Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (24 page)

“Why did he come back to the restaurant but not go inside?”

“I would say you should ask him but obviously that’s not an option,” I said. “He was having an affair with Ilena. Maybe that’s who he was waiting for.”

“You know this?”

“Don’t you?” I asked. “
Maybe he broke it off. Or maybe she did, and he threatened to tell her husband. She’s terrified of Roman. I’m a little afraid of him too. He’s apparently stalking me. My sister saw him lurking outside my house this morning.”

Makina leaned forward in his chair, an amused expression on his face. “Why not Walt Russo, the chef?”

“What about Walt?”

“So far you’ve handed me Doug Zieman, Roman Papadakis, and now Ilena. All possible suspects far more likely to be killers than Vera Bingham. So why not try and distract me with Mr. Russo?”

I tried to seemed scandalized by the suggestion, but I think I just looked caught. “I’m not trying to distract you. I’m trying to help you.”

“I thought you don’t like to help.”

I hated when my own words bit me in the ass. “You will probably just think I’m making this up,” I said, “but I saw Walt, Ilena, and Roman in the restaurant having a secret meeting. Walt signed some papers. Ilena was very upset when I asked her about it.”

“What were the papers?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it was clearly something they were hiding from the others.”

“Okay, thanks.” He studied me for a moment. What he was looking for, I couldn’t tell, but I tried to be blank and innocent.

“I need to do the interview next week,” I said as I got up. “Friday afternoon okay? We can do it here.”

“I’ll confirm with my lieutenant, but I don’t think it will be a problem.” He shook my hand. “If there’s anything else you want to share with me…”

“Not at the moment,” I said. “Have you found Doug Zieman? He hasn’t been home since the murder.”

“No. But two nice women went by his house and picked up his mail.”

I gave him my best Mona Lisa smile. “While you were checking the mailbox, did you search his house?”

“He’s not there. And nothing is missing as far as the neighbor could tell,” he said. “The dog is annoying but she’s a very nice woman, isn’t she?”

Nice try, but I didn’t answer. “So you didn’t find anything?”

“We did find something. He had a list of things he wanted to do. Number twenty-six was owning a high-end restaurant.”

“Let me guess, he also had an entry on surviving a zombie attack.”

“That was one of my favorites.”

“What’s number forty-two?”

Makina sifted through some files on his desk until he found what he wanted. “Number forty-two,” he said as he scanned the paper. “‘Fall in love again.’ Why?”

“It was on a card Doug sent Vera with a dozen roses.” I felt a pang of pity for Vera. I didn’t know which was worse, loving a man who was setting her up for murder, or loving a man who loved her back but was missing and probably dead.

“There’s another item that your friend might be interested in. Number thirty-four.” Makina handed me the list.

After items as whimsical as “Land on the moon” and as practical as “Lose thirty pounds,” I found number thirty-four. “Find a rich woman to buy me whatever I want.” Pity changed into anger.

“That would give Ms. Bingham an interesting motive if something has happened to Mr. Zieman,” Makina said.

“Doug may have told her about having a bucket list. He told me,” I said. “But do you honestly think he shared number thirty-four with Vera?”

“No. But can you be sure she didn’t stumble across the list herself? It was on a bulletin board in his home office. She could have seen it.”

“She didn’t.”

“You sure?”

I met Makina’s eyes. All the fear he’d managed to instill in me was, at least temporarily, gone. I was the person who always saw the worst in others. I prided myself on it, but I knew Vera. Despite trying for more than a year to see her as a bad person, I knew she wasn’t a killer. “I’m sure,” I said.

I
’m sorry about the other day.” Brick looked tired, and some of his usual bravado was missing. We sat on a bench in the exercise area while Andres and Victor set up the equipment.

“If you’re not up to this,” I said, “we can shoot you reading in your cell or something.”

“No, that’s okay. I can walk around a little. Show you how we keep in shape.”

He laughed, and he had reason to. The “exercise” area was a small outdoor section with a broken basketball hoop, some mismatched weights, and a track running along the edges that measured less than a quarter mile. I wasn’t sure what footage we could get of him here, but at least it gave us a chance to talk. The guard was busy with Andres, too fascinated by the video equipment to pay much attention to Brick.

“What happened to you on Friday?” I asked. “Did you have food poisoning?”

“My stomach can handle a lot but I just didn’t feel too good after breakfast. Went to the infirmary and had a few unpleasant hours but I’m good as gold now,” he said. “So what was so important you needed to see me without your boys?”

“It’s this other show I’m working on. I’m trying to find out about a guy who was in Pontiac for a while. His name was John Fletcher. He was in for arson and murder.”

“Short dude, white, older. He’d spent a lot of time in the joint.”

“You knew him?” I couldn’t believe my luck.

“Yeah. Not well, but I knew him. He was hard to miss.”

“Why’s that?”

“He was kind of a preacher, tryin’ to save souls from eternal damnation. That kind of shit. He’d go from one guy to the next, didn’t give a damn about gangs, or gettin’ himself messed up; he’d just preach and preach.”

“
Sounds annoying.”

“He didn’t mean no harm. I don’t think he was all there, you know what I mean? He used to talk about seein’ the fires of hell.”

“He was an arsonist, so he’d know,” I said. “I was thinking that maybe he was set up. That he hadn’t actually committed the murder he was convicted of.”

