by G B Joyce
It was Duke Avildsen. I didn’t mind two bucks a minute with him. Duke was in his seventies and claimed with justified pride that he had been collecting cheques from the league for more than half a century. He had been a player and then a coach, although just for a while. He had been a scout with a bunch of organizations including L.A., where he’d somehow survived five different owners and eight GMs. If they dropped a nuclear bomb on an arena, the only thing left standing would be Duke Avildsen. A hundred square miles would be DayGlo with radiation, but Duke would have a lineup in his hand and he’d be circling numbers, writing notes in the margins. He always said that his goal in life was to make a case to draft a guy in the seventh round and then introduce him at the Hall of Fame induction. He had already done it once. “Just gotta do it again to show it wasn’t a fluke,” he said.
Duke had just checked his bags at the Helsinki airport. I had given him the plum assignment of taking in the Five Nations tournament in Tampere. I owed him at least one. Duke’s grandson was playing for the American team at the tournament. The Littlest Duke was six foot four and as Canadian as maple syrup, but he had been born when Duke Jr. was playing for Oklahoma City. The older Avildsens came to the conclusion that exploiting an opportunity to play in the U.S. program in Ann Arbor was a good way to go. Duke is a proud family guy but he’ll always be a scout first. When I asked him how his grandson was playing he gave me a one-word scouting report: “Horseshit.” He also offered that he thought Duke III, at least on the ice, took after his mother.
“I’m still out West.”
“What the hell. Flights cancelled or something?”
“Guy I used to play with in L.A., Martin Mars, died. Cashed himself out. I’m trying to help with the arrangements,” I said, looking at a faint constellation of lights on the horizon.
“Looking out for your old teammate,” said Duke, whose teammates, most of them anyway, were either involuntarily out of the game or mortally out of commission. “That’s lost these days. So many guys switching teams, getting traded, chasing bigger contracts. Ships passing in the night, you know. All about a buck. Back in my day you played years together, even decades. There were good teammates and bad ones, sure, but the best ones were like brothers. That’s how it was in Montreal. Do you remember Doucette?”
“Little before my time but I know the name,” I said. So did any half-assed student of the game. You have to be up on your Hall of Famers.
“I don’t know if you know the story, but his game went south maybe in his second or third season with us,” Duke said. “We all knew something was wrong. He wasn’t hurt or drinking. So we kept an ear to the ground, everybody in the room. We realized that his wife was fooling around on him. What’s more, we found out that his wife was fooling around on him with a boxer. Do you remember Angelo Angelini?”
“No, Duke, I’m too young and boxing’s not my game.”
“This pug, a heavyweight who knocked out Top Ten contenders with a big left hook and knocked out broads with his looks. ‘Teen Angel,’ they called him. ‘Matinee Idol.’ Guy would sing the anthem before the fight. So anyway, we went and found out where this Gino lived. It was only a couple of blocks from the Deuce and his missus. And so there was five of us that laid in wait for him. And we kicked the shit out of him. You know Cal Decker …”
A great player and an awful drunk who wasted more talent than anybody back in the day and maybe ever. Yeah, I told Duke, I knew of him.
“Well, Cal Decker was a stand-up guy. He smoked this pug. The guy was on the ground, blood pouring out of him at about three or four different points, like marinara sauce spilling out of a five-gallon pot. Cal told him, ‘If anything ever happens between you and Doucette’s wife, the first thing I’m gonna do is go to the mother of your boys and you’ll be sparring with a divorce lawyer and for sure that’s out of your weight class.’ And Cal said, ‘The second thing I’m gonna do is come after you myself and finish what I started.’ Shit, we mostly just watched Cal and peeled him off the dago at the end or he might of killed him. Cal said, ‘This guy probably never won a real fight in his life.’ Cal was never a fighter, at least didn’t go looking for it. If it came down to it, though, for a teammate, especially a good guy like Deuce, Cal would have killed anything but his thirst.”
Duke signed off right after that. I thought of that old war story, one of several hundred in the series, as I started to pass the big-box retail stores in Regina’s farthest-flung suburbs. Yeah, I could see Cal Decker going to bat for a young teammate, especially when the kid had a ton of talent. But that wasn’t what was in play this time. I was wading in long after hanging them up, twenty years after the fact, going the extra mile for a guy who sat in the next stall, a guy who had been my teammate for one season, a guy I wouldn’t have claimed to know at all. Whisper could have used me or anyone else in the room to stand up for him when Iron John Harris was throwing him under the bus. I didn’t because I didn’t want to risk my own job. Going back to Swift Current, I was doing what I thought was the right thing for Whisper, but it was all twenty years too late to matter and for him to ever know. I had my reasons, I guess.
2
I met up with Chief for coffee in Regina. I felt awful. My body still ached from all the hours I had spent behind the wheel, my back was seizing up, and Arthur was letting me know he wasn’t happy either about the hours of confinement. The welt on the back of my head throbbed. Things weren’t going to get much better after I returned the PT Cruiser. We’d be taking the Bug loaner back out to Swift Current. Walt had called Chief to let him know his Jeep was ready.
