The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  Yeah, I was fading, sitting shiva, sleepily daydreaming about a getaway. Then Mitzi splashed my face with cold water.

  “Please,” she said. “Would you two take me over to Martin’s lawyer’s office at ten thirty? I mean, I don’t think I can drive my car. I’m just too upset. The reading of the will should be pretty straightforward. So he told me, anyway. Martin’s accountant is going to be there as well. I just have to sign some things there. Then over to the RCMP headquarters? I’m just not up to it myself.”

  This was the price of being a good teammate. Chief looked at me as if to say, “I want to be traded.”

  I told Mitzi that I had one stop to make before we made the rounds with her.

  5

  Chief and I piled into Mitzi’s Escalade and drove five minutes to a Shoppers Drug Mart overlooking the Trans-Canada at its downtown exit. As we pulled into the parking lot we saw an RCMP cruiser making a slow pass-by, the two Mounties giving me a hard stare while they sipped their coffee. Not a local, they figured, and how is it that a guy in a hat like that drives an Escalade?

  My head began to ache. I never had a concussion that I knew of when I was playing, and it would be my dumb luck to suffer my first while I was drawing a cheque as a scout. Hunts would have a field day with that one.

  I went to the pharmacy at the back of the store to throw myself on the mercy of the staff there. I thought I might have a shot at talking a friendly pharmacist into calling the Shoppers Drug Mart where I fill my prescription in Toronto and coming away assured that I had refills of Celebrex on their records. No dice. Knew it from the look of the old guy who asked if he could help me. He made it sound like he wouldn’t be too shook up if he couldn’t. He stood about five-two, light bouncing off his shiny bald dome, and he was as white as an aspirin. It was hard to tell where his lab jacket ended and skin started. He wore his reading glasses down his hypodermic-needle nose and peered over the top of them.

  “I have to fax your doctor and when he confirms your prescription I can fill it for you,” he said.

  “Shit, that’s not going to work,” I said. “He’s going to Myrtle Beach to golf with his buddies.”

  “You take this for …”

  “For my knee. For the one ligament I have left. For the sharp bits of gravel where my cartilage used to be.”

  “You can go over-the-counter for some relief.”

  “It would be no relief. Tried it. Doesn’t help.”

  “Then you will have to get a doctor here to prescribe something. You could go to emergency …”

  I imagined sitting there for two or three hours. No thanks. “… or maybe you can try the sports injury and physio clinic down the street. Dr. Humphreys. He’s the doctor for the local hockey team.”

  That sounded like the better option. A team doctor would have more empathy with an ex-player on the limp.

  The clinic was only two hundred yards across the sprawling parking lot but I drove it in the Escalade. I limped into the waiting room and explained my situation to the receptionist. She said she could squeeze me in before lunch if I had my health-plan info with me, which I did. I told Chief that there was no point waiting around with me and that he could go chow down in the meantime.

  The only reading material in the office was a pile of year-old Sports Illustrateds. I was staring out the window at passing traffic when I felt my BlackBerry vibrate in my coat pocket. It was an email from Intel-Sec Canada, the investigations and security firm that I had worked for unhappily in my first years out of the game.

  Brad,

  We hope you’re doing well. We have a lot of hockey fans in our office, and though Toronto probably gets the majority of support we followed your L.A. team with interest.

  We have just entered into an agreement to provide the security detail for the league, including details for the commissioner, owners, and star players at games and major events. We are also organizing a unit charged with investigating players of interest to the league office, i.e., any players who might have links to organized crime or issues with substance abuse. It is a long-term contract and a very lucrative one and we believe your background in the game would prove invaluable. We envision it being a springboard to contracts with professional leagues in other sports.

  It would be great to meet up with you when you’re in the city to discuss a role for you on our team.

  Regards,

  Jay Christie

  President

  Intel-Sec Canada Inc.

