The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  “You doing this for someone?”

  He turned his head and nodded. I pressed down.

  “Who?”

  “F-ffff” was all he could manage again.

  “I’m going to give you a chance to walk away and pretend this never happened,” I lied. “Who put you up to it?”

  “She did,” he said.

  “Who’s she?”

  “Mother,” he said.

  “Your mother?”

  “No, Mother, this woman we know,” he said. “We’re partners. She gets the weed and we know boys with a lab. It’s business.” Yeah, Butch and Sundance must have taken turns with the Chamber of Commerce Men of the Month Award.

  “Try again,” I said. This time I pushed down hard enough to make his eyes pop out of their sockets.

  He panted when I eased up. “She had us get the boys at the I to rough up the kid at the gas station,” he said. “She wanted them to give him a message … that he had to settle up what he owed her and come ’round in person to do it. It’s the only time she had us rough up anybody.”

  I couldn’t see Walt being a dope smoker. I didn’t give it deeper thought until later.

  “And what’s that got to do with us?” I said.

  “When we told her that you said you were here for Mars’s funeral and you talked to her at the casino, she told us to look after you.”

  He told me her name but said that he wasn’t sure of the address. “Is it Sixteenth or Seventeenth?” he said, calling out to his fellow fallen soldier. “Sixteenth” was the muffled reply from his supine confederate. I could see how it could get confusing with the town’s numbered street grid. “I dunno what the number is,” he said. “I just recognize the house, that’s all. I only been there a couple of times, ’cause most of the time I deal with her on the phone.”

  “Which one?”

  “I dunno the number,” he said. “There’s a lawn jockey on the lawn.”

  Noted. Had that down.

  “What about Martin Mars? You sure as hell didn’t like it when I mentioned his name at the Imperial the other night.”

  Sundance said nothing but he was spared further violence and humiliation. I heard a car making the turn into the parking lot. I tossed the knife into a snowbank and it disappeared without a trace. I looked over at Chief. He had gone to the Bug and pulled the plastic flower out of the vase and then walked over to the motionless pile of meat in Butch’s leathers. He tossed the flower on his victim’s chest and then realized I was watching him.

  “Got to give him respect,” he said.

  The RCMP cruisers unnecessarily pulled up.

  13

  Albert Daulton tapped a pen on the top of his desk and did his best to look nonchalant.

  “You’re not being charged,” he began.

  “So you brought us in here to present us with the keys to the city?” I said.

  “Don’t be smart with me, sonny,” he said.

  I feigned full contrition. Chief gave me That Look. “Sorry,” I said. “It’s just been a bad night.”

  “So I understand,” he said. “That’s the way the arena’s janitor described it when he dialed 911. He said that pair started everything and you were just trying to protect yourselves.”

  It was a good thing I hadn’t knocked the janitor to the floor when we barged in to get to the board meeting.

  “So if we’re not being charged, what do you need us for?”

  “First, statements for charges against the Loners.”

  “Not going there,” I said. “Not worth it. It was just a friendly exhibition of strength and sportsmanship.”

  Daulton had to anticipate that we might be reluctant to put our names to anything that would jam up gang members.

  “I understand. The methamphetamines and weapons in their vehicle should suffice. Nevertheless, I’m going to request that you leave town as soon as you can and for as long as you can,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. All this lying was making it easier each time.

  “Look, I know Martin Mars was a friend of yours of some sort …”

  “Teammate …”

  “Okay, teammate,” he said, not amused by my continued impertinence. “But your friend died … at his own hand. These are the types of things that we don’t look at too hard for fear of opening wounds. We let the dead rest. We let life go on.”

  “It’s swell to be philosophical about it, but the fact is, my teammate didn’t die at his own hand. He didn’t die from carbon monoxide poisoning …”

  “How do you know that?”

  I told him precisely how I knew that. I told him about Dr. Goto and the absence of cherry-red lividity and hemoglobin that wasn’t binding and blood that had turned purple. The interim coroner seemed suitably convinced when I told him that I had convinced his predecessor to make a phone call up to the chief coroner for the province.

  Daulton didn’t say, “But I can explain.” He just went right to it.

  “It was a mistake I made because I allowed personal feelings to crawl into it,” he said. “It’s not the first time I have. But I have only a couple of months until I retire, so I guess it will be the last time.”

  “You hated Mars that much that you didn’t care how he died,” I said. Ninety-nine percent of accusations from my side of the table to the other would have led to a world of trouble, but he was repentant enough to admit a mistake, just not the one I expected.

  “No, I allowed personal feelings into it because Martin Mars was a friend of mine,” Daulton said. He leaned back in his chair as I leaned forward, and Chief squinted as if his eyes couldn’t believe what his ears had just heard. “Martin quietly did a lot of good work in the community. He had a big role in a program for troubled youth, kids who committed minor offences. He gave them jobs. Even took them into his home.”

  “Like his boarder now?” I guessed.

