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

by B. B. Cantwell

  Pim squinted at him, then seemed satisfied with his response.

  “Well, actually he lives out in the wine country, out toward McMinnville. Being a Frenchie, he’s started making wine in his barn, and it’s almost as good as this!” she said, holding aloft her glass of Blue Nun.

  Before Darrow could ask more, the maitre d’ was suddenly clearing his throat behind him, making Nate jump.

  “So, what can I bring you folks for lunch?” he asked.

  After they all agreed on the daily special of bratwurst on kaiser rolls with sides of German potato salad and house-made sauerkraut, their host retreated to the kitchen.

  “Goodness, the poor man has to do everything here, I guess,” Hester observed sympathetically, trying to steer the birthday conversation away from murder. “This place used to be so popular. I wonder if they’re doing OK?”

  “You know, it’s just not fair how the health crazies have given hot dogs and sausages a bad rap lately,” Pim responded, speaking with the irresistible charm of a fanatic. “There used to be five Wiener Dogs around Portland, all with happy wagging signs, and since everybody started eating sushi, one by one the Wieners have shut down so now there’s just this original one. And look, we’re the only people here at lunchtime. Can you believe that?”

  “It’s a…a crying shame when favorite old places fall on hard times,” Hester commiserated.

  “It’s been so hard on Mr. Gerbils, I tell you,” Pim said in a whisper, nodding toward their host, who was returning from the kitchen.

  Darrow stopped wadding up paper balls from a drinking-straw wrapper and looked up.

  “Did you say ‘Gerbils’?” He turned and cast a sharp look at the restaurateur, now furiously dusting a wall of framed black-and-white photos showing what appeared to be smiling celebrities posing as they took bites from Wiener Dog hot dogs. (Was that really John Wayne?) Recognition dawned in Darrow’s eyes.

  “I thought he was a lawyer!” Darrow hissed, turning back to his dining companions.

  “Oh, he is!” Pim beamed, happy for possessing a bit of knowledge that put the detective at a disadvantage. She paused to sip some wine.

  “And – ? Why’s he here shoveling bratwurst?” Darrow whispered with impatience.

  “Well, Inspector, this was the Gerbils family’s first endeavor when they came to America – it started with a mule-drawn lunch wagon that served hot dogs to the shipyard workers who built all them WWII Liberty ships on the banks of the Columbia,” Pim explained smugly. “The family got out of Krautland just ahead of Hitler’s goosesteppers.”

  “Pim!” Hester shushed her, turning pink at her co-worker’s plain language.

  “And the son who has the business now did become a lawyer, in the same firm as Pieter van Dyke, as you probably know,” Pim forged on. “But he only ever did that to pay the bills. His first love is The Wiener Dog. I seen him here every time I’ve come.”

  Darrow’s mind reeled as they ate their lunch. Had Gerbils overheard his less-than-discreet comments about van Dyke’s murder? He didn’t want to seem insensitive. Nor, when it came to it, did he need his captain hearing about this from an indignant colleague of the victim.

  His musings were interrupted only by “yums” and “mmms” as his companions chomped their hot dogs, punctuated by Pim’s happy squeal as she took a big bite and her bratwurst sprayed grease across her Aloha shirt, this one decorated with ukulele-playing surfers riding waves at Waikiki.

  “You know they’re good when that happens,” she crowed.

  Darrow insisted on paying, and when the restaurateur returned his credit card with the slip to sign, he again stopped and cleared his throat. Darrow looked up.

  “Excuse me for interrupting, but – it is Detective Darrow, isn’t it? I thought I might have recognized you from the news reports.”

  “Oh, yes, Mr. Gerbils, hello. I didn’t recognize you at first…”

  “Of course. It is a very different context from my law office, but the restaurant is my first love.” Gerbils’ eyes, seemingly too small for his head, darted nervously as he gave a soapy grin. “I hope your lunch pleased you?”

  Darrow smiled and nodded. The rotund man hesitated, then continued in a serious vein.

  “If you’ll forgive me, I just want to say that I hope the police remember that Pieter van Dyke had a long and varied law career, as did his father and grandfather, and many men went to prison or paid other prices when they were on the losing side against the van Dykes. People make enemies in our profession.”

