Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (30 page)

She considered it a long time. “Don’t you want to be with someone?”

“I was with someone for more than twenty years. From just a few weeks after my sixteenth birthday until, well, until it was over. I don’t mind the idea of being alone for a while.”

“You seem to be doing fine,” she said. “Better than I do.”

“Do I? I suppose that’s good.”

“But?”

“But what?” I asked.

“But something. You seem like you want to add something.”

Maybe I did. Maybe I wanted to say that I was floundering, that I wanted some certainty in my life, some people I could count on, aside from Victor and Andres, who, let’s face it, were paid to be around me most of the time.

“I didn’t want to add anything,” I said.

Vera took a long sip from a second glass. “We were sold a bill of goods, weren’t we?”

“Which time? The American dream, the idea that justice prevails…?”

“No, that someday your prince will come.”

“Oh, that one. Yeah,” I agreed. “We were pretty much lied to about that. And by our own mothers.”

“Exactly. What was that about?”

“They wanted it to be true.”

“So did I. And look where that got me. Divorced, lonely, dating men who don’t care about me.”
Vera emptied her glass. “Look where it got you.”

“Don’t drag me into this,” I said. “We had some good years, Frank and I. We probably had ten solid good years, maybe fifteen if you include the years we dated. Not all together, but in there somewhere.”

She smiled. “Well, that’s something.” She grabbed the wine to pour herself another glass.

“You’ll find someone,” I said, digging out the same line that has been used over and over, always believed and often untrue. “You just have to know your own worth. Even if it’s hard, it’s better to be alone than to be with someone who doesn’t deserve you.”

Vera smiled at me. “You sound like this shrink I went to after my divorce. My father is this very dominant presence in my life. He uses his money to control me, the way he did with my mother. The shrink said I look for men’s approval as a substitute for the approval I can never get from my father.”

“What do you think?”

She grabbed a slice of cheese and picked through the crackers, finding one of the less soggy ones. “I think…we find Doug, and if he’s guilty of Erik’s murder, we nail the bastard to the wall.”

I laughed. “You’re a bit of a hard-ass when you want to be.”

“I’m learning from the best.”

About two hours later, I left Vera asleep on the couch, curled up with her dogs at her feet. If someone was odd in a good way, my grandmother would say, “That person is a kick and a half.” She would have said that about Vera.

I had an early start the next day, but I wasn’t ready to go home. Something was nagging at me. Everyone involved in the restaurant seemed to be lying about something: Roman about coming to my house, Ilena about Erik and Walt’s friendship, Walt about his address, and Doug, well, he was probably lying about everything. I know people who live in glass houses aren’t supposed to throw stones, but I hate it when people lie to me.

If I was going to catch one of them in a lie, I would have to start with the weak link. I’d already tried Ilena and Roman. Doug was out there somewhere but I didn’t know where. That left one person. I grabbed my folder and found the address, at least the one he’d given me on the first day, and headed to Walt’s apartment.

I wasn’t sure what I’d find there, but I couldn’t just show up demanding the truth. If my going there would make any sense, I would need to rely on Walt’s interest in me.

My plan was to lull him into a false sense of security with my feminine charms—unless I could think of something more believable.

A
partment 3G,” I confirmed before I parked the car on the tidy block of Walt’s Evanston neighborhood. It was one of those large doorman buildings, blocks from the beach and fairly imposing. Something that had been there eighty years or more but had lost none of its elegance.

“I’m looking for Walt Russo,” I told the doorman.

He looked a little puzzled. I’ve asked a lot of questions over the years, and studied the facial expressions of the people on the receiving end. I’d gotten good at it, and right then my producer’s instinct told me that he was about to tell me there was no one by that name living there. Even though the round trip was more than an hour, I was kind of relieved the whole thing was a bust.

“I think he just got home,” he said instead. “Let me buzz him.”

So much for my producer’s instinct.

Walt’s apartment was a mess of boxes and misplaced furniture.

“Moving in or out?”

He laughed. “It’s been like this for over a year. I can’t seem to find the time to settle into the place.”

“Where did you live before this?”

“Down the street at a smaller building.”

I looked around. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”

“Nothing. The news.” He grabbed the remote and switched off the TV, one of those monster flat screens that take up a whole wall. “What brought you up here?”

This was it. The story I’d been concocting the whole way. “I was thinking about the night we had dinner. I made such an idiot of myself.”

“No, you were fine. I just…I came out of the kitchen and you were gone. It was really rude of me to leave you sitting at the table.”

“An invitation to view another chef’s kitchen must be irresistible.”

“It is.” He
moved some newspapers from the couch and offered me a seat. “Wine? Coffee?”

“Nothing, thanks.” I sat down. Walt sat next to me. Close. I was showing up at his apartment without a reason at nearly ten o’clock at night. Obviously he’d come up with a reason, so at least that part of my plan was working.

