B.B. Cantwell - Portland Bookmobile 02 - Corpse of Discovery Read Online Free PDF Page B

Pim for two beats, then gave her a wink before continuing.
    “Well, I’m sorry
it took so long, but I just got word from the Medical Examiner confirming what
I suspected: that Mr. van Dyke had expired hours before the bookmobile ever
arrived this morning.”
    “Oh, thank
goodness,” Hester blurted, then stopped. “I mean, that’s terrible, what
happened – but it means…”
    “It means Ethel won’t
be charged with anything, because there’s not a lot of interest at the
prosecutor’s office in trying someone for manslaughter when the victim was
already dead,” Darrow finished her thought.
    “Well, duh,” Pim
said. “So can we go now?”
    Darrow held her
gaze again.
    “Just tell me
this, both of you. Did you see anything unusual when you were backing
into that horseshoe pit this morning?”
    Pim hung her
head as she searched her memory.
     “Fact is, it
was white-out fog down in that gully, probably as bad as I’ve ever seen fog
anytime, anywhere. So I was real careful and took it dead slow – oh, maybe that’s
a bad choice of words. But if you go too slowly in that darned bus it tends to
die on you – oh, oops again. And that infernal backup beeper was going, so loud
as to wake the dead – ”
    Hester quickly
interrupted.
    “What Pim is
saying is that she took all due diligence to carefully maneuver the bookmobile
into the new parking spot to which we’d been assigned, and we saw nothing out
of the ordinary considering the extraordinarily difficult conditions.”
    She stopped,
with her chin in the air, before continuing hesitantly.
     “So, since it
thankfully wasn’t the bookmobile, what was the cause of death, may I
ask?”
    Darrow glanced
at the two-way mirror on the wall, sipped at his own mug of coffee, and decided
he didn’t care if his partner – or even his impossible-to-please Capt. Myerson –
thought he was telling too much.
    “Well, I’d say
it was the bullet hole right there,” he answered, putting his index finger over
his heart. “All the sand tended to obscure it at first.”
    Hester and Pim
both gasped.
    “But there’s
another weird thing about all this – besides the head of the library society
being shot and left spread-eagled in his undies in a city park’s horseshoe pit.
And that’s the Rose Medallion.”
    Pim jumped as if
stricken. “Did someone find it?”
    “Pim’s been hot
on the trail all week,” Hester confided.
    It was Darrow’s
turn to be surprised.
    “Oh, really? Well,
as you witnessed, we had a small army of medallion searchers out at the crime
scene this morning, and now The Oregonian has confirmed it: The Rose
Medallion was stuck to the logo on the Horseshoe Club sign.”
    Pim swooned.
    “Oh, no! You
mean I could have practically grabbed it from the window of the bookmobile this
morning?”
     Darrow gave her
a deadpan face. He took a sip of coffee and waited two beats before continuing.
    “So neither of
you saw it?”
    Pim raised her
eyes to the ceiling and clapped her hands with a loud pop. “Don’t you think I’d
be over at the Zeus Shoes headquarters claiming the $50,000 right now if I
had?”
    Darrow curled
his lower lip as he rocked the old chair back and forth on two legs, then came
back down with a thump as he spoke.
    “Well, the interesting
thing is, the medallion is gone.”

 
    Chapter 6
     
     
    Wednesday, June
12
     
    Chief Charles
Morse came to the Portland Police Bureau by way of appointment by Mayor Buzz
Brinkley, the so-called “People’s Mayor,” the handlebar-mustachioed owner of a
Hawthorne-district brewpub who rode his old balloon-tire bicycle to City Hall
every day.
    Morse, a
potato-nosed, acne-scarred bureaucratic tyrant whose political bent was more
NRA than ACLU, was Mayor Buzz’s attempt to succor the law-and-order crowd.
    Early Wednesday morning
Morse was standing at the mahogany dais in the Police Bureau’s auditorium at Second
Avenue and Main Street and briefing the press on the investigation of Pieter
van