B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (5 page)

Chapter 8

Harry Harrington
was buck naked except for a strategically draped beach towel that he wore like
Superman’s cape to cover his backside and a beach ball he carried in front of
him.

Walking behind
him, Nate Darrow, who refused to remove his clothing, noticed a butterfly-shaped
birthmark on his colleague’s bony right shoulder as the two detectives wound
their way on a dusty trail past snowberries and beneath mossy cottonwoods toward
Collins Beach, Sauvie Island’s famed nude sunning spot. It was such an
institution that there was even an official county sign out by the road
informing the public that the beach was clothing-optional.

They’d been
directed here after stopping up the road at Downward Dog Farm only to be told
that the farm’s Spiritual Leader, Ma Anand Martha, was spending the day “renewing
her oneness with the Sun God, Ra.” The late-spring heat had returned to
northern Oregon.

“I’ve read
about these people, and you can’t expect them to cooperate unless you’re on the
same spiritual plain, and that means getting bare,” the balding, fifty-something
Harrington had lectured Darrow at their parked car as he stripped down with
what Nate found to be discomfiting zeal. Nate breathed a small sigh of relief
when Harry pulled his modesty-ensuring beach accessories from the car’s trunk.

“OK, Harry, you
can take the lead on this interview, and I wish you luck, but I’m keeping my
pants on,” Darrow told him. “I don’t mind skinny dipping now and then, but the
whole idea of these nudists who go on picnics, munch fried chicken, play
Twister and pretend that everything is perfectly normal while way too many
things are hanging out in the breeze, just kind of gives me the heebie-jeebies.”

 “Well, Nate, my
friend, the missus and I are no naturists, but she has a crazy aunt down in
Bandon who’s always talked up this sort of thing,” Harrington replied, pushing
his perennially slipping eyeglasses up with one hand and then patting his
careful comb-over back into place, while the other hand carefully grasped the multicolored
beach ball to his waist as they walked.

“She says baring
your soul to the universe is the spiritual equivalent of a high colonic. She
sent my wife’s cousin to this crazy school that always sounded to me like that
place Auntie Mame sent little Patrick Dennis, you know? Where they all swam
like salmon going upstream to spawn? Did you ever see that movie?”

It didn’t take
long to find Ma Anand Martha on the sandy Columbia River beach. She and a group
of four deeply tanned followers were the only beachgoers with a tie-dyed kite, soaring
in the breeze above them, tethered to the ground by a string of Tibetan prayer
flags.

Nate hung back near
the tree line, hands in pockets, and watched as Harry introduced himself and
flashed his badge, which he had pinned to his beach towel. As he spoke, Ma
Anand Martha, a freckled brunette whose demeanor was more La Jolla than Lhasa, provocatively
rubbed baby oil on her breasts. Nate heard Harry choke three times during their
exchange of words, muffled by a soft breeze blowing down the river.

“Let’s just hope
he doesn’t need his gun,” Darrow thought to himself, watching idly as a heavily
laden inbound freighter with “TOYOTA” in giant letters across its topsides
pushed aside a high bow wave as it trundled 50 yards from shore on its way to
the Port of Portland.

But the
conversation was surprisingly calm and brief. After a few minutes Harrington
pulled out a ballpoint pen – from where? Darrow wondered – and jotted something
down on his beach ball.

“They say they
have an airtight alibi,” Harry told Nate as they kicked up a small dust cloud
from the dry path on their walk back to the car. “The night van Dyke was killed
all 10 members of their group were up all night long in their barn because
their favorite horse was giving birth. They say the local veterinarian can
vouch for them.”

Twenty-five
minutes later, with Harrington again attired in the blue-and-white striped
seersucker suit he favored in warm weather, they were in the log-cabin-style
Sauvie Island Animal Clinic watching Dr. Nigel Hartley give a mewling tabby kitten
its first vaccinations. Hartley, who sounded like a transplant from New Zealand
or Australia, was confirming the Rajneeshees’ story.

“Yes, mates, I
was there all night with them, from about 8 p.m. until almost bloody 6 in the
morning,” said the plaid-shirted, mutton-chopped vet, shaking his shaggy brown
locks at the memory. “Those folks are good clients and they care about their
animals, but crikey, they almost drove me round the twist that night. It was
Rainbow, their favorite miniature horse. They got her with the idea of breeding
and selling the offspring – you’d be amazed what you can get for these novelty
breeds. But they’re so loopy over their animals I don’t think they’ll ever give
one up.”

