The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  That explained the love of cars.

  4

  The lone funeral-home scrub working that day had driven Mitzi to the funeral home. I was sure she was going to be billed and gouged for that. Chief drove us back to the Mars home. It was a big spread, on the east side of town, a few blocks from the arena and a few blocks from the ramp to the highway that the team bus had rolled up that day all those years ago.

  Mitzi invited us in. I have been in a few multi-millionaires’ homes, those of star players, those of big hitters in Hollywood, and Château Whisper was undoubtedly the least pretentious I had ever seen. It was a three-bedroom split-level and it looked well preserved but unrenovated. It wasn’t even the nicestlooking house on the block. A couple of teachers lived in the home on one side and the realtor who’d sold them the house lived on the other. It was a Just-Folks Street. The decor was consistent with the packaging. No pool, understandable given the climate, I guess, but no great creature comforts either. No big entertainment centre, no crystal chandeliers, no sauna. Most of the furniture was bought off the floor of the big-box store down at the mall, the same place where his employees bought their stuff. There were a few antiques, not the fancy European kind, just a handcrafted cabinet and dining table and other wood pieces that would have fit in a Prairie heritage theme park. There was a blanket of homesteader vintage hanging on the largest of the living-room walls. Mitzi would show us around later and talk about each piece. When she got to the blanket all she could muster was: “Well, Martin didn’t really have any time for art.”

  It didn’t look like Whisper had any time for hockey, either. There wasn’t a sign that Whisper had ever played a game, not a single photo in a game or anything lifted from a program, no mounted puck or framed sweater. Not a thing. At the centre of the mantel over the fireplace was an eleven-by-fourteen photo of bride and groom at the wedding chapel in Vegas. The flash from the camera reflected off Whisper’s horn-rims. On the left side of the mantel were smaller pics of the couple from back in the ’90s, his playing days in Germany, the pair of them in front of European landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Matterhorn. On the right side were photos of more recent vintage, the pair of them fishing and tanning at their place up on the lake. The beard was gone in all of them, and in none of them was he wearing glasses.

  I was in the kitchen with Mitzi when she checked her messages on speakerphone.

  You have two new messages.

  Message One, received today at 12:37 P.M. “Mrs. Mars, this is Ron Beckwith. I’m sorry for your loss. We on the board are going to have to go ahead with our meeting as scheduled at four o’clock, however. Unfortunately, the board members have set aside this time. Given what we’re up against and time constraints, we will have to move ahead with our planning. If you’re not up to attending in your husband’s stead, I completely understand.”

  Mitzi deleted it.

  Message Two, received today at 1:14 P.M. Click.

  A hang-up. Mitzi checked to see if there was a return number.

  NUMBER UNKNOWN. Probably an auto-call, a consumer poll, a giveaway, one of those You’ve-Been-Selected cons.

  Message One was strange enough that it begged an explanation, and Mitzi gave it without my asking. “Martin sits, sat, on the board of the juniors. The team is community-owned. About a hundred and fifty people have shares. Martin has more than most.” Still, Beckwith’s call seemed ghoulish. A pharmacist invests more emotion in a recommendation to take a pill on an empty stomach.

  “Can you go to the meeting, Brad?”

  “Did Wh— Martin have anyone on the board he’d have trusted for a proxy on his vote?”

  “No.”

  The worst grifters are the vultures who smell death and opportunity. The criminals who are at least artful are no worse than the Chamber of Commerce types who make their pillages while proclaiming their good intentions. Chief and I had come all the way to Swift Current to help out, though we figured we’d take a largely ceremonial role. I didn’t need to stick around the scene any longer than a cup of coffee, but I allowed myself to get sucked into a small vortex.

  “I’ll go and let you know what happens,” I told Mitzi.

  She was deeply appreciative. She gave me the details. The board met at a conference room at the arena.

