The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  “I want it like this,” she said.

  As is my nature I was eager to please.

  She stood up and grabbed me by the wrist and led me to the long vertical mirror that was near the short hall to the door. She liked to watch, she said.

  She bent at the waist and pushed her ass in the air and leaned against the wall with hands on either side of the mirror. She had ink, a representation of the f-holes of a violin down in the small of her back. She looked in the mirror and into my eyes as I went deep inside her. She closed her eyes and bit her lip and her head whiplashed in a machine-gun rhythm. In the hallway I could hear young voices, stoned voices, not kids, too late for that, but a metal band that was crossing the Prairies in a van. And laughter. It didn’t matter. They weren’t going to keep us up.

  I held her tight by her waist. I could see her rib cage swelling with each deep breath. I looked at her face. And I looked at mine. I had done mirrors before. Mirrored ceiling in Vegas even. But I had not done mirrors in a long time.

  I looked at her in the mirror and listened to her voice. I hadn’t recognized her at the bar, and even when she dropped the bomb I didn’t know whether to believe it. I did at that moment, though, when she started making noise. In her reflection I saw her teenage face accessorized by her adult life in between. I liked what I saw in that face, but not mine looking back at me. I looked older than I expected, older than I liked. Lined face, softer body. I wasn’t aging as well as she was. Leaving the light on didn’t seem like such a good idea after all.

  I was somewhere between H.G. Wells’s Time Machine and “Letters to Penthouse.”

  “I thought of you all the time,” she said, looking back at me in the mirror, “like this.”

  I made it last as long as I could. On this count awkwardness was a benefit. And when I finally crossed the goal line and caught my breath, I choked trying to find something to fill the silence. “I couldn’t help myself when I saw you again,” I said. It was true as far as it went. I’m trying to remember a time when I could help myself.

  TWO AND A HALF DECADES: There was no catching up all of it in our pillow talk. I turned off the lights in the room, a forgiving darkness. We were illuminated only by the washroom light that I had left on. She had her back to it. She was a silhouette beside me. I could feel her hot breath on me. When she closed in I could feel her pulse.

  She was strategic for a moment. She picked her words. “Funny, I’ve gone to that bar for years,” she said. “That’s where I met my ex. A Revenue Canada convention. And when the divorce was final, that’s where I celebrated.”

  Funny, that she did. Funny, that she’d go where we met and had a night that we thought about thousands of times thousands of miles apart. Funny, that she’d go and not know she was looking for that something.

  I wasn’t going to go cosmic on her. I confessed. I had her address all those years ago. I had never dropped a letter down the Culver Mail Delivery System or in a mailbox. I had taken her phone number with me and never called. I knew how hollow cosmic would sound. It was physical before and physical again. We were better sweating than trying to sweat truth out of each other. We were better straining for it than for answers. The sheets were wet but not with tears. No tears, ever.

  I had taken her address and phone number all those years ago, but now I couldn’t for all my trying remember her last name. When she went to the bathroom to take her contacts out I rifled through her purse and found her business card: Donna Bodnar. It didn’t sound familiar. Might have been that she stuck with her ex’s name. I didn’t know and didn’t ask. I dropped the card in my shoe at the side of the bed.

  She shut the bathroom door behind her. She had seen everything up to that point clearly enough, but with her lenses in too long she decided she could use her imagination the rest of the way.

  “It’s going to be a long morning,” she said at 4 A.M. “But it’s worth it.” The present tense: the indirect promise of more. She kept it.

  Between her held breaths, between her oh yeahs, between her glances into the mirror, years tumbled out. She had gone to law school hoping to become a court crusader and only finding out late in the day that she felt more comfortable on a squash court. She had taken a government job at a pay scale befitting her sheepskin. Two loveless marriages left her with regrets. She regretted marrying a guy who had played a bit of hockey but didn’t make it to junior, a trend of watery failure that tracked through his life off the ice. Most of all, she regretted that she hadn’t gone into divorce practice.