 He paused while
he took the kitten back to a Dutch door and handed it over to its waiting
owner, a shyly smiling 8-year-old girl from a nearby farmhouse.

“There you go, little
Madeline, now be sure Squeaker gets a bowl of cream as a treat when you get her
home,” the kindly vet told her, then turned back to Darrow and continued.

“Anyway, they
were there all night chanting and burning incense,” Hartley continued as he
washed his hands over a basin next to the door. “And I know it was all of them
because I kept trying to suggest that we didn’t
need
10 people to assist
and maybe some of them should get some sleep, but they wouldn’t hear of it.

“So it turned
out the little mare was bursting with twin foals in a bad presentation and I
had to do a C-section, and I tell you it took about two hours of palavering to
convince them it was necessary and that just giving her a beet-juice enema
wouldn’t solve the problem!”

Hartley agreed
that he would sign a sworn statement if necessary, and Nate and Harry stepped
back out into the bright sunshine, breathing deeply of the interesting mix of
aromas on the breeze: floral scents from a neighboring nursery and earthy
manure from a dairy farm.

As Harrington
guided the Caprice back across the narrow old steel-girder bridge over
Multnomah Channel, a Willamette River offshoot that separated the island from
the mainland, Darrow drummed his fingers on the dashboard and frowned in
thought.

“Harry, I don’t
want to know what the captain is going to say when he hears that we struck out
with the Rajneeshees, and I hate to think what he’s going to tell the chief,”
Darrow said, sucking on his teeth.

Harrington, the
veteran of many bosses and several chiefs, seemed to be taking it in stride.

“You just tell
the truth, Nate,” he said, twirling the steering wheel to merge onto Highway 30
back toward the city. “The quick arrest the chief promised the public was
foiled by a bunch of prayer-flag waving nudists chanting over a miniature horse
named Rainbow.”

Darrow rubbed
his temples and squeezed his eyes shut. “Yeah, that’s what I was afraid you
were going to say.”

He flinched when
a furious beeping sounded from his jacket. Fumbling and scrambling to find his new
cellular phone, something all Portland detectives had been issued two weeks
earlier, Darrow finally fished the phone from his pocket, raised its little
antenna, peered at it long enough to pick out the “answer” button and held it
to his ear. “Hello! Nate Darrow.”

Poking an index
finger into his other ear in an effort to hear, Darrow listened silently, then
said, “
Really?
” Muttering thanks he punched the button to hang up. As he
pushed the antenna down he gave a low whistle.

“Well, this case
just gets weirder,” he said with a glance at Harrington.

“What! Tell me.”

“That was Jerry
Lorente at the medical examiner’s, fresh from the autopsy, where he recovered
the slug that killed van Dyke. It had apparently lodged against his spine.”

“Yeah, and what’s
so interesting that he had to call you on that dad-blamed high-tech gizmo?” Harrington
wheedled, waggling his shaggy eyebrows like a shrimp Darrow had seen in a tank
at Jake’s Famous Crawfish, one of his favorite Portland restaurants. Nate had
quickly discovered the fun of keeping Harry in suspense.

“Well, it wasn’t
your garden variety .38 or .22,” Darrow added, pausing to chew on a thumbnail.

“Yeah, AND?” Now
Harry was turning the same red as that shrimp.

“Well, according
to Jerry, it looks a lot like – well, a lot like a musket ball.”

Chapter 9

Thursday, June
13

Sniffing at the
faint odor of disinfectant hanging in the assistant ME’s office at 8:30 the
next morning, Darrow sat across a cluttered desk from a man in green scrubs who
munched a toasted “everything” bagel, talking with his mouth half-full and
spraying poppy seeds and fragments of garlic as he spoke.

“First time I’ve
seen anything like it,” said Jerry Lorente, a fair-skinned, dark-haired
Hispanic who periodically reached up with thumb and forefinger to absently pluck
at his mustache as he spoke. “But I did a little research and what we have is a
lead ball such as was commonly used in firearms of the early to mid-19
^th
century.”

Lorente used a
pair of tongs to pull the slightly misshapen ball from a zip-lock evidence bag
and drop it with a loud “plunk” in a metal tray for Darrow’s inspection.

