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

by B. B. Cantwell

  Corpse of Discovery

  A

  Portland

  Bookmobile

  Mystery

  B.B. Cantwell

  Portland Bookmobile Mysteries

  available on Amazon.com

  Murdermobile

  Corpse of Discovery

  Cover illustration by Stevie Lennartson

  Text copyright © 2014 Barbara and Brian Cantwell

  All Rights Reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, organizations, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Learn more about Portland Bookmobile Mysteries at

  murdermobile.weebly.com

  For Lillian Freelove

  We hope you’ll forgive us someday

  (we could have gone with Princetta)

  Preface

  If you lived in Portland, Oregon – or many other parts of the United States – in the late 20th century, you’d remember bookmobiles.

  These big buses brought entertainment to our doorsteps – or darn close. Every Saturday or so, the bookmobile would lumber up to a nearby park or playground and open its doors to anyone with a library card, whether we were 8 or 80.

  It brought tales of faraway lands, ghoulish monsters, fantastic swordfights. It brought romance, history and adventure – before video was something that streamed, before “texting” meant anything more than sitting down with a pen and writing a story.

  If you went to grade school in Portland you’d also know the exciting history of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery.

  This story weaves all that together – along with quirky tales of the mystical Rajneeshees (who really did poison salad bars), miniature horses (which really are used as service animals), and wooden shoes (which probably would give you blisters if you wore them in a parade). This is, indeed, a work of fiction, but much of it is true.

  Oh, there’s also a murder. I served on Portland’s bookmobile, and I can tell you all about it.

  – B.B. Cantwell

  Chapter 1

  Saturday, June 8, 1996

  Portland, Oregon

  The bookmobile was starting to steam.

  “Dagnabit, this is what they get for going cheap and buying this ‘reconditioned’ thing instead of the new vehicle we were promised,” fumed Ethel Pimala, perched behind the wheel of the Miss Sara Duffy Memorial Bookmobile as it crept along Broadway in downtown Portland. The bookmobile driver’s years of working with children always showed in her tame cursing.

  Just ahead, Corvallis High School’s Spartan marching band, in elaborate chrome helmets, tootled away at the “Washington Post March.” At least their togas look well-ventilated, thought Hester Freelove McGarrigle, the bookmobile’s librarian, wiping a limp wisp of auburn hair from her perspiring brow.

  It was an unseasonable scorcher of a June day for the Grand Floral Parade, a highlight of the annual Rose Festival in a town known as Oregon’s Rose City.

  Putting the “new” Portland City Library bookmobile in the parade was the scheme of the publicity-conscious president of the Portland Pioneer Literary Society, the private organization – “our little aristocracy,” Hester called it – that contracted with the city to provide library services. The president had crowed to his board that the shiny magenta bus with its supergraphics of the late head librarian, Sara Duffy, reading to a circle of adoring children would be “boffo” exposure for the library.

  “Just how well it will play when the bookmobile blows a gasket and they have to send paramedics to rescue us from heat stroke is another question,” muttered Hester.

  The willowy, blue-eyed “Miss Marple librarian,” as the local TV stations had annoyingly dubbed her after her involvement in a local murder investigation, scurried to the rear of the bus a third time to see if she could get the jammed back window to open.

  Once more, the library board had buckled to cost constraints and gone with a bookmobile with no air conditioning. Who knew it would be 92 degrees for the Rose Parade? When Hester had agreed to dress up as pioneer Narcissa Whitman in an 1850s-era dress, complete with whalebone corset, she had assumed it would be a typical cool and showery early-June day.

  The costume was in keeping with the Rose Festival’s theme for this year: “Voyages of Discovery.” Keyed to Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery and the subsequent history of 19th-century pioneers in what was then called “Oregon Country,” the festival encouraged all Portlanders to celebrate their heritage.

