The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  9

  “Welcome back,” the bastard at the front desk at headquarters said. “You’ve been out seeing the sights.”

  Chief shot me the Another Fine Mess You Got Us Into look. Provoking a bitter guy exiled to the desk on the night shift moved to the top of my List of Lifetime Do-Overs.

  We were uncuffed. My BlackBerry and Chief’s cell were tossed in a drawer. We were ushered back to a holding area that was marginally less comfortable than the motel room we’d booked. It had been an eventful day and at its close I had two hotel rooms booked in two cities and was staying in neither.

  “You might as well get comfortable,” the desker said. “This is going to be handled by the day shift and they don’t start coming in until five thirty. I hope the weather doesn’t hold them up.”

  We waited for this fat prick to go back to his station and finish his crossword.

  “I know we should spend more time with a better class of people,” I said, wiping the blood and shaking the plaster out of my hair. “What the hell do they have against Whisper that these punks would come after us?”

  Radio silence.

  There was no figuring it out. We had no call to make. There was no calling Mitzi to bail us out. She had her own grief, way worse than ours, and, besides, we didn’t have her number. I’d find out later that it was unlisted.

  We saw the four kids talking to the Mounties who’d been on the scene at the Imperial. The old hump at the front desk fetched No. 51 a bag of ice to bring down his swollen beak. It was pretty genial. It was pretty familiar. There was no third degree, no reading of the riot act. I suspected the boys had a bit of a rep around town and didn’t go much beyond busting each other up. That’s par for the course when a joint like the Imperial passes for the local cultural centre.

  Chief had started to nod off when I saw a tomato-faced guy of about sixty with a bushy hyphen for a moustache go back to the room where the four kids were being held. He had folds in his forehead deep enough to swipe a credit card through. The broken blood vessels in his nose and cheeks formed a minute red paisley. He gave off the look of a guy who was unhealthy but also unhealthy for you. I thought he might have been a lawyer, but then a lawyer wouldn’t have walked out with the four of them while messing No. 51’s hair like he had made the game-saving tackle on a goal-line stand. I had seen it all before, after games, proud as punch, wishing it had been him and not his son. To Old Man Hanley’s mind, a broken nose was a character builder if it had been earned for the right reason, and from the look on his face it had been. And I figured that No. 51’s enmity toward Martin Mars issued from pronouncements from an authority figure who had bailed his son out of scrapes because of his affection in part and influence in practice.

  The old hump at the front desk shook No. 51’s father’s hand and was given reassurances that the boys would get home safely. “It’s an awful night out there,” the old hump said, though he was relying on hearsay because he didn’t have a window. It was an awful night where we sat too, and as the gash on the back of my head congealed, night bled into morning.

  1

  TUESDAY

  Morning came but not dawn. I didn’t need a window to see that the sun was reluctant to shine on Swift Current and wouldn’t rise until a couple of hours after the first day shift began to file in. I saw it in the faces of the long-time vets and in the citizenry at large. The collective environmental despair tracked back not just to the harshness of the weather but to sunlight deprivation. It was a place where days of work were infinitely long and light shining on lives was unmercifully short.

  In the morning Chief and I sat at a featureless table across from an old Mountie and a young one, clearly mentor and protegé. They struck me as being as ineffectual as Inspector Fenwick and Dudley Do-Right, and they only bothered with the latter half of the Good Cop, Bad Cop routine. They alternately debriefed and mocked us. The young stiff’s name was Constable Prentice and he took the lead under the old master’s watchful eye, the questions cascading out of him without a change in speed, volume, or expression.

  “Tell me again, exactly what were you doing in town?”

  I told him that we were in town paying our respects to a friend of mine from years back.

  “Martin Mars, yes, I know of him, very sad,” said the less-thansage old vet, Staff Sergeant Albert D. Daulton. “There have been a few issues in town regarding Mr. Mars, the holdup at that station the other week being the latest. Well acquainted with it, nature of his business, I suppose, but no matter. His death explains how you came to Swift Current but not exactly how you ended up in … well, in all of this.”

