Until Proven Guilty

Chapter 15

The bike washed up with the tide on Wednesday morning. I was still in bed sampling the sensations Anne Corley’s body had to offer when Watkins called for me to hit the bricks. He said Peters was on his way from Kirkland. I turned back to Anne. “I have to go,” I said.

“Do you have to? Again?” she whispered, her lips moving across the top of my shoulder to the base of my neck. She pulled me to her, guiding me smoothly back into her moist warmth. It would have been easy to stay.

“Yes, goddamnit,” I said, pulling away. “I have to. That’s what I get for being a cop.”

“All right for you,” she said, petulantly. She smiled and sat up in bed, the sheets drawn across her naked breasts, watching me as I dressed. It made me feel self-conscious. My body’s not that bad for someone my age, but it suffered in comparison to her lithe figure.

“What are you thinking?” I asked, sitting on the bed and leaning over to pull on my shoes and socks.

A man should never ask that kind of question unless he’s prepared for the answer. She ran her fingers absentmindedly across my back. “Do you believe in love at first sight?” she asked.

I almost fell off the bed. I turned and looked at her. “Maybe,” I said.

She smiled and planted a firm kiss on my shoulder. “I hoped you’d say that,” she murmured. I finished tying my shoe and bolted from the room. I was still trying to regain my equilibrium when the bus dropped me at Myrtle Edwards Park, eight blocks from my building.

In Seattle, if you want something named after you, you have to die first. Myrtle Edwards Park is no exception. Myrtle Edwards was a dynamo of a city councilwoman, and the park named in her honor, after she went to the great city council in the sky, trails along the waterfront from Pier Seventy to Pier Ninety-one. It consists of a narrow strip of grass, bicycle and jogging trails, some blackberry bushes, and a rocky shoreline. There is no sandy beach. The waves crash onto a seawall made up of chunks of concrete and rocks, carrying a deadly cargo of stray logs and timbers. Nobody swims in Myrtle Edwards Park, although it is a popular gathering place for noontime joggers and other fitness fanatics.

A squad car was there before me. A park maintenance worker had read a morning newspaper account of the Faith Tabernacle murders. When he saw the bike, a sturdy English three-speed, smashed beyond repair but still a relatively new and fairly expensive one, he called the department. Someone had put him through to Watkins. Not only did he talk to the right person, it even turned out to be the right bike. The tire treads matched the plaster casts taken at Faith Tabernacle.

So how do you find the owner of a bike? It’s not like an automobile where everyone has to register and license it. The few who do are mostly those unfortunates who have already been ripped off once and who know there’s no other way for them to identify and reclaim a bike if the department happens to get lucky and recover it. In other words, bicycle registration in Seattle is a long way from 100 percent.

Peters and I started at the other end of the question, going to the manufacturer and tracing the serial number to the retail outlet that sold it. The actual store was in my neighborhood, which isn’t that unlikely since my neighborhood is a big part of downtown Seattle. The store was a Schuck’s, right across the street from the Doghouse. It took Peters and me the better part of two hours of letting our fingers do the walking before we got that far. We ambled into the store about eleven-fifteen, feeling a little smug. A clerk searched through some files before he found what we needed, but twenty minutes later we walked away with a name and address on Queen Anne Hill.

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? You apply a little logic, a little common sense, and everything falls right into place. We should have known. Things were going far too smoothly. The house on Galer Street was vacant and had been long enough that weeds were pushing up through a once pristine lawn. There was a For Sale sign with a telephone number on it in the front yard. We took down the number and the address.

We called from a pay phone and were directed to a real estate office on the back side of Queen Anne. Our good fortune continued. The listing agent happened to be in. She remembered the owner well. He had been transferred to London with Western Electric. He had been in a hurry to pack and move. His company bought up the equity in his house, and he had held a gigantic moving sale early in March, unloading everything but the bare essentials. It had been a good sale. A bike might have been one of the items sold. Dead end.

This job is like that. You take a slender lead and do your best with it. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes not. You have to take the good with the bad. We called Watkins to let him know we had come up empty-handed. He told us the preliminary report had come in on the Faith Tabernacle murders. Ballistics tests showed the weapon to be a.38. It was hardly a quantum leap toward identifying the killer. Watkins also said Carstogi had called and wanted to see us.