  I started to tell her what I had gone on to do after that night following the tournament. She stopped me. She knew and she told me all that she knew.

  She was a grown-up and I liked that. She wanted no apologies and she gave none.

  “I had your address too,” she said.

  I HAD SLEPT MORE in the holding pen with Chief than I did in the Hotel Saskatchewan that night. I spent more time that night in front of a mirror than I had getting fitted for every suit I’d ever owned. She told me that she was going to have to get up early to go home for a change of clothes. She didn’t want to use a sick day, not after being out with her lapdogs. People would talk.

  I looked out the window. It was 6 A.M. so I rang room service and ordered breakfast. Twenty minutes later, when we both staggered over to the mirror again, I heard a door knock. I told the young guy pushing the cart that I needed a minute but took at least ten more. Afterwards, I went to the door in the bathrobe that hung in the closet. Only then did I realize that all our thrashing had been a no-cover, no-minimum, Amsterdamworthy live show for passersby, a full five hours of it. When I had thrown her on the bed I had left the door open. It didn’t bother me as much as her mirror fetish.

  I signed for our meal. She ate her bacon with her fingers, like it was crispy strips of me. We made promises to each other. I didn’t know if she intended to keep hers and I didn’t know if I’d keep mine.

  I watched her shower and then I watched her dress while I did the same. I had no reason to get such an early start but did so out of consideration and admiration for her. I walked her to the sidewalk and flagged her a cab. The wind hit us as if a chill of twenty-five years of distance between us was picking up where it had left off.

  And then I felt a fist crack the back of my head. It was the sensation of a restraining order being violated.

  “Oh for fuck sakes,” she said. “I’m calling the police.”

  Gasoline, meet Fire. Her ex-husband was in my weight class, but a night of parking outside the Hotel Saskatchewan had taken a bit of sting out of his best shot. It had staggered me but not come close to dropping me. I turned and he wound up for a second swing. The old doorman at the Hotel Saskatchewan’s main entrance stepped outside just in time to see the ex-husband dropping, his back hitting the sidewalk and crunching the salt, his head disappearing into a snowbank. His eyes were wide open and focused on the stars the other side of the clouds. His chest was heaving, though.

  She summoned the cops. She told me to beat it. She didn’t want me to get involved. I was going to be an innocent bystander who’d decided not to stand by any longer than necessary.

  “I knew …,” she started to say but ran out of words.

  I raised my right hand and gave her the stop signal. “Don’t,” I said. “Just call me later so I know you’re okay.”

  “I’ll be okay,” she said.

  I looked over at her ex. He had turned on his side but was no threat to get up. “That’s the thing about divorces,” I said. “They’re never final.”

  I gave the doorman twenty and then another. He hadn’t seen anything. And he had seen her before.

  Sex and violence: I recommend the Hotel Saskatchewan.

  2

  I sat in the window of a coffee shop down the street from the hotel, nursed a decaf, and waited for my pulse to clock down. I saw a couple of college students, a smiling Girl You Bring Home to Mother in a bushy fur hat and a lanky Fair-Haired but Bed-Headed Guy, walking by the
window, her huddled inside his down jacket, both of them laughing. This was their glorious present and I envied it, but my jealousy was tempered with the knowledge that one day they’d recall a time when they were undefeated and made the mistake of believing that they were undefeatable.

  I thought about the past. It was never behind you. I saw the cruiser pull up and two officers asking Donna questions and her ex raising himself out of the snow, though his ass was still on the pavement. They cuffed him even though he was in no shape to resist. They offered him a ride to the police station. They insisted. She looked down the street when the cruiser pulled away. She looked but couldn’t see me. It was an awful look. I felt for her in an entirely different way.

  Before I could work up any sympathy for a guy whose life was going to get more miserable and more expensive, my BlackBerry pinged. It was Sandy calling from her office. In defiance of my nature I managed to feel awful.

