Until Proven Guilty jpb-1

by J. A. Jance

  “Great,” she said enthusiastically. “I’ll stop by about then.”

  Anne walked out the lobby door with us. The red Porsche was parked on the street. “Do you need a ride?” she asked, opening the door.

  I waved her away. “No thanks.”

  Peters whistled as the Porsche rounded the corner onto Blanchard. “That’s her car?”

  “Nice, isn’t it.”

  “Beau, who the hell is she?” I gave him a warning look, just one, and he let it drop.

  We took the recording to Sergeant Watkins. As predicted, he was not pleased. He listened to the tape in stolid silence and heard our analysis without comment. “Play it again,” he ordered. We went over Monday’s confrontation in great detail and heard the tape yet again.

  “Taking everything into consideration, you might be right,” he allowed reluctantly. “But you’re drawing conclusions. None of this has any basis as evidence. It’s a damn shame this state can’t even spring for voiceprint equipment. So what are you going to do now?”

  “Go looking for someone else.”

  “So look,” he said. “Nobody’s stopping you. We’ve got Carstogi locked up until Monday afternoon with what we’ve got so far. What have you got to lose?”

  Peters and I went back to the drawing board. We went over the previous Thursday in minute detail, listening to the initial recorded report of Angela’s disappearance, as well as the statements taken later. We learned nothing new.

  We tried Sophie’s house. We wanted to know if she had seen a van, the one Jeremiah had told us about. Nobody was home but Henry Aldrich, the cat, and he wasn’t talking.

  At one-twenty Anne showed up for lunch. We invited Peters, but he claimed to be busy. We left him at his desk and ate in a little Mexican dive at the foot of Cherry. Anne was brimming over with infectious happiness. She had found a minister to marry us and had made arrangements for the ceremony to be held at six a.m. in Myrtle Edwards Park.

  “Why there?” I asked. “And why so early?”

  She shrugged. “I like it there,” she replied, “especially in the morning when it’s quiet.”

  Anne walked me back to the Public Safety Building and kissed me good-bye on the sidewalk, much to the enjoyment of a group of street people gathered around the hot bagel stand outside the front door. “I’ll see you when you get off work,” she said. “I’ll be at your place.”

  I went up to the fifth floor to find Peters pacing impatiently beside my desk. “Come on,” he snapped. “We just hit the jackpot. A grit-truck driver from the Westside Treatment Center saw a black van parked near where Angela was found. He saw it about nine-thirty the morning she died.”

  “No shit!” We were already on our way to the elevator. “So where has he been all this time?”

  “He just got back in town from a fishing trip. He hadn’t seen anything about the murder on the news, but someone was talking about it when he went out to pick up a load this afternoon. He called about ten minutes after you left for lunch.”

  As usual, we had to wait for an elevator, and as usual too, it would have been faster to take the stairs.

  Dick Aubrey, the grit-truck driver, turned out to be a wiry, tough little man with a fiery temper and an ever-present cigarette. He had been fishing in Idaho since the previous Friday afternoon.

  “I came down the hill around nine-thirty or so, and here’s this big black van parked almost in the middle of the friggin‘ road. I blew my horn at him a couple of times to get his attention.”

  “Him?” Peters asked. “You could tell it was a him?”

  “Oh, sure. He was just starting to climb out of the van. I almost took the door off.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Big. Straight yellow hair, long. Overweight.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “Sure. I got a pretty good look at his face. He was an ugly son-of-a-bitch.”

  I brought out some glossies of both Pastor Brodie and Brother Benjamin, taken at the funeral. We had purchased them from the P.I. We also showed him Carstogi’s mug shots. “Any of these?” I asked.

  Aubrey stroked his chin. “Naw. None of these guys. I’m sure of that. This guy was built like a tank. About six-five. Neck like a bull.”

  “What happened next?” Peters urged.

  “Well, I went down to get loaded. You haul two things out of sewage plants, sludge and grit. I do grit. I figured if he was still there when I got ready to leave, I’d call and have him towed away, but by then he was gone. It’s a pain in the ass having cars parked on that road. It’s too narrow.”

