The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  She gave me half marks. That’s half more than usual, but she’s a tough marker.

  “It’s more than guilt,” she said. “It’s shame. You feel guilt when you’ve done something wrong. And guilt’s not a bad thing by any stretch. At least you can tell the difference between right and wrong with guilt. But shame is what you feel when you believe there’s something wrong with you. There’s not a lot that I can tell you …”

  The irony kicked in later. She was talking about Whisper’s brother but she could have been talking about me. Not that she knew. Not that she didn’t.

  Sandy launched into her usual advisory whenever I solicited her help. Usually I went to her when I had an enigmatic or troubled kid or a deeply troubled parent whose issues might be a portent of bad things to come for a son who might represent an eight-figure investment for our team. She doesn’t like it much when I ask her for help on this stuff but she inevitably caves, as she did this time. No guarantees, no warrantees, and, if someone asks, you weren’t talking to me. Opinions rendered are for entertainment purposes only and do not represent clinical diagnosis as accepted by the Canadian Psychiatric Association. Void Where Prohibited.

  “… but I suppose it’s almost like a perfect storm of shame. His failure in school especially when his community had invested hope in him, his failures as a son and a brother, his failure in his faith after being baptized …”

  “Yeah, it came up in the newspaper stories,” I said. “It’s one thing if you leave the colony before you’re baptized, but it’s another if you leave after.”

  That had stuck with me after reading one of the newspaper stories the librarian had dug up. In the absence of comment from any Hutterite elder, a professor of comparative religions told a reporter that Wolf Martens’s baptism “required obedience to God’s call” and “commitment to live the course of his life in our community.”

  “I read somewhere that shame is a sickness of the soul,” Sandy said. “Whatever else he might have been suffering from, almost certainly depression, alienation, and inferiority, maybe paranoia, maybe compulsions, would have been magnified by the shame he felt. It’s not just that shame can cause retreat and surrender,” she said. “Another common response is violence and self-destructive acts. Could he have done it? It would be consistent with some reactions to shame. Could he have not done it and confessed to it? It would be consistent with some reactions to shame.”

  I didn’t feel inclined to explore my own ambivalence, the jangle of nerves and pain in my gut when I allowed myself to drift back to the night at the Hotel Saskatchewan. The nights. If you drilled down deep you wouldn’t hit shame, and whatever you did hit I wouldn’t ever want to know. You can know too much, even about yourself.

  I told her my take about Wolf Martens and matters of the spirit and faith, every last high-minded detail, but then I realized it was a dropped call. I didn’t know how long I had been talking to myself. It felt like five days.

  7

  We turned off Highway 1 and rolled into beautiful downtown Swift Current. I kept an eye out for Butch and Sundance’s Hummer but saw only an RCMP cruiser set up for a speed trap. I held my breath. The cop with the radar gun gave us a dirty look but didn’t wave us over.

  I called Kilmer. I wanted to make sure that he had the details right for the funeral. My call went through to his voicemail. I figured he was on his shift. I left a message, asking him to try to call me later on, letting him know that I’d heard about the approval of Martens’s temporary leave.

  My BlackBerry vibrated and I hit the button. I guessed it was Kilmer calling me back.

  “That’s a really bad move coming back here …”

  I pulled the phone away from my ear. CALLER UNKNOWN. Again.

  “You should go get Geronimo’s car there and give it a test drive for four hours or so. Or you’ll go home in bags.”

  Click.

  I didn’t say anything to Chief again. I turned my head and looked out the passenger window. I tried to figure out how we had been spotted. I tried to figure out how I should take the threat. Someone who had gone to the trouble of tracking down my number and keeping a claustrophobia-inducing close watch on us had to be taken seriously. And when someone had gone to the trouble of poisoning a harmless guy like Whisper and trying, fairly successfully, to cover it up, I had to take everything seriously.

  Chief looked over at me and I forced a smile.

  “Another robo-call,” I told Chief. “I won a cruise vacation.”

  “Maybe you should take it,” he said.

  “Yeah, maybe I should. It’s for two. You want to go?”

  8

  I was in the lineup at Wendy’s and Chief was in the head, busting the seal. I was tapped on the shoulder. It was Old Man Hanley.

  My reflex reaction: It was no coincidence that our paths crossed. He could have spied the Bug from his office window, I thought. He could have been the source of the anonymous threats, though he wouldn’t dirty his own hands with any follow-up, I thought. “If you’re here to threaten me or chase me out of town, get on your horse,” I said.

  It was all I could do to resist the urge to spice up the rhetoric, but I’d probably have violated a local bylaw that would see me thrown into stocks in the town square and forced to wear the Scarlet F.

  Old Man Hanley put up his hand in the universal sign of cease and desist. The folds in his forehead relaxed but didn’t quite disappear. The blood vessels in his nose and across his cheeks burned a little less threateningly.

  “I appreciate what you’re trying to do for my son,” Old Man Hanley said. He was a man uncomfortable with the phrase thank you. He rarely had the occasion to use it.