  I kept waiting for a knock at the door, a friend to prepare dishes that will go uneaten, deliver flowers that will go unnoticed, and let us make a graceful exit for the meeting. The knock never came. I thought it might have been the way Whisper died. A small-town scandal. This was sort of a nineteenth-century attitude, but from what I could tell and all Chief had told me, Swift Current hadn’t moved very much beyond it. The good citizens didn’t want to be stained by associating with the widow.

  Mitzi’s hands were folded in her lap and she had her head down. The only sounds were the furnace churning up and Chief clattering in the kitchen as he got the coffee percolating.

  “I have to know how he died,” she said.

  I wanted to say that only the mentally ill commit suicide and mental illness isn’t something that’s there for explaining. Not by family and friends. Not by scientists who can confidently explain most things. Not by men of the cloth who can doubtlessly explain everything. Not by a mope like me who struggles to explain anything. If I had known her better or if she had been a total stranger, I would have managed to spit that out.

  I couldn’t say a thing, couldn’t do a thing. We just sat there like a fruit-in-the-bowl still life until Chief brought us our coffees.

  “I don’t know how these things go, Brad,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”

  I had a sinking feeling that I was going to be roped into something that I didn’t want to do by someone I was in no position to say no to.

  “Can you go talk to them about it? They called me and brought me in to identify him, but I couldn’t ask them about anything that …”

  Mitzi couldn’t finish the sentence.

  I heard a car rattle up in the drive and a car door open and slam, then the side door of the house do the same.

  “That’s Walt,” Mitzi said. “He lives in our basement apartment. He’s been working at the station for a year now. A few months after Martin hired him we brought him in. Martin said he was struggling with things but he was a good kid. We’ve had a bunch of Martin’s workers, old and young, stay here. We never charged them rent, they just help us out with things, cutting the lawn, watching the house when we’d go on holidays. Walt’s a good boy. He was with me at the funeral home before you got there. He was embarrassed because he didn’t have any good clothes to wear. Martin was closer to him than other boys we’ve had. We never had kids. Couldn’t. They’re the closest thing we’ve had to sons.”

  Mitzi was still stuck in the present tense.

  “Mrs. Mars?” came the voice from the basement.

  “We’re here,” she said. “It’s all right, Walt.”

  Chief came out of the kitchen. “Cream?” he asked.

  Mitzi brought her voice down to a hush. “Poor Walt,” she said. “He works at the other station across town and last week he was mugged and robbed and beaten up on the night shift. He thought he was going to lose his job over the two hundred dollars they took from him at gunpoint. He’s been shaken up ever since.”

  Walt came upstairs. He was a kid, if a kid could be about twenty. He was too big to be a jockey, too little to be much else. He had hair messed by a toque and a chalky complexion messed by persistent adolescence, like a pool of Polyfilla flecked with pomegranate seeds. He had good manners, a gash on his forehead, and a look of worry that Mr. Mars’s death might end his employment, his rent-free address, and the insulin on his health plan. He froze when Mitzi introduced him. He wasn’t comfortable in his own skin, even less so around those in other people’s skin. He added nothing to the conversation except silent witness. Ten minutes later Walt said, “Yes, Mrs. Mars.” Five minutes after that he was sizzling some pork chops.

&
nbsp; “They’re off local farms,” Mitzi pointed out, mustering Swift Current Tourist Board Pride. “I go out to a farm just outside of town and pick them up once or twice a week.” The pork chops were the best I had ever sampled, as if grief were a rare and special seasoning. Chief had seconds. I couldn’t remember ever having a home-cooked meal on the road as a player or scout. I couldn’t even remember making myself a sandwich. They were only pork chops but they tasted as good as any filet mignon I had dropped a C-note on.

