The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

“We’re on Name Number Three, right? No, I’m guessing you keep a couple of others alive too.”

  “What are you talking about? Get the fuck out of here.”

  She tried to slam the door shut. I leaned into it with my right hand. If I wanted to I could have ripped the chain right out of the frame and invited myself in. I fought the urge. That would give her a reason to call 911. Reason prevailed, even though my testosterone was close to cresting.

  “Hey Monica, by the way, heard anything from your friend Phyllis lately? Get a call from her telling you about a dashing guy asking questions about you?”

  With the mention of her square name, the name she was known by along Highway 1 and among officials with Corrections Canada, the single drop of blood ran out of her face. A twitch was a giveaway that I had pieced together who had tipped her about someone poking around a truck stop asking questions about her. Old Phyllis had given her the make and licence plate number but the PT Cruiser was a rental, no use to Harmon. I was a match for the physical description the waitress had given her, though. It wouldn’t have been much of a guess on Harmon’s part, not after I had quizzed her in the casino.

  “I know your story, as much as Wolf Martens and the RCMP know, and I know a bit more than that, namely that my old buddy had you on his payroll until just three weeks ago,” I said.

  “Like I said, he was devoted to me.” “I don’t know why he did it, though ‘devoted’ isn’t on my short list of reasons why he’d want to bankroll you.”

  She slammed the door in my face.

  16

  I had Chief drive to the German bakery in downtown Swift Current. The eat-in section wasn’t intimate, just tight, four small tables with two rickety chairs per crowded just inside the door. The entrance of every customer was announced by a gust of wind that blew napkins off the tables and the opening two bars from “Das Lied der Deutschen.” The anthem took me back to my days playing in the German league near the end and a Bavarian babe who was on the verge of becoming my second wife, at least until she realized that I was still in the game only because I was trying to play my way out of bankruptcy. Any warm and tingly feeling the music might have induced was overridden by the wind, which had me shivering and sitting on my hands.

  I told Chief I had to clear my head. Really, I was just stalling. I wasn’t eager to see Mitzi again. I wasn’t sure what I should tell her. I weighed telling her everything I had found out. I weighed telling her nothing.

  “I didn’t know this guy well enough to know what he would have wanted,” I said. I looked out the window onto the street. The street lights were on even though it was mid-afternoon. It was overcast enough to be night.

  Chief made the leap, assuming that I was talking to him and not myself. “If you want to know what he would have wanted, you gotta look at what he was doing,” he said. “You gotta look at what he was trying to do.”

  Chief didn’t give it a high mystical reading. It wasn’t Sweat-Lodge Wisdom he was offering up. He was matter-of-fact about it.

  I turned away from the window, reached for a pen in my pocket, and started to doodle, all straight lines, all right angles.

  “You know those weren’t robo-calls and wrong numbers I was getting,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Chief said. “I know they weren’t booty calls either.”

  17

  “And he never applied for parole. It seems like he wants to stay in prison the rest of his life.”

  Chief and I sat behind BLTs we hadn’t touched during a recitation of miseries. Mitzi insisted on making us something before she would sit down to hear what I turned up in Prince Albert. I had just given her a very selectively abridged version.

  I left out the part about Whisper’s windpipe being crushed by Monica Harmon. Whisper had avoided revealing or explaining all that could be avoided. He couldn’t have written a fiction of his entire life. His voice, though, was the one thing that had needed to be explained and he had come up with a lie of convenience. I didn’t want Mitzi to know that Whisper had ever lied to her.

  I also left out the fact that he had placed Monica Harmon on the Mars payroll. And the fact that he spoke to Harmon on a regular basis at the Living Sky Casino. I knew that there had been nothing going on between them, but Mitzi was just too fragile. It was already all too much.

  Mitzi bowed her head and sobbed softly, almost a whimper. Her adult life was now in a whole new perspective. Maybe she had always sensed Whisper’s shame. It’s the leading cause of all mutations of avoidance.

