The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  He went through the particulars with a veteran’s remove and efficiency. “A phone call from one Derek Jones, a station employee, age twenty-four. Time: 6:45. Our officers on the scene, Layden and Pierce, brought the boy in to take his full statement.” He paused for a few seconds and scanned the transcript of the statement. In that time he would have edited out anything he considered indelicate.

  “The discovery of the body appears to have been in the normal course of Jones’s working day, albeit a bit later than his schedule calls for. The Mercedes was parked behind the station where it could not be seen from the road or from the pumps and the office. A hose ran from the exhaust to an opening in the passenger-side front window. It was the hose that was attached to the tailpipes of cars in the service bay and run outside. It had been pulled out of the wall. Jones said the car was running when he got there. He turned the car off and …”

  Daulton looked up from the paperwork.

  “… that would seem to be a proper and consistent reaction under the circumstances.”

  “There was no hearing the car from out front or seeing the exhaust when he got to work?” I asked. Mitzi looked at the office wall as if she were trying to find Whisper’s face in the chipped dull grey-green paint.

  “It was a pretty breezy morning even by Swift Current standards, sir,” he said. Sir, already. “It’s a very quiet car. It really gets down to where the car was parked, though. It was thoroughly obscured.”

  He showed us a diagram in the report.

  “And there are images?” I asked. Mitzi raised her right hand, placed it over her mouth, and then turned away.

  “On the computer,” he said.

  He walked the three of us over to Prentice, who was working across the large room. A few words, a few clicks, a few misses, and he finally got his man digitally.

  Image 1: “Here’s the view of the car from the passenger side,” Daulton said. His narration didn’t spare us the obvious. “Clearly, the hose running from the exhaust.”

  Image 2: “Here’s the view of the layout from the rear of the car,” he continued on the unscenic tour. Mitzi wasn’t looking. “You get an idea of how young Jones could miss it. That’s a solid, reinforced back door there, no windows.”

  Image 3: “Here’s the deceased in the front seat.”

  Clearly, the obvious suicide was a hell of a lot less obvious. “Can you zoom in?” I asked.

  Prentice did.

  “He’s buckled into his seat,” I said. “He has his seat belt on.”

  “It may have been that he was driving around prior to coming to a stop behind the gas station,” the Boy Mountie offered in nonsensical colour commentary. I would have bet against him ever getting bumped up to detective.

  “He was a safety-first suicide then?”

  “Maybe he was afraid he’d be pulled over,” Prentice tried.

  It could hardly be more ludicrous. “Maybe so close to death he couldn’t bear the sound of the seat belt alarm anymore,” I said. Chief’s deadpan was freeze-framed. “Even if he was wearing his seat belt, wouldn’t you have pulled over a car that had a hose running from the exhaust to the window? It’s pretty plain in the other shots. Zoom in on the shot from the front.”

  Prentice looked at Daulton and was given the Go Ahead and Humour Him Nod. Whisper’s left arm was under the strap coming across his body.

  “How the hell does he get in that position?” I said. There was no good answer so Prentice floated a couple of bad ones.

  “He didn’t need his left hand to strap himself in. He could have just used his right hand.”

  “So he would have buckled himself up, planning to commit suicide, and pretzelled himself like he was bound.”

  “Maybe he was in pain and reaching for his stomach.”

  “It’s carbon monoxide. He would have gone to sleep. Painless.”

  In this Ping-Pong game between the obvious fact and the absurd conjecture, I had forgotten about Mitzi for a second. She was sobbing. She only caught a glimpse of the third image but it was enough to leave her in tiny little pieces.

  “You’re completely satisfied that this was a suicide?” I asked.

  “That is what we’re going with.”

  “Have you dusted the car?”

  “No. Didn’t see a point, frankly.”

  I didn’t bother to try to reason with him. The car’s interior was immaculately kept. A fingerprint would have stood out like a molten ingot in a bowl of gazpacho.

  “Are you doing a tox on the body? As part of the autopsy?”

  “Body” broke every tiny little piece of Mitzi into shards and splinters.

  “We didn’t think all of that was necessary.”

  It was hard to imagine how you could get months short of retirement in uniform and not know the basics from Crime Scene Investigation 101: “Autopsies are required standard practice in all cases of carbon monoxide poisoning.” In a box somewhere in one of my closets I had an old textbook from back in my college days and that line was highlighted in fluorescent yellow. I suppose that when you’ve spent so much time in Swift Current you’re more likely to become one of the locals and subscribe to their peculiar values than remember and respect your professional obligations. In Swift Current, just as it was with the bus crash and with the molester, people wouldn’t want to know the details of something like a suicide. People there would think that you can know too much. Daulton seemed to have more in common with those people than law-enforcement officers. He had acclimatized himself to a place where denial and avoidance blew around in huge drifts like the snow. Local mores had become his and they had overridden good judgment.

  The devil on my left shoulder wanted me to give him shit. The angel hovering on my right begged me to stay in control and I took the little winged cherub’s advice. “We can ask for an autopsy and toxicology, right?”

