The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  “Suicide,” she said. “I heard. That’s too bad.” Broken up she wasn’t. I pretended she was.

  “Yeah, he was troubled,” I said. “He’d have to be to do something like that. I’m just wondering if you saw something, anything.” I slid a fifty-dollar bill across the table. She pocketed it and thawed a little.

  “Marty was a good guy. I’ll miss him. I mean, his coming here helped break up my shift. And I’d tell him about my problems. I’ve had a few …”

  Too easy to believe.

  “… and he’d listen. He didn’t say much. But a change in him before he did what he did? No, I didn’t see anything at all. Same Marty.”

  “I got to ask, was there ever anything between you two?”

  “The table, the cards, and a short stack that shrivelled quickly,” she said, letting me know that by her reckoning she’d given me fifty dollars’ worth. “No, really, he wasn’t my type.” Her words were pretty chilly. She made it sound like Whisper wasn’t her blood type.

  20

  Chief was letting the Bug warm up in the casino parking lot. We waited for the windshield to defrost. I called Harry Friesen at home. The accountant picked up on the second ring. I asked him to look for any irregularities in the books, anything that had changed over the last two or three months. He was ready to take this as a personal insult, as if nothing irregular could have slipped by him.

  “Nothing improper, just any sort of change, even the slightest thing,” I said and told Friesen that whatever the cost of his time Mitzi would cover it. He told me that he’d give it a look overnight. He said he owed it to his favourite client and would call me in the morning. He was onside.

  Just as we were going to pull out I saw Butch and Sundance file out of the casino. Sundance was limping, only his heel touching the pavement, his ankle locked. He hadn’t been limping when he bull-rushed me the night before, not when he beat a fast retreat either. I watched them shoehorn themselves into the front seat of a black Hummer. I put it at being a couple of years old, but even so it would have been beyond the means of those two if they were trying to earn an honest buck. Evidently, they weren’t concerned with trying to stay inconspicuous. More likely they were advertising their bad intentions.

  21

  I went back by the hospital. The old bat at reception gave me a cold look. My photo was probably pinned to a bulletin board in the security department and I was atop the list of emergencywing pests that were to be ushered back out into the cold. She paged Dr. Goto on the intercom, and after a twelve-second conversation on line one she pointed me to the hallway.

  “What room …,” I started to ask.

  “Just keep walking,” she said, as if she would have been happier pointing me to the exit.

  I walked down the hall and at the end of it Dr. Goto popped out.

  “Oh, Mr. …”

  “Shade, Brad Shade. Call me Brad.”

  “Okay, Brad, I did get a chance to look at the results.”

  “And …”

  “The blood work was inconsistent with carbon monoxide.”

  My look was that of a D student in a remedial grade nine science class.

  “Carbon monoxide binds with hemoglobin. It’s exponentially more likely to bind with hemoglobin. And carbon monoxide wasn’t present at all. Not even at the level that you’d see with a living patient who’s an occasional smoker. There was a minute presence consistent with someone …”

  “… who had worked in a closed area around cars with fumes?”

  “That and any number of conditions, I suppose.”

  “So he didn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “That’s not my determination to make.”

  “Okay, if it’s just us talking and this is unofficial. If it was up to you.”

  “There’s nothing approaching lethal doses of carbon monoxide present in the testing results.”

  “Any possible mix-up?”

  “Well, a confusion in the possession, mislabelling, clerical error. Never say never, but no, I called the labs and spoke with someone there who double-checked for me.”

  “Okay, so your unofficial, purely hypothetical position would be that the chances of a mistake are approaching zero,” I said helpfully. “He died of something else.”

  “If that was my determination to make, that would be the determination I would make.”

  “And any idea what the cause of death would have been?”

  She went through her dance about her job and a pathologist or coroner being in a better position and more qualified to make the determination. I was going to interrupt her when she mentioned the coroner. He might have been in a better position, but I’d have bet his medical background was limited to rudimentary workplace first aid.

  Finally she came out with it.

