The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  I walked around to the back to see if someone might have seen anything: nothing but another infinite white harvest. Not even a gravel road in the distance to throw a crease in it. In the summer perchance a gopher with binoculars would have seen the scene unfold.

  17

  Chief and I sat in a German bakery on the main drag a few minutes before it closed, nursing coffees, hogging a table by the single electrical outlet, and waiting for my phone to charge. I was going to have to track down the historian who had pestered Whisper for an interview and ultimately coaxed it out of him. Mitzi didn’t remember his name. It was the historian who was pestering, so there would have been a fusillade of incoming calls from the crackpot to the Mars’s home phone, nothing that showed up in phone records. Mitzi’s info, a university professor in Regina who was a hockey historian, gave me something to work with: I Google-searched hockey, history, research, regina , saskatchewan, university , and sundry other terms. The search yielded nothing useful. I tried to see what I could find in university calendars online. No one teaching a (Mark-Inflating) History of the Rinks course. Not a sniff. Picking out someone who would fit the profile should be like picking out Waldo from the team picture. The professor remained emeritus from the investigation.

  I called my local back in the east end of Toronto, the Merry Widow. Nick answered. The proprietor was in his usual good mood.

  “You know you left a tab here last time,” he said.

  I did and I knew he was going to mention it. I asked him if he had seen Dave Pal around. Pal didn’t exactly stand out in the crowd. He was a guy of average height, average weight, a bit better than average head of a bit more than average grey hair, a bit thicker than average glasses. He was easier to hear than spot. Pal was the bar’s resident hockey history maven. Fact is, he wasn’t just knowledgeable but zealous about it. Who else puts on exhibitions of feats of memory by reciting the lineup of the Kenora Thistles’ Cup-winning team? When I’m in the house for such momentous though unbidden demonstrations I get my nose out of the glass and heckle something like, “Hey Herodotus, exactly what did you do during the war?” Such points of real history are lost on Pal, who’s the foreman on the afternoon shift at the Lever Brothers plant. He had sought out the company of other bores by taking out a membership with AHHP, the Association of Hockey Historians and Preservationists. I didn’t have much time for Pal. I’d never really forgiven him for ratting out my number and email to one of his cronies, who filled my voicemail with bended-knee requests for an interview for a research paper he was putting together on Montreal’s last Cup winners, otherwise known as My Shining Moment.

  “Dave’s at the end of the bar,” Nick told me. I had factored in the two-hour time difference and knew Pal would be there. “I’ll give him the phone but don’t tie up the line too long. There might be people phoning in for reservations.”

  “Always a first time,” I said.

  I could never have imagined that this day would come, but I actually needed Pal. If anyone was going to know about a guy who was obsessed with hockey history, it was bound to be someone likewise disturbed.

  “Hey Shadow,” Pal said with unearned intimacy. “You still out West?”

  He was proud to possess knowledge of my whereabouts. I got down to business but kept my fingerprints off my intentions. “Yeah,” I said. “I was just wondering. I heard that there’s a guy, probably a member of AHHP …”

  I said it like he always did: ap, rhymes with crap.

  “… who was doing something on the L.A. and Edmonton series back in ’92. Guy in Regina. A professor or something. Does that sound familiar?”

  It did. “Sounds like Stu Gowan, but I don’t know that he’s a professor,” Pal said. “That would be pushing it. He’s an instructor at a community college there. I’m not sure what he’s an instructor of. I never spent too much time with him. Not real popular with the other members.”

  Sounded like the geek who the geeks didn’t like. Not especially intrigued, I plunged ahead anyway.

  “So do you know anything about what he wants to do with the L.A. and Edmonton series?”

  “Yeah,” Pal said. “He wants to make a movie out of it. The last meeting he was shooting his mouth off about it. ‘The story needs to be told,’ he was saying. There’s some good stuff. Y’know, John B. Harris’s curtain call, Hunts’s breakthrough, Mars’s big goal, the broken stick and the disappearance and everything.”

  Paydirt.

  Five minutes later, a Google search and my winning streak hit two. Like Dave Pal had said, Gowan wasn’t quite the academic he made himself out to be. He was an instructor at a community college, basic bookkeeping, closer to high school than university level. Doubtless he felt compelled to have time enough to dedicate himself to hockey history so he maintained part-time status. His number was listed.

  It figured it wouldn’t take much to wind up the Good Professor.

  “Dr. Gowan,” I started, “my name is Brad Shade. I’m in Swift Current for the funeral of my old teammate Martin Mars. Martin’s widow told me that he was working with you on a project about our team back in ’92.”

  It was a dangle that caught him leaning the wrong way. He struggled to keep his skates under him. “Yes, correct,” he said, affecting an ivory tower decorum that must draw laughs from the C students in the back row of his classes. “Martin and I were close. It’s just another tragic point in a complex story …”

  He kept on. When it came to his sense of narrative, it was clear he was a number cruncher, not an artist.

  “Professor Gowan, I’d like to help out. It’s terrible that Martin won’t be able to and I know he’d have liked to have seen the project through to completion.”

