Speak Ill of the Dead (24 page)

“You astound me,” said Alvin.

“Come on.”

“No. I’ve just spent the worst night of my life and all you can think about is your stupid investigation.”

“Not all, not all. Haven’t I been concerned about your welfare tonight? Didn’t I race to the police station with the one person who could get the charges quashed?”

“Big deal.”

“So, what did you find out? Had any of them been there?”

Alvin leaned against the door to the apartment building.

He pulled out the key to the front door. I could tell he was trying to decide whether to tell me or not.

Finally, he broke.

“Yes.”

“Which one for God’s sake? Don’t tantalize me.”

Alvin’s eyes glittered. He inserted the key into the lock and turned it. The door swung open. Alvin stepped through.

“They all were,” he said, just as the door closed in my face.

Sixteen

A
s I shlepped along the corridor to my apartment, I had time to reflect on the evening.

I could still feel the nip from Conn McCracken’s look when he had told me what he thought of Alvin’s investigation and my part in it.

Richard and I had decided the visit to the police station had been enough to take the magic out of our evening. I felt that Richard had taken Alvin’s prowl through his hotel too seriously. And worse, he had his doubts about my motivations for our date.

“How could you even suggest such a thing?” I stared at him, astounded.

“What am I supposed to think?”

“Not that!”

We were pulling up in front of my building, when he dropped this bomb.

“Well, it seems kind of funny, we have this very nice dinner and romantic evening on the same night your hired help goes snooping around my hotel. And, of course, I’m not there to catch him, because I’m all snuggled up with you on the sofa. What else could I think?”

I felt rage rising and bubbling. I could hear my anger buzzing around my ears. The first time I’d let myself relax with someone since Paul, a man I felt I could trust, maybe even love, a man who made my knees crumble. And he reduces it to a scheme to get my own way. I bit my tongue, grabbed my purse and jumped out of the car as fast as I could.

“Go to hell,” I said and slammed the door.

*   *   *

“What did you mean, they all were?” I snapped at Alvin the next day.

His back was turned to me, bony and repellent. His ponytail drooped. He yawned.

“I’m on my break,” he said.

“What do you mean, you’re on your break? You just got here and it’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”

“First, it was time off for overtime. You remember last night? Which I spent in the slammer after doing research for you. Now it’s my break. I always take my break at three o’clock.” He didn’t turn around.

“Fine,” I said, “I’ll wait.”

I picked up the Benning brief and stared at it. I’d been staring at it all morning and most of the afternoon. It hadn’t gotten me anywhere so far.

When the phone rang, I snatched it on the first ring.

“Hi,” said Alexa.

“Hi.”

“I just thought I’d let you know how things are going.”

“How are things going?”

“Oh, they’re wonderful.”

They are not, I thought. In fact, they couldn’t be worse.

“That’s great,” I said.

“Conn and I went out last night. To dinner. We were having such a nice time, until he got a call about a case he’s been working on.”

“Oh.”

“Quite an exciting life he has really.”

“Indeed.”

I already knew about Alexa’s date. I’d seen Conn McCracken the night before. He hadn’t been too happy at the time.

“Well,” he’d said, “I was enjoying a very nice dinner with a very nice lady. We were comfortable and relaxed when the call came in that a suspicious character was prowling around the same hotel where we’re investigating a nasty murder. I had no choice but to come downtown and see for myself.”

“I know what you mean,” I’d said.

“And what do I find? You again.”

He had me.

“Where you shouldn’t be.”

“Right.”

“Because two people have already been killed, and you have already been hit on the head, and you might have been killed. Because this is a serious business.”

“I agree.”

“And because your sister wants me to make sure nothing happens to you.”

“She does?”

“That’s right. And I want your sister to be happy. So, for the last time, I will ask you to leave this to us.”

“Sorry,” I said.

He ignored that. “And don’t think sending your weirdo sidekick is going to be just as good. We know him now, too.”

We both looked over at Alvin. Alvin looked back at us, misery obviously flooding his being.