  “Oh, Pim,” Hester called despairingly to her diminutive, somewhat-pineapple-shaped driver whose Filipino-Hawaiian surname, Pimala, was often shortened by friends. “My father, the band teacher, would love this, but if I have to listen to one more John Philip Sousa march, I’m going to tear off this corset and run screaming and naked into Nordstrom’s to find some classical piano – and air conditioning!”

  Pim, who had come from Hilo decades earlier to study at Portland State University before her scholarship had dried up, waggled the fronds of her woven pandanus-leaf hat, a tribute to the “Kanaka” workers from Hawaii who helped build and run nearby Fort Vancouver, the historic site where Pim volunteered for re-enactments.

  “Well, if we can’t keep this old bus moving so the fan belt runs faster, you’re not the only one who’s going to have a breakdown,” she warned.

  It didn’t help that the Literary Society’s leader had arranged to have two giant dugout canoes – “just like the ones Lewis and Clark paddled” – strapped atop the bookmobile to add “historic flavor.”

  “And about 500 more pounds to haul up Broadway,” Pim had been grumbling all morning.

  Hester remembered with alarm her first car – a stubby little blue Toyota from the 1960s with a high ceiling and truck-sized steering wheel that she had fondly called her “Mr. Magoo car.” It had been a good little car except for its penchant for overheating at stoplights on warm days. Just out of library school, she’d spent a year as an elementary-school librarian in the sun-baked Yakima Valley of Washington, where she’d carefully plotted routes to work that allowed her to turn right and circle around a block until a light changed in order to keep air flowing through the radiator.

  “Oh, dear. Pim, would it help if we turned on the heater? That’s supposed to help drain heat from the engine, isn’t it?”

  “I’ve already got it going full blast, and since the only cooling we’re getting is from these window-defroster fans, it’s getting to be a question of whether this bus melts down first or we do!” Pim replied, reaching down to unbutton the top of her Aloha shirt, part of a collection well-known among her colleagues. Today’s was hot pink with hula-dancing tropical fish and scenes of Diamond Head.

  Scanning the gauges on the “new” bus – recently retired from Ketchikan, Alaska, one of the few places in the United States where A.C. wouldn’t be considered necessary – Pim gave a low whistle.

  “We’re just edging into the red on the temp gauge. Hester, if this parade doesn’t get moving, I’m going to have to take desperate measures.”

  * * *

  Leading the parade marched the man responsible for Pim’s worries.

  Pieter van Dyke, president of the Portland Pioneer Literary Society, was also chairman of the Rose Festival. And chairman of the Oregon Zoo. And vice chairman of the Portland Art Museum. And a socially-climbing member of boards of half a dozen other influential Portland-area community groups, colleges and nonprofits.

  In his late 50s,
thick-bodied with pouchy eyes and thinning flaxen hair on a head shaped a bit like a tulip bulb, van Dyke today was celebrating his Dutch heritage – and his position as self-appointed grand marshal of the Grand Floral Parade – by marching at its head in wooden shoes.

  The impractical footwear was shared by van Dyke’s taller, grayer, pinch-faced law partner and fellow Dutchman, DeWitt Vanderpol, limping at his side. Trailing just behind, their baldheaded, bespectacled and plumply unfit junior partner, Gerhard Gerbils, sported lederhosen to reflect his German ancestry. This particular garment fit better in the lawyer’s younger days, a few thousand sausages ago. His partners joked that Gerbils’ dimpled thighs looked “the wurst for wear.”

  Gerbils’ father had changed the spelling of the family name from “Goebbels” – yes, they were related to the infamous Nazi propaganda wizard – when fleeing Germany just before Hitler invaded Poland. Much to his descendants’ consternation, old Goebbels simply Anglicized the spelling but kept the pronunciation, with the hard “G,” though the new spelling meant his descendants were often mocked as school boys for having the same name as a pet rodent.

  Van Dyke and Vanderpol didn’t often let their partner forget his distant Nazi relative, smirking together over their private joke the day they appointed Gerbils to handle the firm’s public relations.

  Gerbils thought their sense of humor mean-spirited.

