Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries)

by B. B. Cantwell

  “Anyway, let’s just go with the flow and have fun with this,” Karen said as they pushed through a motorized revolving door into the casino’s floodlit foyer.

  A roar of noise and glut of fun-seekers confronted them inside. Onlookers clustered around the foyer’s centerpiece, a simulated river rapid. Rushing water foamed around a rocking canoe paddled by four bare-chested, war-painted young men with long braids and rippling biceps. The lead paddler’s chiseled umber features and obsidian-black hair suggested he might actually be from the Cold Lake tribe. The other three looked suspiciously like moonlighting Portland State football players in tacky wigs.

  The paddlers’ apparent mission: the rescue of a flaxen-haired “Indian maid” (a feather in her hair was the tip-off) who amply filled a faux bobcat-skin bikini. Standing on the rocky shore, she swooned and postured at the advances of a big black bear, snarling and waving his paws thanks to animatronic technology pirated from Disney.

  Karen, distracted for just a moment, turned back to Hester, whose mouth hung open in stunned amazement.

  “Isn’t this great? But really, Hest, I hope you’ll ease up on this murder thing. Duffy’s just not worth the ulcers.”

  “Well, Pim IS!” a defiant Hester shouted to be heard over the roaring water, which at that moment calmed to a hushed ripple in response to the preprogrammed click of a microswitch. All over the foyer, heads turned toward Hester’s ringing voice. Hester shot a poisoned look at her friend. Karen stopped in her tracks and stared down at the maize-and-burgundy Pendleton rug beneath their feet.

  “I’m sorry. I forgot you and Pim are so close,” Karen said into Hester’s ear.

  She paused and then added, “I suppose it hasn’t occurred to you that just maybe cranky old Pim went off her little rocker and actually did it?” Hester folded her arms and glared, but then had to leap aside as a molded fiberglass “log” full of screaming thrillseekers suddenly shot from a tunnel opening in the wall above them and splashed into a water-filled flume that fed the “river.”

  Karen seemed to take no notice of the chaos as she patted Hester’s shoulder, a little too patronizingly. “But really, let’s try to have some laughs.”

  Karen grabbed Hester by the crook of her arm and dragged her toward the smoky gaming room, from which issued the metallic chink-chink-chink of mechanized payoffs blended with the noise of frenzied laughter, intoxication and back-slapping.

  “I know I intend to blow the entire three rolls of lunch-money quarters that I’ve got in my purse,” Karen crowed. “Grab me a gimlet and show me to the slots!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Clearly wash-and-wear would have made more sense, Hester thought in disgust.

  She leaned down to sniff her silk blouse as she dried her hands under a blower in the ladies room, which she’d found behind a door marked “Squaws.”

  Stirred by the hot gush of air, tobacco smell billowed up from her clothing, which for the last three hours had sponged up inescapable clouds of smoke. That’s what I get, Hester thought ruefully, for patronizing a facility managed by people who think “smoke-free” means you don’t have to pay for your cigars.

  Though the Cold Lake tribe owned controlling interest in the casino, Hester had learned from a color brochure she’d picked up at the change counter, the tribe had signed a management contract with O’Hara’s Club, one of Nevada’s biggest gambling operators, with casinos in Las Vegas, Tahoe, Reno and Atlantic City, N.J.

  O’Hara’s, its clientele diluted by the spread of casinos to reservations, Mississippi riverboats and cruise ships, was experimenting here with its first major share in an Indian “gaming and family-fun resort,” as the brochure called it.

  “That probably explains why Cold Lake culture is treated with such peripheral knowledge and only nodding respect, if any,” Hester observed as she and Karen poked quarters into adjacent slot machines. “You notice how the displays and costumes seem to blenderize about eight different native cultures from half a dozen regions? I know from sixth-grade social studies that the closest Indians to have worn the style of headdress we saw on the restaurant maitre d’ was the Mohawk tribe of New York!”

  Hester paused speechlessly at the approach of a Nordic-looking young man, maybe 19. He wore black-and-white spotted cowhide chaps. A studded denim vest flapped open to reveal a swimmer’s pectorals and taut, washboard stomach. He smiled, looked deep into Hester’s eyes, then reached into a bucket he was carrying and handed her a free pocket fan. Across the red plastic fan was the message, “I got hot over the slots at COLD LAKE CASINO.”

