Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries)

by B. B. Cantwell

  Darrow feigned surprise. “Doesn’t like me? Well, how do you like that? I think she’s a pip.”

  He slapped his hand on the table, launching a little snowstorm of spilled sugar into the air. Then suddenly looking about, he jumped up, dug into a pants pocket and came out with a wad of crinkled bills. He peeled off two singles, dropped them on the shop’s counter, fished a saucer-sized chocolate-chip cookie from a jar, broke off half and handed it to Hester as he sat back down. He spoke quietly.

  “But the fact remains that if that thing’s the murder weapon, her fingerprints are the only ones on it. All that’s needed is a good motive and my options disappear. And one thing is becoming pretty clear: Your friend was a little resentful of her bosses.”

  Chapter Nine

  “What a day!” Darrow said aloud to himself as he shut the heavy mahogany door to his new apartment, slid a large flat box on to the kitchen counter and headed into the bedroom.

  Glowing red numbers on a bedside clock read “5:50.” Pulling off his police shoes with the extra thick soles and ridding himself of his tie was the first of his coming-home rituals. The next was to peel his police ID from his belt and empty his revolver. He locked both in the drawer of an old cherry-wood desk that had belonged to his grandfather.

  He stopped in the bathroom to splash cold water in his face before he would head to the kitchen for supper. Darrow could never get into calling the last meal of the day “dinner.” His parents’ New England upbringing made it supper, and it was a vestige of the East that remained years after they had moved to another corner of the country.

  In the bathroom, his nose wrinkled at a strong, sweet aroma, foreign to the scents of his shaving kit. It was cloying in the close quarters of the ancient tiled bathroom, despite the window he’d left open onto the Luxor’s old-fashioned air shaft.

  Darrow climbed in his stocking feet into the claw-footed tub so that he could reach the frosted-glass window. Shoving it open wider with a loud squawk of rusted hinges, he stuck his head out into the air shaft’s dimness. The smell of “old roses” enveloped him like a warm towel at a Turkish bath. Steam was billowing from the window directly below. He could hear a bathtub tap gushing at full bore, and the lilting echo of a female voice singing. Straining to hear the words, he finally made out the refrain: “Oh, I’ve got a luv-erly bunch of coco-nuts, doo de do do...”

  Darrow had been warned about the Luxor’s freakish acoustics. Mirror-smooth granite sided the ventilation shaft. Sheets of the gray-streaked stone at alternating angles gave the tall, skinny wall opposite the windows the texture of a crinkle-cut French fry. Oddly, the shaft was a perfect echo chamber. When windows were open, residents several floors away would unexpectedly hear entire conversations emanating from anywhere in a neighbor’s apartment. Egyptologists from the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry had once spent a generous government grant studying the phenomenon.

  Darrow smiled and clambered out of the tub. Rethinking the building’s layout and which windows opened where, he nodded to himself. “It’s her, all right.” Hester, too, was trying to relax after a hard day.

  He shuffled into the kitchen. Supper tonight, like the better part of the week, was in the pizza box he’d left on the counter. Not just any pizza, but the sumptuous, huge slices of herb-laced cheese and tender crust from “Escape from New York,” the alternative-culture pizza place up on 23rd. The shop’s Statue-of-Liberty neon sign had drawn him in, and quickly he’d realized he’d stumbled on to the best pizza in Portland. Nothing fancy, mind you. No Greek olives or goat cheese, just the best basic pizza this side of the Hudson.

  He grabbed a Thomas Kemper root beer from the fridge, pausing to look longingly at the home-brew beer he’d bottled a few weeks earlier – but he was going out again in an hour, and some rules weren’t worth breaking. Darrow popped the cap and took a deep swig. Feeling almost human again, he sat down to his feast, his mind taking a mini-holiday with a remembrance of his boyhood.

  Until Nate was seven, his father had taught agricultural science at U Mass in Amherst, Massachusetts. The Darrows lived in Springfield, in an old inherited family home on Rittenhouse Terrace, the kind of neighborhood where 1960s housewives would take their turkeys to the nearby bakery to be roasted in the big ovens at Thanksgiving. In typical New England style, the huge house was divided between two families, with the Darrows in the upper half so that Nate’s room was a cozy dormer room in the attic. The downstairs neighbors were the DeLaurentis, who introduced his family to pizza in the early ’60s. Mrs. DeLaurenti, mother of Nate’s best friend Tony, had set the bar high.

