Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (13 page)

This was why I liked to stay home, I realized. People are not easy sudokus.

I
t was ten a.m. when I drove into the parking lot at Dugan. Right on time, but I still felt like I was behind schedule. I liked being busy, liked having two shows to focus on, but I didn’t like feeling responsible for anyone other than myself. And this mess with Vera was somehow becoming my problem too.

Vera had called me the night before, frantic with news of another threat. It had been three days since the “slashed” call, so it seemed to me the caller was on a deadline to get rid of her one way or another. This time the computerized voice suggested she update her will.

I’d been just about to fall asleep, but I stayed up, trying to calm her down and keep her focused on finding out who was behind the calls. I told her about what I’d seen at the restaurant as a potential conspiracy of investors looking to oust her. Perhaps they were all involved in the threat, I suggested. But Vera didn’t buy it. She’d grown up in the world of power and money and saw the meeting with Walt as just another way the Romans of the world conducted business. Vera said that the day after I’d spotted the three in the restaurant, it was announced that Walt now owned eight percent of the restaurant, with his additional share coming off Ilena’s ownership of nearly a third. It must have been what they were meeting about, but it didn’t explain why Walt was rewarded with a larger share of the profits, or why it had come out of Ilena’s percentage. Knowing how badly she wanted to make money, I knew Ilena couldn’t have given up those points easily.

I gave Vera one more speech about calling the police or a lawyer, but now it wasn’t just Doug who was keeping her involved in Club Car. Vera was determined not to be pushed around, a quality I would have admired if it weren’t costing me sleep. I told her to stay at a hotel, but she felt her dogs would protect her. I didn’t want to send her to bed with the thought that anyone willing to kill her would probably be willing to kill two past-their-prime greyhounds, so instead I told her to triple-lock the doors and go to bed.

The rest of the night, and on the hour-long drive to Dugan, I waited for another call from her, but none came. When my cell phone did ring, just as I was getting out of my car, it was Ellen.

“Where have you been?” It was her way of saying hello.

“I’m working.”

“Honestly, Kate, do you expect me to believe that you’re working so much you can’t return a phone call?”

“I don’t know what I expect you to believe, Ellen.” I yawned. “I can’t talk now.”

“You hung up on me the other day. I was trying to tell you about Andrew’s basketball game. He has a uniform and everything. It’s adorable,” she said. “I’ll get you a ticket.”

I wanted to ask why I would want to see a fourth-grade basketball game, but I didn’t bother. “I have to work that day.”

“You don’t even know when it is.” She grunted. “I’m just trying to help you get out more.”

Sadly, I knew that was true. “I don’t need help.”

“I’ve made an appointment for you with my stylist. Friday, eleven a.m. My treat. It’ll be better if Mom doesn’t see you looking all…tired. It’s a spa, so while you’re there, you should really consider getting a facial. It will do wonders for those little lines around your eyes.” Without giving me a chance to respond, she hung up.

I looked in the rearview mirror at the little lines around my eyes. First Andres and Victor, and now Ellen. How bad did I look? Lucky for me, unlike in the fairy tales, this mirror didn’t answer.

W
e got the first shot of the day off at eleven: Tim, Brick, and about sixty other inmates eating lunch in the cafeteria. My image of a prison cafeteria was hundreds of guys lined up at long, rectangular metal tables, clanking their forks and demanding better food. But at Dugan the cafeteria was small, only ten circular tables with six seats each. Like in the visitors room, the metal stools were connected to the tables, which were bolted to the floor.

But unlike the visitors room, which had guards near each of the tables, in the cafeteria the guards stood back, near the entrance and at the chow line. It took me a minute to realize that security hadn’t suddenly gone lax. On either side of the room, about eight feet off the ground, were two small windows covered with mesh. Behind each was an armed guard, his rifle pointed toward the inmates.

I stood to the side and watched Andres move around the room, his camera on his shoulder, getting shots of the men eating lunch. Some of the inmates hammed it up, but others stuck their faces close to their plates and did their best to ignore us. Victor followed Andres around with the boom mic, trying to capture ambient noise and snippets of conversation. He didn’t look happy about it. Even for someone used to heavy metal music and the constant sound of a drumbeat, the noise was overwhelming.