Alexa held me personally responsible for the unplanned end of her evening, and she wanted to make sure I knew it. It was three fifteen when I got off the phone, and Alvin’s break was over by my calculations. I could resume questioning him.

“So, just what did you mean, they all were?”

“They all were. What’s ambiguous about that?” Behind the cat’s eye glasses, his eyes were slits.

“Explain, please.”

“Every single one of the people in your photos had been seen by someone or another behind the scenes at the Harmony.”

“Even Deb Goodhouse?”

“Even her.”

“Even Jo Quinlan?”

“Yup.”

“Even Brooke?”

“I said all of them, didn’t I? All of them. Even the dead guy, Sammy Dash.”

“Wendtz, too?”

“Right.”

“What about him?” I held up Denzil’s picture.

“Him, too.”

“Really?” I said, smiling for the first time in eighteen hours.

“That’s great.”

“It is?”

It was. My life was in ruins. I was not welcome back to my best friend’s bedside. My relationship with Richard was in the toilet. My business was dying of neglect. My sister had Conn McCracken on my back. I had five cats in my apartment and Alvin in my office. I was thrilled to have some people to take it out on.

“I can’t think of a single reason for a Member of Parliament to skulk around the back halls of a hotel, can you?”

Alvin shrugged, but I knew he was intrigued.

“Did you happen to note just which hotel employee saw which of our suspects when?”

“Yes, I did.” He extracted a semi-shredded notebook from one of his many pockets.

I smiled some more.

“I got their names, who they saw, where and when, as far as they can remember.”

“Did you give this information to the police?”

He shook his head. “They thought I was some kind of burglar. They didn’t believe I was investigating anything, so I didn’t tell them anything.”

“Well, that’ll show them, I guess.”

Alvin shot me a look.

“So, now we have witnesses.”

“I can’t go back there. They’ll call the cops in two seconds.

And I don’t think you’d better go there either.”

“We don’t have to go there. You have the names of your witnesses.”

“Right,” he said. “I knew that.”

“Okay,” I said, “let’s get on with it. So, what were they doing there?”

“Fighting mostly.”

I was going to enjoy this. “Let’s hear it.”

“Where do you want me to start?”

“Let’s start with Deb Goodhouse. I’m very curious about her.”

“Well,” said Alvin, “it was very strange. One of the bus boys was delivering room service to Mitzi Brochu’s suite. Just as he gets to the door this woman bursts out, practically knocks him over, bites his head off…”

“And?”

“The woman was Deb Goodhouse. He said he’d recognize her anywhere. He described her. Even her size, which you don’t get a sense of from this picture, although I guess you did your best.”

“All that from just a glimpse as she came out of the door?”

“Well, no. He saw her again. On the staircase. He, my source, was taking the staircase because he wanted to have a cigarette, and employees aren’t supposed to smoke around the Harmony. But he was in a bad mood because La Brochu didn’t give him one red cent for a tip. They all say she was too cheap to tip anybody for anything. So he felt like a smoke, and he thought the stairs would be safe. But Deb Goodhouse was there. Hanging on to the stair rail. And shaking. Of course, my source doesn’t want to be identified, because if they find out he was smoking on the stairs, maybe he could lose his job.”

“Shaking from what?” I asked. “Was she frightened?”

“No, she looked very angry. If looks could kill, he said he’d have keeled over on the spot.”

“Well, well.” I felt like one of Robin’s cats after a bowl of half-and-half. I may have even licked my lips. “Isn’t that interesting.”

It almost killed Alvin to ask, but he did anyway. “Why?”

“Because the Hon. Deb Goodhouse told me that she’d never met Mitzi Brochu. Now what do you think the chances are that she got into and out of Mitzi’s room without meeting her?”

“Not so hot. Mitzi was there, according to my source.”

“Good, very good. What else do you have?”

“Well, there’s more. Your friend Robin’s sister. She was in and out. Couple people saw her on different occasions.” He looked at me coyly.

“Go on.”

Usually I have to drag every little fact out of him, but in this case his desire to tell the story overcame his desire to string me along for a while.

