Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (13 page)

“Well hey nonny nonny, the beast
is back!” Hester called out later that morning, hoping the attempt at cheer
would mask her trepidation as she climbed aboard Bookmobile No. 3 in its old
familiar loading dock at the bookmobile barn.

“Well, now, that’s a nice way to
greet an old buddy!” growled a gravelly voice from the front of the coach.
Hester turned to see Ralph O’Sullivan, the substitute driver whom she usually
saw only when Pim took one of her rare vacations. Leaning out the driver’s
window, he was madly wiping the side mirror, a wad of paper towels in one hand
and a spray bottle of blue cleaner in the other.

A retired Navy man from San
Diego, Ralph had moved to Portland to live near his grandchildren and now
worked part time driving the vans that ferried books between library branches.
Owing to his previous life, Ralph was a cleanliness fiend. Today, as usual, he
wore a white shirt and navy blue tie, with nary a Brylcreemed gray hair out of
place. Pim always came back from vacation refreshed, to a bookmobile cleaner
than it had been in months.

“Oh, Ralph, hi! You know I was
talking about
this
beast, the lovely magenta one that belches diesel
fumes,” Hester said, stamping her foot on the old coach’s cracked linoleum. “Not
the one that belches Onionburgers,” she added with a teasing smile, remembering
Ralph’s favorite lunch.

Hester stopped and looked around
in dismay. “Oh, dear, we’re not going to get a very early start, are we?”

The police bureau’s forensics division
had finally finished collecting evidence from Bookmobile No. 3 the previous
afternoon. A call from the barn shortly after Darrow had left Hester’s
apartment confirmed she’d be on the road again that day.

She’d heard they’d given the old
bus a thorough going over. But as she looked around at the empty shelves – all
the books in cardboard boxes on the floor – Hester’s eyes widened.

“Not much for me to tidy this
time!” Ralph chuckled, running his finger along a usually dusty shelf and
holding it up clean. “Newall said they went through the whole bus with special
vacuums.” Seizing on the topic, he turned all the way around in his seat. “You
know, Ann Rule wrote about a case down in L.A. where they convicted a guy of a
triple murder based on some dryer lint he dropped from a coat pocket! Why, if
you have so much as some cat hair on your cardigan, they’ll find it with these
vacuums. The things have microfine filters, finer than a cigarette filter.”

With a wan smile, Hester
remembered why she always missed Pim when she was off. Ralph was OK, but he
considered himself the world’s leading authority – on any topic. When he got
caught up in details, it could take forever to get anything done.

“Well, we’d better get busy,”
Hester said, taking off her coat. Without thinking, she stepped toward the coat
rack next to the rear cupboard. She suddenly caught herself when she saw the
cupboard’s dark opening, its door now missing.

“Oh, yeah, Hester – ” Ralph
coughed. “You might not want to – They, uh, hadn’t really cleaned up everything
that well back there. So Newall and I did our best with a scrub brush. They
took the door off its hinges and held on to it for evidence. Not to get too
graphic, but Newall said they needed to preserve the spatter patterns – ”

“OK, Ralph, that’s more than I
need to know.” Hester cut him off with finality. “Thank you. We’ll just make
the best of things.” Squeezing her eyes shut, Hester took a deep breath, then
lifted her head and carried her coat back to the front of the bookmobile, where
she draped it over the passenger seat.

 “Look, Hester, I’m sorry,” Ralph
said, both hands raised. “I know this all must have been pretty hard on you,
finding her and all that.” Noticing Hester’s sudden pallor, he paused. “Listen,
you sure you want to be here today?”

Kneeling down to a box of books,
Hester looked up at him and nodded. “Yes. Thanks. I’ll be fine. Time to climb
right back in the saddle, isn’t that what they say?”

“Right, right. But Hester, I’ve
got to say – Pim’s a friend, you know. Ain’t no way I believe she did murder.”

‘“Well, Ralph, that makes two of
us anyway,” Hester said, giving a courageous smile as she pulled books from the
box and began to sort them by subject.

