J. Jance - Until Proven Guilty

“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.

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.

“How much of it is true?” Peters asked.

It took a couple of seconds to comprehend the implications behind Peters’ question. “How the hell should I know?” Angrily I shoved my chair away from the desk, banging it into the divider behind me. I stalked out the door with Peters hot on my heels. We said nothing in the lobby or in the crowded elevator. A couple of people made comment about the previous day’s engagement party. It was all I could do to give their greeting a polite acknowledgment.

Once on the street I struck out for the waterfront. Peters picked up the conversation exactly where we’d left off. “You mean she hasn’t talked about any of it, at least not to you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That she told all this to Cole and not to me?”

“Seems to me that she would have told you. After all, you are engaged, remember?”

I stopped and turned on him. “Get off my back, will you? I’m your partner. You’re not my father confessor.”

“But why hasn’t she told you? If you had spent eleven years in a mental institution, wouldn’t you give your bride-to-be a hint about it, so that if it came up later she wouldn’t be surprised?”

“I don’t know why she didn’t tell me, but it doesn’t matter. It’s history, Peters. It has nothing to do with now, with the present or with us. Her past is none of my business.”

“Why the big rush, then?”

“What’s it to you? Why the hell is it any concern of yours?”

“It looks as though she thought if you found out, you’d drop her.” He was silent for a minute, backing off a little. He came back at it from another direction. “Did you know she had that much money?”

We resumed walking, our pace a little less furious. “I knew she had some money,” I allowed, “quite a bit of it. You don’t stay at the Four Seasons on welfare. She said having too much money made it hard to know who her friends were.”

“And you think that’s why she didn’t tell you how much?”

“Maybe,” I said, “but I didn’t ask her how much, Peters. Don’t you understand? I don’t have to know everything about her. She doesn’t know that much about me, either. That takes time. There’ll be time enough for that later.”

“Has she shown you any of her book or have you personally seen her working on it?”

“Well, we’ve discussed it, but…No.”

“Tell me again why she came to Angela’s Barstogi’s funeral.”

Peters is single-minded. I have to respect that; I am too, usually. The only way to get him to drop it was to tell him what I knew. So I told him about Patty, about how much Anne had loved her, how Patty’s death had upset and hurt her, how being unable to attend her sister’s funeral as a child was something Anne Corley was doing penance for as an adult. It was a sketchy story at best, lacking the depth of details that would give the story credibility.

“How did she die?”

“I don’t know.”

We were walking north along the water-front with a fresh wind blowing in across a gunmetal harbor. Peters listened thoughtfully as I told him what I could. Even as I told the story, I didn’t need Peters’ help to plug it full of holes.

“Just supposing,” Peters suggested, “that she did have something to do with Angela Barstogi’s death.”

I stopped dead in my tracks. “Now wait a fucking minute.”

“You wait a minute, Beaumont. You’re too embroiled to see the forest for the trees, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us are. All I’m doing is asking questions. If Anne Corley isn’t hiding something, it’s not going to hurt anything but your pride. Maybe there’s a connection between Anne Corley and Uncle Charlie.”

“Peters, Anne Corley had nothing to do with Angela Barstogi’s death. She wasn’t even in town until after the wire services had the story.”

“It shouldn’t be hard to prove, one way or the other. You owe it to yourself to get to the bottom of this. You can’t afford to accept her presence at face value, particularly if she’s not being up-front with you. You’re a better cop than that.”

Unerringly Peters hit the nerve where I was most vulnerable. Cops want to be right, one way or the other. They have to prove themselves over and over. Usually it’s less personally important to them. Conflict of interest walked up and smacked me right in the face.

“I’d better ask Powell to pull me from the case,” I said.

“Don’t be an asshole. That’s not necessary, not yet. If we come up with something definite, then it’ll be time to bring Watkins and Powell into it. In the meantime, I think some discreet questions to your old friend Maxwell Cole are in order.”

“Me talk to Cole?”

“No.” Peters laughed. “Not you. I will.”

“And what am I supposed to do while you do that?”