Until Proven Guilty (15 page)

I had blundered onto dangerous ground, and I would do well to be more wary in the future. I see that in cops all the time, had seen it in Peters and myself. We can talk about crime in the abstract; just don’t bring it too close to home.

Anne reached into her bag, pulling out a brand-new pair of jogging shoes. She held them up for my approval. “I went shopping today,” she said in a halfhearted attempt at gaiety. It didn’t take.

We walked to dinner. I tried to recapture the evening’s earlier, lighter mood without success. Anne had crossed over her solitary bridge and left me alone on the other side. What exactly had she told me about Patty? I wondered. That she had died when Anne was eight? Why, then, did the mere mention of Patty more than twenty years later cause such a reaction?

Connie welcomed us with a knowing wink that set my teeth on edge. It got worse when she brought the menus. She gave Anne an appraising once-over. “I heard you were pretty, honey, but that don’t hardly do you justice.”

I bit. “How’d you hear that?”

She grinned. “I’ve got me some confidential sources. The clam strips are good tonight, and we’ve got liver and onions on the special.”

I watched for any hint of disdain as Anne perused the menu. There was none, no hint of snobbishness. She ordered the special, then waited, oblivious to her surroundings, still far removed from me and from the present.

“Hello,” I said at length, trying to get her attention. “Where are you?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to do that.”

“It wouldn’t be so bad if you’d take me along when you go.”

She gave me a searching look. “How did you know I was somewhere else?”

“For one thing, I asked you twice if you wanted a glass of wine.”

Connie slung a cup of coffee in my direction and returned with one for Anne when I gave her the high sign. We were halfway through dinner when Maxwell Cole showed up. I thought it was an unfortunate coincidence. I found out later he had been in and out three times earlier in the evening looking for me.

He favored Anne with a deep bow. “What a pleasure to see you again,” he oozed, as his cigarette smoke invaded the end of our booth.

Connie came over with an ashtray, which she held out to Max. “This is the no-smoking section, Mr. Cole. If you want to keep that cigarette, you’ll have to go over to the next section.” Cole ground out the stub.

“I’ve been on a wild-goose chase,” Max said, addressing Anne. “That little Porsche of yours shouldn’t be so hard to find, but it seems to have fallen off the face of the earth.”

“Why are you looking for my car?” Anne asked.

“I’m not, actually. I’ve been looking for you. I wanted to ask you some questions about Angela Barstogi’s funeral. Are you a relative of hers?”

“Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cole.” She said it in such a sweet-tempered tone that at first Max didn’t believe his ears. He flushed as he tried to recover his dignity.

“I don’t think I said anything offensive,” he said.

“Your very presence offends me, Mr. Cole. If you can’t stand the heat, you know where they say you can go.”

“I could offer a suggestion or two,” I added helpfully.

The tips of his walrus mustache shook with rage. “You’re going to regret this, J. P. Beaumont. That’s the second time today you’ve taken a hunk out of my skin. I’m gunning for you.”

“Sounds like business as usual to me.”

Max would have taken a swing at me, but the bartender, who doubles as bouncer, turned up right then. Connie had summoned him soon enough for him to be there when the trouble started. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Mr. Cole. I think maybe you’d better go in the other room to cool off.” The bartender didn’t brook any arguments. He took Cole’s upper arm and bodily led him away.

“What’s the problem?” Anne asked when they were out of earshot.

“He doesn’t like me.”

“That’s pretty obvious. It’s also obvious the feeling’s mutual. Why does he call you J. P.?”

I sighed. If we were going to end up in the same orbit, it was time to drag out some of the old war stories, the stuff that made me what I am, and let her take a look at it, warts and all. If that didn’t drive her away, maybe she’d return the favor.

“Which do you want first, J. P. or Maxwell Cole?”

“Let’s try for J. P.”

"I’ll have to tell you about my mother first. She was a beauty growing up, but headstrong as they come. She would sneak out of the house at night to date my father. He was a sailor, the first man who asked her out. She was only sixteen. They planned to run away and get married, but he was killed in a motorcycle accident on the navy base over in Bremerton. She didn’t know she was pregnant until after he was dead.

“Her parents threw her out, told her they no longer had a daughter. My mother went to the Salvation Army Home for Unwed Mothers in Portland and signed in under the name of Beaumont, my father’s hometown in Texas. My first names are Jonas Piedmont, after her two grandfathers. None of her family ever lifted a finger to help us. When she told me where my first and middle names came from, I hated them. I still do. I’ve gone by Beau most of my life. The initials came up during college. Some of my fraternity brothers figured out it bugged me to be called that. Max never got over it.”

