The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  I called and left a message. I sent a text. I didn’t go into any detail about Whisper, about Martens. I figured that would be enough to scare Kilmer off getting back to me. I waited. I killed time in my room, checking into our scouting database for new entries. I figured I needed to remind myself about my job before Hunts felt like he had to. Just a couple of entries. Our Quebec guy wrote long, meandering notes about players of marginal interest, as if he were trying to talk his way into liking them. Our Russian guy wrote in broken English and I didn’t like his read of players’ strengths and weakness in games. His say-so was the basis of our drafting a couple of guys who never bothered coming to North America.

  Kilmer called me back when he was on his lunch. I filled him in. He knew all about Martens. He remembered Whisper coming in to visit him. Monthly. The paperwork had to be submitted for each visit, security clearances, background checks, even though Martens wasn’t organized crime or a career criminal. The bulls had to make sure that Martens wasn’t being used by hard-core cons who’d use anybody and anything in max security. Kilmer had talked hockey with Whisper.

  “Yeah, Mars told me the two of them were cousins,” Kilmer said. “Told me his side of the family just shortened their name.”

  Kilmer didn’t know that Whisper was dead and he was certain that Martens didn’t know. He had been part of the detail at P.A. Mercy. The nature of his job: He had to stand guard against any attempted escape by an inmate who for the foreseeable future could only leave in a body bag.

  “Martens isn’t out of the woods by any stretch,” he said. “They had to remove his spleen. He was fifty-fifty to make it when he went in. And, yeah, Mars was there for stretches. He was pretty shook up, for sure. He probably shouldn’t have been let into the room right after Martens was stabbed. The paperwork wasn’t done. I went off the books on that.” Kilmer caught himself. He realized that he had said too much.

  “You’re not going anywhere with this, right?”

  I told him I wasn’t and said that he’d done the right and reasonable thing.

  I asked Kilmer if Martens was lucid. He was. I asked if I could get in to see him. Kilmer gave me the standard lines about the protocol of applying through official channels, about the time involved. I told him that this had to amount to special circumstances, the near-fatal wounding of one, the apparent suicide of another. I also told him about Mitzi and how she wanted some final answers about Whisper’s death and knew nothing about the real reason for his visits to P.A. That got him. After all, Kilmer saw life in the pen at ground level, not as a bunch of files and policy positions in an office in Ottawa.

  “Our supervisor is assigning the detail for guarding him in the hospital. It’s all off the sked and voluntary overtime. I’ve done the past couple of Fridays. I know the guy who has the assignment this afternoon. I can work a trade with him. He’s junior to me and owes me a favour. He won’t ask any questions.”

  I wondered why he was going out of his way. I had told him that I was working with Chief. Still, that shouldn’t have been enough for him to rework his schedule and call in favours. I nudged him on it, not asking why he was doing it, just telling him that I knew he was doing Martens and Mitzi a real service. That was enough to get him off the mark.

  Kilmer said that he thought Martens should have never been in maximum security, that medium would have been fine. He seemed to think that Martens was more mentally ill than criminal.

  “He passed up a bunch of chances to apply for parole,” Kilmer said. “It’s not rational.”

  It was a long way from the most irrational choices Wolf Martens had made.

  5

  I went to the outlet to rent a car. The guy at the desk remembered me. “Do you have anything high-end?” I asked.

  He gave me a PT Cruiser and said that was all he had. “Some sort of convention going on,” he told me. When I sat behind the wheel, I realized that the previous renter had been the size of a jockey and the seat was jammed. It wouldn’t slide back an inch. I would have tried to exchange it but I saw a long lineup at the counter. Wedged in so tight that I just had to take a deep breath to hit the horn, I drove off trying to imagine Anglican ministers in executive cars.

