Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (20 page)

I had no idea what I was going to ask him, but it made sense to me that he could provide a better insight into the criminal mind than a producer, an heiress, and a television crew. I just hoped the idea wouldn’t insult him so much that he’d throw me out of there; I still had two more days of shooting on the documentary.

Now, though, the trip had been for nothing. I thanked Russell and tried not to seem too disappointed.

“If it’s just some general questions you need answers to, I could ask Tim,” Russell said. “He’s got a visitor right now, but I’m sure they’d let him have another one. Especially since you’ve already been to the prison so much and know everyone.”

“That would be okay,” I said. I felt more comfortable talking to Brick about Erik’s murder, partly because he already knew some of it, but also because he was more straightforward. With Tim I always felt slightly off balance as he switched between happy camper and penitent sinner. But I needed to talk to a killer, and Tim was the only one on offer.

Russell led me to the visitors room and sat with me at one of the empty tables. It was more crowded than it had been on the day I’d visited with Brick. Russell told me that a lot of people from out of town visit on Fridays. They take the day off work and spend the weekend going back and forth from a motel to the prison, because it could be months before they can afford to come back.

The visitors were almost all women. Some were clearly mothers, the others were wives or girlfriends with children underfoot, and then there was a sprinkling of what could almost be called sexual encounters: women pulling their tops low to expose as much breast as possible without getting kicked out; the inmate on the receiving end of the show leering and laughing, making the sort of small talk that made me want to cover the children’s ears.

As a producer, I get to sit with the inmate in a quiet room for an hour or more, talking about whatever I like, shaking hands, even going into their cells. But for their family members, no such privileges are allowed.

“It must be hard,” I said to Russell, “to not be able to touch each other.”

“They find ways. There are even a couple of closets that rent out for twenty bucks for ten minutes of privacy.” He could see I looked surprised, and then he added, “I don’t condone it, and I don’t participate, but then I don’t condemn it either. It calms the men and I guess it helps the ladies too.”

“I can’t imagine coming to visit someone who’s going to be here twenty years, or forty, or an entire lifetime.”

“I know what you mean. I think it’s easier to forget. And most do. The friends don’t stick around past the trial, the siblings come once or twice, the wives and girlfriends eventually fade away. Even the fathers, they give up,” Russell said. “But not the mothers. They come until they can’t anymore. Until they’re dead. Then nobody comes.” He pointed toward a table at the other end of the room. “I think Tim’s visit is ending. Wait here.”

I saw Russell walk over to Tim and chat for a moment. Tim got up from the table. A young woman, much younger than Tim, got up too. All three walked toward me.

“Hey there, Kate.”
Tim was all smiles. “Heard about Brick. Can’t handle his oatmeal.” He turned to the woman with him. “This is Angela. She’s from Peoria. She’s my cousin on my dad’s side. Come up to visit me. Ain’t that nice of her?”

“It is.” I reached out my hand and the woman shook it limply.

“Angela is here for the weekend. We visited yesterday and today and we’re gonna visit more tomorrow,” he said. “And Russell says you have a problem with the show you needed to talk about. I’m all ears.”

As Russell led Angela out of the room, Tim sat opposite me.

“Your cousin?” She would have been three or four when Tim went to prison, so it seemed odd, family or not, that she would drive more than two hours to see him.

Tim laughed. “Hand to God, Kate. She’s my cousin. Well, my cousin’s daughter. But she’s family. She’s a shy little thing but likes to do good deeds. A churchgoer. She heard from my mom that I don’t get too much mail, so she started writing me. And after about a year of that, she decided to come up and say hello.”

“I thought you didn’t want to have women believing you could take long walks on the beach.”

“Good Lord, you are a skeptic. She’s my cousin. And almost a child. Can’t be more than twenty-three or-four. You can ask her if you like.”

“No.” I was getting off track. “I’m here about something else.”

“The show,” he said.

“Not the show.”

“Oh.” He lowered his voice a little. “Did somethin’ happen?”

“There was another show I was working on. A restaurant show. And someone connected with it was murdered.”

“The Club Car guy?”

“You watch the Channel Nine news too?”

“Channel Seven, but I guess the story’s the same. Some guy opening a big restaurant was killed there the night of the snowstorm.”

“Yes, that’s it.” I looked around but no one was paying attention. They were all too wrapped up in their own visits to listen in. “One of the other investors is a suspect. She’s a nice woman and there’s simply no way she did it, but she found the body and she didn’t call the police for forty-five minutes.”

“That was stupid.”

“
Yes, I think she realizes that now.”

“It ain’t you, is it, Kate? Whenever anybody says, ‘it was a friend’…”

“No.” I laughed, releasing a little of the tension in my throat. This whole thing had become absurd. “This must sound crazy,” I said, “and forgive me, but I don’t really know what else to do.”

“You want to help this woman?”

“I guess I do. I think she’s being taken for a ride, and that bugs me.”

He leaned in. “Okay, Kate. What do you need?”

I took a deep breath and tried to figure out why I was really there, other than I’d run out of places to go. I told him what I knew about Erik, Roman, and the others. Tim was listening intently, as if he were memorizing every word. “Roman Papadakis was involved in an arson murder some years ago, when someone set fire to the home of his business partner and cousin,” I said. “A lot of people think he did it, but another man was sent to prison. His name was John Fletcher. I can’t find any record of him in the prisoner database.”

“That could mean he’s done his time.”

I shook my head. “Life sentence, plus a hundred.”

“Or he’s dead.”

“Someone told me that he’d been in Pontiac. I know you were in Pontiac….”

