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

by B. B. Cantwell

  Beneath Thurman Bridge find a pit, not a ridge.

  Don’t get sand in your eyes when you pick up the prize.

  Pim, her interest in the world around her suddenly revived, spoke up from the back seat.

  “Is that today’s Oregonian? Can I have a look? I couldn’t find a copy for love nor money this morning!”

  “Nobody could – not until about an hour ago. They had some sort of press breakdown. But now we’re getting mobbed by frustrated medallion hunters!” Harrington moaned. “What are we supposed to do? These people are fanatics!”

  Darrow shook his head.

  “That could mean any number of things, for God’s sake. Harry, just be sure we have enough uniforms to keep the turkeys out of our crime scene. Call for more backup, why don’t you?”

  Chapter 4

  Misty Day had never had to change her name from Gladys Frump or Mabel Crumb; the precious name her parents had given her was perfect for TV. She grew up as a cheerleader, a natural blond and a Beaverton High School valedictorian. She’d kept her figure thanks to Thighmaster, Lean Cuisine and ordering salad dressing “on the side” ever since Jimmy Carter was president. As for her still-yellow tresses? Only her hairdresser knew for sure.

  She had known her days were numbered as co-anchor at Portland’s No. 2-rated network affiliate when they hired a news director half her age – “younger than sperm,” she called the young buck fresh out of USC.

  And sure enough, not a week after her 50th birthday, he’d taken her out for lunch for the “it’s time to put you back on the beat” talk.

  Between the Chilean sea bass and the tiramisu, he’d shoveled flattery about how her “seasoned eye” and keen sense of “the pulse of Portland” made her the right person to do a series of people profiles they would call Misty’s Mavens.

  But the other shoe dropped when she learned who was taking her place at the anchor desk: an oh-so-perky 29-year-old former weather girl in a push-up bra whose “hard news” claim to fame was an exposé on pet psychics.

  So Day was hungry for a story that would help restore gravitas to her curriculum vitae.

  “And being first on air with another high-profile homicide on the Murdermobile sounds like just the thing,” she said out loud, giving each word a snap like a staple-gun as she trotted toward Detective Darrow at the edge of Forest Park. He had just waved off a squad car that was threading its way along the narrow street back toward downtown.

  She didn’t wait for any preliminaries but signaled her cameraman to roll video as she thrust her microphone in Darrow’s face.

  “Detective, is it true that the ‘Murdermobile’ is back, and this time its victim is the head of the Portland Pioneer Literary Society?”

  Darrow, caught off-guard, turned toward the camera with a look as if he’d just stepped in something he didn’t like the smell of. But Day didn’t wait for him to respond.

  “And is it true that Pieter van Dyke was not only run over by the bookmobile but was stripped naked and tortured in some sort of satanic cult ritual?”

  “WHAT?” Darrow spluttered. He hated being on TV. He always ended up looking like Eddie Haskell from “Leave it to Beaver” – if you added a 5 o’clock shadow – and sounding like Barney Fife. It just wasn’t his medium.

  “And that librarian just taken away in the patrol car – Heather Freelove Something, wasn’t it? Is she part of the ‘free love’ cult out on Sauvie Island?” Day added.

  Darrow managed to snap his jaw shut rather than let it hang in response to the preposterous questions.

  “NO, we have no – ” he stopped to draw a breath “ – no positive ID of the victim. And no comment in this early stage of the investigation,” he said, biting off the urge to bite the reporter’s head off. It would only fuel her fire.

  But that didn’t stop Misty Day, who just gave him a smirking, “Thanks, Nick.”

  Licking her lips and dropping the microphone to her side, she looked him up and down. “Hey, haven’t we passed each other on morning runs up here? I seem to remember some tight green shorts.”

  Darrow just stared back at her under eyebrows like gathering storm clouds until she waved her cameraman over to the horseshoe pit and quickly positioned herself for a stand-up. A pair of white-shirted EMTs with a gurney was preparing to load a body bag into the medical examiner’s windowless white van. After catching that wide shot, the cameraman zoomed in on four horseshoe posts, sunk deeply in the sand and still bearing hanks of duct tape, and a large dark stain marking where the body had lain between them. Next he zoomed out to focus on the reporter as she launched into her commentary.