  The questions poured forth, mentor and protegé taking turns like an investigative tag team.

  “And then where did you go?”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “And then what happened?”

  We piled up the mundane details. Prentice took the notes the first time we walked through one of the longer days of our lives. The second lap he just listened to see if our accounts were in sync. The third and fourth, it was the same drill.

  “Unfortunately, your version of events doesn’t wash with the statement that we have from the bartender, and the Imperial doesn’t have a security camera,” Constable Prentice said. “From what I’ve been told you picked a fight with the boys. And no one has mentioned anything about these supposed gang members. Interesting story, though.”

  There was no use pointing out the obvious, that being the bartender taking the side of his regulars. The jocks fearing the bikers or gladly covering for them or both. All of them in it together. It would later occur to me that no mention had been made of any account from Flora and Fauna. Perhaps the RCMP kept copies of the ladies’ standard witness statement and had them sign and date them.

  It wasn’t until we were a good hour in that I picked up on the fact that Daulton was giving us a hard study. He put his hand on Prentice’s right arm to interrupt a fifth pass of the same questions.

  “What do you gentlemen do for a living?”

  We filled in the blanks. I had given up any hope that it was going to impress him.

  “Did you play?”

  I gave him the details.

  “Never heard of you,” he said.

  I wasn’t shattered.

  “And you?”

  Chief gave him the same sort of rundown. He started off by mentioning that he had played in Moose Jaw and Other Garden Spots of the West.

  “Warren Bear,” Daulton said.

  “Yeah,” Chief said, like it was an admission under accusation.

  “Was your father in the service?” the staff sergeant asked. It was the first time I had been surprised since I’d seen the two drawn nine-millimetre service revolvers at the Imperial.

  “He’s dead but, yeah, he was in the service.” Things you don’t know.

  “I’m not sure what he’d think if he could see you now,” Prentice editorialized.

  Again Prentice felt a pat on his right arm.

  “What was your father’s name?” Daulton asked.

  “John Bear.”

  “There are lots of them. I could put together a hockey team of John Bears. Where was your father from? What did he do during the war, son?”

  Where the hell did “son” come from? Maybe the sun was starting to slice through the opaque horizon.

  Chief mentioned the Second Infantry. Chief mentioned the South Saskatchewan Regiment. Chief mentioned Dieppe. I hadn’t picked up any credits in World War II history while finishing my degree by correspondence, but I knew surviving Dieppe was just about the worst ride.

  “Roger,” Daulton said again, putting his hand on his apprentice’s arm, this time with the firmness of finality. “Warren’s father was a war hero. Order of Canada. Prominent in his community.” The staff sergeant went on with a thumbnail life story and stopped occasionally for Chief to fill in the blanks or confirm a detail where necessary. I could feel the air being let out of Prentice.

  Daulton
shuffled the papers in front of him and with them, his thoughts. “You two seem like nice enough fellows,” he concluded. “I’d hate to see anything bad happen to you. You might think there’s not much worse that can happen to you around here, but I haven’t even been trying to make your life miserable. Yet. I can and will if you plan on staying around Swift Current. Others might beat me to it, from the looks of you. So I suggest the pair of you get out of town. Now is only soon enough for my liking. And pass along our condolences to Mrs. Mars.”

  I took everything seriously except the sympathetic afterword.

  We were walked to the front desk. I was limping badly. I usually iced my aching hinge at night.

  It was just after a shift change. The sour old hump had checked out. In his place was a great improvement, a bright young blonde. Her uniform accentuated her broad shoulders and hid her assets. When we had checked in for the night the Mounties had taken our various personal effects. She returned our cellphones and gave us a smile that wasn’t in the RCMP handbook. Mitzi had already called a couple of times, Sandy hadn’t. I told the blonde that I had a vial of pills that were held when we were taken into the back. She said she hadn’t seen them. Prentice must have overheard because he came up to the front desk.

