“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. 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?”