The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  Yeah, dressed up as a piece of heaven, Swift was the most awful patch of turf I had ever crossed.

  But it changed for me in the living room. In the living room of my late teammate. In a living room just up a set of stairs from a three-piece bathroom flooded with still-wet blood that Chief and I were going to have to clean up. In a living room across from a sleeping widow who knew nothing of her husband’s life before she met him or anything other than the work schedule of the boy who killed him and took his own life.

  I wanted to think that silence was something unique to Swift, this dire and frozen place, and to those who lived there. But I had been around too long. Now I was one of them.

  I suppose I always have been a keeper of secrets. It was everyday stuff in hockey, as a player, as a scout. I had a couple of terrible things done to me as a young guy in initiations in Junior A, and I did the same terrible things to the guys who came in a year after me at each stop. I still don’t talk about them. Nobody does.

  Yeah, each time our coach knew we were having our annual players-only party. Yeah, he knew that we were all underage and were going to get drunker than sailors on leave. And yeah, he told us that there wasn’t going to be “any funny stuff” and if he got wind of it whoever was involved was off the team. “I don’t want that call from someone’s parents,” he said. He wasn’t enforcing team discipline. He was cinching the silence. The best of the veteran players always took charge of the initiation. No one would stand for the captain or the best player getting suspended or kicked off the team for hazing. There was a brutal logic to it, but we were too far down the rabbit hole of shame and guilt to be conscious of it. College initiations, peelers pulling the train or whatever, were nothing compared to what went on in junior. The rookie dinners in the league, those were nothing at all, just some pranks and coin pulled out of your wallet, which was fatter than it had ever been before.

  It was too easy to make the transition, joining Swift Current’s collective hush, the town’s wordless chorus. I had done it all before.

  Would things be better if she knew everything that Whisper had kept from her? Not that I could see. If she knew that Whisper hadn’t taken his life? He had gone down a road that wound up costing him his life, different it’s true, but a grey area, metaphysically open-ended. Wouldn’t have changed things if she knew, a crime that now could not be prosecuted. If the boy she thought of as her son had snuffed her loving husband, the boy’s protector? No, the idea that she had harboured the one who’d kill Whisper would only compound her grief.

  Chief left the decision up to me, even though my last decision wasted a perfectly savable life. I didn’t blame him for not pushing me to either tell all or say nothing. After all, I had dragged him into all of this.

  I wouldn’t tell her.

  23

  And that was it. When it was over I drove the Escalade back to the house. And the next thing I heard was the phone ringing upstairs Sunday morning.

  One of the young officers had a BlackBerry charger. It was the source of the juice that let Daulton, Chief, and me hear the voice of a kid whose lifeless body was still warm. I hit the red End button.

  “I don’t know that it’s enough,” Daulton said.

  “Not enough?” I said. “Even with the note?”

  Daulton picked up the note. It was printed in caps, not written in script, and it was done in a hand that had rarely had occasion to put anything down on a page.

  I DIDN’T WANT TO KILL MR. MARS. HARMON MADE ME DO IT. I DON’T DESERVE TO LIVE. I’M SORRY FOR EVERYTHING.

  Daulton dropped the pretense that was issued with his uniform. “Oh, it’s enough for me to believe it,” he said. “And it’s enough to follow up, a lead for sure.”

  “Yeah, that’s a real lead, especially with the fact that a guy died from drinking cyanide when his car was rigged up to look like it was suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.”

  “What I mean is that it’s not enough for charges against Harmon or the bikers, not by itself. And not enough to get a conviction, not by itself.”

  “That’s a pretty high bar to clear. It’s not a high jump. It’s a pole vault.”

  “It’s something that we can start with.”

  Throw fucking caution to the wind, I wanted to say, but for once I decided to play nice. “So they’re going to walk free until …”

  “Those two gentlemen in leather have been charged with several offences …”

  “OK, so she’s going to walk free until …”

  “We’ll bring her in for questioning.”

