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

by B. B. Cantwell

  Darrow, in a beery haze, looked as if he was digesting the story and about to say something profound, but instead stifled a small hiccup and announced, “In third grade we had a gerbil in our classroom – you know, one of those little ratty, hamster kind of animals? And we took turns taking it home for the weekend, to take care of it. Name was Cindy. But when I took it home, it escaped from its little cage somehow. For months, my mother kept finding little nests of shredded newspaper in the back of closets, but we never did find Cindy.”

  He concluded with a tiny burp and a melancholy smile.

  Hester rolled her eyes. “Has anybody ever told you you’re a big help?”

  He looked at her with watery eyes and offered a bowl of pretzels from which he’d been snacking. Hester, shaking her head, rose and gathered empty takeout cartons from the table, tossed them in a trash bin under the sink and grabbed a wet sponge to wipe a puddle of congealed peanut sauce from the table.

  “You know that we picked up Charbonneau, right?” Darrow asked, hoisting his now-warm third beer and rocking back on two legs of the kitchen chair. “Dumb bastard made a royal mess of a nice vineyard out in the West Valley.”

  He paused to sip at the beer as Hester, spying a lemon in a fruit bowl on the counter, grabbed a knife and cut a slice to squeeze into her iced tea.

  “Well, he admits he printed the faked postage-stamp and envelope, but he says he was hired to do it by Pieter van Dyke, who wanted a replica of his father’s most-prized possession. For sentimental reasons.”

  Hester, swirling the ice cubes in her tea, tried not to peer at Darrow’s curly brown chest hairs, clearly visible where his robe was now gaping open. From the living room TV, she could hear muffled snatches of Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson chatting in an old spy caper that Darrow hadn’t turned off. On the kitchen counter, a small electric fan rotated on its stand with a redundant clicking and whirring that stirred the air briefly every time it turned her way.

  Nate, finding solace in venting his frustrations, wasn’t finished.

  “The heck of it is that by putting his great-granddaddy in the canoe and signing his own name, he probably skates around a counterfeiting charge because the law applies only if you make a copy that can’t be readily told apart from the real thing,” Nate said with a chuckle of grudging admiration.

  Hester sighed and shook her head. “And even Eldon Purdy, my most annoying library patron, declared it a laughable fake!”

  They shared ironic smiles. Then another thought crossed Hester’s face.

  “But if he made the replica as a keepsake for Pieter, what was the copy doing in the McLoughlin Collection? There’s no denying that a collector’s item potentially worth a small fortune is missing!”

  Darrow cocked his forefinger at her like he was firing a pistol. “Exactly, Miss Marple!”

  Hester gave him her best scowl and backhanded Darrow on the shoulder as he did a grinning duck and cover. Jumping from his chair, pouring the warm beer into the sink, then grabbing a cold one from the fridge and popping the cap in one swift move, he elaborated.

  “Get this. Our Francophile friend claims van Dyke was the scheming crook in the whole affair. He tells a cockamamie story about how the library president had sold the real first-day cover to a deep-pockets Japanese collector, banked the money and just wanted the copy as a substitute in the library collection.”

  Hester gasped at the suggestion. “Oh, dear, does he have any way to prove that?”

  “Well, we’re looking at van Dyke’s bank records, but if it’s true and he had any sense at all it probably went to someplace in the Cayman Islands where they aren’t too fussy about reporting to the IRS.”

  “Oh – what about the whole thing with the French pistol?” Hester interjected.

  “That I haven’t worn him down on yet. He’s trying to play it innocent. I thought I’d give him today to stew about it and then drop in on him tomorrow for another chat, and I’m taking my thumbscrews.” He gave a diabolical leer.

  “It’s a shame you have to work on a Sunday, Mr. de Sade, and with the weather so lovely,” Hester riposted.

  She paused in thought for a moment, then continued with a shy grin.

  “If you have to spend the day at the salt mines, why don’t you give yourself a break in the evening and have dinner at my place. I’m making chicken curry – nice and spicy; it’s a strangely satisfying thing for a hot day. And I like to do a giant platter of chilled watermelon, fresh pineapple and kiwi fruit on the side. It’s the perfect complement.”

  Darrow gave her a long and appreciative gaze, then self-consciously pulled his robe tighter.

  “That sounds like a wonderful way to end a long day after slaving over medieval torture devices, Ms. McGarrigle. Count me in.”

