Murdermobile (Portland Bookmobile Mysteries) (8 page)

“Oh, Hester, no.” Karen shook her
head vigorously. “Thank you, that’s so kind, and I do appreciate the offer. But
really, I wasn’t asking. We’ll muddle through. Somehow. But please, don’t
spread this around, I mean about Teri June. Steve still has his pride. His
mother still thinks he’s been paying the bills all this time. Somehow, well –
I’d like to preserve that illusion.”

Pondering all she’d heard, Hester
let her eyes wander across the coffee shop’s thinning crowd, then gasped when
she glimpsed her own watch. “Oh my stars, the time. I’m going to be dead in the
morning if I don’t get to bed.”

The pair started scooting chairs
out and stacking their dirty cups. Consternation clouded Hester’s features.
Suddenly, she stopped Karen and spoke in a concerned voice only her friend
could hear.

“Really, why do you stay with
him, if things are that hard? For the girls?”

Karen bit her cheek and looked
out at what was now a swirl of tiny snowflakes. “Yes, that,” she replied
slowly. “And for the sweet things he does, like breakfast in bed every Saturday
for 14 years.” A small smile. “Blueberry pancakes.” She stared vacantly into
the night for a moment, then gave a little grin.

“And you know, he doesn’t have a
whole lot to do, so he runs through Forest Park, every day, 10 miles. He’s got
thighs like Carl Lewis. We still have fantastic nights,” she said salaciously. “Funny,
but failure at business doesn’t seem to bother him that way.” Then her face
clouded. “At least, it never did before.”

Hester’s laugh died on her lips.
With a hand on the shoulder of her newly complex friend, Hester pushed Karen
toward the door. “Come on, Teri June,” she said in Karen’s ear. “Better get you
home before you need a cold shower.”

Out on the edge of the Sandy
River, it was a quiet night. For once, the snow had bypassed this part of the
county. A cold moon reflected dimly off silvery frost coating sedges that grew
thickly near a small, moss-covered house trailer. A great horned owl hooted,
followed by the slow creak of hinges as the trailer’s door opened. A rectangle
of light parted the darkness.

Leaning against her aluminum
doorjamb and peering out, Ethel Pimala rattled a can opener against an empty
dog-food can. Her breath billowed in a white cloud outside the door.

“Lilly-Pilly! Your
nummers-nummers supper is served! It’s your favorite – Kidney-Liver Kasserole!”

From beyond the thorny,
winter-bare limbs of her rose garden came the jingle of tags as Pim’s
18-year-old cockapoo, Queen Liliuokalani, scuffled through thick brush near the
shallow river’s edge.

The gray-bearded little dog, its
back arched slightly with the stiffness of age, appeared out of the blackberry
brambles and hobbled one step at a time up onto the cinder-brick stoop and into
Pim’s modest home.

“There you are, sweetheart. Now
eat up, us old gals need our vigs and vitamins!” Pim beamed as her only
companion gummed a few bites of the brown mush that filled a gleaming china
bowl. Then with an audible “uff,” the dog plopped down on a red velvet cushion
in front of a wood stove. Cheery flames leapt behind a tiny, smoke-smudged glass
door. In the glow, Queen Liliuokalani proceeded to tug with her two remaining
front teeth at burrs tangled in her matted fur.

Pim watched her with a look of
pity, then crooned softly. “Oh, sweetie, we’ll get you going to the poodle
parlor again before too long, I promise. Maybe next month.”

The bookmobile driver sank into a
tattered black La-Z-Boy, a bright orange-and-yellow afghan hiding the cracked
vinyl. Again picking up her checkbook and a plastic pocket-calculator, she
groaned. Paying bills had become an unpleasant monthly guessing game, with Pim
trying to guess which bills she could put off until next month without getting
more of those annoying phone calls asking for “just $20 to keep your account in
good standing.”

“How one old woman and a puny little
dog can cost so much I just can’t fathom,” she muttered, reaching down to
scratch around the dog’s ears. “If only we didn’t insist on luxuries like
eating, eh, Lilly-Pilly?”

It wasn’t as if Pim wasn’t
thrifty. Every Sunday she clipped coupons. Every Tuesday she shopped the
grocery ads. She didn’t drive a new car. But she’d ended up with a whopping
bill last fall for a new transmission for her dented old Gremlin. And the
mandatory insurance just kept going up, even though she’d never had an accident
in her life. Then there was health insurance and property taxes – she could go
on and on about property taxes. On top of it all, the flood in December cost
her $2,000. She thought she’d never get the mud cleaned out of her house. And
now came the letter about flood insurance!

