Until Proven Guilty

by J. A. Jance

  “Here it comes,” Peters said.

  “If our Lord who was without blemish or blame suffered the scourge for our sakes, then it is only right that we who are sinners should follow in His steps. Sister Suzanne, take comfort in the words given to the apostles who suffered and died in the service of our Lord. ‘Beloved, think it not strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you. But rejoice, inasmuch as ye are partakers of Christ’s sufferings; that, when his glory shall be revealed, ye may be glad also with exceeding joy.’”

  Amens were more fervent now as people were caught up in the spectacle. Even on the tape I could sense their excitement, the shuffling feet, the nervous coughs.

  “It is written that ‘the time is come that judgment must begin at the house of God: and if it first begin at us, what shall the end be of them that obey not the gospel of God? Wherefore let them that suffer according to the will of God commit the keeping of their souls to him.’

  “‘Forasmuch then as Christ hath suffered for us in the flesh, arm yourself likewise with the same mind: for he that hath suffered in the flesh hath ceased from sin.’

  “Sister Suzanne, cast all your care upon Him; for He careth for you. It says in First Peter 3:14, ‘But and if ye suffer for righteousness’ sake, happy are ye: and be not afraid of their terror, neither be troubled.’

  “Do you come here willingly, Sister Suzanne?”

  “I do.”

  “I’ll just bet,” Peters said.

  Suzanne’s response had been barely audible, but an exultant “Hallelujah” sprang from the crowd. Maybe if she had said no, that she had been forced, the ceremony would have been canceled and the True Believers would have been denied their blood lust. A baby cried somewhere in the background and was quickly hushed. So the children were there, watching, listening. I thought of Jeremiah. No wonder he was afraid.

  Brodie continued now, his tone no longer that of an orator, but gentler, cajoling, not wanting to frighten Suzanne into backing out at the last minute. “Do you know, too, that those who will smite you do so only as tools of your salvation, bearing you no malice or ill will?”

  “I do.”

  “I think I’m going to puke,” Peters said. “She really let them do it to her.”

  This time there was no sound from the True Believers. They were holding their collective breath in anticipation. This was the sword Brodie wielded over his congregation. Not only had he inflicted bodily punishments, he had provided them for the vicarious enjoyment of his followers. Sickened, I resumed listening. Brodie was speaking again, his tone moving, hypnotic, molding her to his will. If Suzanne Barstogi would willingly hurt herself because Brodie asked, would she have resisted beating her own child?

  “‘Being reviled we bless; being persecuted we suffer it.’ Will you then, Sister, bless and forgive each of those who stand here tonight to be the instruments of your redemption?”

  “Yes.” Her answer was nothing more than a whisper. The recorder detected no shifting, no sound from the crowd. They were ready.

  “Brother Amos and Brother Ezra, hold her wrists.” There was the sound of people moving. “Brother Benjamin, rend her garment.” We heard the sound of her dress tearing, the snap of her brassiere, and then, after a pause, the sharp crack of a lash biting into flesh. Reflex made me count the blows, seven in all, each one slow and deliberate. Suzanne made one involuntary cry at the outset. After that she was silent.

  The tape went on. There had been an out-pouring of amens and hallelujahs, but now that was silenced. Brodie was speaking. “Sister Suzanne will spend yet another night in prayer, not in the Penitent’s Room, but here, at the altar, where she can feel our Lord’s forgiveness. In the morning we shall come again to welcome her return to the fold. Go with God. It is finished.”

  I heard some murmur of talk as people filed out. The next sound was that of someone weeping. “Suzanne?” Brodie’s voice.

  She made no response, although the weeping subsided. “Suzanne. Look at me. I have something for you. It’ll make it hurt less.” A pause, then he continued, his voice soft and cajoling. “Don’t try to cover yourself from me, Sister. I’ve come to minister to your wounds. It’s a local anesthetic.”

  Again the silence. I could imagine him running a fleshy finger across her bleeding breasts, administering some kind of ointment.

  “Thank you,” Suzanne said softly.

  “I want you,” he said.

  “No, please.” There was no audible spoken answer although we heard the sound of the study door closing. I was taken aback. He had asked, and Suzanne had denied him. Even the pastor himself was subject to some rules and prohibitions. It was obvious what kind of additional comfort and forgiveness he had intended to offer.

  The tape clicked on and off, running only when there was sufficient sound in the room to sustain it. There was no way to tell how much time elapsed each time the voices stopped and started.

  “…of-a-bitch” The voice was a man’s, muffled and indistinct. It sounded as though it might have been coming through a closed door, maybe the study.

  I strained to hear. “Turn it up,” I said to Peters, and he did.

  “Get out!” I could recognize Brodie’s voice.

  The other man was speaking now. “…her alone. She’s my wife, not one of your whores.”

