B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery (9 page)

By the time Hester
had filled Darrow in on the afternoon’s latest discovery with the McLoughlin
Collection, cold grease stains had spread across the bottom of the cardboard
pizza box like nimbus clouds across a March sky.

Darrow gave a
long, low whistle.

“Pomp Charbonneau
is a name I really didn’t need to have come up in my dinnertime conversation, I
have to tell you, Miss Marple,” Darrow said.

“I’ll kick you
in the shins if you call me that again,” Hester said coquettishly, but with a
steely cast in her eye that Darrow couldn’t miss.

“Guess how I
spent my whole afternoon,” he continued. “Running all over Greater Portland
trying to find our friend Pomp Charbonneau.”

He shook his
head at the recollection.

“We did figure
out that he’s a swing-shift printer at The Oregonian, but when I dropped by
there the deputy publisher who saw ‘All The President’s Men’ a few too many
times got all First Amendment on me and demanded a warrant before they’d even
give me the guy’s phone number. So I cruised out to Newberg to visit the
address we dug up from state tax records only to find it was one of those
private mailbox centers in a strip mall between a KFC and a nail salon. I got
pepperoni tonight because I needed something to help get the ‘bucket o’ chicken’
smell out of my sinuses after sitting outside the stupid mailbox place for two
hours hoping the guy would stop in to pick up his Publisher’s Clearing House
mailer. He could already be a millionaire, you know, and he doesn’t even seem
to care.”

Darrow sighed and
took a long swallow of his beer. “Mmm, that came out pretty nicely,” he
murmured appreciatively to the ceiling before continuing.

“So now, Hester,
from what you tell me, it sounds like Charbonneau not only might know something
about the gun that killed Pieter van Dyke, but might somehow also be mixed up
in, what, the
counterfeiting
of a valuable library artifact? Some sort
of stamp-collector’s envelope thingy that once belonged to van Dyke’s father?”

Darrow looked
into her blue eyes with that gaze that Hester found hard to take calmly.

“These are some
really weird tea leaves we’ve got to read here, wouldn’t you say?” he said with
finality.

Hester, who had
been taking it all in with her chin in her hand, finally spoke up.

“OK, I can see
that because Charbonneau is a printer he could have faked the first day cover –
but why add a third person? And how in Hades did he make the switch? I vaguely
recall Pim telling me he is a master printer and uses an art-quality technique
of some kind… But, I’ve met him. He’s not master-criminal material. It was the
third guy in the boat that tipped us off it was a fake.”

 “Lord knows, an
accomplice inside?” Darrow said. “But first tell me how much that first-day
cover was worth – the original. Was it worth stealing?”

Hester blanched
and bit her lip.

Darrow knitted
his brow and peered at her. “Hester?”

“Oh, dear, this
isn’t going to play well for the library, I’m afraid,” she said. “But I suppose
it’s going to come out one way or another now.”

Darrow waited
silently, drawing rings in the condensation on his beer bottle as he waited for
her to go on.

Drawing a deep
breath, Hester forged on.

“You know this
isn’t my department but it doesn’t take long to figure out that considering the
value of some of the artifacts in the McLoughlin Collection, the library has
woefully underinvested in security.”

“That doesn’t
sound good,” Darrow said, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and
forefinger. “Come on, let’s have the bad news.”

“Well, it’s
nothing definitive, but my Dad knows a stamp dealer out by Lloyd Center, so I
gave him a call this afternoon and he happened to have heard about a recent
auction of one of the few other ‘Flying Canoe’ covers,” Hester said.

 Gulping, she
added, “It sold for six figures. He was pretty sure it was over $250,000.”

Chapter 15

By the time he
left his job in the color-camera back shop at
The Oregonian
that night, Pomp
Charbonneau had solved several mini-crises that had threatened to stop the
Friday morning newspaper from going to press. 

The sports
editor had been tearing out what little was left of his hair because a centerpiece
photo of an Oregon Ducks athlete had made the team colors appear to be brown
and orange instead of green and yellow.