“I guess Brooke’s problem is even worse than we thought. One of the cleaners saw her doing a line of coke in the washroom outside the big ballroom on the mezzanine. Cut it and snorted it right on the fancy counter where the ladies fix their make-up. This source was cleaning the cubicles and Brooke didn’t even bother to hide. Like cleaning people don’t count, and you could do anything in front of them.”

“Sounds like Brooke.”

Alvin was getting coy again. “That’s not all,” he said, looking at his watch.

“What else?”

“Well, she stayed in the ladies room for a while, and then when my source was coming back with replacement tissues and paper towels, she saw Brooke come out of the washroom, and he was waiting for her.”

“Who?”

“Rudy Wendtz.”

“Bingo.”

“And that’s not all. He belted her right in the chops.”

“What?”

“Slammed her back against the wall. My source pretended to be polishing the water fountain so she wouldn’t miss anything. You know what he said?”

I shook my head.

“He told her he didn’t want her anywhere near Mitzi, and she’d better get the message. Then he belted her again. My source said there was blood running down the side of Brooke’s mouth, and she was crying.”

Whoa.

“And then Brooke said, don’t mark my face, it’s my career. And he said, what do you think Mitzi will do to your career if she finds out about us. Don’t be a stupid bitch, Brooke. You’re going to ruin everything.”

“My, my.”

“And then there was the other one. The TV lady, Jo Quinlan.”

“What about her?”

“Everybody seems to have seen her. More than once too.

Trying to get some dirt on Mitzi. She talked to the chambermaids and the kitchen staff. I heard she even tried to get her hands on the garbage that got taken from Mitzi’s room. She tipped people so they didn’t mind telling her stuff. Mitzi didn’t tip anybody, and she treated everybody like dirt, so no one minded shafting her.”

“How did they shaft her?”

“Well, they didn’t because I guess they didn’t have enough dirt on her. She was cheap, cheap, cheap. And they figured she did a bit of coke on the side herself too. But there wasn’t anything really, um, newsworthy about what she did when she was at the Harmony. Except for the politicians.”

“What politicians?”

“Lots of them. The people I talked to didn’t know too much about it, but Jo Quinlan got pretty excited about some of the people who went there.”

“How did she know who went there if they couldn’t tell her?”

Alvin looked down at his Docs. There must have been something fascinating about them, but I couldn’t see it myself.

He sighed.

“What is it?”

“Well, it’s just that these people didn’t want to tell me all this. Their jobs could be at stake, you know. So I had to give them a little something to help out.”

“How much of a little something?”

“Jeez, there were a lot of people. About eighty or ninety dollars.” He looked at me through his eyelashes.

“Fine.”

“More like a hundred, really.”

“I’ll give you your alleged hundred dollars. But in return I want to be able to talk to any one of your sources, whenever I need to. That means names, Alvin. Names.”

“Jeez, I forgot a couple guys. It cost me more like one twenty-five by the time I was through.”

“You’re close to being through again.”

“Like, I really hate it when you don’t even trust me.”

I’m afraid I snorted.

“What does that mean?”

“Where did you get all this money you so generously gave to your sources?”

He drew himself upright. “I work here. You pay me. I got other things going on the side. I get by. You can’t go around trying to get information in this town without a bit in your pocket to help people relax.”

“Hmmm. Okay. I’ll write you a cheque. You start by giving me the list of who saw whom do what at the Harmony.”

We were both in the middle of writing when a black shadow loomed against the door and Merv barged into the office, without knocking.

“Whoa,” he said, “you sure know how to get yourself in deep doo-doo.”

“Why, Merv, how poetic.”

He shrugged, “If you got it, flaunt it.”

“Why am I in doo-doo?”

“Well,” he said, lowering himself into a visitor’s chair and giving Alvin a nasty look, “a couple of reasons.”

I nodded to encourage him.

Merv was still narrowing his eyes at Alvin.

“Alvin,” I said, “you’ve been working pretty hard. Why don’t you take a little break, get some air?”

Alvin picked up his half-written list, slithered past Merv and vanished out the door.

“Gives me the creeps,” Merv said.

“Merv, Merv, you’ve got to learn to broaden your horizons.

It’s a whole new world out there.”