  “You can do whatever you like. What we can do we’ll do if we see fit.”

  “Maybe I’m just used to procedures being followed. Spoiled, y’know, growing up around Metro’s finest, son of a decorated officer and all that.”

  Our conversation, such that it was, ground to a halt. It seemed pointless to ask him if his crack crew had checked for any boot prints or tire tracks around Whisper’s Benz. If they had he would have been waving them at us as fine examples of his detachment’s professionalism. Any of that evidence at the scene was lost two days after the fact, washed away by the freezing rain.

  I suspected it was equal parts incompetence and intransigence. The Mounties on the scene had botched their report and the official line went sideways as a result. Daulton had to have seen that, but a tow truck couldn’t have budged him.

  “We’ll have to talk to the coroner to see if he can look at this,” I said.

  “Suit yourselves on that count,” he said and smiled.

  “We can take the car away?” I asked.

  “As far as I’m concerned it would be a happy sight to see you going down the road with it,” he said. Any sense of decency was the first casualty of his hostility toward me.

  “Let’s go,” I said. Daulton was racking his brain to try to come up with another passive-aggressive form of harassment dressed up in a cloak of justice. We were out the door before he could figure out another way to make our lives miserable.

  8

  The blonde at the front desk had Mitzi sign a form before she handed over the keys. Her hands shaking, Mitzi passed them to me. I told her that I’d see her back at the house. I didn’t need to follow Chief. We had covered this route enough.

  The Mercedes was parked at the back of the lot. The windshield was frosted inside and out. Maybe more inside than out. Cold, wet air had blown inside while the window was lowered for the hose running from the tailpipe, so from the driver’s seat the windshield looked like a frosted beer glass. I turned the key and the motor kicked in on cue. The sound of perfection, a collector’s car as finely tuned as a Stradivarius. But it wasn’t violin music I heard. It was the sound of
a crowd laughing. A comedy album was in the cassette player. I waited for it. Steve Martin.

  I like to get small.

  The tape was muddy, practically demagnetized by the passage of three decades, thirty winters of long refrigeration, and thousands of plays, rewinds, and fast-forwards.

  I know I shouldn’t get small when I’m drivin’, but, uh, I was drivin’ around the other day, you know, and a cop pulls me over. And he goes, “Hey, are you small?” I said, “No, I’m tall, I’m tall.”

  I don’t know how I had forgotten this. Whisper had been playing it in the Benz when we had the sweatbox challenge. I told him it was almost as bad as the heat and to put something else on. He said he had only one tape. Even back in the early ’90s it seemed hopelessly dated.

  I left the cassette in the deck and left the play button down. I looked under the seat and found the empty case, cracked, with the album cover in miniature, Martin with a fake nose and glasses and a hat of balloons.

  I didn’t feel safe hazarding a guess about the suicidal mind. If I did, though, I’d have bet against someone determined to turn out his own lights wanting to exit laughing.

  While I waited for the car to warm up I looked in the glove compartment for any other cassettes, anything else to listen to. There was nothing in there except the original owner’s manual in a beat-up plastic case. I supposed that original touches like that are points of pride among vintage car buffs. I took out the manual and fanned through it. A piece of yellowed paper fell out. It was beat-up, folded and unfolded a hundred times by the look of it. It had a note, printed not written, and back-leaning in a leftie’s hand: ACHTEN SIE AUF DAS AUTO. I went to Google Translate and punched it in.

  TAKE CARE OF THE CAR.

  9

  Chief and Mitzi had beaten me back to the Mars home. I had just stepped in the door when she handed her cell to me.

  “Mr. Shade, it’s the fuel pump,” Walt said. “I don’t have a part in stock. I’m not going to be able to get it until tomorrow. As soon as I do I’m on it.”

  The nightmare was now heading into second overtime.

  Walt said he’d come back to pick me up and ferry me back to the station to get the loaner.

  When he did come, I tried again to put his fears to rest about where he might find room and board for the next stretch.

  “Mitzi is going to let you stay on,” I said. I stopped short of saying that she was worried about him, even though, at the worst time of her life, she was.

  Walt stared at the road ahead. He looked unconvinced.

  “You’d probably help Mitzi just by being around. She could use the company.”

  Still nothing.

  I did what I could to make small talk.

  “From Swift Current originally?”

  “No, from a ways away, grew up on a farm. Family farm.”

  “Did you think about staying on there?” I wasn’t really hinting that he should look at that as a fallback. He could have and probably should have taken it that way, even though that wasn’t what I had intended.

  “No, when I came into the city to go to school, I decided I was gonna stay here.”

  He didn’t strike me as the college man. Not with his black toque with the Mack Truck patch centred perfectly, pulled down over his eyebrows. He looked like he had reached the perfect station in his life, working the pumps, making change, checking oil, giving directions, asking if there’d be a car wash with that fill-up.

  “… I was the youngest of six kids and my brothers and sisters are all farming. I had no place to go, so I just stayed here. At first I worked at the arena. Just did odd jobs there and helped out at the other things at the rec centre. Maintenance. Sweeping and mopping. Painting during the summer. That’s where I met Mr. Mars.”

