Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (12 page)

Besides, my phone rang.

I glanced at the caller ID. “Ellen,” I said as I answered. “Not the time.”

“This is important. Mom called. She wants us to come over to her house Saturday to decide what we want when she dies.”

“Mom’s dying?”

“No. You’re such a drama queen. She wants us to decide now what we each want so there’s no fighting when she does die, years from now.”

“I don’t know if I’m free Saturday,” I said.

“Of course you’re free. We have to decide what time. I think we should take Mom to lunch after, so it should be about ten at her house. That way we can relax after we go through her stuff. It will be nice for all of us to get together.”

I had a feeling my mom and Ellen had cooked up this morbid scheme as an excuse to get me out of my house. “What about Dad?” I asked. “Doesn’t he want to join in the fun?”

“He figures he’ll die before Mom, so he doesn’t really care to get involved.”

I
sighed. I could hold off Ellen, but combined with the extra-strength guilt power of my mother, I didn’t even bother to resist. “Okay. Ten a.m., Saturday.” As I spoke, I saw Vera answer her phone. Her face went pale, and she looked at me, panic in her eyes. “Ellen, I have to go.”

“Kate,” I could hear Ellen saying, “We have to talk about Andrew’s game. He’s second string but you’re his aunt and you—”

I hung up. I walked to Vera and she handed me her phone. A computerized voice was saying, “You’re the next to be slashed,” over and over. I handed it to Andres, who also listened. Victor, the last to hear, was the only one of us who had the sense to record the voice, with a pocket digital recorder he kept handy.

“That recorder was genius. I could kiss you,” I said.

Victor leaned in.

I laughed. “I said I could kiss you, not that I would. Why do you have that with you, anyway?”

“I’m a songwriter. If I get inspired I got to put it somewhere until I have time to work on it.”

He glanced toward Andres, expecting, as I did, some remark about focusing on work instead of writing songs on a client’s dime. But Andres just smiled. “Smart move,” he said. “Now we can take this to the police and find out who’s been harassing Vera.”

Vera looked at Andres, then at me.

“I told them,” I admitted. “I was just—”

“It’s fine,” she said. “It’s good that you did.” She rested her head on Victor’s shoulder, and he put his arm around her. “But this call turns everything upside down.”

“Why?”

“They’re all here,” she said. “They’re all inside. So who made the phone call?”

Victor shook his head. “That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Someone taped that, then used voice-changing software to disguise their identity. They might have programmed their computer to make the call at a predetermined time. The person who did it could be standing right next to you when you get the call.”

“Or
he could be around the corner. Maybe drove off pretending to be upset so he could send the message,” I pointed out. “Erik does seem to take his vision for the place very seriously. If Vera were looking to change his plans, he might be upset. Except he doesn’t strike me as a techie type.”

“Any ten-year-old could do this,” Victor said. “You download the software off the Internet. You can even compose the call, like a draft e-mail, and then when you’re ready, tap into your account from a smartphone, and press ‘send.’”

I looked back at the restaurant. I could see Doug and Walt through the window, but Roman and Ilena weren’t in view. “So pretty much anyone with a cell phone and a computer?”

Victor nodded. “Pretty much.”

That wasn’t our only problem. “What did the caller mean by saying Vera was ‘next to be slashed’?” I asked.

“That he’s going to hurt her,” Andres said.

“But he said ‘next.’ Who was first?”

“Everyone’s fine, right?” Victor said. “All the investors are alive and healthy? So maybe it’s something else.”

“What about my car?” Vera asked. “Tires get slashed. Maybe that’s what he meant.”

The four of us ran the four blocks to where Vera had found the only available parking space in a three-mile radius. By the time we reached it, we were coughing from the below-zero air filling our lungs, and I was feeling a sharp pain in my chest, the kind you get from the lack of a consistent exercise program that would help you build the stamina to run four lousy blocks.

Each of the four tires on Vera’s Mercedes was as good as new.

“God, I was really worried there for a minute,” Vera said.

“I think you should keep worrying,” I told her. “If it’s not your tires the caller was talking about, then what was it?”

