J. Jance: Until Proven Guilty

He considered. “I’m going to miss Angel,” he said, “even if she was a girl.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out a business card with my name and telephone number on it. “If anyone gets after you about today, I want you to call me, understand?” He nodded.

I started toward the door but Jeremiah stopped me. He reached behind a broken-down dresser and pulled out a cup, a child’s cup with the ABC’s around the top and bottom. The name Angela was written in bright red letters on one side. Gingerly he handed it to me.

“It was hers,” he said. “Pastor Michael told her to get rid of it, but she didn’t. We hid it.” He stopped and stood looking at the cup, shifting uneasily from foot to foot. “Do you think I could keep it?”

Nodding, I returned it to his grubby hand. “I think Angel would like that.”

As soon as he had once more concealed the cup, I walked Jeremiah back downstairs. Brodie glared at him as we came past, but he refrained from comment. I guess Sergeant Watkins’ threat of jail had carried some weight with Brodie. He had all the earmarks of a bully and a coward, someone who would lord it over those who were weaker than he. I wondered about his frustration at being faced with a tough little kid who refused to cry. I wondered if, by not crying, Angel Barstogi had signed her own death warrant. It was a possibility.

As a homicide detective, however, I’m not allowed to act on mere hunches. I can move only when I have solid evidence that points me in a certain direction. I had a feeling about Michael Brodie, but nothing substantial. Jeremiah’s revelations about the “lickings” in Faith Tabernacle gave us a basis for making inquiries, but nothing more.

Slowly the crowd in the house diminished as people filtered out. At last there were only Peters and Brodie and Suzanne and me. We took them into separate rooms.

Suzanne’s original numbness was beginning to wear off, but she had a hard time following my questions, to say nothing of answering them. Some things, like the date of her divorce, escaped her completely. She claimed she simply could not remember.

That bothered me. Cops learn to listen to what’s said as well as to what isn’t; then they combine the two in order to get at the truth. Suzanne was under a lot of stress, but nonetheless there was a lot she wasn’t saying. I didn’t know why. She was hiding something, that much was certain, but I didn’t know what or who she might be protecting. Did Pastor Michael Brodie exert such influence that he could coerce a mother into concealing her own child’s murderer? It was a chilling thought, even for someone who has been in this business as long as I have.

We left Gay Avenue around ten o’clock that night. I was starved. It had been a long time since breakfast. We went to the Doghouse, a lowbrow place in my neighborhood that stays open all hours and has fed me more meals than I care to count.

Peters and I don’t exactly see eye to eye on food. Peters is an enzyme nut. He eats sprouts and seeds, which may be okay for rabbits, but in my opinion that stuff is hardly fit for human consumption. He avoids sugar and salt. He consumes little red meat and can declaim for hours on the evils of caffeine. In other words, there are times when he can be a real pain in the butt. I don’t mind eating with him, but I’ve thought of carrying earplugs for when he gets on his soapbox.

I, on the other hand, thrive on ordinary, garden-variety, all-American junk food. Karen got the barbecue in the divorce settlement. It went with the house. Since that was the only piece of cooking equipment I had mastered and since barbecuing was unavailable in my downtown high-rise, I converted to restaurants. Other than the department, the Doghouse is my home away from home.

It’s at Seventh and Bell, a few blocks from where I live. It’s one of those twenty-four-hour places frequented by cops, cabbies, reporters, and other folks who live their lives while most people are asleep. The waitresses wouldn’t win beauty pageants but the service is exceptional. The food is plain and plentiful, without an enzyme in sight. Connie, a grandmotherly type with boundless energy, tapped her pencil impatiently as Peters groused about the available selections. She finally pacified him with an order of unbuttered whole wheat toast and some herb tea.

I wolfed down a chili burger with lots of onions and cheese while Peters morosely stirred his tea. “What do you think?” I asked eventually.

“It’s got to be some kind of brainwashing,” he said. “He’s got her hiding something. The question is, what?”

“Beats me.” On the way across town we had exchanged information as much as possible. Afterward Peters had become strangely quiet and withdrawn. That’s the tough part about breaking in a new partner. There’s so much to learn before you can function as a team. Ray Johnson and I had worked together for almost eleven years before he bailed out to become chief of police in Pasco. I had become accustomed to his habits, his way of thinking. It was hard to tell where Ray’s ideas left off and mine began.

With Peters it was different. He had a guarded way about him. I was still very much outside the perimeter. After two months of working together I knew almost nothing about his personal life other than the fact that he was divorced. For that matter, he didn’t know much about my personal life, either. It’s a two-way street.

Peters gave me a long, searching look. “You ever have anything to do with a cult before?” he asked. The question was evidently the tip of an iceberg. There was a lot more lurking beneath the surface than was apparent in his words.

“No,” I replied. “First time.”

“Lucky for you,” he said, returning to his studious examination of the bottom of his teacup. I waited a moment to see if he would continue. He didn’t. At last I gave up and changed the subject.

“What’s the agenda for tomorrow?”

Before he could answer, a noisy group meandered out of the bar in a flurry of activity. I caught sight of Maxwell Cole at the same time he saw me. He extricated himself from the group and came to our booth. Max is a hulking brute of a man whose handlebar mustache and ponderous girth give him the appearance of an overfed walrus. “Damned if it isn’t old J. P.” he said, holding out his hand. “Fancy meeting a brother in a dive like this.”

I ignored his hand, knowing it would go away. Max’s reference was to our fraternity days at the University of Washington. There was no love lost then and even less now. Then we had been rivals for Karen Moffit’s affections. I won that round. Karen Moffit became Karen Beaumont, and Maxwell Cole got his nose out of joint. It’s ironic that five years after Karen divorced me, I’m still stuck with Maxwell Cole. I’m a bad habit he can’t seem to break.

These days he’s a columnist for Seattle’s morning daily, the Post-Intelligencer. His column, “City Beat,” serves as a pulpit for Maxwell Cole, self-professed righter of wrongs. He doesn’t pretend to be unbiased. He’s one of those liberals who always roots for the under-dog whether or not it has rabies.

I could handle this self-righteous, pontificating son-of-a-bitch a little better if I hadn’t spotted old Maxey Baby down on First Avenue a couple of times, hanging around the porno flicks. I don’t think he was down there doing movie reviews. He looked at home there, a regular customer, like me in the McDonald’s at Third and Pine.

Cole likes to take on the Seattle Police Department, casting all cops in the role of heavies. I’ve lost more than one case after he has tried it in the press, noisily waving the flag of the First Amendment all the while. One of his success stories, Harvey Cahill, killed somebody else within a month after Max got him acquitted. By then nobody remembered Cole’s bleeding heart. They went gunning for someone to blame. Yours truly took a little gas.