The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  A hand reaching up to a sheet to cover a bare shoulder. A handcuff rattling against a rail.

  “I kneeled beside him and prayed. Martin was drugged and on the couch, too weak to get up. Monica grabbed stuff she had in the apartment and got it out. Drugs. She told me to pick up the knife and I did. And then she grabbed Martin on the couch around the neck. She choked him. He saw it. Her stabbing our father. He was frozen. He couldn’t speak but she thought he was gonna tell somebody about what he saw and so she choked him. I got her off of him but she had already crushed his throat. She squeezed the voice out of him. She sank her finger deep into his neck. Into his windpipe. He gagged. He coughed. I had to peel her off him. I checked to see if he was breathing. He nodded. She took her stuff and left.”

  The clock stretching the minutes. The clock not quite grinding to a halt.

  “I called the Marses and asked if they would take Martin in for the night. Until my father came by to pick him up. Said that my father was at another colony on business. That I had a conflict with a class I was taking—they thought I was still in school. Couldn’t be left alone. They said they would do it. So I drove my Mercedes out to Herbert and dropped Martin off with them. I told them my car had problems, didn’t think I could drive it back. I drove it ’round the back of the station and took the plates off it, put a note for Martin in it. The Marses got a trucker, a regular who had driven up from California, to give me a ride into Regina.”

  Words exchanging outside the open door. The wind faintly howling outside a window sealed fast.

  “When I got back I went to a payphone. Our phone had been cut off. I called the Marses, called them collect, and told them what had happened. I asked them to look after Martin ’cause he couldn’t go back to the colony. He had no family no more and just awful memories. He needed a new life. I knew the Marses liked kids and had just the one son who’d died in an accident years back. They told me they would do it and they did.”

  A clipboard hanging on the wall. A corkboard for cards and best wishes holding only tacks.

  “When I got there my father was still on the floor in this pool of blood. Monica had come and taken all her clothes out.”

  The ticking of the clock outpacing the drip-drip-dripping and blip-blip-blipping. The squeak of a nurse’s running shoes in the hallway.

  “I went to the police and told them that I had done it. They asked what happened to my brother and I told them I killed him too and got rid of the body in a dumpster. They thought I killed him but they never did find a body. They might even still be looking for the body for all I know. There’s no harm in talking to you about it, now that Martin’s gone. I pleaded guilty to whatever they wanted to charge me with.”

  A head turning on the pillow. Eyes almost focusing on a hazy presence barely seen but heard and felt.

  “No, I don’t know where she is or what she’s doing. I wish I did. I don’t think Martin would have found out where she’d gone. He never said anything about her. I wish I knew. She took me in when I was alone in the world. She was a few years older than me but it didn’t make a difference.”

  One in a white jacket and another in a government-issue uniform walking into the room. Both wordlessly expressing in their own professional capacities that there would be nothing else for today.

  “No, I haven’t applied for parole but I’m not afraid of anything out there. I’m afraid of the wrath of God. That’s all that I’m afraid off. I want to be with Monica. I always did. If she’s not there for me, then I don’t want to go anywhere.”

  A head on a pillow turning again to watch a projection on the ceiling. A projection denying its lonely audience any chance to control or influence or dissolve or resist its images and shadows.

  “Years later I started getting letters. It was Martin’s handwriting but he signed as a cousin of mine. Put a picture of the Mercedes in there too. That’s how he got ahold of me and first visited me when he was heading off to play hockey. Martin told me that he didn’t remember that night. I hope he wasn’t just saying that.”

  A voice from the door saying, “Okay, time.” Words leaving no avenue for appeal.

  “I’ve ruined more lives than my own. Leave before I ruin another.”

  A hand, not a failing one, picking up the newspaper and the red notebook under it but not the Bible. The fold in the newspaper keeping the red notebook out of sight.

  9

  I walked across the street to the coffee shop to grab Kilmer a large double-double and myself an extra-large black. I ran through my brief time with Wolf Martens. Shame had eaten away his soul and gnawed on the bones left over. He wanted to ponder a wasted life in seclusion. Solitary confinement suited him.

  I tried to imagine the Voice of God that Wolf Martens heard. I suspected that the voice was like a basso profundo with a computer-generated echo punctuated by thunder. God’s not on my speed-dial nor me on His, but when I do call Him the line is usually busy or goes straight to His voicemail. Whenever He has picked up, He has sounded sort of like James Garner.

  I always think I’m prepared for what I’ll see in a hospital but I never am. The cuffs on the right hand wouldn’t have been tight if they had been looped around his biceps. His wrist was no thicker than a chicken wing. MONICA and a heart with black ink dripping out of it were unevenly tattooed below the knuckles of his right hand.

  Martens’s story seemed a quarter inch from flush. A couple of washers were left over after assembly. I didn’t completely trust his version of events leading up to the father’s murder, but the biggest pieces seemed to be in place. If true, he wasn’t a perp so much as a collateral victim. If just mostly true, most likely the case, he was an accessory. He had kept the bloodhounds off the little brother’s trail all those years at a price, one he paid when the judge piled it on in sentencing. I didn’t believe that he had been the one who’d reduced his brother’s voice to a whisper. That he had choked him. If Martens had done the deed, Whisper wouldn’t have driven hours out of his way to pay him visits and try to talk him into applying for parole.