  “You sound exhausted. Are you as bad as you sound?”

  I answered the query the way she offered it and reassured her that, no, I was probably not quite that bad. I told her, yeah, I was tired, rundown, and probably coming down with a bad case of something. I didn’t tell her that it was a bad case of conscience. She’d always cautioned me about the dangers of self-diagnosis.

  “Up all night,” I said. Technically true.

  I told her the plans for the day or days ahead. “I’m doing it for her,” I said, her being Mitzi. “She’s in a bad way and wants some answers. And something is wrong about the whole thing. I owe it to Whisper. I’m just trying to do the right thing.”

  It must have been the full catalogue of wrong things that made me less than convincing. She didn’t bother with Socratic questioning or cross-examination. She went straight to thesis and verdict and expressed her displeasure.

  “I had to call you,” she said. “You didn’t think to call me. You know that I worry about you out there. And you just send a text, not even a voicemail. A text. That’s not how you treat someone you love. Respect, concern …”

  She rhymed off items for a shopping list for the next time I went to the supermarket to pick up a personality. Or maybe she was dictating a personal ad she was planning to place.

  Her goodbye was not final, just rote, somehow worse than final. I tried to believe that it was just Sandy having a bad day at the office. That didn’t work at all. I was guilty on all counts, a repeat offender. That I wasn’t aware of any of this until she pointed it out only made it worse.

  While I was on the phone with Sandy, I had a Google alert for the Swift Current juniors. The paper in Regina had a report that the franchise was in negotiation with three potential buyers who intended to move the team to Grand Forks, Fort McMurray, or Anchorage. In fact, the high roller in Anchorage talked boldly about bringing two teams to the state, pointing out that the regional airlines he owned could help out with travel issues for other western league teams. “I’ll offer it up at below cost,” Daddy Coldbucks said munificently. For every sale or move of a franchise in the pros, in junior there were about ten bad rumours. The more outrageous the backstory, the less likely that there was fire with the smoke. Still, given the ten-to-one ratio, I had to make it at least a three-to-one shot that something might be happening. For every three noisemaking clowns like the Anchorage blowhard, there’s one guy with gelt and tight lips who isn’t available for comment until after the big deal closes.

  3

  I waited outside Regina’s downtown library. The staff were a couple of minutes late in opening but this was inconveniencing no one else. Finally, a librarian opened the door. She had horn-rims and her hair up. I’d have put her at a well-preserved forty and she clearly worked at it, a streak of purple in her hair being just a hint of a wild side. She looked nothing like every librarian who’d scolded me over overdue books at the Boston College library. She looked like every librarian who took off her glasses and let down her hair in old-school classics on Spectravision.

  She smiled when I stepped inside and stopped shivering. She smiled when I kept my voice low and asked where back issues of the Prince Albert paper were. She pointed me to shelves weighed down with a ton of newsprint in perfect daily order. I had tried to do my searching online, but the web archive material for The Prince Albert Daily Herald went back only seven days. I was looking for events in P.A. when Whisper’s visits had become more frequent.

  I carried a pile of papers to a century-old oak table. I assured the librarian that I’d keep the papers in order. I was everything she ever wanted in a man. I had respect for library protocol and the Dewey Decimal System.

  The P.A. paper was easy to leaf through. Births. Deaths. Weather. Fundraisers. Wheat prices. Classifieds. Farms up for sale, which doubled back to Deaths and Wheat prices. Days passed by in the fifteen seconds it took me to flip through the pages. I was looking for a business story, a commercial deal that had sparked Whisper’s interest in this singularly uninteresting place.

  I stifled a yawn. I caught the librarian looking at me. I had to try to stay focused. I came up to the days before Whisper stayed overnight in P.A. for the first time.

  Then I hit the jackpot.

  In the pile of papers, there was just this single day that the front page of the paper had something resembling front-page news. P.A. was awakened from its slumber by an attempted murder. The photo above the fold was a decades-old portrait that looked like the one on Whisper’s hockey card. At least if Whisper’s hockey card picture had been taken by a mug-shot photographer.