Brick shrugged. “If that was the case, he didn’t say nothin’ to me about it. He just asked me if he could save my soul.”

“What did you tell him?”

“If he could find it, he could save it.” He laughed.

“Where is he now—do you know?”

“Dead. Right before I left Pontiac to come here. He had cancer all over his body,” he said. “How’s he connected with your dead friend at the restaurant?”

“He might not be,” I admitted. “But the police are looking at a woman I know, and I don’t think she’s the one.”

“You tryin’ to help?”

“Unfortunately.”

Brick nudged me in the ribs. “Kate Conway has a soft side,” he said. “I’m gonna tuck that away for later.”

“How does my alleged soft side help you?”

“We all con artists. Killers, thieves, drug dealers…”

“TV producers…”

“We try and get people to do what we want,” he said. “And we all want somethin’.”

“I want to get the police away from this woman and from me.”

“You stepped in it, didn’t you?” He shook his head. “What’d you do? Alibi her?”

It was probably a dumb move, which I’d been making a lot of lately, but I felt an odd kinship with this man, trapped in a life he didn’t want by a past he couldn’t escape. “Kind of,” I admitted. “I maybe helped her a little with the time line.”

“Shit, Kate. Stupid. You sure she didn’t kill the guy?”

“Yes. Mostly sure,” I said. “He was stabbed. She owned a gun, so if she were going to kill him why not use that?”

“
Guns are traceable. Besides, she might not have been thinkin’ straight.”

I hesitated, wanting to ask Brick a question that had been on my mind since I saw Erik’s body. “What’s it like to kill someone?” I finally asked.

“Depends, I think. For some people it’s like swattin’ a fly.”

“For you?”

Brick looked down at his hands. “A gun puts some distance between the killer and the other guy. Kind of like that camera puts distance between you and whoever you talkin’ to. It makes it easier to do something disagreeable.”

“But a knife?”

He sighed. “I never stabbed no one. I gotta think it’s real intimate, looking that person in the eye, watching the surprise they feel when the knife first goes in. Then the pain, the fear. Watching as their eyes go blank. Somethin’ fierce about it, somethin’ desperate. You have to want that person real dead to do something like that.” We sat quietly for a while before Brick spoke. “I answered your question. Now you answer mine. Why’d you alibi that friend of yours?”

“It just started with a small lie and kind of snowballed.”

“It always does. You want my advice?” he asked.

“Why not?”

“Stop. Back off, shut up, and let your friend get herself out of it.”

“Good advice.”

“You ain’t gonna follow it, are ya?”

“Probably not.”

“Okay then, I got another piece of advice for you. You need to ask yourself why this dude got shanked. What was he up to? In my experience, if a brother gets himself killed, probably he did somethin’ to cause it.”

“That makes sense,” I said.

“That’s probably what Tim told you, right?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “And he said he didn’t know John Fletcher.”

Brick considered it. “Maybe he didn’t. Fletcher told me he only preached to the sinners. Maybe he didn’t think Tim made the cut.”

We spent about twenty minutes getting footage of Brick shooting hoops by himself and sitting on the bench, staring up at the sky. He called it his meditation time, when he let himself get lost in his thoughts. Afterward I asked him what thoughts he was lost in, but he declined to share. Instead, he offered one last piece of advice.

“Carin’ about people is a slippery slope, Kate,” he said. “You let someone into your world, there’s no tellin’ what you might do to protect them. You just better watch yourself.”

“You do the same,” I said. “And remember we have one more interview left.”

“I’ll pencil you into my busy social calendar.” Brick nodded toward the crew. “See you guys.”

Andres and Victor waved at Brick, who stood quietly while the guard handcuffed him and led him inside. Andres looked over at me.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. Knowing that Brick had killed three people and regretted only one weirdly made him easier to trust. It made him seem honest, in a kind of twisted way. “We’re getting footage of Tim at the library,” I told Andres. “He works there every afternoon.”

Tim rolled a cart down a short aisle in the chaotically organized library. He put books on shelves, he took them off again, he paged through them, and he chatted with two other inmates who were checking out books—all at Andres’s direction. Tim barely looked at me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was looking for signs of the con artist that he appeared to be now that he was crying innocence. All I saw was the same laid backed guy I’d met the first day.

When Andres had all the shots we needed, I told him to break down the equipment while I waited back with Tim.

“So what did you find out?” I asked.

“You mad at me, Kate?”

“You’re attempting to extort money from someone, Tim.”

“No.” He
shook his head slowly, confusion mixed with concern. “You asked me for help, and I asked you for help. That kind of thing is done on the outside all the time. It’s just business, right?”

“I suppose. What’s your help?”

“I talked to a bunch of guys I know from Chicago and one of them had heard of that Papa guy.”

“Roman Papadakis.”

“Yeah. This guy had done some work for him.”

“In his restaurant?”

Tim looked around. “Kind of. He provided backup when things got sticky. He told me that your guy Roman was looking to unload a package.” Tim said it as if the meaning were obvious.

“What’s a package?” I finally asked. My years shooting documentaries in prison only took me so far.

“A…you know, a person.”

“Kill someone?” My voice elevated and Tim’s eyes widened. I lowered my voice. “Did he say who this package was?”

“No, but this guy I talked to, he’s only been here six months, so the information is pretty fresh.” Tim was whispering. “He told me that he might be able to get in touch with some people on the outside and find out more. But there’s a catch.”