  I tried to game out Martens’s story with what came years after. It hadn’t been just a crushed larynx that had rendered Whisper mute, but also a strain of post-traumatic stress disorder. An identity concealed all those years had calcified into non-being. His carving by Iron John had evoked the anger of his father and broke the seal on Whisper’s emotional tinderbox. His mother’s death and his father’s murder, both wrapped up in perversions of devotion, had made him keep his distance from religion. And even still, no matter how haunted he was, he had held on to the values of selflessness and generosity from the colony.

  I was out of the cold and in the lineup for coffee when I got around to the notebook I had lifted from Martens’s room. It was a red hardcover appointment book with a binding elastic that kept the pages crease-free. He had printed his name but not an address on the front, a match for the left-handed scrawl on the note in the Mercedes owner’s manual. I flipped the first leaf and came to a calendar spread across two pages. Martens had circled a few days with notations. The rest of the book dedicated a page to each day and every passing hour in the business year. He used it as a diary and a chapbook, collating his random thoughts, a few passages in broken German, a language that had been taught in the colony’s one-room school and used by his father in belittling him. He also drew in it in pencil and ballpoint pen. Fields. Barns. Humble homes. The horizon. The sun. He had a comfort level with or fond recollection of inanimate things more than people. Only two people were drawn in the pages. One was Whisper, probably at age nine or ten, on skates and in a wool hat on what looked like a frozen slough. The detail made me think it had been drawn from an old photograph. The other was a young woman I didn’t recognize and seemed to have been drawn from memory.

  When I flipped through to the back cover a folded piece of paper fell out. It was a photostat of an entry in a program. A quote was underlined: “Everything I learned about the game and everything else I learned from my
brother.”

  10

  “What’s the prognosis?”

  “He goes back this week,” Kilmer said. “Tomorrow, maybe the day after. It’s all OT, a guard here twenty-four hours. We’re not budgeted to do it a week at a time. He’s weak but he’s out of danger.”

  When you’re millions of dollars of beef under contract to the club and have a boil to lance, you get the undivided attention of a battery of medical experts. When you’re in for murder and your vital organs have been shish-kebabed, you’re on a conveyor belt set on high.

  “I gotta ask,” I said. “Would he get compassionate leave for a family funeral?”

  “Depends how close the relative is,” Kilmer said, making it sound like a long shot.

  “What if it was his brother?”

  “The one whose body never turned up? That he confessed to murdering?”

  I nodded in the affirmative.

  “And what do you have to back that up? I mean, you don’t have to prove it to me but you’ll have to prove it to somebody who can get approval on this.”

  I thought about it. I ruled out DNA testing. That would take weeks—too late. The traditional standby would be more time-effective. “If they were looking at a missing persons or search for human remains they’d have his dental records on file,” I said. “He suffered a fractured cheekbone and had surgery to repair it right before he went missing. Something would show up there, maybe.”

  Key word: maybe.

  Kilmer tried for a second to keep an open mind about it, no small feat for a guy who slams cell doors shut for a living. Kilmer said he didn’t know, even if all this were demonstrably and convincingly true.

  “Has he ever talked about what happened before?” I asked.

  “Not a word. I mean, I’ve heard other stuff.”

  “Stuff” included the name tattooed on Martens’s right hand. I asked Kilmer if he knew Any Stuff at All about a woman named Harmon. The guard had dropped his guard before but raised it again, clearly. He wasn’t going to get into specifics. It was final, like he had turned the key in the lock.

  Kilmer ducked his head back in the door to Martens’s room just to make sure that he was still breathing. It wasn’t visible, just audible. Kilmer didn’t look at him with resentment or even bafflement. He didn’t quite have all the pity beat out of him as he crossed off days to his retirement. One of the last ounces he reserved for Martens.

  I gave Kilmer my business card. I thanked him and he asked if I was driving back tonight. I told him I was going to the junior game first. He said he was too and that his son was on the team. I told him that I’d watch for his kid. He told me not to bother.

  “My son’s the backup goaltender,” he said.

  11

  I sat in a booth at Boston Pizza. A copy of the local rag had been left there. The sports section was given over to a preview of tonight’s game. The bump in unemployment claims in town was the big news on the front page. Reading about it only brought home what I could see out the window from my seat: a bunch of shabby guys stepping reluctantly out of a mission into the cold for a day of loitering at the time when the fortunate were rolling in for shifts in the office, the store, the warehouse, the factory, and, yeah, the penitentiary.

  I was going to have a four-hour drive back to Regina after the game. My third instinct was to find out exactly what happened to Martin Mars. The quest for truth was running a few lengths behind my first instincts, staying alive and staying employed. Good news on No. 1: It had been a day since I’d last had my life threatened. No news on No. 1A: That passed for good news.