  “We’re going to hold on to the pills for now, just to check them out,” he said.

  “They’re a prescription,” I said.

  “Well, it looks that way but they might be street drugs in a prescription vial, that’s all. So we’re going to check them out. Who knows, maybe they’re sex pills.”

  “Oh yeah, they’re sex pills all right. I have to take one or else I’m in too much arthritic pain to …”

  I felt Chief’s hand on my shoulder. He squeezed hard enough to deflate a football.

  2

  The cab ride was time for silent gathering of thought. Chief and I had just about exhausted conversation. We had just about exhausted everything. He was asleep thirty seconds after I slammed the door and told the driver where we were going. En route I saw a Dollarama store that was just opening and had the driver pull over. I limped into the store and bought a plain black toque that would keep the cut on the back of my head covered. I put it on in front of a mirror to check out other subtle scrapes and welts and wondered if I should go all in for a ski mask. I decided against it.

  Sixty seconds after I got back in the taxi I had to nudge Chief awake. We were going back to check out of a room that we had spent all of a minute in.

  At first I had thought it was strange that Mitzi should be so alone in her mourning. Eighteen hours later I had my own theory. She had the virtual monopoly on honesty and decency in town, at least among those I had encountered on my misbegotten odyssey. Okay, Walt seemed like a good kid, not quick on the uptake, maybe a bit damaged, but he seemed to genuinely care about Mitzi and mourn Whisper. Daulton’s late-coming leniency gave me faint hope that, whatever his failures, he might be on the up and up. But the junior team’s board members, the crowd at the Imperial, and most of the boys on the force were bastards all. I’ll admit that, with 80 percent of the precincts reporting, I had a hate-on for Swift Current.

  And I also thought that Mitzi might be right. Whisper had been doing well. He seemed to have had the love of a good woman and definitely a well-preserved beauty. He was in a position to sell off his thriving business so he could retire to watch sunsets at the beach. Suicide didn’t fit.

  I had missed my flight back to Toronto. I was going to have to use my air miles to get a flight when I got back to Regina. I’d have to use another point plan to cover another night at the hotel. There was no way I was going to be able to bill the team, not with Tomlin’s hot breath on Hunts’s neck. There was no way I was dipping into my own limited reserves. I called the Hotel Saskatchewan to book a room for my luggage and hopefully for me.

  I roused Chief when we were back at the motel. I could see overnight losers exiting the casino on the north side of Highway 1. They were hoping that the wind would blow the stench of cigarette smoke and failure off them.

  “I’m washing up and then we’ll go back to say goodbye to Mitzi,” I said.

  The ice was slippery under my boots. I skidded. I caught my balance. Arthur shouted: “Boss, get us back to terra firma.”

  3

  Chief turned the key for the fifth or sixth time. A tenth time and more until the key clicked and the engine didn’t sputter.

  “Battery is as flat as the world before Columbus,” I said. Chief told me with just a look that I could have chosen my words more carefully.

  I didn’t bother to ask him how he was enjoying the trip so far. I had caused him too much grief already, and now the players in this grand conspiracy against us had enlisted the internal combustion engine.

  “Whatever fixing it costs I’ll hide it on the expenses,” I said. “Just over-claim on the mileage and I’ll sign off on it.”

  I knew he over-claimed anyway, but our owner had frozen salaries two years ago and giving the boys a break on mileage was my way of throwing them a bone.

  No response. His hard stare was defrosting the window.

  I Googled auto repair and Swift Current . I punched the Mars listing that came up. I recognized the voice that answered. Walt. I spelled out the situation.

  “Mr. Shade, yeah, I know the hotel,” he said. “I’ll be right over with the tow.”

  “I’m surprised you’re in,” I said.

