Speak Ill of the Dead Read online

  “Oh, is that all?”

  I noticed he was laughing.

  “Well, whatever you can tell me,” I said, laughing too.

  “Let’s see, she came down about once every two months. I have no idea who came to see her. Hotels are not in the business of keeping tabs on clients.”

  “What was she doing here?”

  “In the hotel?” His eyes twinkled.

  “In Ottawa.”

  “The scuttlebutt is she was writing a book on federal politicians. On their personal style or something.”

  “A book on Members of Parliament?”

  “I heard on M.P.’s, Senators, the Prime Minister, the back room boys, everyone and everything.”

  “Have you ever read her stuff?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Then you know what she was like. A lot of people would want to avoid being in her book.”

  “Perhaps not enough to kill her.”

  “Humph,” I said, getting back to the suicide wings.

  “Even though you might like it to be a conspiracy of parliamentarians.”

  I thought he had a point, so I tried another approach.

  “Did you know her well?”

  “Not really. She only stayed here three times since I’ve been here.”

  “Did you like her?”

  “Not in the least.”

  I raised my eyebrows and sipped my beer.

  “She wasn’t very likeable.”

  I had to agree.

  “And she upset a lot of people before she died,” he added.

  I knew what he meant. She’d been able to upset me a lot even after she died. Case in point, here I was on a Sunday night in a bar with a man I’d just met. Something I’d never done before in my life.

  “I know. Robin was one of them.”

  “And you say she’s still in shock.”

  “That’s right. And the police want to talk to her as soon as she’s well enough.”

  “Too bad,” he said. With sympathy.

  “Right.”

  Our conversation slid into personal matters, likes and dislikes, what chance the Jays might have this season, what it was like to live alone in Ottawa.

  Much later I looked at my watch and shook it. The time couldn’t be right. I had to get home to bed like a good little girl or I wouldn’t be able to catch up on the Benning case tomorrow.

  “Gotta go,” I said, whipping out some cash and looking around for the waiter.

  “It’s on the house,” Richard said.

  “Thanks.” I was on my feet, still marvelling at the fact I’d had two beer on a work night.

  “Something I said?” he asked, rising.

  “No, just pressures of work. Time for me to hit the hay. Do you mind if I call you if I have other questions?”

  “No problem.”

  As we walked back to the foyer, where the big-haired receptionist was chirping at new arrivals, I decided to grab a cab. It was very late by my standards, and the walk by the river was just a little too isolated at night. I’d had enough big, strapping clients who were victims of vicious predators to be under any illusions.

  “Thanks, again.” The front doors opened, and I walked towards the cab stand.

  Richard took me by surprise as he caught up to me. He took the Blueline driver by surprise too.

  “Can I give you a lift?”

  The last surprise was when I realized how much I wanted that lift.

  I found myself smiling as I waited for the parking valet to arrive with Richard’s car, and I was still smiling as we pulled on to Wellington Street and turned left.

  “Usually I walk,” I told him.

  “It must be nice. Especially with all the tulips.”

  “What tulips?”

  “The million or so tulips that are about to bloom,” he said, flashing a look at me.

  “I guess I haven’t really noticed them. You sort of take them for granted when you’ve lived here most of your life.”

  As we slipped along the Parkway, the river glittered in the May night. In five short minutes, we drew up in front of my building, and I felt a jab of regret.

  “Good night,” I said, regretting the regret.

  “We seem to have gotten off topic. Aren’t you going to ask me about her boyfriend?”

  “Whose boyfriend?” The words slipped out before I could stop them. Mitzi’s boyfriend, of course. “What about the boyfriend?”

  “I think he lives here in Ottawa, but he was always in her room. Every time she was in town.”

  “But not this time.”

  “Oh yeah, this time, too.”

  “Well, where was he when…”

  “According to the hotel staff, they had a knock-down drag-out dust-up, the night before. Bad enough for the other guests on the floor to phone and complain about the noise.”

  “Do the police know?”

  “They do.”