  “So, this is Misty Day, asking questions with no answers – just yet. But I knew Pieter van Dyke personally. I lunched with him just last week – paella in the Pearl District. You all saw him lead the Rose Parade days ago in his charming wooden shoes. Somehow this minion of Portland society has apparently met an ignoble death here, in some sort of bizarre ritual. For months, our chief of police has been harping about the petty crime wave in this corner of Portland, with several arrests of residents of Downward Dog Farm, the Rajneeshee spinoff commune on nearby Sauvie Island. Now, has this cult’s disrespect for the rule of law turned deadly, targeting one of our most prominent civic leaders? I, for one, won’t rest until questions are answered. I’m Misty Day, for KSNZ News You Can Use.”

  Darrow had learned the hard way that trying to correct the wild ideas that some TV reporters tended to sling about like gravy on Thanksgiving was about as easy as, well, getting a gravy stain off a silk tie. He turned to face a problem he could do something about: the crowd of onlookers who were starting to hop the police tape. He grabbed a bullhorn from the trunk of Harry Harrington’s unmarked blue Caprice.

  “Hey, hey, folks, let us do our job here, this is a crime scene and we will be here all day, so please just go home,” Darrow beseeched, his amplified words echoing with a tinny vibrato through the little canyon beneath the bridge.

  “But I was here first and if I could just look for the Rose Medallion for two minutes I promise I won’t touch anything,” pleaded a young mother in Coke-bottle eyeglasses and chestnut braids with a crying baby in a knitted bag strapped to her chest.

  “NO, I’M SORRY – ” Darrow stopped and lowered the bullhorn as the baby’s cries turned to shrieks. “I’m sorry,” he said in a muted voice. “We have what looks to be a homicide here. It has to take priority, I’m sure you understand. Please just go home.”

  Darrow hadn’t had any coffee before setting out for his morning run, so now his head was pounding from caffeine withdrawal. Added to the charley-horse in his right calf, he was gimping about like Long John Silver after a hard night of pillaging. He staggered over to his fellow detective.

  “Harry, it looks like the crime-scene folks and the extra uniforms can handle this now. How about giving me a lift back downtown?” he asked. “I need to interview a librarian I know.”

  * * *

  DeWitt Vanderpol had just turned off the television and was on the phone to his law partner, Gerhard Gerbils.

  “Why do I have to be the one to make a statement about his death?” Gerbils asked, not trying to conceal a prickly tone.

  “Because you’re the firm’s spokesman, remember?” said Vanderpol, who did his best to conceal a lifelong fear of public speaking which he had hoped to overcome by becoming a lawyer.

  “I just think you knew him better, you worked with him longer, and besides, I’m the junior partner, which means you get 5 percent more of the firm’s gross than I do,” Gerbils added snarkily. Suddenly, something dawned on him. “So…now that Pieter is gone, shouldn’t we just split things 50-50?”

  “It’s way too early to be thinking of anything like that!” Vanderpol snapped. “But we just lost our biggest link to the community. There may not be anything left to split unless we’re way out in front on this – ‘what a tragedy it is, but we’ll continue serving our loyal clients, it’s what he’d want,’ all that kind of stuf
f. I called the police chief and he expects to have a press briefing tomorrow. I told him we’d be there.”

  * * *

  Pomp Charbonneau plopped down in the dinette of his travel trailer, the cushions draped with a French tricolor afghan knitted by Wife No. 2, and munched on a snack of brie and Triscuits as he paused to admire the new antelope head mounted above his portable television. He saw no need to tell anyone it was road kill from an unfortunate accident he’d had driving across Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on a recent trip to southeastern Oregon.

  He flipped on KSNZ news in the hope of catching that foxy new anchor girl. So much better than the old bag she replaced. And he always had an eye out for the “next former Mrs. Charbonneau,” as he liked to call his romantic conquests.

  There she was!

  “Oh, my heart goes pitty pat, mon cheri!” he cooed, holding up his wineglass in salute and waggling the other hand over his chest. She was introducing a news story.

  “And now we have a live report from veteran reporter Misty Day at the scene of the apparent murder of Portland civic leader Pieter van Dyke, on the edge of Forest Park. Misty?”

