Until Proven Guilty (8 page)

She was a far cry from the mousy, passive image of a sociologist that I’d formed, more from fiction than from experience. She was like a breath of fresh air. I guessed rich people could decide to do anything they damned well pleased with their lives. She sure didn’t live on a sociologist’s salary.

I started out to tell her only a little of the Angela Barstogi story, but somehow it all rolled out, from Sophie Czirski’s unproved allegations to a Jesus Loves Me poster that had hung above Angela’s bed. I hadn’t talked about a case that way since Karen left, and never to someone I didn’t know. It was a serious breach of discipline in the loose-lips-sink-ships tradition, yet I was unable to check myself. Anne Corley listened quietly, nodding encouragement from time to time.

I finished. We were sipping coffee. She stirred the strong black liquid thoughtfully. “If that’s what she had to live with, no matter how she died, she’s probably better off.”

I don’t know what I had expected Anne to say, but that wasn’t it. She’d lost her professional demeanor and seemed to be weeping inwardly for Angela Barstogi. Her sadness didn’t seem weak, however. There was strength and resilience under Anne Corley’s veneer of graceful beauty. It was like finding real wood when you expected particle board.

We left the restaurant within minutes after that. There was no question of lingering over a conversational after-dinner drink. Once more I felt oddly responsible for her abrupt change of mood. It was somehow my fault. That wasn’t the only thing that made me uncomfortable. Anne Corley bought my dinner. That had never happened to me before, and I wasn’t sure I liked it.

We drove back to Seattle in a subdued mood. I wanted to redeem the evening, but it was obviously beyond recall. She had moved away from me, was grieving for a child she’d never met. No banter, no small talk could bring her back. I congratulated myself for being a social failure. Who goes to dinner with a gorgeous woman and squanders the conversation on murder, child abuse, and other such scintillating stuff? J. P. Beaumont, that’s who.

When Anne stopped to let me out in front of the Royal Crest, I halfheartedly asked her up for a drink. She gave me a wilted smile and said, “Some other time,” in a voice totally empty of enthusiasm. Dejectedly I watched her drive away. It was clear that whatever interest I had held for her was gone. There was no sense in calling the Four Seasons. I had had one shot at her, and missed. Whatever it was I had lost, it was something I suspected I wanted.

T
he phone was ringing as I stepped off the elevator. I didn’t rush to answer it. I figured whoever it was would call back later. It was still yelling at me after I unlocked the door and turned on the lights.

“Where the hell have you been?” Peters growled before I had a chance to say hello.

“It’s none of your goddamned business, actually. It is Sunday, you know.”

“I’ve been trying to get you for a couple of hours. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”

“I don’t want to be picked up. I want to go to bed and sulk.”

“You’re going to the airport. We’re meeting someone.”

“All right, Peters. Cut the crap. Who are we meeting?”

“A fellow by the name of Andrew Carstogi.”

“You mean Barstogi.”

“Barstogi is an alias. Andrew Carstogi is Angela’s father.”

“I’ll meet you downstairs,” I said.

Peters picked me up in a departmental car, explaining to me as we drove that Carstogi had called in during the funeral. No one could find me, but they had finally located Peters after he came home from watching the Yankees strangle the Mariners.

“How was the funeral?” Peters asked.

The funeral was light-years away. I had gone to the funeral without knowing Anne Corley, and now, five hours later, I had met her and lost her. It had to be some kind of indoor world record for short-lived romance. I shrugged. “Michael Brodie gave quite a performance,” I said.

“Faith Tabernacle people were out in force?”

I nodded. “They arrived as a group and left as a group.”

“The inquiry came back from Illinois. Drew a blank on everybody—except Brodie and Jason. They show that old license on Clinton Jason, but that’s all. I asked them to check him further and to keep looking for the others.”

We drove down the Alaskan Way Viaduct, along the waterfront with its trundling ferries and acres of container shipyards punctuated by the red skeletons of upraised cranes. We sped down a canyon of railroad freight cars that towered on either side of the road. The long springtime evening of gray sky and gray sea matched my own dreary outlook. I tried to get Anne Corley off my mind, to focus on Angela Barstogi, the case, anything but a lady driving out of my life in a bright red Porsche.

“Tell me about Angela’s father,” I said. “What brought him out of the woodwork?”

