Speak Ill of the Dead. Mary Jane Maffini

      When Alvin’s good, he’s very, very good. He’s particularly good in absentia. I spent the rest of the afternoon combing through the articles by and about Mitzi Brochu. It proved to be a potent dose of a poisonous pen. Mitzi had been a lot of things. Nice was not one of them.

      Alvin had been very thorough. There was even a picture of Wendtz. Rock promoter Rudy Wendtz, according to the caption. He was shown sampling sushi with Mitzi, she glittering and malevolent in black velvet and metal, he with a two-day growth of beard and slicked back dark-blond hair ending at his shoulders. He looked like a man who worked out. And weren’t those tattoos an adorable touch?

      Articles on Mitzi were plentiful and while one or two bleated about the effect her call to “diet or die” had on the already precarious eating habits of teenage girls, most gushed about Mitzi’s wicked wit and unflagging sense of style.

      When I had finished wading through the world of the late La Brochu, I slapped the magazines on the table and considered taking a Gravol.

      She had her favourite targets: actors, politicians, TV personalities and a Toronto model she compared to a grouper.

      Deb Goodhouse had been the butt of insults for years. I thought Mitzi’s jabs had been a one-time random effort to skewer women M.P.’s in general. But Mitzi articles dating way back had rearview shots of Deb and curare-tipped remarks about her sense of style. Running a close second was Jo Quinlan, who averaged two major slams a year by Mitzi. I wasn’t sure who suffered the most slings and arrows: Deb or Jo.

      I flipped through the magazines and checked the little credits area in the front. The photographer was the same for all the Deb and Jo pictures and many of the others. He smiled out from a photograph that made him look very, very good. I fished the scissors from the desk and snipped out the picture of the photographer.

      Sammy Dash was his name, a man who obviously loved his work.

Six

      Alvin was settled in at the desk, humming, so I found myself huddled in the back of the office, surrounded by work I should have been doing. It was just after nine in the morning, but already I did not feel like working. All I could think about was rat-faced Mombourquette waiting for his chance to scurry through the Findlays’ front door and drag Robin off to the station, still in her pink pig slippers.

      No, the best thing, I told myself, was not to sit in the office listening to Alvin sing his favourite Fred Eaglesmith song for the eighty-second time. The best thing would be to get out and stir up a little dust to distract Ottawa’s finest from my very, very vulnerable client. I had a few strong options based on reading about Mitzi’s favourite victims. A phone call was all it took, and I was on my way.

      “You’re spooking the horses,” Alvin sang, “and you’re scaring me.”

      “Good,” I said, just before I slammed the door.

      * * *

      Deb Goodhouse was one of those rare women who look good in red. Very good. Her hair was still dark brown, almost black, cut in a dutch-boy style. Her dark eyes and ivory skin showed to advantage with her red blazer and matching slash of lipstick. She looked like Snow White, grown middle-aged and professional. She smiled and shook my hand till my bones ached. But I could tell she was not at all glad to see me.

      “Well,” she said, “imagine. Alex and Donnie’s little sister. What can I do for you?”

      I wondered if she could have been one of the handful of Ottawans who had missed the sight of Robin and me being hustled away from Mitzi’s murder site by the cops. Somehow I doubted it.

      Still, she’d been willing to see me, which was the only way I could have gotten past the long-faced security guards and into the labyrinth of offices in the West Block of the Parliament Buildings.