  I had seen the sides of beef that were the commissioner’s bodyguards at the draft. They went three bills apiece and looked like the two anchors at the end of the rope for the Toronto police department’s tug-of-war team. They were, in fact, ex-NYPD, former beat cops, probably run off the force before they were fully pensioned because of serial internal investigations. They should have been able to do their jobs for the Commish working in the background, but they couldn’t have been more conspicuous if they had worn DayGlo vests and flashing lights atop straw hats. I hated that type of work but I couldn’t rule out having to do it to put food on the table if my contract wasn’t going to be renewed in L.A.

  I was imagining a very different line of work than my present one when the patient with the next appointment came through the door. The kid from the night before, I thought. I could see his football sweater under his unbuttoned down jacket. The nose that Chief had pounded into bone meal was neither bandaged nor the worse for wear. No black eye, just a limp, one that looked as bad and painful as mine, nothing I had seen a trace of the night before. He was on crutches and his left leg was heavily braced. He hadn’t even been limping at the end of hostilities. Must have fallen on the ice or maybe someone had lived my dream and pushed him down a flight of stairs.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said by way of an icebreaker.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You come here often after getting busted up in bar fights? They keep your file out just in case?”

  “You’ve got the wrong guy,” he said. And I had. He hung up his down jacket. He was wearing No. 59 but the name on the back read HANLEY. He took a seat on one of the chairs lined against the far wall, as if he couldn’t stay far enough away from me. He put it together. “You must be thinking about my brother. We’re twins. We get mixed up all the time. Even by people who know us.”

  I could see that. I could guess it probably caused this kid no small amount of grief too. Chief had done his part in giving him some relief for a while. You weren’t going to need a program to tell them apart. His brother would be the one walking around with a nose encased in plaster and eyes lined in black and red and yellow rings like a psychedelic raccoon.

  No. 59 checked in and the receptionist asked how he was doing. He winced and gave a look of What Can You Do Anyway. He didn’t say he was doing okay. He wasn’t going to lie.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, when he sat back down. “My buddy and I got into some sort of thing with your brother at the Imperial.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense,” No. 59 said. “He was out late and my father was up in the middle of the night. It happens.”

  “I’m sure it does,” I said. “Your dad got him out of the lock-up, looked like he had done it before.”

  The kid barely pent up the resentment. “He’s been in a fight a night since he got back,” No. 59 said. “He made the football team at the university as a freshman, played some special teams but got a concussion, a bad one. He got medical leave from school. His year’s wiped off the books but it didn’t bother him so long as he’d be eligible to play again next year. The one doctor he saw said he should never play again. Our father found him another doctor who’d clear him. When he drinks he gets wild.”

  “I’d bet it’s more than beer,” I said.

  “That’d be a safe bet.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “I tore my knee up in the first game in my last year of high school,” he said. “Nerve damage. I thought they were going to have to amputate it. My father
says I’m lucky but it’s hard to see it that way.”

  I told the kid that I knew a few specialists connected with our team. I had come on to the kid and he didn’t deserve it. This was a make-good. I told him that I could give him contact information for the orthopedic surgeons who are the team’s first choice for major work. “Maybe there’s something they can do for you,” I said. I remembered exactly what it was like to spend months on crutches. Looking at him, I knew that he’d be filling a prescription for Celebrex or another anti-arthritic when he sprouted his first grey hair, just like I did.

  “That would be great,” he said. I gave him my card. While I typed his email into my BlackBerry I pumped him for Swift Current 411. I told him that I was in town for Martin Mars’s funeral and that I had fallen out of touch with him after he left L.A. He seemed to have no working theory for why the mention of Whisper’s name would have ignited the fires at the Imperial the night before.

  “Mars has always been the chief competition for my father, I guess,” No. 59 said. “My father didn’t have a lot of time for him. He said that he made his money the easy way. ‘He was the only son of a couple who built their fortune the way I built mine, through blood, tears, and sweat. I’ve made my own good fortune.’ My father is the majority owner of a bunch of gas stations and auto-repair places and some other retail outfits. He’s involved in some oil drilling south and west of here.”