I brought the Big Man up to speed. He took his eyes off the road and almost put us in the ditch when I told him about Martens Sr.’s murder, Whisper’s foggy eye-witnessing the crime, and the Divine Miss Harmon’s attempt to quiet or kill him by strangulation.
“Thing like that would mess with a guy his whole life. You still don’t think it was suicide, do you?”
“I don’t. He kept his demons locked away for years. It looked like that, anyway. It wasn’t that he was haunted. He was chased.”
It seemed like deaths were out there in every direction and none was your run-of-the-mill departure from the mortal coil. I couldn’t imagine that, near the end of this tragic arc, there’d be something so plain as a broken guy just cashing in his chips.
My BlackBerry pinged. The call display announced prompt delivery: REG PUB LIB.
I checked the time. It was 8 A.M. She said that she had something to show me. I told her that I had to drive out for the funeral and asked if there was any way that I could come in early. She told me to come to the employees’ entrance in the back of the building.
I had one call to make in advance. Thankfully, in another time zone to the east, the business day had already begun for government offices.
3
“Martens, e-n-s, just the way it sounds, he’s an inmate at the penitentiary in Prince Albert,” I said. I gave the woman on the other end of the line Martens’s relevant numbers that had been provided for me by Kilmer in P.A., namely date of birth and inmate number.
“This is a family member who has died?”
“Yes, a brother,” I said. “A younger brother. The only surviving member of the immediate family.”
My backup for that would half-fill an administrative eye-dropper. I figured I might as well pretend to be holding a hose.
“And you are …”
It was a drill that the woman from Correctional Service of Canada had been through a thousand times.
“My name is Brad Shade. I’m a family friend acting on behalf of the widow of the deceased. I have known the deceased for more than twenty years. We worked together.”
I gave it a properly grave reading. That the widow of the deceased did not know of the existence of her husband’s brother was a detail that wasn’t going to speed things along. Neither was the fact that I was taking a small liberty with my claim of long-standing friendship, seeing as I had shared a hotel room with
him two or three nights a week one winter and hadn’t spoken to him in more than twenty years. And of course I didn’t volunteer that the say-so of Wolf Martens was the only spongy corroboration of the brotherly bond. I didn’t even like to admit it to myself.
“Temporary leaves are difficult but we can expedite them. Can you have the death certificate faxed to us?” she asked.
I told her that I could and took down the number that I’d pass along to Bob Roth, who had all the paperwork.
She asked if I could prove the relationship of the deceased to the inmate. I told her it would be tough when it was in fact impossible.
She One Moment Pleased me and I held in a musicless void. I sat there wondering why at least a few bucks from the thousands I sent to Ottawa every year couldn’t be dedicated to some Muzak to be piped in for callers while on hold. Beats Starland Vocal Band, I guess.
After a couple of minutes and four bucks in roaming charges, the woman from CSC came back on the line.
“Thank you for holding. Yes, according to our records, there is a TL form filed for the funeral … tomorrow in Swift Current. Transportation and security for a funeral. The filing was made and approved yesterday.”
I’d had a good feeling about Kilmer but even so had underrated him, I thought. I hadn’t given him a sob story or a hard sell, but he’d have to be a stand-up guy to file the paperwork for Wolf Martens’s leave. And after I thanked the woman on the line, I realized that someone with authority could probably move the request for a leave faster than the guy on the street.
4
Alexis Stewart of the Periodicals Research Department had the bound hard copies of the papers out. Six months of papers were in each volume, wrapped with heavy broadsheet-size covers. She strained to carry a year and a half of all the Saskatchewan news fit to print over to a long oak table near her desk and I saw the muscles in her upper arm pop. She had flagged coverage of the murder and the brief court case with yellow sticky notes. She kept her voice to a hush, although I hadn’t passed anyone on my way in and no one else was in the line of sight. I wondered if it was just a matter of adaptation to her environment.
“I don’t remember the case. Too young. Before I was born. I mentioned it to the supervisor and she said it was all over the news. I was able to get the dates from the Canadian News Index.”
The index used to compile a year’s worth of the big stories from papers across the country before the internet made it redundant. She gave me the full history of the reference series. She was just happy to talk to someone. She made eye contact.
“There might be some that I missed. I’ll keep on it if you want …”
Oh yeah, I wanted her on it. “…
but I thought you’d want to see something as soon as I came up with it.”
The last chapter played out on the front page of The Leader-Post. The courtroom was “packed” for the sentencing and Wolf Martens “remained impassive” while Hizzoner told him that he was going away for life. The story noted that violent crime was almost unheard of in the Hutterite community and that these murders were believed to be unprecedented. The story noted that only one elder represented the Hutterite colony in the courtroom. There was no comment from the Hutterite elder. There also wasn’t a line about the elder declining comment. It’s funny. Anywhere else the case would have been sensationalized. The paper would deliver readers not just the truth but a soap opera. Not in Regina, though. Not in the ’70s. Those reporting the story seemed embarrassed by it and dug only an inch deep for fear of causing their readers to push the paper away, a judgment that nothing good would come from playing out the tragedy in greater detail and that what was past was best left in the past.
