Speak Ill of the Dead. Mary Jane Maffini
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.”
“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