  He stood silently, clicking his ballpoint pen, then concluded.

  “If you’re thinking of ruling out the Rajneeshees, Mr. Darrow, I hope you’ll look at anybody who has gotten out of prison recently – anybody who might have been there because of Pieter van Dyke or his family!”

  Chapter 11

  As they stopped to drop Pim at the bookmobile barn in Northeast Portland, Darrow groaned as he unfolded his 6-foot-2 frame from the back seat of Hester’s well-traveled two-door Civic. He had insisted that the “birthday girl” take the roomier front seat, regretting it the moment Pim hopped in and slid the seat all the way back, putting Darrow’s knees under his chin.

  “Do you know you have eight rolls of wide, clear tape rolling around the floor of the car back there?” he asked Hester as he settled into the front seat.

  “Oh. That’s where it keeps disappearing to,” she said with a thoughtful look. “You’re in a librarian’s car, sir, and that is the librarian’s friend – book tape. It’s used for mending paperback covers and that sort of thing. Sort of our version of duct tape. That stuff would mend the Eiffel Tower if it ever broke. I’m rarely without it.”

  His feet still tingled with the feeling returning to them as Hester guided the car toward the police headquarters.

  They rode silently for several blocks, but as Hester began to turn toward the Burnside Bridge, beneath the giant White Stag Sportswear sign with its iconic leaping deer outlined in white neon, they both started to speak at the same moment.

  “Say, Nate – ”

  “Hester – ”

  Both grinned with a little embarrassment. “You first,” Darrow interjected.

  Hester smiled and nodded thanks.

  “I didn’t know if I should say anything in front of Pim, but that Charbonneau friend of hers – His ancestor’s pistol she was talking about…” Hester hesitated.

  “Yes?” Darrow goaded her, fidgeting with some book tape that had rolled forward from beneath his seat.

  “The pistol missing from the McLoughlin Collection was a copy of that pistol,” Hester blurted.

  Darrow’s response was cut off by a shrill beeping from his sport coat. “Oh, that damn thing again,” Nate cursed as he slapped at various pockets to find the cellphone. Finally he fished it from an inside breast pocket.

  “Yeah, Harry, I’m almost back to the office, what’s up?” Darrow responded after the initial greeting.

  Hester heard a muted squawking from the earpiece and watched Darrow’s brow knit. “No shit, Sherlock?” he asked his colleague after a few moments. “Harry, hang in there, I’ll be there in five.”

  Pocketing the phone, Darrow took a deep breath and clicked his teeth together a few times before explaining to Hester.

  “Well, a fisherman on the creek at the edge of Forest Park spotted something that had caught in the old grating where the stream disappears under the Thurman overpass – it must have washed up after our little thunderstorm last night,” he said. “And it appears we not only may have found the gun that killed van Dyke, but from the French manufacturer’s name on it and the little ‘Portland City Library’ metal sticker on the bottom of the grip, I’m betting it’s your missing pistol.”

  Hester’s mouth hung open. “Oh, my lord.”

  A thought dawned on Darrow and he pulled out his cellphone again.

  “Maybe I can make good use of this gadget for once,” he announced, peering at a list of phone numbers that had been prepr
ogrammed into the phone when he got it. Finally finding what he sought, he hesitantly punched three buttons in succession, and when an answer came, he spoke briskly.

  “Yeah, Konnie, it’s Nate Darrow. I wonder if you could get me everything you can find on a guy named Charbonneau. First name of Pomp – P-O-M-P, as far as I know, probably a nickname but that’s all I have. And I’m definitely looking for an address and phone if you can find it.”

  As he pocketed the phone again, Hester’s probing look loosened his tongue.

  “Look, I’m still not saying we have anything on Pim’s friend, but there are a few too many coincidences here and his name keeps popping up,” Darrow explained.

  “Goodness, I don’t think you’re ever going to be Pim’s favorite,” Hester said ruefully.

  Darrow gave an audible sigh. “Thanks for the ride, I’ll tell him she says hi,” he finished, as he jumped out of the car in front of the Portland Police Bureau.