  If the old man was also drilling his hatred of his rival into his sons, I could see why No. 51 might have seen red when I mentioned Whisper’s square name, especially if No. 51 was drunk, high, or chemically wired. With shorted-out synapses as a chaser, he’d probably have taken a swing at Mike Tyson.

  I tried to change the subject. “Do you have to go to Moose Jaw or Regina for rehab?” I asked him. “That’s a hell of a drive.”

  “They actually have a good rehab facility at the hospital here, as good as the one in Moose Jaw and pretty close to Regina’s,” he said. “The Mars Rehab Centre.”

  I was leafing distractedly through an old SI and stopped, turning my head.

  “Yeah, it was his donation,” No. 59 said. “He’d come by to check in and talk to the therapist I see there.”

  “And people don’t like him even if he’s doing stuff like this?” I asked. I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  “Thing is, Mars is really picky … was … with what he’d give money to. He wouldn’t give anything to church charities. Something like the hospital, the public school, sure. He gave money to our football program at the comprehensive school, but when our basketball team at the Catholic church wanted to go play in a tournament against teams from the States, he wouldn’t even buy us water bottles.”

  The game of hockey and Whisper’s career path would make an atheist of just about anybody, I guess.

  A fourteen-year-old clad in a hockey jacket and perched on crutches exited a room in the back of the office and the receptionist told the better of the Hanley twins that he was good to go. He hobbled off. “C’mon in,” Dr. Humphreys said. While I sat and waited I Googled Hanley and gas and auto. I landed on a couple of news stories about the Garageland Canada bidding from early January.

  Mars, Hanley, BPS, and two internationals in running for Garageland.

  It looked like Hanley had been cut out of the deal that had gone to his chief competitor just before that competitor decided to pack it all in. That’s the type of lucky bounce that a self-made man wouldn’t leave to good fortune.

  6

  Dr. Humphreys recognized my name. He dropped the names of a few junior players he had worked with. He was in his thirties, a no-neck lifter and recreational jock, and he told me that he had played for a bantam team with a guy who made it into the league for about a week. I suffered His Unremarkable Career Retrospective because I’d suffer more without my Celebrex. He asked to have a look at my knee, maybe just to make sure that I wasn’t an imposter. He asked me the particulars and I told him when and how it had happened, Lavery and the knee-on-knee.

  “You tore it up a few years too soon,” he said. “They made big strides in that work by the late ’90s. You might have lasted a few more seasons. You might have played until you were forty.”

  I’d always thought that but had never said it. I suspected only the first half was true. I might have lasted a few more seasons and ground a few more bucks out of the game. I was never going to be a forty-year-old playing in the league. I had already fallen out of love with the game when I shredded two ligaments. In fact, I could barely remember ever being in love with it. The nearest thing to a warm and fuzzy feeling I ever had about hockey these days was when I had to pop my anti-inflammatory of choice and it burned another dimple in my stomach lining.

  He handed me a prescription and wished me well.

  I asked him about the Hanley twin who had been in to see him.

  “Very nice kid,” he said. “An awful injury. Maybe it has turned out for the best. He says that all this time he has spent in doctors’ offices and in surgery has made him want to go to med school. He’s a very bright kid.”

  That was my read of him too.

  I told him that I was in town to pay my respects to my former roomie and Swift Current’s former chief philanthropist. And I told him that I had a sense that two more wings for the hospital and the successful drilling for the Fountain of Youth still wouldn’t have earned Whisper the respect he deserved from the locals.

  “It’s a funny town,” he said, in case that had escaped my notice. “Almost any town is at least a little envious of someone who made a fortune.”

  It was a token defence of a town that was, from what I had seen, not very funny at all. “Usually, it’s envy of someone who throws his money around on something other than charity,” I said. “Most places are pretty deferential to those with money. I would have thought most would be proud that someone with the money to live anywhere chose to stay here.”