  “I’m shaky, I’ll tell you, Mr. Shade. But I had to be in here first thing. There were a bunch of cars and trucks in for repair. I gotta look after them but I wasn’t going to take any more on until …”

  His voice and thoughts trailed off. I didn’t wait for him to finish.

  “I appreciate your doing this,” I said.

  He said he had a loaner he could give us if it came to that. He promised he was going to make Chief’s sled Job One.

  Fifteen minutes later I climbed into the cab of the tow truck with Chief after me while Walt put the hook and chain on. He clearly did this daily. He said that he would drop us off Chez Mars while he got under the hood of the Jeep back at the garage.

  The cut on his forehead hadn’t healed much overnight.

  “Was that from the other day when the gas station got knocked over?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. His face reddened. “It was worse before. They must have been waiting for me. I spend most of the shift in the booth at the self-serve. It’s locked in and safe. But they waited until I had to use the washroom. I had the ‘back in five minutes’ sign up and they got me from behind. Tackled me and whaled on me. They gave me a couple more shots after I cleaned out the till. I had the minimum float in there. I told Mr. Mars he could dock it out of my pay but he said it was all right. ‘The price of doing business,’ he said. He was real kind to me.”

  Walt looked ready to cry. I tried to get him to buck up.

  “I’m sure Mitzi won’t have a problem with you staying on for as long as it takes to sort all this out.”

  Walt looked unconvinced. He had the look of a guy who had been beaten down so many times that he had just about given up caring. He had the look of a guy whose every life appointment had turned into disappointment.

  4

  “Thanks, Mitzi,” I said. Chief and I were sitting on the well-worn leather couch in the living room and she set down desperately needed coffees in front of us. The coffee was scalding hot but Chief swallowed his in two gulps.

  I told her that I appreciated Walt coming out. And I told her that we were haggard looking simply because we hadn’t brought a change of clothes.

  “Were you able to find anything out with the Mounties?”

  I didn’t bother to tell her that we were their overnight guests.

  “The guy I talked to last night wasn’t helpful at all. It might be different if you come with us. I can’t guarantee that they’re going to tell us anything more than they did last night … which was nothing at all. But I think by rights they’ll let us see the ph
otos of the scene. They told you there was no note?”

  “That’s what they said,” she replied.

  I didn’t want to dive too deep in that reflecting pool of sorrow. Only one in five or six leave notes. It figured that Kurt Cobain would. Words and sounds and gut wrench: He died as he lived. It would have fit if Whisper had walked away from life like he walked away in L.A.: without a word or backward look.

  I needed to change the subject. “We went to the board meeting,” I told her. She didn’t ask me about it but I followed up anyway. “The guy who left the message was saying that he’s lined up buyers for the team. It looks like the team is losing money hand over fist and I suppose … Martin …”

  I almost said Whisper.

  “… and a few others had been going into their own pockets to make up the shortfall. The guy …”

  “Ron Beckwith?”

  “Yeah, Beckwith says he has buyers but it doesn’t look like a transparent piece of business.”

  “Martin was involved with it, I know.”

  “Well, I didn’t like his act in the meeting. And it looks like he’s quite happy to look after the sale of the team unilaterally.”

  The phone rang. Mitzi got up and went to the kitchen to get it. She still had it on speaker. Another hang-up.

  I looked at Chief. He didn’t have an exit strategy either. Mitzi came back into the living room and broke up our attempt at telepathy.

  “What do you think, Brad? What should I do?”

  I didn’t even know where to begin. The requisite stuff that goes with any death, the reports put together by the Mounties, the financial considerations, especially those with the team: She wasn’t up to any of it by herself, probably at the best of times, definitely at this point in extremis.

  I know what I’d have liked to have done. I’d have liked to have gone down to the Imperial to settle my tab, get one for the road, give a piece of my mind to the chickenshit bartender, throw a scare into No. 51, wipe the smile off his old man’s face, and let the air out of the bikers’ tires. I doubted Chief was down with C, D, E, or F. He would probably have been okay with A and B.