Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [20]
“Won’t you sit down?” he offered.
We sat. I looked at Peters, grim faced and tense. I wondered how this office compared with the Cadillac-driving swami of Broken Springs, Oregon. Peters was holding himself in check, but just barely. “We wanted to see your church,” I said before Peters had a chance to open his mouth. “We thought seeing it might give us some ideas about Angel’s death.”
Brodie’s defenses came up instantly. “Surely you don’t think someone in the church had anything to do with it.”
“We haven’t ruled out anyone so far,” Peters commented stiffly, glancing at Brodie’s hand. Brodie covered the scratched hand with the other one in a pious and, I thought, highly suspicious, manner. Peters noticed it too.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
There was the pause—slight, but enough to be noticeable. “Oh, a little over six months, I guess. Before that we met in private homes.”
“I see,” I said.
“Would you like to see the rest of it?” he asked, rising suddenly. “We have a fellowship hall and a kitchen in addition to my little apartment.”
“What’s the room we just came through,” Peters put in, “the one with the Bible stand in it?”
There was another pause, as if Brodie wanted to consider his words carefully before answering. “That’s our Penitent’s Room. It’s where people can spend time in prayer when they have strayed.”
He hustled us out of the study through his apartment, as if anxious to leave the area and the subject matter behind. The apartment was something less than luxurious, but obviously Brodie didn’t believe in living in the same kind of squalor deemed appropriate for his flock.
We followed him through the rest of the building. What little of the upstairs that wasn’t devoted to parsonage contained several small Sunday School rooms. Downstairs we found a commercial-style kitchen off the fellowship hall. The equipment was polished to a high gloss. The Faith Tabernacle women evidently spent far more time maintaining church facilities than they did their own homes. The fellowship hall was outfitted in the same barren style as the sanctuary. Its only furnishings consisted of two sets of splintery redwood picnic tables pushed together to form two long banks of tables.
When the tour was over, Brodie ushered us back to the Penitent’s Room in the best bum’s-rush tradition. “I need to go outside to greet people now,” he said. “Once the service starts, you will have to leave.” He gave a rueful smile lest we think him rude or inhospitable. “It’s like a Mormon temple. No one who isn’t a True Believer is allowed inside during services.”
The lady with the scrub brush was kneeling in front of the little altar in the Penitent’s Room, her bucket of soapy water still beside her. She was totally immersed in prayer. We stopped nearby but she never looked up. We went back through the sanctuary under our own steam.
Outside, a little flock of True Believers waited patiently for their shepherd to welcome them to worship. The women, their hair covered with either scarves or hats of some kind, dropped their eyes demurely as we passed. The men nodded without speaking, while the children maintained the same eerie silence we had noticed the day Angel Barstogi died. It was not a joyful gathering.
Jeremiah stood next to a beefy man with a full red beard. He had to be Benjamin Mason. He was a big man who looked like he had spent some time on the working end of a shovel. I walked up to Jeremiah and nodded at him without speaking. There was no sense in getting him in more hot water.
“Are you Mr. Mason?” I asked.
“Yes,” he answered, his tone wary, uneasy.
“I’m Detective Beaumont. Did you get a message to call me?”
“Didn’t have a phone,” he mumbled.
“Mind if we