  “Pretty typical of the boys he took in, yes,” Daulton said. “We had picked him up for underage drinking a couple of times when he started working at the filling station. He lost his job and was living on the street when he was found in possession of methamphetamine. When his case was going to court, Martin stepped forward and told the Crown he’d give him a second chance and vouch for him. The case was dropped. He did a lot of that sort of thing.”

  “There’s a lot that you don’t know about him … he’s not who he claimed to be all those years,” I said, thinking I was one step ahead of him. I wasn’t.

  Daulton bit his lip and looked away. He wasn’t used to being on the other side of the justice being done. A career criminal wouldn’t blink. Daulton tripped the wire. He did everything but break out in hives. He’d hoped this tear-soluble 10 percent confessional would have sufficed. He soon realized that we knew too much for him to get off that easy.

  “I had known him for years, even before he played in the league. I knew about his story, about his family.”

  “You know that those weren’t his parents?”

  “I knew the Marses, his ‘parents.’ I knew the old couple first and always thought it was strange that they were presenting him as a son when he clearly wasn’t. I was just a constable then, first year or so on the force. I was out in Herbert a lot. People were suspicious and I was too, but I let it rest. No harm in it. People around here will talk about something and then they let it drop and carry on like they never thought or talked about it in the first place. And it was years after the Martens murder. I never put it together.”

  Daulton leaned forward. He lowered his voice even though no one was within earshot. “When Martin was twenty he came to me and told me that he had trouble,” he said. “He told me exactly what had happened . Everything he saw.”

  “Why did he come to you then?”

  “He had a contract offer to play hockey in the States but was going to need a visa to work there, and the American authorities would be conducting a background check, a pretty intense one. I told him that it would be better if I just wasn’t involved at al
l, but he said that he had no one else he could ask. I spoke with an executive with the club.”

  “That would have been Hal Sutherin, our general manager in L.A.,” I said. It wasn’t until after Chief and I left Daulton’s office that it would hit home: that Hal’s brother, Bud, was the one tugging on John Harris’s arm when Iron went off on Whisper, that Bud probably knew Whisper’s backstory but didn’t loop in Iron, that the Sutherins managed somehow to keep it to themselves, that it might be the single well-kept secret in a game lousy with gossip. One-third of that secret died with Hal Sutherin when he was felled with a heart attack on the seventeenth hole at Riviera, ruining a round when he was on pace to shooting his age. Another third died when his older brother, Bud, fell down the sinkhole of dementia about a decade back.

  “Yes,” Daulton said. “I spoke to Sutherin. He told me he thought he had heard it all a year or two before, when a player found out in the visa application that the woman he thought was his sister was in fact his mother. And I spoke with the visa authorities. There was a significant hole where his birth records should have been. I told them just the thumbnail details, that Martin Mars’s biological parents were both dead, and that he had endured a terrible emotional trauma. I didn’t lie but I left a fair bit out. Finessed it, if you want. It complicated things but we were able to get the paperwork done. It was something that wouldn’t have been cross-referenced with a years-old missing person case. I had to bend the rules but it was impossible not to be sympathetic. It was our secret.”

  Daulton was claiming that he was all heart when he pushed through Immigration’s background check, but he was also covering his own ass for not following up on his original suspicions about the Mars family. It’s one thing for a case to go cold, another to throw it in the freezer the way he had. Once he finessed the visa application, Daulton was bound in the secret more than anyone, more even than Whisper. All Whisper had to lose was his privacy. Daulton would have lost his reputation and his job just for starters. He might have even been charged and prosecuted.

  “It wasn’t just a secret with the two of you,” I said. “There’s his brother. You had to know he’d been in contact with his brother …”

  “For a lot of years, yes, I did.”

  “You think he knew about …”

  “About my role in all this?” Daulton said. “I want to say no, he didn’t, but I could only go on what Martin told me. I’ve been afraid of it getting out.”

  “What’s the old saying, it’s easy for three to keep a secret if two are dead,” I said. “I guess you’d be rattled by anyone kicking up too much dust around Mars’s death, anyone like me.”

  He didn’t like the dash of pepper I wanted to add to the fresh servings of his candour. “Draw your own conclusions,” he said, trying to resurrect the wall. It wasn’t quite as thick as onion skin.

  “They’re drawn,” I said. For a couple of breaths we had run out of things to say. Daulton was preoccupied with the implications of somebody outside this messy loop knowing his role in concealing Whisper’s secret, somebody being Chief and me, someone being anyone we had told or planned to. While this was sinking in I spied a number written down on a notepad near his phone. It was upside down but I didn’t have any trouble recognizing it. It was mine. No name. Not part of a form. Just my number. Could have pulled it from our interrogation Monday night. Could have pulled it right off the BlackBerry’s screen when it was confiscated by the Mounties who dragged us in. That my number was somewhere in the building wasn’t surprising. That it was so handy for Daulton was telling. Another conclusion drawn: Daulton didn’t charge Chief and me because he didn’t want us lingering around headquarters or in town kicking up the aforementioned dust. It hadn’t been Butch and Sundance or any other outlaw trying to get in my head with the threatening calls. No, the calls originated from an ID-protected cell in this shabby office in the local seat of Truth, Justice, and the Canadian Way.

