Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (9 page)

“I was one of those teenagers
with a backpack and a Eurailpass. A buddy and I spent the summer after high
school, along with half the rest of the American teenage population in 1976.
Paprika has been one of my favorite seasonings ever since.”

An eyebrow arched, Hester reached
to the window sill and lifted a large crystal goblet of pear-colored
chardonnay. “Have you eaten? Lord knows I always have leftovers. My
grandmother’s old recipes make enough for a family of 10. I’ve yet to learn to
cook for one.”

“Uh, thanks, I already Escaped
from New York. Though, uh, a little taste never hurt.” He looked around the
kitchen. Atop the refrigerator sat a blooming purple primrose with the
supermarket price sticker still on the plastic pot. “Uh, I don’t suppose you
have a cold beer for a parched public servant?”

Hester curtly nodded. “Fridge.”
Hoisting a huge stainless steel spoon and stirring the bubbling pork
concoction, she stole a glance at Darrow’s waist as he kneeled to pull a Blue
Heron Pale Ale from the refrigerator’s lower shelf. A silvery detective’s
shield peeked from a leather flap snapped around his belt.

“Good thing you’re out running in
the mornings or you’d have to get your arteries rootered out before you’re 50,
the things you eat.”

“Ah, but life’s too short to eat
boiled bulgur. Had a housemate in college who hardly ate anything else. Biggest
bore in Eugene.” He smiled. “Uh, say, I brought you a little present.”

Nate nodded at the package as he
popped the cap from his beer. Hester knit her brows and pushed a steam-limpened
curl out of her eyes. She took the package and ripped open the paper.

“A can of Barbasol?” She looked
quizzically at Darrow. He sat low in the chair, his arms and legs crossed,
smirking.

“After you, uh, ran into me at
the meeting last night, I thought maybe you could use that.” He chuckled. “That
moustache was terrible!”

“Oh.” Hester’s face reddened
again. “That.”

“I know – wicked to remind you.
But you blush so well.”

“Humph.”

“Interesting group, wasn’t it?”

“You know they would have clammed
up in a minute if my friend and I had shown up without any kind of disguise. We
just wanted to find out what they were plotting in revenge for – for what
happened to Miss Duffy.”

Mulling this, Darrow propped his
feet on a stool and loosened his tartan necktie with a comfortable grunt.

“Your friend seemed pretty
steamed up about defending that children’s author. What was that all about? I’d
sort of like to talk to this Teri June person. Is she local?”

Hester whirled away from Nate and
furiously stirred at the stove. Amidst the billowing steam, she reached up to
struggle with the switch to an ancient, dusty ventilator fan, which finally came
on with a “pocketa-pocketa-pocketa.”

“Oh? Her? Um, I don’t know much
about her. She just writes silly little books for girls. Never really met
her...At least, that is, I guess we’ve talked, but I’ve never actually been
introduced.”

Hester winced and took a slurp of
wine. Damn, why couldn’t Karen just have kept her little secret?

Darrow sipped at his beer bottle,
then rolled his tongue through his lower lip.

“Talked, but not been introduced?
Look, Hester, I’m not sure just what you and your friend were really up to last
night, but I have a feeling you’re sticking your nose a little too far into
this whole situation. I know Ethel is your friend. But she’ll get her day in
court. The best way you could help her is to convince her to get a good lawyer.”

He gazed up at the droplets
collecting on the peeling yellow enamel above Hester’s stove. “Do you know she
plans to defend herself?”

Hester rapidly nodded her head in
exasperation. “Yes! And I’ve already tried to talk her out of it. To no avail.
Once she gets an idea like that, she’s like a bear with a bun.” She let out a
big sigh. “Look, have you, uh, found out anything about some silly letters Pim
might have written...?”

Darrow’s head jerked up and his
eyes widened. “And just how did you hear about that part of my investigation,
Inspector?”

“Oh, well, you know Paul Kenyon.
He talks a lot, wouldn’t you agree?” Hester smiled coquettishly.

Darrow smoldered. “Thanks a lot
to the genius downtown who put that monkey on my back.” He swigged his beer. “Well,
since you ask, yes, I checked with both
The Oregonian
and library
administration. Both confirm a history of inflammatory letters accusing Duffy
of racism. All of the letters apparently from the same well-used typewriter,
all bearing the same ‘anonymous’ signature, and I quote: ‘A Discriminated
Liberry Employee.’ But they also all bore the same return address – a P.O. box
out at Troutdale station. Seems your Pim was a stickler for obeying postal
regulations – always included a return address.”

