The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  “You say there’s nothing in the books any different?”

  “Business was very steady. Expenses constant. No unusual one-time expenses.”

  “Anything?” It’s through persistence that coal becomes a diamond. Not this time, apparently.

  “That’s been the nature of Martin’s business. All locations show steady revenue. Small expenses in maintenance but really nothing significant. Some repairs were incurred with the robbery. Some vandalism, a broken window.”

  “Were there any changes in the payroll?”

  “It’s a high-turnover business,” he said. “Lots of minimum-wage or slightly better positions, part-time workers, kids mostly. I really don’t see any red flags there.”

  “Any disgruntled employees or former employees who might have gone postal?”

  The accountant assured me that the employees of the Mars company were by and large thoroughly gruntled.

  “I can assure you Mr. Mars made sure his long-term people were well compensated and had benefits other similar companies didn’t offer,” he said. “He was very fair by nature.”

  That would be one explanation for his hockey career being somewhat less than satisfying, if not for him then for those people who paid him to play. In the game, fair play is soft play.

  Still, I gave it one last shot. “Check the rolls. Any names not on the last pay run that had been on the sheet the month previous?”

  “Three that I can see that are outside the part-time minimum-wage student bunch,” he said. “Stanley Smith. Herb Lacker. Vivian King.”

  Friesen said all three names sounded familiar to him. He also said that, based on their pay scale, he figured that Smith and Lacker were mechanics in the company’s top scale, and he presumed King was the manager and bookkeeper of the auto-parts dealership and farm-machinery-repair operation. “Three semi-senior folks.” I asked him to email me their addresses and personal info on file and any contacts.

  When I pushed away my empty plate the waitress gave me a dirty look. Although the air in the restaurant was polluted by strains of Lady Antebellum, she thought that my voice had been a little too loud when I was making my calls and I had fouled the scenery by having written on paper placemats and napkins.

  12

  Four o’clock, business hours were winding down. I had calls to make and I could do it from the limited comfort of the PT Cruiser’s front seat. I had to ring up the folks who knew the stories of the three senior employees who had been dropped from the payrolls over the two months before Whisper took his early and involuntary retirement. Stanley Smith and Herb Lacker were straightforward. Their managers said they had been model employees and good guys. As Harry Friesen had presumed, they had been mechanics for Mars Co.

  “Stan turned sixty,” the station manager in Estevan said. “He salted away some pretty good money over the years and he did a bit of independent work on the side. We threw a hell of a goingaway party for him at the Legion. His brother has a condo in Florida. He’s been down there golfing ever since.”

  Scratch Smith.

  “Lemme tell you, we’ll miss ol’ Herb,” the station manager in Kindersley said. “He’s helping out his older brother with the family farm. I guess the brother took ill and all the kids have run off to college and the big city.”

  Scratch Lacker.

  I called Mars Co.’s head office in Swift Current and tried Vivian King from the business directory. I thought that her phone line might not have been disconnected, but when I punched K-I-N-G into the directory it bounced back: “No matches were found.” I pushed the zero for the receptionist and gave her a bullshit story about King calling me up with regard to a line of credit to finance an extension, a sunroom. “I’m afraid I can’t help you, sir,” the secretary said. “I’ve never heard of, it’s a Ms. King, is that right? Are you sure it’s Mars Gas that she worked for?” I asked her to patch me through to her superior. The same drill. No Vivians. No Kings.

  From what Friesen told me, Vivian had drawn the thirdhighest wage in the office and no one there had any idea who she was.

  I called the accountant back and he assured me that King’s placement on the head office’s roll was no clerical error. I asked him to pull up any relevant records of her employment. He put me on hold. My luck: the Starland Vocal Band’s “Afternoon Delight.” He came back on the line and put me out of my misery. “I have her papers and there’s no reason given for her termination,” he said. “The space is blank. That’s unusual, at least for the way Martin kept records. And I can see from the Save function that it was actually Martin who filed the termination and not someone else from the office. Again, unusual. Roth was cc’d on the file.”

  After I was through with Friesen I called up Roth. The lawyer said that any firings of senior people went through his office and he did recall the King file. “I thought the blank space was unusual,” Roth said. “This was a termination. I remember asking Martin about it, y’know, possible issues with wrongful dismissal and the like. We would need to cite cause, I told him, but he said that court was the last place Ms. King wanted to go.”

  I didn’t want to bounce the name off Mitzi. I didn’t want to plant any seed about infidelity if there hadn’t been any or even if there had, even if Whisper was paying for some on the side.

  One last call. It went through to voicemail.

  “Ms. King, yes, my name is Val Avery …”

  Whenever I had used aliases in my old job in investigations I had picked out names of obscure character actors. It distracted me from this line of work’s wretchedness.

  “I was just poring over the books here in our accounts office and it seems through an oversight … and I apologize for this …”

  I adopted the Canadian default posture of apologizing for something without any cause.

  “… but we have failed to compensate you for vacation time owing. There are just a couple of forms that I need you to sign. I can come around and give them to you, witness it, and file for prompt payment. I also wanted to clear up any questions you might have with regard to your benefits coverage going forward. I want you to be assured that it did not end with your departure from Mars Co. …”

  I went on to other small fictions that would put money in her pocket. I gave her my cell number. I opened the PDF Friesen had sent me and made a note of the address on file.