  Today, van Dyke was in his element, waving happily at the crowd lining the curb and beaming with a smile that spoke of dental-chair whitening treatments.

  The parade was rounding the block to Fifth Avenue to pass in the shadow of “Portlandia,” the 34-foot Statue-of-Liberty-like copper sculpture kneeling over the entry to the neo-art-deco Portland Building. Van Dyke, always hamming it up in public, a habit dating to a high-school role in “Guys and Dolls,” threw his hand to his chest and mimicked getting skewered by the giant trident the statue brandished. Onlookers guffawed.

  “Wait till they see the bookmobile,” he shouted into Vanderpol’s ear so as to be heard over the sound of the marching bands. “Getting that reconditioned model left us enough money to hire the airbrush muralist out of Atlanta who does all the fancy graphics on the trucks that carry NASCAR teams. Old Sara Duffy never looked so good!” he said of the elderly librarian, the victim in the murder case Hester had helped solve. “That little glint in her eye? The guy actually uses diamond dust to get that effect!”

  The grandson of Vincent van Dyke, a former governor and subsequent Oregon Supreme Court justice, Pieter van Dyke had grown up watching his father, Vincent Jr. – also a lawyer – unsuccessfully run for one public office after another. Pieter’s basic life strategy was to glad-hand his way into the public’s heart. He had a reputation for throwing Portland’s most lavish high-society parties, including hosting the annual Friends of the Library New Year’s Costume Ball, the group’s premier fundraiser. Pieter always dressed as Pierrot.

  “Speaking of the good old book bus, I wonder where it ended up in the parade? I told them to put it near the front,” van Dyke told Vanderpol, as both peered over their shoulders.

  * * *

  Watching the bookmobile’s temperature needle climb every time the hot engine idled, Pim was sweating from nerves as much as from the heat.

  “I’ve got to keep this thing moving and keep that fan spinning or she’s going to boil over for sure!” she told Hester. “Hold on, I’m going through the marching band!”

  “Pim, be careful!” Hester grimaced, covering her eyes with both hands.

  Pim, who had been driving for the library for 40 years, gently goosed the accelerator and the bookmobile edged toward the waddling derrières of the Spartan band’s tuba section. Then fate took a hand. It was time for the band’s special drill, and as the drum major’s whistle shrieked, the band members pivoted to march backward, aiming straight for the oncoming 12-ton bus, whose magenta hue – the favorite color of Portland’s first head librarian – made it hard to miss.

  Pim flashed the high beams through a cloud of steam and Hester waved her long arms like a Navy signal officer working the semaphore.

  The drum major – a quick-thinking member of the Math Club – nodded his high, plumed hat, shrilled his whistle three times and waggled arms in his own special code as the band magically parted on each side of the big bus. Pistoning trombone slides narrowly missed the rearview mirrors. Pim hit the air horn in rhythm to the band’s march – Hester recognized “Stars and Stripes Forever” – and the crowd cheered at what looked like a planned bit of choreography.

  But disaster loomed.

  “Pim, look out, the sheriff’s horse patrol is stopped in front of us!” Hester warned.

  “I will not be a horse murderer!” Pim said grimly. Her love of animals started at home with her ancient cockapoo, Queen Liliuokalani.

  “Quick, take this right turn and maybe we can circle around the block and rejoin the parade after this thing has cooled off a bit!” Hester coached.

  “Just like in your old Magoo car!” Pim grinned, gunning the engine. Giving it all the leverage her 4-foot-10 physique could muster, she cranked the wheel to swing the lumbering vehicle onto Yamhill Street.

  * * *

  City father Simon Benson wanted Portland to be walkable, so downtown blocks were platted half the size of city blocks in New York.

  “Pim, we’re going to need to go several streets over if you really want to give the fan time to cool down this beast,” opined Hester, leaning out the open passenger window in an effort to get some fresh air. She reached up and yanked out a pearl-handled hair pin so her coppery tresses fell out of the pioneer bun and caught the breeze.