“Where’s your mother now?”

“She died of breast cancer when I was twenty. She never made up with her parents. They lived here in Seattle the whole time, but I never met them. Didn’t want to.”

“You loved her very much, didn’t you?” Anne commented gently.

It was becoming a very personal conversation. Anne seemed to bring out the lonely side of me, the part that needed to chew over my life with another human being.

“Yes,” I said at last, meeting Anne’s steady, level gaze. “I loved her. She could have taken an easy way out, given me up for adoption or had an abortion. She didn’t though. She never married, either. She said that being in love once was enough for her.”

“What about you?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Is once enough for you?”

“Maybe not,” I said. It was more a declaration of susceptibility than one of intent.

Anne looked away. “Tell me about Maxwell Cole.”

I wasn’t quite ready to talk about Karen, but Maxwell Cole led inevitably in that direction. “As I said, we were fraternity brothers together. He started out being Karen’s boyfriend. We met at a dance he brought her to, a Christmas formal, and the sparks flew. She broke up with him right after New Year’s and started dating me.”

“He’s a pretty sore loser. Is that the only grudge he’s got against you?”

“It’s gone beyond the grudge stage,” I said grimly. “He’s deliberately torpedoed me. When I was a rookie, he almost got me thrown off the force.”

“How?”

“There was a kid, a young crazy up on Capitol Hill. He was up there taking potshots at people with a gun. I was the first on the scene. I called to him and told him I was coming in. I thought we could talk it out. As soon as I came around the corner into the alley, he fired at me, hit me in the arm, my left one. The bullet knocked me to the ground. He evidently thought I was dead, because he got up and started walking toward me. I shot him, killed him on the spot.

“Max was just starting on the
P.I.
then. He was a cub reporter, so he wasn’t assigned to front-page stuff, but he did a feature on the kid and his family, how the kid had been an emotionally troubled boy who had been shot down in cold blood by a trigger-happy cop with a bullet in his arm. I’m still a killer cop as far as Max is concerned. He brings it up again whenever he has a chance.”

“And are you a killer cop?”

“I don’t think so. It took months to come to terms with it. I’ve never had to do it again.”

“Would you?”

“Would I what?” I had gotten carried away with the story. Her question brought me back to earth in a hurry. Her eyes were fixed on mine, searching, questioning.

“Would you do it again, given the same circumstance?”

Her gray eyes were serious, her face still and waiting. Here it comes, I thought. The answer to this question is going to blow it. There was no sense in lying. If we were going to be together, I would have to be able to be the real J. P. Beaumont.

“Yes,” I said. “Given the same circumstance, where it was either him or me, I would kill again.”

Anne stood up abruptly. “Let’s go,” she said.

T
he bike washed up with the tide on Wednesday morning. I was still in bed sampling the sensations Anne Corley’s body had to offer when Watkins called for me to hit the bricks. He said Peters was on his way from Kirkland. I turned back to Anne. “I have to go,” I said.

“Do you have to? Again?” she whispered, her lips moving across the top of my shoulder to the base of my neck. She pulled me to her, guiding me smoothly back into her moist warmth. It would have been easy to stay.

“Yes, goddamnit,” I said, pulling away. “I have to. That’s what I get for being a cop.”

“All right for you,” she said, petulantly. She smiled and sat up in bed, the sheets drawn across her naked breasts, watching me as I dressed. It made me feel self-conscious. My body’s not that bad for someone my age, but it suffered in comparison to her lithe figure.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, sitting on the bed and leaning over to pull on my shoes and socks.

A man should never ask that kind of question unless he’s prepared for the answer. She ran her fingers absentmindedly across my back. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked.

I almost fell off the bed. I turned and looked at her. “Maybe,” I said.

She smiled and planted a firm kiss on my shoulder. “I hoped you’d say that,” she murmured. I finished tying my shoe and bolted from the room. I was still trying to regain my equilibrium when the bus dropped me at Myrtle Edwards Park, eight blocks from my building.