Darrow tugged off
his gray corduroy sport coat as the room’s fuggy atmosphere started to make his
head swim.

“So,” he
shrugged, in bewilderment, “Who even
has
guns like that around Portland,
Oregon, in 1996?”

“Hey, I know
who!” erupted a voice from the room’s open doorway.

Both men’s heads
swiveled. Against the doorjamb leaned Gavin Peacock, the office’s resident
know-it-all, in scrubs flecked liberally with something brown and yellowish
that Darrow didn’t want to analyze too closely.

 Nate had encountered
him in the line of duty a couple times and couldn’t decide which was more
off-putting: Peacock’s high-pitched, raspy voice or his waggling, skunk-striped
beard, cut in the Lincoln style to frame his weak chin but with no mustache. It
worked on Honest Abe, but smacked of pretension at the end of the 20
^th
century, Nate thought privately.

“OK, spill,”
Darrow responded as Peacock smirked.

“I have a cousin
who’s into historical re-enactments, you know, of Civil War battles and all
that sort of thing, and they have a whole group over at Fort Vancouver – the ‘First
Oregon Volunteer Infantry’ – that does demonstrations with muskets and
flintlocks and that sort of gun,” Peacock said. “I’ll bet you might find out
exactly what fired that ball if you go talk to folks at the national historic
site.”

Darrow listened
thoughtfully, realizing this was the first time Peacock had actually said
something useful within his hearing.

Slapping his
thigh, Darrow flung his jacket over his sweat-stained shirt back and rose
without delay. “That, my skunk-bearded friend, is a great idea.”

*     *     *

Thirty minutes
later Darrow and Harry Harrington were sitting in stopped traffic on the
Interstate Bridge at the north edge of Portland as they watched the tower of a Tidewater
Barge Co. tug glide beneath the raised drawbridge.

The tug was
pushing a barge filled with frozen French fries downriver to Portland after
making the 300-mile trip from Lewiston, Idaho. But all Nate and Harry knew was
that it was holding them up.

“I swear to God,
they must have a special scanner set up that sees me coming, because this
bridge goes up
every
darn time I try to cross over to Washington,”
Harrington complained.

Darrow, having
grown numb to Harry’s protestations about traffic conspiracies, let his eyes
wander to the car stopped in the lane next to them: a blue Civic hatchback with
“WASH ME” written in the dust on its fender. Beyond, in the far distance, the perfectly
conical snowy peak of Mount Hood rose over the river.

As his eyes idly
wandered over the next car the driver suddenly turned and looked straight into
his eyes. Darrow glanced away in embarrassment.

Then he turned
back.

He and the
blue-eyed driver of the next car simultaneously rolled down their windows.

“Hester!”

“Nate!”

“We run into
each other in the weirdest places,” Darrow said to his favorite librarian. “Hey,
where you heading?”

“Oh, Pim had a
thing in Vancouver this morning and we’re meeting for lunch – it’s her
birthday!” Hester called across the traffic line.

At that moment
the bridge deck finished lowering and the gates went up, so Harry pulled
forward and Darrow waved to Hester and closed his window.

The Caprice
zoomed ahead the last 500 feet to Washington soil, and Harry took the signed exit
toward Fort Vancouver National Historic Site.

Founded in 1824,
Fort Vancouver was one of the first outposts of European settlers in this
corner of the continent. Originally it was a Hudson’s Bay Co. fur-trading post.
Later it doubled as a military installation for the U.S. Army, with early
officers including Ulysses S. Grant and other famous names. Now it was run by
the National Park Service, with an authentic replica of the original wooden
fort, complete with blacksmith shop, fur warehouse and a chief factor’s house
with cannons out front.

Harry steered
the Caprice around a traffic circle and along Officers Row, a stately line of
restored, maple-shaded officer homes – now subdivided into ritzy rental
townhouses – and hung a right on a winding drive to cross grassy parade grounds
to the fort.

Darrow and
Harrington were conferring at the log-built gatehouse with a park ranger, whose
long gray braids hung down on both sides of her Smokey Bear hat, when who
should walk up the gravel path from the parking lot but Hester McGarrigle.

Today, Hester
was outfitted for the weather in olive-colored slacks and a cream-colored
cotton blouse emblazoned with a bamboo print. She carried a broad-brimmed straw
hat, part of a large hat collection that she loved in concept but could rarely
stand to wear on the grounds that hats were too claustrophobic.

