J. Jance: Until Proven Guilty

“Still packing a grudge, I see,” Max said, carelessly reaching across our table to flick a drooping ash into an unused ashtray. He was oblivious to the fact that he was intruding. I’m sure the idea never crossed his mind.

“I’d say it’s a little more serious than a grudge,” I allowed slowly. “Antipathy would be closer to the mark.”

He turned from me to give Peters a nearsighted once-over, blinking through thick horn-rimmed glasses. “This your new partner? What happened to Ray?”

“Ask the public information officer,” I said. “He gets paid for answering your questions. I don’t.”

Max looked pained. “You know, it doesn’t pay to deliberately offend the press. You might need our help someday.”

“It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

Connie brought the coffeepot and shouldered Max out of the way. She glared meaningfully at his cigarette and removed the offending ashtray. There didn’t seem to be any love lost between Connie and Maxwell Cole, either.

“Come on, Max,” someone called from the door. “We’re waiting on you.”

Max paused as if reluctant to abandon the confrontation. He finally sauntered away. Once the door closed behind him, Connie turned back to me. “He writes mean stuff about you,” she said, “and he don’t tip too good, either.”

That made me laugh. “Maybe I’ll get even by doing some writing of my own one day,” I told her. I had no idea the opportunity would present itself so soon.

Once she left the table, I turned back to Peters. “What the hell does J. P. stand for?” Peters asked.

“Don’t ask.”

“That bad?”

I nodded. He had the good sense to drop it. Jonas Piedmont Beaumont was my mother’s little joke on the world and me too, naming me after her two grandfathers. I first shortened it to initials and then settled for Beau. The initials had stuck with people who’d met me during my university days. I wanted to punch Max in the nose for bringing it up. He once had a nickname too. Maybe I could return the favor.

“Now, what’s the next move?” I asked, returning our focus to the business at hand.

Peters looked at his watch. “It’s only eleven. What say we go back to the office and sift through whatever statements have been transcribed. That’ll tell us who we should hit up tomorrow.”

“Maybe we’ll have a preliminary medical examiner’s report by then too, with any kind of luck.”

We went back to the office. For another four hours we pored over the Gay Avenue transcripts. Sergeant Watkins must have moved heaven and earth to have them typed that fast. The pattern was fairly obvious. The adults were noticeably vague about details prior to five or six months ago, although two of them indicated they had previously lived in Chicago. They all gave similar accounts of the last few days leading up to Angel’s death. I paid particular attention to the statement from Jeremiah’s stepfather, Benjamin Mason. The handprint bruise on that kid’s arm hadn’t come from a fall. No way. Like Jeremiah, all the children gave every evidence of being scared silly. In his own way, Jeremiah was just as plucky as Angel Barstogi. I hoped he wouldn’t have to pay the same kind of price.

We finally called it quits about four a.m., so tired we couldn’t make our eyes work anymore. I invited Peters to stay over with me, but he wanted to go on home to Kirkland, out in the suburbs across Lake Washington. He in turn offered me a ride home, but I wanted to walk.

“It’ll settle me down so I can sleep.”

I walked down Fourth. Most city dwellers avoid deserted streets late at night. They’re afraid of being mugged; but then, most people don’t pack a loaded.38 Smith and Wesson under their jacket.

Seattle is a deep-water port situated on Elliott Bay in Puget Sound. Huge container and grain ships ply the waters just off the ends of piers that jut out at the foot of steep hills. Although the water isn’t more than five blocks from where I live, I seldom smell the ocean. That morning, though, the wind was blowing a storm in across the sound, and the pungent odor of saltwater permeated the air.

I walked with hands shoved in pockets against suddenly chill air. Maxwell Cole came to mind as I walked. He’s had it in for me ever since I beat him out with Karen, and for the last twenty-five years of my life it seems like he’s always been around, always there to ding me. He was the reporter who covered the shooting when I was just a rookie.

A crazy kid holed up with a gun, and I had to shoot him. He was the only man I ever killed, a boy really, eighteen years old. It tore me up. For weeks afterward I couldn’t eat or sleep. All the while my good ole buddy Max, my fraternity brother Max, was playing it to the hilt, interviewing the boy’s widowed mother, distraught girlfriend, stunned neighbors, making me sound like a bloodthirsty monster. A department review officially exonerated me, but exonerations don’t capture headlines. His coverage of that one incident created a killer-cop legend that twenty years of quality police work hasn’t dented.

My relationship with Maxwell Cole is anything but cordial, yet, whenever I encounter him in public, he always acts like an old pal has just snubbed him. Old pal hell! As far as I’m concerned, it always takes a monumental effort at self-control just to keep from decking him. I walked into the lobby of my condo, the Royal Crest, feeling some elation that once more I hadn’t hit him and given him more fuel for the fire.

The walk had done me good. I was glad to open my apartment door. My place is tiny, a little over eight hundred square feet, with a view that overlooks the city. Lights from Seattle’s skyline suffuse my living room with a golden glow, so much so that I often leave the lights off and just sit. Friends have told me it’s great light for thinking or screwing. I’ve done a whole lot more of the former in that room than I have the latter.

Thinking was what I wanted to do right then. I undressed, pulled on a frayed flannel robe, and settled into my easy chair, a tall old-fashioned leather one that I managed to salvage from the debris when I moved out of the house in Sumner.

A sense of quiet settled over me as I gazed out the window. I thought about Angela Barstogi. Angel. Probably was one now. Yesterday morning she had been a living, breathing five-year-old. This morning she was dead. What had made the difference? What had turned her into a homicide statistic?

I thought about the people I had met during the day, turning them over in my mind one by one, trying to get a clear picture of who was involved. I thought about the men whose statements I had read, from Brodie to Jeremiah’s stepfather, Benjamin, to Thomas, Amos, and Ezra. They all seemed like dregs to me, seedy characters you’d expect to find living in a halfway house somewhere. They got my hackles up, made me wary.

Thinking about the people involved, assessing them, trying to sort out the relationship — that’s how I get on track with a case. And in my mind that’s exactly what this was. The beginning of a case, just like any other. What I couldn’t have known that morning as the sun began to color the cloud cover outside my living room window was how much Angel Barstogi’s murder would change my life.

I thought that after I found her killer, everything would continue as it had before. That was not to be. After poor little Angela Barstogi, nothing would ever be the same.

Idragged myself out of the house at seven-twenty and walked to work, propping my eyes open with a cup of muscle-bound coffee from the McDonald’s at Third and Pine. The restaurant mirrors the flavor of the street, and Third Avenue in downtown Seattle is an absolute cross section of life in this country. I love it and hate it.