Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (14 page)

“Is this better? Knowing you won’t be executed?”

“Yeah, it’s Shangri-La.” He laughed.

I laughed with him. “How do you cope, Brick? How do you get through the day knowing it’s always going to be the same, always going to be lonely, always going to be out of your control?”

He pointed to the books under his bed. “That’s how I cope. I escape into my imagination.”

Fifteen minutes later Tim was giving a different explanation for his serenity, in a very different environment. Tim’s cell was almost monastic in appearance. His cell mate, who declined to be on camera, was waiting out the interview in the warden’s office. But it was clear which bunk was Tim’s. While the top bunk had dozens of photos of naked and half-naked women taped to the wall, the rest of the cell, including Tim’s bunk, was stark. The fixtures were the same as in Brick’s cell—toilet, sink, shelf—but there was no clutter, no food, no TV, no books.

Tim stood in the middle of his cell, giving us a tour as if he were showing us around his home. Which, I had to remind myself, he was.

“I thought maybe you would have a picture of Jenny,” I said.

He pursed his lips. “Don’t think I could look at her face. I don’t think I have that right,” he said. “Or the stomach for it. It’s hard enough with just my memories.”

“Prison must be lonely.”

“It is, Kate,” he said. “I guess anywhere can be lonely. Being in a crowd where you don’t belong, that’s a kind of loneliness, or being with someone that don’t suit you. But it’s lonely here. You ever get lonely, Kate?”

I ignored the question. “You seem to make friends with the guards,” I said. “But I noticed you weren’t friendly at lunch with the other inmates.”

“They talk about things that don’t interest me. I just try to be a good person. I think that if Jenny can see me, and I’m doing everything I can to be a good man, then maybe it will help her rest in peace. That’s all I want.”

“That’s all? You don’t miss women?”

He smiled. “You mean sex? Yeah, I miss sex. It’s been so long I can barely remember what it’s like to run my hand down the soft curves of a woman’s
skin, or to feel her face against my neck.” He seemed to get lost in the thought for a moment, but then he raised an eyebrow. “And maybe this ain’t the moment for rememberin’.”

He rested his arm on his cell mate’s bed and took a deep breath, turning his eyes on mine and staring into them. “But to your question, Kate, I do miss women. And not just for sex. Women keep men sane. You give us a place to be scared, to be gentle, to be forgiven. In here, among all these men, we have to be hard all the time. There’s no place to rest.”

“What does that do to you, years of living like this?”

He smiled faintly. “I…” He paused; just a hint of water in his eyes that he quickly blinked away. He set his jaw firmly. “Some men fall into a dark hole, get angry and bitter. Some men build a new life here, new family, as if the world outside doesn’t exist.” He hadn’t answered my question, not directly, but there was a catch in his throat. There was something vulnerable, some part of himself he was trying to hide, but he wasn’t doing a good job. He saw some reaction in my eyes, which in truth was part sadness for Tim and part concern that Andres was getting the right angle for the shot. Whatever Tim reacted to, he put his vulnerability away, the way I might toss a pair of socks in a drawer, closed away and hidden from view. It took only a second before the smile was back.

“Brick says he finds his escape in books,” I said.

“I don’t try to escape. I stay right here. Today. I don’t think about tomorrow. I don’t think about years of this. I’ve resigned myself to it. I admit I do sometimes think about the past. And I do remember with regrets, but I try not to indulge. I try to stay focused on the situation as it exists and get through it as best I can.”

“And that works?”

“So far.”

I smiled. He had a casual charm to him, so I knew he would come across well on camera. I could picture the women watching the show, the prison groupie types, who would line up to be Tim’s place to rest. Murdered wife notwithstanding. Which brought me to an interesting point.

“Do you have a girlfriend, Tim?”

“You applying?”