  I looked out the window. No. 59 was outside. Perched on crutches. I nodded. “No problem” was all I said, not fully erasing my sneer. I didn’t need to go into my reasons. I wasn’t about to tell him that he could never know his son’s pain the way that I could. From what No. 59 had told me, his injury might have been worse than the one that wrecked my career. Nerve damage, that’s just about as bad as it gets. I’m a cold-hearted bastard about a lot of things, but I can’t be about an innocent kid in for a lifetime of pain.

  Chief came back from the head, took one look at Hanley, and engaged his death stare, hotter than the heat lamps warming the burgers. I told Chief everything was cool. If we could ever figure out how to harvest Chief’s surging testosterone, we’d be able to shut down nuclear plants across the country.

  Hanley turned to the Big Man. “I was thanking your friend,” he said.

  Chief was suspicious of any peace offering. I was too. On the ice, when it’s time to go, everything is honest and inevitable. “We’re cool, everything’s okay,” is the prelude to three-quarters of the scraps I’ve ever been a party to off the ice.

  Hanley jumped back in where he had left off with me. “You’re right,” he said. “He is a good kid. It’s almost like he sees things more clearly since he got hurt.”

  I could have told him that getting hurt has a way of pulling back the gauze, lifting the fog, and throwing everything into sharper focus.

  Old Man Hanley kept talking. “He told me that he didn’t realize what the game was until he had to watch it on crutches. ‘It’s not that special. I don’t want it anymore. There are other things.’ That’s what he said to me.”

  “That’s pretty smart,” I said.

  “I want you to come back to my office,” Hanley said again. He nodded his head. His office was a one-minute walk away.

  “Okay, I’ll just let Mitzi Mars know where we’re going,” I said. I keyed in her number and rang through to voicemail. I sent her a text as well. That would have been enough to scare Hanley off trying anything funny or unfunny.

  Hanley led the way and we went in single file across the snow-covered street. I followed. Chief was behind me. No. 59 brought up the rear, negotiating the snow and ice on his crutches. It was like a Swift Current variation on the cover of Abbey Road.

  We took our pla
ces in Hanley’s office. “I understand that you have been taking an interest in Martin Mars’s death,” he began.

  “How would you know that? Your friend Daulton tell you that?”

  He ignored me.

  “And I understand that you have, what, an interest in me as …”

  “As a suspect,” I said. Some of the lustre had gone off our new-found friendship.

  “You’re making the presumption that there was a crime committed and I have no idea what you’re basing this on. But just so you don’t waste any of your time or mine, I can tell you that Martin Mars’s death would be adverse to my interests.”

  “What is it that they say about business? If you can’t beat them, kill them.”

  “I wasn’t out to outdo Martin Mars. There was no ‘beat’ in this at all. And Bob Roth can vouch for that if you don’t believe me.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Roth put together our partnership on the Garageland deal. To whatever extent we were fighting for our pieces of the market, Garageland was an opportunity for us only if Mars and I did it together. Neither one of us could do it on our own. The Garageland chain was beyond our scale. We’re not big businesses. We’re very successful small businesses, but we both knew our limits.”

  “Why didn’t Roth tell us this? Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “One, he couldn’t have known that you would have been interested. Two, there was a matter of confidentiality involved. He would have breached it if he told you, and whether Martin Mars is alive or not, we still have an agreement.”

  I must have looked unsatisfied. I was.

  “Here’s the paperwork,” Hanley said, pulling a folder from an old-school filing cabinet and pushing it across his desk. The contract was thick, initialled throughout, signed, witnessed, and apparently legit. When I called Bob Roth after I left the office he vouched for it. In fact, the lawyer said that the last points of the contract were being hammered out late in the previous week, with a race to have business finished by the end of the business day Friday.

  Still, I had to see if Hanley could account for where he was later that Saturday night and Sunday A.M. When I asked, No. 59 piped up and said that he and his father were at a game at the arena, that they had taken three employees and sat in the company’s box. Hanley piped up to say that they had retired to the Legion for drinks after the game and No. 59 had acted as a designated driver, dropping off the lawyers and his father’s employees before going home to watch a late rebroadcast of Hockey Night in Canada.

  “Mars’s death complicates everything going forward,” Hanley said. Things were looking slightly less complicated for me with Hanley out of the mix. One name stroked off the list, two when I factored in No. 51, the thuggish, able-bodied son, acting as his father’s factotum.

  “So if you had no reason to want Martin Mars erased from the picture, who would?”

  Hanley had his own theory, one that had more than once crossed my mind.

  “I’d look at the team,” Hanley said. “I don’t know what kind of game Beckwith is playing. I know a lot of us who’ve invested in the team over the years are worried about how fast he’s moving on this. We’ve put money in and it could turn out to be a bad investment if the bidding isn’t straight.”

  Hanley’s instinct, as always, followed a buck, and he said that he had heard that Beckwith’s business was struggling these days. “There are more housing stops than starts around here these days,” Hanley said. “A lot of people are struggling, but could someone use a one-time injection of capital? Beckwith sure as hell could.”