The food didn’t look particularly appetizing either—two bologna sandwiches on white bread, potato chips, and a small mound of iceberg lettuce with one cherry tomato. I knew that the food at Club Car would be better, but it wouldn’t be more exclusive. You had to do a lot more than make a reservation to get a place at these tables.

I pointed to the bolted-down table. “I guess no one is going to throw one of the tables over if they don’t like the food.”

Dugan’s public officer, Joanie Rheinbeck, didn’t even break a smile. She’d joined us for the shoot to see if she could help us, but it was my guess she was really there to make sure we didn’t get in anyone’s way.

“That’s not a problem,” she said. “
We do meals in shifts. It keeps the number of inmates out of their cells to a minimum and that keeps the risk to a minimum.”

“Inmates against the guards?”

“That,” she said, “and inmates hurting each other. They can turn a soup ladle into a deadly weapon. And believe me, they will if they feel even the slightest insult.”

“But those guys are watching.” I pointed toward the men behind the mesh-covered windows.

“A lot of these inmates are getting backdoor paroles, so they have nothing to lose.”

I grew up in the suburbs, married young, and have lived in the same house in the arty Bucktown neighborhood of Chicago for the past ten years. I haven’t gotten so much as a parking ticket since I was in my twenties. But because of my work on true crime shows, I knew enough prison slang to understand what a backdoor parole was—dying inside these walls. And knowing that made me feel kind of badass in my Ann Taylor business-casual and Aerosoles pumps.

“The food meets nutritional standards,” Joanie continued a little defensively. “We have a very small budget, but no inmates go hungry. They have three meals from us, and they can buy food from the commissary.”

“They can buy their own food?”

“Sure,” she said. “Most of them do, and they can get hot pots, typewriters, toiletries.”

“A lot of call for typewriters?”

“Once in a while. The most popular items are coffee and cigarettes.”

“Where do they get the money?”

“Family, usually. Or jobs around the prison,” she said. “Tim works at the library. That’s how he earns.”

“And Brick?”

“He’s not working at the moment. He must get his money from family.”

“He doesn’t have any family, at least any who care enough to visit him,” I said. “He told me he’s estranged from his brother, so I doubt he’s getting money that way.”

Joanie shrugged. “Well, he’s
getting it somewhere. He always reaches the two-hundred dollar limit for the account. So does Tim, between his earnings and the money he gets from his parents.”

“Have you met Tim’s parents?”

“No, but he’s still very close to both of them.”

“You know that much about his life?”

“Everyone knows Tim. He’s friendly with the staff,” she said. “I think he’s trying to convince himself he’s not a bad guy.”

“Is he?”

“The court system thought so.”

Andres and Victor walked toward us. “We have them lining up for food, eating, and talking,” Andres said, his camera at his side. “What else do you need in here?”

I looked over at Brick, holding court with five other men. He was doing most of the talking, while the others seemed to hang on his every word. When Brick laughed, the others laughed, and he looked to be enjoying both the attention he was getting from the men and the fact that I was watching.

Several tables away, Tim sat in silence. His table was full too, and the other men were quietly chatting, but Tim wasn’t included. He seemed lost in his thoughts, or bored, or tired. In any case, he was making no special effort to notice Andres, Victor, or me.

My job was to make prison seem bleak. People have expectations about prison, about it being a place of punishment and isolation. While it’s always interesting to tweak those expectations a little, no one, especially Crime TV, would want some viewer to change the channel because he was pissed off about a bunch of killers sharing a laugh over lunch.

“I guess that’s it for this scene,” I said to Andres, then I turned to Joanie. “What do you think of these guys?”

“All of them or just your two?”

“My two.”

“They’re okay. That one”—she pointed to Tim—“is quiet enough these days, but he raised some hell for a while. When he was at Pontiac, he was suspected of beating up on a guy for calling him a liar.”

“What had he lied about?”