  As the Dodge City-Adonis disappeared around a corner, Hester caught her breath and added, “And it explains why there are so many white-bread employees. I don’t think the Cold Lake tribe has enough members to staff the coat-check room in this place.”

  “Oh, lighten up, Hester,” Karen said, snapping her fingers as two glowing electronic tomahawks teamed up with a tepee on the slot machine before her. Four quarters plopped out. “Rats! I almost got the Big Wampum.”

  “It’s OK, I’m having fun in an odd, really cheap way, if I don’t think about it too hard or inhale deeply,” Hester replied, furiously waving her fan as a man with a Willie Nelson beard and Lyle Lovett hair ambled past, blowing cigarillo smoke from the side of his mouth.

  “Well, I’ve still got half a roll of quarters and I don’t intend to leave yet because any moment now I’m going to be rolling in untold wealth, and Lord knows I wouldn’t complain,” Karen said, weariness edging her voice.

  Her eyes darted up and down the rows of slot machines as she slurped the last piece of ice from her empty glass. “Where in the name of all that is good and sacred is a cocktail waitress?”

  “I’ll do some tracking for fresh sign and see if I can flush one out for you, Kimo Sabe,” Hester said with a salute. She sidled up to Karen and whispered in her ear, “But faithful Tonto here is driving the Teri June-mobile home tonight, my dear.”

  Karen stuck out her tongue and waved Hester away. “Fine. Go. Please, I’m dying here.”

  Hester wandered away from the slot machines and stepped around a crowd of craps players that seemed disproportionately peopled by women with bouffant hair-dos. Then, objective in sight, she made a beeline across the casino in pursuit of a retreating cocktail waitress in a Pocahontas mini-skirt.

  “Oh, miss! Excuse me? Miss! Say, could I get – Oh, hell!” The waitress, toting a tray mounded with dirty glasses and overflowing ash trays, pushed her toe against a swinging door and disappeared as nimbly as Alice’s white rabbit.

  Just as Hester started to turn away, the door opened again. She turned back with a whirl. “Oh, miss – ”

  Coming through the door, just beyond a small knot of laughing baccarat players, wasn’t a waitress but a group of men. What caught Hester’s attention was the look of the two in front, both sporting beautifully draped Armani suits in that expensive, sheeny material she’d only ever seen in pricey boutiques on her trip to Rome. Each wore exotic, sculpted sunglasses. Sunglasses in Oregon in February? At night?

  “Who are these characters?” Hester whispered.

  Speaking with them as they moved into the room were two Cold Lake tribal leaders, one old and craggy faced, wearing dressy Levis, a white shirt, striped tie and neatly cropped hair topped by a feather-trimmed Stetson. Hester recognized him from the casino brochure.

  The other, Hester realized with interest, was the tribe’s young lawyer, about whom she’d just read a write-up in Willamette World, Portland’s tabloid weekly. The paper said Tony Madras was a Lewis and Clark law school grad with a taste for sushi, racehorses and Lamborghinis. His business acumen was largely credited for the tribe’s new prosperity, though he had just skated around an indictment for misappropriating federal low-income housing funds that helped build a cousin’s mini-mansion up near Hood River, Hester recalled.

  Strong cheekbones highlighted his features of chiseled bronze. Perfect teeth flashed as he spoke. Black braids hanging down the
back of an open-collared, red silk shirt touched the waist of his glove-tight, black leather pants.

  Bringing up the rear was a fifth man. He wore a dark olive suit, obviously European and expensive. His eyes hid behind Ray-Bans. Hester didn’t notice him at first, he so diligently tried to blend with the group. But even the most casual observer would have quickly concluded from his awkward manner that he was somehow an outsider.

  Hester’s intake of breath hissed audibly through her teeth, the recognition came as such a jolt.

  The fifth man was Paul Kenyon.

  “And when did you start shopping at Mario’s?” Hester whispered, recognizing on his slim frame the wares of Portland’s toniest purveyor of clothing-from-the-Continent.

  Beneath the suit’s narrow lapels were satiny ivory pleats of an art-deco tuxedo shirt, bound at the collar by strings of a bolo tie with a gaudy, hand-tooled silver buffalo-head clasp, complete with turquoise eyes.