  I heard the familiar menacing tone in Brodie’s voice. “You seem to forget, my word is law here.” The door slammed. The visitor’s hard-soled shoes stormed through the sanctuary. The front door slammed heavily behind him.

  Now we could hear the mumble of Suzanne’s voice alone. It rose and fell. It was a prayer of some kind, but the words themselves escaped us. It continued for some time, on and off, intermittently reactivating the machine.

  Then suddenly, sharply, “…t do you want?”

  A sharp report of a pistol answered her, followed by the sound of an opening door. We could hear Brodie’s voice. “What happened? Suzanne?” A gunshot was his answer too, followed by silence as the machine shut itself off.

  The next voice was that of Sarah, the cook: “…my God,” and the sound of hurrying footsteps. Then came the sound of another door and more footsteps, followed by Peters’ voice: “He didn’t nickel-dime-around, did he?” The recorder was switched off before anything further was said.

  “That was Carstogi!” said Peters, his voice tense with excitement. “It has to be.”

  “How can you be sure?” I asked. “I don’t think it sounds like him at all.”

  Just then Anne asked permission to return to the living room. She was wearing the same blue suit she had worn the day before, only now her hair was pulled back and fastened in an elaborate knot at the base of her neck. She looked like a ballerina. The similarity wasn’t just in looks. I knew that her external beauty concealed the finely tuned, well-conditioned body of a professional dancer.

  “Beau, I’m going to take off now,” she said, moving toward the door. She nodded to Peters. “Nice to see you again, Ron.”

  Peters stood up apologetically. “I hope you’re not leaving on my account.”

  She smiled. “No. I have lots to do.”

  I followed her to the door. “Can you come back tonight? I don’t know what time I’ll be back, but I can give you a key so you can let yourself in.”

  “Do you think you can trust me?” She was laughing as she asked the question. I rummaged through the kitchen junk drawer to locate my spare keys.

  I handed them to Anne, and she dropped them into her jacket pocket. “Thanks,” she said, giving me a quick peck on the cheek.

  I walked with her to the elevator lobby, where she turned and kissed me, a full-blown invitational kiss that sent my senses reeling. The elevator door opened. There stood three of my neighbors.

  “That wasn’t fair,” I protested.

  “It wasn’t, was it?” she agreed. The elevator door closed, and she was gone.

  Chapter 14

  Peters, still intent on the tape, was playing it again as
I came back into the room. “So much of what Brodie says sounds like he’s quoting directly from the Bible.”

  “Probably was. Taken out of context and given a forty-degree twist, you can use the Bible to justify almost anything.”

  Peters’ tea was gone. I brought him another cup. We listened to the tape, not once but several times. “There’s a clue in here somewhere, if we could just put our fingers on it,” Peters said as he switched off the recorder for the last time. He stood up. “I guess we’d better get back over to Faith Tabernacle. The place is probably still crawling with people. Watty will be climbing the walls.”

  “What about Carstogi?” I asked.

  “What about him? I’m sure the trail leads back to him one way or the other.”

  I remained unconvinced. I said, “Let’s get a description of the hooker and put vice on it. Or maybe we could track down that cab.”

  “You’re determined he didn’t do it, aren’t you? But you’re right; we should check it out.” Peters glanced down at the tiny machine in his hand. “What about this? Erase it?”

  “No, don’t. We’ll want to listen to it again. If there’s something in there that we’re missing, maybe we’ll catch it next time. Leave it here.” I took the recorder from him and placed it in the top drawer of the occasional table beside my leather chair. “That way it won’t leak into Cole’s hands.”

  Back at Faith Tabernacle Sergeant Watkins was running the show, directing a small army of officers who scrutinized every inch of the church and took statements from anyone who looked remotely related to the case. At the moment we drove up, Watty was standing next to the front door, supervising a kneeling lab technician who was making a plaster cast of something behind a row of decorative bushes.

  “What’s up?” Peters asked him.

  Watkins glowered at us. “Where the hell have you been?” He went on without waiting for an answer. “We found some tracks here. The footprints have been obliterated, but we should get good casts of the bicycle tires. Someone parked a bike here during the night.”

  “You think the killer used a bike for his getaway?” I asked, shaking my head.

  “You have a better suggestion?” Watty snapped.

  I had to admit I didn’t have one. “Where’s the father?” the sergeant asked.

  “He’s back at the Warwick. We’ve got a guard on him.”

  “A guard!” Watkins exploded. “What I want on him are cuffs and orange coveralls. We’ve got three people dead so far. We’d better arrest someone pretty goddamned soon.”

  “Carstogi didn’t do it,” I said.

  “What? Are you his goddamned character witness? I understand he was out all night. Where was he?”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t know!”

  “He went to the Palace for a sleazy, X-rated movie and got himself picked up by a hooker. He doesn’t know where they went. He’s from out of town.”

  Watkins examined my face as though he thought I was a raving lunatic. “That’s the shakiest goddamned alibi I’ve heard this week!” He turned to Peters. “You agree with him, Detective Peters?”

