Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery by Clare O'Donohue Page B

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’ddescribed 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 thefire, 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