  That buffalo is familiar, at least, Hester thought. She’d noticed it during a few of Paul’s bookmobile visits and had marveled how she’d “never seen anything quite like it.”

  But, dark glasses aside, even the bolo worked with the avant-garde, urban-Western look Paul sported with surprising panache, Hester observed in wonder.

  Then her hand flew to her chest, as a piercing glint of light flashed from Kenyon’s left earlobe.

  “Oh my sainted aunt, is that a diamond? That’s amazing!” she said aloud. Turning from a blackjack table next to Hester, a heavy, horse-faced woman in a flowered fuchsia-and-chartreuse cocktail dress held her left hand aloft and waggled a tiny engagement ring. “Thank you!” she tittered.

  Startled, Hester recovered quickly enough to pat the woman’s shoulder and chirp, “You must be so excited!” Then she sidled away to stand behind a totem-pole planter. From here she could peek unobserved at Paul’s entourage.

  Smiling and talking, the men skirted the edge of the large hall, then turned and disappeared through another door, this one heavy, carved mahogany. It bore a large brass sign: “PRIVATE. By reservation only.” A stern young Cold Lake man with loose and flowing black hair and a tight, dark suit pulled the door closed and stood outside it with his arms crossed.

  “Oh, Pauly, what are you up to?” Hester murmured, licking her lips. “So this is your night to visit the Indian children, hmmm?”

  Hester sucked in her cheeks. Resolutely, she strode toward the mahogany door and tapped the shoulder of a nearby keno operator. He turned, raising bushy red eyebrows and fixing watery blue eyes on Hester. A name tag on his buffalo-skin caftan said, “How! I’m Eldon.”

  “Excuse me, I just saw a, uh, friend of mine go in there, and I was just curious what’s, um, inside...”

  Eldon stared stonily. From beneath a green visor, wild hair with streaks of orange and gray spilled into a pony tail. Age spots mixed with faded freckles across his leathery jowls.

  “Heh, heh.” Hester tried her best 5,000-watt smile. “I mean, look Eldon, I didn’t want to bother him, but we need to get back to Portland ... Uh, you see, I just got a phone call from my babysitter and, it’s terrible, you see, the baby has a fever. It’s 105! And she’s only two days old!”

  Hester winced. The watery eyes stared, unblinking.

  Oh well, in for a dime, in for a dollar, Hester thought. With her fruitiest come-hither look, she tossed her strawberry locks and batted her eyelashes. Eldon, unmoved, picked up a smoldering cigarillo and took a long suck. Hester watched as no smoke came back out.

  “Great, I’m flirting like Elly Mae Clampett, but G. Gordon Liddy here isn’t falling for it for a second,” Hester groaned to herself.

  Wait – in for a dollar? Had she learned nothing from reading all those Dashiell Hammetts? Maybe you really could buy information from these people!

  Hester frantically dug in her purse. Finally she pulled out her hand, fingers twined around all that was left from her gambling spree. Opening her palm, she looked down at a lone Susan B. Anthony dollar she’d gotten in change from a post-office vending machine. She looked up again. Eldon, moving no other muscles in his face, winked at her. Hester closed her eyes in disgust and wished that she were anywhere else.

  Cheeks burning, Hester turned away and almost collided with a cigarette vendor.

  The woman touched Hester’s arm to steady her.

  “Careful, honey. No luck with old Eldon, huh?” she cooed. “I couldn’t help but notice. He’s a tough old fart. Can I point you to the powder room or something?”

  About Hester’s age, she seemed to be wearing only leather fringe – lots of it, mostly hanging from her plump, alabaster breasts. Tan leather hot pants and moccasins completed the outfit. Beneath a French knot of chestnut hair, a tray laden with Kools hung from straps around her shoulders. A name tag said “Deanna.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Hester sighed. “Actually I was just wondering – what’s behind the door?” She nodded past the keno counter.

  “Oh, us peons call it the High Rollers Lounge,” the cigarette girl said with a wry smile. “It’s a plush little room where the fat cats play. Just poker, usually, but some pretty big stakes.”

  She looked around the room, then waved Hester closer. Obviously relishing a chance to conspire, Deanna continued in a whispered hiss.