  5

  Dinner hadn’t hit bottom when Chief and I headed over to the arena. It was adjacent to a working-class neighbourhood on the east side of town and south of Highway 1, not even two minutes from the station where they found Whisper. The arena was the utilitarian centrepiece of the town’s parks and rec department, but from the looks of it there wasn’t a lot of recreating going on. On the playground beside the arena, monkey bars climbed out of a couple of feet of snow and the foot of the slide was a pile of hard brown slush. The outdoor rink for shinny was likewise snowed under. The park was a plain unbroken by a single boot print and there wasn’t a kid in sight.

  Chief and I walked into the conference room at the arena. Seven men and one woman, septuagenarians, lined a long table. Their clothes were made for business if the business had been conducted in 1964, which was around the time they had made their respective wads. The man I took for Beckwith had taken centre stage. He was all of seventy and had been a member of the original board that had landed Swift Current the junior team. His construction company had missed out on the contract to build the arena back in the ’80s, but Beck-Bilt’s drab piles of cinderblocks were all around the town. He wore a grey suit a half shade darker than his skin, a timeless outfit in that it never has nor ever will be in style. He had a white-knuckled grip on his coffee mug, and I imagined that his hold on the proceedings was just as viselike. He offered me what passed in Swift Current for a warm welcome.

  “Who are you?”

  I tried to tidy it up in proper business fashion. “I’m Brad Shade. I’m serving as proxy for the late Martin Mars. This is my friend Warren Bear.”

  Chief nodded. A couple of members of the board rewarded him with a look of toxic distrust.

  “So you say you’re acting as a proxy for Mars,” said the master of ceremonies, whose voice I now recognized as that in the voicemail. His impulse to close ranks was deep-seated and indigenous to the town. Given tragic precedent in the team’s history, you’d think that a correction would have been made, that complete transparency would have become standard procedure. Instead, Beckwith and company liked to keep things opaque. “I suppose you have documents to indicate that. Dated. Witnessed.”

  He supposed right. Mitzi had signed and Chief and Walt had put their scrawl as witnesses beneath it.

  “It seems to be valid,” the lone woman conceded with undisguised regret. She was, I’d learn later, a long-standing member of the town council and a vice-principal at the local high school. From the looks of the bespectacled harridan, she was a scold of the first order. If I spoke out of order she’d probably hand me a detention. The vice-principal slapped a copy of the minutes from the last meeting down in front of me like she was trying to squash a beetle crossing the table.

  A couple of points of order, a couple of motions, a couple of secondeds-and-all-in-favour-say-ayes later we got down to business. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the team as a going concern was not going so well at .500 on its ledgers. The arena was the smallest in the league. So was the market. In fact, other Prairie towns had bigger population bases and bigger arenas yet were content to have teams in lower and less-expensive leagues. The cost of travel was eating into the bottom line. The shortfall on a yearly basis steamrolled into mid-range six figures. It had been booster hubris to take on a major–junior franchise back in the day. The market had been too small to break even twenty-five years ago. Twenty-five years of cost escalation and the town’s almost completely stagnant economy made it an even bleaker picture. The only reason the team was still in Swift Current was its tragic arc. The board saw it as a point of honour; taking the franchise out of Swift Current would have been giving the brush to the four teenagers who’d died in the crash on the outskirts of town. But the realities were plain as the numbers in the ledgers: It could no longer be sustained with this ownership set-up.

  “We have no choice,” Beckwith said. “We can only go to the community so often to cover these losses. We can’t pay for the best European players. We can’t convince the best players from other provinces to come here. Any coach worth anything won’t work for what we pay him, and if we do get someone who’s any good at all he’ll jump at the first decent job offer. Let’s face it, there’s no future here, the way things are. I’ve taken the liberty of talking to some people who would be in the market to buy the franchise for relocation. Victoria is strongly interested. There’s a group in Winnipeg and businessmen in the States who are also prepared to make offers. I can’t see the league’s board of governors standing in our way. Bidding will go up to four or five million to the right buyer. We can pay dividends to our shareholders and ice a team in the Saskatchewan league.”