 But the
full-page Meier & Frank department store ad in which the men’s briefs looked
Pepto-Bismol pink was the biggest challenge. Nobody was going to pay for that,
and it meant thousands to the newspaper.

As usual, the
bosses had turned to their best print-shop wizard to save the day.

On his 45-minute
drive home, Charbonneau made a quick stop at his private mailbox and was
pleased to find another order from a Portland artist for 25 giclée prints of
the oil paintings she made featuring montages of balsamroot blossoms, a
prolific wildflower that carpeted hillsides on the sunny side of the Columbia
Gorge.

The headlights
of his old truck reflected on the silvery sides of his trailer and in the eyes
of a big raccoon as he pulled to a stop at the edge of a Willamette Valley vineyard.
Looking up, he saw the seven stars of the Pleiades pulsing in and out of focus
in the darkening sky.

Charbonneau
stepped inside briefly, rummaged through his tiny fridge, pulled out a homemade
venison meat pie, popped it into the propane oven, and then set a plate of
yesterday’s leftovers on the front step for the raccoon before crossing his
clearing to a small barn.

After a steamy shower
in the bathroom he’d plumbed himself, he rubbed a towel over his dark, wet hair
and pulled it back into a ponytail as he stepped into the cool sanctuary of his
winery, which occupied half the barn.

Sniffing happily
at the heady sour-tart aroma of fermenting grapes, Charbonneau picked an old
canoe paddle off a hook on the wall, lifted a net of cheesecloth from atop a stainless
steel vat and vigorously stirred, breaking up the cap of grape skins and pulp
that had floated to the top of his newest red.

While others
used special metal paddles purchased from wine-supply warehouses for this daily
chore, Pomp preferred the old wooden paddle he had used on many a canoe trip
exploring sloughs along the lower Columbia. That it might not be perfectly sterile,
perhaps explaining why several of his wines had gone “off,” mattered less to
him than the character it added.

Replacing the
cheesecloth over the vat, he stopped at a small table, polished a wineglass
with a cotton towel, then pulled a bung from a purple-stained oak barrel and
used a pipette “thief” to pull a sample of merlot and transfer it to the glass.

He held the
glass up to the single light bulb hanging from above, swirled the ruby liquid
and then took a deep, satisfying sniff before stepping back into the other half
of the barn and pulling the door securely closed behind him.

The rest of the
barn was divided into two quarters: his print shop and his collection room.

This was the
latter. He plopped down in an old leather recliner to sip his wine and admire the
wall hung with oiled iron animal traps, more canoe paddles of all sizes,
tomahawks from the Shoshone Tribe, ancient snowshoes, and his collection of
vintage firearms – all authentic. The library had its McLoughlin Collection.
This was the Charbonneau Collection.

Nearest his
chair was a rough wooden wall of framed photos of his four ex-wives and eight
children. His first wife bore him no offspring, or there’d have been more. 

“Ah, you
slacker, you,” he said to her photo as he swirled the wine under his nose.

Charbonneau’s
one big regret was that he didn’t see more of his kids. He scanned their framed
school photos. At top were the oldest, Pomp Jr., Sacajawea and Clark, a trio of
dashing, dark-eyed teens. Next were Wife No. 3’s preteen offspring, T.J. (for
Thomas Jefferson), and the girl, Montana. At the bottom were Wife No. 4’s
little girl, Dakota, and the preschool twins, Jean and Baptiste.

Also there:
framed mementos, such as a sample of the $2 bills he had printed up and
regularly handed out to the homeless back in D.C. before some Starbucks cashier
had noticed she had a till full of bills on which Thomas Jefferson sported a
Snidely Whiplash mustache.

 About that
time, Wife No. 4 had thrown him out, so Charbonneau had decided it might be a
good idea to move to the West Coast before the Secret Service tracked him down.
When he scanned a map, the nearby community of Charbonneau, Oregon, had
originally drawn him to the Portland area.

He sipped the
merlot – good plummy notes developing, he noticed – and remembered the
printing order he’d stuffed in a pocket.