  Charbonneau’s head jerked as if he’d been slapped the way Wife No. 3 used to do. His wineglass dropped and shattered, soaking a rug with several ounces of a very nice Sancerre.

  * * *

  On rural Sauvie Island, 10 miles northwest of downtown, the Portland area’s most famous nude beach was sprinkled with its usual cross-section of patchouli-scented hippie women, aging gay men and grizzled old bikers with more faded tattoos than anyone ever wanted to see. As usual, binocular-toting crews on heavily laden container ships plodding up the Columbia River crowded the starboard railing to get a look at their next port of call – and anything else they could see.

  Mostly farmland and wildlife refuge, the island was where Hester’s parents had taken her as a child to pick pumpkins at Halloween. Her mother had delighted in spying for migrating buffleheads and mergansers there with her Audubon chapter while her father explored the back roads with his teachers’ cycling group.

  Down the road from the nude beach, it was another sunny June day at Downward Dog Farm. Ma Anand Martha was out in the farmyard petting the chickens, each of whom had a name and none of whom would ever be slaughtered. Downward Dog Farm had some of the oldest chickens in Oregon.

  What it didn’t have was a television.

  Chapter 5

  “So everyone’s favorite Channel 3 reporter is convinced you’re part of the old Rajneeshee commune because of your middle name,” Darrow told Hester two hours later in an interrogation room at Portland Police Bureau headquarters.

  “Oh my sainted aunt!” said Hester, slapping her chest with a half-stifled snort. “Well, actually, she was my sainted aunt, old Freelove Princetta McGarrigle, of Nova Scotia, from whom my parents got my adorable middle name. As I’ve told anyone who has ever asked, it’s one of the old-fashioned virtue names, like Faith, Hope and Charity.”

  “Yes, I remember,” Darrow said, “and your first name comes from the writings of Nathaniel Hawthorne, for whom I was named.” Their eyes locked for a long moment.

  “You two gonna sing a duet or something?” Pim asked, looking worriedly back and forth at them.

  The moment’s spell broken, Darrow handed Hester some coffee in a cracked red mug that he’d brought in from the staff room, and handed a cracked blue mug to Pim, who sat silently glowering at him from the other end of the table. The smell of steaming Maxwell House competed with the room’s permanent aroma of old socks. “And forgive me for not correcting Misty Day at the time, but my experience is that you can always tell a TV reporter – ”

  “But you can’t tell them much,” Hester finished the old saying for him with a groan and a grin. “My father says that about Scotsmen, which is allowed since he is one.”

  “Yes, my dad used to say it about Swedes, since we had a few in the family,” Darrow said, leaning back in an orange plastic chair that reminded him of his high-school cafeteria, and putting his feet up on the table as he used to do in his high-school cafeteria.

  The table was old, wooden and covered with scribbled graffiti. “Jim Bob + Mr. T, 1989,” scrawled in black Sharpie, caught Hester’s eye.

  “So, as enchanting as I find your workplace, Mr. Darrow, how soon can Pim and I be on our way?” she asked.

  “Yes, I’d like to know that, too, Inspector, whenever you’re done with your screen test for ‘Fast Times at Ridgemont High,’ ” added Pim, reverting to her favorite sarcastic name for the policeman who had helped mistakenly send her to jail a few months earlier as a suspect in Sara Duffy’s murder. She had never warmed to him.

  Darrow gazed silently at Pim for two beats, then gave her a wink before continuing.

  “Well, I’m sorry it took so long, but I just got word from the Medical Examiner confirming what I suspected: that Mr. van Dyke had expired hours before the bookmobile ever arrived this morning.”

  “Oh, thank goodness,” Hester blurted, then stopped. “I mean, that’s terrible, what happened – but it means…”

  “It means Ethel won’t be charged with anything, because there’s not a lot of interest at the prosecutor’s office in trying someone for manslaughter when the victim was already dead,” Darrow finished her thought.

  “Well, duh,” Pim said. “So can we go now?”

  Darrow held her gaze again.

  “Just tell me this, both of you. Did you see anything unusual when you were backing into that horseshoe pit this morning?”

  Pim hung her head as she searched her memory.