  “If she doesn’t head off for parts unknown or go underground or hop on the back of a Harley,” I said, content with a short list of snags. “Then your questions can’t be asked and you have dead bodies and a dead end.”

  “I understand where you’re coming from.”

  “Probably not. Doesn’t seem like it, anyway.”

  “We need something more than this to bring her in on. Something other than this.”

  Daulton finished taking my statement while Chief gave his in another room. He was through first.

  “Funny, that you came back to the Marses’ house before you were going to take him to the drugstore on an errand,” he said.

  I scrambled. “He needed his insulin. He looked pretty sick. I thought he was going to drop right there.”

  It was a satisfactory answer. Daulton did his best to look unsatisfied.

  I didn’t see any benefit in disguising my impatience and Daulton was of the same mindset. I had my job to get on with and he was a clock-punched card closer to his retirement.

  “If you had reported all this right away, it would have turned out much better,” he said. “But you’re so smart. You decided to do things your way. You’re the son of a police officer …”

  “A staff sergeant,” I said.

  “You think that justice usually gets done. You think you can get it done by yourself.”

  “Done, yeah, but I don’t know who I’d count on to do it around here …”

  Normally I would have let it go right there but I didn’t like Daulton pinning this dead end on me. The assistant coach at B.C. had tagged it just right all those years back. “Shade, you’ve got an electric mouth,” he’d said. Daulton had flipped the switch and powered it up.

  “I know about you and I only just met you. You’re a vet. You’ve been here, what …”

  “Almost thirty years,” he said. He thought he was shutting me down, but no, I handed him a shovel and out of reflex he started to dig himself into a hole.

  “Almost thirty years,” I said. “So you would have gone out to the road when that bus flipped over and those players were killed.”

  “It was an awful thing.”

  “I’ll bet it was. So was the fact that no one was found responsible or the fact that the families of the dead never saw a nickel of compensation. It was an awful thing but it shouldn’t have been so awful for you. You’re a professional, right? Deal with this stuff every day, right? I think the real awful part was that you knew that bus was unsafe. Shouldn’t have been on the road, right?”

  Not a blink. Not a twitch. Twenty-seven years of practice and he had it down.

  “It must have been hard writing up that report,” I said. “It must have been even harder when a couple of those kids’ families were suing the team and they didn’t have evidence like that in their files. It must have been really hard. That and the coach. Everybody in the league seemed to know what was going ’cept the people in this town, who should have been the first to know … and you, who should have been the first in town to know, you with your keen insight into the criminal mind.”

  They brought Chief into Daulton’s office just as I was in full vent. The Big Man gave me That Look.

  “I’ll tell you what I think of justice,” I said as I stood up and leaned over Daulton’s desk. “I think it gets done. Sometimes it gets done right away but sometimes it can drag on. Sometimes it’s straightforward and by the book. Somet
imes it’s a little crooked and, well, whatever it takes.”

  I said a few more things, not including “Goodbye.” I hit him where he lived. He had booked others for assaulting an officer when they had inflicted minor wounds compared to the waxing I gave him.

  I had to get on with the Whatever It Takes. I just had to figure out Whatever That Was.

  24

  It couldn’t have just been that Whisper had cut her off the payroll. That wouldn’t have been enough. She had to believe that Whisper was going to take her down, and she had to know exactly how he had her.

  Whatever it was that Whisper had, Daulton didn’t know and hadn’t put it together. It wasn’t her identity. It wasn’t her whereabouts. Daulton knew that. Her parole officer knew that too. And it couldn’t have just been that she was moving weed. She was smart enough to cover her tracks. She knew how to roll around in the mud and not get caught with dirt under her fingernails.

  She thought she was smart. She had a criminal’s ego. And she thought that Whisper and everyone else wasn’t up to her speed at all. If Whisper had her, dead to rights it had to be because she’d sold him short and overestimated herself.

