Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (5 page)

“What’s this?” Karen joined the
two librarians and reached for one of the fliers. “Dear goodness!” she
exclaimed, reading the invitation. “What are you doing tonight, Hester? What am
I saying? You never do anything.”

Before Hester could utter a word,
Karen continued. “Tonight we infiltrate the pack. We are going to the WWCAC
meeting.”

“They’d never let us in, Karen,”
Hester croaked, finding her voice.

“You just let me take care of
that!” Karen said, her chin jutting and eyes afire.

Ethel Pimala was also on desk
duty of a sort, two miles away at the library offices next to the bookmobile
barn. All Wednesday morning, she had sorted books for delivery vans to take to
shut-ins. The work was dull compared to driving the bookmobile around town.

Shortly after Pim returned from
lunch – her usual kielbasa-on-a-stick from Dogs Aplenty, over on Burnside – the
motor-pool supervisor, Jean Wilson, had approached her work table. The spindly,
gray-haired woman’s eyes were wide. She had wrung her hands as she announced
loudly enough for most of the work crew to hear, “Ethel, there’s a policeman to
see you!”

After 20 minutes of interviewing
Pim in a spare office, Darrow’s patience was stretched.

 “So how did your fingerprints
get on the booster shoe, Miss Pimala? Just how often do you use your hand to
work the bookmobile’s accelerator?” Darrow asked, immediately regretting his
sarcastic tone. Darrow didn’t like wise-guy cops. Most people reacted better if
you remembered your manners and dealt with them straight.

Pim didn’t like sarcasm either,
unless she was dishing it out. Her glare over the top of her cateye glasses let
Darrow know she didn’t have a lot of time for him.

“Look, I got five carts of
returns to deliver to Grand Central or a bunch of angry shut-ins are going to
get overdue notices, and I’ll give ’em
your
phone number,” Pim replied,
crossing her arms and leaning back in an old brown plastic chair. She reached
for another stale Chee-to from the bag Darrow had bought from the vending
machine out in the hall. Her fingers were already powdered orange.

Pim had quickly realized there
was more to this interview than she’d expected. She decided to show her bulldog
side and go on the offensive.

“Can you tell me why it matters
that you found my fingerprints on the booster shoe? I already told you I had to
put it back on the pedal first thing Monday. Talk to Bob Newall, our mechanic.
He’s always taking off my booster shoe to adjust the throttle linkage or some
dang thing.”

Before replying, Darrow studied
the bronze-chested surfers on Pim’s canary-yellow shirt. Below the top button
was a brown splotch of – was it mustard? Gulden’s, maybe. He could see the
little seeds in it. Shaking his head, he drew his attention back to the matter
at hand. Looking Pim in the eye, he spoke softly.

“I never find it easy to look at
a murder victim, Ethel – May I call you Ethel? But I have to look, and I have
to look closely, because if the person who took that life has left any clues of
their identity, even the smallest, most insignificant-seeming thing, I can’t
afford to miss it. It’s my job, and I’m pretty good at it. If guys like me
weren’t any good, we’d all be in trouble, right? So when I looked at Miss
Duffy’s cold body stuffed in that closet, I looked at where she’d been hurt. I
looked at how somebody had hit her over the top of the head with something hard
and solid, hit her hard enough to actually crush her skull in a little.”

He paused as he saw Pim blanch.
It was a useful interview tactic, Darrow often found. Drawing people into the
grim realities of his job helped awaken them to the diligence beneath his
civility.

“No, it wasn’t pleasant. But as I
looked at where she was hurt, I could even see where the weapon had hit her
with such force as to leave a strange sort of crisscross pattern right on the
top of her head, where the skin was broken. So we went through that bookmobile
inch by inch, looking for objects that might have the same pattern. And we
found something. We found your booster shoe.”

Pim sat with her hand over her
mouth, then shook her head as she spoke with a squawk.

“And my fingerprints! They only
had them on file because I do some moonlighting as a school crossing guard!
I’ve never even gotten a speeding ticket.” Thoughts flashed across her face,
then a look of alarm. “You think I killed her!”

“I don’t really know what to
think, Ethel. Maybe you can help me figure it out. Why don’t you tell me how
well you knew Miss Duffy.”

