Speak Ill of the Dead (6 page)

I guess someday I’ll have to work on smoothing out my conversational skills. But he didn’t seem to mind.

“Miss Brochu stayed here whenever she stayed in town. She liked the Harmony and the brass always insisted on making a big deal out of her. There was talk about using her in an ad campaign for the Harmony Hotel chain. She got preferential treatment, so I guess that’s why she chose us over the Hilton or the Westin or the Chateau.”

“Hmm,” I said, “she didn’t strike me as too harmonious.”

“True,” said Richard Sandes, “but she was very well known and popular, well, maybe not popular, but she got good media coverage and people liked to read about her and liked her broadcasts, so it must have seemed like a good idea to the decision-makers.”

“Did she get free rooms?”

“No, but she got the suite for the price of a standard room, provided we weren’t booked solid for a convention or something.”

“How long has that been going on?”

He stopped for a second and looked at me.

Maybe I was getting goopy from those suicide wings. I dabbed at my mouth and fingers with a napkin. I’d lost the habit of worrying about how I looked to a man.

“I don’t know,” he said, “I’ve only been here for six months. I’d have to check the files.”

“Oh,” I said, distracted from my Mitzi probe, “where were you before?”

“Toronto.”

“Quite a change to Ottawa. How does your family like it here?”

Richard sipped his Perrier for a second before answering.

“I’m here on my own.”

I didn’t know quite what to say. There are many reasons for being in a new city on your own. Most of them you shouldn’t pry into.

“Do you like it here?”

He shrugged. “I don’t get out much. I’ve been putting in pretty long hours. But I like that and I like the Harmony.”

“It’s a beautiful hotel. I can see why you like it.”

“Yes. I hope I can stay on.”

“Would they move you without…”

He smiled at me. A crooked smile with a lot of sadness in it.

“I’m the manager at a showcase hotel where a star client was murdered. In a very showy way. The Official Philosophy of Harmony Hotels is to provide a place where clients don’t have to worry. There’s a lot of heat right now. Somebody’s got to carry the can, and I’m the ideal candidate.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Life isn’t always fair, Ms. MacPhee.”

“Right. Tell me about it.”

He waved the waiter over to refill our drinks. I was surprised to see mine was empty. There’s something about suicide wings.

“So,” he said, “what did you want to know about Mitzi Brochu?”

“Everything. How often she came here. Who stayed with her. Who came to see her. What she was like.”

“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

Y
es, 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. Would 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.”