The Black Ace

by G B Joyce

  I felt guilty and, I admit, that’s a long way from my natural condition. I felt as though I had hardly known Whisper at all. And if he felt that I was there for him, it was only because no one else was. That’s how it is with a Black Ace. The other guys on the team would rather do a group hug with a quorum of lepers than be a Black Ace’s best friend.

  Whisper was practically asking Gowan to keep chasing that theme. I would have bet with a little prod Whisper would have talked about the hotbox Mercedes contest. The Good Professor’s lack of interviewing skills were a by-product of his dearth of social élan. He didn’t think about stories. He thought about things and numbers. He wasn’t even listening when Whisper was opening up. The paper shuffling stopped.

  I nodded off with the buds still in my ears. The curtain dropped. When I came to we were just passing Herbert.

  “I really appreciate this, Chief,” I said. “I can’t guarantee you that you’ll have a job when we come out of this, mostly because I can’t guarantee that I’m going to have a job when we come out of this. But I’ll tell you, so long as I have a job and a say in who stays on the staff, you’ll be there.”

  He nodded without turning his head. I could have said a lot more but there didn’t seem to be any point. There’s only so much physical and mental torment a guy can take, but he can take a lot more of that than empty promises, however heartfelt.

  “I don’t like funerals but the fireworks are after the service.”

  “I like fireworks,” Chief said. Yeah, hundreds of times in his life, in his best days on a nightly basis, he had thrown lit matches into the gunpowder factory.

  4

  Chief and I had made good time down Highway 1. We ended up being the first in the room at the funeral home.

  Mitzi came in after us. She looked fragile and weak. The black made her look even paler than she was. She came into the room with Roth on one side of her and Friesen on the other. They were positioned to catch her like a second baseman and first baseman congregating under a cloud-scratching pop fly.

  “Thanks for coming,” she said to me. Her voice was faint and her words were slurred by trauma, sedatives, and a couple of hours of restless sleep.

  Hanley was next into the room. No. 59 was in tow and he took a seat, careful to lay down his crutches where they wouldn’t trip mourners. They did the ritual handshakes. I asked No. 59 how his knee was and if he had called the ortho. He said that his father was going to foot the bill for him to fly first class to Toronto for surgery. He said that he hoped the surgery would be good enough to fly back economy. I had a life lesson for him. I told him to seize every chance to fly first class.

  Ed and Derek Jones were the second family act to put in an appearance. Ed knew Roth and Friesen only passingly but shook their hands and told them to call him if there was anything he could do. The younger Jones looked like he wished he could be anywhere else, the list being topped by a poolside chaise lounge on a cruise ship with the British Virgins awaiting—the port of call, not the passengers.

  Beckwith came in, and right behind him, Van Stone. Stoner looked buoyant but not improperly so. That had always been his nature, and I suppose if it had been him in the casket he’d have had the same dopey grin. “Dude, I hate all this but it’s good to see you, too long, too long,” Stoner said and he kept right on going, filling me in on the sale of the junior team and his plans to make it the best junior franchise in the country. Beckwith was only half-listening but still fully grimacing, knowing that the new hands-on owner wouldn’t like anyone else’s fingers on his prize, including and especially everyone sitting on the board.

  Stu Gowan made an appearance, one that I hadn’t expected but should have seen coming. At least he showed enough taste not to bring a folder of hockey cards to be signed by any former players in attendance. He had probably already added Whisper’s obit to a folder in an overflowing filing cabinet.

  Kilmer came in with Wolf. Wolf was wearing a suit the guard had pulled from his son’s closet. He made his way over to Mitzi and shook her hand without introducing himself. At that point Kilmer, Chief, and I were the only ones in the room who knew his connection. Mitzi didn’t put it together. He recognized her from photos that he had filed in his red book. I’d give it back to him at the end of the service.

  Kilmer and Wolf sat in the second row of seats, directly behind Mitzi, the lawyer, and the accountant.

  Daulton showed up in uniform. He was standing at the door when Kilmer turned and nodded. Daulton walked over and sat next to Wolf. Kilmer whispered in Wolf’s ear. “Thanks,” Wolf said to the Mountie and nothing more. I figured that Kilmer told him not to do anything that might make a scene.

  A couple of station managers and a couple of out-of-town suppliers showed up. A funeral-home staffer pointed them in the direction of Mitzi, who should have been easy to pick out by the sobbing behind the veil.

  Roth checked his watch. He had thought about asking a clergyman to speak to the assembled but assumed any candidates would blow him off because Whisper had never darkened their doors nor, more to the point, dropped bills in the passed hats. The lawyer reached into his vest pocket, uncrumpled his handwritten speech, and gave it one last review.

  Monica Harmon walked into the room at that point and stood in the back. I saw her first and she gave me a snarky overconfident smile. Heads turned toward her in sequence. Inspector Daulton’s. The station managers’. Not Wolf’s, though.

  Harmon gave No. 59 a smile. Mistaken identity. He had no idea who she was.

  A complete stranger walked in. He was dressed more for a desk job than for a funeral service. I didn’t recognize him but I had a pretty good idea who he was and why he was there. Harmon eyeballed him once and looked straight ahead.

