Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (14 page)

Hester’s sarcastic glee dissolved.
Her blue eyes smoldered purple at Paul Kenyon.

“Yes, and what’s really shocking
is that they haven’t figured out what boobs they’re making of themselves by
holding the wrong person in jail. You’d think they’d arrest the real murderer.”

Paul gave a look of mild
surprise. “You mean there’s serious doubt? Boy, from what I’ve heard around the
Justice Center, it’s just a matter of whether the prosecutor will go for the
death penalty or not.”

Hester recoiled as if slapped.
She had momentarily forgotten that possibility. “Oh, don’t be absurd,” she
snapped. “Now excuse me while I finish checking in these returns.”

She punched the Instie-Circ’s
keys with ferocity, only to have the machine emit a long, piercing beep that
caused even Mrs. Loman to look up quizzically.

“Oh, drat this infernal piece of
junk. I really don’t need this today! Ralph, can you take a look? I can’t get
interfaced.”

Ralph shook his head vigorously. “Oh,
no. I’m not what they call computer literate. I cleaned up that machine for you
this morning, but that’s as far as I go with blasted computers. Besides, I was
just going on break.”

Pulling a cigarette from a shirt
pocket, he fled out the door.

Just as Ralph disappeared out the
front, there came a loud banging on the rear door.

“Come around front!” Hester
called. But the banging sounded again, louder. As Hester rose from her seat,
Paul Kenyon stepped over.

“While you deal with the crowds,
why don’t you let me get the computer working for you,” he said in a hushed and
sympathetic voice. Hester hesitated just a moment, then the banging started
again.

Looking anxiously toward the
door, she turned back to Paul. “Yes, thanks – the, uh, password is ‘Aloha’ –
and the entry code is there – ”

She was interrupted as the rear
door was yanked open. Stepping quickly to the back of the bookmobile, Hester
called out, “Excuse me, this entry is closed today! Puh-leease use the front
door!”

But a pimple-faced teenager with
a severe bowl-shaped haircut thrust his face in. Several more young, leering
faces peered from behind him. On the curb, the crowd of onlookers swarmed
close.

“So where’d they find her?” the
young hooligan blurted. “The TV said it was in the back, in a cupboard or
something!”

Hester’s eyes widened in sudden
fury. “What?!”

Opening her palm wide, she
forcefully shoved the young man back to the curb, reaching past him in an
effort to pull the door closed. She froze when a television camera suddenly
turned her way. A young blonde woman she recognized from Channel 3 materialized
out of the crowd, gripping a microphone and speaking loudly to be heard over
the jostling.

“... and we now meet the checkout
clerk. We’re told she actually discovered the body of the brutally slain
library director, an elderly woman beloved by generations of Portlanders who
grew up listening to story hours on this old bus, a vehicle that this crowd of
regulars has now tragically dubbed ‘the murdermobile.’ Heather, tell us your
feelings.”

With the microphone thrust her
way, Hester felt her throat constrict. She stopped breathing as all eyes looked
up at her. From the tree, the starlings silenced their racket. Suddenly the
only noise in the park was the reporter’s script rustling in the breeze, joined
from inside the bus by the muted squealing of one of Mrs. Loman’s hearing aids.

Finally, Hester felt her airway
open and she could speak.

“Go. Get. Away. Shoo! Get. Get
out of here!” she shrieked. “Ghouls!”

Grabbing the door, Hester slammed
it shut and locked it. She turned and leaned back against the door as if to
block further entry.

“What are these people? Vampires?”
she gasped to Mrs. Loman, who silently nodded and smiled. Suddenly aware of the
dark closet facing her, Hester strode back to her seat, from which Paul Kenyon
quickly rose.

“Hester, what is it? Are you OK?”

She was surprised to see genuine
concern in his face.

“Oh, it’s – it’s nothing. I’m OK.
Just a little crowd-control problem. I’m fine.” She felt her eyes drawn to his
for a moment, then looked quickly away. “Thanks.”

“The Instie-Circ is working now.
I hope it doesn’t give you any more problems.”

