from Escape From New York, the counterculture pizza joint
up on 23
^rd
named for a bad Kurt Russell movie from the ’80s. The
pizza joint’s neon Statue of Liberty sign was a neighborhood icon.

“Hester! How was
your afternoon?” Darrow inquired.

She opened her
mouth but realized she had to stop to think about her answer. Finally, she
spoke.

“Well, actually,
it was kind of weird, if you want to know the truth.” She paused and looked
into his hazel eyes. As usual, she felt a little extra flip-flop as their eyes
locked. Was this what the French called a frisson? Hester shook herself out of
overanalyzing.

“As a matter of
fact, something came up that I probably need to talk to you about,” she said in
a rush, as the old lift clinked and clanked slowly upward. “Something – ” she
hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Something to do with that Charbonneau
character.”

A jolt like a
painful memory crossed Darrow’s face. When it became apparent Hester wasn’t
ready to say more, he crinkled his forehead. “So, have you eaten?” Bobbing the
box up and down in his hands and nodding at it, he added, “Why don’t you come
on up?”

Hester
hesitated.

“Oh, you know I
like to watch my girlish figure.” A facetious tone, then a note of seriousness
as she added, “And Bingle T. is probably ready to eat his foot.”

 She referred to
the 28-pound Maine Coon cat with whom she shared an apartment, whose constant
crooning as a kitten got him named after Bing Crosby. The initial “T,” for
“Troublemaker,” came later, because of his tendency to escape from her
apartment and show up in the most unlikely of places.

Hester
cogitated, feeling her stomach rumble. In a sudden moment of rebellion against
dieting – and letting a fuzzy feline rule her life – she turned back to Darrow.
“Actually, pizza sounds great! The Wiener Dog seems like a long time ago, and
all I’ve had since then was a couple of kimchi chicken wings that were,
frankly, kind of nasty.”

Darrow’s eyes
brightened. “If you want to stop in and feed the cat, I’ll keep the pizza
warm,” he offered.

But Hester was
resolute, punching the “4” button when the elevator stopped at her floor.

“No, he’ll
survive. I’ve had him on a diet anyway ever since Mr. Podlodowski the janitor
was prompted to do his Porky Pig imitation the last time he came to fix my
kitchen fan. He saw Bingle T. and made some rude comment about how ‘if that big
fella had been born over at Good Samaritan they’d have had to charge for
triplets,’ ” referring to the hospital a few blocks away.

Darrow bit back
a grin as Hester mused.

 “You know, I’ve
really cut back his crunchies – he’s a terrible 24-hour snacker – and I think
he’s still gaining weight!”

Now a look of
mild alarm crossed Nate’s face, but as Hester caught his eyes again, the
detective put on his best look of poker-face innocence.

“Imagine that!”
he commiserated as the elevator finally clunked to a stop at his floor.

Darrow’s apartment
was transformed since Hester had peeked in shortly after he had arrived four
months earlier. As he passed the dining nook, he slid the big pizza box onto a
dark walnut British pub table, which Hester immediately admired for its clever
old-school design, with extra leaves that slid out to seat more dinner guests.

“Got that in
Sellwood,” Darrow told her as he gestured her to a chair at the table, then peeled
off his sport coat and hung it on a brass rack in a corner.

The
bricks-and-boards bookcase along one wall held a sizable collection of vinyl LP
records, their jackets leaning up against a high-quality receiver and turntable
like what her dad used to play his Sousa marches on before her mother had
finally nudged him over to compact discs and a good set of headphones.

“And that was my
father’s stereo outfit, too high quality to give up in favor of soulless
digital,” he said, noting Hester’s fascination. Darrow had inherited it when
his parents had died in a car crash when he was in college.

 Cocking his
head with a sudden thought, he grabbed an LP off the shelf, shook the record
from its sleeve, deftly dropped it onto the turntable, flicked the power button
and eased the needle into the grooves. The mellow piano playing of Vince
Guaraldi started to tinkle softly from a big Advent speaker next to the
shelves.

Hester tilted
her head back in appreciation, gazing across to a wall with a large framed
print of van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Cypresses.” Fanciful, Dr. Seuss-like trees
and golden stalks of grain swayed beneath a blissfully blue French sky.

Darrow had
disappeared into the kitchen but now reappeared with a slightly dripping
longneck beer bottle in each hand.

“The one
culinary rule in Chez Darrow is that beer is the perfect pairing with pizza,” he
announced as if emceeing a cable-TV food show. “And I happen to have put a new
batch of my home brew in to chill when I left this morning. Will you try one
with me?”

At Hester’s nod,
he popped the tops using a wall-mounted bottle capper at the kitchen’s entrance
that was etched with the message, “Souvenir of Wall Drug, South Dakota.”

Hester studied the
beer bottle Darrow handed her. “Rosabella Amber Ale,” the obviously homemade
label said. Beneath a drawing of an old-fashioned looking sailboat was the
legend “A full-keeled brew from Darrow Brewing, Portland, Oregon.”

Shifting her eye
from the bottle to Darrow, who was just finishing a first swig with a
contemplative swirl through his cheeks, Hester raised the beer in one hand and
pointed curiously at the label.

