Until Proven Guilty

by J. A. Jance

  I lay my finger across her lips and silenced her. “Then as we walked, or rather, as we ran home, I remembered that I did have a ring buried among my treasures.” I pulled the box from my pocket and opened it. The tiny chip of diamond caught the light and sparkled gamely. “My mother was never married,” I explained; “she was always engaged. And now, from one of the longest engagements in history, this ring is going to be part of one of the shortest.”

  Anne took the ring from the box and held it up to the light. “This was your mother’s?”

  “Yes.”

  She gave the ring back to me and held out her hand so I could place it on her finger. It slipped on as easily as if it had been made for her. “Thank you,” she said. “You couldn’t have given me anything I would have liked more.”

  We sat on the couch for a long time without speaking or moving. It was enough to be together, my arm around her shoulder, her hand touching mine. That night there was no need in the touching, no desire. We sat side by side, together and content.

  “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.

  Chapter 19

  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?”

  “Go back over every shred of information we have so far to see if you can find anything new.”

  We had reached the Hillclimb, a steep flight of stairs that leads from the waterfront up through the Public Market and back into the heart of the city. I felt beaten, defeated. I had turned on her, given tacit approval to Peters to go ahead and scrutinize Anne’s past. Suddenly I was more than a little afraid of what he might find there.

  We climbed the stairs without speaking. The market was jammed with vegetable and fish merchants setting out their wares. The boisterous activity was totally at odds with how I felt. We came out of the market at First and Pike. Peters turned right and started back toward the Public Safety Building.

  I stopped. “I’m going to go talk to her,” I called after him.

  Peters came back. “Why?”

  “I have to. I have to give her a chance to tell me. I want to hear it from her.”

  “Suit yourself,” Peters said with a shrug.

  I didn’t go directly back to the Royal Crest. Peters’ questions hadn’t fallen on deaf ears. Why hadn’t she told me? More to the point, what had she told me? Very little, I decided. She had said she had been married once, but she hadn’t mentioned her husband’s profession or his subsequent suicide. That’s not surprising. Suicide is something that hangs around forever, dropping load after load of guilt on the living.

  Anne had divulged little of her family background, other than bits and pieces about Patty. And she certainly hadn’t mentioned being institutionalized; but then, that’s hardly something you go around advertising. I know I wouldn’t.

  Come to think of it, there was a lot I hadn’t told her, either, gory details in the life and times of J. P. Beaumont. I had touched briefly on my relationship with Karen, but that was all. It was as if Anne and I had an unspoken agreement not to let the past taint our present or our future. On the one hand, I could rationalize and justify her not telling me her life story. On the other hand, I was angry about it.

  I walked for a long time, trying to think what I would say to her. There wasn’t the smallest part of me that accepted the idea she might have been responsible for Angela Barstogi’s death. I finally turned my steps homeward. I stopped and bought a P.I. from a vending machine on the corner. I remembered her reaction when I had asked her about Patty. I had an obligation to be there when she read the article. After all, it was because of me that she was drawing Maxwell Cole’s fire.

  The halls in high-rises are less well soundproofed than the apartments. As I approached my door, I could hear Anne’s voice from inside the unit. That surprised me because I expected her to be there alone. I paused before fitting my key in the lock. Listening through the door, I could hear she was on the telephone, that she was finishing a conversation. I turned my key in the lock and pushed the door open.

  I expected to find her on the couch next to the phone. Instead, she was halfway across the living room, eyes frantic, face ashen. She looked at my face blankly, with no sign of recognition. All I could think was that she had laid hands on the article before I got there.

  I moved across the room quickly and grasped her by the shoulders. She was shaking, quivering all over like someone chilled to the bone. “Anne, Anne. What’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  For a long second we stood there like that, with me holding her. I don’t think my words registered at all. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I came to check on you. I was afraid you’d read it by yourself. Have you read it?” She was struggling, trying to escape my grasp. Her eyes stared blindly into mine. She didn’t answer.

