Until Proven Guilty

by J. A. Jance

  When the tour was over, Brodie ushered us back to the Penitent’s Room in the best bum’s-rush tradition. “I need to go outside to greet people now,” he said. “Once the service starts, you will have to leave.” He gave a rueful smile lest we think him rude or inhospitable. “It’s like a Mormon temple. No one who isn’t a True Believer is allowed inside during services.”

  The lady with the scrub brush was kneeling in front of the little altar in the Penitent’s Room, her bucket of soapy water still beside her. She was totally immersed in prayer. We stopped nearby but she never looked up. We went back through the sanctuary under our own steam.

  Outside, a little flock of True Believers waited patiently for their shepherd to welcome them to worship. The women, their hair covered with either scarves or hats of some kind, dropped their eyes demurely as we passed. The men nodded without speaking, while the children maintained the same eerie silence we had noticed the day Angel Barstogi died. It was not a joyful gathering.

  Jeremiah stood next to a beefy man with a full red beard. He had to be Benjamin Mason. He was a big man who looked like he had spent some time on the working end of a shovel. I walked up to Jeremiah and nodded at him without speaking. There was no sense in getting him in more hot water.

  “Are you Mr. Mason?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he answered, his tone wary, uneasy.

  “I’m Detective Beaumont. Did you get a message to call me?”

  “Didn’t have a phone,” he mumbled.

  “Mind if we talk to you for a minute?” Reluctantly, he followed us to our car. I thumbed through some notes I’d made from the transcripts. “Brodie says you were working Friday morning?”

  He nodded. “That’s right.”

  “And you do yard work. Can you give us a list of places you worked Friday morning?”

  “Wait just a minute.” Suddenly he came to life. “You’ve got no right—”

  Peters’ hand shot out, catching Mason’s arm just above the elbow. “You wait a minute, pal. He asked you a civil question. You can answer it here, or we can take you downtown.”

  “Viewmont,” he said. “I was working some houses up at the north end of Viewmont over on Magnolia.”

  “Anybody see you?”

  “Dunno. Usually nobody’s home.” He mumbled the addresses and I wrote them down.

  “Got any I.D. on you?”

  His hand shook as he fumbled his wallet out of his hip pocket. When he dragged the battered piece of plastic out of its holder, the license turned out to be an Illinois one, several years out of date. The name on it was C. D. Jason. I felt a jab of excitement.

  “What’s the C stand for?” I asked.

  “Clinton,” he answered shortly.

  Not Charles, not Chuck, not Charlie, but Clinton. The picture matched, but the names were different. Peters took it from me and examined it. He put it in his pocket. “We’ll just take this with us,” he said easily.

  “But I need it to drive,” Mason protested, reaching for it.

  “You’d best get yourself a Washington license. Meantime, what did you do to the backs of your hands?”

  Mason withdrew his hands and stuffed them in his pockets. Not before I noticed that the backs matched Brodie’s, scratch for scratch.

  “Let me guess,” Peters said. “I’ll bet you got those scratches trimming hedges.”

  “That’s right,” Mason said. “How’d you know that?”

  “Psychic,” Peters replied.

  Mason or whoever he was scurried into the church like a scared rabbit. Peters said nothing until Mason was out of earshot. He turned to look at the church. “I’d love to get a stick of dynamite and blow this whole pile of shit to kingdom come.”

  “You’d best not let Powell hear you talk like that. Powell might be looking for an excuse to bust you back to the gang.”

  Peters gave me a searching look. “You know something I don’t know?”

  “I don’t know anything. I have a suspicious nature.”

  We spent a couple of hours touring arterials, collecting sample packets of mustard from every fast-food joint we could find that seemed to be within a reasonably close geographical area. It would be strictly blind luck if we happened to get a match, but that sort of thing does happen occasionally. I believe the psychologists call it intermittent reinforcement. It’s what keeps bloodhounds like me on the trail. Every once in a while we hit the jackpot. It happens often enough that it keeps us from giving up. We just keep at it.

  We carried a picture of Angela Barstogi with us, the one that had been in the newspaper. We asked all the clerks, all the busboys, if anyone remembered a little girl in a pink Holly Hobbie gown. Nobody did.

  With the mustard sacked and labeled, we drove over to the Westside Treatment Center. The receptionist was off for the weekend, but we managed to get a list of employees, their schedules, and their phone numbers from a supervisor. We spent the remainder of the afternoon on telephones working our way through the list to no avail. It wasn’t that people were uncooperative or reluctant to help. It was just that no one had seen anything. We finally called it a day around seven Saturday night. We were getting nowhere fast.

  Peters offered to drive me over to Kirkland and back, to take me to a wonderful health food restaurant he knew. I appreciated the offer, but I was beat. I wanted to be home in my own little apartment with my own little stereo and my own little self. “I’ll take a rain check,” I told him.