  “This is good news. They might leave Robin alone.”

  The little question still nagged me inside. If the boyfriend was the bad guy, why would Robin be lying?

  “What’s his name? Mitzi’s boyfriend.”

  “Wendtz. Rudy Wendtz.”

  We said good-bye for the second time and I smiled at the memory of Richard Sandes, all the way from the car to the elevator and from the elevator to the sixteenth floor and all along the hallway to my apartment. I kept smiling up to the point where I spotted my neighbour, Mrs. Parnell, moving her walker back to her apartment after her outing to the garbage chute. It’s hard to keep smiling once you’ve spotted Mrs. Parnell.

  I nodded to her and made a futile attempt to pass without engaging in conversation about anything I might have done to provoke her. She might be in her seventies, but she is a woman who embodies the word “formidable”. I’ve heard other neighbours speculate about her links to power in former governments, even insinuations about intelligence work in World War Two. Whatever the scuttlebutt about her past, at this point in her life Mrs. Parnell was content to occupy her time being a pain in the butt.

  “Excuse me, Ms. MacPhee,” she said, staring down at me over her remarkably long nose, reminding me of every nun who ever caught me making a paper airplane in Religion class. Her ability to terrorize was not diminished a whit by the fact that she leaned on the walker. Somehow she managed to hang on to a cigarette in a long holder everywhere she went.

  Mrs. Parnell is the sixteenth floor’s keeper of the public morality. She has two passions, music, opera in particular, and making sure no one, but no one, gets away with anything, but anything.

  “Oh, hello, Mrs. Parnell,” I said, once I was sure there was no escape. “Lovely evening.”

  She was five-eleven if she was an inch and I could feel myself shrinking as she continued to stare down at me. Why I, a thirtysomething lawyer, nasty as the next guy, should be intimidated by a tall, awkward old lady in a mud-coloured sweater with holes in the elbows was beyond me.

  “Ms. MacPhee, is it possible cat noises have been heard coming from your apartment?”

  “Cat noises,” I said, shocked. “Certainly not, Mrs. Parnell. What would ever give you that idea?”

  “I have ears, Ms. MacPhee.”

  Yes, and the less said about them the better, I thought. What the hell, the best defense is a good offense, somebody once said. It seemed to me to fit the occasion. I gave it a try.

  “I also have ears, Mrs. Parnell, and may I suggest you have confused the howling of vowels from one of your gruesome operas with feline sounds in the vicinity. And who can blame you?”

  “Well!” she said, moving herself and her walker back into her apartment with remarkable speed and slamming the door.

  I whipped open my own door, slid through and closed it. A great chorus of meows greeted my arrival.

  Five

  Yes, this is Alvin Ferguson. Yes, I will accept the charges.” Alvin held his hand over the receiver and shot me a meaningful look. “It’s my mother, it’s quite personal. Wo
uld you mind waiting outside for a couple of minutes?”

  It was Monday morning at ten, and I was still standing in the doorway of Justice for Victims, clutching my muffin and coffee. I opened my mouth just as Alvin reached over and closed the door.

  I sat on the stair sipping my coffee, nibbling my muffin and listing all of the things I would like to do to Alvin. I’d finished the coffee, the muffin and the list, and was getting up to go back in to insert the telephone somewhere painful, when I heard the “excuse me.” It was What’s-his-name.

  “Oh, hello, um…” I said.

  “Ted. Ted Beamish. You remember, I ran into you the other day outside the Parole Board Office.”

  “Right.”

  “We talked about having a coffee together sometime when we ran into each other.”

  Well, he had talked about it.

  “I saw on the news that you and Robin Findlay were there right at the scene of the Mitzi Brochu murder. That must have been right after we bumped into each other. I’m sure you must have been very disturbed by it.”

  “You bet.”

  “So I didn’t like to call you right after the…um, incident, but I thought I might try today. It’s a new week and…” A band of sweat formed on his upper lip.

  I might as well have coffee with the guy, I thought, since there was no point at all in strangling Alvin with a witness present.