  He couldn’t conceal his shock at this unexpected stroke of good fortune: I was volunteering with enthusiasm for something that Whisper had to be dragged into and seemed to regret after the fact.

  “I’d be honoured,” he said. “I’m sure it would have been what Martin wanted.”

  Bullshit.

  “I’m going to be in Saskatchewan for a day or two, ” I said. “Would you like to meet up?”

  “I’m sure that I can clear some time,” he said. Weeks, probably.

  We set up a time that night when I hoped to catch up to my luggage at the Hotel Saskatchewan. Just as I was about to sign off I heard the beep of another call coming in and bade the Professor a quick adieu.

  “Hello,” I said. It was the last word I got in.

  “You need to leave town. You and Geronimo.”

  A heavy breath followed and then a click. I checked caller ID. Unknown. I tried to think of a way that the bikers had tracked down my number. The easy answer: They shook it out of the motel owner. They had done a lot worse in their lives and I figured they were a legitimate risk to do a lot worse to us. They’d already kicked the shit out of us in a bar fight, so I couldn’t figure out why they would want to raise the stakes and stalk us. Did they mistake us for someone else? Did they imagine we were working for someone? In the end, it didn’t matter. No good reason and no bad one would make the threat feel any less real.

  “Wrong number,” I said to Chief. I didn’t want to have to find money in the scouting budget for danger pay.

  18

  It seemed like Martin’s demise might be good news for Old Man Hanley. If Hanley was in the bidding for the deal with Garageland Canada, he’d have one less significant rival with Whisper out of the way. If there had been any sort of professional animosity, it would go a long way to explain why No. 51’s mouth watered when I rang the Pavlovian bell, the mention of Whisper’s name.

  It was the stroke of five. Hanley’s simple storefront offices were where Mitzi had indicated, just up from the drive-through exit, where the locals drove into this cold town with a cruller in one hand, a coffee in the other, and the steering wheel between their knees. The lights were on.

  We hadn’t let Mitzi know about our first brush with the old bastard. I had to get a face-to-face with him, som
ething we could keep on the down low from the widow. I stopped at Mark’s Work Wearhouse to get a white shirt that might offer a patina of respectability or at least distract a receptionist from the rumpled jacket over it.

  The matron who took Hanley’s calls and tracked his appointments looked like his work wife, dedicated, long-suffering, unnoticed, ignored. Her hair and skin and manner were as grey as a February sunset in Swift Current. Her glasses had gone out of style five years before. She didn’t know or didn’t care or actually embraced the notion that they made her beady-eyed.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, walking up to her desk. “My BlackBerry died on me and it’s gone to a better place.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, who is it you’re looking for?” she asked.

  “Mr. Hanley. I should be down there if you look,” I said. “Bradley Shade from Petro Tech.”

  No downward glance. “I’m afraid there’s nothing in his daybook,” she said.

  “I know that he spoke to one of our junior representatives at a trade show,” I said. “Damn, I have a new girl. She assured me that this was all looked after. My secretary had to go on long-term medical leave. Carpal tunnel.”

  I was sure that a few more head fakes and dropped names were going to get me into the office but they weren’t necessary.

  The door cracked open. “Dot, get David for me,” Old Man Hanley said.

  “Mr. Hanley, there’s …,” she said and then stalled out. She feared both bothering him if I was a nobody and offending me if I was a somebody.

  Anything less than an instant “Yessir” wasn’t going to sit well with him. “Dot, I said …,” he grumbled and stuck his head out the door. He saw me and then figured out where our ships had passed the previous night. We both got our snarls up.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he said. “Dot, call the RCMP. This man is trespassing.”

  “Whoa, tiger. I’m just here to invite you to Martin Mars’s funeral. I’m the social coordinator for the Widow Mars. I just figured you’d want to be there. I feel awful about our little misunderstanding last night. I guess I was stricken with grief.”

  This was mostly for Dot’s benefit, although provoking Hanley was as fun as getting dealt both bowers and the trump ace in a hand of euchre.

  “Cut the crap, sonny. I don’t know what your game is but you’d better scram before I have you removed forcibly.”

  “I’ll leave when I’m ready. I just wanted to breathe the same air as someone as lucky as you, a guy whose chief competitor decides all of a sudden to jump out of a plane without a chute. Seemed to work out pretty well for you. Convenient.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He was among the most unconvincing liars I had ever met and I had the acquaintance of hundreds of coaches, general managers, agents, reporters, and players whose alarm clocks failed to ring in time to get to morning practice.

  “I’m interested to know where you were Saturday night and Sunday morning.”

  “None of your business.”

  “It should be the Mounties’ business, though.”

  “If it is I’m sure that they’ll take it up with me. But they haven’t and won’t.”

  “It’s a small town. There are only a few rocks I have to look under. The first one I looked under I found your idiot son.”

  There was no chance that he’d think I was insulting No. 59. It was pretty clear who the idiot was in the pairing.

  “Dot, dial 911.”

  “That won’t be necessary. I’ll see myself out. I’ll also see my way back in at some point.”

