The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  Chief went into the kitchen to dial up the wife. He always sounded different with her, like he wasn’t in a dark place, like he was just about to laugh. I heard him ask about their boys and she put them on. He told them not to wait up and said he’d make them breakfast and take them to school the next morning. He was the Guaranteed Nullifier of My-Dad-Can-Beat-Your-Dad. The Little Chiefs could just refer their playmates to a couple dozen blood-soaked videos on YouTube.

  While Chief was doing his Dagwood Bumstead, I laid it out for Mitzi. The first promise was No Promises.

  “I don’t know that I can help you at all,” I started.

  She knew I had worked in investigations. She asked if I knew someone who could help.

  It was an out that I could have taken. The snags: (1) There wouldn’t be a dick for hire in Swift Current who could bring the advantage of local knowledge and contacts, (2) someone coming to the town out of the cold would take weeks to get a handle on the principals, (3) it would be impossible to gauge a hire’s enthusiasm for the task and I suspect it would wane pretty quickly, and finally (4) a dick from outside might eyeball Whisper’s books and think Mitzi was suitable for perpetual fleecing.

  On the first count, I was no worse than anybody I’d have been able to find. On the second, I knew the principals better than any investigator because I had played with and even roomed with Whisper. On count three, I would be motivated at least by a sense of sympathy for Mitzi. And finally, there was the matter of money. When I told Mitzi I’d have a look, she said that she would pay me for my time. “You don’t have to do that,” I told her. “I owe it to him. You can pay me in pork chops for now.”

  I laid out the ground rules. I warned her about the painful exercise of plumbing the truth. Whisper had kept everything on the down low from his teammates, and if he had confided anything in Mitzi she had to open up before the window closed. All of us have secrets, but when they’re bound by shame we’re forced to live behind thin plaster masks that we fear will crumble when we try to take them off. Better to live locked in the darkness of regrets than to have our fictional selves reduced to so much dust in our hands and expose the unrecognizable faces behind them.

  “If I’m going to help you, you’re going to have to be an open book to me and I’m going to ask you some questions that you might find uncomfortable … no, that you will find uncomfortable.”

  She said she understood. “I’m going to have to ask you to recall things … no detail is going to be too small. You might find it too much.”

  Again, understood.

  Chief came back into the living room. He had absorbed an earful from the missus, and she still hadn’t seen the bruises he was sporting. He gave me the closest thing to a dirty look I had ever seen from him. It said, If you’re going to dig your way out of a hole, just don’t hand me a shovel. I gave him the unspoken promise that I’d make it up to him. Exactly how, neither of us knew.

  Chief turned around and went back in the kitchen, where he and the coffee percolated. I looked at Mitzi. I thought to myself that she had aged well, that she was still hot. I had to get the thought out of my head but it wasn’t easy.

  12

  The ashtray filled with dead soldiers. Dead soldiers smeared with half moons of blood-red lipstick.

  “It’s not that Martin and I kept secrets from each other. Whatever we did we did together. We shared everything except our pasts. It’s always one of the things you talk about when you meet someone. ‘Tell me about yourself. Where are you from? What’s your story? Your family?’ Martin just said, ‘I’m a hockey player and that’s all you need to know about me.’ He wasn’t much of a conversationalist, I’ll grant you. He never asked me where I was from. ‘What’s past is past,’ he’d say. ‘It doesn’t matter anymore.’ And that’s why I fell for him and I guess that’s why we got hitched so quick. I had a past. I had spent a few years in Vegas. I had a few things that I regretted. Martin didn’t want to know about them. He didn’t care about them. It was all about going forward for him. And I thought I’d never meet a man who would look at me that way. For who I was, not what I had done.

  “I never asked him about his voice. Well, I did say to him when we first met that he had a nasty cold and he said, ‘Hurt myself playing hockey—stick.’ And I never brought it up with him again. I just figured it was painful for him to talk about. Every word he spoke, he was reminded of it. I wish I could have heard what his voice was like before it happened. I’ll bet he had a beautiful voice.