  I glanced at my BLT but let it sit. I’d have come off callous if I took a bite of it. Chief’s stomach growled. It was unaware of the etiquette of mourning. He fought off the urge.

  To Mitzi’s credit, she raised her head after five minutes. To her greater credit, she moved off What Was and moved on to What Might Be.

  “Is there anything we can do for Martin’s brother? Any way to get him out?”

  “I don’t know. He’s like a lot of guys in prison. He’s mentally unstable. He needs help. Probably too late now.”

  I respected her even more. It seemed like she wanted to step into her husband’s breach and try to save his brother, a complete stranger to her. That he was a convicted murderer didn’t weigh on her thoughts. She couldn’t think ill of her late husband’s brother.

  She excused herself to get more Kleenex in the kitchen. I stole a bite of the BLT, chewed hard and fast, and swallowed so that I wouldn’t have a mouthful when she came back into the living room.

  “I don’t know if I can stay on in Swift Current,” she said.

  Seconded.

  “It was a lonely place even when Martin was here,” she continued.

  I picked up the considerable slack in the conversation. I told her that I trusted Roth and Friesen to look after the business end. Even on less than ideal terms, she would get out with more money than she’d ever have a chance to spend. I told her that she could settle in a place where the weather and neighbours weren’t as cold and harsh. That could have been any place at all if you took the two counts in concert. I rhymed off likely destinations: Victoria, the Gulf Coast, San Diego, maybe Mexico or the Caribbean. I left Vegas off the list—no sense leaving one bad memory for another. I told her that I’d help her as much as I could. For a minute, an awful, tasteless, glorious, opportunistic minute, while I rhymed off all these attractive choices, I painted a picture for her and, I’ll admit, for myself. I thought a guy could do worse in life than end up as her winger. She was well preserved, as I noted before, and she had the wherewithal to stay stunning. What kind of guy could lust after a grieving widow? She was in the room with one. I kept thinking too soon but it was an effort.

  She started sobbing again. I had spoken in my usual conversational voice, but if I had cranked the volume up to one hundred decibels she wouldn’t have heard me. If I had put on a slide show of the choicest gated communities she couldn’t have seen it from the front row. At that moment I regretted turning up anything at all about the life and death of her husband. At that moment I thought my life and hers would be easier if it had just been left a suicide.

  “We still don’t know …”

  That was as far as she could go and this was one blank that I wouldn’t fill in for her. We still don’t know who killed Hugo Martens, Martin Mars, and Whisper? I owed it to her to try to find out. I owed it to him.

  Mitzi composed herself.

  “You haven’t touched your sandwich,” she said. “Go ahead.”

  I had a second bite and even though it had been sitting there for half an hour it was delicious. The lettuce was crispy enough to have been plucked from an iceberg. The bacon crunched as if it were working from muscle memory.

  “This is so good,” I said, desperate to pull off the impossible, namely pushing conversation onto the mundane.

  Mitzi stifled tears. Small talk was hard but still easier than the rest. “It’s the one advantage of living out here,” she said. “The meat from the local farms just tastes so much b
etter than what you buy in the stores. Everyone in town has a farm that they go to for their meat …”

  She paused. I could tell from her expression that her mind was performing some introductory human calculus.

  “From everything that you’ve told me about Martin’s growing up, it makes sense now that he had me buy our meat from a Hutterite colony about ten minutes out of town. He never drove out there. He always had me do it. He said that he got lost on those back roads.”

  It hung out there in the silence. There had been a couple of compelling reasons for Whisper’s not wanting to drive out there. That he might be recognized. That it would bring back unwelcome memories.

  I lost my appetite.

  Mitzi tried to distract herself with The Today and The Tomorrow. “I’m going to stay on,” she said, raising her head, looking out the living-room window at a snowdrift. “I’m going to ask Bob and Harry to sit in Martin’s spot on the team’s board for now. Maybe I’ll be able to do it in time.”