“Knew her? Everybody in the
library knew her. She was our boss for a long time. I didn’t know her better
than anybody else.”

Darrow stared up at the
fluorescent light buzzing over their heads and counted six dead flies caught in
the fixture before he continued. “What kind of a boss was she? Did you like
her?”

Pim crossed her arms again,
leaned back in the chair and pursed her lips.

“Honestly? No, I didn’t much like
her as a boss. She was, well, you know, kind of high-falutin’, to tell you the
truth. But she was the library director, and I worked as hard for her as I
would have for anybody. I gave her all the respect she deserved, that’s the
kind of people I come from, Mr. Darrow. Too bad I never got much for my
efforts.”

“Oh? How do you mean that?”
Darrow sat forward and picked up a paper coffee cup, absently pinching his
fingernails into the rim. His temples had begun to pound.

“Well, I don’t blow my own horn
any louder than the next gal, but I think I might have deserved to move up in
the library, you know? I do a lot more on the bookmobile than most people
realize. I work a little computer when the librarian’s busy and I make sure the
books all get stamped with the right date, and I can point out the Westerns to
people who want Westerns and the biographies to them who want them, though I
never much cared for that stuff myself. And yet everybody in administration
still just calls me a driver.”

Darrow pinched his upper lip.
Speculatively, he spoke from behind his hand. “Sounds like that was a problem
for you.”

Pim answered directly. “Yes,
Detective, when an old broad like me is trying to do the best job she can for
somebody for 40 years and never gets a promotion, that’s a problem. But for the
love of Pete, that doesn’t mean I did anything to Miss Duffy!” She paused and
then spoke as if to herself, “I’ve heard enough people around this place who
wanted to, though.”

Pim guffawed as she remembered. “Why
just last week, our sweet little children’s librarian was over here saying
she’d like to wring the old girl’s neck for throwing in with that book burning
group! It was something to see! Linda used to work with me on the bookmobile
and I never seen such a dainty little thing with such a hot temper...”

Pim suddenly noticed Darrow
jotting quickly in his notebook. Her chuckles died and her eyes widened.

“But look, she didn’t mean
nothing. People say things all the time, but that don’t mean they’re a serial
killer like that Al Bundy or whatever his name was. People just let off steam.”

Darrow nodded, his face
thoughtful. “Theodore,” he muttered softly.

“What’s that?”

“You mean Theodore.
Ted
Bundy.”

“Oh, right, just like I said.”

Darrow pursed his lips and
squinted at her assessingly before speaking again.

“For the record, Miss Pimala,
where were you on Saturday night?”

An hour later, Hester’s toes were
beginning to feel numb from a long day on the hard marble floor when she saw
Nate Darrow stride in through the swinging wooden doors. Rainwater from his
anorak joined the pool inside the door where a small plastic warning sign bore
a graphic depiction of a man doing a pratfall in a puddle of water.

“I guess the freeze is over and
the Oregon monsoon is back,” Hester observed as he paused in front of her desk
to brush water from each sleeve. “And if you plan to shake like a dog, step
back five paces!”

“I’ve always preferred snow,
personally,” Darrow muttered. He looked up. “Hey, tell me the name of your
children’s librarian. Linda, uh, Smiley or something like that?”

“Linda Dimple. And you’ll find
her by turning left at Oscar over there, then look for the desk next to the
cardboard T-Rex. Why? Need a Teri June fix?”

“Terry who?”

“June. Teri June. That’s ‘Teri,’
with one ‘r’ and one ‘i’. Never mind. Inside joke. Anything I can do for you,
neighbor?”

“Say, do you have a coffee break
coming anytime soon? I foraged for lunch from a couple of vending machines and
I’m in vicious need of caffeine that doesn’t come from freeze-dried flavor
crystals. Buy you a cup?”

Ten minutes later, they sipped
lattes in the glassed-in Starbucks pavilion overlooking the red tiles and
fountains of Pioneer Courthouse Square. Outside, poncho-clad skateboarders with
pierced noses ignored the “no skateboarding” signs. The rain had turned to a
typical February drizzle.

“But surely the booster shoe had
been removed by Bob Newall or one of his men,” Hester insisted after Darrow
recounted his interview with Pim. “I’m sure there’s a perfectly simple
explanation for it being off the gas pedal.”