“No.
Just wondering. I know a lot of men cope with their loneliness by forming relationships with women on the outside.”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t. I tried that once, about ten years ago. I met a nice lady through the Internet. There’s sites up for guys inside to meet women.” He blushed a little. “It’s sad, really. Guys post things about how they like to send flowers and take long walks on the beach. Guys doing fifty years.”

“But some women fall for it.”

“They do. And some of it’s sincere. Wishful thinkin’. You know, ‘Maybe I’ll get out and take that long walk on the beach with this nice lady who cares enough about me to drop money in my commissary account and visit me on alternate Saturdays.’” He smiled a shy smile. “I did, for a while. I was just off death row and somehow I had this idea that maybe I would get out someday. I half-convinced this lady it would happen. But it wasn’t fair to her, so I stopped things cold.”

“Why did you think you’d get out?”

He paused, was quiet for a long time, then finally said, “I thought differently then.” He moved a little farther back in the cell, prompting Andres, Victor, and me to move as well so we could keep him in the shot.

“You want coffee, Kate?” Tim asked. “I keep a small stash.”

“That’s okay,” I said. I could see Joanie checking her watch out of the corner of my eye, and I knew her patience was running thin. “We’re going to have to wrap up for today.”

“Well, next time, then,” Tim said. “And be careful driving home. There’s going to be a terrible storm tonight.”

“Really? I hadn’t heard that.”

“Weather is a bit of a hobby of mine; always has been,” he said. “And I was listenin’ to the radio earlier, heard that Chicago is in for a terrible pile of snow.”

“Chicago is thirty-five miles from here,” I pointed out.

“But that’s where you live, isn’t it?”

I smiled. “Thanks for the warning, Tim.”

I
do not drink hard liquor. It takes a certain kind of woman to walk into a bar and slam Jim Beam. I am not that woman. Which, in certain circumstances, is a character trait I regret.

I walked into my house and put down my tote bag. I had maybe five seconds of peace and quiet before the phone rang. The caller ID, the world’s greatest invention for passive-aggressives, showed that it was Vera, so I didn’t pick up. I figured she’d gotten another threatening call, and though I felt bad about it, there wasn’t anything I could do to help. What Vera needed to do was get as far away from Doug and the others as possible. Advice I’d already given her several times. If she wasn’t going to follow it, there was no sense in repeating myself when I was tired and hungry.

I wandered into the kitchen, heard my cell phone ringing, ignored it, and looked for some food. I didn’t have anything in the fridge except a stick of butter and some wilted lettuce.

“I need to get my act together.”

I grabbed the two dozen delivery menus I kept stored in a drawer by the sink. I was getting a little too familiar with the selection, and the delivery guys were getting too familiar with me. At my favorite Chinese restaurant, the nice, if nosy, woman who answered the phone always asked if I was ordering “just one entrée” again. Saying yes, and hearing her sigh in response, made me feel like I’d failed somehow. On occasion I’d order two entrées just to cheer her up.

Leaving out Chinese as an option, I spread out the menus on my kitchen counter like a deck of cards, closed my eyes, and pointed.

“Bucktown Burgers,” I said. “Mediocre food with button-popping portions. Sorry, Walt, but that’s just my style.”

I picked up my home phone to dial Bucktown Burgers, but as I did, it rang.

“Kate?”

Damn it. “
Vera. I just got home. I’m really hungry and about to order dinner.”

“There’s a problem.”

“Can it wait?”

“No.”

“Where are you?”

“At the restaurant,” she said. “You have to come. Something has happened.”

“What?”

“I don’t think I should say over the phone.”

I put the menu on the kitchen counter and thought about not going for a minute, but there was that rudeness thing again. Plus she did sound like something was wrong. And I was curious. Maybe mostly I was curious. If she’d told me over the phone what had happened, I might not have been so quick to put my coat back on.

I stopped at Bucktown Burgers’s pick-up window on the way to the restaurant and did my best to cram the half-pounder into my mouth while still more or less staying in my lane as I drove downtown.

