B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery

by B. B. Cantwell

  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 re
volver 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.

  By the time Hester had filled Darrow in on the afternoon’s latest discovery with the McLoughlin Collection, cold grease stains had spread across the bottom of the cardboard pizza box like nimbus clouds across a March sky.

  Darrow gave a long, low whistle.

  “Pomp Charbonneau is a name I really didn’t need to have come up in my dinnertime conversation, I have to tell you, Miss Marple,” Darrow said.

  “I’ll kick you in the shins if you call me that again,” Hester said coquettishly, but with a steely cast in her eye that Darrow couldn’t miss.

  “Guess how I spent my whole afternoon,” he continued. “Running all over Greater Portland trying to find our friend Pomp Charbonneau.”

  He shook his head at the recollection.

  “We did figure out that he’s a swing-shift printer at The Oregonian, but when I dropped by there the deputy publisher who saw ‘All The President’s Men’ a few too many times got all First Amendment on me and demanded a warrant before they’d even give me the guy’s phone number. So I cruised out to Newberg to visit the address we dug up from state tax records only to find it was one of those private mailbox centers in a strip mall between a KFC and a nail salon. I got pepperoni tonight because I needed something to help get the ‘bucket o’ chicken’ smell out of my sinuses after sitting outside the stupid mailbox place for two hours hoping the guy would stop in to pick up his Publisher’s Clearing House mailer. He could already be a millionaire, you know, and he doesn’t even seem to care.”

  Darrow sighed and took a long swallow of his beer. “Mmm, that came out pretty nicely,” he murmured appreciatively to the ceiling before continuing.

  “So now, Hester, from what you tell me, it sounds like Charbonneau not only might know something about the gun that killed Pieter van Dyke, but might somehow also be mixed up in, what, the counterfeiting of a valuable library artifact? Some sort of stamp-collector’s envelope thingy that once belonged to van Dyke’s father?”

  Darrow looked into her blue eyes with that gaze that Hester found hard to take calmly.

  “These are some really weird tea leaves we’ve got to read here, wouldn’t you say?” he said with finality.

  Hester, who had been taking it all in with her chin in her hand, finally spoke up.

  “OK, I can see that because Charbonneau is a printer he could have faked the first day cover – but why add a third person? And how in Hades did he make the switch? I vaguely recall Pim telling me he is a master printer and uses an art-quality technique of some kind… But, I’ve met him. He’s not master-criminal material. It was the third guy in the boat that tipped us off it was a fake.”

  “Lord knows, an accomplice inside?” Darrow said. “But first tell me how much that first-day cover was worth – the original. Was it worth stealing?”

  Hester blanched and bit her lip.

  Darrow knitted his brow and peered at her. “Hester?”

  “Oh, dear, this isn’t going to play well for the library, I’m afraid,” she said. “But I suppose it’s going to come out one way or another now.”

  Darrow waited silently, drawing rings in the condensation on his beer bottle as he waited for her to go on.

  Drawing a deep breath, Hester forged on.

  “You know this isn’t my department but it doesn’t take long to figure out that considering the value of some of the artifacts in the McLoughlin Collection, the library has woefully underinvested in security.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Darrow said, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger. “Come on, let’s have the bad news.”

  “Well, it’s nothing definitive, but my Dad knows a stamp dealer out by Lloyd Center, so I gave him a call this afternoon and he happened to have heard about a recent auction of one of the few other ‘Flying Canoe’ covers,” Hester said.

  Gulping, she added, “It sold for six figures. He was pretty sure it was over $250,000.”

  Chapter 15

  By the time he left his job in the color-camera back shop at The Oregonian that night, Pomp Charbonneau had solved several mini-crises that had threatened to stop the Friday morning newspaper from going to press.

  The sports editor had been tearing out what little was left of his hair because a centerpiece photo of an Oregon Ducks athlete had made the team colors appear to be brown and orange instead of green and yellow.

  But the full-page Meier & Frank department store ad in which the men’s briefs looked Pepto-Bismol pink was the biggest challenge. Nobody was going to pay for that, and it meant thousands to the newspaper.

  As usual, the bosses had turned to their best print-shop wizard to save the day.

  On his 45-minute drive home, Charbonneau made a quick stop at his private mailbox and was pleased to find another order from a Portland artist for 25 giclée prints of the oil paintings she made featuring montages of balsamroot blossoms, a prolific wildflower that carpeted hillsides on the sunny side of the Columbia Gorge.

  The headlights of his old truck reflected on the silvery sides of his trailer and in the eyes of a big raccoon as he pulled to a stop at the edge of a Willamette Valley vineyard. Looking up, he saw the seven stars of the Pleiades pulsing in and out of focus in the darkening sky.

  Charbonneau stepped inside briefly, rummaged through his tiny fridge, pulled out a homemade venison meat pie, popped it into the propane oven, and then set a plate of yesterday’s leftovers on the front step for the raccoon before crossing his clearing to a small barn.

  After a steamy shower in the bathroom he’d plumbed himself, he rubbed a towel over his dark, wet hair and pulled it back into a ponytail as he stepped into the cool sanctuary of his winery, which occupied half the barn.

  Sniffing happily at the heady sour-tart aroma of fermenting grapes, Charbonneau picked an old canoe paddle off a hook on the wall, lifted a net of cheesecloth from atop a stainless steel vat and vigorously stirred, breaking up the cap of grape skins and pulp that had floated to the top of his newest red.

  While others used special metal paddles purchased from wine-supply warehouses for this daily chore, Pomp preferred the old wooden paddle he had used on many a canoe trip exploring sloughs along the lower Columbia. That it might not be perfectly sterile, perhaps explaining why several of his wines had gone “off,” mattered less to him than the character it added.

  Replacing the cheesecloth over the vat, he stopped at a small table, polished a wineglass with a cotton towel, then pulled a bung from a pu
rple-stained oak barrel and used a pipette “thief” to pull a sample of merlot and transfer it to the glass.

  He held the glass up to the single light bulb hanging from above, swirled the ruby liquid and then took a deep, satisfying sniff before stepping back into the other half of the barn and pulling the door securely closed behind him.

  The rest of the barn was divided into two quarters: his print shop and his collection room.

  This was the latter. He plopped down in an old leather recliner to sip his wine and admire the wall hung with oiled iron animal traps, more canoe paddles of all sizes, tomahawks from the Shoshone Tribe, ancient snowshoes, and his collection of vintage firearms – all authentic. The library had its McLoughlin Collection. This was the Charbonneau Collection.

  Nearest his chair was a rough wooden wall of framed photos of his four ex-wives and eight children. His first wife bore him no offspring, or there’d have been more.

  “Ah, you slacker, you,” he said to her photo as he swirled the wine under his nose.

  Charbonneau’s one big regret was that he didn’t see more of his kids. He scanned their framed school photos. At top were the oldest, Pomp Jr., Sacajawea and Clark, a trio of dashing, dark-eyed teens. Next were Wife No. 3’s preteen offspring, T.J. (for Thomas Jefferson), and the girl, Montana. At the bottom were Wife No. 4’s little girl, Dakota, and the preschool twins, Jean and Baptiste.

  Also there: framed mementos, such as a sample of the $2 bills he had printed up and regularly handed out to the homeless back in D.C. before some Starbucks cashier had noticed she had a till full of bills on which Thomas Jefferson sported a Snidely Whiplash mustache.

  About that time, Wife No. 4 had thrown him out, so Charbonneau had decided it might be a good idea to move to the West Coast before the Secret Service tracked him down. When he scanned a map, the nearby community of Charbonneau, Oregon, had originally drawn him to the Portland area.