Hester winced again. “Pim never
was exactly a rocket scientist,” she groaned.

Darrow looked pensive for a
moment, then reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a paper clearly
stamped at the top in red ink: “COPY.”

“You never saw this,” he said to
Hester as he tossed the document on the counter. “And if you tell anybody about
any part of this conversation, I’ll tell them you smoke funny cigarettes
and
I’ll turn my apartment just above you into a neighborhood homeless shelter
where I’ll teach every bum in Portland to do the flamenco. Do I make myself
perfectly clear?”

Hester nodded dumbly.

“We found this in a trash can
when we searched her trailer last night.” He spread it for Hester to read. The
type was uneven, obviously the work of an old typewriter badly in need of a new
ribbon. The letter was to the editor of
The Oregonian
.

A sentence near the bottom caught
Hester’s eye:

“That old biddy Duffy is no
bettur then oNE of them Klu Kluck Klaxoners. IN fact, she probly wearS one of
those pointed pillow cases on her head at evEry meetiNg of the Wommen who
Cain’t havE Chldren. She makEs me sick to my sTumach! She has ruint my life.”

“Oh, Pim.” Hester crossed her
arms tightly and pursed her lips. She turned to Nate.

“Look, I know this looks bad. But
this is something she didn’t even mail! She was just letting off steam. Why,
this is an awful invasion of her privacy. She was angry and hurt – more than I
realized. But 90 percent of the staff resented Miss Duffy in one way or
another. You’ve got to believe me. Pim couldn’t have killed anyone.” Her eyes
pleaded with Darrow.

He remained silent. Then he
pointed to the top of the letter. “Take a look at that.”

The date typed at the top of the
crumpled paper was the previous Saturday.

“The day Miss Duffy died!” Hester
gasped involuntarily.

Darrow nodded mutely.

Friday morning dawned sunny and
crisp. It was Hester’s half-day off. After an exhausted and luxurious sleep in
until almost 9, she caught a bus downtown and enjoyed a leisurely breakfast at
the Heathman Pub and Bakery. Large windows looked out on a corner behind the
Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall – named for the Portland steel heiress whose
largesse had bought its renovation. Across the way was a stretch of downtown’s
lovely tree-shaded Park Blocks.

In brown grass across the street,
this morning brought a peek of orange from the season’s first crocuses, hearty
survivors of the week’s weather, Hester noted with amazement from her stool at
the window counter.

Her nine-grain bagel smeared with
ricotta cheese and tart gooseberry preserves was a favorite counterpoint to the
strong Italian coffee the pub served in mugs almost as generous as their pint
ale glasses.

But this morning, Hester couldn’t
give herself up to pleasant preoccupation with The New York Times crossword or
aimless people-watching as the mix of Brooks-Brothers-clad lawyers and
Norm-Thompson-clad everybody-else rushed past on the sidewalk outside.

This morning, she pondered the
puzzle of Pim.

She had talked longer than she’d
intended with her bookmobile colleague the previous afternoon, until the jail
matron finally came and shooed Hester away so somebody else could use the room.

Hester had asked Pim to recount
her conversation with Darrow at the bookmobile barn, word-for-word as much as
she could recall. That, plus what she’d been able to pump from Darrow and read
in the paper, now filled her mind. Slowly, she tried to sort the facts.

The autopsy said Duffy had died
Saturday night – sometime between 8 p.m. and midnight, the medical examiner
believed. She had been wearing her best outfit, the blue dress that she only
ever wore for special occasions – anybody at the library could tell you that.

Yet her whereabouts earlier that
evening and what led her to the bookmobile remained a mystery. Darrow said
they’d tracked her from the time neighbors saw her leave her Rose City-district
bungalow around 5:30, then to dinner, apparently alone, at her favorite
senior-citizen smorgasbord, North’s Chuck Wagon, out on 82nd. From there, she
had disappeared.

What had she been up to? Why all
dressed up on a Saturday night? Could it be Miss Duffy had a date? Maybe
meeting a friend at the theater or a concert? Maybe even a boyfriend?

Hester realized that neither she
nor any of her colleagues had ever thought of Duffy as having a private social
life, much less a romantic side. But even nuns were known to fall in love,
sometimes with the most unlikely of suitors. Had there been a mystery man in
the retired librarian’s life? Had the relationship somehow turned ugly?

But that didn’t explain why Duffy
was found in the bookmobile. Nor why Pim’s booster shoe had been the murder
weapon. Maybe the booster shoe wasn’t what actually killed her. Maybe she’d
been killed elsewhere, with some other kind of club, then her body planted in
the bookmobile and the booster shoe clunked on her head as a red herring?