I
curled up on my couch and did a sudoku puzzle online. I started with the hardest one, and after I failed at that I went to medium, and finally gave up and chose an easy one. I got an amazing sense of accomplishment when I typed the final number into the box and an electronic fireworks display indicated that I had solved it.

After that minor intellectual stretch, I opened up a Word document and started to make a list of all the things I had to do around the house. Things like go through my closet and weed out the clothes I didn’t wear, and throw out the long-past-their-expiration-date spices in my kitchen cabinet. As I typed I knew I wouldn’t do any of it. Even writing the list seemed like too much work. I deleted it and instead made a list of all the reasons someone would go to the trouble of computerizing their voice just to scare Vera.

There was Doug’s reason: an old girlfriend who wanted Vera out of Doug’s life. But that made sense only if you didn’t think about it too much. Wouldn’t threats make the two of them closer? If Doug really believed it was someone from his past, it would make him less likely to rekindle that romance and more likely to feel protective of Vera. Of course, that didn’t mean an old girlfriend would think logically, but it just seemed far-fetched, particularly that the ex would go to so much trouble to disguise her identity. If she wanted Doug back, why not just tell Vera who she was? I deleted that option.

Then there was Vera’s reason: She’d been asking about financials. Something fishy was going on and somehow Vera had managed to stumble across something. Maybe she’d seen a document or overheard a conversation but hadn’t known what it meant. It might be a threat to any of them. They all had a strong reason for wanting the place to be a success, and if Vera put a stop to it, a threat would seem plausible. I put that possibility in bold.

Third was what Roman had said, a lovers’ quarrel. That’s how he’d
described the fight between Vera and Erik. It seemed less likely, but I couldn’t rule it out. It wouldn’t be Vera’s first love triangle. Maybe Doug was using the threats as a punishment. He seemed like a man who avoided direct confrontation and might prefer the anonymity of a computer-altered voice. Plus it would allow him to still play the concerned boyfriend. That option stayed too.

And if there was something going on between her and Erik, then Ilena, a self-described hog butcher, would certainly be upset about it. It was a maybe. Ilena seemed more likely to be blunt about her feelings. Unless she was concerned that a direct confrontation would open up divorce proceedings.

Finally there was what Walt had said about Roman. Walt became available for Club Car when the restaurant he’d been working at burned down. Just like an earlier restaurant of Roman’s. I went back online and looked up Roman Papadakis. There were several entries, mainly about restaurants he had invested in, places that opened with great fanfare, many of which had since closed. According to the background material I’d gotten from the Business Channel, about half of all restaurants close in the first three years. As much as I wanted to see a pattern of bad business practices in Roman’s track record, it could easily be chalked up to the realities of the restaurant business and the fickleness of the elite crowd that Roman always went after.

But the fire wasn’t so easily explained. Especially since Walt had been wrong. That first fire hadn’t been in Roman’s restaurant, but in the home of his business partner, his cousin. I found a few articles detailing a 1989 fire that killed the cousin, Michael Papadakis. In one, I read that the victim’s throat had been cut, then the house set on fire. The first article said that Michael was “embroiled in a legal battle with his cousin and co-owner, Roman Papadakis,” and stopped just short of calling Roman a suspect.

But every subsequent account listed a man named John Fletcher as the person responsible. Fletcher had burned down some garages to cover up thefts and had done time in Stateville, a prison near Dugan with an even fiercer reputation. According to one article, after prison Fletcher had found work at the Papadakis restaurant as a busboy, but was fired after three weeks and wanted revenge. Within days of the
fire, Fletcher was arrested and then, almost as quickly, convicted of murder and arson. Case closed. Any concerns about the legal battle between Roman and his cousin were gone after the conviction.

There’s no statute of limitations on murder, so if Roman or one of his associates did kill his cousin, he might be nervous Vera had found something damaging. But that also seemed far-fetched. Roman was a smart guy. As a matter of practicality he surely knew that with one man already in prison for the murder, the police were unlikely to reopen the case without extremely compelling evidence. Assuming Vera hadn’t found a videotape of Roman setting the fire, which I’m guessing she would have mentioned to me, he was safe from prosecution.