  I wasn’t done with Hanley, just done for now. I scrammed but before I did I glanced at the mantel by Hanley’s office door. An eight-by-ten glossy of two football players, Nos. 51 and 59, an imperfect match. Yeah, that swinging dick at the I and the wounded kid at the sports clinic, living proof that everything good comes into the world with a corresponding evil. With the number Chief did on 51’s beak you’d have been able to tell them apart when their football sweaters were in the wash.

  19

  Chief was getting restless but doing his best not to show it. I told him we just had a couple of stops to make and then we could get back to Regina.

  First stop: the Living Sky Casino. I buttonholed a bartender there. I had a beer and Chief a soda water that he barely touched. He’d had so much coffee we were going to have to make three pit stops on the trip back to Regina. The bartender’s name was Ray and, to be blunt, his clientele was like the Merry Widow’s. Homo intoxicus was elbow to elbow with Homo emptipocketus. They had been there since lunch. Ray was going to have another bad night.

  I asked Ray if he knew Martin Mars. He did. Like bartenders everywhere, he had a natural rumple that bonded him with the usual supplicants. Like bartenders everywhere, he talked to strangers. Like bartenders everywhere, he seemed to talk freely but also gave the impression of knowing more than he was telling.

  “Marty would order drinks and I could hardly hear him over this racket,” Ray told me. He had a booming voice, all bass, no treble, but I had a hard time hearing him over the white noise from the floor. The slots seemed to pay off in sound, not cold, hard cash. Those lining the craps table yelled, begging their money to jump back in their pockets. The roulette wheel spun with the ball rolling like it was chasing Harrison Ford in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The only silence was found along the bar, where the wounded were self-anaesthetizing before they had to either explain or cover up their losses.

  “Was he a hard drinker then?” I shouted.

  “Didn’t ever have more than a beer,” said Ray distractedly, as he searched for his lighter in advance of his scheduled smoke break. “He bought other people drinks and sat there nursing a ginger ale listening to them.”

  “He didn’t go to the tables?”

  “He played the five-dollar blackjack table over there,” he said, pointing ten o’clock from his post. A woman manned the table, high mileage, with blond hair, black-and-grey roots, and black-and-yellow bags under empty eyes. She was standing across from our dancing partners from the night before at the I and the probable source of the subsequent threatening phone calls, Butch and Sundance. I had a better look at them than I’d had during the previous evening’s festivities: They were wearing vintage black leather vests, and the crest sewn on the back announced them as Loners. They wore heavy-metal T-shirts, Iron Crosses, and neither cologne nor deodorant. They were banged up, but not as bad as Chief and me. They were getting too old for this stuff, like Chief and me. Unlike Chief and me, they were in full denial of this fact.

  Butch and Sundance were the only players at her table, but the dealer didn’t seem to mind. She engaged them in small talk and laughed. So desperate for attention, I figured, she had long ceased to care about the source.

  “You don’t throw out guys wearing colours?” I asked Ray.

  Ray explained to us that these days leather with their patches carried about as much weight as a Montreal Maroons sweater, Allegiances to the Long Gone. “They don’t ride anymore. They were in jail for a long stretch and had their bikes taken off them by the cops and put up for auction. Poor fuckers, when they got out of jail they found that the Loners didn’t exist anymore. They fell in with the Angels and these boys were on the outs. No friends left. New generation, I guess.”

  I knew all about obsolescence but didn’t go into it. I watched the dealer wave over a girl to have her drop comp drinks for the Rebels Without a Club. “She seems to have tamed them,” I said. “I can’t see her and Martin Mars, though.”

  “Nah, Marty just talked to her. Five bucks a hand until he went bust. He bought a couple of drinks before for one or two of the guys. And then he’d wait until there was no one sitting at the table and he’d go over and play.”

  “Always the same?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In a good mood, down mood, pleasant, businesslike, whatever.”

  “Look at what I look at all night,” Ray
said. I scanned the bar and his point was made. “He was happier than these guys. I mean, I’m taking care of them, but whenever I’d look over it seemed like he was concentrating hard. He talked to her while she was dealing. She’d space the hands out so long as it was just him and not people waiting. And if he ever won, which I think he did once or twice, he’d tip her big. Any money he brought he left here, one way or another.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Fern.”

  I hit the ATM. I took out two hundred dollars and balled up the receipt so that I wouldn’t accidentally look at the balance.

  Fern Maclean had a smoker’s sallow complexion, and the overdone eyelashes, liner, and makeup gave her raccoon eyes. Her hands were bare of any jewelled ornamentation, densely veined, and skeletally thin. She had led a hard life. In another town she might get a job in a casino but they’d hide her in the back. In Swift Current there were no lookers to bump her from her gig. Anyone with looks had a ticket out of town.

  I sat at her table. Chief didn’t bother to come over. I busted. I won with 17. I lost with 18. I lobbed her a softball.

  “Marty Mars used to play here, didn’t he?”

  “I could always count on him,” she said. “He was like you. He didn’t have a system either, unless you count playing hunches.”

  She said it with an effortless stone face. She was street smart and she liked to show it. She wasn’t long on emotion and didn’t feel obliged to apologize for it.

  “I’m a friend of Marty’s. I played with him in L.A. I’m just trying to help out his missus to see what was going on with him. I guess you know he died …”