“No, sorry, I talked to Newall
before I left the garage. He checked with his two mechanics and none of them
have worked on the bookmobile’s throttle or touched the booster shoe since last
November when they did an overhaul. It’s all recorded neatly in a little log
book.”

Darrow arched an eyebrow, then
added, “I was hoping you might provide that ‘perfectly simple explanation’.”

 Understanding the routine
necessities, Hester had already given Darrow her ironclad alibi: She’d spent
most of the weekend with her parents at their Oregon Coast cottage, as several
of their neighbors could attest. Her mind reeled as she stirred her latte. The
coffee aroma usually helped to revive her in the late afternoon, but this time
she was befuddled. Through a droplet-coated window, she watched a skateboarder
leap off a rain-slickened ledge.

She suddenly realized Darrow was
speaking again.

“...and so I talked to a few
other employees in the building where Ms. Pimala works, two of whom recalled
that she recently loudly threatened to ‘go postal,’ as she phrased it, and
‘take out the whole damn administration’ after she apparently was passed over
for a pay raise. Know anything about that?”

Hester looked dumbfounded for a
moment and then rolled her eyes.

“Oh, for goodness sakes, I can’t
believe they’d bring that up!” She sipped at her coffee before leveling her
gaze impatiently at Darrow. “It’s like this. In December, Pim’s trailer was
flooded when the Sandy River overflowed its banks. It was a big expensive mess
for her, on top of just having paid her property taxes, which go up every time
some dot-commer builds another starter mansion up the road from her. We all
know it’s been a big burden to her. Dear old Pim isn’t one to suffer things
quietly, I’m afraid. Anyway, she was really hoping for a pay raise or a
promotion this year. And yes, she might have said something ill-advised in
hindsight. But good Lord, we all make jokes. It’s a coping mechanism.”

Darrow shrugged apologetically. “Just
asking.”

“Now you tell me how you can be
so sure the booster shoe was the murder weapon. Surely it couldn’t have left
that – that clear a mark on Miss Duffy’s head? I can’t say I noticed anything.”

“You’d be surprised,” Darrow said
soberly, blowing on his coffee and taking a sip. Suddenly distracted, he put
his cup down with a frown and reached across a counter to grab more sugar
packets. In a practiced move, he held three together, ripped off the ends and
dumped the contents into his steaming cup.

“Sweet tooth?” Hester inquired
with veiled amazement.

 “You’d think they could put more
than half a teaspoon in these stupid little envelopes,” he grumbled, showering
the table with a confetti of torn paper. After furiously stirring with a wooden
stick, then tasting, he spoke again, with renewed fervor.

“Yes, there’s more to it. The
grooves in the aluminum hadn’t been cleaned. Whoever did it was careless, or
almost got caught, or just didn’t care about whether we identified the weapon.
The stuff in the grooves might just be mud, but I really don’t think so. We
have it in the lab now, for comparison of the tissue residue to Miss Duffy’s
DNA and to match the hair strands that were readily apparent.”

Hester sucked in her breath. “And
if it matches?”

Darrow looked past her, his eyes
on the skateboarders swooshing silently beyond the glass. “Look, I shouldn’t
even be talking to you, and I hope you understand this is just between you and
me. But somehow I don’t think old Ethel quite fits the profile. Maybe it’s
those shirts she wears.”

A small grin cracked his stony
features. Hester put a hand to her mouth to suppress a giggle. “She doesn’t
like
you
, you know.”

Darrow feigned surprise. “Doesn’t
like me? Well, how do you like that? I think
she’s
a pip.”

He slapped his hand on the table,
launching a little snowstorm of spilled sugar into the air. Then suddenly
looking about, he jumped up, dug into a pants pocket and came out with a wad of
crinkled bills. He peeled off two singles, dropped them on the shop’s counter,
fished a saucer-sized chocolate-chip cookie from a jar, broke off half and
handed it to Hester as he sat back down. He spoke quietly.

“But the fact remains that if
that thing’s the murder weapon, her fingerprints are the only ones on it. All
that’s needed is a good motive and my options disappear. And one thing is
becoming pretty clear: Your friend was a little resentful of her bosses.”