  Glancing in the bus’s side mirror and catching a reflection of her own slim face with strong cheekbones straining for the air currents, she suddenly felt like one of those floppy-eared dogs who just love to go for rides.

  “And I don’t give a hoot!” she thought, relishing the few cooling freshets.

  Pim leaned on the horn, ran yellow lights and sent more than one baby-jogger-pushing mother scurrying for the curb. Hester, peering down side streets, finally glimpsed the parade where it had turned a corner and headed back on a parallel course.

  “Pim, hang a left, I think there’s an opening for us!”

  The big bus bobbed and swayed, and as it leaned around the corner a few unsecured books flew from the mystery shelves.

  “OK, the needle’s dropped, thank you Goddess Pele!” said Pim, addressing the sky. “And look ahead up there at the parade, Hester, that looks like the Allee-ANCE Fran-SAY fur trappers from over at the fort,” she added, tackling the re-enactment group’s name with her usual exaggerated diction reserved for tweaking what she called “them highfalutin’ languages.”

  “Oh, are those the fellows you know from the historical park? Do you think they’ll let us barge in?”

  “Sure, that’s my buddy Pomp Charbonneau leading them! He’s a direct descendant of one of the Lewis and Clark gang. He was the guy who helped me print up those fliers for the Kanaka Village fundraising picnic. Remember, you met him that once.”

  Leading two columns of unshaven men in buckskin breeches was a wiry, raven-bearded Gaul in an eye-catching raccoon hat. And this wasn’t just the raccoon’s tail – it was a whole taxidermied raccoon, wrapped around his head. As he waved the tricolor flag of Napoleon, Pomp Charbonneau’s green eyes danced and the raccoon’s shiny marble eyes bobbed above. Its little paws waved as if in a plea for help.

  “My God!” Hester recoiled.

  * * *

  Oh, boy, is the captain going to owe me for this, Nate Darrow kept telling himself as sweat stains spread up the side of his T-shirt under the blazing sun. Across the back was the slogan “Hopped Up on Full Sail IPA,” an homage to his favorite Columbia Gorge craft brewer.

  Portland might get rain and ice in the winter, but it could also get beastly hot in the summer, Darrow had been warned as he headed into his first June in the city, after moving north from the uni
versity town of Eugene. Rivers bring some breezes, but Portland is 100 miles up the Columbia River from the cooling ocean air.

  But this was too early for this kind of heat, everyone agreed.

  As the new guy in the Portland Police Bureau detective squad – and one of few who’d come up through the ranks and had memories of “those good ol’ days of traffic duty,” he’d been reminded – Darrow had been “volunteered” to help supervise in staging the parade, one of his captain’s favorite public-service projects.

  Darrow expected it also had something to do with his “rising star” having risen too fast in his first months, when the press overplayed his part in “single-handedly” reviving the bookmobile librarian after she’d fainted at finding a body in her bookmobile.

  For this one day, it meant he was organizing 15 traffic cops, a half dozen bike patrolmen, eight meter maids, and even the horse patrol.

  Finally the first part of the parade had reached the end point, where Taylor Street crossed over the Stadium Freeway. The tall detective, with a runner’s build and a prematurely graying thatch of hair over luxuriant chestnut eyebrows and a strong aquiline nose, watched with satisfaction as a stocky, baldheaded uniformed cop in aviator sunglasses furiously waved the Rose Queen float into a church parking lot.

  In the First Aid tent at the lot’s edge, two red-faced and grimacing men in their 50s were prying off wooden shoes as they showed a nurse their blisters.

  The brassy notes of a Sousa march wafted up the block. But another sound clashed in Darrow’s ear, causing him to turn and look back down Taylor. There in the middle of the parade, a buckskin-clad man with a wild animal on his head waved his arms like a band conductor and split the ranks of mountain men marching behind him.

  And through the middle came the new Sara Duffy Memorial Bookmobile, its air horn blaring as if it were a fogbound freighter crossing the Columbia River bar.