“That’s right, twist the knife!”
Pim hollered, her voice echoing through her metal-sided home. She reached for a
half-empty bottle of Tums from a shelf next to the recliner. Queen Liliuokalani
looked up with cataract-clouded, liquid-chocolate eyes. The old dog whimpered.

It wasn’t supposed to be like
this. Pim leaned back in the recliner and rubbed her eyes.

She was so young and hopeful when
she’d gotten off the plane from Hawaii all those years ago. She was to continue
a proud Pimala family tradition, begun when a Hilo cousin won a Rotary
scholarship to Portland State University. Ethel would be the fifth Pimala to
study at PSU. Her cousins were scattered around Portland and making good
livings as boilermakers at the shipyards or unloading chip barges at the pulp
mills. Hawaiians had worked in this region ever since the Hudson’s Bay Company
brought them as laborers for the fur-trade at Fort Vancouver, now a national
historic site just across the Columbia River.

But for Ethel, it seemed her college
days were the beginning of a struggle to make ends meet. When a college grant
program dried up the same autumn of her uncle’s sugar cane failure back in
Hilo, Pim’s hopes for higher education wilted, too.

Look for a job with the
government, urged her family, which had learned the benefits of public
employment as Hawaii moved toward statehood. Good benefits, regular raises,
strong unions. Her teenage days driving cane trucks helped her land the
bookmobile job.

“So much for the government gravy
train, eh, Lilly-Pilly?” said Pim, opening her eyes and patting for the little
dog to jump onto her lap.

The cockapoo struggled to its
feet and Pim scooped the dog up and kissed her nose, dry and cracking with age.
Pim’s eyes strayed to a gilt-framed photo perched on the shelf next to the
antacids.

“And Prince Charming there was a
big help, wasn’t he?” Pim lapsed into baby talk as she rubbed the dog’s pink
belly.

The photo showed a happy and
smiling young Pim overflowing a flowered one-piece bathing suit, a hibiscus in
her hair, her arm around a handsome, well-muscled fireplug of a man in Speedos.
His blond flat-top glinted in the hot sun. It was their honeymoon. They’d
scraped together enough to visit her family on the Big Island, but they
couldn’t afford any of the fancy new hotels springing up on the Kona Coast. So
they stayed with a cousin in the ranch country near Waimea and drove each day
down to lovely Hapuna, the island’s best white-sand beach.

Larry Kozloszewski was a
longshoreman. He still worked over at the Port of Vancouver, north across the
Columbia from Portland. Their 10-year marriage was stormy. When he drank, he
had an ugly temper. Pim threw him out the day he broke her jaw.

After the divorce, she’d dropped
his name and taken back her own, back in the days when few women did that sort
of thing. None of her relatives could ever pronounce “Kozloszewski” anyway.

He left Pim with no kids, but
with custody of their dream castle: a rust-stained, single-wide trailer on 10
acres of riverfront dotted with cottonwoods and crowded with deer, rabbits and
great blue herons. He’d also left her the mortgage.

Paying the bills had never been
easy. But Pim loved her country hideaway. Every August, she held a riverfront
luau – tiki torches and the whole works – for co-workers from the bookmobile
barn. She’d roasted a pig in a buried oven one year, but the sound of sand
grating on tooth enamel had put a damper on conversation for the rest of the
party. Now, she stuck with hamburgers on her well-used Smokey Joe grill.

Pim’s biggest frustration: She’d
never gotten the library promotions she’d counted on. A little extra money in
the paycheck would have helped a lot in keeping up her place, might even have
allowed her to replace her old trailer with a handsome new double-wide.

But they’d only ever thought of
her as a driver. While the library union had seen to it that Pim got token pay
hikes over the years, she’d never convinced her bosses that she could handle a
job as a desk clerk, or maybe even as one of those telephone reference people
who answer all sorts of wacky questions that come over the phone.

“I don’t know why, Lilly-Pilly.
Mummy’s always been pretty good at coming up with answers when we watch
‘Wheel,’ now hasn’t she?” Pim crooned as she continued to reminisce. She
frowned at the thought.

She knew why she hadn’t gone
anywhere in her job. It was that old white-bread Miss Boston-bluenose, Sara
Duffy. The old biddy wouldn’t give her a promotion because Pim wasn’t as white
as the driven snow, because Pim wasn’t just like that old bat who’d never
stepped foot into a ray of sunshine in her life. Even after she left the
library, Pim was certain, Duffy had influenced her cronies that Pim could never
go beyond grinding gears.