Ralph knelt over another box and
inspected the contents. “Oh, boy, they did a number on jumbling these up, I’m
afraid. Here’s Louis L’Amour on top of Danielle Steel!”

“
She
probably likes that,
but I’d expect better of Louis,” Hester muttered, pushing a red curl out of her
eyes.

Ralph spent more time poring over
book jackets than sorting. A true-crime paperback held his attention a moment,
its lurid cover showing a bloody steak knife wielded by a crazed suburban
mother of four. “Hey, I don’t think I’ve read this one!” he said, turning to
plop the book on the dashboard.

Another thought occupied Ralph’s
face as he turned back, pausing to lean against a bookshelf. Arms crossed, he
looked down at Hester.

“You know, they always consider
family first. It’s amazing how many spouses kill each other, or brothers murder
sisters, or cousins grab squirrel guns out of their pickups after a little
squabble over who gets the last barbecued rib at the family reunion.”

Hester gave a little roll of her
eyes, struggling to quell her first feelings of exasperation. “Well, if you’re
talking about Miss Duffy, she had no family. Her last cousin passed away last
year in Connecticut.”

Ralph wasn’t to be put off,
however.

“Of course, if the victim is
somebody old, they always look at the heirs, to see who inherits. People are
greedy, and if there’s money, sometimes they get impatient. You know – there’s
a lot of scuttlebutt about how old Sara wasn’t exactly poverty stricken.”

Hester had stopped sorting. She
sat on the floor and leaned back against a cold metal wall to listen.

“So, Hester, if it wasn’t Pim,
who did this? If I were investigating, first I’d want to know how much money
old Duffy had stuffed in a mattress, and second, I’d want to know who gets it.
Did she have any close friends?”

Hester’s eyes froze on a faded
sign on the wall beyond Ralph’s head: “No tobacco-spitting on the bookmobile.”
The sign had been there so long, she rarely noticed it, nor did she now as her
mind processed the thought Ralph had planted.

“Friends?” she repeated.

Hester suddenly leaned forward
and resumed her task of organizing books for the day’s run. Nodding at another
box, she urged her driver to help. “Come on, Ralph, let’s get going. You gave
me an idea that just might be worth talking to somebody about.”

The view from the top of Skyline
that noon lived up to the reputation that made it a regular stop for tour buses
filled with camera-toting tourists from Osaka, Oslo and Omaha.

Amid wafting puffs of cumulus
beyond the city skyline, Mount Hood’s shark-tooth peak gleamed with snow. To
the northeast Hester saw the low hump of Mount St. Helens. A flat, surgically
precise cut marked where a wide crater had replaced the peak’s top thousand
feet. Hester remembered the day it erupted. She and a long-ago flame were at a
bed-and-breakfast in the Yakima Valley wine country. They saw the sky turn
black at noon.

Hester had worried nobody would
expect the bookmobile today. But Shelly Guenther, the library’s ace P.R. woman,
had passed the word to Portland TV and radio. At least one bored news manager
apparently found enough lingering sensationalism in the Duffy murder to air the
announcement on news breaks all morning.

Through the windshield Hester saw
several regulars clustered around a park bench, some looking a little grumpy
that the bookmobile was 20 minutes late. “Uh oh, Ralph, I’m afraid we’re in for
it,” Hester said, her loyal patrons pointedly glancing at watches as the driver
wrestled the big bus over to the curb.

Beyond was a knot of new faces,
several people craning their necks as the bookmobile ground to a halt. Small
children played tag, running in and out of the crowd. There were several baby
jogger-strollers piloted by slim mothers in Nike spandex. One entire helmeted
family had come on bicycles, complete with one of those toddler trailers, its
bright orange safety flag wagging in a light breeze.

In a parking slot just beyond,
Hester noticed a TV news van with a microwave dish raised atop its roof. Cables
snaked across the lawn and around the trunk of a lone fir, its branches sagging
beneath a flock of starlings whose incessant chittering added to the general
hubbub.

“I wonder what’s going on up here
today, they must be having some kind of fun-run or something,” Ralph muttered
as he yanked the huge parking brake into position.

