Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (2 page)

“The audience doesn’t know you’ve seen photos,” I said. “They’ve spent the last twenty minutes watching the host of our show pick out furniture and paint the walls this nice, um, reddish color.”

The room had the feel of a college apartment. Hand-me-down tables from the husband’s parents had been painted off-white, and pressboard shelves had been hung on two of the walls. Their cream sofa had been
sloppily reupholstered with a wild floral pattern. And by “reupholstered” I mean cheap fabric was tucked around the cushions and stapled at the corners. Then the couch had been repositioned on an angle, which for some reason was supposed to make the room better for entertaining.

When I looked through the camera lens, the place looked amazing. But when I looked at it in real life, I was depressed. I knew it would be about twenty minutes before the shelves started falling off the walls and the staples on the couch came undone.

“Our viewers,” I said, turning to the equally unimpressed husband, “will be sitting on the edge of their seats, worried that you might not like the new rug or the mural over the fireplace.”

“I don’t really like it.”

“You can paint right over it the minute we’re gone.”

This was my seventh episode of
Budget Design
, the Home Network’s latest hit, and each time, I gave the same pep talk to the homeowners, who either hated the remodel or couldn’t work themselves into the rabid dog/game show enthusiasm that the network wanted.

“Can we just do it again?” I asked. “Big surprise. Big enthusiasm. Lots of specifics. You love the drapes, love the rug, love the”—I pointed toward a weird sculpture our host had found at the Salvation Army—“you love whatever that thing is.”

“It’s just not what I wanted,” he said.

I gave him my best fake smile. “The thing is, the sooner I get what I need, the sooner we’re out of your lives. You and your wife have a nice DVD of your moment on TV, and a funny story to go with it.”

He looked at his wife. “Next time you want to be on TV, leave me out of it.” He walked out the door.

I crossed my fingers. Five minutes later, and exactly on cue, he was back. This time he was completely surprised, overwhelmed by the beauty of his new living room, and madly in love with his wife.

“We’re done,” I said. “And now you can have your living room all to yourselves.”

As the cameras were packed up, I watched him throw the sculpture in the trash.

D
espite the stop-and-go Chicago traffic and the snow falling steadily against my windshield, I nearly fell asleep on the drive home. I hadn’t been sleeping well lately, but it wasn’t just tiredness. I was bored. For almost five months, I’d been working on decorating shows and makeover shows. Ugly rooms with a new coat of paint or ugly people in new clothes. One was just like the other, and I didn’t care about any of it.

I’d always loved being freelance. It meant I could work on a documentary about a presidential election for three months, followed by two weeks on a golf special. After more than twelve years as a television producer, I knew everything there was to know about the history of the cookie and how the Wild West had gone from lawlessness to statehood. It was fun because those topics—most topics—were interesting to me. How to turn a perfectly nice living room into a piece of crap was not interesting to me. And it was beginning to show.

When I got home, I halfheartedly began cleaning up the living room. Sometimes, when I was working as much as I had been lately, I’d leave clothes, newspapers, and half-finished cups of coffee scattered around the entire house. I didn’t love living like this, but it wasn’t an indication of depression, anxiety, iron deficiency, or any other condition that my sister, Ellen, routinely diagnosed me with.

These days there was a lot of talk about my hair. Mixed in with the dark red were a few whitish gray strands, which Ellen swore needed to be taken care of by her stylist, who’d seen a picture of me and declared me “savable.” The price of saving me was a hundred and seventy bucks a visit. I may have needed a little sprucing up, but I wasn’t interested in being mugged by a hairdresser with a God complex. In a moment of compromise, I’d bought a box of Nice ’n Easy. It sat unused on my bathroom counter.

I
moved all the clutter from the living room into the dining room and looked around. Little had changed in the past year. It was the same couch, the same rug, the same plant that was nearly, but not quite, dead. The painting of the couple walking down Michigan Avenue still hung over the fireplace. The bookcases were still littered with a combination of mass market paperbacks and hardcovers, a no-no according to the decorator/host of
Budget Design
. And there were still empty spaces where framed photographs had once been displayed. Except for my parents’ wedding photo and a picture of my oldest nephew’s confirmation, the whole house was devoid of any photographic evidence of my life before.

Before. I hated that word.

Frank had been dead for almost seven months. I’d canceled his cell service, donated his clothes, written thank-you letters to everyone who’d sent flowers, and gotten back to living, just like I was supposed to. And, as it turns out, living sucks. It’s bills, and laundry, and boring television. The closest I’ve come to sex in nearly a year is watching a Viagra commercial. I’d read a couple of books on grieving that well-meaning friends had given me. Well, I’d read the covers. But they hadn’t helped me feel better. They’d just made me less inclined to mention how I was feeling so my well-meaning friends would stop dumping books on me.

