Until Proven Guilty - J. A. Jance [70]
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 waterfront 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