  I opened the red notebook again. The first entry was printed more neatly than the declaration of love tattooed on his right hand.

  And all that believed were together, and had all things in common.

  I flipped ahead.

  The verse had a Biblical rhythm to it, but as a Sunday-school no-show I didn’t recognize it. Fooling around with Google a few days later I found out it was from Acts, which I couldn’t have told you is the fifth book of the New Testament. I found out later that it was a verse that was a cornerstone for the Hutterites. The founder of the Hutterites, a guy named Hutter, gathered his worshippers around a blanket and had them toss in everything they owned, their devotion being defined by their willingness to give up personal property for the communal good. The story goes that Hutter and his people were peace-loving peasants who resisted war and war taxes. Authorities meted out justice as they used to see fit in Moravia and burned him at the stake. A bunch of those who succeeded him were similarly incinerated. The Hutterites didn’t wait for the Moravians to become infected with religious tolerance or run out of matches. The worshippers beat a retreat across the pond, just like the Mennonites and the Amish. It would take a lot to get me to move to rural Saskatchewan but I suppose religious persecution would do the trick.

  Only when I found out about the story of Hutter’s founding of the sect did the first line in Martens’s own words start to make sense.

  I have nothing to put on my blanket, no goods that are my own but this notebook and Bible.

  All that line had me thinking about was the blanket that hung on the wall in Whisper’s living room. Mitzi said she couldn’t understand his attachment to it. It had been a reminder of who he had been, where he had grown up, and how he had wanted to live his life.

  I didn’t have to dive deep into the book to figure out that the self-prosecution of Wolf Martens aspired to match the persecution of the Hutterites centuries back.

  Confession

  It’s because of my failures in faith that I failed in school when I was sent off. It’s because of my failures in faith and in school that I couldn’t go back. I brought shame on our family. I am ashamed that I still hate my father. That he put being a leader in the colony ahead of caring for my mother. I do hate him for that, still. I was guilty and will be forever guilty in my heart for hating him. I did not murder him but I did get him murdered. And when I go down into my heart I am ashamed that I do not mourn him as I should. Monica was the angel who avenged when I was too weak to do it myself. She cut through the knot that tied me to my faith and the colony. And when she did that she pulled down all the bridges behind me. I cared for my brother enough that I didn’t want to send him back across bridges that were no longer there …

  The first forty pages of the notebook were thick with confessions that were in a left-hander’s backslant but printed neatly and legible. Though the entries were random and almost incoherent, elements of the story were consistent with his account in the hospital ward. His father had painted his ambitions on his older son when he wasn’t a suitable canvas. When he was in the process of falling out of school, he began to fall in with the wrong people. Having failed and landed in the margins, he looked for approval and acceptance elsewhere, standard attraction and indoctrination for the criminal enterprise. And Monica Harmon was, from his account, even idolized, an enterprising criminal. He had landed a monster who impressed him as an angel, which is what only the most monstrous of monsters are able to pull off.

  I was deep in meditation of the tumults, cosmic and domestic, when the waitress came over to my table to take my order.

  While waiting for a hamburger, I sent a text to Sandy. She would have been seeing patients. It looks like I’ll be back Fri pm @ earliest. Profuse apologies and backpedalling followed. I didn’t expect her to be happy that I was another couple of days on the road. I knew she wouldn’t be happy that I had to settle for a text, but I wasn’t up for another sparring session and being reminded, fairly I guess, what a shit I was.

  I had a call to make after I searched for a number. From the automated switchboard I selected the staff directory and waited to hear the name that had stuck in my memory. “I wonder if you could help me,” I said. “I was in your archive when you opened this morning. I was looking at editions of the Prince Albert paper from a month or so back.”

  “I think I remember you.”

  I pictured her twirli
ng her hair around her finger and biting her lip.

  “I’m wondering if there’s any database or listing of newspaper stories in Saskatchewan dating back to the early ’70s,” I said.

  “That point in time is too early for any online newspaper search engine, certainly with the provincial papers,” she said. “The Regina and Saskatoon papers are in the National Newspaper Directory listings. Do you know what year you’re looking for?”

  “Around ’74. Maybe ’75. I’m looking for stories about a double murder, probably stories that came out after the trial.”

  “That would have been a big story,” she said. “I have a friend who works in the library at the paper here in town. I’ll see what she can pull for you.”

  I tried to imagine how I could repay this smouldering volcano and all I could come up with was offering my body for human sacrifice.

  Mitzi was the next order of business. I stuck to my need-to-know approach. I felt faint pressure from the right-to-know angel on my shoulder but looked the other way while I made my call.

  “I’m here in P.A. looking into whatever the business deal was that Martin was planning to invest in,” I said. “It doesn’t appear to have been anything out of the ordinary.”

  I looked heavenward out of fear of incoming lightning.

  “The funeral is set for Friday,” she said. “Just a small service at the funeral home. Early in the morning. Just a few people will come.”

  “Are you okay?”

  She said she was. I doubted that but let it go. We said our goodbyes.

  My BlackBerry vibrated just when my plate was dropped in front of me. Harry Friesen was calling me back.