  5

  Even though the service was forgivingly brief, my mind drifted off. I suppose everyone is the same way at a funeral. Unless the deceased is your flesh and blood or your best friend, you think about your life, here and now or elsewhere and the past, not the extinguished life and exhausted time of the poor stiff at the front of the room.

  There in the funeral home in Swift I thought of my days in college. I thought of a philosophy course I’d taken and a professor standing at the front of the class talking about justice, the theory of justice. I’d had an urge to raise my hand and get a word in but I didn’t. I had just heard about a kid on a team we had played against a few weeks earlier. I had heard that the kid had played his last game. He was a freshman like me. He had been a defenceman. The puck had been dumped into his end of the ice and he had skated back to pick it up. A big winger had skated in after him. It had been up to that point a routine play, something you’d see a hundred times in any game. The kid had picked up the puck and the big winger lined him up. The kid could have got his stick up or the butt end of it into the gut of the incoming winger. He didn’t. He played it clean. He went into the boards and broke his neck. They carried him off the ice and while this philosophy class was going on he was breathing through a tube.

  I couldn’t start to count how many cops my father has introduced me to. I know a hundred by name. I had a pretty good sense of what law enforcement was: something that was only associated with justice and never as closely as you’d like. Justice is a nice thing to kick around in a theoretical sense.

  I wanted to put up my hand in that class and say that justice isn’t something that is but something that gets done and too often doesn’t get done. And that morality is whatever it is that you’re willing to do or not do to have things done or not done to you.

  I snapped out of my daydream and my thoughts went to the unlucky stiff at the front of the room. I thought of what a shitty hand life had dealt him in so many ways and how much good he had made of it. He had wanted justice to get done and he had erased a few lines and written some in along the way. He had lived by a moral code higher than mine, but he was also, down deep, a player, and for him justice and morality had been something other than theories.

  6


  Chief and I drove over to Roth’s offices after the service. I saw his car in the lot. He had left Harry Friesen to see Mitzi home and keep her company. Just after we arrived, Monica Harmon pulled into the lot and followed us into the building.

  “Such a nice service,” she said. “I’m sure it will be such a nice will.”

  I wordlessly feigned disgust and failure. I knocked on the door and the lawyer cracked it open.

  “Have you started the reading yet?”

  “Come in,” Roth said.

  Chief and I walked in and before Roth could shut the door Harmon squeezed past him. “I’m here for the will too,” she said.

  He put up no opposition.

  “Which room is it?” I asked, though I didn’t need to.

  “The conference room in the back,” he said. “Take a seat in there. I’ll be there in a minute. I just need to collect some papers.”

  Harmon brushed past us and opened the door to the conference room.

  Daulton was sitting at the long oak table, his uniform looking out of place in the oak-lined space.

  “Do come in, Ms. Harmon.”

  She looked puzzled. She looked less so when she glanced over her right shoulder and saw the man who had been the last to walk into the funeral home and the first to leave. She was familiar with him. She had been seeing him on a regular basis for a long time, a nuisance, a pen pusher, a dull man who was almost too easy to stay two or three steps ahead of. Check that, entirely too easy.

  “Just a few things to go over, Ms. Harmon,” he said. “Or should I call you Ms. King?”

  “Or Fern?” I said.

  “Yes, is it Maclean?” he said. “Very good then.”

  I was sure we could have dug up another alias or two. The Mounties would do just that later on.

  Roth arrived with a few folders in hand and laid them out for the man who had welcomed Monica Harmon and was more familiar with her than the rest of us, although maybe not as much as Whisper had been.

  “Just one moment, please,” he said and he asked the lawyer a few questions in a hushed voice. He asked for a pad of paper and pulled a pen issued by the government agency.

  Harmon crossed her arms in front of her and made a show of what she portrayed as momentary annoyance. It would turn out to be a lot more than momentary and a lot more than annoyance. Even a hiccup can become chronic.

  “It’s awful about Mr. Mars, isn’t it, Ms. Harmon?” Daulton said. It wasn’t his win but he was already taking a victory lap.

  “Yes,” the man said from behind the papers. “It has come to our attention that you have maintained a position and drawn an income that you have not reported to me as required as a condition of your parole. That’s a violation of your parole, although minor compared to maintaining another identity, opening bank accounts in those names …”

  “Drawing health benefits from a company drug plan, Vivian?” I said. “For shame. I wonder whether there might not be something a little stronger than a parole violation. It’s not like you broke curfew or anything. I mean, it might be something along the lines of defrauding the health insurance outfit that covered you as a Mars ‘employee.’ And it might be that there are tax code implications.”

  “So it would seem,” Roth said. “It would seem that there are multiple social insurance numbers registered here.”

  Daulton had managed to get the number for one Fern Maclean and the account number where the casino direct-deposited her salary. When Daulton and his boys advised the casino’s manager of the presence of a convict in the midst of the operation, he opted to co-operate and open his books. It had all been passed on to my good friend in the Attorney General’s office who, through a third party who owed her a favour for a case that disappeared at her request, found a way to direct relevant facts to someone of influence at Revenue Canada.