  We picked Dick Aubrey’s brain. He came down to the Public Safety Building and did a composite sketch. With the Identikit sketch in hand, Peters and I went over the names of everyone we had questioned in connection with the case. We were able to put names and faces with every person but one. Angela Barstogi’s Uncle Charlie had to be the wild card in the deck.

  We took the sketch and went to see Sophie. This time she was home. We walked up to her front door and could hear the television set blaring through the wood. Peters knocked, twice.

  “Oh,” she said, “are you coming to arrest me?”

  Peters laughed. “No, we’re here for some help.”

  We went inside. The cat, inside now, was already on the couch. He took a dim view of sharing it with company.

  Peters brought out the sketch Aubrey had made and handed it to Sophie. She held it close to her face, examining it first with the pointed glasses in place and then with them lowered so she could peer over them. She handed it back to Peters.

  “Maybe,” she said.

  “What about a van? Do you remember seeing one of those in the neighborhood?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I do, now that you mention it, a black one, but not the last few days. I thought it was part of the group. I saw it a few times, usually in the morning.”

  “Will you call us if you see it again?” I asked. “Try to get the license number and call us right away.”

  “I most certainly will, young man,” she said. I got the distinct impression Sophie Czirski still didn’t approve of me.

  We escaped without having tea. We went back to the department and reported to Watkins. We felt like we were making progress. We sent for motor vehicle reports on a list of known sexual offenders in the state of Washington. It’s the grunt work, routine things, an expired vehicle license or an unpaid traffic ticket, that often break a case. We left the computer folks to pull together the information we needed.

  “Ready to call it a day?” I asked Peters.

  “How about stopping by for a drink on the way home. I’ll buy.”

  I glanced surreptitiously at the clock, trying to remember exactly when I had told Anne I’d be home.

  “Come on,” Peters insisted. “You’re not married yet.”

  I took the bait. “All right,” I agreed. “I guess I can stop off for a while.”

  Chapter 18

  We went down to F. X. McRory’s on Occidental Street. Peters got off on the right foot by buying a bottle of champagne. “All right, you closemouthed bastard,” he said, raising his glass, “now that I’m a party to this little romance, you’d better tell me about her.”

  I didn’t need to be asked twice. I hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone about Anne. I’m afraid I waxed eloquent. I told him how she had looked at the funeral and about our first dinner at Snoqualmie Falls afterward. I told him about the Porsche and the fur jacket and the Doghouse and the depth and the laughter and the wit and the sudden darknesses, all the things that seemed so contradictory in Anne, and all the things that made me love her.

  About that time Captain Powell showed up and, uninvited, took a chair at our table. “What’s this I hear about you getting married?”

  I looked to Peters for help, but he stared off into space, as innocent as the day is long. “Who is she?” Powell continued.

  Taking a deep breath, I said, “her name’s Anne Corle
y. She’s the Lady in Red from Maxwell Cole’s column.”

  “Are you shitting me? You said you met her at Angela Barstogi’s funeral, last Sunday. What is this, love at first sight? That only happens in the movies.”

  “It’s a shotgun wedding,” Peters interjected snidely. I aimed a swift kick at him under the table, but I missed. He grinned at me and motioned to the waitress for what I thought would be our bill. Instead, a second bottle of champagne was delivered, Eastern Onion Style.

  It consisted of a singing telegram complete with a down-and-dirty stripper. Only afterward, amid hoots of laughter, did I realize that while we’d been talking, the bar had quietly filled with people from the department. They were all there. Not only Powell, whose frown of disapproval had been replaced by a wide grin, but also the rest of the guys from homicide, Hamilton from public information, and the women from word-processing.

  They had a wild assortment of off-color cards, congratulating me for lechery despite my advanced years. It was a rowdy party by any standards. I don’t know how Peters managed to arrange it. He must have done it while Anne and I were having lunch.