As always, the subject put Pim in
a somber mood. Reaching to the shelf below the Tums, she picked up a chipped
cut-glass decanter she’d brought home from the bargain table at K mart – it
was, in fact, a blue-light special. She held it to her eye to see the glass
edges turn the stove’s flames to dancing rainbows. Tipping the decanter over a
scuffed and stained plastic tumbler, Pim poured herself a glass of supermarket
sherry – she called it her one “crutch.” She sipped as she glared into the
dying flames of the wood stove.

“Well, I guess old Duffy finally
got what she deserved, didn’t she? And I hope she likes the heat where
she’s
gone to.”

From the chair arm, Pim picked up
a remote-control unit and punched a button. Atop the rattly Frigidaire across
the room, a portable television came to life.

“...and Vanna is turning over the
last consonant, only vowels remain. Players, you have five seconds to identify
this saying!”

“BY HOOK OR BY CROOK!” Pim
crowed. She beamed down at the sleeping cockapoo and slapped the chair arm. “See,
Lilly-Pilly, what did I tell you? Is Mummy good, or what?”

As if she’d been pinched, the
little dog suddenly jerked awake, looking toward the door with alarm. “What – ”
Pim started to ask, when a crash of crumpling metal cut her off. The trailer
seemed to rock as if in an earthquake. She struggled in panic to lower her
chair’s footrest, but the recliner jammed. Sherry spilled into the matted fur
of the pathetic cockapoo trying to scramble for safety.

The trailer’s door flew open with
a bang, shattering the glass in a china closet and toppling a collection of
hand-painted pineapple salt-and-pepper shakers. A husky figure in a baseball
cap and blue jumpsuit leapt into the room, waving a large pistol. “Police!” he
bellowed. “Freeze!”

All night, Hester’s mind had
sorted through the strange events of the previous day. Bingle T. had stalked
out of the bedroom in disgust at her tossing and turning. Punching down her
pillow for the umpteenth time, Hester felt like a contestant in one of those
dreadful TV wrestling shows. She watched the glowing red numerals on her
bedside clock change from “3:59” to “4:00.”

When next she opened her eyes,
the numerals read “8:23.” Hell! She’d forgotten to set the alarm!

Oregon’s fickle weather had
changed again overnight, and Hester ducked out of a cold drizzle as she pushed
open the library’s staff door 33 minutes later. Her hair had that too-wavy,
unshampooed look that even a good brushing couldn’t hide. She was still
functioning on only the front inch of her brain as she furiously punched the “4”
button inside Grand Central’s tiny back-stacks elevator.

As always when she was in a mad
dash to check in upstairs for her day’s assignment, the ancient Otis – a
rickety cousin to Grand Central’s persnickety public elevator – paused an extra
few beats before finally deciding to once more make the slow ascent. One last
time before its cogs and pulleys freeze up for eternity, Hester thought.

“Auuugh!” she screeched through
her teeth when the compartment jerked to a stop with a loud “ca-chunk” at the
second floor.

Staring fixedly down at the
scuffed black-and-white linoleum, she squeezed to the back corner of the tiny,
airless compartment to make room as the doors opened. In pushed three young
library pages, their arms loaded with books and magazines.

Hester’s temples throbbed as she
found herself staring at the back of a head of magenta-streaked, over-moussed
hair. A few inches from Hester’s nose waggled an ear pierced with a row of
seven gold earrings, which climbed almost to the top of the thin cartilage.
Patchouli fumes filled the elevator.

Hester squeezed her eyes and
moaned softly. A pale, striking blond wearing a black turtleneck over crinkled
black leggings and clunky Doc Martens punched “3.” The pages were caught up in
a loud, gossipy conversation. A few moments passed before their words pierced
the fog shrouding Hester’s sleep-deprived mind.

“...and the cops went out to her
trailer last night and put her in handcuffs and everything. My aunt who works
at the Justice Center said they’ve found all sorts of evidence. It sounds like
she really did it!” said the booted beauty.

“What amazes me is that she was
so dumb as to leave the body on the bookmobile! I mean, DUH!” This from the
pierced ear.

The third page, a painfully thin,
goateed young man of about 19 with jet-black hair to his waist and a single
emerald stud piercing his nose, spoke in a high, nasal voice. “It’s all karma,
you know. Duffy tried to control people’s minds, and the pendulum of world
consciousness just swung back and restored the balance. It’s very Zen. Old
Ethel will be a counterculture hero in this town, just wait and see.”

With another “ca-chunk,” the
elevator stopped and the trio shuffled out, leaving Hester to ride the
remaining one story in stunned silence. She was spending a lot of her time in
stunned silence these days.