At seven thirty, as usual, my phone rang, and as usual, I debated whether to answer it before finally giving in and picking up.

“How are you?” Ellen asked in that way she had that projected both alarm and pity.

“Fine, Ellen. I was fine yesterday, and the day before, and the week before. You can stop calling me every evening to check up on me.”

“I’m just…” I could hear her searching for the words that Dr. Phil would use. “I’m just concerned that you’re not dealing with your life as it is now. I think you’re wrapped up in what you wanted your life to be instead of what it actually is.”

Given that I hadn’t disclosed anything more personal to Ellen than the damage an ice storm had done to my gutters, I wasn’t sure what she
was basing that on. No, scratch that—I was certain. She was deciding what I should want for myself, then feeling sorry for me that I didn’t have it. What she wasn’t doing was asking me what I wanted. If she had, I would have told her what I wanted was an evening without a call from her.

“Are you doing anything tonight?” she asked. “Besides working?”

“I’m going to a movie.”

“Oh.” The surprise was evident. “With who?”

It’s tricky when you lie to your sister. Ellen knew most of my friends, and I knew that tomorrow she would call whomever I named to casually ask how the movie was and therefore check my alibi. So it was too risky to name someone she knew.

On the other hand, using the name of a total stranger would only make her assume I was lying, and that would lead to another round of uninvited analysis.

“Vera Bingham,” I said, grabbing the name of someone who was neither a stranger nor a friend. As soon as the words exited my mouth I knew I’d made a huge mistake.

“What?” She managed to extend the word to three syllables. “How can you? I mean after everything she’s done to you? I don’t understand you, Kate. I really don’t.” She just kept talking, asking me why over and over without giving me a chance to answer. And then the coup de grâce: “Does Mom know?”

“I’m almost thirty-eight, Ellen. I don’t need Mom’s permission to go to the movies.”

“But why her?”

“If I said I was staying home, lying on the couch and eating takeout, would you feel better?”

“Much.”

Now she tells me. “Well, then I was lying about Vera. I’m ordering Indian food and watching TV.”

After we hung up, I plopped on the couch, reached for my cell phone, and dialed the Taj Mahal. One order of chicken tikka, naan bread, and vegetable samosa, my usual Tuesday night fare, arrived thirty minutes
later. As I ate, I flipped through the television channels, trying to avoid any shows I’d worked on, and settled on
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, the one in which Laura accidentally reveals to the world that Alan Brady is bald. Then I fell asleep, waking up with drool falling from my mouth onto a couch cushion. I dragged myself to bed, leaving my teeth and face dirty, in case washing them would wake me up. Once in bed, I drifted in and out of sleep until roughly three a.m., when I woke up and stared at the ceiling until the alarm went off.

For the next five days, I did exactly the same thing. Only the menu was different.

O
n day six, the phone rang. Lauren, the executive producer of
Budget Design
, offered another episode.

“It’s a really cool couple in St. Louis who are having a baby. Our designer wants to turn the screened-in back porch into a nursery,” Lauren said. “They have a guest room we could use, but, you know, blah! We’ve done a dozen guest rooms into nurseries. We’re upping the budget to five hundred for the makeover because this will be totally different.”

And crazy
, I was going to add. But I didn’t. Good television always wins out over good sense, especially on makeover shows. Protecting an infant from the weather wasn’t nearly as important as having something new to show the audience. Not my problem, I reminded myself. I took a deep breath and said what I’d been rehearsing for days.

“I hate saying it,” I admitted, “but I’m at the point where I just don’t think I can bring you the kind of work you deserve.”

Normally, I’d swear with my dying breath that I loved working on whatever show I was hired to do. Money is money. But I liked Lauren, liked working for her company. I didn’t want to end a bigger relationship by screwing up on something like
Budget Design
.

I could hear her sigh, which made me immediately regret my choice. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, I suddenly decided.

“On the other hand—” I started to say.

“We’ve just gotten the okay on a new show for Real TV,” Lauren interrupted, saving me from a pathetic attempt at backpedaling. “It’s a documentary on men who’ve committed serious crimes and now have long prison sentences. We want to focus on how they handle the reality that they will die in prison. How they spend their days, do they keep in touch with the outside…that sort of thing. We’re calling it
Life Without Parole
.” She took a breath and continued. “We’ve got two ex–death row inmates in Illinois that you could handle. I’m setting up interviews now. Do you know Dugan?”

“
Only by reputation.”

“Well, they’re both at Dugan. The public officer is a woman named Joanie Rheinbeck. She isn’t too thrilled about us being there, but we have the okay. I’ve talked to both inmates on the phone and they understand what we’re looking for. It might be more up your alley, but I have to warn you, Kate, these are some hard-core criminals.”

I’d given up working on true crime shows seven months ago, tired of being privy to the many ways human beings can destroy one another. But as it turned out, nothing is more exhausting than a job you hate.