  “I think just Wh— Martin’s memory might be enough to keep Van Stone involved with the team.”

  “And I’m going to tell Walt that I want him to stay on. It will be good for him and good for me, I think.”

  I saw no need to point out that he had a sweet deal that he couldn’t come close to matching in Swift Current.

  Only a couple of breaths later Walt came in the side door. We dropped the subject of Walt’s Room at the Inn. Mitzi asked me my plans and I told her that I was going to book my flight, that I had to reconnect with my employer and the women in my life, those being Sandy and my daughter. She asked me if I’d stay for dinner. I checked my watch. I couldn’t see heading back on an empty stomach. I didn’t like the idea of stopping at another roadside place in a couple of hours. I told her that I’d be happy to stay for dinner but that I was going to have to be a bad guest and hit the road after dessert and coffee.

  She said she understood. She started to rummage through the refrigerator and freezer, trying to figure what she could whip up.

  “I just don’t know what to do,” she said. “You liked the pork chops the other day, didn’t you, Brad?”

  “Yeah, I did.”

  18

  Shortly thereafter the phone rang. Mitzi took the call in the kitchen. Roth was calling to say that he had a few matters to discuss with Mitzi, some papers to sign. Mitzi said that she wanted his advice about a couple of things as well. She invited Roth over for dinner. “Nothing formal or fancy,” she said. “Just some pork chops.”

  I cringed. The lawyer explained to her that the main course wasn’t on his diet plan. I watched her drink it in with bafflement, punctuated with a shocked “Really?” Roth asked Mitzi if she was alone and she told him that Chief and I had been on-site and Walt had just arrived. He asked her to put me on the line.

  “Is she still under sedation? Is she okay?”

  Mitzi was within earshot, so I picked my words. “Yes on both counts, though a little shaky on the latter,” I said.

  “Well, I’m just worried about her.”

  “I’m sure it’s appreciated.”

  “Do you think coming over after dinner is appropriate?”

  Again, I looked over at Mitzi. She asked Chief if he wanted more coffee and put another pot on. “I think it would probably be for the better if we were all here in support,” I said. At that point it hit home that I had assumed the role of captain on the support team of a woman I hadn’t seen in almost twenty years, someone I barely knew.

  “I’ll be over shortly,” Roth said. I liked the fact that he was willing to come over to the house for the good of his client’s widow and endure the fresh perfume of pork chops.

  I lowered my voice while Mitzi ran the water. “Good,” I said. “But I think you should keep the paperwork to a minimum. She’s still …”

  “Fragile,” he said, sparing me having to risk Mitzi overhearing. “Yes, I’ll be over shortly.”

  It wasn’t going to be a wholesale line change, just a little relief, but for that I was grateful. With the coffee dripping, Mitzi began to root through the freezer to round up pork chops and was disappointed to find that she had only enough for dinner for three, which is to say only enough to feed Chief.

  “Brad, I’ll call the colony farm and ask them to put something together we can have for dinner, but I don’t think I’m up for the drive out there,” she said. “Walt can go with you.”

  “Sure,” I said. Another mitzvah to add to my swelling number of good deeds.

  If Chief and I tried to run this errand alone, we would end up hopelessly lost and be discovered on the side of the road the following spring. Even if we had a GPS it would have been useless to sort through the approximations that passed for addresses out on the gravel rural-route side roads. Walt wouldn’t offer much in the way of conversation but he’d know which snowbank was the left turn and which fallen road sign was the right.

  Roth was knocking on the door twenty minutes later and we headed out. First we cut across town and turned in the Bug loaner at the repair shop in exchange for Chief’s Jeep.

  Chief looked relieved to be behind the wheel of his usual ride and pushed the driver’s seat all the way back. I offered Walt the passenger seat and stretched out in the back.

  In between Walt’s unembroidered instructions for right turns and left turns and go straights, I tried to make small talk with the kid. Again, it was nothing that reached the level of the Algonquin Round Table.

  I asked him how he was holding up.