  “It was all so fast, that weekend together, but I knew in the first five minutes that I’d never meet a man like him. I hear them talk about ‘unconditional love’ on those talk shows. That wasn’t what I needed. It wasn’t what he wanted. It was the one big thing: Don’t go there. Did I think there was pain in his past? Sure, everybody has some things they want to get away from. My parents were gone from my life. He never asked me about them, never asked to meet them. I never asked to meet his.”

  A string of pearls fingered. A pale beige compact opened and snapped shut.

  “He called the gas stations ‘the family business.’ I never met his parents or heard about another member of ‘family,’ even second- and third-hand. He grew up outside of Swift Current. In Herbert. I met an old woman, two houses down from here. She said that her son had taught him at the school out there. She’s dead now. I’ve never been out there, just passed the exit on the highway. I’m told it’s not much. I know that there are gas stations there and I know that one of them was the family business. Whenever I asked him how many stations were in the chain, when he was thinking about buying a new one, he counted them by name and Herbert was always the first.

  “Mostly, though, I stayed out of his business. He hated travelling for the company. Most trips he did he’d come back the same day. Two, three, four hours the same way. Once a month he’d go up to Prince Albert. That was his longest trip and he’d have to stay the night and he just hated that. ‘I hate P.A.,’ he’d say, and he’d come back from there in a bad mood.

  “He wasn’t happy these last few weeks or so ’cause he was going up there once a week rather than once a month and he had to stay over each time. It started the week after New Year’s. I remember how bad the roads were and I tried to talk him out of going, but he said that he had to. Then the one time he was up there overnight I had to call him to tell him that there had been a robbery at the station Walt works at. Walt had a gun pulled on him and he was beaten up with a black eye and they couldn’t make out anything on the security camera. There was only so much money in Walt’s float. Every two hundred bucks he had to deposit it in the security box and had no way of getting to it. Three men with ski masks. It was awful. Walt was shaken up. When he came back Martin felt so bad. He tried to help him in every possible way.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t usually smoke in the house. I gave up smoking more than ten years ago. More than that, I guess. I fainted when the officer told me about Martin, and when he helped me, y’know, to get some fresh air, I saw his partner having a cigarette. I asked him if I could have one. I sent Walt out to buy a pack. You never smoked, did you? I smoked when I met Martin all those years ago. Why start again? Maybe I just want to go back. I don’t know.”

  The empty pack pitched. A fresh one cracked.

  “The broken stick? He gave it to me after the game. He told me to keep it and said that I had to show it to him whenever I thought I should. He had promised me that we’d get out of L.A. as soon as we could. He had talked about going to Europe to play. But before the playoffs—who was it you played? Edmonton, right?—Martin had talked about staying another year in L.A. He thought he’d get traded and land with a team that wanted him. I was mad about it, mad as I ever got with him. I don’t know what happened other than that goal and he never talked about it, except for what he said right after the game. ‘If I ever think about breaking a promise to you again, show me this stick.’ And I never had to. When we got to Germany it was just fantastic. Martin picked up the lang
uage incredibly. After four years he was just about completely fluent. He told me that he even had dreams in German. Anyway, they talked to him about staying on and coaching over there, but he said he had to come back. ‘The family business.’ It was the first I’d heard of it, but I didn’t ask him about it. I knew he was coming back ’cause he had to, even though he wanted to stay. I didn’t think I should show him the stick. He had kept his promise to me.”

  A lighter clicked three times before flaming up. The well of fluid almost emptied.

  “He really didn’t talk about his career at all. To anybody, really. It was so strange when this man called from Regina. A professor, he said. A historian. He was writing about hockey and wanted to talk to Martin about his career, especially about that goal against Edmonton. The man called again and again. He just wore Martin down. I remember they met in Moose Jaw. Martin would never go all the way to Regina unless he really had to, almost never, ’cause he didn’t have any stations or truck stops there. He met him and came back angry. Not himself at all. I didn’t ask him about it.”

  A quarter cup of coffee spilled on the table. A paper towel turned light brown.