“I’m still on for Friday?” he asked, putting his arm behind me on the couch. It was a high school move, but since my last first date had been in high school, it seemed about right. “For the interview.”

“Yes,” I said. “You in the morning and Detective Makina in the afternoon. Have you spoken with him?”

“Makina, yeah. Just the day after, you know. I made a statement about Erik.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t know Erik very well. Aside from work.”

“Ilena said you were like brothers.”

Walt leaned a little closer. “Remember when I said the other night that you were bad at the dating stuff? You’re still bad at it.”

“I’m not used to dating.”

“I get that. I think that’s cool. Vera said you were married for a long time.”

“Dated for six, married for fifteen.”

“Wow.”

“Vera’s really nice, isn’t she?” I said. “But I think you were right about her being in over her head. I think the other investors have to be more savvy.”

“You mean Roman and Ilena?”

“No, I mean all ten investors.”

Walt sat back on the couch. “I think I’ll make coffee,” he said. He got up and left the room, just like he had on our first date.

This time I followed him.

Like the rest of the apartment, the kitchen was a mess of boxes and newspapers.

“You should tell me what you know,” I said.

“I don’t know anything, Kate.”

“
You know where Doug is.”

“I don’t get it,” he said. “I thought you just wanted some stuff about opening a restaurant. I didn’t think you were Woodward and Bernstein.”

“I’m not.”

“So why do you care?”

“Where’s Doug?”

“He didn’t kill Erik.”

“How do you know?”

For a second I thought he was going to tell me, but he just looked at me.

“Who are the ten investors?” I asked.

“I don’t know. Doug was looking through the financial papers, and he found some stuff about the money that didn’t add up.”

“What stuff?”

“The investors.” He seemed confused. “I thought you knew about all of it.”

If I admitted I didn’t, Walt would likely clam up, but I didn’t have anything else to bluff with, so I changed tactics. “What I don’t know,” I said, “is where Doug is.”

“He’s at an apartment on Irving Park,” Walt said. “A buddy of mine is out of town, so Doug’s been staying there.”

“Why?”

“So Roman doesn’t kill him.”

“Do you think Roman killed Erik?”

“Don’t you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if you think so, why not tell the police? At the moment, Makina is chasing a theory that Vera killed Erik.”

Walt laughed. “Why would she kill Erik?”

“She found the body.”

“No, she didn’t,” Walt said. “I found the body. I heard Vera come into the restaurant and I ran out the back.”

I hadn’t expected that. I wasn’t sure where to go next. “Does Makina know?” I asked.

Walt shook his head.

“
You have to tell him. You might have heard something or seen something.”

“I didn’t.”

“You still have to tell the police.” If Walt could place himself at the scene before Vera, that let her, and me, off the hook. Walt would look guilty and I could forget about who killed Erik and just get the sound bites I needed. This was working out better than I’d expected.

“I’m not saying anything,” Walt said. “Maybe that makes me look bad, but I’m not saying anything to the police.”

“Okay.” There was no point in pushing him. I would tell Makina in the morning. “Why did you run?”

“I didn’t know it was Vera,” Walt said. “Not then. I thought it might be the killer.”

“What were you doing there?”

“I’d left some stuff. My knife roll and some notes. I wanted to get them but when I saw Erik’s body, I just freaked out and left.”

“Why? You could have left them at the restaurant.” I looked at Walt, who wasn’t meeting my eyes. “Unless you weren’t going back to the restaurant. Unless you were quitting. Ilena said you were putting the word out you were available. She said it was because of Erik’s murder. But maybe you had made up your mind about leaving before Erik was killed.”

“It doesn’t really matter.”

“It does if Erik realized he was losing the city’s hottest young chef. It might mean losing his dream. If you fought, and in the heat of the argument you grabbed one of your knives…”

“That didn’t happen.”

“But you were quitting.”

“I was…keeping my options open.”

“What about the three extra points you got? Wasn’t that an incentive to stay?”

“How do you know—”

“The late-night meeting with Ilena and Roman.”

“You sure are a fly on the wall, Kate.” He seemed defeated. “Those points were a reward for information.”

“
What information?”

“There’s something you don’t already know?” He tried to laugh but it came out as a nervous cough. “Roman approached me about this deal about eight months ago, but I couldn’t get out of my contract. And then—” he stopped.

“And then the fire.”

“Right. That happened and I was free, so I jumped on board. But right away there were problems. I don’t think Ilena wanted my kind of cooking. She kept changing her mind about things. And then she got Erik involved, who wanted to make the restaurant about the front of the house instead of what Roman and I wanted, which was a place all about the food.” He took a breath, seemed to rethink what he wanted to say. “It’s part of the process, though, right? The creative differences. Erik had a point about the atmosphere. And Ilena’s done a hell of a job with promotion.” He gestured toward me. “Getting a TV show…I mean, that shows you her push.”