He pulled it out
and mentally calculated the income it would bring. Thank God, maybe he’d keep
the collection agencies at bay for another month. Child-support was killing
him.

Not only that,
but Pomp Jr. was graduating from high school on Sunday back in Virginia and Dad
had promised him a Trans Am for graduation. While Charbonneau tended to live
for today and didn’t worry much about his children’s future, a Charbonneau
promise meant something.

 Pushing himself
out of the armchair, he stepped through another door, into his print shop.

A look at his
watch told him he had a few minutes before his dinner would be hot. Thinking
ahead to the weekend when he’d tackle the art prints, he set his wineglass
safely out of the way and busied himself cleaning up from his last job: the
Flying Canoe first-day cover.

A grin flashed
across his face as he studied the extra copy he’d kept to frame for his wall.
He and his ancestors had long resented the short shrift historians gave Toussaint.
From the time he was knee-high to his grandfather, Pomp had heard the family’s
belief that the Corps of Discovery should have been known as the Lewis, Clark
and
Charbonneau
Expedition.

So Pomp had
exercised his wicked sense of humor and put Toussaint in the canoe, too, when
he replicated the Flying Canoe first-day cover for Pieter van Dyke.

Chapter 16

Friday, June 14

At 8 a.m., traffic
into the city was all clogged up on the downhill bends of the Sunset Highway
just before the tunnel, but it didn’t bother Nate Darrow. He took pleasure as
he shifted into fourth gear and listened to the throaty roar of his classic silver
Volvo 1800 coupe as it rocketed up the hill in the opposite direction, toward
Portland’s western suburbs.

Darrow’s old car
was one of his few material possessions in which he invested real pride, one of
the Seven Deadly Sins his Lutheran grandmother had warned him about.

 He’d worked the
summer after high school on a crab boat out of the Oregon Coast town of Newport
to buy the used car, a symbol of panache that had set him apart from school
chums who drove hulking Impalas and old Beetles.

 He called his
car “Sven,” in honor of its Swedish heritage, which it shared with Darrow’s
mother’s family, the Boresons. He was reminded of that heritage every time he
looked at the parts bill when his car needed a repair – more and more often,
now that it was 30 years old.

“They have to
charge so much because some guy named Ole rows the parts across from
Stockholm,” he grumbled jokingly to friends.

A recent rebore
meant this was one of those periods when his bank balance was low but he could
step on Sven’s accelerator and not have to worry about sounds from under the
hood like someone choking on lutefisk.

And he always
took pleasure in the car’s red leather bucket seats, wood-trimmed dashboard,
and sleek profile.

“It’s like
Bond’s original Aston-Martin, just without the machine guns or the smoke-screen
thing,” he had boasted to Harry Harrington.

“That kind of
depends on how much oil Sven is burning on any particular day, Nate,” Harry had
replied.

This sun-drenched
morning was supposed to be his half-day off, but Darrow was pursuing a hunch on
how to track down the elusive Pomp Charbonneau without having to wait for a
stakeout outside The Oregonian that night. With Hester’s revelations about his
apparent involvement in forgery, Charbonneau was definitely now a “person of
interest.”

Recalling that the
printer also dabbled at winemaking, Darrow had phoned his brother, Bud, after
saying goodnight to Hester the previous night.

“If Charbonneau
is part of the winemaking scene out in the West Valley, my brother will know
him,” he’d assured Hester.

Bud Darrow had
chosen to carry on the “family business,” as he put it. The two boys had heard
their father, an Oregon State viticulture professor, wax eloquently and
endlessly about the Willamette Valley’s suitability for growing cooler-climate
wine grapes such as pinot noir and pinot gris. While his father’s involvement
in Oregon’s nascent wine industry in the 1970s had been limited to academics
and bringing home bottles to sample around the family dinner table, from the
early 1980s Bud had been one of the region’s rising winemaking stars. He had his
winery in the little village of Carlton, north of McMinnville, where the town’s
tall grain elevator now cast its shadow on a growing number of tony tasting
rooms along the two blocks of “downtown.”