  Then the Darrows had moved west when his father had taken a job as a research professor at Oregon State, the agricultural school in Corvallis, first researching hazelnuts, and later wine grapes. College towns – and he’d lived in several – usually had decent pizza, but Portland was taking his taste buds back to his youth. His older brother, Bud – not a very original nickname, but far preferable to the “Silas” his parents had stuck him with – would shovel the DeLaurentis’ walk all through a Massachusetts winter for the promise of a pizza party. In his mind, Darrow went through all the different varieties Mrs. DeLaurenti had made, naming each aloud. At first he couldn’t remember if the Roma tomatoes went with the mushrooms or with the sausage.

  These little memory exercises were something Darrow practiced to relieve the stress of being a cop. He did the same thing when trail-running, an effective sort of self-distraction when his calves threatened to cramp. Kind of a yoga thing. Some of the old guard he worked with called him a head case.

  A soft knock broke the spell.

  Darrow rose stiffly from his rocking chair and padded to the door. His slipper-socks made little sound as he wound his way around unpacked boxes to peep through the tiny glass hole in the door. With a groan he recognized Paul Kenyon raising his fist to knock again. This, Darrow thought, was just about the fitting cap to a long and bad day.

  The librarian’s murder investigation had taken on a macabre life of its own. One after another, members of the Pioneer Literary Society had taken it upon themselves to call the mayor and demand a quick end to the investigation and the publicity – mostly the publicity. The mayor was pressuring the police chief to make an arrest. The chief’s deputy had made several calls to Darrow’s captain. Darrow, at the bottom of that food-chain, felt he’d spent the day in a hyperbaric chamber.

  “Hey, Paul,” Darrow said with forced joviality as he opened the door. Paul Kenyon was being a bit too earnest about his task of assisting the police, Darrow thought. The chief had sent this eager pest over the other morning with some vague reference to Paul’s mother “being somebody,” with the heavy implication that she could turn them all into castratos if she wasn’t pandered to.

  “What brings you out tonight?” And how the hell did you get my address, Darrow thought privately.

  Kenyon hesitantly entered the apartment. “I really didn’t want to disturb you at home, Detective, but after talking to Mother, I realized the information I have is too important to keep to myself any longer.”

  Darrow ushered Kenyon into his living room. It was still mostly packing boxes. A bricks-and-boards bookcase was taking shape against one wall. The only seats were Darrow’s rocker and a couple of folding chairs. The last wedge of pizza shriveled in its box.

  “No trouble at all, Paul. I won’t make excuses for the place, though,” Darrow said, clearing a sweat-reeking singlet off the metal chair closest to the rocker, then plopping back down. “It’s definitely still a work in progress.”

  Kenyon sat and launched directly into his speech. “As I said, Detective, I wouldn’t have bothered you with this if it hadn’t been worrying me. I was a cadet at the police academy over at Clackamas and I know that even the smallest piece of information can sometimes close a case. The instructors there were always hammering that home. You remember how it was?”

  Darrow grunted noncommittally. He tried to veil his irritation for a moment longer.


  “Well, I’ve known Sara Duffy for most of my life. She and Mother were the closest of friends and colleagues. Her death has been devastating to Mother.”

  “Colleagues? Your mother is a librarian, too?”

  “No, no, Mother is the leader of Women Who Care About Children. You’ve probably seen them on the news. It’s basically a progressive, pro-family group. Miss Duffy was in line to be treasurer next year.”

  Kenyon relaxed a bit in his hard chair. He stretched long, gray-wool-trousered legs and showed a colorful pair of argyles fitted snugly into tasseled loafers. He bore an expression not unlike the family feline that has enjoyed a leisurely afternoon snack at the expense of a prized parakeet collection.

  “I think you will find that Ethel Pimala is the murderer,” Kenyon stated bluntly.

  Darrow sat up slightly and fixed his eyes on Kenyon’s. He took a slow swig from the root-beer bottle he still cradled before responding. “The bookmobile driver? What would you know about her?”