  A convicted murderer remains in critical condition after a stabbing at Prince Albert’s federal penitentiary.

  Wolf Martens was rushed to Prince Albert’s Mercy Hospital with multiple stab wounds Tuesday morning, a spokesman from the Department of Corrections said.

  Officials said that no charges have been laid and the assault in the maximum-security facility is under investigation.

  Martens was sentenced to life for the murder of his father and brother in 1974. Martens confessed …

  The reporter reprised details of a stabbing that had left a man face down in a pool of blood in a basement apartment on the less-picturesque side of Regina. The reporter reprised the details of an even more awful crime, the stabbing of a nine-year-old and the disposal of his corpse in a dumpster, his remains never found. Wolf Martens had pleaded guilty to the murders and a variety of other counts and was sentenced in a court around the corner from the Hotel Saskatchewan. Martens’s story in court, the same story in the newspapers almost thirty years ago and on the pages more recently, was fiction, as it turned out.

  I flipped through the papers for the days that followed Wolf’s ambulance ride to Mercy’s emergency. The day after he was still in critical condition. Three days later he was listed in serious condition. And that was the last mention of Wolf Martens in the P.A. paper. Even on the slowest news day in a Town of Happenings Few and Far Between, the slow, painful recovery of a guy serving a life sentence gets bumped off the page by eighteen-wheelers rolling over, road closures, and 4-H Club meetings.

  I looked up when I stacked the last paper in a neat pile. I caught the librarian looking again. This time she didn’t turn away. I smiled.

  I Google searched Wolf Martens and murder on my BlackBerry. I found a brief entry in Wikipedia that gave the very abridged account of his story. I searched the name in images. The mug shot came up. So did photos of Wolf, handcuffed, being led out of court. The resemblance to Whisper wasn’t uncanny but their faces had the same Teutonic engineering, hair and skin the same dark Bavarian paintwork. Wolf being led away in cuffs was a smaller guy than Whisper had been, as if shrunken by a string of sleepless nightmares.

  The librarian was worked up to the very edge of Come Hither. She moved her nameplate on her desk, just in case I might have missed it: ALEXIS STEWART, PERIODICALS RESEARCH DEPT.

  “Has anyone told you that you look like that hockey player who was married to that actress?”

  “I used to get that all the time
,” I said.

  WOLF MARTENS’S INCARCERATION explained the collect calls, the only way inmates can call long distance. It would also have explained Whisper’s monthly trips there. Martens’s stabbing would have explained the timing of Whisper’s more frequent overnight stays in P.A. None of it explained why Whisper was dead, though.

  I had to go to P.A. I had to talk to Wolf Martens. There are loose ends and then there are loose ends. There was no knowing the story of Whisper’s death without knowing the story of his life, and the fact that Whisper had gone so far out of his way to conceal his connection to Martens made me believe that the convict could tell me a story that no one else could tell.

  4

  I passed the doorman. “Good morning, sir, welcome to the Hotel Saskatchewan,” he said, tipping his hat as if he had never seen me before, smiling because “good” didn’t start to cover it.

  I went to my room and called Chief. He picked up even when SHADOW showed up on his call display.

  “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “Listen, do you know anybody up in P.A.?”

  “I know lots of people. Why?”

  I told him why. I told him about the guy who had been stabbed, the guy I thought was Whisper’s brother.

  “Shit, I played junior with a guy who’s a guard at the pen,” Chief said. “Todd Kilmer. Killer could have played some college hockey in the States but he got married young and wanted to stay close to home. He got a call from the coach of the prison workers’ team. They had a job opening and, y’know, they put in a good word.”

  Chief filled me in. He had Kilmer’s cell number. Chief told me to let him know that he gave me the number and that he had been meaning to get in touch. Chief seemed relieved that I hadn’t asked him to make the call for me.