We went to the Warwick. A detective sat at the end of the seventh-floor hallway. Powell and Watkins were making sure Carstogi didn’t go anywhere without an escort.

We knocked. Carstogi opened the door. He looked a little shaken. “Have you seen the paper?” he asked.

“I don’t read papers,” I said.

Peters shook his head. “I didn’t have time.”

“Look,” Carstogi said bleakly.

Peters read aloud. “”Police have sequestered the father of Friday’s slain child in connection with the subsequent double murder of the child’s mother and minister.

“”Andrew M. Carstogi, being detained in an undisclosed downtown location, arrived in town Sunday evening and was involved in a confrontation at Faith Tabernacle in Ballard during the day on Monday.

“”The church in the Loyal Heights area was the scene of two gangland-style murders that occurred later that night. Dead are Pastor Michael Brodie, age forty-nine, and his parishioner, Suzanne Barstogi, Carstogi’s estranged wife. The woman’s age has not been released.

“”Arlo Hamilton, Seattle Police public information officer, said that detectives are searching for a bicycle that may have been used by the killer in making his escape.

“”Barstogi and Carstogi, whose exact marital status is unclear, lost their only child, Angela, on Friday. She was the victim of a brutal homicide that occurred in Discovery Park. That incident is still under investigation. No arrests have been made in that slaying and police officials refuse to say whether or not Carstogi is a suspect in either the church murders or the death of the child.

“”Inquiries in Chicago, former location of Faith Tabernacle, revealed that the group, a fundamentalist sect, left Illinois under a cloud after accusations of physical violence and alleged child abuse. At least one of the violent incidents involved Carstogi, but none of the alleged charges against the group were subsequently proven.

“”Interviews with Suzanne Barstogi prior to her death gave no hint of any dissatisfaction or disagreement within the Faith Tabernacle organization. She expressed gratitude that the entire congregation had stood by her during the period of the loss of her child.

“”An unidentified airline revealed that Carstogi was a passenger on a flight that arrived at Seattle’s Sea-Tac International Airport Sunday night, where he was reported to have been inebriated. He was overheard making threatening statements regarding Brodie. Carstogi allegedly held the minister responsible for the loss of his wife and child.

“”He reportedly left the airport in the company of two homicide investigators, Detectives Ronald A. Peters and J. P. Beaumont, who are assigned to the murder investigation of Carstogi’s daughter.

“”Funeral arrangements for Brodie and Barstogi are pending with the Mount Pleasant Mortuary, where a spokesman indicated the bodies will probably be returned to Chicago for burial.“”

Peters folded the paper when he finished.

“There’s more,” said Carstogi. “Look on page seventeen.”

Obligingly Peters reopened the paper. “The top corner,” Carstogi said.

Peters glanced at me over the top of the paper. “It’s Cole’s column,” he said.

“Read it.”

“”Who is the Lady in Red? The mysterious lady, although that may be a title she doesn’t deserve, first appeared in a red dress, driving a red Porsche, and carrying a red rose at the funeral of Angela Barstogi, Seattle’s five-year-old murder victim. The lady has since been seen several times in the company of Detective J. P. Beaumont, the homicide investigator assigned to the case.

“”Seen last in a red sweatsuit in an area restaurant, she became verbally abusive when questioned about her connection to the case. She was accompanied by Detective Beaumont at the time.

“”Because you, my faithful readers, are the eyes and ears of Seattle, I would appreciate knowing about this lady and why Seattle’s finest are keeping her under wraps.“” Peters handed me the paper. Next to the column was a picture of Anne Corley as she had appeared at the funeral, tears streaming unchecked down her face.

“Who is she?” Carstogi asked. “What does she have to do with all this?”

“Nothing,” I said. “We’ve checked her out. She’s collecting data for a book on violent crimes with young victims.”

“But he says you’ve been seen together.”

“We happened to hit it off, just like you and that girl did the other night, except she’s not a professional. Understand?”