  I didn’t trust Beckwith after listening to him on the voicemail. I trusted him even less now. I would have liked to play poker against him. His words came faster and his voice rose when he got around to the prospect of a sale. With that much at stake, Beckwith could have cooked a deal, an inside job that, if he swayed the board, might get him a nice reward from an appreciative new owner above and beyond what he was fairly due.

  6

  I called Mitzi and said I’d write up the details for her to pass on to her lawyer. She asked us to stay the night. I told her that I had to get back to Regina, that I had a flight out in the morning. I told her I’d go by the RCMP office and ask them what they could tell me about Whisper’s death. It seemed the least I could do short of staying over. Chief and I climbed into his Jeep, he put RCMP into his GPS, and we followed the arrow downtown to the Mounties’ offices.

  The good news was that it had heated up a bit in Swift Current. The bad news was a forecast of freezing rain.

  We stopped to fill up the Jeep. Chief looked at the sky, down to its last few minutes of daylight, washed-out grey directly above us, heavy weather on the horizon directly into the wind.

  “Maybe we should try and beat that back to Regina,” Chief said. “It looks like it’s going to be bad.”

  “We’ll be all right, so long as you’re driving,” I said. I gave Chief my corporate card and went inside to the counter of the convenience store. I grabbed a couple of Red Bulls and the local paper, The Southwest Booster. Whisper’s death got five paragraphs on page 4.

  Martin Mars, a former pro hockey player and the owner of a province-wide chain of service stations and truck stops, died Sunday morning. He was 48.

  Mars, who grew up in Herbert, Sask., played briefly for the Swift Current juniors before he was traded to Prince George and drafted by Los Angeles.

  He kept roots in Southwest Saskatchewan, returning to oversee his family’s business, one that started with a small two-pump gas station in Herbert and later branched out with more than a dozen service centres along the Trans-Canada.

  In recent years Mars branched out into retailing, including Mars Farm Equipment and Repair on Main Street in Swift Current.

  Mars also served on the board of the junior hockey team and the Swift Current Arena, and in an advisory role with the city’s triple-A teams.

  There was no mention of suicide. Then again, in Swift Current, word would get around fast. It probably had made it around already.

  I got out my BlackBerry while Chief waited for the pump to spit out the receipt. I Googled Martin Mars. I thought his death might fly under the national media’s radar. It didn’t. The Globe and Mail picked up on it. I guess no political heavyweights, artistes, or socialites bit the dust that day.

  Martin Mars, a journeyman hockey pro who scored a goal that ended one of th
e longest overtime games in modern history, died in Swift Current, Sask., Sunday morning. He was 48 years old. A cause of death has not been announced but authorities are treating Mr. Mars’s death as a suicide.

  We pulled up beside the yellow brick RCMP offices. From his south-facing window an officer would have a view of a line of the town’s thirty-two registered churches. Each of them promised some sort of deliverance, the assurance that Mountie and citizen alike are in Swift Current as part of God’s plan. From his north-facing window an officer would have a picturesque view of Highway 1 and a line of old rundown motels and new big-box stores that run alongside the Trans-Canada artery. No doubt each and every one of the boys in uniform envisioned one day getting in a car and going down that road in one direction or the other with his worldly possessions packed up in the delivery truck behind him.

  The crusty bastard at the front desk had no window. He stood six-four and would have been a handful in his day, but that day was long gone. He had gone soft across the middle and added a chin, but his deskside manner was the residue of his once legit tough-guy attitude. Chaining him to the front desk was best for all involved. Let him out of the office and someone could get hurt, including him. He was suspicious of us at first, hostile a minute later.

  “I’m wondering if I could speak to the officer or officers who went to the scene of Martin Mars’s death,” I said.

  “And you are …?”

  I told him. My name didn’t register with him. He was no hockey fan.

  He gave Chief the hairy eyeball. “And he is …?”

  I told him Chief was with me. A curl of his lip betrayed deep-seated intolerance.

  “And you want to know about this fellow because …?”