  Chapter 21

  Sunday, June 16

  Sunday dawned without a cloud. A laser-like sunbeam streaming through a crack in the bedroom curtains awakened Hester early.

  She took a moment to come out of a dream in which she’d been swimming in Diamond Lake, up in the Cascade Mountains, where her family used to vacation. In her dream, she’d gotten a stitch in her side and was sinking into the water, with pressure building and building in her chest. It wasn’t pleasant but somehow it wasn’t frightening because in her dream she somehow knew she could wake up and it would just be a dream.

  Her eyes popped open.

  “Oh, it’s you. I should have known.”

  Bingle T. was perched high on Hester’s chest, his big green eyes gazing unblinkingly into hers. Somehow, it seemed, he could will her awake. And the weight of the big Maine Coon had given her the drowning dream more than once.

  The cat made no sound but calmly reached out a tufted paw and gently poked Hester’s forehead.

  “Yes, it’s after dawn so it must be breakfast time, I know how you think, fishbreath,” she murmured.

  Slipping out from under the puffy white comforter that was her only bedding in the summer months and pulling on her fuzzy pink slippers, Hester parted the chrysanthemum-print curtains and sucked in a breath at the morning’s brilliance. She pushed the window wider and took a deep lungful of the sweet morning air.

  No cars yet buzzed up Everett Street. The only sound was the call of a sparrow in one of the big-leaf maples lining the street and the cheerful ring of a bicycle bell. Hester looked down and waved as Mr. Manicotti from Apartment 302 pushed his old three-wheeled Schwinn out to the sidewalk and pedaled off toward a favorite coffee shop.

  “This is it!” Hester exclaimed, turning back to Bingle T. “It’s Rose Garden Breakfast Day!”

  Hester’s mother had started the tradition years ago as a mother-daughter outing that had turned into a happy annual event. Once school was out, they’d wait for the first cloudless June day and take a breakfast picnic up the hill to Portland’s famous International Rose Test Garden in Washington Park.

  They’d get there early, long before the crowds, spread a blanket and have the garden all to themselves, with the roses at peak bloom scenting the morning air with every imaginable variation of sweet aroma.

  Now that her parents had retired to a comfy cottage on the Oregon Coast, Hester occasionally invited a friend. But spontaneity was part of the pleasure, so usually she just took Bingle T.

  It was barely 8 a.m. when she parked in an empty hillside lot and looked out with pleasure over the sprawling rows of flowering rose bushes and the view beyond of the city skyline and snowy Mount Hood.

  Bingle T. appeared out from under a seat, where he usually hid while the car was in motion. Hester clipped a line on to the small dog harness the big cat wore for such outings, though Hester never used the “d” word when squeezing him into it.

  Wearing some old black jeans and a favorite tie-dyed T-shirt, she gathered up her wicker picnic basket, stocked with a Thermos of coffee, a fresh orange, slices of Granny Smith apple, and the main course: a footlong maple bar she’d picked from the bakery case at Rose’s, a 23rd Avenue legend specializing
in Paul Bunyan-sized baked goods. As the Oregonian’s food critic had once put it, a shipment of Rose’s cinnamon rolls could “solve the problem of Third World hunger in one swell foop.”

  “I don’t know about foops, but the baked goods are pretty swell,” Hester told Bingle T. as she broke off a corner of maple-glazed pastry and dunked it in coffee.

  From answering questions on Reference Line, Hester knew that Portland’s fascination with roses reached back to the highbrow tastes of the city’s upper classes in the 1890s. By 1905, Portland had 200 miles of rose-bordered city streets, which helped attract visitors to the Lewis and Clark Centennial celebration that year. Washington Park’s rose garden originated with a World War I effort to save the finest strains of hybrid roses grown in Europe lest they be lost in the bombing.

  As was tradition, Hester had spread her blanket on the grass next to a planting of the current year’s All-America Rose Selections. For 1996, that included, appropriately, a rose named Mount Hood – a grandiflora that sprawled like a snowdrift of perfect, cone-shaped white blooms.

  Bingle T. didn’t particularly like being on a leash. He usually did his best to discourage Hester from taking him on what she called “walkies” by constantly wrapping his line around fence posts, parking meters, or, in this case, rose bushes. On one memorable outing to a park that had peacocks, a peacock’s sudden bugling call sent the big cat rocketing 15 feet up a Douglas fir until he reached the end of his leash. Hester had no alternative but to yank him back down, inch by inch, as if she was hauling in a boat anchor. The term “like herding cats” held a special poignancy for her.