  The door to RCMP headquarters closed behind me and I braced myself against the cold when my BlackBerry vibrated. It was a call from Donna. I didn’t take it. A minute later a voicemail alert flashed on the screen. I gave it a listen.

  “Hey, it’s Donna. Just want to tell you that you’re clear on that mess with my ex. I’m not pressing anything. It’s just not worth it. He’d lose his job at Revenue Canada and that would be a whole other mess—our kid with school expenses and him being indigent. It wouldn’t make sense for me. So he’s going to keep his job holding other people’s feet to the fire and appear to be the fine upstanding citizen I know that he’s not …”

  She went on for thirty more seconds or so. At one moment it was practicality, the next indignation, and after that what I was cynical enough to expect in a disaster scenario like this, even with a highly intelligent woman, sentimentality.

  I only half-listened at that point, though. It was after she mentioned her husband’s job that I realized how Whisper had Monica Harmon. If I hadn’t listened to that call, it wouldn’t have come together so neatly. I was going to his wake the next day. I had a few calls to make first.

  I decided it would be better to go back to Regina for the night. It was the only safe thing. If she knew or even suspected that I had the cards to play, Black Aces and Eights, a Dead Man’s Hand, and that I intended to run the game that Whisper had planned, she knew enough bad people to leave me as thoroughly dead as my old teammate.

  25

  Bob Roth wasn’t exactly clear why I had asked him, but once he determined that he wasn’t breaking the law he went through with it anyway.

  “Yes, Ms. Harmon. Yes, I’m sorry for calling late. I’m the executor of Mr. Mars’s will. It’s my duty to tell you that his last will and testament will be read in my offices tomorrow after the funeral and it is incumbent on me to inform all principals named …”

  And Roth went on. I sat beside him in his office and nodded. He looked skeptical.

  A few minutes later the Big Man was behind the wheel, rolling back to Regina.

  1

  FRIDAY

  Do Not Disturb hanging from the doorknob. Snow falling and wind blowing outside the window.

  “I thought about you all the time I was driving all over. It’s funny. That bump there, I fell on the ice. Lucky I wasn’t knocked out.”

  A naked body resting up against another naked body. A shoulder feeling faint puffs of breath.

  “Maybe it won’t make everything right. Everything is so broken. But it’s going to make at least one thing right. Thanks. No, really, I have to thank you. You did a good thing. It helped a lot. It helped me do the right thing for a guy I used to play with. At the start I didn’t want to be involved, and then at some point along the way I felt like I had to do the respectable thing. God knows I’ve done lots of things that weren’t respectable at all.”

  A laugh holding back. A hand gently pushing.

  “No, not this.”

  Fingers running through hair. A bathroom light shining through a small open gap.

  “How well do you know people? I like to think that I read people better than most. And I do it for a living. It’s not the game. It’s people I read. I don’t get many wrong, but I couldn’t have been more wrong with Whisper. That’s what we called him. Martin Mars. Wasn’t even his real name. I know now how I got it all wrong, why I did. I mistook the player for the guy under the sweater, the guy on the ice for the one in real life. Does that make sense? I think that most of the time what you are is what comes out on the ice. But not for Whisper. The exception, I guess.”

  An elbow bending with a hand propping up a head. Eyes finding the shape of a silhouette.

  “I thought he’d be a guy pushed around in life. He was pushed around when I knew him. On the ice and off. He was a guy who walked away rather than sticking around and pushing back. He just didn’t have it in him when I knew him back then, well, except that one time, that one time when he pushed back. He had an awful deal in life, turned it right around, and still had it in his mind to push back on that one thing …”

  A phone ringing once. A hand lifting and dropping the receiver before a second ring.

  “Yeah, that’s right. I never thought of it that way. A slow burn. Every game your name is crossed out on the roster and you have to sit in the press box. Every time you see your name and it’s not your name. Every day you know your brother is putting an X through a square on a calendar. A slow burn, yeah, I guess I’ve never thought of it that way because I’m just not made that way. Do you want breakfast? It will take them a half hour to bring it up here.”