In Seattle, if you want something named after you, you have to die first. Myrtle Edwards Park is no exception. Myrtle Edwards was a dynamo of a city councilwoman, and the park named in her honor, after she went to the great city council in the sky, trails along the waterfront from Pier Seventy to Pier Ninety-one. It consists of a narrow strip of grass, bicycle and jogging trails, some blackberry bushes, and a rocky shoreline. There is no sandy beach. The waves crash onto a seawall made up of chunks of concrete and rocks, carrying a deadly cargo of stray logs and timbers. Nobody swims in Myrtle Edwards Park, although it is a popular gathering place for noontime joggers and other fitness fanatics.

A squad car was there before me. A park maintenance worker had read a morning newspaper account of the Faith Tabernacle murders. When he saw the bike, a sturdy English three-speed, smashed beyond repair but still a relatively new and fairly expensive one, he called the department. Someone had put him through to Watkins. Not only did he talk to the right person, it even turned out to be the right bike. The tire treads matched the plaster casts taken at Faith Tabernacle.

So how do you find the owner of a bike? It’s not like an automobile where everyone has to register and license it. The few who do are mostly those unfortunates who have already been ripped off once and who know there’s no other way for them to identify and reclaim a bike if the department happens to get lucky and recover it. In other words, bicycle registration in Seattle is a long way from 100 percent.

Peters and I started at the other end of the question, going to the manufacturer and tracing the serial number to the retail outlet that sold it. The actual store was in my neighborhood, which isn’t that unlikely since my neighborhood is a big part of downtown Seattle. The store was a Schuck’s, right across the street from the Doghouse. It took Peters and me the better part of two hours of letting our fingers do the walking before we got that far. We ambled into the store about eleven-fifteen, feeling a little smug. A clerk searched through some files before he found what we needed, but twenty minutes later we walked away with a name and address on Queen Anne Hill.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? You apply a little logic, a little common sense, and everything falls right into place. We should have known. Things were going far too smoothly. The house on Galer Street was vacant and had been long enough that weeds were pushing up through a once pristine lawn. There was a For Sale sign with a telephone number on it in the front yard. We took down the number and the address.

We called from a pay phone and were directed to a real estate office on the back side of Queen Anne. Our good fortune continued. The listing agent happened to be in. She remembered the owner well. He had been transferred to London with Western Electric. He had been in a hurry to pack and move. His company bought up the equity in his house, and he had held a gigantic moving sale early in March, unloading everything but the bare essentials. It had been a good sale. A bike might have been one of the items sold. Dead end.

This job is like that. You take a slender lead and do your best with it. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. You have to take the good with the bad. We called Watkins to let him know we had come up empty-handed. He told us the preliminary report had come in on the Faith Tabernacle murders. Ballistics tests showed the weapon to be a .38. It was hardly a quantum leap toward identifying the killer. Watkins also said Carstogi had called and wanted to see us.

We went to the Warwick. A detective sat at the end of the seventh-floor hallway. Powell and Watkins were making sure Carstogi didn’t go anywhere without an escort.

We knocked. Carstogi opened the door. He looked a little shaken. “Have you seen the paper?” he asked.

“I don’t read papers,” I said.

Peters shook his head. “I didn’t have time.”

“Look,” Carstogi said bleakly.

Peters read aloud. “‘Police have sequestered the father of Friday’s slain child in connection with the subsequent double murder of the child’s mother and minister.

“‘Andrew M. Carstogi, being detained in an undisclosed downtown location, arrived in town Sunday evening and was involved in a confrontation at Faith Tabernacle in Ballard during the day on Monday.

“‘The church in the Loyal Heights area was the scene of two gangland-style murders that occurred later that night. Dead are Pastor Michael Brodie, age forty-nine, and his parishioner, Suzanne Barstogi, Carstogi’s estranged wife. The woman’s age has not been released.

“‘Arlo Hamilton, Seattle Police public information officer, said that detectives are searching for a bicycle that may have been used by the killer in making his escape.

“‘Barstogi and Carstogi, whose exact marital status is unclear, lost their only child, Angela, on Friday. She was the victim of a brutal homicide that occurred in Discovery Park. That incident is still under investigation. No arrests have been made in that slaying and police officials refuse to say whether or not Carstogi is a suspect in either the church murders or the death of the child.

“‘Inquiries in Chicago, former location of Faith Tabernacle, revealed that the group, a fundamentalist sect, left Illinois under a cloud after accusations of physical violence and alleged child abuse. At least one of the violent incidents involved Carstogi, but none of the alleged charges against the group were subsequently proven.

“‘Interviews with Suzanne Barstogi prior to her death gave no hint of any dissatisfaction or disagreement within the Faith Tabernacle organization. She expressed gratitude that the entire congregation had stood by her during the period of the loss of her child.