Hester arched her eyebrows. “Well,
thank you. That makes my day a little easier.”

Paul nodded a farewell, and when
Ralph climbed back aboard, Hester instructed him to guard the door and bar
entry to any patron without a library card.

We’ll see how that plays on the
evening news, Hester thought, dreading the call she could expect from
administration Monday morning.

Hester calmed down as she went
about the routine task of checking out materials for her real “regulars” and seeing
them on their way. As usual, Mr. Fields waited until he was last aboard to
check out his selection of “Star Trek” paperbacks.

As Hester punched his card number
into the Instie-Circ, it responded with a beep like a hospital heart monitor on
a patient who wouldn’t see tomorrow.

“Damn! I’ve got to reboot this
blasted thing!” Hester blurted. After punching the restart button and counting
impatiently to 10, she spun the machine around to peer at the 10-digit entry
code Pim had long ago taped to the back because it was too long to memorize.
Hester found no sign of the crinkled and faded note in Pim’s penciled scrawl.

“Ralph, what’s become of Pim’s
cheat sheet? I need the code for this darn machine again!” She shook her head
apologetically at Mr. Fields.

Ralph turned from his station by
the door. “You mean that tattered little paper stuck on the back? I came across
that when I was cleaning up the machine this morning. I figured it was just
Pim’s mother’s phone number or something. Couldn’t hardly read it anyway, so I
chucked it. And I tell you, it took a pint of acetone to get that old sticky
tape off!”

“Oh, great, how am I –” Hester
stopped as a thought struck her. “Well, then, how did Paul get this thing to
work?”

She attempted a few keystrokes,
only to have the computer squeal in protest. She shook her head in puzzlement. “He
must
be good. Every time I think I’m getting the hang of computers, I
meet some computer whiz who makes me feel like a kid playing with an Etch A
Sketch.”

Picking up a pad and pencil and
digging for her date stamp, Hester muttered, “Well, I guess we do things the
old-fashioned way the rest of the run.”

That Saturday kept reminding
Hester of a title from the library’s video collection – an old war movie she
often delivered to the Disabled American Veterans Home out in St. Johns: “The
Longest Day.”

  By mid-afternoon, she’d run
into a variety store to buy a cheap bed sheet to drape over the back closet to
discourage the morbidly curious. Even still, she’d twice had to shoo away
snoops who’d pulled the sheet aside, thoughtlessly ripping down its anchoring
thumbtacks, which ricocheted like buckshot in the bookmobile’s tight confines.

“Now I know who those
rubberneckers are who cause traffic jams around every freeway wreck,” Hester
had groaned to Ralph.

 After finally trudging up the
Luxor’s front steps in a rapidly thickening dusk, she’d changed into a
comfortable old sweater and jeans and opened a tin of Seafood Medley for Bingle
T. Then she quickly munched a Caesar salad from the not-quite-wilted romaine in
her fridge before gathering herself up again.

 Hopping in her dented blue
Civic, the car her mother described as resembling “a little wedge of cheese on
wheels,” Hester drove across the Willamette to her favorite market to pick up a
few ingredients for her special Sunday dinner.

Knute’s and Barry’s was a
Portland original, started by a couple of Scandinavian-born health nuts. It
catered to an eclectic clientele of Baby Boomer gentry, a sizable population of
hippie holdovers with Reed College decals on their old VWs, a growing segment
of spiked hair-and-Doc Martens Internet groupies and anybody else who liked
unprocessed, high-quality food with an international flavor. Hester would shop
there if only for the fragrant and chewy hazelnut-sunflower pumpernickel baked
by a co-op in Tillamook.

Today, Knute himself was manning
the all-you-can-eat organic lutefisk bar. Hester gave a polite shake of her
head at the proffered sample tray, which never seemed to empty. She wondered
absently how any food processed with lye could be labeled “organic.”

“Instead of all-you-can-eat,
maybe they should call it ‘all-you-can-take,’ ” Hester confided to another
woman lining up at the checkout counter.