“Rosabella is my
uncle’s boat, named from a wonderful old sea chantey – the boat I’ve sailed on
around Vancouver Island and down in the Sea of Cortez,” Nate explained. “The
artwork is by my 10-year-old niece, so be kind.”

“No, I think it’s
quite good. I’m just mildly bemused at witnessing another Nathaniel Darrow
fanaticism,” Hester said with a smile in her eye as she took an appreciative
sip.

Darrow handed
her a plate and napkin, then held the box while Hester scooped up a pizza
slice, making sure she didn’t lose too many of the black olives.

As the spicy
aroma filled her head and Hester took her first bite, a clatter from Darrow’s
hallway caught their attention.

 “What the…?”
Darrow said as he set down the pizza box and strode into the short hall to
investigate.

Hester heard a
door open, then a confused “Whoa!” from Nate combined with a familiar, excited
feline trilling, and suddenly her fluffy, gray-and-black striped cat with the
large green eyes was scooting around the corner and leaping into her lap.

“Bingle T., how
on earth?” Hester cried, as the big cat unceremoniously sniffed at her pizza
slice, snagged a piece of pepperoni in his teeth and gobbled it down with hardly
stopping to chew. “How did you get here?”

“Well, to paraphrase
an old Beatles song, ‘He came in through the bathroom window!’ ” Darrow said in
answer to her question.

“And don’t
worry, all we heard was my can of Barbasol getting knocked off the windowsill.”

“But, but…” was
all a dumbfounded Hester could manage as her ravenous cat helped himself to
another piece of pepperoni from her forgotten pizza.

“Apparently he
has figured out how to get out your bathroom window and climb up to mine using the
ivy and pipes on the wall in the air shaft,” Darrow informed her.

A dawning look
of comprehension on Hester’s face slowly turned to suspicion.

“Wait, how have
you figured this out so quickly?” Her eyes flitted between her neighbor and her
cat, who was suddenly looking all too at-home in these surroundings.

Darrow’s lips
came together as if he were about to whistle. He looked down and reached over
to scratch the big cat behind the ears. A throaty purr immediately rose from Bingle
T.

“Cheese it, the
cops, Bing boy!” Darrow hissed in his best Edward G. Robinson imitation.

“You’re telling
me this isn’t the first time he’s DONE THIS?”

Hester’s
incredulity warmed the room a noticeable five degrees, Darrow thought. 

“Well,
apparently he likes pepperoni, as you might notice,” Darrow explained.

“But, but –
when?”

“Remember that
time last week I knocked on your door and said I found him in the hallway? And
another time old Podlodowski unlocked your place and let me pop him back
inside.”

Hester was now
turning as red as the third piece of pepperoni her cat was about to snitch.

“And why on
earth didn’t you TELL ME THE TRUTH?” she spluttered.

With lower lip
protruding, Darrow looked like a guilty second-grader caught taking an extra
gumdrop from the teacher’s secret stash. After wagging his head back and forth
a few times, he explained.

“Because I
thought you’d get all upset about it! And I guess I called
that one
right,” he said, muttering this last part to the cat.

Returning to
address his human neighbor, he added, “And it was kind of nice having the
company!”

Hester stared up
at an old water stain in the ceiling as she blew her breath out through
clenched teeth, then let her peeve evaporate with a sigh as she deftly moved
the pizza out of Bingle T.’s reach before he could get a fourth pepperoni. 

“You terrible,
horrible cat!” she said, trying unsuccessfully to stifle the mirth sneaking
into her voice. Then, to Darrow, “Do you know he once got into the trunk of a
neighbor’s car when they were packing for the beach and I had to drive 20 miles
down Highway 26 to retrieve him when they stopped for gas?”

Darrow, relieved
that he seemed forgiven, returned to gobbling pizza.

Pausing to look
at her neighbor again, Hester’s eyes wandered down to his service revolver in a
shoulder holster.

“You ever shoot
that thing?” she asked, ready to change the subject.

Darrow blanched
and slapped his forehead, realizing he’d forgotten his usual routine of locking
the gun in his nightstand drawer the moment he stepped in the door.

“Well, actually
I don’t even keep it loaded most days,” he called back, having moved quickly
into the next room to peel off the shoulder harness. Beyond the wall and
through the open door, she heard him add, “I’m not very good at following
procedures, I’m afraid.” A silent pause. “I’m a terrible policeman, really.”

Hester smiled at
that admission. He might not follow all procedures, but she wasn’t sure that
made him a bad policeman. The more she got to know him, she was pretty sure Darrow
felt the same way.

“I probably do
enough procedure following for the both of us,” she said to herself, reflecting
on her day as she opened the pizza box and helped herself to a fresh slice.

“What’s that you
say?” Nate asked as he returned and plunked down in a dining chair of carved
wood and forest-green leather.

“Actually, I was
just thinking I need to depart from procedures myself and tell you about
something I haven’t even told my bosses yet,” Hester said, taking a quick gulp
of her neighbor’s refreshingly hoppy home brew to bolster her resolve.     

It was Darrow’s
turn to look quizzical as he plucked a piece of slightly burnt pepperoni from
the top of the pizza and surreptitiously handed it to the cat that was now
furiously polishing his ankles.