  6

  At least I’d have work to do for my day job when I was in Prince Albert. I wasn’t going to try to claim the trip on my expenses, because an item like that, something way off my approved budget, would stand out in the audit that Grant Tomlin planned to put our department through. I wouldn’t have been trying to pull a fast one, but it just might look that way enough to give the rest of my expenses more intense scrutiny, a headache I didn’t need. No, having a game to watch Wednesday night was about keeping my conscience clear and the off chance that I might see something other scouts might miss. Skipping out of any chance can become habit-forming, and next thing you know you’re taking every available shortcut rather than working in the scouts’ default mode, trying to squeeze in as much as humanly possible.

  Medicine Hat was playing that night in P.A. P.A. had a player that I was interested in, a gawky left winger, rail thin, but a hard worker. I had seen him three times and he’d left nothing on the table. He emptied his pockets, every last bit of lint, every shift. He didn’t look like a star. He was a red-headed stepchild, all Adam’s apple and acne. I hoped he was going to fall to us in the fourth round in June. I had to see him again to make sure that I didn’t have him wrong. He was reason enough to go to P.A. That’s what I told myself driving to P.A. when I could feel my body stiffen in the seat. Arthur felt like violin strings being wound tight, ready to snap. I didn’t want to take the pills and get the gut pain on the drive.

  My cell vibrated. I pulled it out of my jacket with my right hand while keeping my left on the wheel. I was speeding to Saskatoon, where I’d have lunch and then finish the drive to P.A.

  It was Scoop from the Herald. I hadn’t expected he’d get back to me so soon.

  He had asked around about the Mars family.

  “From what I gather in my reporting,” he said, imagining that he was manning the desk at the Paris bureau of The New York Times and not gnawing on a stack of back issues in the Herbert Herald’s spartan newsroom, “the Marses were originally from Roslynn and moved here from Regina in the ’70s. That’s where they operated an Esso station, pumps and lunch counter. They moved to Herbert when they bought an independent station and that’s the one that started the chain. The Marses were awfully private people. Weren’t much on small talk, though you’d think that would just go with running a diner. Minded their own business.”

  It was only interesting as far as it went. I congratulated him on his spadework with half my heart and then nudged him on to the matter of Whisper.

  “Yeah, well, according to an old customer of theirs, a retired farmer, the Marses had a boy. He said he thought they were pretty old to have kids.”

  I mulled over the possibilities, attached alternative theories to the hazy memories: The Marses had raised a nephew or a grandson as their son, or maybe it had been a foster-child arrangement or even a legal adoption.

  My hope for semi-ironclad answers was a guy manacled to his hospital bed, a guy whose keeper considered him insane.

  7

  In person, Kilmer looked all business, 100 percent by the book right down to the comma and semicolon, what you’d expect from a guy whose lighthearted moments on the job were as rare as harmonic convergences. He had a thick frame and thick hands like a butcher, again what you’d expect from work that had a lot in common with moving meat from slaughter to a locker. I could tell that he had played. He had scars that he didn’t get on the job. If they had been injuries picked up in the workplace, he would have sought other gainful and less painful employment.

  “I can give you five minutes,” Kilmer said. “Have to see how he’s doing. He’s tired and he’s drugged still …”

  I was going to need more than five minutes to get something that could put us, Mitzi, Martens, and me, in the same neighbourhood as c
losure and the same area code as justice.

  “And the one person who came to visit him died …, ” I said.

  I wanted to say “his brother” but I wouldn’t have taken that suspicion to the bank. It was just based on that one line in the program the Good Professor had shown me, my gut reaction when I saw the photo of Martens in the P.A. paper at the library, and a guess dressed up as intuition. I was almost ready to make the leap but didn’t want to spook Kilmer.

  I showed Kilmer Whisper’s obits in The Globe and Mail and The Southwest Booster but wished I had a photo of him slumped over the steering wheel to show him, something to shock him and break down his stiff defences against emotional manipulation. He had been a confederate when I first spoke to him, but upon my arrival he seemed to have a host’s remorse and waning enthusiasm. He could read people pretty well, and I suppose he could read my need becoming desperation. He didn’t know about the threatening phone calls and I tried not to let on that this was more than a mission of mercy, but he knew something was up and I wasn’t advertising it.

  “You know his story?” he asked.

  “Just what I read in the paper from the stabbing.”

