Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (8 page)

It sounded dicey to me, but then my idea of high finance was paying off the full balance on my credit card. Vera understood that world better than I did. “How much did Doug invest?” I asked.

“The same as me,” she said. “He was originally hired to get investors for the place, and he liked it so much he decided to put his own money in. That convinced me it was a good risk.”

“Except that’s not why you did it, Vera. You did it to bond with a guy you barely know.”

“I know him. I met him on a dating site. He used to work for some financial firm that went under, so he opened his own small company and now he mainly invests his money and the money of some clients.”

“And the others?”

“Roman’s got money in eight Chicago restaurants, and two in New York. As far as I can tell he’s a legitimate businessman. He’s a tough guy, but he’s been around a long time and this is Chicago, so he’s got connections.”

“Meaning what? He’s mobbed up?” I said it as a joke, but Vera didn’t laugh.

“I
think he knows people, but that doesn’t mean anything. It’s just…” She hesitated. “Getting a liquor license in Chicago is a complicated process. There’s all these classes of licenses and you have to apply for the right category, like if you have outdoor seating, or want to stay open late. And then there’s the background check. Anyone with as little as five percent interest in the restaurant has to be fingerprinted, get a criminal background check, submit information about their finances.”

“Did everybody pass the inspection?”

“I don’t know. All I know is that when I looked at the liquor license application, Roman’s name wasn’t on the list as one of the owners. And he’s supposed to own fifty percent,” she said.

“You think he has a criminal record or something?”

“Maybe, but then how did he get liquor licenses for all his other places?”

She had a point. “And, as you said, this is Chicago,” I said. “It may not be the same ‘vote early, vote often’ Chicago of my youth, but you can still bribe a public official, can’t you? We haven’t gone that straight.”

“That’s my thinking. If he wanted to be on the ownership papers, he could find a way around the licensing board.”

“Was Ilena on the application?”

“Yes. Ilena, Erik, me, Doug, and Walt Russo.”

“Who is Walt Russo?”

“The chef. I don’t think he’s putting up any money, but he’s a five percent owner because of who he is.”

“The chef.”

She looked at me, puzzled. “He’s not just any chef, Kate. He’s one of the hottest chefs in the city. You’ve heard of Maison Pierre, haven’t you?”

“Was that the fancy place on Michigan Avenue that had a fire?”

“It was on State Street, but yes. There was a fire that absolutely gutted the place about three months ago. That’s the only reason Walt was available.”

“So you, Doug, Ilena, Erik, and Walt—all of you are on the
application for a liquor license. Except Roman,” I said. “Did you ask him about it?”

“I asked Doug.”

I waited again, and again Vera hesitated. “And he said…”

“He told me that I should stop worrying,” she said. “That I wasn’t a businessperson. That I didn’t understand how these things work. That he’d make sure I didn’t lose my money.”

“He told you to be a nice little girlfriend and stand by your man.”

“Pretty much.”

I felt a wine headache coming on. “Call your lawyer, get your money back, and walk away.”

“I can’t do that.”

I leaned across the table and grabbed her arm for emphasis. “Vera, if you’re going to tell me that you care about Doug—”

“If it is a scam, I don’t think Doug’s behind it. I think Doug’s getting scammed too.”

“For Christ’s sake, Vera. Even if he is, so what? He’s a grown man. Let him take care of himself. The best thing you can do is put some distance between you and those people.”

“But I don’t have to, now that you’re involved. You have the perfect opportunity to ask everyone questions and find out what’s going on.”

“You want me to investigate them while I’m interviewing them?”

“Isn’t it pretty much the same thing?”

I sat back. It was the same thing, kind of. “It would make the show more interesting.”

“But you won’t use this on the show,” she said, suddenly alarmed. “I understand about the rest of it, Kate. I do. You can make us all look like rich jerks if you want, but this isn’t for public consumption.”

“But it’s the most interesting part of the story,” I said. “All I’ve got so far is a bunch of self-important people spending ridiculous amounts of money on a restaurant that the vast majority of Chicagoans would not be welcome in. The kind of people who will watch this show will not be welcome there. I would not be welcome there,” I pointed out. “If I can show some real problems, it will give the audience a reason to tune in after the break.”

“But you can’t
tell anyone. Not anyone. If anyone suspected you were looking into the threats, someone might actually follow through on them. You wouldn’t want that to happen, would you?”

I took a deep breath. “Let me think about that.”

Vera laughed.

I
was hungover when I parked my car in the Dugan Correctional parking lot the next morning. The good news about having had too much wine was that I finally had my first full night’s sleep in more than a month. The bad news was that alcohol-induced sleep isn’t particularly restorative, so I didn’t feel any better because of it.

Tim Campbell, the second inmate in the prison story, was finally over the flu or whatever else had held him up the first time. I’d meant to go through his file after dinner with Vera and write questions for the interview, but I never got around to it.

Instead, I sat in my car and briefly reviewed his background. It wasn’t as colorful as Brick’s past. It was just sad. Nearly twenty years earlier, in a meth-induced rage, he apparently stabbed his wife eighteen times with a steak knife; she bled to death on the kitchen floor. She had been eight weeks pregnant at the time, though Campbell claimed he didn’t know and doubted his wife, also a meth addict, did either.

Since then, he’d had three execution dates set, with each date getting pushed back because of appeals. When Governor Ryan commuted his sentence, Campbell wigged out, demanding the state put him to death. For the next three years he’d been on suicide watch, then briefly found Jesus, but he seemed to have put that behind him. What he would be like today was anyone’s guess.