  But her feline companion, his leash tied to a nearby stair railing, had now settled down under a planting of crimson-red Chrysler Imperial, the All-America Rose of 1953. He alternately nibbled grass and chewed on his own special breakfast of Kitty Snax while Hester sipped her coffee and pondered the mystery of Pieter van Dyke.

  Did his murder really have something to do with shady dealings at the library? The business with the faked first-day cover sounded awfully fishy. And the fact that the murder weapon was a replica of a pistol owned by this Charbonneau character didn’t do anything to steer suspicion away from him.

  Hester also realized that if the pistol replica had been kept at Fort Vancouver, Charbonneau might easily have had access to it – and, unlike many people, would have known how to use it.

  “But why use a weapon that would so easily point to him?” she asked her furry breakfast partner, pausing only to yank him away from digging under an orange hybrid tea rose called – coincidentally – Bing Crosby (All-America Rose, 1981).

  As she watched a jet contrail tracking into the blue sky from the direction of Portland International Airport, Hester’s wandering mind also flashed back to Dabney Pensler’s stress attack that had conveniently sent him home when the first-day cover fraud was discovered. Nobody had better access to the McLoughlin Collection. Could the fussy pince nez conceal the face of a criminal?

  Pausing from her breakfast, Hester dug into her bag for the old Pentax Spotmatic that used to be her father’s favorite camera. Over the years, roses at their peak of bloom had become one of Hester’s sentimental favorite photo subjects. She’d shoot the flowers in black-and-white, make prints at the public lab at Portland State University and then hand-color them, giving an arty 1920s look. They would be cards and framed gifts to friends and family through the year. Her mother kept prodding her to stage a gallery show.

  As she happily focused and snapped her way along a row, her mind kept mulling the mystery.

  There’s the whole question of the weird ritualistic way van Dyke was killed. Was there really some cult involved?

  “It sure seems like the Rajneeshees keep cropping up!” she said aloud, her cheeks pinking when she realized she’d caught the attention of an early-rising pair of octogenarians who now peered at her over a nearby row of coppery-orange blossoms called Singin’ in the Rain (1995).

  “Come along, Horace, it’s when they start talking to themselves that they become dangerous,” said the sweater-wrapped female half of the duo, whose blue-rinsed pincurls closely matched a lavender-hued floribunda behind her.

  But was there really a ritual involved here, Hester wondered? Maybe someone just held a terrible grudge against van Dyke and didn’t just want him dead but wanted him dead and humiliated. Staking out a pasty, somewhat potbellied middle-aged man in a spread-eagled pose in his underpants was certainly humiliating.

  Or maybe it wasn’t just a humiliating pose. Hester’s mind reeled as she thought back to her Art History classes at the University of Washington, where one of her professors was a Leonardo da Vinci nut. What if Pieter van Dyke had been posed like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, in some strange message only a master of symbology might understand?

  “No, that sounds too much like the plot of a bad novel where the answer can be found only by holding ‘The Last Supper’ up to a mirror and counting the disciples,” Hester admitted sheepishly to herself.

  As she put away her camera, Hester realized that she hoped, somehow, the murderer wasn’t Pim’s friend Charbonneau. She felt an inexplicable need for Pim to forgive Nate Darrow.

  “Why do people always feel the need for one friend to like another friend?” she groaned aloud, turning just in time to see Lavender Pincurls looking owlishly back her way while poking her finger in Horace’s back to prod him to move faster toward their Buick in the nearby lot.

  Of course, there was also the strange coincidence about the Rose Medallion being found by someone linked to one of Pieter van Dyke’s law partners. And was there really anything to learn from the medallion, evidence-wise? She made a mental note to quiz Nate Darrow about that.

  Also not to be forgotten was Gerhard Gerbils’ mysterious admonishment to Darrow at the Wiener Dog. Did van Dyke have any enemies who were recently released from prison?

  Too many questions. And too big a maple bar. Hester wrapped up the leftovers, stashed everything in her picnic basket, untied her cat and headed for home.

  Chapter 22

  Harry Harrington and his wife had just left the old stone St. James Lutheran Church on the leafy downtown park blocks when the pocket of Harry’s green herringbone suit started burbling.

  “Hang on a second, Harriet, it’s that doggone new gizmo,” Harry said to his spouse, a sallow-faced, 54-year-old, 100-pound CPA whose wheat-colored hair hid in a pillbox hat above her pumpkin-colored linen blazer and skirt. The pair had met at a Willamette University sorority party 30 years earlier and thought the combination of their names was so funny they had no choice but to wed.