  A hand lifting the receiver. A finger punching five.

  “One Canadian breakfast, one continental. Coffee and OJs. Grape jam or jelly if you have it. You can just knock and leave it outside the room if we don’t answer.”

  A thick hand reaching behind a thin neck. Thick fingers grabbing purple-tinted hair ringed with sweat.

  “What time do you have to be at the library?”

  A soft hand squeezing a hard bicep. A knee forgetting to ache.

  “Yeah.”

  A man dressed in white and black pushing a cart to the door of the room. A knock on the door going unanswered.

  2

  Ms. Alexis Stewart reported for duty at her desk in the Periodicals Research Department with cheeks flushed by a guy she had seen for the first time on Entertainment Tonight and in the March 27, 1992, issue of People magazine. Her memories of the night wouldn’t be spoiled by the knowledge that the man she had shared a sheet with only hours before watched paramedics pull another kind of sheet over a hard-luck kid whose death would go unnoticed in the newspapers piling on her desk. It wasn’t that she was cold-hearted, just that she had no idea.

  3

  Chief was standing in the lobby. He was on the phone with his missus and laughing about something one of the Little Chiefs had said. It was the type of call I was never on either end of. And never will be. Yeah, I had calls from Sandy, but they weren’t the same. Yeah, I had calls, other calls. Something was missing. Nothing shared the same way. Yeah, I’d spent another night with my testosterone revving. That was what I had instead. Mr. Independent. I had to settle for Ms. Co-Dependent for a Night I and II.

  Chief caught a look at me just as he was about to sign off. He thought I was pissed at waiting for him to get off the phone. I was just pissed about what he had, what Whisper had for all those years, what I had missed out on.

  The service was scheduled for two o’clock. I told Chief that this would be a quick turnaround. That we’d be there an hour, ninety minutes at most. I don’t know why he believed me at that point. Maybe he didn’t.

  An hour later we were passing those hydro-pole crucifixes.

  I leaned into the back seat and pulled out my laptop.

&nbs
p; “You don’t mind, do you, Chief?” I said.

  “Go ahead.”

  “Just want to look at a few reports.”

  I looked at reports I had on windows that I’d opened before I left the Hotel Saskatchewan. I skimmed them. I plugged in my earbuds and opened a sound file. That was the real reason that I’d booted up my laptop.

  GOWAN: On that overtime goal it was Ted Edgar who had the shot on net, wasn’t it?

  WHISPER: No, actually it was Brad Shade. It was right during a line change.

  The big historian, he didn’t even check the box score to get the first assist on the goal.

  GOWAN: Shade was your linemate that night?

  WHISPER: Yeah, he was stuck with me. Six shifts. He was my roomie too.

  GOWAN: How would you describe him as a player?

  WHISPER: As a player? I dunno, I always thought Shadow could have been a pretty good guy if he hadn’t got hurt. It’s how it goes. You gotta be good and then you gotta be lucky. Soon as you get hurt once, your chances of getting hurt again go way up. I was lucky. ’Cept for my throat I never got hurt.

  The cover story had become so much a part of him that he wove it into an answer to a question a long way from his own story. He said it like he believed it. Maybe he did.

  He went on.

  WHISPER: The one thing I’d say about Shadow was that he was the best teammate I ever played with. Not the best player by a long stretch …

  The truth, but it still wounded.

  … but Brad helped me, not just ’cause he was my roommate. The one thing that always bothered me about leaving the team is that I never thanked him. Maybe if I had, maybe he would have tried to talk me into sticking it out. He couldn’t have done it. I never tried to get ahold of him all those years later either. I felt bad about it. I owed him something just for getting that far in L.A. It was tough, but Brad was the one guy in the room who really had the time of day for me. And a good teammate isn’t the guy who’s good with the stars, y’know. It’s the guy who’s there for the little guys, like me. He was like a brother to me.