The day after the sentencing, The Leader-Post ran this story that spilled over from the front page to a full halfway through the front section:
Wolf Martens was eighteen and recently baptized when he left the colony to take an electrical engineering course. Though his and other Hutterite colonies keep what they believe is a safe distance from the world beyond their fences, they are by no means as isolated as the Amish. It’s common for young men to go to towns and cities for extended periods for schooling so that they can return with skills that will benefit their colonies. The society is traditional, but there are engagements with the outside world. Wolf Martens’s went terribly wrong.
Not long after Martens left the colony for Regina last year he struggled with his schooling. “He was a below-average student,” an instructor at the community college said. “It was clear that he lacked the background in math and sciences to make a real go of it. I think he understood his predicament better than any of us did. And I know he was distraught.”
Said one classmate: “Martens didn’t connect with me or anyone else in the course even when we tried to reach out to him. We knew he was failing. It’s a tough course but it’s easier when you have friends you can work with.”
The breaking point, it seems, was the death of his mother, Helga Martens. No death notice appeared in the local paper and members of the colony declined to comment, but one local health official, speaking on background, said that Martens had a bleeding ulcer that could have been treated with the proper medical attention. “When they finally called for an ambulance she had already lost a lot of blood,” the official said. “She had been complaining of intense pain for several weeks but refused to go to the city for treatment or even have a doctor come out to the colony.”
According to police documents, weeks after Helga Martens’s death an elder had driven her younger son, Hugo, into the city and left him to stay with his older brother, Wolf, overnight. Hugo, then age nine, needed surgery and wouldn’t be fit to travel for 24 to 48 hours following the procedure. Members of the colony have said that the Martens were concerned with Hugo’s staying overnight away from the colony for the first time. Wolf Martens assured them that he would take care of his little brother and drive him out to the colony when he was fully recovered.
Though members of the colony have declined to talk to the media about Wolf Martens, it appears that he never returned after his mother’s death. If he had any contact with his father it would have been by phone or letter.
According to one police official with knowledge of the investigation, Wolf Martens became so distraught after his mother’s death that he decided to disavow the Hutterites. He also dropped out of school and started drinking. “He took a series of minimum-wage jobs but never stayed more than a couple of weeks at any of them,” the police official said. “He became involved in illicit and illegal activity.”
For a few days after his surgery, it seems that Hugo Martens stayed with his brother and they remained out of touch with their father. At present the whereabouts of Hugo Martens’s body remains unknown.
Technically true. The RCMP wasn’t reopening the cold case, but I was trying to find out what happened to Hugo Martens. At least what happened to him besides becoming Martin Mars.
I was reluctant to take up any more of the librarian’s time. Then again, that she had already volunteered so much of it made me think that she wouldn’t be completely opposed to volunteering just a few minutes more.
“Is there any way that you can search the online newspaper database for any reference to Monica Harmon and a term like drug or court or sentence for me? I promise I won’t ask for anything more. I’d appreciate it.”
She had no idea why I was asking for all this. Though she was locked away in a library, walls of books and a big oak door separating her from the real world outside, she seemed to sense that these weren’t casual searches I was asking for and not morbid curiosities either. She checked the spelling with me and keyed it into the database.
Twenty-five hits in The Regina Leader-Post. About the same in The Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. Even a few in the national fishwraps.
I stood behind her as she scrolled down the screen and I scrolled down her. “I hope you weren’t insulted when I said you looked like that hockey player,” she said without looking
over her shoulder and realizing that if I hadn’t been I was now.
5
I called Sarge with a name and a date of birth. Or at least day and month of birth. I told him that I wasn’t sure of the year and that it fell into a range. It complicated what was a hassle to start with. He heaved a sigh. He said he’d have them run for me but let me know without saying so directly that what was a favour I shouldn’t have asked for had turned into a big favour even he shouldn’t ask for. He told me that he’d picked up a hat trick in the police versus fire department old-old-timers game. He said that he took two minors as well. “Horseshit calls,” he said. “When are you coming home, anyway?”
“Soon,” I said with confidence that wasn’t well-founded.
“I’ll put in a call to a buddy of mine down at Metro headquarters and I’ll call you back if anything turns up,” he said, and he would do just that.
6
“It can’t just be that he feels guilty. He should have been able to get past that. It has to be something more.”
I had Sandy on the line while Chief drove. I had to raise my voice to make myself heard above the old Bug’s strained whine. He kept his eyes on the road and expression unchanged while I gave her the rundown. Yes, it was a neat bit of distraction and manipulation, but though she knew it she didn’t care. She approached someone in need of her help unconditionally. Hearing about other people’s problems distracted her from problems of her own, those being me. Examination rather than self-examination, it wasn’t just her job or her calling. It was some personal need. She had empathy enough for the two of us. That being a good thing. She reminded me that some people want to do the right thing, but no matter how many times she did I willed myself to forget or deny the fact.
I wasn’t worried about roaming charges on this call. I spilled out the whole bottle. I was telling her about my visit to Wolf Martens and the events that had landed him a small room in the Hotel Nowhere and a shiv into his organ collection. As always, she found my amateur psychoanalyzing amusing.
