Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries)

by B. B. Cantwell

  “Well, they think Teri June writes about things that should be private. You know, mother-daughter talks, that kind of thing.”

  “As if every family was ‘Ozzie and Harriet.’ ”

  “Preaching to the choir, Karen,” Hester responded in a lilting sing-song. She had participated in this conversation before.

  “Sorry, Hest, I know. But those WWCACers make me crazy,” Karen admitted. She gazed up the long staircase. “I really came in to get some interior design books. Steve has this weird idea about turning our third guest room into an aviary. I wish the Arts Room wasn’t on the fourth floor.”

  “You can take the elevator,” Hester said, pointing a pencil.

  “And be trapped in it for life? Never!” Karen said, resolutely starting up the marble steps.

  Grand Central’s elevator was another ancient fixture. It often stalled between floors. A periodic feature on the elevator wall was a hand-scrawled sign: “ABANDON HOPE ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE.” The maintenance staff waged an ongoing battle with whoever put up the sign, and had yet to claim victory. The sign, Hester saw, was up again.

  Proud Portlanders built the big library in the late 1800s. The design was based partly on New York Public Library, with an ornate facade and huge, beautiful rooms. The structure was actually two buildings in one. The public rooms were built around a central core, known as “the Stacks.” This core, open to staff only and crammed with books, had two to three floors for every one public floor. Nearly two-thirds of the library collection was jammed into the Stacks. With iron-grate floors and a series of short connecting staircases, the 10 floors of stacks were always a highlight of any library tour.

  Hester settled into her chair and looked around for patrons. Things were slow this morning. Probably fallout from yesterday’s ice storm. From her vantage point, just to the left of the staircase, Hester could see into the Fiction Room. Just as she was wondering if she might get a chance to grab something to read, a second wave of patrons pushed open the doors.

  After directing visitors up the stairs to Business, Social Sciences and Periodicals, Hester came face to face with Paul Kenyon.

  “So you finally got a promotion,” he said with a smirk that bordered on a leer.

  “Just a temporary reassignment, until the bookmobile is back on the road,” Hester replied coldly.

  “Probably by the end of the week, I should think,” Paul said. “We’ve pretty much done everything we can in there. It’s up to the boys at the lab now.”

  “We?” Hester asked, sucked in to the conversation by Paul’s curious remark.

  “Oh, I’m just giving the police a little help,” Paul said with a smug smile. “Mother is the one who actually volunteered me, of course. And with my background in police methods and as a member of the ‘Friends,’ I wanted to help. Besides, the Police Bureau can use all the help it can get. One of Portland’s worst murders in years and they have a rookie on the case. A new guy named Darrold or something like that. Mother is furious.”

  Hester was dazed by this information. “Do they have a suspect yet?” she asked.

  Paul looked grim for a moment. “It’s early days yet, Hest,” he said.

  The undeserved familiarity made Hester grit her teeth, but just as she was going to say something, Mrs. Kenyon’s shoes click-clacked across the marble floor and she claimed Paul’s attention.

  “Paul, have you confirmed the hall for tonight?”

  Marge Kenyon acknowledged Hester's presence with a curt nod. Turning back to Paul, she nattered, “Have you notified The Oregonian?” Without waiting for a reply she reached deep into the leather tote she carried and produced a sheaf of gray fliers edged heavily in black.

  “These are to be handed out to library patrons today,” she instructed Hester as she plopped the stack on the counter. “Come along, Paul, we still have business to do.”

  Paul gave his arm to his mother and a bemused smile to Hester as the duo sailed out the front door.

  “Women Who Care About Children Emergency Meeting” blazed in bold type across the somber, shaded page. “In Memory of Sara Priscilla Duffy, WWCAC will meet tonight at 7 p.m. at the Mumfrey Mansion to discuss a fitting tribute. The public is welcome.”

  Hester picked up her phone and called the administration office. The library did not “distribute” anything for anyone. There was a table out front where groups could leave fliers for people who might want to take one. Hester’s call confirmed that these could go on the table. She would put them there at the end of her shift, in another hour.

  An arm reached over the desk and plucked up a flier. “That woman is making an enemy,” Linda Dimple said with quiet determination.

  “What did she do in Children’s?” Hester asked, leaning closer to Linda.

  “Told me that harassing members of WWCAC wouldn’t be tolerated...that social disobedience was to be expected when, quote, ‘crude and pornographic materials were being forced into the hands of innocent children.’ And that my job would be under review if I stepped over some imaginary line...”

  “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.

  Chapter Seven

  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 closel
y, 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?”

  Chapter Eight

  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 hindsi
ght. 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.”