Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (16 page)

“Did either of you touch anything?” Makina asked.

“We could see he was dead,” I said. I tried to keep my answer vague, just in case we had touched something we shouldn’t have. “And obviously we didn’t know if the killer was still inside, so we wanted to get out as quickly as possible. But I don’t remember if I touched anything, if either of us did. It was pretty frightening.”

“Ms. Bingham, when did you call Ms. Conway?”

“I was almost here,” she told him. “Less than a block away.”

“And how long did it take you to drive over, Ms. Conway?” He turned back to me.

“Ten minutes or so,” I said. “Hard to say exactly in this weather.”

These were small lies, tiny little lies. And actually, they were helpful lies, I told myself, because instead of focusing on Vera, the police would go after the real killer.

“Okay,” Detective Makina said. “Wait here. No, wait in your car. You stand out here, you’ll freeze your balls off.” Even in the flickering light from the streetlamp, I could see him blush. “Sorry about that, ladies. I meant you’ll be really cold.”

I grabbed Vera’s elbow and led her back toward my car. Once we’d closed and locked the doors, I turned the heat to high, and took a deep breath.

“He seemed to believe us,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t he believe us? We were telling the truth. More or less.”

A
fter another twenty minutes, Detective Makina took our names and addresses and sent us home. We’d been there long enough to watch a stream of crime scene investigators arrive and begin carrying out evidence. But Erik’s body was still inside, dead, along with his dreams of running the reincarnation of a 1930s nightclub.

I told Vera to leave her car at the scene and come home with me. I wanted to make sure we had our stories straight for the inevitable follow-up we’d get from Makina, but there was another reason.

“If someone was trying to set you up, they may have realized that won’t work. Plan B could be to kill you,” I told her on the drive to my house.

“Do we tell the police about the threats?” she asked.

I thought for a moment. “Yes, I guess we should. Maybe if they check the phone records of the other investors they’ll figure out who’s been calling you, and whoever that is is probably Erik’s killer.”

“And we have to find out if Doug is okay.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Vera!” I snapped. “Stop believing in people, will you?”

We walked into my living room around eleven. The storm was still going, and I was shaking from the cold and the murder. But I was grateful to be home. I left Vera in the living room and went to put on the kettle.

As I stood in the kitchen waiting for the water to boil, it hit me. I was an idiot. I should have just called the police, told the truth, and let the chips fall where they may. If Vera ended up in a six-by-eight cell, eating bologna sandwiches, what business was that of mine? Even if she was innocent, I could hardly be faulted for stepping out of it.

But I knew why I hadn’t. It was stupid, and no one would
understand if I tried to explain it. I didn’t even understand. I was helping Vera because Frank would have wanted me to. Because, as Tim said about Jenny, if Frank could see me trying to be a good person, maybe it would help him rest in peace.

“I don’t have anything to eat,” I said to Vera as I brought two mugs of tea into the living room.

“That’s okay. I’m not hungry.” She was standing in front of the fireplace, looking at the painting Frank had done of the couple walking down Michigan Avenue. She took her mug, had a sip, but her eyes never left the painting. “He was a really talented artist, wasn’t he?”

“He was,” I said, nudging her toward the couch.

“I’m glad you have his paintings up.” She hesitated. “But no photographs of him. Why not?”

“I took them down when he left the house. To move in with you, if I recall. I just never felt like putting them back up.”

“I have one photo of us, Frank and me, that I kept in my bedroom. I put it away when I met Doug.”

“Vera, this will be easier for both of us if we leave Frank out of it, don’t you think?” I said. “Our little…friendship, for lack of a better word, may have begun when Frank died, but we really have to focus on the situation as it exists and get through it as best we can.”

“That’s good thinking,” she said.

As she spoke, I realized I was taking Tim’s advice for the second time in just a few minutes.

“Poor Erik,” she said. “I don’t even know if he was from Chicago or where he lived or if he had a girlfriend, do you know that, Kate? I never really talked to him about his life, about anything aside from the restaurant.”

“Too late now.” I tried to shake the image of the blood from my mind. “Vera, I have to know everything if we’re going to get through this.”

“I’m not holding anything back.”

I wasn’t sure I believed her, but I was stuck in this mess now, so I had no choice but to hope she was telling the truth. “We’re going to have a problem once the police check the phone records.”

“I
was just thinking that. I called you at seven fifteen, but it was almost eight when we called the police. They’re going to ask why we didn’t call them sooner,” she said. “But I’ll just say I waited for you outside the restaurant.”

“In the middle of a snowstorm? They’ll wonder why you didn’t go inside looking for Doug. Unless you say you were afraid of being alone with him and only went inside minutes before I arrived.”

“But that will make him look guilty.”

“It’s better than making you look guilty.”

“I want to stay out of trouble but not at the expense of an innocent person,” she said. “I might be willing to believe that Doug liked me at least partially because of my money, but I don’t believe he killed Erik.”

“Okay, so just tell the police what we do know about Doug. The lies about not wanting you to invest and insisting you buy a gun,” I said. “If he looks guilty to them you can always pay for his lawyer.”

“You said yourself that people get wrongly convicted just because they’re the first suspect the police have.”

“Be sensible.”

She shook her head. “Next option.”

“Okay.” I sat and stared at my ceiling. It needed a fresh coat of paint. I closed my eyes and tried to think. “The battery in your phone died. You called me when you were almost at the restaurant…”

“A block away,” she said. “Why was that so important?”

“Cell phones ping off towers. The police can locate where you made a call by triangulating the call from nearby cell towers. They won’t be able to tell if you were in the restaurant or a block away, but if you said you called from your house, or even twenty blocks from the restaurant, they’d know you were lying.”