  Chapter 12

  Back at Grand Central Library that afternoon, the hands on Hester’s old Timex said 3:45. For 15 minutes she’d been contemplating a break to dash across the street to Callahan’s Confections for a $2 bag of dark chocolate-covered licorice.

  But for the past five minutes she’d also been contemplating the ample nude figures in the paintings on the wall opposite her in the McLoughlin Collection gallery.

  Peering in concentration at the oil just opposite her, Hester raised one elbow behind her head, pointed her chin skyward and draped a leg over the corner of her old walnut desk in emulation of the 18th-century model’s pose.

  “My, you could have put the ‘hip’ in hippo, my dear,” she scoffed under her breath, sitting back into her chair. Gritting her teeth, she dug into her purse for the wax-paper bag of celery sticks she’d brought from home.

  The healthful snack was cold comfort after the earlier drama of calming Dabney Pensler’s nervous fit over the idea that the library’s pistol may have been involved in van Dyke’s murder. Hester wished she’d at least filled the celery sticks with peanut butter.

  Just as she was turning back to the inventory list from which she’d been slowly ticking off items for the past two hours, the phone on her desk jangled.

  “Hester, it’s Holly Fontana up in the Rotunda – I’m the designated minder for the Corps of Discovery Exhibit this afternoon,” came a frantic voice when Hester picked up. “Someone said Dabney went home with another of his stress attacks, but we need someone from the McLoughlin Collection up here right away.”

  Hester stopped in the middle of reaching for another celery stick. “Well, I’m just the pinch-hitter this week, Holly, can’t it wait?”

  “No, I don’t think it can – Hester, I’m sorry, but we have a patron who insists we have a blatant counterfeit in our exhibit!”

  * * *

  “It’s a fake! It’s a laughable fake, and I can’t believe the library would fall for this!”

  The hysterical words echoed beneath the vintage leaded-glass domed skylight at the top of Grand Central as the elevator door shuddered open and Hester stepped out.

  Dodging a small crowd of curious onlookers that included an overexcited class of backpack-dragging third graders from Oregon City, she tried to quash a wince as she recognized the speaker as one of her lesser-favorite bookmobile patrons. Eldon Purdy wore a smug sense of entitlement almost as regularly as he wore the slightly crushed and sweat-stained Panama hat that perched now atop his stringy, black hair.

  The little man’s face was blotchy with emotion as he leaned over a glass case that contained part of the library’s display of Lewis and Clark artifacts, keyed to this year’s Rose Festival theme. Holly Fontana, whose curly brown tresses ordinarily framed a smiling and welcoming face, huddled next to him in a posture of embarrassment, waggling her fingers to try to quiet his protests.

  “Mr. Purdy, what seems to be the problem?” Hester cooed in her most patron-calming voice as she strode across the marble floor.

  “Did you people even look at this display before you opened it to the public or did you just have trained monkeys put it together?” he blustered.

  Hester gave him a frozen smile – a practiced expression that silently said, “Yes, I’m a public servant, but I don’t have to respond to insults from annoying little men in stupid hats.”

  She crossed her arms and tapped her toe silently until he chose to elaborate.

  Finally, popeyed, he pointed into the case at a display of first-day covers, some of the McLoughlin Collection’s trove donated by Pieter van Dyke’s father.

  “I made a special trip downtown just to see this – I’ve been a philatelist all my life, and the Flying Canoe error printing of the Corps of Discovery 150th anniversary issue of 1955 is second in rarity only to the famed Inverted Jenny!”

  Ceasing her tapping, Hester looked puzzled.

  “Oh, for goodness sakes, surely any expert putting together an informative public display of United States postage stamps knows about the Jenny!” Purdy fussed, his liver-purple lips pursing. “It was an early 20th-century stamp showing a World War I biplane but it was accidentally printed with the plane flying upside down. They sell to collectors for hundreds of thousands apiece!”

  Hester, remembering her mother’s coaching in the days when she wore pigtails, silently counted to 10 before responding.