She cocked an eyebrow at me. “Who knows? Who cares? These guys will kill each other over anything.”

“Nothing redeemable?”

“That’s not really my department.”

“And Brick?”

“They call him the professor. He goes around quoting Shakespeare and Freud, and anything he can. He seems to know what he’s talking about, but most of these guys didn’t make it through the tenth grade, so if he’s full of shit, they wouldn’t know anyway.”

“Seems pretty harmless now,” I said. “Even if he is full of shit.”

She shrugged. “As long as he doesn’t cause any trouble, I really don’t care. Sort of like you.”

“Me?”

“We have TV crews here from time to time, and all the producers say the same thing prison guards do: You can like them as people, but you can’t get so caught up in their lives that you don’t do your job, right?”

I looked over at Brick and Tim. “Right,” I said.

T
he inmates had fifteen minutes for lunch, including the walk from their cells to the cafeteria and back. Joanie had allowed us an additional ten to make sure we got what we needed, but she made it clear what an inconvenience it was to both the kitchen staff and the other inmates.

Even more of an inconvenience was shooting Tim and Brick in their cells. It meant locking down their section so none of their neighbors could cause us any trouble. Both of the men were housed in the same block, a long row of nothing but cement walls and iron bars. Tim was on the far end of the second floor, near the staircase to the cafeteria. Brick was in the middle of the row, so we went to his cell first.

While Andres readied the camera, Joanie and I waited outside the cell. We were only allowed to open the door once we were ready to shoot and had a guard in place to make sure things were calm.

“How big is this cell?” I asked Joanie while we waited for the guard.

“Six by eight. Brick is in his alone, but Tim shares.” Before I could ask, she answered, “Brick’s old cell mate is in protective custody at the moment because of an incident with another inmate.”

Brick laughed. “He tried to get to know a new guy better than he wanted to be known. And the new guy apparently had a few friends that my cellie wasn’t aware of.”

I looked through the bars at Brick, sitting on his cot. The place was small, just enough room for bunk beds, a sink, a toilet, and a small shelf crowded with a dozen or so items. Among them were a small TV, a bag of coffee, a hot pot, vanilla wafers, and some instant soup. The cell was packed, but it would have been almost livable except for the piles of books Brick had stacked on nearly every inch of floor space.

“You know you’re going to get a write-up for that,” Joanie said to him. “You’ve got to return them to the library.”

“These are mine,” he said. “Kate even got some of ’em for me.”

I looked at Joanie. “I didn’t think it was against the rules.”

“It’s not,” she said. “
But he has to keep them away from the cell door. It makes it hard for guards to get in if they need to, and if one of these firebugs gets an idea and lights this paper walking past his cell, the whole place is in chaos.”

Brick immediately began moving the books under his bed, stacking them in neat rows after separating them into piles.

“You must get sick of this,” I said, once Andres had the camera rolling and the guard had arrived and unlocked the door to Brick’s cell. “All of these rules.”

“It is what it is, Kate. I would prefer to decide for myself what time I got up in the morning, or when I ate dinner, but that’s not the life I have,” he said. “I sometimes think heaven is walking out into the sunshine with the day ahead of me and no idea what would happen.” He smiled. “I’d probably spend most of it in the library, so I guess it don’t matter if the sun shines or not.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t end up back with your gang?”

“They got no use for an old man like me,” he said. “Shit. They got no respect for me either. I see these young punks come in here with their attitude, thinking they can do twenty standing on their heads. They don’t get what it’s like.”

“What’s it like?”

He waved his arm around. “It’s this. Day in, day out. Year after year.”

“It must get to you.”

“It did. A long time ago. I got tired, trying to be tough all the time, trying to show I had it under control. Being on death row, it was all lawyers and appeals, and one guy after another being taken for his walk and never coming back. I got just in-my-bones tired.”

“Did you think you deserved the death penalty?”

He shrugged. “I think an eye for an eye, you know? But then I got blood on my hands. I don’t pretend to be a good man. I don’t pretend to believe in mercy or forgiveness, or all that God shit. But those judges do. The juries do. So them wanting to kill someone, that I never understood.”