“Right, Hester,” she muttered
under her breath. “And maybe there was a mysterious one-armed man with a bad
limp, a patch over one eye and a gravelly Mediterranean accent who met Duffy in
the foundations department at Meier & Frank, dragged her into a fitting
room and had his way with her before bashing her on the head with a frozen
codfish, which he then cooked and ate for dinner, heavy on the tartar sauce.”

She sighed. She’d probably read a
few too many whodunits to be a very realistic gumshoe.

But could Duffy and Pim have
somehow met that night? Hester couldn’t shake her disbelief in the scenario.
Pim had been awfully convincing in her recollections of Saturday.

Pim said she’d spent the day
pruning roses in her garden and treating them with dormant spray, then after a
frozen pizza dinner had curled up with a video of “Ernest Goes to Camp.” She’d
even kept a receipt showing she’d returned the video Sunday morning to a nearby
Plaid Pantry. Hester had gritted her teeth as Pim explained, “I always get a
receipt when I return videos – You never know when one of them Pakistani
fellers is gonna screw up the records and claim I didn’t return one on time.”

Her neighbors didn’t think she
had gone out, but they couldn’t be sure, as they were in and out all day and
had gone to play bingo at the Troutdale American Legion that night.

Hester took a bite of her bagel
and nodded gratefully as a counter clerk offered a coffee refill.

Could Pim have called Duffy,
lured her to the bookmobile barn under some false pretense and killed her? Even
if Pim had the remotest capacity or motive for such a thing, it just didn’t
make sense.

One thing Pim had related from
Darrow’s interrogation stuck in Hester’s mind: Pim clearly recalled Darrow
saying something about the wound to the
top
of Duffy’s head.

Recalling the grisly discovery in
the bookmobile cupboard, Hester shuddered. She hadn’t gotten that clear a look
at Miss Duffy’s wound.

But if the blow clearly was to
the top of her head, Hester didn’t see how Pim could have been the one who
swung the booster shoe. Pim was 5 feet in heels – or, more accurately, 4 feet
10 in the Keds she usually sported. Miss Duffy was a willowy foot taller than
that, easily. Pim could never have reached high enough to score a telling blow
to the
top
of Miss Duffy’s head.

Besides, Pim had often protested
to Hester of the carpal tunnel syndrome in her right wrist from years of
grinding the gears on good old Bookmobile No. 3, and she often wore a brace on
that wrist. Plus, this damp time of year arthritis practically crippled her
left wrist. Her doctor would testify to that. She couldn’t have hefted that
booster shoe hard enough to hurt anybody, Hester was almost certain.

Finishing her breakfast, Hester
slid off the stool and slipped out of the cozy pub and into the chilly morning
air. Glancing at her watch, she saw she still had time for a brisk walk beneath
the Park Blocks’ towering trees to the Portland State campus and back.

Strolling past the statue of
Teddy Roosevelt on horseback and offering a smile and a nod to the elderly
Chinese ladies who always gathered there for Tai Chi exercises, Hester
continued to stew.

The only thing that did make
sense was that Duffy was at the bookmobile barn for some specific reason, and
whomever she met did her in.

So who was both familiar with the
bookmobile and had reason to want Duffy gone for good? Somehow her book banning
had to have something to do with it. That’s what had made Duffy famous,
apparently nationwide. So who had the most to lose if Sara Duffy kept doing
what she was doing?

Something was nagging Hester, an
idea trying to emerge from the back of her mind, slowing her feet as she walked
past the old stone walls of St. James Lutheran Church. As she came to a park
bench, she slowly sank onto it and watched traffic whiz past on Salmon Street.

Across the street, a businessman
emerged from his parked car. Hester watched vacantly as he went to the trunk
and pulled out a brief case, then returned to the driver’s seat to make a call
from his car, a big BMW.

The car, that’s what Karen would
lose. And the house, and the private schools, and all the little luxuries to
which she must have become accustomed as a successful author.

Hester shook her head, as if to
rid it of the awful thought. Karen couldn’t have murdered Duffy. Or could she?

What if Karen had twisted it into
some sort of libertarian crusade? Maybe she’d managed to rationalize it
somehow. Had Teri June extracted a frustrated and violent revenge in the name
of literary freedom?

Hester shivered, then looked
around and noticed a cold wind rattling the tree limbs like sabers overhead. It
was
still February. She quickly stood and strode toward Grand Central
Library.