  “Well, Mr. Purdy, I have to excuse myself. You’ve seen me on the bookmobile so you know I’m not the expert who staged this exhibition, but I assure you that my colleagues pay the greatest attention to scholarly detail.”

  Swallowing hard, she continued. “Still, even the best scholars are eager to learn more. What is it you’ve discovered?”

  Eagerly seizing his moment of tribute, Purdy brushed strings of hair from his eyes and dug into a pocket of a leather briefcase he carried. He pulled out a magnifying glass large enough to convince Sherlock Holmes that size mattered.

  “I brought this because I wanted to savor the details of the Flying Canoe first-day cover on display,” he simpered. “But imagine my surprise when I saw this.”

  He placed the magnifying glass, as large as Hester’s palm, on the glass display case above the first-day cover in question. In the envelope’s upper right corner was a postage stamp with a cancellation reading “First Day of Issue.” On the left half of the envelope, a meticulous engraving showed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark wading through a cattail-edged marsh. Purdy stepped back and waved his hand for Hester to take a look.

  From her inventory duty, Hester knew a little about the famous Flying Canoe first-day cover. The postage stamp it bore showed the two famous explorers paddling a canoe at the mouth of the Columbia River. But through a printing error, a few batches of the stamps showed the canoe up in the sky instead of on the river’s surface, thus the stamp’s nickname.

  She brushed her auburn hair behind her shoulder and bent to peer through the magnifying glass.

  “I’m sorry, I guess I don’t know what to look for, it looks about as I expected – there’s the canoe up in the sky!” she said with an appreciative chuckle.

  “But don’t you see!” Purdy fumed. “Count them!”

  “Pardon?”

  “How many men are in the canoe?”

  “Oh!” Hester looked again. “There are, um, three.”

  “YES!” The little man raised his arms in the air as if signaling a football touchdown.

  Hester looked confused. Purdy saw that she didn’t understand.

  “Don’t you see? The Lewis and Clark stamp of 1955 showed only Lewis and Clark in their canoe. Lewis – and – Clark – and – nobody – else!”

  * * *

  Fifteen minutes later, in a quiet backroom of the McLoughlin Collection, Hester pored over the provenance file for the first-day cover, which she had removed from the display and brought along with her.

  The file noted that Vincent van Dyke Jr., Pieter’s father and a son of a former governor, had acquired the philatelic treasure in 1955 on the day t
he stamp was issued in Astoria, Ore., a fishing and one-time fur-trading center at the mouth of the Columbia River. Not far from Astoria, on the edge of a marshy slough seen before only by local Indians, deer, beavers and myriad waterfowl, the Corps of Discovery had spent the long, wet winter of 1805-06 in a tiny fort they had built from scratch.

  Vincent Jr. was one of only a few dozen collectors to get out of the post office that day with a first-day cover before an observant 12-year-old complained about the printing mistake and asked for his money back. Sales were then suspended.

  Hester was amused: The file even noted that the release of the flawed stamps was blamed in part on lax oversight by the local postmaster, absent from the ceremonies because it was opening day of the local salmon-fishing season at the Columbia River’s famed Buoy 10. Her father, an avid angler, talked about Buoy 10 as if it was a religious shrine.

  Hester’s head swam. Taking a deep breath, she again picked up the magnifying glass she had appropriated from Mr. Purdy with the promise of returning it next time the bookmobile came by his stop at Toshmore Court. Actually, even with that promise, he wouldn’t give it up until she made a “citizen’s arrest,” as if that was something a librarian could do, Hester recalled with a tiny grin.

  She held the glass up with one hand. With the other she grasped a glossy black-and-white photograph she’d pulled from the file. It was a photo of Vincent van Dyke’s Lewis and Clark Flying Canoe first-day cover. The photo was taken the day it was accepted into the collection of the Portland City Library.

  In the photo, the stamp showed two explorers in a canoe.

  Shifting the magnifying glass to the envelope she had brought downstairs from the rotunda, she again counted three men in the canoe.

  Leaning closer so that her nose almost smudged the magnifier’s glass lens, she scrutinized the new figure in the center of the canoe. He seemed to be attired in the buckskin clothing of a fur trapper, regalia familiar to anyone who has studied the period.