  “Sure, why not?”

  “How about the Mayflower?”

  As we settled into our booth, I wondered what we would find to talk about. It doesn’t bother me to sit there and not say anything, but it seems to make other people a bit edgy.

  I ordered coffee and sat there.

  Ted Beamish ordered carrot cake with his coffee and started talking.

  “I had a lot of leave accumulated so I thought I’d take today off and get a few errands done,” he said.

  “I’m an errand?”

  The flush raced up his face.

  “Of course not. It’s just I had some free time and I was on Elgin Street and I thought I’d drop in and see if you weren’t too busy to have coffee. To tell you the truth, you didn’t look too busy.”

  “You mean because I was sitting on the stairs? They’re my favourite place to sit and contemplate when I have a tough problem.”

  This seemed more reasonable than the truth, that I had been turfed out by the office help who needed to discuss an urgent and private problem with its mother.

  “Do you have a tough problem now?”

  I thought of Robin and Benning and Alvin.

  “Yes,” I said, “several.”

  “That’s interesting. The stairs, I mean.”

  “Works for me,” I said, although I never intended to sit on them again.

  “Tell me about Justice for Victims,” he said. “I heard you set it up yourself.”

  “Right.”

  He wasn’t one to give up, and he was nudging about my favourite subject. It was possible I was going to be lured into conversation after all.

  “What do you do?”

  “Well,” I said, feeling my motor turn on, “victims are the forgotten players in our legal processes. I’m running an advocacy agency for them. Justice for Victims represents the interests of victims in dealing with various parts of the government and the judicial system. We lobby for or against proposed legislation which we think will affect victims. For instance, changes to the Young Offenders Act. We offer support for the victim in dealing with the system. Often a victim is victimized all over again by the time a trial or a procedure is over. Or they’re terrified when a criminal is about to get paroled back into their community. They don’t know what to do, they don’t know what their rights are.”

  “Sounds great to me.” He gestured to the waitress for a refill. “How do you get funded?”

  He’d hit the sore spot.

  “We’re a membership organization. Anyone with an interest in justice and victims can join for a small fee. I’ll get you an application form,” I grinned. “You’ll get a newsletter out of it, and sense of doing something good. And I get a constituency to mount letter writing campaigns to the feds when necessary. I ask for donations, too.”

  “And you can make a living this way?”

  “More or less. We get grants from various levels of government and personal and corporate donations. I supplement with a bit of legal work on the side, and I get asked to participate in task forces looking at the victim perspective.”

  I didn’t tell him my expenses were minimal to run Justice for Victims. The office was sub-let from the association next door. Alvin came subsidized, although not quite subsidized enough. I also didn’t mention I had to top up my own living expenses, not that they were high, out of Paul’s estate. Still it was worth it as far as I was concerned.

  “I can see why you would be so committed to victims’ rights, after what happened to Paul. And that guy getting away with it.”

  I didn’t let myself think about this too often. The wounds were still there. Paul, brilliant and funny, would have been thirty-four in three weeks if a drunken lout hadn’t polished off a two-four of beer, then lurched onto the road with his RX-7 and mangled Paul’s little Toyota. It had taken three hours to cut his body from the wreckage. Longer than his killer served.

  “One year suspended sentence. Gotta give the guy a chance. After all, he never killed anyone before.” My hands were choking my coffee mug as I talked. Choking the drunk driver, choking the judge.

  “Tough on you.”

  I wanted to change the subject. I wasn’t in the habit of discussing just how tough it was.

  “Right,” I said, “so what else are you going to do on your day off?”

  “I’m treating this like a Saturday, so I’m doing Saturday stuff,” he said. “Drop over to the market and get a few things, go to the library and stock up, see how the tulips are coming up…”

  Those damn tulips again.

  “…maybe go to a movie tonight.”

  He’d been looking into his empty coffee cup, but now he flicked a glance at me.

  “I don’t suppose you’d feel like a movie tonight.”