  “Who was that on the phone?” I demanded. “Who were you talking to?”

  My words finally penetrated and she seemed to focus on my face, to hear what I said. “No one,” she stammered. “It was a wrong number.”

  I shoved her away from me, sending her reeling into the leather chair. “Don’t lie to me, Anne; for God’s sake don’t lie to me!” I wanted to shake her, force her to tell me the truth. I started toward the chair, but the look on her face stopped me. In seconds her face had been transformed. She might have put on a mask. A calm, cold mask.

  “It was business,” she said, her voice flat and toneless.

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Mine,” she said.

  “Why did you tell me it was a wrong number?”

  “I was upset.”

  I turned back to the couch and sat heavily, the weight of the world crushing my shoulders. When I looked at her again, she was under control and so was I, but something was dreadfully wrong. I forced my tone to be gentle, made the words come slowly, the way you might if you were speaking to someone who didn’t know the language. “Was it about the newspaper article?”

  She blinked, puzzled. “What article?”

  “Maxwell Cole’s. In today’s paper. It talks about Milton Corley. Tell me about him.” I handed her the paper, open to Maxwell Cole’s column. She read it quickly, then dropped it in her lap. She looked up at me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me, Anne? You left me wide open to attack.”

  Her eyes, fixed on mine, didn’t waver. “I didn’t think it mattered,” she said.

  “But it does matter. You should have told me. Yourself.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Tell me about Milton Corley. Why did you marry him?” It was not a question I had expected to ask. It was the wounded cry of a jealous suitor, not a professional cop with his mind on his job.

  “Because I loved him,” she answered.

  “Loved him or used him?”

  “Used him first, loved him later.”

  Maybe she was being honest with me after all. “What about J. P. Beaumont? Is it the same with him?”

  She raised her hands in a helpless gesture, then dropped them back in her lap. She nodded slowly. “At first I only wanted information.”

  I felt my heart constrict. “And now?”

  “I love you.” They were the words I wanted to hear, but I couldn’t afford to believe them.

  “Why?” The word exploded in the room. “Why do you love me?”

  “Because you found the part of me that died when Milton did. I told you that last night.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “Yes. It’s the truth.”

  My gaze faltered under her unblinking one. “Tell me about your book. I want to read it.”

  “All right,” she said. “After I get it back from Ralph. I sent it to Phoenix with him. He’s having it typed for me. I have to revise the last chapter.”

  “Why?”

  “I made a mistake.”

  “What kind of mistake?”

  She looked at me as if puzzled. “The kind that shouldn’t be made if you’re any kind of writer. Why all the questions?”

  “I wanted to hear this from you, Anne. You should have told me. I shouldn’t have had to read it in the newspaper. It makes you look suspicious.”

  For several long minutes we sat without speaking. “What about us?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll have to give it some thought.” I got up to leave. I had touched the personal issue and skirted the basic one. I had to ask. I had to have the answer from Anne Corley’s own lips. “Did you have anything to do with Angela Barstogi’s death?”

  She heard the question without flinchi
ng. “So that’s what’s bothering you,” she said in a monotone. She dropped her head in her hands. “No, Beau, I didn’t. I was in Arizona. Check with United. Check with anybody.”

  “Do you know someone named Uncle Charlie?”

  She shook her head. I went to the door and stood there uncertainly, my hand on the door-knob. I didn’t know whether to leave or apologize. “I didn’t think you did, but I’m getting some heat thanks to Maxey. I’d better go back to the office,” I said at last. “I’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 20

  Work was a tonic for me that day. I worked like a fiend. I dove into every statement and every file with absolute concentration, finding comfort in the necessary discipline. Anne had said she had nothing to do with Angela Barstogi. I wanted to prove it to the world and to myself. There was nothing I wanted more than for Peters’ suspicions to be dead wrong.