  “Martin had his routines. He made sure he visited his stations and truck stops, one a day. In rotation. The rest of the time he’d spend in the office that he kept downtown. He went to the board meetings of the team. He went to games but not all of them. He went to the kids’ games, teams in town that Mars Motors sponsored. He liked seeing kids happy. He didn’t golf much. He didn’t ski, although he liked to water-ski when we’d go up to the lake.

  “The nearest thing he had to a vice was the casino. The Living Sky, they call it. It looks like a big teepee with searchlights out on Highway 1. It opened a few years back. He went mostly on Tuesday nights. He took a phone call for business Tuesday nights and after he’d go to the casino and unwind. He’d take out a hundred bucks or so and play a few hands of blackjack. He had a beer or two there. You probably know from when he was playing he wasn’t a drinker at all, really. It was just part of socializing. He’d buy more beers for other people than he did for himself. No, I don’t know any names or anything. Mostly, I guess, he’d talk to people, strangers who didn’t know him. He said it was more interesting than television. I never asked to go with him. I’m sure it would have brought back too many memories, though I didn’t tell him that. I had my own reasons for keeping the past in the past.”

  A pen ran dry. Another found.

  “I was with a man. Not a good man. He was physical with me. I just walked out that day and he thought I was coming back, the day I met Martin. I never heard from him again. I told Martin I didn’t want any wedding announcement in the paper and Martin told me that he didn’t either. This guy told me that I could be a dancer. A singer. I guess I thought I could be a star. I was young and not very smart, I guess. He had me do films and other things. He would have been mad that I left the way I did. I just had the clothes on my back. I had nothing precious. No heirlooms, oh no, nothing handed down. No warning, no call. Martin said that whatever I had he could replace. He knew I was coming from a place that I didn’t want to go back to.”

  A sleeve tugged. A throat cleared.

  “The man … he died five years ago. I always searched for his name on the internet and in the Vegas newspapers. I saw that he’d been arrested a couple of times. And then I saw that he’d died in a car crash out on the interstate. The obituary said that his wife and son survived him.”

  A name on a page stroked out. A question mark scrawled.

  “Martin wouldn’t have ‘enemies.’ There were ‘rivals.’ ‘Competitors’ is a better word. The Hanley chain. They have franchises for transmissions, for brakes. Dealerships for cars, new and used, in the southwest here. You hear their commercials all the time on the radio. They own some stations too. They have their offices on Main Street, up from the doughnut shop. I know that Bill Hanley, the old man, had made offers to Martin, but what they were … well, I don’t know. Martin wasn’t fussy on him. I take it that he was pretty nasty.”

  A clock chimed. A watch checked.

  “I don’t know if this is helping. Do you think it’s helping? I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to tell you. Of course, you can talk to Bob Roth and Harry Friesen. I’m sure that anyone at his stations or truck stops will talk to you. I don’t know them real well, but most of them I’ve met at the company Christmas parties over the years.”

  A phone rang. A caller hung up.

  “It happens all the time.”

  A curtain drawn. A snow-covered lawn stared back.

  “Personal effects? What Martin had on him when he … sorry, it’s so hard, but yes, the police gave them back to me. They’re in the trunk of my car. I haven’t worked up the nerve to bring them in the house yet.”

  13

  Mitzi said that there was nothing wrong with Whisper. Still, things seemed to have been eating at him over the last weeks of his life. And for a guy who lived by routine, that routine was disrupted a bit over that same stretch. It might have been the imminent deal with Garageland or the piece of business in Prince Albert or the sale of the junior team or the assault on Walt or something that Mitzi wasn’t aware of, one of those secrets we keep from those closest to us, something like bad news from a trip to the doctor. I know I don’t share things I want to run from or deny, and I’m sure that has more to do with a certain age you reach rather than the way you’re wired.

  I asked Mitzi for complete access to every piece of paperwork, every computer file, every key to every drawer of every desk. And I went through them one by one.

  His phone: His cell had been returned to Mitzi that morning when we left the RCMP officers to polish their brass buttons.