  I reached across the desk and picked up the paper. He didn’t move. I waved it. He would be wasting his time at a poker table at the Living Sky. I presumed the last Anonymous Trip Advisory had been made and I moved on.

  “It will be easy for you to figure out what Wolf knows. I was up in P.A. yesterday. I phoned in a request for the release and they told me that it had already been filed. The supervisor of the guards had done it.”

  That’s the problem with getting an inch ahead of yourself. It always takes you a foot off course.

  “No, I doubt a guard filing a request like that would have been appropriate,” Daulton said, his official superciliousness resurfacing. “I filed the request immediately when I got word of Martin’s death. I put the nature of his relationship to Martin down as ‘cousin, sole surviving’ and all the rest. I presumed it wouldn’t be filed by anyone else. I know that Martin’s wife had no knowledge of the brother. And it would be processed expeditiously if the request came from my office. The instructions are for the guard to deliver Wolf Martens to our headquarters and we’re to supervise his leave in tandem.”

  It was a lot to take in and I needed a minute. Precisely why he wanted Wolf Martens to be at the service for Whisper I didn’t know, but I could guess. A promise made. A pre-emptive tightening of the circle. Guilt. Daulton was about to fill the silence with his rationalizations of his past actions and inactions but I jumped in.

  “You knew an innocent man was sitting in prison all these years,” I said.

  “I realize the justice system failed in this case. Unfortunately, you have someone who is either unstable or insane, but he has given his confession, repeated the details over and over, and been found to be competent by experts. Martin coming forward wouldn’t have changed much.”

  “And so you know that the real perp walks, right?”

  “I know the ‘perp’ based on what Martin told me. She did time for drug and firearms possession. Her sentence was pleaded down to a pittance. Another failure of the justice system. She’s on our radar. We keep tabs. She’s still in town. People like her do what they do. They know we know what they do. And they know the limits of what we can do about it. It’s an elegant dance.”

  “Glad you can see the elegance in it.”

  “Martin told me their paths crossed sometimes. He never went into it, but he was such a pure spirit …”

  Nice word for a naïf.

  “… he thought he could coax her to clear his brother.”

  Even Whisper couldn’t have been that clueless, to think that Harmon would talk her way into a life sentence.

  “He said, ‘I’m going to get her and she’s going to go away,’” Daulton said. “Look, I’m sure she’s involved in the same things she’s done before …”

  She worked in the navel in the town’s seedy underbelly but somehow lint wouldn’t gather around her.

  “But there’s nothing you’ve been able to take her down on, right?” I said. “Even though these fat ex-con bikers and kids are working for her.”

  “We can’t close the circle, not yet, much as I’d like to. Martin said that he was close.”

  Close.

  “You have an address for her?”

  “I couldn’t give it to you if I did.”

  And he didn’t.

  14

  Chief and I went for coffee and meditated wordlessly, like a pair of yogis on a mountaintop. Whisper had told Daulton that he had Monica Harmon. It could have been an empty boast. Then again, it would have been one hell of a coincidence to make an empty boast about bringing down a criminal one day and be found very dead the next. Especially when the criminal you’re talking about got away with murder once. Especially when you’re found in the front seat of your treasured connection to your only sibling. Especially when you’ve been laid out to look like you checked out with self-inflicted carbon monoxide poisoning and the sum total of CO in your system equals about the same amount as you’d get on a draw of a cheap cigar.

  I didn’t know for a fact that Whisper had Monica Harmon cold. I was just going to
presume that he did, rattle her cage, and see what fell out.

  Sarge called.

  “You owe me,” he said.

  “I owe you for everything, starting with a spectacular gene pool.”

  “You know, these friends of mine have more important things to do than spend hours chasing down …”

  “Sarge, this call is costing me two dollars a minute,” I said, knowing that this price point would speed things along and spare me a speech.

  “Just tell me one thing,” he said. “How did you have the date but not a year?”

  I looked at Wolf Martens’s red notebook on the dash and flipped it open to the first pages. “A calendar, a day circled, and initials in it,” I said. “A little guesswork, a little luck.”

  I left out a little larceny.

  He gave me a rundown on Monica Harmon’s colourful career; her many convictions; her time off the street, which seemed far too brief; the name of her parole officer; her address. He read off the area code and the first three digits for her phone number and waited for me to take them down. I took a not-so-wild stab at the last four digits.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” he said.

  Sarge was going to ask me how I knew but I reminded him that the call was costing me. Sarge is more sensitive to the value of a dollar than most, never mind two dollars. He left the good off bye.

  15

  I could see the footprints I had left in the snow three hours before. I knocked on the door. A couple of seconds later the peephole went into full eclipse and a deadbolt was unbolted, but the door remained chained.

  She looked surprised to see me again so soon. She looked surprised to see me at all after she had made the call to Butch and Sundance. She did her best to mask her surprise. Her snarl looked like it had been sculpted in nicotine-laced wax. She again greeted me with a puff of smoke in my face.

  “What the fuck do you want now?”