“You’re very clever.”

“My misspent youth of television producing,” I said. “But we still have the problem of time. Assuming you called me, drove another block, parked the car…Where did you park your car, by the way?”

“Around the corner.”

“Why down the street? The place was deserted. You could have parked in front of the restaurant.”

“Doug told me to,”
she said, then quickly added, “and nothing about that request makes him guilty of setting me up to take the fall for Erik’s murder. He just didn’t want me in front of the restaurant. He said that the block was too dark, and my car could get vandalized. I parked around the corner because there’s more traffic. Doug thought it would be safer.” There was a little doubt in her voice, which was the first reassuring sign of self-preservation I’d heard from her all evening.

“Fine.” I sipped my tea. “After you called me, a block from Club Car, it might have taken you ten minutes with the snow coming down to park and walk to the restaurant. You went inside, called Doug’s name a few times—”

“I did call his name.”

“Good, then so far it’s maybe fifteen minutes since you called me. You wait. You try to call Doug but realize your battery is dead. You hear a noise. You think it’s Doug. You go into the kitchen. No Doug. You walk a little farther in. You see Erik’s body on the floor. You run to the front door, try and call 911—”

“But my phone doesn’t work.”

“Exactly,” I said. “That whole thing could easily take twenty-five minutes. I arrive. You tell me what you saw. I check it out for myself because I’m that sort of person.”

“You are. You never let anything go unchallenged.” She seemed almost proud of me.

“So I go in and see that Erik is dead. We go back outside, we’re flustered. I’m shaking. We go to my car, where I use my cell phone to call the police.”

I sank back on the couch, relieved. The story fit the facts, was true in every way except that Vera’s cell phone hadn’t died, which the police would not be able to verify….

“Damn it.” I snapped back up. “You called Doug. You called him and called him.”

“So…” I could see Vera slowly figure it out. “I called Doug with a cell phone that had a dead battery.” She wrinkled her mouth. “I could say I used the cell phone charger you have in your car.”

“I don’t have one.”

“Okay, so I
got the cell phone charger from my car. And I charged my phone in your car. And that’s where I called Doug.”

“Do you have a cell phone charger in your car?”

She shook her head. “I could buy one. They’re so handy. I’ve been meaning to get one anyway.”

“Stores have video cameras,” I said. “If you bought one now, and they somehow found the tape of it, it would look like you were trying to create an alibi.”

“They’re not going to look for videotape of me at stores. They’ll just believe me.”

“Vera, prisons are filled with people who thought the police would believe them,” I said. “Besides, if you called Doug in the time between when you called me and when I called the police—”

“So let’s just tell them that I called you, went in and found the body, and waited until you arrived,” she said. “There was a lot of blood, right?”

“It looked like it to me.”

“So wouldn’t there be blood on me if I’d killed him? Doesn’t blood spray?”

“Spatter.”

“Whatever.” She was excited, figured she had found a way out. “Wouldn’t I have blood on me?”

“You could have changed your clothes in the time between calling me and calling them.”

Vera’s shoulders slumped. She sat quietly for a minute, then looked at me. “I’m in trouble, aren’t I?”

“No, Vera,” I corrected her. “We’re in trouble.”

T
he next morning, I met Andres and Victor outside Dugan and told them the same story Vera and I had planned for the police—about Vera’s calling me before she found Erik’s body.

We’d decided to ditch the dead cell phone story and just say she was flustered, uncertain what to do next. Anyone who knew Vera would vouch for that. Of course, I didn’t think the police would find forty-five minutes a reasonable length of time to be flustered. Even Victor and Andres seemed surprised that Vera wouldn’t have thought of calling 911, but since it was me telling the story, they bought it. I hated to lie to them, but I couldn’t get any more people involved in my stupidity.

“That’s weird, though,” Victor said. “The caller said Vera was next to be slashed. But it turned out Erik was next.”

“So either the caller sent the threat to the wrong person,” Andres started.

“Or he sent the call to Vera a few days early,” I finished.

Victor’s fingers started tapping out a beat on the light case. “So the interesting question is, was Erik also getting threats? Or was our Vera the only person receiving them?”

“That’s two questions,” Andres said. “And it’s beside the point. We have the recording of the threat Vera got. We’ll turn it over to the detective on the case, and he’ll be able to figure it out.”

Victor wasn’t so willing to let it go. “So what happened when Doug turned up?”

“He hasn’t,” I told him. “At least as of an hour ago. Vera’s been calling him since she found the body. She’s probably left a hundred messages at his home, his office, and on his cell. No Doug.”

“So he could be dead somewhere,” Andres said.

“Or he could be on a plane to Belize with Vera’s money and whatever he took off Erik’s dead body,” Victor said. “I got a bad vibe from the guy.”

Victor gets a bad vibe from nearly everyone, so mostly I don’t take it seriously, but this time I was interested. “Why?”

“He told me he didn’t listen to music.”

“That’s weird,” I said. “He told me he didn’t watch TV.”

“So what does he do with his time?” Victor asked, then answered his own question. “I’ll tell you what he does. He rips people off, and then slashes them.”

“Then the police will catch up with him.” Andres wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “Where’s Vera now?”

“She went home,” I said. “She was worried about her dogs. She promised to be careful, and, you know, she’s a grown woman. She can more or less take care of herself, so…”

As I said it, I felt worried. Worried about her, about the whole scheme. I’ve lived a dull life, in which I’ve done very few really risky things. Time after time friends have said I need to stir things up, make some trouble once in a while. Now I had, and it made me queasy.