  9

  When Chief and I walked out of Hanley’s offices, my BlackBerry pinged. The caller ID gave me UNKNOWN. When I answered I kept it low-key and waited for the other party to speak first. This wasn’t the same Unknown as the threats, though. This Unknown made herself known to me, volunteered it. Five minutes later I was knocking on Unknown’s door and trying to remember that line of bullshit about vacation pay and benefits I had strung on a voicemail the day before. It was something I could dispense with as soon as the door cracked open and I recognized the face looking out at me from behind the chain.

  10

  “Well, this is awkward. What should I call you?” I asked her. “Fern? Viv?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Well, I guess you’ve figured out that I’m not Val Avery and that there’s no outstanding vacation pay and your next trip to the dentist will have to be out of your own pocket, unless the casino workers have their own plan.”

  Telling me to go fuck myself would have taken too much effort and given away that any of this mattered. She blew smoke in my face like she was spraying me with nicotine-based Mace. My eyes watered and I waved my hand.

  “Any particular reason that you have two names? One at the Living Sky, another one on the Mars payroll. You do get around.”

  “A girl is allowed more than one name,” she said.

  I didn’t have to roll my eyes to get a further explanation. I just did so for my own amusement.

  “I have an ex-husband,” she said. “I actually have two, but the one ex-husband is my special problem. He’s out East, thankfully, and if I never see him again it will be too soon. My account is under my name, the one I used when I was still married. But at work and out in public I’m using my middle name and my maiden name. I don’t even feel comfortable doing that. But you can’t be too careful, especially with dangerous people.”

  “And your ex out East …”

  “A court has ruled that he’s dangerous. I’ll just leave it at that.”

  Any claim to victimhood was nullified by fraud.

  “You have my condolences but now, about the way my friend tipped the dealer, your no-show job with Mars Gas.”

  “Oh, I showed. I showed to answer the door and unchain it and welcome him into this house. Not daily, but weekly. He strung me along. He said he was going to leave his wife for me. He said she was frigid. I guess I’m a career sucker for lines of bullshit. It never happened and was never going to happen. He put me on the payroll and told me that I should quit working at the casino, but I told him that I had to get out of the house to do something or I’d lose my mind.”

  Ah, an admitted grifter with the Old Protestant Work Ethic. Very admirable.

  I hated to admit it, but the kept-woman story stood up on a first pass. Back in my awful interlude between my playing days and my scouting job, my days working for the investigations outfit, I had turned over stones of many rocky marriages and found women like Maclean/King, those who lived in a damp, dark, immoral murk. More than once I came across a guy having an affair who would go see the woman on a regular basis in a public place. It was usually in a workplace, either hers or theirs. It would be brazen enough to be exciting and would be a neat bit of subterfuge, leaving people to think that they would hide it better if any fire were there.

  I told Maclean/King that what Whisper had done outside the lines of his marriage didn’t matter to me and I wasn’t about to loop Mitzi in. I was trying to give a freshly minted widow closure, not compound her grief.

  “Tell me about your ex,” I asked.

  “There’s not a lot to tell,” she said. They always say that when there is.

  “Try me. Or at least humour me. You know, sexual jealousy as a …” I didn’t bother to complete the unthinkable thought. She had neither looks that killed nor looks to kill for. Whisper got better cooking at home.

  “Like I said, he’s out East. He’s in Windsor. He worked in a casino there. So did I. That’s where I met him and that’s where I left him. Now he works in a bar. He’s worked in so many there I don’t know which one he’s working at now.”

  “Any reason to think that he’d be out here or that he might get jealous of you dealing cards to another guy at a home game?”

  She didn’t bother to answer, too awful and too typical to consider. I moved on. “Where were you Saturday night?”

  “Where I am every Saturday night, dea
ling at the five-dollar table at the casino in front of a cast of thousands, star of my own reality show under the security camera.”

  “Do you know who would want Martin Mars dead?”

  “Can’t imagine why. I told him that it was over and I didn’t want his money anymore. I didn’t care. I just wanted to get on with things and that’s all I want now.”

  There’s nothing so noble as the willingness to turn down cash. Nothing so implausible either. I could imagine reasons why someone might want Whisper dead, but I couldn’t imagine why Maclean/King would. She was in a textbook position to extort him. Killing him wasn’t going to get her “job” back. It was the one way to guarantee she couldn’t. In fact, Whisper might have had reason to see her dead, for fear that she’d rat him out to Mitzi once he turned off the tap and money stopped flowing into her account. I couldn’t put extortion past her, and her place on the payroll looked like his way to pay her less painfully on the installment plan.

  On my second pass, though, when I was back in the car and Chief was driving away, I gamed out the whole picture and the situation looked less clear. I thought of the other trysts I had investigated, and this one wasn’t a match on a few major counts. He might have been guileless, but meeting his mistress on a regular basis in a casino? You couldn’t get worse cover. Where people go to get a load on, to get into trouble, to get a momentary thrill.

  I just didn’t buy Whisper and this woman, not when he had Mitzi at home.

  11

  My cell vibrated: M & M MARS. The widow had an update for me. I tried to wipe the images of Whisper and the other woman or any other woman out of my mind. I was semi-successful.