  “Oh, she’s been around since I was a kid. She hated Miss Duffy. She wrote the most poisonous letters, letters you wouldn’t believe, and I personally overheard her threaten to kill Aunt Sara – that’s what I always called her. I could swear to it in court.”

  Darrow pulled his lanky body out of the comforts of the rocker and began some manic stretching exercises, leaning against a wall and pulling one foot up behind his thigh. Talking to Kenyon over his shoulder, he said, “Letters? How many letters? Did you see any of them?”

  “Well, some of them were letters to the editor of The Oregonian. She wrote at least two or three in six months. And then, of course, Mother saw the ones that were sent to Aunt Sara. I made copies of them for an evidence folder.” Kenyon pulled from his leather knapsack a thick manila folder and handed it to Darrow.

  Darrow opened the cover to inspect a sheaf of copy paper. The typing was light and irregular, obviously the work of a cheap portable typewriter, with frequent misspellings. Darrow read aloud the first words that struck his eyes: “You’re racist dayS are all most over.”

  * * *

  One floor below, Hester’s eyes were closed as she scrunched far down in the brimming tub. The aromatherapist she’d been consulting in a little shop down on 21st hadn’t quite gotten it right yet. This batch of bath oil, guaranteed to cure migraines and aching feet, smelled like her grandmother’s dusting powder. Rather than drain away stress, it just made Hester want to sneeze.

  She thought about her day, and about Nate Darrow. She pictured him, wet and kind of scruffy in the coffee shop. She remembered their conversation, and how easy it seemed to come. She imagined his voice.

  Wait, she really did hear his voice.

  Hester’s eyes opened wide and she bolted upright and grabbed for a towel before she realized the source of the sound: the open window.

  “Oh, that weird ventilation shaft,” she groaned, a hand to her heart. Then she stopped to listen. Something didn’t make sense about what she was hearing.

  “Your racist days are almost over,” Darrow said loudly and stiffly. It sounded like he was reciting.

  Then she heard another man’s voice – another familiar voice. The only word she caught clearly was “Ethel.” The two voices continued to talk back and forth.

  Hester strained to hear, then bit her lip when she realized who belonged to the second voice, and the topic of their conversation. Was Paul Kenyon telling Detective Darrow that Pim was the murderer? This was insane. She turned off the steaming tap and cocked an ear closer to the open window.

  Damn, the pacing detective kept striding over a loose board that creaked loudly, drowning many of his words.

  “When was this written?” Darrow asked testily, turning over the top letter. “There’s no date.”

  “Mrs. Pimala often forgot to date the letters. I think that one was fairly recent,” Kenyon replied, the smug look still on his face.

  Darrow began to sift through the other letters in the folder. All written on the same typewriter, it seemed. From the few dates, the letters appeared to go back to 1991.

  Darrow’s mind raced. These were published in The Oregonian? It must have been common knowledge that Ethel Pimala and the former head librarian were feuding. Why had no one mentioned this tidbit before? This close-mouthed town would drive him nuts.

  Kenyon, like an impatient puppy, couldn’t keep quiet. “It might seem odd to you that Mrs. Pimala continued her vicious letters after Aunt Sara retired. But then Ethel has never been what you might call a normal person.”

  Darrow looked up with a furrowed brow. “Oh?” Kenyon had his attention again. His irritation hadn’t subsided, however, and Darrow felt a perverse pleasure at blaming this particular messenger.

  “Well, it’s easy to see. Ethel has delusions of persecution having to do with being non-white. She blamed Aunt Sara for her awful little life, made all these wild accusations about racism, claiming she’d been discriminated against at the library. But it was plain to everyone that Ethel had only herself to blame. She is basically uneducated. Her people are pineapple laborers or something and she should count herself lucky to have any kind of job at all. Aunt Sara was kindness personified to keep her on after those letters started.”

  Hester almost yelled out. She caught herself just in time. Why that little rat! Pim was not uneducated and her relatives owned a small sugar cane farm and made a decent living. Pim might be a hothead at times, Hester reflected, but she was a hard worker, often boasting that she’d only ever taken three sick days in more than 30 years with the library.