  She told me what had shown up in Whisper’s blood. Lethal. Readily available. Impossible to trace for purchase. Rat poison. Cyanide. That was the purplish tinge.

  A minute later I caught up to Chief in the parking lot. Chief had kept the Bug running the whole time. The low rumble and the exhaust billowing out of the tailpipe had my mind racing, imagining the scene behind the garage that night. Whisper strapped in the front seat with the motor running, Whisper slowly dying, Whisper already dead when the key in the ignition was turned.

  22

  Dr. Hodges’s number and address were listed and I cold-called him in person rather than on the phone. I imagined that he screened his calls. I also imagined him busying himself about the house with chores and his wife’s upkeep. The way Dr. Goto had laid it out, his wife was near bedridden with a bad back and a variety of arthritic ailments. Moreover, for reasons that she never explained to him, she hadn’t left their house for almost three years even prior to the onset of her joints’ violent protests. Arthritis and anxiety were one hell of a daily double.

  We arrived to see a promising sign: The doctor’s Volvo was parked in the driveway of a comfortable but hardly ostentatious split-level. I went up their plowed path and left Chief in the Bug, where he watched powerlessly as a bunch of kids pelted the windshield with a fusillade of snowballs.

  I knocked on the door. Nothing. I waited thirty seconds and knocked again. I heard a small rumble inside, signs of life. One more knock at another half-minute interval got Dr. Hodges to the door. He had a determined and austere leanness, starting with a flat stomach and running right through to a grey moustache trimmed to pencil narrowness. He exercised self-control so that he could preach it.

  “Yes, can I help you?” he said, giving me a look from head to toes and back and judging me an unfortunate case if not an unsavoury one, a drop-in patient who was coming down with something, coming down with everything.

  “I hope so.”

  “I’m unfortunately very busy. I can’t invite you in right now. Can you call back later?”

  “Dr. Goto at the hospital sent me. I need your help. And I need your help quickly or an injustice might happen.”

  I tried to push all the right buttons in one breath. Dr. Goto represented a referral and a first pass through screening. The necessity of his help was a play for a sympathetic reaction from a man in a sympathetic business and also a stroke of his ego, the implication being that his expertise left him uniquely qualified to help. Of course it worked.

  “Go on.”

  And I did. I explained to him that I was calling about the death of Martin Mars, which the RCMP was treating as a suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. I explained what Dr. Goto had turned up in her slightly more than cursory lab work, wholly at odds with the Mounties’ theory about the death. I explained some other curious circumstances, such as the seat belt, the cassette player, and the behaviour of the victim in the days and weeks leading up to the death. And, saving my biggest swing, I told him that his successor as coroner in the jurisdiction had decided not to order an autopsy.

  “I was worried that something like this might happen,” the doctor said. He couldn’t be bothered to hide his low opi
nion of Daulton. “I can make a phone call to my successor but I can’t overrule him.”

  “Can you call the provincial coroner’s office? Would that get him off the mark?”

  “Better not to do that as the first salvo fired,” the doctor said and I knew he was right. Better to be clinical with this sort of thing, better not to get emotional with a guy who seemed more of a bureaucrat than a law-enforcement officer, and better to gently offer sage counsel to a guy striving to serve the public in a role that found him completely over his head.

  “Can you see if the Mounties will go back over the scene?” I asked him. “Just a nudge in that direction for Daulton. Once the toxicology report is filed. The station has been in lockdown. I have a key to it.”

  I didn’t mention that I had been out there and worked my own casual search. I didn’t mention that I had turned the coffee off. I didn’t mention that I had seen the Ravens cup in the trash. If anything came back in the toxicology report they were going to be doubling back and doing a more intensive search.

  “I’ll do what I can,” the doctor said. I sensed that he was energized by the call to action once more.

  I thanked him, though maybe too quickly.

  “It has been a few years since we had a homicide out here,” the doctor said, a comment on the improbability of one blowing into Swift Current with me, and also a comment about his former position, which had been slightly more than honorary and nothing less than dormant.