  I had a good time. It was getting late, though, and no one seemed to be in any hurry to leave. I was trying to think of a polite way to abandon ship, when there was a flurry of activity near the front door. My reason for going home early strode toward me, a dazzling smile on her lips. Anne’s very presence brightened the room, and it became an engagement party to remember.

  Captain Powell came up to be introduced. “Now that I see the lady in question,” he grinned, “maybe love at first sight isn’t out of the question after all.”

  Well-wishers came forward for introductions and congratulations. The guests milled around for some time before they gradually began to disappear. At last only the three of us remained — Anne, Peters, and me. Peters looked enormously pleased with himself.

  “You sure put one over on me,” I said to him. “Thanks.”

  Anne added her thanks to mine and gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “You’re welcome,” Peters replied.

  We left Pioneer Square on foot. Peters said he was going back to the department, while Anne, after producing her pair of Nikes from the ubiquitous Adidas bag, set a swift pace up First Avenue. I found myself hurrying to keep up, wanting to shield her from the human debris around us. “Couldn’t we take our constitutional in a better part of town?” I suggested. “First Avenue tends to get a little rough.”

  “The bums don’t bother me,” she said, and they didn’t. Panhandlers pick out soft touches from blocks away. It’s as if they have a radar connection. None of them approached Anne as she marched through them. Something in her carriage, her bearing, moved them away from her. Like the crush of people in Snoqualmie Lodge, the groups of bums opened before and shut behind her while she moved forward unimpeded.

  Driving in a car you’re not as aware of it, but from Pioneer Square to Seattle Center there’s a long, steep grade that tops out at Stewart Street. By the time we reached that point, I was about half winded. Anne set a stiff pace.

  “I didn’t know I was so far out of shape,” I grunted.

  Anne was clearly enjoying herself. “You’ll just have to get out and walk more,” she said.

  We walked in silence for a block or two. “Is Ron coming to the wedding?” she asked suddenly.

  “Ron? Oh, you mean Peters? I don’t know. I invited him.”

  “I don’t think he likes me particularly.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “During the party I caught him staring at me several times.”

  “I think he’d like to believe you’re after my money, although seeing your car should have taken care of any suspicions on that score. I guess he thinks we’re rushing into something. Leaping without looking, that kind of thing.”

  I caught her by the hand and pulled her back to me. “Why are you marrying me? Everybody knows cops make lousy husbands.”

  She reached up and kissed me on the cheek. “But great lovers. I’m marrying you for your body.”

  “Anne, you could have any body you wanted. Why me?”

  Her eyes, which had been bright and teasing a moment before, softened. “Because you made me remember what it’s like to be a woman, Beau. I had forgotten.”

  I pulled her to me, and we stood clasped in an embrace for a long moment at the corner of First and Virginia. Her answer may not have been good enough for Peters or Powell, but it was for me. At last we resumed walking, both of us quiet and lost in our own private thoughts.

  We ran into Ida Newell, my neighbor, in the lobby. It was a moment I had been dreading. I was sure by now Ida had monitored Anne’s comings and goings on the closed-circuit channel. It was time to make an honest woman of her, I decided. “I’d like you to meet my fiancée, Ida. This is Anne Corley. Ida Newell.”

  “Fiancée,” Ida sniffed. “I’m surprised. I haven’t met you before.”

  “I’m from Arizona,” Anne said with an easy smile. “It’s been one of those long-distance affairs. I’m very happy to meet you.”

  That seemed to satisfy Ida. At least she entered her own apartment without further comment. “That was masterful,” I murmured gratefully. “You saved my bacon on that one.”

  Anne smiled. “It’ll cost you,” she said.

  Safety deposit boxes have never been high on my list of priorities. What few trinkets I’ve kept over the years, I’ve stowed in various nooks and crannies around my house. I left Anne in the living room and rummaged in my bottom dresser drawer. I found the faded velvet box in its place in the left-hand corner. I felt a lump in my throat as I opened it.

