Speak Ill of the Dead Read online

  Speak Ill

  of the Dead

  by

  Mary Jane Maffini

  Text © 1999 by Mary Jane Maffini

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.

  Cover art: Christopher Chuckry

  We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.

  Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada

  Printed in Canada

  05 04 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1

  Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Maffini, Mary Jane, date

  Speak ill of the dead

  ISBN 0-929141-65-2

  I. Title.

  PS8576.A3385S63 1999 C813’.54 C99-931189-1

  PR9199.3.M3433S63 1999

  I am most grateful for the endless support and firm opinions of my writing group: Joan Boswell, Vicki Cameron, Audrey Jessup, Sue Pike and Linda Wiken. And also to Linda Berndt, Susanne Fletcher, Janet MacEachen, and Dr. Lorne Parent for their advice and to Georgia Ellis for the fictional use of her balcony. Many thanks to my publisher, Sylvia McConnell, for believing in me and in this book, and to Allister Thompson, the most courageous of editors. Any errors are my own.

  Much of Ottawa is as it is portrayed, although it is only fair to mention that Justice for Victims and the Harmony Hotel are both figments of my fevered mind, as is St. Jim’s Parish. Don’t waste your time looking for them. Strangely enough, the one million tulips are real.

  -MJM

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  One

  That particular morning all I could think about was getting rid of Alvin.

  It was the thirteenth of May. After the three feet of snow that came in November and stayed topped up all winter, I should have been paying attention to the signs of spring. I stomped along the bike path bordering the Ottawa River, not looking for groundhogs or robins and unaware of the fresh buds on the deciduous trees. Instead, black thoughts of Alvin clogged my mind.

  All down Wellington Street and up on Parliament Hill thousands of tulips had popped out of the ground, on schedule for the annual tulip festival. I didn’t notice them.

  My mind was focused primarily on liberating my office from Alvin’s presence, and secondarily on dealing with my large, meddlesome family, so Alvin or someone just like him never happened to me again.

  By the time I picked up an extra large Colombian Supremo and honey oatmeal muffin across from my Elgin Street office, I was concentrating on the family part and my theory that I’d been switched at birth. That’s how I account for being short, stocky and dark-haired in a family where everyone is tall, slender and fair. My sisters are long-boned and ash-blonde, beautiful still in their late forties. The pleats in their good wool slacks always lie flat; there’s never a button missing on their silk shirts; their hair is just the way they want it to be.

  I’m lucky if I can find my clothes on the chair in the morning, and my hair doesn’t even bear talking about. And if I don’t take the fifty-three minute walk to and from work every day, I go off the top end of the scale.

  Even now, thirty-two years after my birth, my father still looks at me with surprise. It’s a look I remember well from my childhood. Surprise—when he found me hanging upside down from a tree, or when he discovered six frogs in the bathtub, or when he read a note from The Nun of the Year saying I had played hookey from First Communion Class.

  My beautiful sisters would just laugh. They were perfect. So they could afford to think it was amusing when I got fished out of ponds, ejected from Sunday School, stranded on the school roof. And one of them, Edwina or Alexa or Donalda, would rescue me, take me by the hand and make sure that even my father could see the humour in the situation. I would stand there, looking way up at a tall, fair man, hoping he would recognize me.

  Donalda was named for my father, Donald MacPhee, and like him she was cool, detached, correct. Alexa and Edwina were named for my mother’s brothers. Good Cape Breton names, although a bit out of place when we moved to Ottawa—a city of Barbaras and Beverlys and Susans. It’s a tribute to my sisters’ elegance as teenagers that they were never tormented about their names. Just floated through high school with their lovely long straight noses in the air, their blonde hair just so and lots of boys to carry their books. I suppose it didn’t hurt that my father was the principal of St. Jim’s.

  All I got was the best name, Camilla, from my mother, who died when I was born.

  My sisters returned to Nova Scotia to get good solid degrees in English at St. Francis Xavier or Mount St. Vincent or to train in nursing at St. Rita’s. They returned with tall, respectable husbands—a dentist, an accountant and in Alexa’s case, a doctor. Alexa’s a widow now, but she still retains all the points she got for snagging the doctor.

  As for me, I went charging through the University of Ottawa and wound up with a Law degree and no man in my life but Paul, whose dead face still smiles down at me from his picture on the wall in my office, three years after the accident that changed my life.

  When I was growing up my sisters used to look at me with affectionate amusement—“Oh Camilla, how could you do that to Daddy’s new car?” Now they pucker their perfect faces with worry and bite their Clinique-covered lower lips and try not to pester me about working seventy hours a week and forgetting to get my hair done.

  My father still regards me with surprise.

  But that’s not the problem. The problem is he spends fifty percent of his time rescuing the children and grandchildren of old friends. People who, through no fault of their own, have fallen on hard times. Like Alvin.

  “This particular boy,” my father had said, meaning Alvin, “this particular boy never had a chance. Not like you, dear, with every opportunity.”

  I gave it my best defensive play.