  I declined the offer of a ride, too. I didn’t want Peters to know that I was going to stop and pick up a Big Mac and an order of fries at the McDonald’s at Third and Pine. He had made enough sarcastic remarks about junk food while we were gathering the mustard. I wasn’t about to let him know that I am a regular customer at the local Big Mac outlet, that the clerks know me by name and order. It’s not that I’m ashamed. It’s just that I didn’t want to give Peters any more ammunition.

  As I stood waiting for my order, I looked around at the stray slice of humanity sitting in those four walls munching Big Macs. There was a genuine bag lady with her multilayered coats. There was a group of young toughs arguing loudly in one corner. In another a couple of long-legged hookers daintily dipped Chicken McNuggets under the watchful eye of a well-dressed pimp.

  The clerks took the orders and the money, shoving the food back across the counter with studied disinterest. It was business as usual as far as they were concerned. With all the weirdos hanging around, it was hardly surprising no one had noticed a kid in a nightgown eating a hamburger for breakfast at eight o’clock in the morning.

  I went home and let myself into the peace and quiet of my apartment. I mixed myself a generous MacNaughton’s. Then I set the table with a place mat and a matching linen napkin. I may like McDonald’s, but I won’t eat on paper plates in my own home, either. I arranged the hamburger and fries tastefully on the brown-bordered stoneware plate the decorator had assured me was very chic and very masculine. Then I dragged a Tupperware container of radishes and celery out of the fridge.

  Those mealtime amenities may seem silly at times, but for three months after I moved out of the house, I ate on nothing but paper plates with plastic forks, knives, and spoons. I was sure Karen would come to her senses and take me back. I was living in a world of miserable, not blissful, ignorance. I kept thinking Karen had divorced me on my own merits, believed that what she said about being a cop’s wife was the truth. I hadn’t known about the accountant then, the accountant for an egg conglomerate who had come to town looking for an egg-ranch site near Kent or Puyallup. I hadn’t known this jerk had walked into the real estate office where Karen had just started working and swept her off her feet.

  The day after the divorce was final she married him, and I hired an interior decorator. That’s almost five years ago now. He moved Karen, Kelly, and Scott to Cucamonga, California. I guess he’s an all-right guy. The kids have never complained to me, and Kelly told me last Christmas that he (his name is Dave) has them put the child supp
ort money I send in a special savings account for college. He may be all right, but I hate him, and I eat on real plates with real napkins because I want Karen to know my world didn’t end just because she left. At least, it didn’t end completely.

  I ate, cleared the table, and put the dishes in the dishwasher. I run the dishwasher once a week on Sunday morning whether I need to or not. I made a fresh drink and went to stand on the balcony. It was a chill spring evening, tending more toward winter than summer. Across the street at the Cinerama the ticket holders’ line for the nine o’clock show disappeared behind the Fourth and Blanchard Building, a tall, pointed, black glass monstrosity called the Darth Vader Building by locals. For a while I stood there watching and listening, hearing little snatches of conversation and laughter that wafted up to my eleventh-floor perch. Periodically a juggler appeared to entertain those waiting in line. Some people will do anything for money.

  I was tempted to mix another drink and stay home to lick my wounds, to bring up all that old family stuff and beat myself over the head with it. It occurred to me, however, that it wouldn’t be healthy. At eight fifty-five I put my glass in the sink and rode the elevator downstairs. The ride down was longer than the walk across the street. The last of the line had entered the theater by the time I bought my ticket. I didn’t bother to ask what was showing.

  It wasn’t a good decision. The wife in the movie was getting it on with every Tom, Dick, and Harry in town. Instead of cheering me up, the story rekindled my anger over losing my family.

  When I came home, I took myself and a bottle of MacNaughton’s to the recliner in my darkened living room, and I didn’t quit until we were both gone.

  Chapter 6

  Sunday morning dawned clear and cold. I woke up, still sitting in my chair, nursing a terrific hangover.

  Friday and Saturday’s storm had blown itself out. The cloud cover that usually keeps Seattle temperatures moderate was missing. The sun had barely come up when banks of fog rolled in. Once the fog burned off, the sun’s rays offered no warmth.

  Hindsight is so simple. I should have had some premonition my life would change that day. If I had called old Dave, Karen’s new husband, and asked him to spare me a few chicken entrails, maybe I could have gotten a seer to give me some advance warning. I wouldn’t have been caught quite so off guard. Unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—Dave and I don’t have that kind of relationship. As it was, the morning appeared routine, ordinary, once I’d swallowed enough aspirin to quiet the pounding in my head.

  I made breakfast, hoping that food would help. I have mastered the art of microwave bacon and soft-boiled eggs. Then I ran my weekly load of dishes and washed my weekly load of clothes. Anything that has to be ironed goes across the street to the cleaners and laundry. By then I was feeling half human.

  After I finished my chores, the week’s collection of crossword puzzles was waiting in the hall outside my door. Ida, my next-door neighbor, knows I hate newspapers and love crossword puzzles. She saves them for me all week. On Sunday morning she leaves a little stack outside my door after she finishes with her own paper. I’ve come to regard the weekly stack of puzzles as a variation on the Easter Bunny theme. It’s almost as magical.