  I asked him to humour me. “Oh, and don’t tell him that we talked,” I said. It was an important request, though one that didn’t enhance my credibility. I had to hope that he didn’t take me for a crank and I couldn’t be sure.

  Just at that point, I heard a woman calling from what I presumed was a bedroom in the back of the house.

  “I won’t,” he said. “Frankly, I’m not sure you’re aware of this, but you didn’t tell me your name.”

  Once I gave Dr. Hodges my phone number and email address my business in Swift Current was done, at least for that day. I had other transactions to look after in other places.

  23

  Chief and I checked back in with Mitzi. I told her, truthfully, that I had a couple of things to do back in Regina, foremost among them being reunited with my suitcase and my computer. I didn’t tell her that I’d be relieved to look in my rear-view mirror and see a town overpopulated with supposed good guys and well-established bad guys who would mess us up and even do us physical harm.

  Chief’s Jeep wasn’t going to be ready for at least another day, but that was something we’d have to work out later. The Bug went from being the most conspicuous car in Swift to the slowest on the Trans-Canada. The gutless shitbox didn’t even meet the limit full bore. Under the speed limit was fine by me anyway. The road was messy. The traffic was heavy, a lot of transports desperately trying to make up for a day lost to Highway 1’s closure the previous night.

  We were a half hour on the road back to Regina when I told Chief to take the exit ramp. He rolled his eyes. We had practically a full tank of gas at this point. I had used the washroom at Mitzi’s. Chief knew I wanted to pull over for a piece of business. He probably had a sinking feeling when he saw the sign on the road: HERBERT NEXT EXIT.

  We rolled past the two service stations at the end of the ramp. The larger one was a Mars Gas station. The lesser was a ramshackle independent gas seller who probably had his pumps rigged.

  “Go straight,” I said. “Give me five minutes.”

  We would have had four minutes to spare if we were just going to take in the sights in beautiful downtown Herbert, the one short block of it. The retail hub was dark: a greasy spoon, a Chinese restaurant, and a Salvation Army second-hand store. The town’s memory bank was boarded up: a museum with a joyous mural that had been painted by high-schoolers on its brick side. The one light on the main drag came from the Herbert Herald headquarters, established in 1885, which would have been the era when Herbert was last a thriving community. I told Chief to pull over. “You can keep it running,” I said, vouchsafing my intent to keep it short.

  The newsroom was humming. Actually, the one lonely staffer was humming distractedly to fill in the words to a song he half-remembered. He had his back to me and was focused on the screen of a pre-millennium computer. He was engrossed in a write-up of bridge-club results. He tore a page of the Herbert’s current newsstand edition into tiny pieces, folded them into bite-size squares, and chewed them instead of gum. He didn’t hear me come in the door.

  “Excuse me,” I said and the guy almost fell out of his chair, choking down his pulpy wad. “I was wondering if you could help me.”

  “Our offices close at five,” he said, either oblivious to the fact that it was after the close of business or resigned to the reality that there was nowhere better to go. “Give us a call in the morning.”

  I was trying to picture the other person who would have made this an “us” operation. A two-dollar bet on the chances of this unlucky soul both writing for and delivering the Herald would have paid $2.80.

  A second after he tried to blow me off, he determined that I wasn’t there to be blown off. Scoop came up to the counter. His hair was unruly, even arbitrary, curled, matted, dirty, and colourless, like a size seven-and-a-half dustball. Everything he wore was five years old, maybe ten, and machine washable except for the boots that hiked his Dockers up to his shins. Coming out of community college, he had been told that he was going to need the real-life hands-on work experience that a small-town weekly offered. It had probably been the other person who made appearances in the newsroom, the proprietor, who had told him that. And that would have been when Scoop’s Dockers weren’t faded and stained and his dream of Big-City Glory didn’t have holes in its knees.