She exchanged pleasantries and
sore-feet stories as her favorite checker, a smiling young woman with a
bleached-blonde buzz cut, rang up her purchases: organic endive-and-radicchio
salad blend, Sicilian radiatori pasta, chanterelle mushrooms and four range-fed
chicken breasts wrapped in recycled brown paper.

When the total appeared on the
register, Hester dug through her old straw purse for her checkbook.

It took a moment, as the line
grew behind her, before a picture suddenly appeared in Hester’s mind: In the
middle of that day’s muddle, she’d written a check for Campfire mints to
irresistible little Molly Hartley, a 9-year-old Beverly Cleary fan at the
Eastmoreland stop. She’d slipped the mints and her checkbook into a drawer...

“Oh, Lord, take me now! I left my
checkbook on the bookmobile!” Hester exclaimed. Concern flitted across the
checker’s face. Behind Hester, a man in a teal Gore-Tex windbreaker who’d been
nervously jingling a Range Rover key ring picked up his package of
apple-jalapeno sausage links and stormed off to the next checkout.

“I’m sorry,” Hester pleaded to
the checker.

“Oh, don’t mind him, he always
comes through the line with the one item in the store that’s not marked,” the
checker confided. “We call him ‘Price-Check Charlie.’ Look, I can hold on to
this stuff, it’s all rung through. If you come right back with a check for the
exact amount I won’t even have to re-ring you.”

“Thanks!” Hester blurted, digging
the bookmobile key ring from her pocket. “It won’t be 15 minutes!”

Hester drove quickly through streets
rapidly clogging with weekend revelers headed for a Trail Blazers game. The
bookmobile barn was less than a dozen blocks away, tucked between two wide and
busy commercial streets.

At night, the side street was a
quiet and dark mix of small warehouses, closed offices and a few peeling-paint,
dirt-yard houses. Tightly drawn drapes revealed only the flickering telltale
glow of televisions being watched. Not one house showed a lit porch light,
perhaps on the theory that one doesn’t want to stand out in a neighborhood like
this, Hester thought as she passed.

She noticed the one streetlight
on the block had again been doused, probably by a neighbor kid’s BB gun – if
not something of larger caliber. Hester shuddered, thinking for a moment that
she might be wiser to head for a well-lit bank machine and get some cash on her
credit card.

No, she’d just gotten the balance
down to zero on that darn card, and she was saving it for her next Europe trip.
She resolved to just run in and out of the bookmobile barn.

Halfway down the street, Hester
turned the little Honda into a driveway blocked by a chain-link gate with a
large padlock hanging from a hasp. Ten yards beyond, the light from her
headlights reflected off the fading magenta of Bookmobile No. 3, seemingly the
only source of color on the block.

 A single mercury-vapor security
light did its best to illuminate the driveway. But as on most February days in
Oregon, the weather had changed from a few hours earlier. Heavy clouds now
scudded overhead on a cold wind. A few big raindrops plopped on Hester’s windshield.
The darkening night absorbed the light like a blotter wicks up ink.

Hester sat for a moment in her
car’s warm cocoon, listening to the heater fan whir and the familiar patter of
a public-radio talk show. She cast a look up and down at what she could see of
the empty street.

“OK, brave heart, what are you
waiting for – an engraved invitation?” she asked herself. Opening the door, she
thought for a moment of leaving the car running and the headlights on. Then she
pictured a dark figure leaping into the Civic and tires squealing into the
distance the moment she stepped away.

 “Yeah, good idea, Hester,” she
said, switching the engine off and pulling out the key. She briefly thought of
leaving the headlights on. Then she considered how her day had gone, and how it
might conclude. “We’re talking dead battery, right?” she asked the cold wind
that whistled an imperceptible reply.

Switching off the lights, Hester
hurriedly locked the car door and walked a few feet down the cracked and uneven
sidewalk to a small gate designed for pedestrian entry. Around her feet, dead
brown leaves scuffled in the wind.

Already, she was just outside the
ring of light. As she fumbled with her library keys, trying to find the right key
for this small padlock, something from the bookmobile caught Hester’s
attention.