  Peters shifted uneasily under his gaze. “No,” he said at last. “Beau and I differ on that score. I think Carstogi is our prime suspect.”

  Watty turned back to me, a look of smug satisfaction spreading over his face. “I’m glad somebody around here has some sense. Majority rules. Now I suggest you get off your ass and nail it down.” He walked away.

  Peters looked at me for a reaction. “He asked my opinion, Beau.” It was part apology and part justification.

  “That’s why they have two detectives on this case, remember?” We went inside.

  The bodies were gone and the crime lab folks were pretty much finished. One of them tossed Peters a bulging manila envelope. “You can cross robbery off the list of motives,” he said. “There’s seventeen thousand dollars in cash in that baby. It was in a bottom drawer in the study. We’re taking it down to the department for safekeeping.”

  I went into the study. A well-thumbed and much-marked Bible lay open on the desk. I turned some of the pages. The marked passages were all of a vein similar to what we had heard on the tape. Nothing in Brodie’s selections spoke of forgiveness or loving one’s neighbor, to say nothing of one’s enemies. Faith Tabernacle’s leader had demanded retribution from his followers, had turned a blind eye on adultery. Someone had learned the lessons well and had given Brodie a taste of his own medicine. “Vengeance is mine” was the message. The Lord was excluded from the equation.

  A halfhearted prayer service was continuing in the fellowship hall. The few True Believers who held jobs had not gone to work. Like bewildered sheep they huddled together for warmth, locked in a cell of interminable prayer, waiting for direction. Brodie had told them what to do and when to do it for a long time. Without him they had no idea how to function. I felt sorry for them. At the same time I felt repulsed. They had turned their lives and minds over to a monster masquerading as a messiah.

  I saw Jeremiah. I tried to catch his eye in hopes I could get him to come talk to me. I think he saw me, but he studiously ignored me. Already someone had taken up Brodie’s mantle and was pulling the strings.

  Peters and I hit the street. We went back to Gay Avenue. Like the evidence techs before us, we found nothing. It looked as though no one had been in the house since we had come with Carstogi the day before. As we stepped off the porch to leave, Sophie Czirski hailed us from the concealed gate in her fence.

  “Is it true?” she demanded as we approached. “They’re both dead?”

  “Yes,” Peters responded.

  “Serves ’em right,” she muttered, “both of ’em.” Her loose dentures clicked in satisfaction.

  “You didn’t do it, did you, Sophie?” Peters’ question was a joke more than anything, but Sophie’s face brightened.

  “I didn’t,” she said. “Wish I had, though. I was right there in the house from ‘Little House on the Prairie’ to the eleven o’clock news. Then I went to bed. No way to prove it, though. Nobody saw me. You want to take me in?”

  Peters grinned. “That won’t be necessary, but you call us if you see anything strange around here, will you?”

  Her red hair bobbed up and down. “I will,” she assured us, and we both knew it was true.

  We questioned some of the other neighbors and then returned to Faith Tabernacle to canvass that area, looking for leads the whole time. We kept after it all day. For a while it looked as though we were going to come up empty-handed. We were still at it when yellow school buses started discharging passengers in late afternoon. Shortly after that a kid on a bike, probably junior high or so, rode up to where Peters and I were standing.

  “You guys detectives?” he asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “I saw someone on a bike this morning when I was on my paper route. I usually cut through the church parking lot to get to the house across the street. It’s the last one on my route. Someone was just leaving the front of the church. He was in a hurry.”

  “Did you get a good look at him?”

  He shook his head. “It was too dark. I only saw the reflectors on the bike’s wheels.”

  “What time was it?”

  Again he shook his head. “I don’t know. My dad gets home from work about two—he’s a janitor—and he wakes me up. I deliver my papers and go back to bed. That way I can have breakfast with everybody else in the morning. I usually get home around three. This is my last house.”

  He couldn’t give us much more than that. We took his name, address, and phone number and thanked him.

  “Nice kid,” Peters said as we watched him wheel his bike back down the street.

  “He came within an inch of getting himself killed this morning. If he’d seen him, I don’t think our killer would’ve hesitated pulling the trigger again.”

  About six-thirty we went back to the department to dictate our reports. We finished about an hour later
. Peters offered me a ride home, and I accepted. It had been a long day.

  The lights were off in the apartment when I came in. I felt a jab of disappointment. I had hoped all day that Anne would be there when I came home. It had been years since someone had been at home waiting to welcome me. I fixed a drink and went to the bedroom to hang up my jacket. Anne was there in my bed, curled up and sound asleep. I beat a hasty retreat to the shower, overwhelmed with gratitude for my good fortune.

  Clean-shaven and showered, I slipped into bed beside her. She snuggled against me. When I nuzzled her neck, she stirred. “Good evening, Sleeping Beauty.”