  “A friend of mine died Sunday …”

  He pulled a card out of his desk drawer. “Here are our rates for death notices,” he said. “The people at the funeral home in Swift usually take care of that for you.”

  I inhaled and made a supreme effort to will up patience. I glanced around the newsroom. On its walls were cheaply mounted pages from notable events across history. The most recent one was in the year of my birth. The front page that day had been given over to a photo of the ribbon cutting for the town’s centennial project, the Herbert Museum, with a mayor wearing a sash and a scissors-wielding girl in a swimsuit modest enough for Bible camp.

  “I’m not here about a death notice. My friend died in Swift Current. He grew up in Herbert. I was just wondering if you could help me track down anybody who knew him.”

  “I know most folks in town,” he said, as if this were a bragging point.

  “His name was Martin Mars,” I said, and then I spilled out the thumbnail biography, ending with the fact that, as far as his widow knew, he had grown up in Herbert.

  “Yup,” Scoop said with the authority of the chronicler of Herbert history as it unfolded. “That would have been the original Mars Gas station that you passed coming off the highway. There’s a plaque up in the diner that says the business was founded there back in the ’70s. I don’t know the family …”

  “Martin’s parents died more than a decade ago.”

  “I can ask around for you.”

  I was sure he could fit it into his busy schedule. I was also sure that he would turn it into an item for the Herald’s next edition. I gave him my number and email and the details for the funeral. He said he would be in touch.

  Chief didn’t bother asking me how it went. He pulled away wordlessly and I didn’t bother to point out the original link in the Mars chain out by the Trans-Canada.

  “No more stops,” I said. “I promise.” And we were good.

  24

  The rest of the drive back to Regina wasn’t triumphant, but Chief and I couldn’t have been happier if we’d been in the lead convertible in the Cup parade. Chief didn’t even mind when I nodded off for an hour. The most important thing to Chief was the prospect of sleeping in his own bed. It was ten o’clo
ck when we got back to Regina. Chief would be tucked in for the night at ten fifteen. He was going to tell his missus nothing about our overnight detention. He pre-empted questions with fictions. That welt where the skull ring had landed, that was a fall on the ice in Mitzi’s driveway. His exhaustion, that was a by-product of my snoring like a chainsaw. He would strip down when she was out of the room so that she wouldn’t see the bruises, the biggest being where Butch had cracked the chair over his back.

  I spun my own story. En route I had phoned Stu Gowan and told the Good Professor that I had a couple of loose ends to tie up, players to go talk to, coaches to meet, before we could sit down and fill in the blanks on his study of the life and times of Martin Mars. I was buying myself time. I told Gowan that I’d meet him at quarter after ten at an internet café that was open 24 hours. I had nothing to do other than check in at the Hotel Saskatchewan and check in with Hunts to let him know that I had fulfilled our team’s obligation, such as it was, to the Widow Mars. Then I’d hose off a couple of days of sweat and grit.

  The internet café was down the street from the Hotel Saskatchewan. I knew what the scene would be and that he, in a slight upgrade from Scoop’s packaging, would be the least funky thing in there. The staff and clientele would be pale, thin-wristed Donnie Darkos dressed in black and starved Nancy Noires whose parents were appalled by their piercings and tattoos. These would be kids the Good Professor passed in the halls of the school every day, oblivious to their snickers. Gamers would be on the computers, wielding machine guns and throwing grenades on generic war-strewn streets that were still more interesting than the ones where they lived. The music would be some gawdawful shrieking, some shaven-headed woman, I imagined.

  I was able to spot the AHHP’s Black Sheep from the sidewalk. He was sitting in a window seat and wore style-free cords tucked into his boots and an unpatterned and unravelling sweater that might have been bohemian on someone else but just messy on him. He waved me over to his table and we exchanged pleasantries. Even my feigned enthusiasm couldn’t match his genuine excitement. He opened his laptop. He positioned it directly between us. To him it was a thin, hard plastic conduit through which my elemental experience would flow and achieve immortality on his screen and, if his fondest delusions came true, on the big screen too.