  Living large in Swift Current would be pretty unappealing. I drew a mental picture of the subsistence lifestyle you could afford at minimum wage and with insulin to buy. At least there was no nightlife to miss.

  “Did you play hockey?”

  “Not really. I had skates and a stick growing up but my parents wouldn’t let me play in a league. I liked watching the team and all at the rink when I came to town. I never got to go see hockey like that growing up.”

  “Seriously? No Saturday nights sitting around the TV?”

  “Not really. Our family wasn’t like that.”

  He struck me as an earnest, luckless kid.

  “Mitzi says they liked you best of all the boys who came in. She’s going to pay for you to go back to school. It’s what Martin wanted.”

  He wasn’t family. The Marses didn’t have any. He was the nearest thing. He grieved in his own way. He had a lot of practice, I suspected. He wouldn’t know what to do with a good break.

  We pulled into the station and it was hard to miss the loaner, one selected to humble customers for the convenience and discourage them from all but wholly necessary driving: a canaryyellow ’99 Volkswagen New Beetle, the first year that they rolled it off the production line in Mexico. The little plastic flower in the holder on the dash, a standard feature, served as some sort of cosmic joke. As if the locals couldn’t already see us coming, now Chief and I were touring Swift Current in a clown car. If it had had satellite radio I would have found the calliope channel.

  10

  When Walt and I made it back to the Mars home at twelve thirty, Derek Jones and his father, Ed, were just leaving and Mitzi was giving them thank-yous for respects paid. The kid was still shaky and his father, one of Whisper’s longest serving mechanics, a giant who looked like he could hoist a car all by himself, was likewise. I walked them out to their car and stood with them while the wind howled. I asked the kid the particulars of his discovery of Whisper’s body and he gave me the blow-by-blow, right down to the song playing on the radio. By the end of it he was choked up.

  “If I had been on time, I might have been able to save him,” he said.

  I assured him that was unlikely. The Mercedes was down a quarter-tank of gas when I picked it up, so it could have been idling for more than an hour, maybe more than two if the tank had been filled, long enough to do the job. Ed gave Derek a stern look, one that said that he regretted his son being pulled home from what the family had always regarded as an extended vacation.

  Ed was struggling to come to grips with his boss’s death. “Martin had plans to take the Mercedes to a rally of vintage cars in Vegas in the spring,” he said to me as he climbed in the passenger door of his son’s beat-up pickup. “I told him that it was gonna be tough riding around in the heat with the car’s crappy air conditioning. He said he was going to get Freon for the air and fix ’er up when he had a chance. He’d go in at all hours to work on it … didn’t want to get in anyone’s way.”

  I asked the kid if he had a key to the station.

  Jones the son dug through several strata of crumpled bills, loose change, his driver’s licence, bank and credit cars, and girls’ phone numbers before hearing the familiar jangle. He excavated a key chain that probably weighed three pounds and would have put him at risk of a lightning strike. I must have given him a look that begged explanation because he gave me background I hardly needed. “I do maintenance, y’know, janitor work at nights for a bunch of stores and offices ’round here,” he said.

  The kid sorted through three dozen keys before finding the one to the gas station. He uncoupled it and gave it to me and I promised I’d return it. Maybe there was something in the office that Mitzi might want, a photo or something sentimental, I said.

  Ed Jones seemed satisfied with that and told his son that they were going to have to go over to the station later and get the vehicles on-site over to the main garage downtown. And not a minute later the old Ford’s one headlight lit up like a Cyclops waking up and the Joneses were rolling down the road, trying to warm up the cab with their body heat and no other help.

  11

  I went back inside and took a seat beside Chief on the living-room couch. Chief was big enough to make it look l
ike he was wedged in a high chair. Mitzi sat at ninety degrees from us. In the brief time that I had been out with the Joneses, Walt had retired and gone to bed. We could hear Walt snore every now and then and acknowledged it with glances. Mitzi told us that the kid’s hours at work were so irregular that it always seemed he was trying to catch up on his sleep.

  Small talk could only last so long, though. After a wordless few seconds, her head dropped and she whimpered.

  “He couldn’t have done it,” she said.

  I wasn’t completely convinced, but what we had heard from the lawyer and the accountant reinforced the notion. What we’d seen in the RCMP headquarters suggested that the circumstances might not have been so cut and dried.

  She asked me what I thought. I unrolled the ball of string.

  “I don’t get the seat belt,” I said. “I don’t get the position of his arm. And I don’t get the reason. Everything you’ve told me and I’ve heard …”

  I was going to mention Steve Martin in the cassette deck but I held back. Somehow it felt less than respectful.

  “How can I find out what happened? Can you help me?”

  I don’t go looking for trouble but I don’t mind it in reasonable amounts.

  I looked at Chief. I had put him through the wringer already. I’d be hanging him out to dry if we were going to get involved any deeper.

  “Can we take another hour?” I asked him. “I know your missus was expecting you last night.”

  The Big Man’s body was exhausted but not his patience. “I’ll call the bride.”