  “There’s no space in my office for another person, Daddy. You know I just have the one room, and it’s fifteen by fifteen, and it’s full of files and equipment. Where would he sit?”

  “That’s just it, he could help with the files. Put them in the filing cabinets for you. He could answer your phone. Do the correspondence. Run the photocopier. You have a law degree, dear. Even if you insist on running this agency for victims, you don’t need to do everything yourself. Give Alvin a chance. You won’t even have to pay his salary. The government training program will pick up eighty per cent of it. At any rate this poor boy doesn’t even want a salary, just a chance to get some experience. Having some help in the office will give you time to think.”

  Time to think? I definitely didn’t want time to think— about Paul, about the kind of life we might have had if he had lived.

  “Sorry, Daddy. No deal.”

  “Alcoholic father, God rest his soul, poor old Mike, and that brave little woman struggling to put all those children through university. Be a big weight off her mind. Mine, too.

  You don’t seem to have any life at all, dear. Which reminds me, your sisters want to have a family dinner after Mass on Sunday. I don’t suppo
se you’d consider going to…”

  By the time I had tucked my styrofoam cup and my muffin under my arm, fiddled with my key and kicked open the door of the Justice for Victims office, Alvin had started his third week on the job. He’d already told me he was looking forward to a career in the World of Art, and that office work was not his first love.

  He was in fine form that morning, and the sunlight glinted off his nine visible earrings as he brushed the remains of his breakfast from my Globe and Mail and into the wastepaper basket. “The Bear”, a local rock station, blasted from the radio.

  “Mitzi Brochu,” he said.

  “Gesundheit,” I told him, as I moved a stack of research notes and put down my own breakfast. “I hope you’re not coming down with a cold. But if you are, please feel free to stay home until you feel completely better. Better yet, have you considered going home to your mother in Sydney?”

  But this subtlety was wasted on Alvin.

  “Robin Findlay called. She wants you to go with her to meet Mitzi Brochu.” The look on Alvin’s face indicated this was some kind of big deal.

  “Mitzi who?”

  “You’re kidding me, right?”

  I wasn’t. I scooped a stack of envelopes from the chair and sat down.

  “Wow,” he said. “You got to cut down on your working hours and get a life. Everyone in the country knows Mitzi Brochu. The Sultana of Style, the Queen of Cool, the High Priestess of…”

  “Okay, I get the picture.”

  I remembered Mitzi Brochu, a scrawny fashion writer and broadcaster, with a poison pen and a tongue like a switchblade.

  The phone rang.

  “Justice for Victims,” Alvin chirped. “No, I’m sorry, Mizzz MacPhee is in a staff meeting. No, no idea when. Sure, try later.”

  He hung up before I could snatch the receiver from his hands.

  “What meeting? What meeting am I in?”

  “This is important. This woman can make or break you. Any chance you could skip home and put on your teal suit? And ditch those running shoes?”

  “No, there is no chance I will skip anywhere. And, furthermore, this woman cannot make or break me. I am not trying to make a fashion statement, I am running an advocacy agency for victims of violent crime. I don’t give a shit about Mitchy Bitchy.”

  “Mitzi Brochu,” said Alvin. “That’s too bad, because Robin said it was really important. Incredibly important. Let’s see, where did I put that message?”

  He rummaged through the desk drawers one by one. Five minutes later, he located the message in the wastepaper basket and wiped a coffee spill from it.

  “Harmony Hotel, this afternoon at 2:30. Suite…” he held the message up to the light, “it’s a bit washed out…but I think it’s Suite 815.”

  “Come on. I’ve got to get ready for Ralph Benning’s parole hearing. And I’m way behind on the brief to the Department of Justice. Not to mention the membership drive…”

  “Camilla, Camilla, Camilla. That’s what I’m here for, membership drives and that stuff. It’s called delegation, remember?”

  “I do remember. I remember it was all here to do before you came and now you’ve been here for three weeks, it still is.”

  “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. But first, why don’t I run over to the library and get you some background on Mitzi? You don’t want to put your foot in it.”

  There was only one place where I wanted to put my foot. I thought about it. Sure would be easier to breathe in the minuscule office without Alvin. And easier to think without his radio. Really, that’s the way I had set it up. To work alone, long and hard. The three visitors’ chairs were just enough for the devastated crime victims and their relatives who found their shaky way to the office. The rest was all business. Phone, fax, photocopier and mile-high files. I loved my mingy little office—when Alvin wasn’t in it.

  He stuck his head through the door just as I was enjoying the foot thought.

  “By the way, your sister called.”

  I forgot the foot. “Which one?”

  Alvin shrugged before he closed the door. “I can’t keep them all straight.”

  I knew it didn’t matter which order I called them in, it would be the last one who left the message. The other two would have plenty to say. Sure enough, it was Edwina with an invitation.

  “Why don’t you come for lunch on Sunday? Frank will pick you up.”

  Lunch with my family comes off the time you have to log in purgatory, but no one wins arguments with Edwina, so I didn’t bother. I was just finishing up with her when Alvin got back.