  My father was a sailor, a wartime enlistee who probably hadn’t learned one end of a ship from the other before he died. The ring he had given to my mother wasn’t much, but I’m sure it was the most he could offer his sixteen-year-old sweetheart. I could imagine him proudly making the purchase at some low-life pawnshop in Bremerton. My mother had kept the ring, treasured it. It came to me when she died, and I kept it too. It was my only link with a father whose face I never saw.

  I slipped the tiny box into my pocket and returned to Anne. She was sitting on the couch, her head resting on the back of it. “Tired?” I asked.

  “A little,” she said.

  I sat down next to her with my hand on her shoulder, rubbing a knot of stiffness from between her shoulder blades. I cleared my throat. “You know, we had a wonderful engagement party. It’s a shame we didn’t have a ring.”

  “We don’t need a ring—” she began.

  I lay my finger across her lips and silenced her. “Then as we walked, or rather, as we ran home, I remembered that I did have a ring buried among my treasures.” I pulled the box from my pocket and opened it. The tiny chip of diamond caught the light and sparkled gamely. “My mother was never married,” I explained; “she was always engaged. And now, from one of the longest engagements in history, this ring is going to be part of one of the shortest.”

  Anne took the ring from the box and held it up to the light. “This was your mother’s?”

  “Yes.”

  She gave the ring back to me and held out her hand so I could place it on her finger. It slipped on as easily as if it had been made for her. “Thank you,” she said. “You couldn’t have given me anything I would have liked more.”

  We sat on the couch for a long time without speaking or moving. It was enough to be together, my arm around her shoulder, her hand touching mine. That night there was no need in the touching, no desire. We sat side by side, together and content.

  “Happy?” I asked.

  “Ummmhm,” was the answer.

  “Let’s go to bed,” I said, “before we both fall asleep on the couch.”

  “But it’s early,” she objected. It was a mild protest, easily overruled.

  We undressed quickly but without urgency. Our bodies met beneath the sheets, her skin cool against my greater warmth. I eased her onto her side so her body
nestled like a stacked saucer in my own, my hand resting comfortably on the curve of her breast. “Just let me hold you,” I murmured into her hair.

  It couldn’t have been more than eight o’clock, but the previous days of frenetic activity had worn us, fatigued us. Within minutes we both slept. For all the ease of it, we might have been sleeping together like that for years.

  Chapter 19

  Maybe I should start reading the newspapers first thing in the morning. That way I wouldn’t get caught flat-footed quite so often. Peters brought me a copy and I read it at my desk with him watching from a few feet away. Maxwell Cole’s column pronounced Anne Corley to be a dilettante copper heiress from Arizona.

  Max had done some homework. He had dug up a good deal of information. Had Anne Corley not been linked to J. P. Beaumont, I think she would have been pictured sympathetically. Colored by his antipathy for me, however, she became something quite different. Rich, and consequently suspect, Anne Corley was depicted as a character out of a macabre, second-rate movie.

  Cole reported as fact that for eleven years, between the ages of eight and nineteen, Anne Corley had been a patient in a mental institution in Arizona. She had been released, only to marry one of the staff psychiatrists, Dr. Milton Corley, a few weeks later. The marriage had caused a storm of controversy and had resulted in Corley’s losing his job, in his being virtually discredited. He had committed suicide three years later, leaving a fortune in life insurance to his twenty-two-year-old widow.

  Corley’s money, combined with that already held in trust for Anne as a result of being her parents’ only surviving child, created a formidable wealth. Cole touched on her book, but focused mainly on her wandering the country dropping roses on the caskets of murdered children. It could have been touching. In Cole’s hands, Anne became a morbid eccentric, one whose continued sanity was very much in question.

  Trembling with rage, I set the newspaper aside. Anne Corley was not a public figure. What Max had written seemed clearly an invasion of privacy, libelous journalism at its worst. My first thought was for Anne. What if she had purchased a paper and was even now reading it alone? How would she feel, seeing her painful past dragged out to be viewed and discussed by a scandal-hungry audience? That was what Cole was pandering to. He was selling newspapers with lurid entertainment rather than information, and he was doing it at Anne’s expense.