  True, when discrimination became a contentious fixture of the workplace, Pim had seized upon it as a cause of all her frustrations. The library had never officially addressed the issue, but in an organization with such a long history of lily-white management, it couldn't be discarded. However much substance was there, Hester knew Miss Duffy had long ago blackballed Pim as a troublemaker.

  “And it’s never been fair,” Hester fumed, slapping her sponge mitt into the bath water.

  Bubbles flew as Hester angrily splashed her way out of the tub. Bingle T., who’d been curled on the bath mat, scrambled for the hall, pausing only to give Hester a dirty look before he stalked toward the bedroom.

  “Well, this day isn’t over yet, Mr. Holier Than Thou Kenyon. You just wait!” Hester fumed as she dried herself. Remembering Marge Kenyon’s “emergency meeting” Hester stormed to her closet and flung open the door. “The question is: What do you wear around these kinds of people?”

  Chapter Ten

  It was 7:05 p.m., and the meeting had already begun as Hester and Karen pulled up to the circular driveway in front of the Mumfrey Mansion. In these hallowed halls, Women Who Care About Children gathered regularly.

  The mansion was a historic eyesore in the west hills of Portland. Its architect and builder had been a sea captain, to which the miserably narrow staircases offered mute testimony. WWCAC, by virtue of the membership of Marella Mumfrey, had obtained a permanent meeting place in the old ballroom on the fourth floor.

  The mansion loomed large and ugly in the gray, cold Portland night. Small, glaring lights picked out stepping stones from the parking area to the front door. Floodlights on the building’s exterior showed a cracked foundation and accentuated the badly listing south tower. Miserable as it appeared at night, Hester knew it actually looked worse in the daylight.

  The home was erected with grand pretense but a minimum of expense some 60 years earlier by Captain Mathusalum Mumfrey, a founding member of the Columbia River Pilots Association, the stalwart seafarers who venture out in any weather, day or night, to guide ships into the mouth of the mighty Columbia, an area of turbulent waters aptly dubbed the “Graveyard of the Pacific.”

  When old Mathusalum was alive, Karen explained, he had rarely allowed visitors into the mansion. But a few years earlier, marking the pilot group’s golden jubilee and his own 90th birthday, the crusty old salt had sought to prove that he could still make the leap
from a wildly tossing pilot boat to a ladder dangling from a storm-wracked freighter off Astoria.

  “He was wrong,” Karen chirped.

  As Hester slipped on the soggy, decaying leaves littering the front walk, the last stanza of “America the Beautiful” squawked in matronly tones from an upstairs window. Karen, steadying her friend’s elbow, grimaced. “At least we missed that!”

  Hester’s arched brow and grimly puckered mouth went unseen under a luxuriant black beard and bushy false eyebrows. Karen, who had starred in “Oklahoma!” and “Bye-Bye, Birdie” in community college, hadn’t forgotten her skills with theatrical makeup. With an old makeup kit and plenty of spirit gum, she had transformed Hester’s features as they’d sat in Karen’s BMW a few minutes earlier.

  “This stuff itches,” Hester mumbled. She straightened the Fedora her grandfather had worn. Black trousers, an old white shirt, a “Scenic Crater Lake” souvenir necktie and a red-checked sport coat from Steve White’s closet made up the rest of Hester’s disguise. The sleeves of the sport coat, size 40 “short,” gave up three inches before Hester’s arms did.

  “I look like a circus clown,” Hester whined.

  “Quit being a baby,” Karen shot back.

  Whatever the horrors of the Mumfrey Mansion’s exterior, the interior touched on magnificent. Here, old Captain Mumfrey hadn’t scrimped. Varnished wood gleamed as brightly as the brass fixtures all around. A mosaic marble foyer depicting snowcapped Mount Hood in tiles gave way to teak floors intricately inlaid with contrasting holly. None of it went at all well with the garish rhododendron wallpaper.

  The staircase from the foyer to the first floor was broad and grand. The stairs to the second and third floors were narrower and steeper. From there, the climb resembled the last 50 feet up Mt. Everest, Hester thought as she puffed up the ladderlike steps.

  “My God,” she wheezed. “Did they ever actually have a ball up here? You’d never navigate this in heels!”