  Peters has season tickets to the Mariners’ games. That particular Sunday, the Yankees were in town. We had decided the day before that I would pull the funeral duty. It’s a part of the job that I don’t relish, but season tickets are season tickets.

  I suppose I should explain why cops go to murder victims’ funerals. They go to see who shows up and who doesn’t. Statistically most people are murdered by someone they know. Oftentimes a murderer will attend the funeral for fear his not being there will throw suspicion in his direction. Sometimes it works the other way too. The killer is a complete stranger who goes to the funeral because it gives him a feeling of power to be there without anyone knowing who he is, so homicide detectives go to funerals. It comes with the territory.

  Brodie had told me that Angela’s Thanksgiving Service would be held at Mount Pleasant Cemetery on top of Queen Anne Hill. It struck me as being a little odd. I would have expected them to have a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon in Faith Tabernacle itself. It seemed self-effacing, as though they didn’t want to draw attention to the church itself.

  I decided to walk to the cemetery. I suppose I could have gone down to the department and checked out a car, but I didn’t feel like going anywhere near the department, not even as close as the motor pool.

  I got over being a suburban type all at once. I sold my car when I moved to the city. I got my apartment cheap because it didn’t come with a parking place. Later I found out why it was cheap. Parking in downtown Seattle costs a fortune. I did the only sensible thing—I learned to love the bus.

  Gone were the days of the fifty-five-minute commute. All commuting ever got me was an ulcer, hemorrhoids, and a divorce. Walking isn’t all that bad except that having dates without a car has proved to be something of a challenge. The upshot is that I’ve virtually given up dating except for those rare cliff-dwelling creatures like myself who aren’t insulted by an offer of dinner or a movie contingent upon walking to and from. There aren’t too many women like that, so my sex life has dwindled. I chum around with some of the lavender-haired ladies from the Royal Crest who are glad to have my friendship but don’t make demands on my body or my schedule. Like me, they mostly don’t have cars. It’s a lifestyle that suits me.

  The two-and-a-half-mile trek to Mount Pleasant Cemetery, much of it almost perpendicular, felt good. It finished the job of clearing my head. A chill wind was blowing off Puget Sound, and a few clouds scudded across the sky ahead of the wind. Seattle wouldn’t be the Emerald City if it didn’t rain on a fairly regular basis.

  It wasn’t necessary to stop and ask directions at the cemetery office. I could see a little knot of people gathering just over the crest of the bluff. I stationed myself a little apart with my back to a suddenly gray Lake Union. I checked off the arriving players against Brodie’s roster.

  The True Believers arrived first. It was clear they had been instructed to speak to no one. They came as a group, huddled together near the coffin as a group, and knelt to pray as a group. Suzanne Barstogi, kneeling stoically in the middle of the second row, was accorded no special recognition or position of honor as the mother of the slain child. This was a group Thanksgiving Service, I reminded myself, and Pastor Michael Brodie would not tolerate any individual outpourings of grief that might crack the shell of his little facade.

  I had called Brodie earlier and jotted down the names of those he expected to be in attendance. Looking at his flock now, I was able to put some names with faces. Jeremiah, of course, Benjamin Mason/Jason, Ezra, Thomas. There was one more man, but I couldn’t recall his name. Other than Suzanne, the women eluded me. They were so drab and so alike, it was impossible to sort them out.

  Sophie Czirski was there, her ramrod thinness totally at odds with the pudgy Faith Tabernacle women. She planted herself firmly at the foot of the coffin and glared at the kneeling pastor with open defiance, daring him to question her right to be there. The wind, blowing at her back, periodically made her red hair stand on end. It gave her a wild appearance. If I had been Brodie, I would have thought twice about picking a fight with her.

  Maxwell Cole turned up with a long-haired photographer in tow. At Cole’s insistence, pictures of the kneeling congregation were taken from every possible angle. His taste is all in his mouth. Sophie watched the proceedings with a malevolent glare. When Cole unwisely asked her to move over so they could get one more picture, she told him in no uncertain words and with considerable volume what he could do with both the photographer and his camera. She didn’t budge an inch.

  Scattered here and there were a few hangers-on, people who make a habit out of going to funerals, ones who get a kick out of watching as other people’s emotions go through a wringer. I looked at them closely, wondering if any of them were named Charlie. After the servic
e I would request a copy of the guest register.

  The service itself was just getting under way. The Faith Tabernacle group began singing a tuneless little hymn that no one else seemed to recognize. I moved closer so I could hear what was being said, taking up a position just to Sophie’s right at the end of the coffin.

  I don’t know why I looked up, probably nothing more than good old-fashioned male instinct. Had I paid attention, I would have seen every man in the group staring unabashedly in the same direction. The most beautiful woman I had ever seen stepped over the crest of the hill and strode without hesitation toward Angela Barstogi’s coffin.