  He tossed a pile of magazines on the desk. All back issues of Femme Fatale. All with the Ottawa Public Library stamp still on them.

  “There you go, here’s the sort of thing our girl Mitzi’s written in the last two years.”

  “Alvin. The library doesn’t lend these magazines. How’d you get them past the security system?”

  “It’s easy when you know how.”

  “Well, I can’t survive without using the library for research. Don’t get me into hot water with them.”

  I got up and stuck my nose out into the hall to see if any librarians had tracked Alvin back to the office.

  He took advantage of my move to reclaim the chair at the desk. “Take a look at them. You’ll get an idea about Mitzi, anyway, before this afternoon.”

  The Benning hearing was supposed to occupy my mind that morning and it did. I pored over the transcript of Ralph Benning’s trial and the newspaper reports of the same. I reread notes from my interviews with Myra Anderson, the victim, and worked on a strategy for the hearing. I made a note to myself to talk to the prosecutor of the case. But it was hard to concentrate.

  “Do you mind not whistling while you type?”

  “What, I’m just a happy guy. It’s better than you, grunting and snarling to yourself over those files.” Alvin tossed a pile of envelopes into the wastepaper basket.

  “What’s wrong with those?”

  “Mistakes on them.”

  Since Alvin’s arrival our garbage rate had soared. We had become a fifteen foot by fifteen foot, four-basket-a-day office. I rescued the envelopes from the garbage.

  “Put labels over them. If you can’t think cheap, can you at least think green?”

  “Sure.”

  Alvin flicked his coal-black ponytail over his shoulder and turned back to the typewriter. I pretended I didn’t hear his next little remark about hormones.

  The rest of the morning yielded little. By noon, I was hungry and faced with a pile of paper with Benning doodled on it over and over, surrounded by meaningless squiggles, crosses and puffs of smoke.

  On a normal day, I like to eat a sandwich for lunch in the office. But Alvin was there, and I wanted to get away from him. He handed me the pile of Femme Fatale issues as I headed out.

  “I can’t take those,” I said. “They are clearly marked Ottawa Public Library.”

  Rip. Slap. The covers landed in the overflowing wastepaper basket.

  “Happy lunching,” said Alvin.

  As I walked away from the door, I heard him answer the phone.

  “Sorry,” he said, “I have absolutely no idea if or when she’ll be back.”

  * * *

  Elgin Street was showing the first signs of spring. Lily white, bare arms were sticking out of short sleeves everywhere as I shlepped along several crowded blocks to the Manx Pub. Time to get out the summer clothes. That shouldn’t be hard, since I hadn’t had time to pack them away over the winter.

  I snagged the last table for two in the Manx and wiggled right in, spreading my coverless magazines out on the other side. I ordered the pasta special and began checking out the samples of Mitzi Brochu’s style. Her prime targets were overweight celebrities and royalty (“Porky Princess Should Shun Public Participation”). The Princess was lucky enough to hightail it back to Europe after Mitzi skewered her. The media people were not so fortunate. Mitzi liked to take aim at the fashion foibles of tel
evision personalities too. “Dump the Frumps—Ship Media Fashion Losers Back to the Boonies” targeted female news anchors and talk show hosts across the country. One of our local news anchors, Jo Quinlan, got it right between the eyes with the headline “From the Barn to the Big Time”. The caption under her photo shrilled “Beefy country look is out: time for a makeover, Jo-Jo.”

  Every now and then, Mitzi scored a double play: “Fat and Frumpy—Dual Deficit Punctures Polyester Politicians”. The rear view shot of local political mover and shaker Deb Goodhouse bending over probably would have cost the photographer his life, if she’d caught him snapping on his wide angle lens.

  Two minutes into the first article and I knew one thing: I had no desire to meet Mitzi Brochu.

  Femme Fatale was reputed to be outselling Chatelaine and Canadian Living, the former leaders in the field of women’s magazines. I was astonished that people paid to read it.

  “Oh God, look at that,” said my waiter as he deposited my plate on the table. “Mitzi Brochu, isn’t she wicked? My favourite one was her TV piece on ‘Ban the Bum’. A lot of people are still blushing over it.”

  “Hmmm,” I said, only partly because I had a mouthful. And partly because I was asking myself what kind of person took such obvious pleasure in holding other people up to ridicule.

  * * *

  Even on the walk to the office, I kept asking myself why Robin Findlay, my oldest and closest friend, the most sensible person in the world, who dreamed about picket fences and children, slept in blue flannelette nighties and doted on her six cats, would want to see Mitzi Brochu.

  When I opened the door, Alvin was pointing to his watch. “Robin called in a panic. You just missed her.”

  I made room on the desk for the pile of Femme Fatale and dug out my briefcase.

  “Better hustle,” he added. “It’s a hike over to the Harmony. And she sounds like she’s going over the edge. Oh, and don’t give another thought to your threads, maybe Mitzi will keep her eyes closed.”