  He pointed me into the room. The door was propped open.

  He could sit in the hall and see Martens and me. Even though my voice carried, I’d be out of the guard’s earshot.

  “He confessed to the murder of his father,” Kilmer said. “He doesn’t seem like a murderer, but a lot of murderers don’t.”

  I couldn’t stare down Wolf Martens’s demons. I had to appeal to his inner angels, dormant, incarcerated in their own way. As far as Kilmer was concerned, I was there as the messenger, the bearer of the worst possible news, the Good Samaritan with the awful task. Of course, he didn’t know that my task was a fair bit more complicated than that.

  I thought I was ready for it. It was like everything else in a hospital. What you think you’re ready for ends up being something that you’re not ready for.

  8

  An IV running into a vein on the heavily taped left hand. Handcuffs unnecessarily binding the right to a hospital bed’s railing.

  “Who are you?”

  Fluid drip-drip-dripping in the bag. A monitor blip-blip-blipping in close rhythm.

  “It’s about Martin? You’re a friend of Martin?”

  All worldly possessions sitting one atop the other on the table beside the bed. A ballpoint pen atop a red notebook and below that a Bible.

  “How? How did it happen? When? Martin?”

  A scaffold holding up a small television, not activated, not watched, beside the hospital bed. Daylight but no sunlight coming in half-opened blinds.

  “What car? My old car? He wouldn’t do it. I rebuilt that car, bought it for nothing and rebuilt it over a couple of months. I gave him that car when he was just a kid. I drove him out to Herbert after everything happened. Took the plates off it and left it in the Marses’ lot. Left a note in it and told him to look after it for me. All these years he promised me that it would be there when I got out. He thought that would make me want to get out. I don’t want to. Never did. Less now than ever. My brother wouldn’t do it. Never. Something had to have happened. What aren’t you telling me?”

  The hand tethered by the tube weakly taking The Southwest Booster from the visitor. The visitor opening the paper to the life stories of those whose stories are at an end.

  “It doesn’t make sense. I guess nothing does. He wanted me to get out. He said he’d look after me. I didn’t want to get out. He didn’t tell anyone about it. He didn’t even tell his wife about it. That’s what he told me.”

  Eyes too weak to read more than the headline looking away from it. A failing hand putting the newspaper on top of the red notebook.

  “He told me to hang up if she ever picked up the phone when I made the collect calls. I did. He didn’t want her to know and I wanted to be left alone. I wouldn’t have blamed Martin if he didn’t want anything to do with me. He did anyway. He ended up becoming a good man, far better than me. I ruined my own wretched life. And my father’s. I failed him and it ended up that I got him killed.”

  The call for the doctor over the intercom. His name repeated.

  “He was the head of the colony in Roslynn. He was very good with anything to do with machinery. He was less good with people, I think. I got baptized. I got baptized earlier than most. Eighteen. Same thing, to prove my father’s devotion more than mine, I suppose. He wanted it. And then I got sent off to school in Regina, mechanical engineering. I was going to come out to the colony after I graduated … graduated … but I knew from my first day in class that I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t good enough. I had gone from a one-room classroom … I was the only kid doing high school work, the next oldest was in grade eight, even my little brother was there too … I had gone from there to university, a big campus, classes with a hundred kids, hundreds of kids. I wasn’t ready. Jung und dumm. I didn’t tell my parents I was failing. I didn’t tell my parents I dropped out. That was even before the Christmas exams. I went to work at a gas station, part-time and then full-time. Met Monica there. I worked for cash. For the Marses in Regina. They had a station there they were selling. They had just bought one out in Herbert.”

  A plastic cup of water half-emptied. A small bottle of orange juice full and untouched.

  “I went home for Christmas. I didn’t feel it in my heart anymore. If I hadn’t been baptized I could have walked away. It’s different when you’re baptized. The worst sin there is. My mother got sick when I went back to Regina in January. I thought she got sick ’cause of me … what I’d done. She should have gone to hospital. It would have been routine. But she wouldn’t leave the colony. My father didn’t want her to, either. He should have known. I never forgave him for that. He wanted to put her health in the hands of God as proof of his devotion. Other people on the colony would have been fine with going to the city to see a doctor. But my father wouldn’t, and even though my mother knew she needed help she obeyed my father.”