Just to cover my bases, I looked up the Illinois prison database for a John Fletcher, but there was no record of him in Pontiac, which Walt had mentioned, or in any prison in the system. Without John Fletcher to question, that was just another dead end.

I closed the computer and thought about watching TV, but I’d been doing too much of that lately. Annoyed as I was to admit it, Andres and Victor were right. I had been spending too much time locked in my house, and it was beginning to feel quiet and lonely and stale.

“Shoes.” I startled myself with the sound of my own voice, and jumped off the couch in search of shoes. Once I found them, and a coat, gloves, hat, and scarf, I was pretty well exhausted. No wonder no one goes out in the Midwest in the winter. It takes too long to get dressed. But since I was all wrapped up, I grabbed my car keys and closed the door behind me, letting the cold air hit my face and wake me up.

That’s where my plan hit a snag. I had nowhere to go. I didn’t feel like seeing a movie or going to the mall. Most of my friends for the past fifteen years had, it turned out, really been Frank’s friends. After he died there were a few concerned phone calls and promises of lunch, but they drifted away. It meant that unless I wanted to find out if Victor’s band was playing somewhere, there was Ellen and Vera. Neither option appealed to me.

So I drove. I went toward the lake, zigzagging my way southeast,
until I got to the Water Tower, the only building in the area to have survived the Chicago fire. At night it was lit up and had a beautiful eeriness to it that made me want to stare for a long while. I stopped the car at a bus stop, but when I saw a cop walking toward me, ticket book in hand, I moved on.

I drove nowhere in particular, taking a meandering route that was supposed to lead me home. Instead, I went in the opposite direction. Maybe it was because the threats toward Vera were connected to Club Car that I found myself on the street where the restaurant was to be built. I assumed I’d pass a dark building and, with nothing else to do, I’d drive northwest toward my Bucktown neighborhood. Maybe get a pizza.

But the restaurant wasn’t dark. The dining area was lit by candles and there were people inside. I parked the car and walked toward the window. I saw a tall, lanky figure sitting at the bar, a tablecloth draped over it, an elaborate candelabra and two glasses of wine on the cloth. The figure, I quickly realized, was Walt. At first he seemed to be alone, but I saw movement from behind the bar. Ilena was holding a bottle of wine in her hand. She was laughing at something Walt had said.

“She gets around,” I said to the cold, winter air. This put her at three men and a husband—a bit greedy, even for someone with Ilena’s sense of entitlement.

A light came from the kitchen. I saw the door swing open and watched as Ilena and Walt turned their heads to greet the third person. I couldn’t see who it was. I waited, hoping for whomever it was to walk toward the candlelight, but he just stood there. Ilena said something. Walt nodded. No one seemed angry or surprised. I moved a little closer to the window. If any of them had looked my way they would have seen a bundle of winter clothes staring into the window. They would probably assume I was a homeless person and ignore me. A sad reality of city life, but one I was counting on.

I could see the third figure move, taking steps toward the candlelight. I did my best to will him into view. And then, he stopped.

“Damn it,” I whispered. “Two more steps.”

As if he heard me, he moved two more steps. Roman. It was Roman. It wasn’t
a romantic tryst between Walt and Ilena, or if it was, it included Roman, and that was a little more excitement than I was prepared to witness. Ilena poured her husband a glass of wine, which he sipped. He took a bundle of papers out of his coat pocket and handed them to Walt. I could see Walt looking at them. Then Walt signed them and gave them back. Roman patted him on the back, and Walt got up from his stool and put on a coat.

What business transaction takes place in a candlelit room under construction at night with only three of the partners present? I saw Walt walking toward the front door, so I jumped back from the window. There was no time to get to my car, so I went as quickly as I could around the corner and hoped for the best. I watched Walt come out into the cold air, his breath swirling around him. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and walked past me toward Canal Street.

I didn’t know what Walt had been doing, and I reminded myself I didn’t really know him. But he’d been the one I liked, the one who seemed different from the rest of them. But he wasn’t different. From where I stood, shivering in the cold, Walt was just one more greedy guy making backroom deals.