  “You thought you were scamming Mars, getting on his payroll. He sold you on the idea, right? Better than a one-time payout. More reliable. Cleaner. A squeeze every two weeks. How sweet is that? Did he want you to talk to his brother, convince him to apply for parole? Is that how you thought you had him dangling? You thought he was a mark but he was setting you up.”

  She said nothing. She stood still. The situation was registering, and until all the pieces fell into place, as they inevitably would, it took everything out of her just to draw a breath.

  “He threatened you, didn’t he? Said he was going to expose you if you didn’t help him with his brother. And then you realized that he could pull the pin on that grenade after his brother was released. He was going to get his revenge one way or another, sooner or later. Unless you moved in first.”

  As reconstructions go, it might not have been dead-on but it didn’t have to be. Maybe they couldn’t hang her on murder, I thought, although I’d have banked on Butch and Sundance selling her out without blinking. In the meantime, they could slam her with frauds, evasions, and everything else, and that was a start.

  “There’s going to be a lot that they can shake loose,” I said. “I suspect that this is only the start of it. We might even be able to coax Hanley’s son and his friends to discuss your role in the robbery and assault at the gas station. There are some very big things that you might walk on, though I believe in a just universe. It’s just the snowball effect, all these little things that are …”

  “Fireworks,” Chief interjected.

  “Fuck off,” she said.

  Roth and the parole officer looked a little scandalized by my lapse into trash talk and hers into profanity, but Daulton smiled.

  It wasn’t finished here. In a few days’ time, when they were able to move ahead on the prosecution, building a case with Walt’s suicide note, with testimony from the co-operating Loners, with physical evidence that included a half-empty box of rat poison found in Harmon’s trash that matched residue found on the Ravens mug at the station, someone was going to have to tell Mitzi. Roth was up to speed and could have done it. Daulton likewise. It could have been anyone in the lawyer’s office. Anyone but Chief and me. It wasn’t finished in Swift Current, but we were.

  Seemingly, Whisper, the most guileless guy I had ever met, had set up a career criminal. She had destroyed what was left of his family and he had preyed on her greed for delicious if posthumous payback.

  7

  Chief and I left Roth’s office. While we let the car warm up we saw Daulton and the parole officer leave with Monica Harmon cuffed in the back seat of the cruiser.

  Chief looked at me and said not a word. He gave me a nuanced expression that clearly begged an instruction to hit Highway 1.

  “Just one last thing,” I said. “One last stop.”

  8

  An unmarked car with back-seat doors that opened only from the outside was parked in the driveway, blocking in Harry Friesen’s Civic. Chief pulled up in a no-parking zone across the street. I doubted we’d get ticketed, although we were getting too used to miscarriages of justice in these environs.

  I knocked but didn’t bother waiting for an answer. When I walked in with Chief in tow Mitzi was on the couch across from Friesen, which I expected, and from Wolf and Kilmer, which I didn’t. We had walked in a few minutes after the conversation in the living room had condensed to a hushed dialogue between Mitzi and the brother-in-law who she’d only heard of the day before and was meeting for the first time.

  It seemed like they couldn’t look each other in the eye. And the rest of us in the room couldn’t work up the nerve to look at them.

  “It’s what Martin would have wanted,” she said.

  “I know,” he said.

  Five seconds of silence. Ten. I cut in. I had to, no matter how awkward it was going to be.

  “Mitzi, again, I’m so sorry for your loss and I wish we could stay on …”

  I caught a look at Chief, whose expression said Be Really Careful What You Wish For.

  “… but we have to get back to Regina and I have a flight to catch. I promise to stay in touch and if there’s anyt
hing I can do for you, just let me know.”

  “Brad, I appreciate everything you’ve done. Everything that Martin said about you over the years, it’s all true.”

  Friesen chimed in and so did Wolf. It wasn’t a house party, but the scene had less of the pall that had hung over the household after Whisper’s death and then Walt’s.

  “I’ll walk out with you,” Kilmer said. “I could use a cigarette.”

  Kilmer walked out behind us but he didn’t reach into his jacket. He just wanted to fill us in out of earshot of the principals.

  “He told me after the service that he wanted to meet her to give her his condolences and to tell her all that his brother had meant to him. And she told him what you had told her, about him being an innocent man. She told him that if he was really sorry that his brother had died he should do what Mars wanted—apply for parole. Just out of respect for him. She said that whatever it was going to cost, she’d look after it. If he needed help on the outside, she said that she’d do whatever she could. He even talked about working on cars again. He looked at the pictures on the mantel and couldn’t keep it together when he saw a picture of his brother beside the Mercedes. I think that did it.”

  9

  I was able to catch the last flight out of Regina to Toronto. For once I slept on the flight, the fastest three hours of my life.

  I got the Rusty Beemer out of the parking lot. Almost three hundred bucks. I wasn’t dead broke but I was dead-to-theworld exhausted. Thought I’d be gone for ten days and I’d ended up on something like the Bataan Death March.