“Yeah, I’ve met
Charbonneau,” Bud Darrow responded on the phone to Nate’s inquiry. Bud’s voice
was old cigar to Nate’s coffee and cream.

“He’s kind of a
survivalist nut. Has it in his head he can do a great Bordeaux blend here, but
he just can’t get his Cab to ripen in the little gulch he’s farming. Frost
comes too soon.”

“Can you tell me
where he lives?” Nate pressed.

“Oh, golly, he’s
out below Ribbon Ridge. Makes wine in a barn he bought from old Billy
Brickhouse, and lives in an Airstream trailer next to Billy’s chardonnay
vineyard. But the roads out there are like a rabbit warren, you’ll never find
it on your own.”

“What if I
talked to this Billy fellow? Could he show me? It’s kind of urgent.”

“Naw, don’t
bother old Billy. He’s got phylloxera in his best pinot patch and the man’s a
basket case right now. Tell you what, come out for breakfast tomorrow and
afterward I’ll run you out there. I’ve got to pick up a load of cow dung up in
Yamhill anyway. Solstice is coming, you know.”

As Nate turned Sven
past the Beaverton malls to weave his way toward the rural valley, he pondered
the phenomenon that was his big brother. Two years earlier, Bud Darrow, who had
earned a double major in philosophy and viticulture at U.C. Davis, had
converted his winery to biodynamics, an agricultural protocol posited in the
1920s by Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. It combined organic sciences with
mysticism, which in practical purposes meant that, among other things, Bud
planted his vines by the light of the full moon and buried manure in old cow
horns to ferment for six months before being dug up every solstice and used as
fertilizer.

Skeptical
colleagues tongue-in-cheekily referred to his brother’s Wahoo Vineyards as “Woo
Woo Winery.” Nate tried to reserve judgment.

“If nothing
else, all the rules about pruning on the Feast of St. Stephen and spraying
fertilizer on Epiphany mean your brother’s out in his vineyard paying a whole
lot more attention to the plants than those absentee owners who fly in twice a
year from California,” Nate had heard from the proprietor at his favorite
Portland wine shop. “And healthy vines make good wine.”

Sometimes,
though, Bud seemed to be leading the parade of Oregon’s growing cadre of crystal
healers and Maypole dancers, Nate thought. He’d gobbled a piece of cold pizza
before leaving home, since Bud had promised a “tofu-kale free-range scramble” for
breakfast.

A half-hour
later, Nate was surreptitiously picking the green and gray bits out of his eggs
as Bud and his wife, Betty, regaled him with the latest lacrosse-field
achievements of Nate’s 13-year-old nephew, Dylan. Their 10-year-old daughter,
still in her nightie, sat uncommunicatively nearby with a morose look on her
face as she munched through a bowl of granola.

“Sophy’s not
really a morning person,” her mother explained.   

As Nate tried to
smile appreciatively, a green-and-white sheriff’s cruiser pulled slowly into
the old yellow farmhouse’s gravel drive just behind the silver Volvo.

“Well, hey, it’s
Wayne Jordan,” said Bud, a two-inches shorter, 20-pounds heavier, crew-cut
version of his brother. This morning Bud was outfitted in Lee jeans and an L.L.
Bean flannel shirt in contrast to Nate’s collegiate wardrobe of checked Oxford shirt,
corduroy trousers and argyle socks.

Nate stood to
shake hands as the uniformed deputy from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office
climbed the creaky steps to the screened sun porch where they were breakfasting.

“I was just
passing and saw the old Finnish flivver,” smiled the blond, freckled deputy, a former
colleague of Nate’s from his early days on the force in Ashland, near Oregon’s
southern border. Jordan could never seem to keep straight which Scandinavian
country built Volvos.

“Wayne, what a
nice surprise,” Nate responded as Betty, a farm wife whose milky complexion and
calm demeanor seemed to draw nourishment from the nature around her, sprang to
the kitchen for an extra coffee cup.