  It was just under two hours before game time. I drove over to the arena early.

  13

  “That’s the kid I’m watching. I love his first step. He gets from zero to sixty in two strides, even with the puck. Never cheats. Pays the price.”

  I was in a corner seat and Kilmer was beside me. His thighs were so wide that he had to sit with his knees together so they didn’t spill out over the side of his seat, standard stuff that applies to any pro or a lot who only got as close as he did. He had played the game and he saw what I did. Only after the first period did he tell me that it was his sixteen-year-old’s first season of junior, that his son had been a sixth-round draft choice, that he was going to get more games next year. Kilmer didn’t bother telling me that Junior was on the small side. The program listed him at five-eleven and the program lied. The kid sat on the bench, a baseball cap on his head, and opened and closed the gate.

  I asked the guard about his own playing days. He was sheepish. He confessed to a crime of his own imagining.

  “Never got a sniff with the pros,” he said. “In four years of junior my team made the playoffs two times and we never won a round. In my last year, we were out of the playoffs by Groundhog Day and I knew I’d never play another game that meant anything. And I kept trying but it was gone. I tried to tell myself to sell out and play with an edge. Be an example for the younger players who are gonna be back next year and might go somewhere. Didn’t work. I got in more fights the last five weeks in junior than I had been in the three and a half years before. I got in fights at practice. I lived wild … off the rails completely.”

  A goal was scored. The cheers
drowned out whatever he was reminded of.

  I told him that I was the same way when my career in the league wound down. He sighed and nodded.

  I left the game with a couple of minutes to go in the third period. I started up my car and waited for the seat warmer to kick in. I sent a text to Chief to let him know where I was. I passed along the relevant info, that the kid had a goal, two assists, and a couple of posts thrown in for good measure. Back in Reg in am.

  14

  I put my key in the ignition. Before I pulled the car out of park and before my seat ceased to feel like a block of ice, I opened up my laptop. I presumed that part of the waitress’s indignation at the Boston Pizza tracked back to the fact that I had availed myself of a plug beside the booth for recharging my MacBook. I opted for a little uneasy listening for the road trip: the Good Professor’s interview with Whisper.

  GP: This is hard for me to ask, but how did you hurt your throat?

  WHISPER: Took a stick there. I was, I dunno, ten, twelve, thirteen. It was a long time ago. It’s better now than it was. There was a whole year that I couldn’t talk at all. Coulda been worse. I know I thought it was going to be the end of me.

  GP: What was it like growing up in Herbert?

  WHISPER: Oh, I dunno. Really, I don’t remember too much of being a kid. I was like everybody else. Played hockey there. I got a late start. Once I played I played a lot, though. We played outside some. Seems like we could play outside back then a lot more than you can now. My folks were good about it. My father never played. He worked a lot and he was older, but he drove me to games. He …

  It was a story but not his, a story told as infrequently as possible rather than lived out. The Canadian Idyll was his cover story for a Canadian Gothic.

  I rolled down the highway, no one behind me, crossing paths every five minutes with an eighteen-wheeler going the other way. The only radio station I could get clearly was one of those conspiracy and mystery phone-in shows. Callers fearful of terrorist attacks on the water supply and power grid asked the host if a month’s worth of supplies in their underground bunkers would see them through to the other side of the end of the world.

  15

  My mind raced. Every time I passed a tractor-trailer I glanced in the cab and imagined the driver had smoked Monica Harmon’s weed and popped her pills and snorted her lines and bought her hot wares and screwed her working girls and maybe even her. Maybe he partied with her. Maybe he mourned her. Her chosen professions and vices hardly promoted longevity.

  I passed stations and checked the time, 11 P.M. I looked for the right place to pull over. I was looking for a place with a fleet of eighteen-wheelers parked in neat rows in the adjoining lot. I was thinking of the old saw about truckers knowing the best places to grab grub on the road. I doubt any of them kept a Michelin Guide in the glove compartment. The low-fuel warning beeped just when I saw the lights of the biggest truck stop between Saskatoon and Regina.

  I sat in a booth in the restaurant. The sign above the preferred counter space let interlopers like me know that it was reserved for truckers on runs. Three seats in a row were occupied by a cumulative nine hundred pounds and plumber cracks that could have passed for parallel and perpendicular tectonic plates.

  An old broad chewed gum and willed up the strength to take my order. Her script monogram said her name was Phyllis. I wanted a burger but I didn’t need fries and knew not to ask for salad. Before I filed my requests, though, I peeled off two twenties, slid them across the table so that they’d be within her easy reach, and asked her if she could help me. A pair of double sawbucks could buy a lot of ice for her feet.

  “Monica Harmon told me this was a good place. You know her?” I kept my nose in the menu.

  “I haven’t heard that name in years.”

  “When was the last time you heard it?”

  “Like I said, years.”

  Phyllis was in no rush to fill me in. She eyeballed me. She was trying to piece it together: Who was asking? Cop? Mountie? Bad. Not a fit though. Customer? Supplier? Plausible. Green light.