*    
*     *

“Pim, orange coveralls just don’t
suit you,” Hester said three hours later, trying to be glib and lighthearted. “I
should have brought a green marker and we could have at least drawn a palm tree
on the pocket or something.”

The jail’s visiting room was cast
in a cold winter light from a six-inch-wide floor-to-ceiling window pimpled
with raindrops. The pouches under Pim’s eyes were purple and puffy. She was in
a sour mood after her night in the modern Portland Justice Center. Its fancy
name didn’t change the fact that she’d spent a night in “chokey,” as Pim called
it.

“Hest, this is just outrageous.
They came right at bedtime. They didn’t give me any warning or anything. And
they put Lilly Pilly in the pound. Promise me you’ll find her and make sure
she’s OK. If they hurt that little dog, I’ll sue them for a billion dollars!”

Her voice sounded tinny and
strained over the closed-circuit telephone, the only way visitors and inmates
could communicate through thick glass that separated them. Hester wished she
could reach through the barrier, pat Pim on the head and say “There, there.”

“Of course I’ll check on her.
I’ll make some calls as soon as I’m back at the library. I’m afraid I can’t
stay long. They haven’t got anybody to cover the info desk after my lunch
break.”

Pim managed a grateful little
grin. Hester studied the creases in Pim’s brown forehead, speckled with age
spots. Hester had never seen her friend look so old.

“Pim, do you want to tell me
about it?”

“Oh, Hester, it was awful. After
those jackbooted, uniformed monkeys brought me in here, that Darrell fellow –”

“You mean Detective Darrow?”

“Yeah, that suit you’re so stuck
on. He came in around 10:30 last night and they put me in one of those creepy
rooms like you see on ‘NYPD Blue,’ with the two-way mirrors on the wall and
everything, as if you don’t realize you’re being watched.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Hester
clucked.

“Well, they parked me in there
all alone at first for about a half hour, just to make me sweat, and I knew all
the time they were outside watching me. Well, finally that Darrell comes in and
he and this other detective kept me in there for about two hours asking me all
about the booster shoe and why it had Miss Duffy’s blood and hair on it, and my
fingerprints.”

Hester cocked her head.

“Pim, have they proven all that?
I thought their lab was going to analyze it.”

Pim puffed up her cheeks, then
blew into the mouthpiece with a windy “whoosh.” She nodded, looking wearier.

“Apparently they put a rush on it
and the lab results were complete just before they closed up shop last night.
Now they’re even going to do one of those NRA tests or whatever it’s called.”

“DNA, you mean?”

“Whatever. Hester, somebody
conked Miss Duffy with my booster shoe, and the police are charging me with it!
Hester, this is crazy!”

“I know, Pim, I know!”

Hester’s mind raced. Pim couldn’t
kill anybody. She blustered when riled, but she was one of the gentlest people
on Earth. Hester remembered the time the bookmobile ran over a squirrel. A
distraught Pim insisted on stopping so she could wrap the dead animal in an old
blanket and take it home for a proper burial in her rose garden. The little
cross she erected was still there.

“Listen, Pim, who’s your lawyer?
Have you talked to him yet?”

“Ha!” She snorted. “Them
jackboots read me my rights and said they’d get me one of those public
defenders if I couldn’t afford a lawyer. I told ’em ‘no way, Jose.’ ”

“Pim, haven’t you ever used a
lawyer? What about your divorce?”

“That bloodsucker? He’s the
reason I’ll never pay a cent to another lawyer, not if my life depends on it!”

It just might, Hester thought
with a moment of dread. She rolled her eyes.

“But Pim, the public defenders
can help you. The law requires the state to pay for a lawyer if you can’t. Or
won’t
.”

Hester glared at her stubborn
friend.

“Nope. Everybody knows those
public defenders are just a bunch of Willamette U. dropouts. I might just as
well go do a cannonball off the Vista bridge as put my life in the hands of
those clowns.”

Hester glowered in frustration. “So
what
are
you going to do?”

Pim gave a smug smile. “I’m going
to defend myself.”

“What?!” Hester choked.

“That’s right.” Pim sat back in
her metal folding chair and crossed her legs. “I watched Judge Wapner for
years. I know how those guys operate. Besides which, don’t forget one thing,
Hest.”

 Wearily, Hester pinched the
bridge of her nose and peered through a web of fingers at Pim. “What’s that?”

“I’m innocent. So I can sue these
turkeys for false arrest. I’ll probably end up richer than that Microsoft guy,
Phil Gates.”