“There’s not much to tell so far. He called the department between two-thirty and three. He had just heard. I don’t know how. He raised hell with whoever answered the phone. Said he knew it would happen, that he had tried to stop it. When he said he was catching the next plane out, it sounded like he intended to do bodily harm to Brodie and Suzanne as well. The brass thought we ought to intercept him. Powell wants us to park him someplace downtown where we can keep an eye on him. I had to beat up the airlines to find out what flight he’s on.”

“I think doing bodily harm to Pastor Michael Brodie is a wonderful idea. What say we miss the plane?”

“Orders are orders,” Peters replied.

We rode the automated underground people mover to the United Airlines terminal. We didn’t have to wonder who Andrew Carstogi was. An angry young man stumbled through the gate, shedding flight attendants like a wet dog shakes off excess water. He was drunk and spoiling for a fight. I’m sure Carstogi didn’t enjoy walking into the welcoming arms of two waiting homicide detectives. The feeling was mutual. It’s never fun to be put on the baby-sitting detail, especially when you’re dealing with a grieving parent.

Peters and I fell into step on either side of Carstogi. Peters flashed his badge. I thought Carstogi was going to coldcock Peters on the spot.

“What’re you guys after me for?” he demanded sluggishly. “My kid is dead. I just got to town.”

I thought I’d deflect a little of the anger, calm the troubled waters. “Take it easy. We’re here to help.”

“You can help me, all right. Just tell me where that asshole Brodie is, that’s what you can do.” He turned to me with a swaying leer and shook a clenched fist under my nose. “You know where he is? I’ll take care of that son-of-a-bitch myself.”

Carstogi allowed himself to be guided onto the subway. The security guard eyed us suspiciously as we led him, ranting and raving, through the gate. He hadn’t brought any luggage. “Don’ need any luggage,” he mumbled. “Only came to town to smash his fucking face.”

Carstogi balked at the car. “Hey, where’re you takin’ me? I got my rights. I wanna lawyer.”

Peters was losing patience. “Shut up,” he said. “You’re not under arrest. We’re going to try to sober you up.”

“Oh,” Carstogi replied.

We went to the Doghouse. They have a sign in there that shows all roads leading to the Doghouse the same as signs all over the world tell the distance to that godforsaken end of nowhere called Wall Drug in South Dakota. Connie put us in a corner of the back dining room even though it was closed. She brought me coffee and Peters tea, then asked what Carstogi wanted. He wanted beer. He didn’t get it. Peters ordered him bacon and eggs and whole wheat toast served up with a full complement of questions. I thought it commendable that Peters put aside his own personal prejudices and ordered some decent food for Carstogi.

It took a while for food and exhaustion to do their work. When we finally dug under the bluster and bullshit, what we found was a twenty-eight-year-old guy in a world of hurt, a man who lost his wife once and his child twice, all to the same man, he figured, Pastor Michael Brodie.

The story came out slowly. First there had been a series of tent meetings to save souls, of miracles performed before wondering sinners who were prepared to follow the miracle worker to the ends of the earth. Except the miracle worker turned out to have feet of clay. He was into weird stuff like multiple wives and physical punishment for redemption of sins. Anyone who tried to stop him was liable to find himself smitten by the right hand of God. God’s right hand turned out to have a mean right hook.

Andrew Carstogi had come to his senses one morning with the crap beaten out of him. It had made a big impression. He had crossed Brodie on the righteousness of physical punishment, on Brodie’s requirement that all wives belonged to God’s Chosen Prophet first and their husbands second. Brodie hadn’t quit until Carstogi was unconscious. If Carstogi had left it at that, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but Andrew Carstogi didn’t take kindly to being beaten up or losing his wife. He called in the cops and the press.

Chicago is a pretty tolerant place, but once the charges had been made, even though Carstogi had been unable to substantiate them, Faith Tabernacle was held up to ridicule. Experience tells me that the Pastor Michael Brodies of the world can handle almost anything but ridicule.