  “Fact is, it was white-out fog down in that gully, probably as bad as I’ve ever seen fog anytime, anywhere. So I was real careful and took it dead slow – oh, maybe that’s a bad choice of words. But if you go too slowly in that darned bus it tends to die on you – oh, oops again. And that infernal backup beeper was going, so loud as to wake the dead – ”

  Hester quickly interrupted.

  “What Pim is saying is that she took all due diligence to carefully maneuver the bookmobile into the new parking spot to which we’d been assigned, and we saw nothing out of the ordinary considering the extraordinarily difficult conditions.”

  She stopped, with her chin in the air, before continuing hesitantly.

  “So, since it thankfully wasn’t the bookmobile, what was the cause of death, may I ask?”

  Darrow glanced at the two-way mirror on the wall, sipped at his own mug of coffee, and decided he didn’t care if his partner – or even his impossible-to-please Capt. Myerson – thought he was telling too much.

  “Well, I’d say it was the bullet hole right there,” he answered, putting his index finger over his heart. “All the sand tended to obscure it at first.”

  Hester and Pim both gasped.

  “But there’s another weird thing about all this – besides the head of the library society being shot and left spread-eagled in his undies in a city park’s horseshoe pit. And that’s the Rose Medallion.”

  Pim jumped as if stricken. “Did someone find it?”

  “Pim’s been hot on the trail all week,” Hester confided.

  It was Darrow’s turn to be surprised.

  “Oh, really? Well, as you witnessed, we had a small army of medallion searchers out at the crime scene this morning, and now The Oregonian has confirmed it: The Rose Medallion was stuck to the logo on the Horseshoe Club sign.”

  Pim swooned.

  “Oh, no! You mean I could have practically grabbed it from the window of the bookmobile this morning?”

  Darrow gave her a deadpan face. He took a sip of coffee and waited two beats before continuing.

  “So neither of you saw it?”

  Pim raised her eyes to the ceiling and clapped her hands with a loud pop. “Don’t you think I’d be over at the Zeus Shoes headquarters claiming the $50,000 right now if I had?”

  Darrow curled his lower lip as he rocked the old chair back and forth on two legs, then came back dow
n with a thump as he spoke.

  “Well, the interesting thing is, the medallion is gone.”

  Chapter 6

  Wednesday, June 12

  Chief Charles Morse came to the Portland Police Bureau by way of appointment by Mayor Buzz Brinkley, the so-called “People’s Mayor,” the handlebar-mustachioed owner of a Hawthorne-district brewpub who rode his old balloon-tire bicycle to City Hall every day.

  Morse, a potato-nosed, acne-scarred bureaucratic tyrant whose political bent was more NRA than ACLU, was Mayor Buzz’s attempt to succor the law-and-order crowd.

  Early Wednesday morning Morse was standing at the mahogany dais in the Police Bureau’s auditorium at Second Avenue and Main Street and briefing the press on the investigation of Pieter van Dyke’s murder.

  A former chief in the Columbia Gorge city of The Dalles, Oregon, Morse had spent much of his career focused on – some said obsessed with – the 1980s takeover of parts of Central Oregon by the followers of the Indian mystic Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

  Among other misadventures, the Rajneeshees had infamously poisoned more than 700 people in The Dalles by tainting salad bars with salmonella in an effort to reduce voter turnout in a local election in which the cult was trying to pack the county courthouse with its own members. (The scheme also involved spreading pathogens on the handles of courthouse urinals.)

  The election ploy flopped. But Charles Morse never again trusted anyone in water-buffalo sandals.

  “With this horrendous, ritualistic murder of one of Portland’s finest citizens, we will look very closely at cults and anyone who practices strange and godless rituals,” Morse said, a droplet of perspiration on his ruddy cheek suggesting that his woolen dress uniform with the stiff shoulder-boards and “scrambled eggs” on its brimmed hat was perhaps not the best choice for a heavyset man in a crowded, poorly ventilated room full of klieg lights.

  “Chief, is it not correct that the former Rajneeshees at Downward Dog Farm on Sauvie Island are the focus of your investigation?” asked Misty Day, whose tightly French-knotted hair today seemed to pull the darkly tanned skin on her temples even tauter than her plastic surgeon had intended.