  “Okay,” he said, when he clearly wasn’t.

  I asked him how things were going over at the station on the west side of town, which had reopened in full.

  “Okay,” he said. “We pretty much had to get going. A truck was scheduled to fill up the underground tanks. We had some repairs lined up. We showed respect by keeping the station on the east side closed. I don’t know when that’s gonna be opened or if it’s gonna be opened at all. I don’t know the manager out there. I’m just glad I don’t have to work there. I don’t think I could stand it.”

  “You’re good with cars?” I asked.

  “Learnin’. Just the basics, though. I want to get so that I can buy ’em and fix ’em and sell ’em. Y’know, it’s a good sideline.”

  “You bought any?”

  “I bought the old Impala that was out behind the east station, right beside Mr. Mars’s Mercedes. I don’t think that I can ever work on that one.”

  “Hey Chief, can you turn the radio down?” I said. “I feel a migraine coming on.” It was true but it wasn’t going to be me who was knocked dizzy and reeling. The Big Man pushed the button and I reached into my coat to pull out my BlackBerry. I checked the battery and it had more than half a charge, good for a few more hours. I had an email alert. It was from Ryan MacDonald, a scout with Boston, a complete knucklehead and ass-kisser, and, I’d safely have bet, a guy who’d be the first whizzed with budget slashing in a lockout. Despite my boundless sympathy for my fellow man, I ignored the email. I found the voice recorder icon and held the smartphone up behind the headrest that Walt was leaning on. I leaned forward so that both ends of the conversation would be clear for playback.

  “I guess I could see that. What do you think of that, Chief? What he says, what was it again, Walt?”

  “That I don’t think I could go work on that Impala,” he said.

  “Which Impala?” I asked.

  “The one that was parked beside Mr. Mars’s Benz. That would be too hard to do.”

  Chief nodded his head. “I guess,” the Big Man said.

  I kept it in the small talk vein. “Funny, when you said that you bought something to fix up that was out at the station on the east side, I thought it might have been the van.”

  “That Volks’ hippie wagon that was parked in the back, naw. That’s a customer’s. I don’t know who would want to spend a hundred bucks on that old thing.”

  “What do you think of that van, Chief? The one we saw in those police ph
otos of the scene behind the station.”

  “Couldn’t tell much about it,” he said, turning his head to look at me in the rear-view mirror and try to figure out where I was going.

  “Take the left here,” Walt said. “The road is gonna get bumpy.”

  It did. Our asses were put into the meat tenderizer on a low setting and change was shaken out of Walt’s pockets onto the floor of the car. It was only the start of the shaking.

  “Walt, how is it that you know that the Impala was parked beside Mr. Mars’s Mercedes? And that it was behind the station? Or that the van back there was an old Volks?”

  “I went out Monday to see if there was anything I could do.”

  “His car was moved Sunday morning, after the police photographer was done with it. While you were on your shift across town.”

  “I heard someone mention them then, I guess.”

  “So you thought you saw them but you had that wrong. You only heard about them from …”

  “I guess I heard it from someone, I can’t remember.”

  “That’s really curious, Walt. What do you think, Chief?”

  “‘Curious’ is a good word,” he said.

  I didn’t give Walt a chance to get in. “That’s the sign there for the turn for the colony farm, right?” I said, without waiting for Walt’s confirmation. “So you know where the Mercedes was parked and more importantly what it was parked beside, even though you couldn’t see the scene from the road and even though everything was cleared away right after.”

  I took a little licence with “right after,” not that he’d know.

  “Yeah, I guess,” the kid said. He looked like he had seen a ghost. I would have bet he had.

  “You got all that, Chief?”

  “Yeah, Shadow, I heard all of it.”

  “Good, I have it all here too,” I said.

  I hit Stop. I held my breath. I just hoped the recorder had picked up everything he had said. And it had, crystal clear, not too loud but loud enough to rock Walt’s world and start lifting the fog that had settled around events that Sunday morning.