Carstogi looked chagrined. “Yeah, I understand.”

I was furious at Maxwell Cole. It was one thing to keep my professional life under the bright light of public scrutiny. It was another to expose my personal life, to make my relationship with Anne a topic of casual breakfast conversation.

“I think you’d better hurry up and remember anything you can about that date you had the other night,” Peters was saying to Carstogi. “We’re looking for a needle in a haystack, but with what you’ve given us, we don’t know what kind of needle or which county the haystack’s in.” He shook the folded newspaper in Carstogi’s direction for emphasis. “Detective Beaumont may not think you’re the one who killed Brodie and Suzanne, but he’s going to have one hell of a time convincing us.”

“I already told you. Her name was Gloria. That’s all I know,” Carstogi said, caving in under Peters’ implied threat.

“Try to remember where you went.” Peters pressed his advantage, finally getting through Carstogi’s reluctance to a bedrock of fear beneath.

“I was kind of drunk. I think we drove over a long bridge.”

“In a cab, a car?”

“A cab. I think I came back in the same one the next morning.”

“Pickup-and-delivery prostitution,” Peters muttered. “Where did you go?” he continued. “A motel? A house?”

“It was a house, I guess. I didn’t pay much attention. A man came out to the cab and took my money, then Gloria and I went inside, into a bedroom.”

“What about the cab?” I asked. “Do you remember anything about it?”

“No. It was blue or maybe gray. The guy chewed gum. He was a big guy, dark hair, kinda oily. That’s all I remember.”

“Nothing other than that?”

“No.” Carstogi shook his head.

I looked at Peters. “What say we take him for a spin and see if he can lead us back to the little love nest?”

“You do that,” Peters said. “Drop me at the department. I’ll see if vice has been able to dig anything up.”

Carstogi came with us reluctantly. There had been some photographers outside the hotel when we went in, and we attempted to avoid them by leaving through the garage. We weren’t entirely successful. Maxwell Cole’s sidekick from the funeral caught us as Carstogi climbed into the backseat.

Once in the car Carstogi seemed more dazed than anything. “Why does everyone think I did it?” he asked.

“For one thing, your alibi isn’t worth a shit,” Peters told him. “And the place where the bike was found is well within walking distance of the Warwick. But most important, you’re the guy with the motive. Our finding your friend Gloria is probably your one chance to avoid a murder indictment. You’d better hope to God we can find her.”

“Oh,” Carstogi said. From the look on his face, Carstogi was beginning to grasp the seriousness of his situation.

After dropping Peters off, Carstogi and I headed north on Highway 99. Aurora Avenue, as it is called in the city, has its share of flop-houses and late-night recreational facilities. Carstogi recognized the Aurora Bridge, but that was all. He had no idea where they had turned off. He and Gloria had apparently played kissyface in the backseat. He said he dozed on the way back, that he didn’t remember any landmarks. We wound through the narrow streets around Phinney Ridge and Fre-mont, to no avail.

“If I could just remember something about that cab,” Carstogi said, more to himself than to me.

“I wouldn’t count too heavily on that,” I countered.

“Why not?”

“Prostitution is illegal in this state. If they say you were with them, they’ll blow their little business wide open. I’d guess, from the sound of it, that they’re probably a group of free-lancers, independents. If we don’t get them, the Mafia will.”

“You mean they’d lie and say I wasn’t with them?”

I looked at Andrew Carstogi with some sympathy. The young man seemed ill-equipped to deal with the real world.

“That’s exactly what I mean.”

Carstogi hunched miserably in the front seat. “But I didn’t do it. I would have taken her back. I wanted to kill Brodie, but never Suzanne. I still loved her.”

I shook my head at my own stubbornness. “Alibi or no, I believe you.”

“Thanks,” Carstogi said, his voice crackling over the word.

“It’s cold comfort,” I acknowledged. “That and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee.”

“Not at the Warwick.”

I laughed at his small joke, and he did too. I think he felt a little better when I dropped him off, but I didn’t. I figured it wouldn’t be long before the room at the Warwick would be traded for somewhat plainer accommodations in the city jail.