Carstogi was Disavowed. It’s worse than it sounds. In the world of Faith Tabernacle, he ceased to exist. Not only was he no longer a member, he was no longer a husband or father either. He tried to get a court order for custody of Angela. Unfortunately, Suzanne was neither a prostitute nor a drug addict. Later, when Brodie made a killing in a real estate deal on some property the church owned, the whole congregation folded their tents and stole away in the middle of the night. Once they left Chicago the group had as good as fallen off the edge of the earth until a cousin of Carstogi’s, a guy in the navy in Bremerton, put two and two together and came up with the connection.

Carstogi finished his story and looked from Peters to me as if we should understand. I still felt there were big chunks missing. “Why do you say he killed her?” I asked.

“He almost killed me,” he replied. He had sobered up enough that his words no longer slurred together.

“That’s two men going at it. It’s a long way from killing a defenseless child.”

“You been in the church?” he asked.

“We’ve been there,” Peters replied.

“But during a service?” Carstogi continued doggedly. “Have you been there during a service? If I just coulda gotten that judge to go to a service he woulda given me custody.”

“Tell us about the service,” Peters suggested.

“You probably won’t believe it. Nobody else does.”

“Try us,” I offered.

He looked at us doubtfully. The sobering process made him more reluctant to talk. “It’s like he owns them body and soul. Like it’s a contest to see how far they’ll jump if he tells them.”

“For instance,” Peters said.

“If he told them to eat dog shit they’d do it.” He said it quickly, with a ring of falsehood.

“That’s not really what you’re talking about, is it?” Peters’ face was a mask that I had a hard time reading myself. Carstogi gave him an appraising look, then shook his head.

Peters followed up on the opening he had made. “You’re afraid to tell us for fear you’ll end up being prosecuted too, aren’t you?”

“It’s scary,” Carstogi admitted. “I didn’t realize until after I got out. You just do what he tells you, what everyone else is doing. It doesn’t seem so bad at the time. You don’t think that you’re hurting someone. The whole time Brodie is there telling you that suffering is the only way those sinners are going to heaven, that you are the chosen instrument of God.”

“Shit.” Peters got up and left the table. He went into the bar and came back a few minutes later. A distinct odor of gin came with him. Maybe the juniper berries in gin had been promoted to health food status. Because I knew about Broken Springs, Oregon, and Peters’ own situation, I could feel for him, but to leave in the middle of an interrogation was inexcusable, to say nothing of drinking on duty.

I made a mental note to climb his frame about it later. I don’t like personal considerations to get in the way of doing the job. If you’re a professional, that kind of thing doesn’t happen. Objectivity is the name of the game. While I was making that little set of mental notes, I should have remembered something they used to say in Sunday School about taking the beam out of your own eye before you start worrying about the mote in somebody else’s. But then, I was still very much the professional. J. P. Beaumont hadn’t reached his own breaking point yet. It was coming.

Carstogi was exhausted. We put him up in the Warwick, which happens to be at Fourth and Lenora, a half block cornerwise from where I live. It made dropping him off and tucking him in a simple matter. He seemed more than happy for us to stick him in a hotel room and tell him we’d come get him in the morning.

Peters came with me to my apartment. I got out my MacNaughton’s and located a dusty gin bottle with enough dregs for a reasonable drink or two. We tried to plan for morning, which by now was already upon us.

“You think he’s telling the truth?” I asked Peters.

He nodded. “Sounds like it to me, as far as it goes. He’s scared some of the shit is going to roll downhill and he’ll end up with charges lodged against him. I’m afraid he’ll rabbit on us before we can get him into court.”

I had to agree with Peters’ assessment. If we went strictly with Carstogi, we would be leaning on a bent reed. “Do you suppose we can use him to bring Suzanne around?”

Peters considered for a moment. “It would be worth a try, although I doubt it’ll work. Even considering what she’s been through, she won’t squeal on that Brodie bastard. That’s the mystifying part about brainwashing. She may know he’s a killer, but she’ll stick to him like glue.”

“You could be right,” I allowed, “but we have the element of surprise on our side. She has no way of knowing that Andrew Carstogi is in town. Maybe if we brought him over and dumped him on her, it would jar her into slipping. After all, they were together almost ten years. She probably still has some feelings for him.”

“It’s worth a try,” Peters agreed.

We made arrangements to meet at the Warwick at eight. We’d take Carstogi with us to breakfast and then head for Gay Avenue. We’d try to get there before Suzanne had a backup group from Faith Tabernacle. Our best bet was to catch her alone.