“‘An unidentified airline revealed that Carstogi was a passenger on a flight that arrived at Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport Sunday night, where he was reported to have been inebriated. He was overheard making threatening statements regarding Brodie. Carstogi allegedly held the minister responsible for the loss of his wife and child.

“‘He reportedly left the airport in the company of two homicide investigators, Detectives Ronald A. Peters and J. P. Beaumont, who are assigned to the murder investigation of Carstogi’s daughter.

“‘Funeral arrangements for Brodie and Barstogi are pending with the Mount Pleasant Mortuary, where a spokesman indicated the bodies will probably be returned to Chicago for burial.’”

Peters folded the paper when he finished.

“There’s more,” said Carstogi. “Look on page seventeen.”

Obligingly Peters reopened the paper. “The top corner,” Carstogi said.

Peters glanced at me over the top of the paper. “It’s Cole’s column,” he said.

“Read it.”

“‘Who is the Lady in Red? The mysterious lady, although that may be a title she doesn’t deserve, first appeared in a red dress, driving a red Porsche, and carrying a red rose at the funeral of Angela Barstogi, Seattle’s five-year-old murder victim. The lady has since been seen several times in the company of Detective J. P. Beaumont, the homicide investigator assigned to the case.

“‘Seen last in a red sweatsuit in an area restaurant, she became verbally abusive when questioned about her connection to the case. She was accompanied by Detective Beaumont at the time.

“‘Because you, my faithful readers, are the eyes and ears of Seattle, I would appreciate knowing about this lady and why Seattle’s finest are keeping her under wraps.’” Peters handed me the paper. Next to the column was a picture of Anne Corley as she had appeared at the funeral, tears streaming unchecked down her face.

“Who is she?” Carstogi asked. “What does she have to do with all this?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We’ve checked her out. She’s collecting data for a book on violent crimes with young victims.”

“But he says you’ve been seen together.”

“We happened to hit it off, just like you and that girl did the other night, except she’s not a professional. Understand?”

Carstogi looked chagrined. “Yeah, I understand.”

I was furious at Maxwell Cole. It was one thing to keep my professional life under the bright light of public scrutiny. It was another to expose my personal life, to make my relationship with Anne a topic of casual breakfast conversation.

“I think you’d better hurry up and remember anything you can about that date you had the other night,” Peters was saying to Carstogi. “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack, but with what you’ve given us, we don’t know what kind of needle or which county the haystack’s in.” He shook the folded newspaper in Carstogi’s direction for emphasis. “Detective Beaumont may not think you’re the one who killed Brodie and Suzanne, but he’s going to have one hell of a time convincing us.”

“I already told you. Her name was Gloria. That’s all I know,” Carstogi said, caving in under Peters’ implied threat.

“Try to remember where you went.” Peters pressed his advantage, finally getting through Carstogi’s reluctance to a bedrock of fear beneath.

“I was kind of drunk. I think we drove over a long bridge.”

“In a cab, a car?”

“A cab. I think I came back in the same one the next morning.”

“Pickup-and-delivery prostitution,” Peters muttered. “Where did you go?” he continued. “A motel? A house?”

“It was a house, I guess. I didn’t pay much attention. A man came out to the cab and took my money, then Gloria and I went inside, into a bedroom.”

“What about the cab?” I asked. “Do you remember anything about it?”

“No. It was blue or maybe gray. The guy chewed gum. He was a big guy, dark hair, kinda oily. That’s all I remember.”

“Nothing other than that?”

“No.” Carstogi shook his head.

I looked at Peters. “What say we take him for a spin and see if he can lead us back to the little love nest?”

“You do that,” Peters said. “Drop me at the department. I’ll see if vice has been able to dig anything up.”

Carstogi came with us reluctantly. There had been some photographers outside the hotel when we went in, and we attempted to avoid them by leaving through the garage. We weren’t entirely successful. Maxwell Cole’s sidekick from the funeral caught us as Carstogi climbed into the backseat.

Once in the car Carstogi seemed more dazed than anything. “Why does everyone think I did it?” he asked.

“For one thing, your alibi isn’t worth a shit,” Peters told him. “And the place where the bike was found is well within walking distance of the Warwick. But most important, you’re the guy with the motive. Our finding your friend Gloria is probably your one chance to avoid a murder indictment. You’d better hope to God we can find her.”