  “She had things going on at stops along the highway. The company had the gas. She had the grass and ass. Then she branched out into more dangerous stuff. She made a lot of money. If these boys …”

  She looked over at the express counter where the three hawgs were perched, piles of near-humanity who looked like they would have never had boyhoods.

  “… had their way, they’d name this highway after her. They’d do anything for her.”

  What she said made me wonder about Wolf Martens’s stabbing. Monica Harmon would have had friends in ye olde caboose. So would Butch and Sundance. Kilmer didn’t know who wielded the blade. It wouldn’t have been a biker. My Uncle Henry, Sarge’s little brother, had worked for a couple of years undercover, getting inside the Para-Dice Riders when they were in a gang war with the Satan’s Choice. Henry was lucky to get out alive but, even after he cut his hair, shaved his beard, and dialed back his menace, he never seemed quite right after that. What he always said was that a biker or anyone working for one had “a useless and dangerous pride in his work.” A stabbing on behalf of a gang inside would have closed the deal with fifty perforations, probably more, delivered with certainty, sadism, and symbolism. The perp wouldn’t have been a professional. Otherwise, Wolf Martens would have been on a slab. It could have been an inmate intimidated by Harmon’s friends, some unlucky guy who drew the short straw and was told to do unto Wolf Martens lest the boys did unto him. Still, the timing seemed to make no sense. It would have been a fit if he had been stabbed his first month inside, when there might have been a misplaced fear that he’d trade info with the law in turn for years knocked off his sentence. It wasn’t a fit, not decades later, not when a lot of those who had buried bodies were buried beside them. The Best Before Date on Wolf Martens’s inside information had expired three decades ago.

  This tough old broad took a hard look at me. She didn’t know what I was thinking, but she knew I was thinking.

  “She had things going …”

  She ratcheted up the surliness. She didn’t want the detail lost. “She doesn’t anymore. Not that I know. She got out of business.”

  “Why?”

  She held off the urge to call me Sonny. She did a quick survey of the room. She didn’t turn around. She relied on the radar and heat-sensory system that had developed over the thousands of miles she had padded behind the counter and between the kitchen and the tables. “You don’t have enough twenties to get that out of me. I don’t know.”

  A dead end, at least beyond the fact that Monica Harmon wasn’t an inmate’s chimera. I ordered my burger, relish, and a coffee. I had topped up the tank but I still felt like I was running on empty and could have nodded off in the front seat if not for fear that I’d end up as dead as Whisper, done in by the cold. I put it in drive and started toward the ramp. I checked the rear-view and saw Phyllis standing outside the front door of l’Auberge Diesel. On her smoke break and on her cell.

  1

  THURSDAY

  It was morning but dawn hadn’t cracked. The road sign said REGINA 25 KM. My cell vibrated over in the passenger seat. I was going to let it go to voicemail but then I saw the call display: HERBERT HERALD. Scoop was up early to deliver something other than papers.

  “This is Brad Shade.”

  “Brad, this is Kenneth Malling from the Herbert Herald . The reporter you spoke to ….” He was showing his full mastery of the obvious.

  I wanted him to cut to the chase. This was going to show up on my phone bill at two dollars a minute. “You turn up anything more on the Marses?”

  “I was able to contact a couple of guys who went to school with your friend before he went off to play junior hockey,” he said.

  Maybe there was a future for Scoop after all and he might be able to write for and dine on a better quality of newspaper. Or not.

  “They said he really kept to himself. Total loner.”

  “Nothing a
bout a brother?”

  “No.”

  “Church?”

  “Marses didn’t go.”

  I took a flyer. “Did anyone mention Monica Harmon?” I asked him. “Evidently, Martin Mars had a brother and Miss Harmon was his girlfriend.”

  It took him a breath, a hem and a haw for it to kick in. “There’s someone here who worked as a mechanic for a couple of years for the Marses quite some time ago, retired now,” Scoop said. “He said the Marses decided to move out to Herbert because there was some real trouble with drugs and hookers at their place just outside of Regina. And he mentioned the Harmon woman by name. He said she was ‘a bad apple’ and that she went away to prison on drug charges and other things a few years later.”

  I thought Scoop was going to waste my time. I had misjudged him.

  “Yeah, I talked to a lawyer in town …”

  Okay, knock me over with a feather. I figured there wasn’t even a justice of the peace.

  “… He’s retired now but his brother is a big criminal lawyer in Regina. He said she pleaded down from some heavier sentences.”

  “And now?”

  “She was released a few years back. She hasn’t reoffended, I guess. That’s what the lawyer here says. He said he doesn’t know where she is. He also said, though, that she would … let me check my notes … ‘probably be well-advised to keep a low profile.’”

  “Kid, you did a great job. I appreciate it.”

  “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you.”

  I hit End and then the BlackBerry hummed again. I didn’t turn my head to look at the call display. I just figured it was Scoop with a trivial footnote that he had forgotten to pass along. It wasn’t.

  “Shadow, I hope I’m not getting you up. I figured you’d be sleeping in after your long trip and I’d leave a message. I’m going to be in transit all day back from Europe.”