At day’s end, she always left the
bookmobile with shades drawn over the side windows. She thought that it might
discourage a prowler from spying the Instie-Circ, which despite its outmoded
capabilities
did
resemble a valuable computer.

But now, unexpectedly, Hester
thought she saw something in the front window. In the periphery of her vision, a
soft blue glow outlined the window, like the moon suddenly burning through a
rain cloud.

Hester stared at the bookmobile.
Was it a reflection of the TV blur from houses across the street? No, there it
was again. It must be the night maintenance crew, Hester thought. Maybe they
could let her in?

“Bob?” she shouted. “Bob Newall?
Is that you? Bob, it’s Hester. Come let me in!”

The glow vanished but nothing
more happened. Stamping her foot, Hester stepped back beneath the security
light and furiously sorted through the two dozen keys on her ring. Finally, she
found the tiny key for the padlock. “Thank you, Lord!” Hester shouted into the
brooding sky, the burst of manic energy overcoming her reserve.

As if to punctuate her
exclamation, a door slammed.

Hester’s head swiveled back
toward the bookmobile. “Bob? Ralph? Who’s there?”

 Over the sudden pounding of
blood through her temples, Hester heard rapid footsteps. A running figure
dodged in and out of shadows beyond the bookmobile, approaching a gate at the
far side of the barn. For a fleeting moment, as the far gate opened and closed,
another security light dimly illuminated the hurrying figure. The chain link,
the distance and gloom diminished Hester’s view.

All Hester could really make out
was a tan coat, and something about its texture. It was – crinkled. Maybe just
wrinkled. Or it was, perhaps, leather? Whoever it was, they were gone. Hester
stared hard after the vanished figure.

Buttoning up her coat and
gathering her wits, Hester opened the lock and marched in, greeted by the
familiar smell of diesel fuel and the scrunch of cat-box litter beneath her
feet. Switching on the fluorescent light inside the bookmobile, she found
nothing out of place. The Instie-Circ remained on its shelf, she noted with a
bit of disappointment. And there was her checkbook, in the drawer with the mints.

Hester stood for a moment in the
greenish fluorescent glow. Was that the light she’d spied around the edge of
the drawn shade? No, too bright. She was at a loss to figure out what anybody
would want on the bookmobile.

Unless the police missed
something in their search, Hester thought with alarm.

But what? Some evidence left
behind, something with obvious meaning only to the killer? Shuddering to think
she might have encountered Miss Duffy’s murderer, Hester suddenly decided it
was time to get back among other people – quickly. Hastily locking doors behind
her, Hester ran back to the Civic.

A few minutes later, her
breathing was still shallow as she wrote a check and handed it over for her
groceries.

Back in the car, setting her
purchases on the passenger seat and locking the doors, Hester finally felt her
heart slow. She took comfort in the mundane surge of shoppers back and forth in
the parking lot around her, and paused to evaluate what she’d seen. What should
she do about it? Who should she tell?

Nate Darrow would probably be
angry at her for entering the bookmobile after seeing the fleeing figure,
Hester considered. She’d hear a big lecture on how foolish she’d been. But
somehow, she had sensed that once the intruder had fled, she was in no danger.
How could she explain that to a man – especially one whom, she had to admit,
she was trying to impress?

Besides, Hester wondered, what if
what she’d seen had nothing to do with the murder investigation? What if her
imagination was working overtime? She’d feel foolish if the intruder was just
some street person looking for a dry place to spend the night.

Hester drummed her fingers on the
steering wheel. With a sense of detachment, she gazed out her window, from the
sign in the market’s window touting “Organic Bulgur, Radish Sprouts, Echinacea
Smoothies,” down to her steering wheel, to the little trumpet symbol on the
horn button. A symbol of warning, a symbol of caution.

And suddenly Hester recognized a
warning in the back of her head. Suddenly she knew why she wouldn’t tell the
police, at least not immediately. She would keep this to herself, at least
until she puzzled things out.

She’d keep it to herself because
she knew someone who liked to wear leather.