“Yes, and it looks like a really
slow news day for somebody if
that’s
what they’re covering,” Hester
added.

Ralph dug the morning’s
Oregonian
from beneath his seat and propped one foot on the gear box as Hester set up
the Instie-Circ. Unlike Pim, Ralph considered that he was a driver and nothing
more. If Hester wanted help, she usually had to ask.

Oh, well, this is just temporary,
I hope, she thought to herself as she threw open the forward door, turning a
welcoming smile to her patrons.

First aboard were the Donaldson
sisters, Marvella and LaVerne, in pink polyester pantsuits. All that
distinguished them today: one’s kerchief was puce, the other’s chartreuse. The
puce sister immediately stepped over to pat Hester on the shoulder.

“Dearie, dearie, how dreadful for
you, all this horrible business with our dear, dear Miss Duffy!” she cooed.
Hester nodded, absently wondering whether the use of “dear, dear” was a common
generational tic or just a macabre tribute to the lexicon of Sara Duffy.

Recalling a secret Pim had taught
her about the twins, Hester subtly tilted her head until she could see a mole
beneath the sister’s left ear. “Mole means ‘M,’ for Marvella,” she muttered to
herself.

The puce sister, undistracted,
now dropped her voice to speak confidentially.

“I have a theory, you know, on
who did it. You know that dreadful Eye-talian man who used to always come
aboard smelling like garlic and anchovies? You know the one – sat over in the
corner and read those art magazines? He used to give me the lewdest little
winks. You tell the police that’s who did in poor Miss Duffy.”

Hester gave her patron an icy
smile. She carefully chose her words before responding, “Why, Miss Donaldson,
I’d never have thought of that on my own.”

Marvella Donaldson nodded
vigorously as she turned back to her sister. They stepped over to scan the
romance shelf.

Looking up, Hester gave a genuine
smile as she saw Mrs. Loman pick her way carefully up the steps. Without a
word, Hester reached under her table, pulled out the new Tony Hillerman and
slipped it into one of Mrs. Loman’s bags. The old woman’s thin lips pulled back
in a toothless grin as she stepped toward the mystery rack.

Stifling a chuckle, Hester turned
to Ralph and whispered from the side of her mouth, “Oh dear, Mrs. L forgot her
dentures again!”

Turning back to the door, Hester
was surprised to see Paul Kenyon step in, for once unaccompanied by his mother.

Hester’s face burned as she
looked down at her table and tried to look busy. Why was she blushing, she
wondered, furious that she couldn’t exercise better control of her capillaries.
Paul was the one with the little secret.

“Hester,” he said, nodding in
greeting.

Hester looked up as if she hadn’t
noticed him before. “Oh. Paul! Hi.” She quickly returned her eyes to the
Instie-Circ and busily pushed keys.

Ignoring the snub, Kenyon stepped
back to the magazine rack and picked up the latest issue of Byte Digest.

Hester noticed Paul wore his
usual conservative clothes – green cotton sweater today, no earring. As he
scanned the magazine, she kept sneaking peeks in a vain attempt to spy a hole
in his earlobe.

She jumped when Ralph spoke. He
was folding his newspaper to get a better look at a story he found of interest.

“Hey, says here in the Onion – ”
Ralph liked to use the locals’ pejorative name for the daily paper – “says that
the library is going to have a big audit. Says that new city commissioner has
gotten in with those book-banning folks. Quotes her here: ‘We’re finally going
to see where all that money is going.’ All that money, huh? What do you think
of that, Hester?”

Hester shook her head in despair.
“Yes, libraries are notorious money-laundering operations. Millions, just
millions flow through this institution. Why, the bookmobile is only a front for
a gun-running operation between here and east county, you know.”

Hester gave a saucy smile to Paul
Kenyon, who now hovered at her table. “Yes, sir? Did you want an AK-47 or an
order of Uzis today? And don’t forget, we’re having a special in white slavery.
Please leave your unmarked bills in the return bin.”

Paul gave a patronizing grin.

“Yes, seems like the library is
having a few problems,” he said, glancing toward Ralph in the driver’s seat. “A
shock about Pim, wasn’t it?”