  Harrington finally wrestled the phone from his pocket and hit the button to answer.

  Harry wasn’t adept with the new phone. Besides the IBM Selectric typewriter he still used to write reports, his closest brush with anything “high-tech” was during his days of using a walkie-talkie in the Navy. So whenever he spoke into the new phone he held it out in front of him and spoke loudly, with careful enunciation.

  “YES, NATE, WHAT IS IT?”

  “Listen, Harry, sorry to bug you on Sunday, I know you’re probably only just getting out of church, but there’s a loose end we need to follow on van Dyke.”

  “WELL, NATE, LIKE MY MOTHER ALWAYS USED TO SAY, ‘SORRY DOESN’T BUTTER THE PARSNIPS!’ BUT WHAT DO YOU NEED, BUDDY?”

  “I’m heading out to Hillsboro to interview that Charbonneau clown again, but I wonder if you could check if there might be anybody who van Dyke or his family made an enemy of, in their legal profession, who got sent to prison and maybe just got released.”

  Harrington, having listened with the phone pressed to his ear, again held it out in front of him.

  “OH, I GET IT, NATE, YOU’RE THINKING SOME EX-CON MIGHT HAVE HAD A MOTIVE TO OFF VAN DYKE?”

  “Well, you never know. Maybe a check of prison release records…”

  “I DON’T HAVE TO CHECK PRISON RECORDS, I CAN TELL YOU OFF THE TOP OF MY HEAD. YOU GOTTA REMEMBER, YOU’R
E WORKING WITH A GUY WHO’S BEEN AROUND THIS TOWN A WHILE. AND IT HAPPENS I READ IN THE PAPER THAT ONE OF THE HEAD RAJNEESHEES INVOLVED IN THAT SALAD BAR POISONING, MA ANAND CARLA, GOT OUT TWO WEEKS AGO.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’m sure that got our chief all hot and bothered, but what does that have to do with van Dyke?”

  “WELL YOU MIGHT ASK, WHAT DOES THAT HAVE TO DO WITH VAN DYKE?” Harrington smirked. He loved to show off his near-encyclopedic knowledge of the Oregon legal system, which Nate was quickly learning to value.

  “Yes, Harry.” Darrow put on his patient voice. “I did ask.”

  “WELL, NATE, IT SO HAPPENS HER APPEAL WAS ONE OF THE LAST CASES THAT WENT BEFORE OLD JUDGE VAN DYKE, PIETER’S GRANDFATHER, BEFORE HE RETIRED FROM THE SUPREME COURT IN SALEM. HE SPOKE OUT STRONGLY FOR CONVICTION AND WAS PRETTY MUCH CREDITED FOR SEEING SHE GOT LOCKED UP FOR 10 YEARS. HER 10 YEARS WERE UP LAST WEEK.”

  The phone line was silent as Darrow took this in.

  “OK, well that’s a connection, I’d say. But how likely is it that she’d hold that big a grudge against the judge’s grandson?”

  “WELL, MAYBE YOU DIDN’T FOLLOW THE RAJNEESHEE STORY AS CLOSELY AS I DID, BUT YOU NEED TO KNOW THAT MA ANAND CARLA WAS MORE LOOP-DE-LOO THAN ANY OF THEM, AND BOY DID SHE HAVE A MOUTH ON HER. WHEN THE OLD MAN READ HIS JUDGMENT SHE GOT UP IN COURT AND SAID – AND I QUOTE – ‘I WILL COME BACK AND FUDGE UP YOUR LIFE, MISTER, AND I WILL FUDGE UP YOUR CHILDREN’S LIVES, AND YOUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN!’ ONLY THING IS, NATE? SHE DIDN’T SAY ‘FUDGE.’ ”

  Again, Darrow brooded silently for a moment.

  “Rajneeshees again. I just don’t believe this,” he said, adding a word that also wasn’t fudge. “How did we miss this connection earlier? The chief will skin us if this has anything to do with van Dyke’s murder.”

  By now, Harriet Harrington was plucking at Harry’s sleeve and pointing to her watch to remind him they had a date for mimosas with the pastor and his wife. Harry was glad he had an excuse to beg off. The pastor’s wife always used the cheapest frozen orange juice in her mimosas. Harry claimed it was made using nothing but pits and peels.