The ranger
continued to talk as Darrow pantomimed his surprise and waved hello to Hester,
who stopped and hovered within hearing distance.

“The guy you
really need to talk to is our head curator, John Vouri, he’s the historical
firearms expert here,” the ranger said in a gravelly voice, taking off her hat
to fan herself on the hot day. “But I’m afraid he’s on family leave in Ohio and
won’t be back for a few more days. I don’t really have anyone else on staff who
can talk much about that sort of thing, but John’s a wizard on that stuff.”

“Oh, dear, that’s
who I’d hoped to see as well,” Hester spoke up, drawing the others’ attention. “But
Detective Darrow, why are you here?”

Darrow caught a
warning glance and a throat-clearing from Harrington, to whom he gave a
perfunctory, slightly annoyed nod of reassurance before responding. “Uh, it’s
part of an investigation.” The obvious message-left-unsaid: “I can’t talk to
you about it.”

 Darrow and
Hester had a personal history that was a poorly kept secret among a few of his
colleagues. That it had happened when she was a primary witness in a case he
was working, potentially risking his job had the brass found out, had created some
awkwardness between them. The fling had been short-lived, though the attraction
still smoldered.

Hester caught
the implication. She looked at him quizzically for a moment.

“Well, you might
not be able to talk about it, but I can talk about why
I’m
here, and
frankly it doesn’t hurt for the police to hear,” she forged on.

Now she had
their full attention. Hester peered at the nameplate on the ranger’s breast
pocket.

“Ranger McPhee,
I work for the Portland City Library and today I represent the McLoughlin
Collection, our collection of art and artifacts named, as you probably know,
for your fort’s original chief factor, John McLoughlin.”

Ranger McPhee’s
braids danced as she nodded.

 “And at
Memorial Day, for one of your re-enactments, we loaned you folks a valuable
replica of a historical French flintlock pistol, what we call the Charbonneau
pistol,” Hester continued. “It was to be returned within a few days, but we
discovered yesterday that it’s not where it should be, so we’re wondering if
there was some delay in getting it back from you folks, perhaps?”

As she spoke,
Darrow and Harrington exchanged meaningful glances and Nate saw that Harry’s
eyebrows were starting to do the shrimp thing again.

 Now concern
clouded Ranger McPhee’s age-crinkled face.

“Boy, I wish I
could help you there. I can take a look around John’s office but I don’t have
keys to his gun lockup. I’m afraid he left in rather a hurry right after the
Memorial Day events – his father had a heart attack. And sadly the old man died
a week later, so John stayed on for the funeral and is attending to some estate
matters before he returns.”

Hester’s hand
flew up to cover her mouth.

“I could maybe
get him on the phone if you need,” Ranger McPhee concluded.

“Oh, no, no – I’m
sorry to hear of his circumstances, let’s not bother the poor man,” Hester
said. “I expect it’s probably in a safe place and we’ll get it back when he
returns. I think I can placate our curator with that.”

“Ahem,” Darrow
interjected. “This, uh, pistol you’re talking about…Would it by any chance
shoot something that looks like a musket ball?”

Hester appeared
dumbfounded by the question. “I really have no idea, but why on earth are you
asking?”

But Ranger
McPhee spoke up in response to Nate’s question.

“If it’s
something we were using in our re-enactments, then, yes, it would most likely
shoot a standard lead ball like you’d see used in muskets from the early 19
^th
century, I can tell you that much,” she said. “In fact, they were just using
firearms like that in a re-enactment rehearsal here earlier this morning.
Unfortunately, I saw the volunteer in charge of that part of the program drive
out of here about 20 minutes ago or you could have picked
his
brain.”

Darrow pinched
his lip in thought. As he looked out across the fort, he saw Ethel Pimala
approaching from the direction of the fort’s vegetable garden. She wore one of
her garish Hawaiian shirts and directed a beaming smile toward Hester.

“Hester, did you
say you were going to have lunch with Pim?” Darrow asked. “I wonder if I could
crash your party and join you?”

“Why – sure,”
Hester stammered.

Harrington cast
a stern eye at Darrow. “Nate, we really need to get back – ”

“It’s OK, I’ll
get a ride back to town with Hester,” he consoled Harry, then cocking a
questioning eyebrow at the intrepid librarian. “That OK with you?”

Hester shrugged
in confusion. “I don’t see why not. The more the merrier.”