  “Now don’t get me in trouble for telling you this, but they’re trying something really weird and new in there, too. You’ve probably heard about these virtual-reality computer things? You know, games and stuff that are like 3-D, complete with some kind of headsets that you wear? Well, they’ve got that in there. Just got it working a couple days ago. Had to hire some computer geek from Portland to work out the bugs. He told ’em he could have it running in two weeks, and it’s been more like three months! But I hear it’s working now. You can go in there and play what they call VR Poker.”

  “Wow,” Hester whispered.

  “How it works, see, is you put on one of the headsets and through some sort of fancy Internet hookup you can be in a poker game with somebody in Vegas! Or for fun, they have like different programs with projections of Wild West gamblers. One of the cooks told me you put this thing on your head and it’s just like you’re playing Texas Hold’em with Bret Maverick or Doc Holliday, characters like that.’’

  “That is wonderful!” Hester gushed.

  “You bet it is, honey. O’Hara’s is testing the system here and in Vegas, but they aren’t really talking about it yet. It’s practically the first set-up of its kind in the world! I tell you, it’s going to put this place on the map! But mum’s the word!”

  “Hey. Thanks for rescuing me.”

  She reached to grasp Deanna’s hand in thanks and realized too late that the Susan B. Anthony dollar still stuck to her palm. Hester looked down at it, then shrugged with a sheepish look at Deanna. Hester reached to deposit the coin in the cigarette tray’s tips cup.

  Deanna laughed and blocked Hester’s hand. “No, honey, you better hold on to that,” she said as she strolled away. “You might need to make a phone call or something.”

  Hester was intrigued with the thought of Paul as virtual-reality doctor. It had to be him, with all those Friday night visits! Was he really that good? Headsets and high-rollers? This she had to see.

  Hester eyeballed the mahogany door and its guard as she scurried from the center of the room to points on each side of the door. “Right there, that’s the best view,” she muttered, and headed for the roulette wheel.

  As she parked herself on a high stool next to the roulette table, the stocky croupier – dressed like an 1840s trapper, complete with coonskin cap – called, “Place yerrr bets, ladies and gentlemen.”

  Hester, giving up on Susan B. Anthony, suddenly remembered her “emergency” $5 bill tucked behind her driver’s license in her wallet. She pulled it out, bought one $5 chip and plunked it down on the black square with the number “8.” (Likewise, whenever she bought Lotto tickets at Fred Meyer up on Burnside, Hester always bet on some combination with th
e numeral 8, based on Bingle T.’s birthday: Aug. 8.)

  As the wheel spun, Hester kept her eyes on the door. Eventually, the wheel wound to a stop and she heard the trapper shout, “Black 8! Congratulations to the lady with the lucky chip!”

  Hester smiled and nodded. The croupier took that as assent to let the bet ride. Hester saw shadows beneath the mahogany door, as if someone were about to exit. The wheel spun. Hester craned her neck and watched the door.

  Vaguely, she was conscious of another cry of “Black 8!” Someone pointed at the square and she vacantly smiled and nodded, but kept her eyes on the door. The wheel spun again.

  After 15 minutes, Hester’s eyes were glazing over. She’d done her best to keep sight of the door, but she’d had to keep bobbing her head and twisting on her stool to see through the crowd, especially considering the high quotient of cowboy hats (since when had Oregonians started wearing cowboy hats?). Around her, people now occasionally applauded. She presumed it was for the banjo player who’d wandered over and was picking out the tune from “Deliverance.”

  The roulette wheel continued to spin, but its soft clicking merely niggled at her consciousness. Hester’s mind reeled with speculation about Paul Kenyon’s association with men who looked for all the world like Las Vegas hoodlums.

  She yawned wide and glanced at her wristwatch. 11:30. Late for a librarian.

  Hester was about to give up when without warning the door swung wide. At the same moment, the crowd cleared, as if on cue from a Hollywood director.

  Hester had a clear view of a green felt-topped playing table. A conical green-glass hanging lamp threw down a pool of bright light on high stacks of chips. Around the table sat four men – as far as she could tell, they were all men – each holding a fan of cards.

  But what drew her eye as headlights draw a deer were the strange head gear that concealed each player’s upper face. With wires and knobs, the headsets made the players appear like some weird robotic beings.

  The headsets were enough to conceal a wearer’s identity. But the player directly in Hester’s line of sight wore a bolo tie with a buffalo-head clasp. She had a clear glimpse before the door closed again.