Tim had been right about the storm. Just as I walked to my car the snow began falling, and not the pretty, fluffy, Hollywood snow, the kind you can brush playfully off a cheek. This was furious clumps of snow mixed with sleet, pelting anyone stupid enough to be out in it. Just the kind of weather that makes everyone wonder why Chicagoans live in Chicago.

The snow wasn’t the worst of it. The wind was crazy. Snow was blowing everywhere, and even with the windshield wipers at full speed I could barely see past the hood of my car. I had to slam my brakes to avoid some idiot who was crossing the street against the light, sending my fries flying all over the floor of the passenger seat. And despite having sacrificed half my dinner to keep from hitting him, the guy gave me the finger. Nice.

By the time I pulled up in front of Club Car, I was wet, annoyed, and holding a soggy, half-eaten hamburger.

“Whatever it is, it better be life changing,” I said to Vera, who greeted me at the door of the restaurant with a pale expression and grateful smile.

“It is.”

She led me back to the restaurant’s kitchen. No work had been done on the place since I’d been there a few days before. It was dusty, and with no heat on, very cold. The cookware and other items Walt had brought in for the tasting were sitting on the counter untouched since then.

“So what is it?” I asked.

She didn’t answer. But as I got to the stove, I saw what had been so important. Blood was coagulating on the floor. Blood that had come from more than a few gaping holes in Erik Price’s body.

From past shows I’d worked on, I’d seen crime scene photos. I’d looked at pictures in which people had been shot, strangled, bludgeoned, stabbed, or drowned. I’d sorted through images of half-naked women left dead on the street, and bloated, long-dead corpses found in trash cans. I’d always thought seeing it in person could be no worse than seeing it in a photo. I’d been wrong.

“I think he’s dead,” Vera said as she stepped just inches behind me.

His eyes were open but blank, his face slightly swollen, as if he’d been punched in the eye. I tapped my foot against his calf. It was stiff. I felt acid coming up into my throat. I bit my lip and swallowed hard. “He’s dead.”

Vera took a step closer to the body, but I put my arm up to stop her. “Where are the police?”

“I haven’t called them yet.”

I spun around. “You haven’t called them?”

“I wanted to get your advice first.”

I grabbed her shoulders and pushed her slowly out of the room. I didn’t want to be near the body anymore, and I sure as hell didn’t want to accidentally leave evidence of my being at the crime scene.

Once we were in the main dining area, I felt the acid leave my throat and panic replace it. “We have to get out of here,” I said. “The killer—”

“There’s no one else here,” she said. “I checked while I was waiting for you.”

“You checked?” I stared at her. She was either much braver than I’d
thought or much, much dumber. “Look, I’m going to ask this, because it has to be asked,” I started.

“I didn’t kill him.”

“Then what the hell are you doing here?”

“Doug called me. He told me to meet him here.”

“In the middle of a snowstorm?”

“The storm hadn’t started yet.” She said it so matter-of-factly, as if meeting her boyfriend on a cold night at an unfinished restaurant was a normal thing to do. I wanted to strangle her, but I could only handle one dead body at a time.

“So where’s Doug?”

“I don’t know. The door was open when I got here. I heard something in the kitchen. I walked in and saw Erik on the ground. I didn’t know what to do. If Doug…” She didn’t finish the sentence. “I called you.”

“You heard something? What did you hear?”

“Noise. I don’t know.” She looked at me; finally fear was registering. “Do you think I heard the murder?”

“Did you call me right after you found Erik?”

“Yes. Within five minutes.”

“Then you didn’t hear the murder. He’s been dead at least a couple of hours. Rigor mortis has set in,” I said. “But you may have heard the murderer. He was probably hanging around long enough to make sure he’d set you up for killing Erik.”

“Who could it be?”

“Really, Vera? You can’t take a guess?”

“Doug would never do something like that.”

“Did he call you from his home or his cell?”

“I didn’t recognize the number. It must have been a new office number or something,” she said. “I don’t see why that matters right now.”