Tim’s smile widened to a toothy grin. “It ain’t a fraternity, Kate. We don’t have a secret handshake or an alumni directory.” He laughed. “Well, I guess the parole board kinda does, but just because we were in the same place don’t mean we knew each other. In case you hadn’t noticed, these places are huge and packed to the rafters.”

I sighed. “I understand.”

“When was he there?” Tim leaned forward, his hand nearly touching mine.

“The murder was in eighty-nine, and he was arrested quickly, convicted quickly.”

“I’ve heard that tune. Somebody with connections commits a murder and somebody with no connections and no money goes to prison.”

“I know that’s a bit of an urban myth, but it might have actually happened in this case,” I said.

“It’s
no myth. It happens. Happens more than ya think.”

I looked at Tim. The grin was gone. He was staring at me with soft, sad eyes. I was almost afraid to ask. “Who are you talking about, Tim?”

“You hear stories, is all,” he said. He was resting his arms on the table, one hand on top of the other. He looked relaxed, except his hands were tightly clenched.

I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to get more involved in other people’s problems than I already was, but I asked anyway. “Did you kill your wife?”

“We talked about that in the interview,” he said. “I told you what I done.”

“You told me you were responsible. You told me you didn’t remember. You skirted the answer.”

Tim looked frightened for a moment, then tears formed in the corners of his eyes. He blinked them away. “No. I didn’t kill Jenny.”

“What happened?”

“Kate, I spent years tryin’ to get someone to believe me. It nearly killed me. It don’t matter now. Too much time has passed to really change anything,” he said. When he saw I was about to protest, he waved me off. “Please, just leave it alone.”

“But if—”

He shook his head. “No.” He was adamant. “The justice system is an imperfect mistress. We all want to believe that if we tell the truth we will be believed.”

“What if we lie?”

He looked back at me. “Well, then we get what we deserve.”

B
y the time I left the prison I was exhausted, and it was only two o’clock. Tim hadn’t wanted my help, so I had no choice but to shake off the depressing possibility that he was wasting away in prison, wrongfully convicted of his wife’s murder, and get on with the mess of my own life.

It was noon on the West Coast, I reminded myself, and I had a call to make. I was hoping Ralph would be at an early lunch and I could just leave a message, but on the second ring, he picked up.

“Ralph Johnson,” he said. He sounded chipper.

“It’s Kate Conway.”

“Kate.” He elongated my name, seeming sad and worried. Kind of like Ellen does. “Is everything okay?”

“You heard.”

“I got a call from some police detective in Chicago, looking to confirm that we’d been taping a show there,” he said. “It’s awful. I talked to Erik Price a couple of times when we were setting this up. He had such high hopes for the place. They all did. And now…” he left the sentence unfinished. “It’s just terrible.”

“It is,” I agreed. More terrible than Ralph could imagine.

“Would have made a great show, though, if we could have finished it with this,” he said. “When do you ever get an angle like this on a business show?”

“So it’s definitely canceled?”

Ralph didn’t answer. I could hear him breathing, so I knew he hadn’t hung up. My guess was that the silence was due to a tug-of-war between his personal ethics and his professional instincts. He wanted to be disgusted by the idea of using someone’s death as a ratings ploy, but instead he was intrigued by it. I understood his dilemma. I was feeling much the same way myself.

“Do you think any of them would give us an interview?” Ralph said finally. “Maybe
explain what happened, where the investors go from here. Does the restaurant still open or does Erik’s death kill the dream? That kind of thing.”

“I don’t know. I could ask.”

He paused again. “I’ll have to check with my boss, see what he thinks, but if you set things up on your end, I’ll set things up here,” he said. “It would be a shame to scrap the footage after all that shooting.”

“It would.” For the first time since Erik’s murder I felt relief. If the show went forward, and if people agreed to be interviewed, then maybe it would be the simplest way to get answers without raising any suspicion.

“Maybe even Detective Makina would do an interview,” Ralph said, his voice back to being chipper. “Give him a call and see.”

The relief was gone.

I sat in my car and made four phone calls. Walt said he’d do the interview, but only if I had dinner with him. Ilena said yes before I’d finished asking. Roman laughed, muttered something about vultures picking the bones clean, but he also said yes, and Doug didn’t answer either his cell or home phone.

I had a fifth phone call to make, but I wasn’t in a hurry to speak with Detective Makina. So instead I considered my options. The smart move was to just produce the last day of the restaurant show as if it were any other: ask the questions that would get me the predictable Business Channel responses Ralph was looking for, and not ask anything designed to smoke out a killer. When did I become Nancy Drew, anyway? The smarter move would be to call Ralph back and tell him the participants weren’t available, and wash my hands of the whole thing.

Then there was the dumb move, the one I was destined to make. And that was to get even more deeply involved in this mess than I already was. It would either get Vera, Victor, and I out of trouble, or drag Andres down with us. I didn’t need to present Makina with the killer; I just needed to throw him off our scent. And whether Vera liked it or not, I knew exactly who that person was.

I called Doug again. When he didn’t answer, I dialed another number. Vera answered on the third ring.

“You know where Doug lives, don’t you?” I asked.

“He has a house in Oak Park.”

“Ever been to it?”

“A couple of times. Why?”

I dug through the paperwork I had for the show and found a copy of the release form that all of the show’s participants had signed. The address Doug had given was in Oak Park. “Meet me at his house in an hour,” I said.

I had no idea what we would find there, but I needed Vera on board for Doug as the killer if my plan was going to work. If he was home dodging phone calls, it was probably best that Vera was there to see it for herself.

E
xcept he wasn’t there. The house, a Craftsman-style bungalow, was locked up tight. The snow from earlier in the week had piled up on the steps, mail sat in the mailbox, and several days’ worth of papers were frozen to the porch.