  A breath drawing in not all the way to the chest. A breath leaking out like the tiniest puncture in a soft bicycle tire.

  “My mother died. I came back for the funeral. I thought of what would happen to my little brother if he ever got sick. Thought about sick, anyway. Didn’t count on hurt.”

  A hand shifting an inch inside the straightjacketing thin white sheet. The imprint on the pillow shifting with a head turning.

  “He was playing hockey on the pond with other colony boys. All in hand-me-downs. Our father flooded the ice. He put up the boards. It was something that an elder had done for the boys, and when he got too old and couldn’t do it anymore our father took it over. Didn’t like hockey, just thought it was a way to honour the elder. The boys from the colony couldn’t come to town to play in the leagues. Could only play among themselves. The one day, Martin—I mean, it’s not even his name but I’ve had to call him that all these years—Martin got his skate in a rut and fell into the boards. Headfirst. Last thing he remembered. He broke his cheekbone around his eye, had his teeth busted up. I called to talk to him and our father. I drove right out and I took him into the city. My father didn’t even want to do that … said it would heal. They kept him in hospital overnight and did surgery on him the next day. Reconstructed him. And then a couple of days later they checked him out and I took him back to the apartment where I lived with Monica.”

  A head ducking from the hallway into the room. Two sets of eyes looking upward at the clock on the wall.

  “Yeah, I had fallen. Completely fallen, I guess. I knew I couldn’t go back to the colony.

  “And our father came for Martin. He went by the hospital and they told him that I’d checked Martin out and gave him my address. And when he came he knocked on the door. Martin was on the couch, watching hockey on TV. I was letting him rest, hoping he’d sleep. We don’t have TVs on the colony. Never seen a game. Didn’t even listen to one on the radio. He was falling asleep. Monica was in the
bedroom, having a cigarette. There were bottles around. There was other stuff, yeah. There were drugs. And I answered the door when our father knocked. Monica was expecting some guy that she sold stuff to, but it was our father and he saw everything. He understood it right when he saw it.”

  A head ducking back out of the room. Wheels of a gurney humming in the hallway.

  “He pushed his way in, shouting. Had a temper. He said what would people on the colony think if they saw this. ‘Why did God test me like Job?’ He knew I was lost just having a television, and he could see the beer bottles and the vodka. And he thought I was corrupting Martin. He grabbed me. He was big like Martin. He pushed me down.”

  A folded hospital gown waiting for the nurse on the next shift. An empty bedpan hiding under the bed.

  “No, Martin was tired and drugged. He couldn’t get off the couch. He was half-asleep. But yeah, he saw it. And Monica did. All of the noise got her out of the bedroom. She was half-naked.”

  Chin falling slowly to chest. Head bobbing once.

  “I had fallen, yeah, completely.”

  Eyes closing slowly and tightening. An invisible hand drawing lines on temples.

  “I had met her at the truck stop. She worked there. She drank. She did drugs. Other stuff. But she was my first and only. She had me work for her.”

  Eyes opening and looking for a window. Eyes finding only a curtain drawn.

  “Yes, I love her. Monica. Monica … Harmon. She took me in when I was alone in the world. She saved me.”

  A hand reaching for the top sheet. The sheet ruffling faintly when pulled up to a shoulder.

  “He shouted at me, the worst possible things. He said he didn’t deserve a son like me. He shouted at her. He pushed me when I tried to get between him and Martin. He hit me. He said he would call the police and we’d all face God’s wrath. He grabbed me and shook me. I didn’t fight back. I’m not a fighter. That wasn’t our way, the way I was raised. That didn’t change in me, I guess. But Monica grabbed a knife from the little kitchen and she ran over and stabbed him. In the neck. Just once. He fell. At my feet and I saw all this blood. His eyes were open and looking up like there was no ceiling.”