Andres and Victor had the same small room from Brick’s interview lit and ready in just under thirty minutes, record time that turned out to be unnecessary, as there was a delay bringing Campbell from his cell.

When he did arrive, he was all smiles. He was about forty, white, skinny, not particularly tall, with dirty blond hair grown to his shoulders and a small scar on his left cheek.

“Hey, y’all,” he said as he entered, waving his cuffed hands. “Sorry
this whole thing got delayed, but I’m so glad we finally got it all worked out.”

He sat, smiling, looking from Andres to Victor, talking about the Blackhawks game on Sunday and how this was shaping up to be a good year for the team. He barely looked at me.

Once he was uncuffed, he settled back in his chair and started pointing at the equipment. “Man, you got a lot of fancy shit. Lights, camera, action, I guess.” He shook his head in disbelief. “There’s a whole world of changes out there, I’ll bet.”

“I saw from the information I was sent that you’re from Peoria,” I said, mostly just to get his attention. I sat in a metal chair across from him, with my knees maybe two feet from his.

He looked over at me as if he’d just noticed I was there. “Yes ma’am. Born and raised. You ever been to Peoria?”

“No, I don’t think I have.”

“You’d remember. If you go, get some pizza bread at Avanti’s. It’s the best there is. I was kind of hoping I’d get it for my last meal, but now that ain’t gonna happen.”

“So good it’s worth dying for?”

He laughed. “Well, ma’am, you try it and tell me.” He laughed harder, licked his lips, and looked around the room. “Man, I shouldn’t a said anything about it, ’cause now I’m going to take the memory of it back to my cell.”

“You don’t have to keep calling me ma’am,” I said. “I’m Kate.”

He blushed a little, but he finally looked me in the eye. “Hi, Kate. I’m Tim.”

Once the camera was rolling, I settled into the interview. I couldn’t help notice that once we were officially introduced, Tim’s eyes never left mine.

“You must miss a lot of things about home,” I said.

“I sure do when I let myself think on it, which I don’t most of the time. I try to keep my focus here, you know, in this place, ’cause this is all I got now.”

“At the risk of making you homesick, tell me about Peoria.”

“It’s a nice town. Pretty. Right on the river, with big houses on the hill that look down on the water.”

“
You live in one of those houses?”

“No, not me. My folks weren’t poor, they weren’t rich. They were just decent people, that’s all.”

“What was your childhood like?”

He shrugged. “It wasn’t
The Brady Bunch
, you know. It was just…normal, I guess. My dad worked as an accountant at Caterpillar tractor company and my mom stayed home with me. I was an only child but I wasn’t alone much. I hung out with my best friends, Dickie Waters and Joe Santori. We used to be in Little League together. None of us any good, but we thought we were.” He grinned widely. “I think every American boy thinks he’s gonna make the major leagues.”

“So what happened?”

“Drugs. I smoked pot, drank beer…everybody did. But Dickie and Joe knew when to stop, and I guess I didn’t.”

“What drugs did you do?”

“It was the eighties, ma’am. What drugs
didn’t
I do?” He stopped for a minute, seemed to be enjoying memories of a better time. “Coke, speed, ’shrooms, anything I could get…but it was meth that did me in.”

“How young were you when you started?”

“Fourteen, I think. Started with simple things, but by the time I was supposed to graduate high school, I was pretty well gone.”

“And your parents?”

“I gave ’em trouble they did not deserve.”

After Brick’s wariness, I wanted to be clear. “You’re going to have to go into some detail about that trouble,” I said.

He lost his smile. “Yes ma’am. That’s why we’re doing this, isn’t it? So some kid out there with a drug problem doesn’t end up wasting his life away in here.”

Ten minutes in, some trouble with the mic caused us to take a break in the interview. Victor rushed around trying to fix it, Andres glared at him, and Tim sat back and watched.

“Sorry about this,” I said.

“I ain’t got nowhere better to be, Kate.”

I looked up at the guard, and Tim saw me looking.

“He don’t got nowhere better either. Do you, Russell?”

The guard laughed. “No, Tim, not until six o’clock.”

“Russell here has three kids. Twelve, nine and…” Tim looked back toward the guard. “How old is Gail?”

“Four,” Russell answered.

Tim nodded. “That’s right. She just had a birthday.”

“That she did,” Russell said. “Tim has a great memory.”

I looked from one to the other. “Must be hard to work in a place like this. On one hand wanting to relate to each other as people, and on the other hand having to keep order.”

Russell shifted his weight and shrugged. “Tim here is no trouble. We have some bad guys here, but Tim isn’t one of them.” He stopped, seemed to consider his words. “It’s different once people are inside. What they did…well, no one is in Dugan for parking tickets.”

“You don’t think about their crimes?” I asked.

“I don’t,” he said. “What they did doesn’t bother me as much as what they’re capable of doing.”

Tim smiled. “And Russell knows I’m not interested in picking any fights.”

“So what if someone picks a fight with you?” I asked.

Tim seemed to consider the question, before quietly answering. “I guess it’ll last long enough for him to stick me in the belly.”

T
ell me about the night your wife died,” I said once the mic had been fixed. I usually prefer to ease into a situation as delicate as that, but I was looking to throw Tim off his game and get him to stop staring at me. Unlike Brick’s attempt at seduction, Tim’s steady gaze had no sexual intent. At least none that I could see.