  I had written him a Prescription for Truth Serum: Take One Massive Dose Immediately and Save the Shit for a Stool Sample. “Yeah, his stand with the church charities hurt him,” he said in a voice low enough that it might not be picked up if I were wired. “People here put a lot of value in their churches and it doesn’t seem like Mr. Mars had an affiliation. Some said Mr. Mars’s charity work was all a tax dodge.”

  Yeah, this would have been the righteousless indignation of the appointed and self-appointed arbiters of morality. Having a good heart, a generous spirit, and unimpeachable character wasn’t as important as standing in the church. A small town populated by smaller people. Yeah, I’m cynical enough to have bought that right out of the showroom without a test drive.

  7

  The session at Robert Roth’s humble offices was again proof that Whisper had a lot to live for, not just the love of a good woman but a net worth well into the eight figures. With just a few small exceptions, recognition for past favours, the estate went to Mitzi in its entirety. To Mitzi and his Mercedes, as it turned out. Whisper’s will provided for storage and care of the car. Many dutiful children haven’t made out as well as his ride. A few other forthwiths and wherefores followed. There was a general instruction for Mitzi to help out Walt with any expense for schooling as she saw fit, a couple of lines that Mars had added to his will when he updated before Christmas. Roth laid the document on a green felt pad atop his old oak desk and didn’t look up as he gave it an abridged reading. The provisions in the event of her predeceasing him went unread. She whimpered when Roth came to the instructions for the burial. Roth sensed my basic mistrust of everybody and slid the will across the desk for my inspection and I read every last line. It was all on the up and up.

  The accountant, an obese and constantly sweaty man named Harry Friesen, opened the Excel numbers, even though it was hard for him not to hit two keys with fingers as fat as German sausages. The ledgers on the screen made his green visor glow. Mitzi Mars was set for life. There were a few charities that my old winger had named. A few last requests to look after
, stuff for Roth to discharge. I had steeled myself for a longer session, Roth and Friesen sucking all the hours out of a complicated tangle. That wasn’t the case. It was straightforward and they said that they were doing this pro bono.

  “He was a loyal client and good friend for years, a pillar in the community,” the lawyer said.

  In this community I didn’t imagine that there were other pillars. Whisper’s virtue probably stood out like the thick metal shaft of a car hoist in an auto-repair shop. I liked Roth and was inclined to trust him. He stood no more than five foot four and was reedy enough to trespass undetected in a dressing room full of jockeys. Roth might have been as upstanding as Whisper but could aspire to be no more than a pylon in the community.

  “Martin stayed with me for years when it might have been attractive for him to go to one of the big outfits,” said Friesen, dabbing the southern borders of his brushcut with a damp handkerchief. “He told me that he wanted to keep his money in town and with people he knew.”

  I had judged Swift Current harshly. It seemed there were a few good men in town, but with Whisper’s death not enough to make up a golf foursome.

  I thanked Roth and Friesen for their time and good work and Mitzi followed suit, muffled by a wet handkerchief. Roth had done this before and I expected him to be all business, but he seemed legitimately concerned about Mitzi’s welfare. I assured him that we’d keep an eye on her for as long as we were in Swift Current. I didn’t tell him that we were looking to get out of Swift Current post-haste.

  Chief took the wheel of Mitzi’s Escalade and drove us six blocks to RCMP headquarters.

  I asked to see Staff Sergeant Daulton. He was fetched by Prentice, who looked reluctant but lacked the confidence to stall or put us off. Daulton looked neither happy nor irate to see our sorry asses once more, though from the twinkle I detected through his beady little spectacles I suspected Mitzi’s well-preserved curves mitigated the matter. She was just out of his age bracket but a guy can dream, even an old one. Our previous meeting went unmentioned. In her presence Discretion was Albert Daulton’s middle name.