  “I’m not ready to see other people yet. Sorry.”

  This time the flush surged up past his hairline and down through his shirt collar. I could have sworn his hands got pink.

  “Oh, of course not,” he said, “I realize that. Just talking about a couple of people watching a movie.”

  “Don’t mind me, I’m being a jerk,” I said. “I’ve got a lot on my mind and it’s making me surly.”

  I noticed he didn’t leap to deny this.

  “This thing with Mitzi Brochu has thrown me. You remember Robin, I guess.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I remember seeing the two of you together a lot at law school.

  “Well, she’s just devastated by the whole thing and doesn’t seem to be getting over it, so that’s a strain. The police have been complete creeps about it.”

  “Hmm.”

  “So the point is, once life gets back to normal and I’m not such a jerk, sure, let’s get together and go to a movie. Maybe Robin could come too.”

  That might be just what she needed, I thought to myself. And this little guy might be the perfect match for her. Pleasant enough. Appreciates tulips. Probably likes cats too. Maybe a movie with a single man would be enough to get Robin to climb out of bed and comb her hair.

  “I’ll get your number,” I said, “and let you know when would be a good time.”

  He wasn’t the type to insist on paying the bill. He got a point from me for that.

  “I’ll be off to the library,” he said as we stepped out of the Mayflower and into the very bright sun.

  “I’ve got some stuff to check out. Let’s walk over to together,” I said. Death Row reprieve for Alvin.

  “Sure.”

  He was the kind of person you could be comfortable with, without talking. I liked that.

  As we reached the corner of Elgin and
Laurier West, across the street in Confederation park, 15,000 tulips exploded into view. He stopped to look. Robin would have too. This could be a perfect match.

  We jostled by the camera-toting tourists enjoying the Festival of Spring. By my calculations, there was a tourist for every tulip.

  “So,” I said, while we raced the light across Elgin, “did I ever tell how I feel about the parole system?”

  “Let’s not ruin a perfect morning.”

  We said good-bye inside the library. I galloped up the stairs to reference and he headed for fiction. He was planning to do the W’s. Wodehouse. Westlake. Wright. Wolfe.

  I was planning to do the W’s too. Wendtz.

  There was only one Rudy Wendtz in the city directory. He had an address on the Queen Elizabeth Driveway and his employment was listed as prmtr. After a while, I figured out this must mean promoter. But what did promoter mean?

  I let my fingers do the walking and sure enough, in the yellow pages under Promotional Services, I found “Events by Wendtz”.

  What kind of events, I wondered, give you the kind of income you need to live at that address on the Queen Elizabeth Driveway?

  * * *

  Back in the office, there was no sign of Alvin. With luck, he’d caught the first flight back to Sydney to resolve the family crisis.

  Wherever he was, I had free access to the phone. I checked in with the Findlays. Robin was in bed.

  “Perhaps when Brooke gets here…” Mrs. Findlay let her sad, flat voice trail off. “It’ll be good to see her.”

  “Well, yes,” I said, “especially after her long walk.”

  Mrs. Findlay always pretends she doesn’t hear my Brooke comments.

  “And you too, will you be here tonight?”

  “Count on it,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s good. Robin has been finding the visits from the police very upsetting. Wait a minute, here she is. She says she wants to talk to you. Are you sure you should be out of bed, dear? Dr. Beaver says…”

  “What police? What visits?” I shouted into the receiver. But no response.

  “Camilla?” Robin sounded like an exhausted mouse. “I think they’re going to arrest me.”

  * * *

  She looked like hell when I shot through her front door twenty minutes later. In sharp contrast to the perky, bright, blue flowers marching across every free inch of the Findlays’ kitchen, Robin had definite grey undertones. She was wearing an old United Way campaign tee-shirt with tea stains down the front, grey jogging pants with a hole in the knee and pink pig slippers. Deep half-circles were gouged under her eyes. Her blonde curls hung in greasy strands. She clutched a china cup of camomile tea, and her knuckles were white.