  His daily planner: It seemed like Mitzi would be able to recite it, but there might be some variation that could be significant.

  His bank and credit card statements: Ditto.

  His records for the cell, home phone, and office number: Ditto.

  His personal mail: She said Whisper never got more than a postcard from anybody. I told her that I still wanted to see it.

  His laptop: I hit History. Nothing special. I was a little afraid I’d come across a dead man’s favourite porn sites. But no. I had to peek at Whisper’s email: Mitzi gave me the username and password to his Yahoo! account. I logged in. Opened and saved entries were all business. Nothing in drafts or deleteds. I turned the page after fifteen or twenty minutes.

  Mitzi dropped the shoeboxes in front of me. I spread them out on the dining-room table and recruited Chief to help me piece the puzzle together. Even if you haven’t left a trace of DNA or a whiff of aftershave behind you, you’re bound to have left numbers, sometimes names, sometimes patterns. Forensic stuff like this would bore the shit out of most investigators but I always liked it. Reconstructing Whisper’s life was like doing Sudoku.

  I checked the phone records first. I took the last three months of them, making notes as I went. I checked the additional charges and long-distance calls. The outgoing long-distance calls were listed but didn’t incur charges on a flat-rate plan from Ma Bell. I saw numbers in Prince Albert. I reverse-directoried them on my BlackBerry: the Best Western. A bunch of other repeaters: Each checked out as a station or truck stop on Highway 1. Every Tuesday there was a collect call from an unlisted number and it timed out with the business call that was Whisper’s appointment. The call stopped coming three weeks before his demise. I cracked my knuckles and mulled it over. A business call collect: asterisk.

  Chief checked out Whisper’s cellphone and his daybook. It turned out that he had only twenty-six numbers filed in his phone: home; Mitzi’s cell; the junior team’s offices; Beckwith, the minor hockey association’s director; Benvenuti’s, which was, Mitzi said, his favourite dinner spot on Main Street; his top lieutenant, Buster Griffiths; and finally each station and truck stop in the chain. Chief reported that there was nothing out of the ordinary or ambiguous in Whisper’s daily planner, no mystery set of initia
ls. Every appointment and doing was spelled out in considerable detail, even the most mundane of life’s duties, for example:

  home depot, shower curtain, lights for basement

  555-2509 plumber

  I checked out the personal and joint bank accounts and credit cards: a bunch of automatic withdrawals. Household stuff, including the last shower curtain and fluorescent lights Whisper would ever buy. Incidental purchases when he was making his rounds up and down the Trans-Canada. Some charges at restaurants around town, a night out with Mitzi or a business lunch. Then there were the hotel charges in Prince Albert. I didn’t want to raise the possibility with Mitzi, but I wondered if it might be a romantic hideaway, as much as P.A. lent itself to romance, which wasn’t much. No massive cash withdrawals. No cheques made out to CASH. Everything was traceable, a row of peanut shells tracking back to a prosperous cipher. The man, to say the least, did not live large. One entry in his chequing account that made me smile: the two-hundred-dollar cash withdrawal slash donation at the Living Sky Casino. Every Tuesday. Maybe that collect business call made him feel lucky. There weren’t any cash deposits on Wednesdays, so it was a safe bet that he never broke the house.

  I wasn’t going to be able to get through Whisper’s company’s books: I accessed what he had on his laptop but couldn’t make sense of it without some help. I was going to need Friesen the accountant to walk me through item by item, at least for the last couple of months. He was also going to have to give me a satellite view of everything attached to Whisper’s Empire. I was going to need Friesen and maybe Roth to give me an idea of any bigger plans or developments that their late client might have had in the works.

  Whisper’s Collected Works and Letters littered the dining-room table and made for dull reading. Nothing looked like a red flag or even a yellow one.

  14

  I told Mitzi that Chief and I had to look after some business and we ducked out. We both just needed air and airing out from her smokes. Mitzi’s rambling had my head spinning and my right hand cramping. I also felt that I could speak freely only if I got away to a place where she wouldn’t overhear me.