As the two old
friends caught up over shade-grown, fair-trade Costa Rican dark roast – Bud had
long ago spoiled his brother for the instant coffee he’d consumed in college – Nate
got around to telling a little about his interest in Pomp Charbonneau.

“I know where
that wacko lives,” Jordan responded. “I had to assist once with a health-department
enforcement when he staged an unlicensed possum roast during our big Memorial
Day wine tour. He claimed it was the perfect pairing with his new red blend. But
people were throwing up.”

As Jordan
finished off a second helping of scrambled eggs, with kale bits stuck in his
teeth to show for it, he added, “Hey, Nate, I’m heading out past Ribbon Ridge
to do a welfare check on someone’s grandmother – I could lead you to
Charbonneau’s place.”

Bud Darrow happily
consented to pass off that duty, quipping, “A truckload of steaming cow shit
waits for no man.”

Ten minutes
later Nate was downshifting the Volvo for the umpteenth turn along the narrow
country roads, weaving among hazelnut orchards, patches of Douglas-fir forest
and sunny hillsides of wine grapes.

A cloud of dust
raised by the sheriff’s cruiser signaled that the road turned to gravel ahead.
In another 500 feet, Nate followed as the cruiser turned into a grassy drive
and slowly rocked and rolled for five minutes along the edge of a vineyard
thick with emerald green, heart-shaped leaves and corkscrewing tendrils
climbing wires toward the sky.

At a clearing, red
taillights flashed through dust as Jordan pulled up alongside a gleaming silver
travel trailer, its front end supported by cinder blocks, with small
red-white-and-blue flags – one American, one French – fluttering from staffs
above the door.

 “My brother was
right, I’d never have found this place,” Nate said as the two men climbed out
of their cars. “Wayne, thanks for the help, but you really don’t need to stop.
I just need to talk to this guy.”

“Not a problem,
it’s my neighborhood. Let’s see if ol’ Pomp is home,” replied the deputy, reverting
to his “line of duty” protocol, fingering the baton on his belt and unsnapping
his sidearm holster as he stepped to the door of the trailer and gave a polite
rap.

The only sound
was the trilling “chirree” of a red-winged blackbird from a cattail marsh
across the road.

Jordan rapped
harder. “Sheriff’s deputy, Mr. Charbonneau!” he called, his voice echoing away
into the vineyard.

  Across the
clearing, an unseen rusty door hinge slowly creaked from a small barn that was
once cherry red but was now faded to match the wild pink roses edging a nearby
ditch.

The two men
exchanged glances, then nodded and walked toward the barn. Darrow reached under
his sport coat and put his hand on his service revolver, trying to remember if
he’d loaded it that morning.

They were
halfway across the clearing when a diesel engine chugged to life from the far
side of the building. In another instant, an ancient flatbed truck with
rounded, rusting green fenders careened into sight, speeding away down a
narrow, grassy lane between vineyard rows.

Darrow threw up
his arms and vainly shouted, “Stop! Police!”

He ran to look
down the gap between grapevines, hoping to be able to identify the truck. It
looked like an old Chevy, probably built about the same time Darrow was born.
Its knobby tires threw bits of sod high into the air as it sped away.

His eyes widened
at what else he saw: Just turning into the lane from the opposite direction was
a small tractor pulling a trailer full of vineyard clippings. On the side of
the trailer’s wooden box was stenciled in large letters, “Brickhouse
Vineyards.”

Old Billy
Brickhouse barely had time to react to the oncoming flatbed. He spun the
tractor’s wheel and plowed sideways into the ditch. His trailer turned on its
side.

The speeding
truck caromed to the right and flattened the tall, crossed poles supporting the
end of a vineyard row. It continued along the row, taking down two more sets of
stout poles, each with a loud pop, before lurching to a stop with tangled
ribbons of wire and shredded grapevines protruding from every wheel well.

Now Darrow could
make out the hand-painted sign on the truck’s door: “Charbonneau Cellars: For
the amour of the grape.”

Turning to
Deputy Jordan, he said, “I think we’re going to do more than just ask a few
questions of Mr. Charbonneau.”