Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (6 page)

“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.