*    
*     *

A little after six that night, Hester
peered out through the fisheye peephole to see Nate Darrow’s nose looking like
an Idaho russet potato knocking at her apartment door.

Grabbing the remote to mute Peter
Jennings on her kitchen TV, she swung open the door and Darrow’s nose returned
to normal.

“I can’t believe you’ve arrested
her!” Hester snapped before he could say anything. “She couldn’t possibly have
done it! How could you let them storm into her home like the Gestapo coming at
midnight?”

Darrow shrank back into the hall,
step by step, until Hester had him pinned against the opposite wall. He raised
one palm to fend off her fury. In the other hand he held a small, gift-wrapped
package.

“Whoa! Time out!” Darrow’s eyes
blinked wide like a nervous racehorse’s. Her reaction was more than he
expected. Swallowing surprise, he responded with thinly veiled anger.

“First of all, nobody’s the
Gestapo and it
wasn’t
midnight. We follow the rules, despite what you’ve
seen in trashy movies. If your friend has a complaint, she’s welcome to file it
with Internal Affairs!”

“I don’t
go
to trashy
movies, Herr Himmler!” She thrust out her chin and returned his belligerent
stare. Darrow blinked first. He raised his head to gaze at the dusty,
torch-shaped light fixture on the mint-green wall. He spoke again, more softly
this time, but with an undertone of resentment.

“For what it’s worth, the
decision to arrest her last night wasn’t mine. But we didn’t have a lot of
choice in the situation, what with all the library association bluenoses
shaking their bank books at the mayor. Anyway, your friend isn’t exactly
blameless. Motive plus opportunity plus evidence equals arrest. Go look it up
in the primer for ‘Law & Justice 101’.”

Darrow caught his breath.

“Look, I’m sorry all this had to
happen. And, actually –” He clenched a fist to his mouth. “Hester, I came by
because I know Ethel’s your friend, and I wanted to let you know that I object –
probably even more than you do – to how she was taken into custody.”

Hester glared at him. “Oh?” she
finally said.

“That’s right. Look, they
fast-tracked the warrant. They got a judge to come in after dinner last night.
I got the call on it just as I left the Mumfrey Mansion,” Darrow explained
quickly. “I had to ask for assistance because it was in Multnomah County’s
jurisdiction. But I expected to make the arrest, and keep it quiet and – well,
polite.” He studied the scuffed door jamb, then continued with a pained
expression.

“Unfortunately, as you might have
heard on the news, the sheriff just inaugurated his dandy new SWAT team last
week and has been dying to try it out. Well, the hot dog who heads it happened
to get a look at the report the bureau faxed over about Miss Pimala. Apparently
he picked up on that bit about ‘taking out’ the library administration and
concluded that little old Ethel might have an AK-47 stashed in her coat closet.
On the drive out there, I got stuck behind a jackknifed semi on the Banfield
and – well, the geniuses decided not to wait.”

Hester turned away from him, but
continued a slow boil.

“Well, congratulations, you’re a
noble soul,” she said sarcastically. “But I think you should know the library
board met in emergency session this afternoon and was all set to fire Pim with
no more questions asked, thanks to all the calls they got after TV news got
wind of last night’s little ‘Raid on Entebbe.’ Thanks to calmer heads, the
union persuaded them to give her vacation time. But I can tell you from seeing
her today, looking about 80 years old in an ill-fitting orange jumpsuit, that
this is far,
far
from a vacation!”

Darrow nodded, rubbing his
temples. “Most days I like being a cop,” he muttered. “Other days kind of suck.”

Hester flattened her mouth and
turned back to face him. Her eyes strayed down to the package. Impulsively, she
spun on her heel. She left the door open as she strode into the kitchen to
check on a pot of boiling potatoes.

“You’d better come in!” she
called brusquely behind her. “My little old lady neighbors are pretty quick to
call Portland’s best to report strange men loitering in the hallway. You might
not enjoy explaining.”

The apartment was redolent with
the spicy aroma of pork, paprika and cooked cabbage. Nate followed her into the
kitchen. Steam droplets coated the leaded glass of built-in china cupboards. 

“Mmm, this place smells like the
best cafe in Budapest!”

Hester’s mouth turned up at one
edge. She nodded Nate towards a wicker chair at her tiny kitchen table and gave
a tug to straighten the red Chinese silk housecoat she liked to wear when she
cooked.

“You’re pretty close. My mother’s
family came from a little town near the border of Austria and Hungary. Hungarian
peasant fare is my idea of comfort food. You know that part of the world?”