Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (12 page)

Talking about dogs was like replaying my own boyhood, when dogs could mean life or death and were brought up carefully. To me dog talk was like remembered music, hours-long discussions of dogs by friends and relatives and people now dead or far away, dimly seen faces along the igloo's sleeping benches with wind battering the smooth snow walls outside; a woman listening while trying to coax a few willow twigs into enough heat to boil a kettle for tea.

“William let Smokey run with the team when he was on'y a few months old, just to build speed and be able to stick with the others. Morton was home then and he's the one taught William what to do, and when. Smokey was maybe a year ol' when William harnessed him aroun' the middle of the team so he'd learn how that part worked. I think he was near two when William began hookin' him in right behin' the lead dog, a good one but gettin' old, Morton had trained 'im. It wasn' more'n a few trips before Smokey learnt what a lead dog done. I remember the first time Smokey went on the lead himself. Morton told William ‘Take him out on a half-day trapline, with the old dog leadin'. Then when you come to head back, harness Smokey in the lead and see if he can follow the fresh trail back home.' And he did.”

I broke in, couldn't stand not to, even though I knew it wasn't new to them, actually old, like it was to me, knowledge that's in the blood.

“It's all slow but sure,” I said. “First the dog follows a fresh trail like that, only half a day old, and soon he can do one not so fresh and soon he's watchin' when he goes anywhere, even a two or three day or longer trapline, so he'll know how he came and how to get back.”

I stopped and No Legs resumed. “When William sold his dogs he could've got twice't as much if he'd let Smokey go too. But he wouldn'. Allus said if he had a dog team again he wanted Smokey for lead. He'd take him everywhere, everytime he went out, winter or summer. Trained him like he was a house dog. Say, ‘stay!' and he'd stay. Say, ‘go home!' and he'd go. Say, ‘git in the boat, Smokey, and sit!' and he'd jump in and sit in the bows.”

His expression was one of pain, regret, maybe for himself or maybe for William, how could I tell?

“I could mistake William, but not Smokey,” he said. “There was that Skidoo, and there was Smokey runnin' alongside or out front, like showin' he could still do the job better.”

I had no more questions but we kept talking. Their parents, they told me, both were dead. This had been their house when they were children and their buddy William was in it a lot. We sat there another hour or so, I don't know why except that I had some dog stories, too, like one about how along into April when the snow sometimes got crusty out on the trail and would cut the dogs' feet, we'd make moccasins for them . . .

No Legs: “What of?”

“Seal-skin or canvas, but seal is best because with canvas you'd be lucky to have it last a day.”

Then we both produced examples of how some hunters and trappers had the patience to teach a mediocre dog until he was some use, and others had no patience and would be whipping a good dog until he was no good. I told about my father, the one who drowned when I was young, and how people often told me he never bought a dog in his life; was given a male and female when he was fifteen and raised every one he owned after that, training them so good that people were always wanting to buy or make a good trade for breeding stock.

I finally stopped, realizing I had done an awful lot of talking, my reward being that they were easier with me, all stiffness gone.

“I didn' know Eskimos was such big talkers,” No Legs said, and his sister giggled and looked to see how I would take it.

“Inuk,” I said.

“You goin' after William? I don' know where he was gain' but he ain't back or I would know, or Cecilia.”

I had been thinking about it even when I was talking. With the weather still too bad to fly, following him through new drifts by snowmobile wouldn't be any bed of roses. But somewhere in the dog conversation I'd had an idea. What the hell, there was nobody here to say, Matteesie, don't be a fool.

“Anybody still around here with a good team?” I asked.

“Six dogs would be best but four might be okay, with a lead one that could follow William's trail even through this snow.”

No Legs looked at me long and hard.

“How about it?” I pressed.

His smile was a lovely thing to see, like a guy who had come through a long hard night and was greeting a new kind of day. “There's a woman here with a team. She's a teacher. Useta be at Arctic College in Inuvik and belonged to the dog-team club they got there, gain' out weekends and stuff. Don' know how good her dogs are but”—laughing—“they go by me like the bloody wind sometimes.”

That's when I had another idea, the kind that zooms into the head and out of the mouth all in the same breath, with no time left over for considering the ins and outs, the on this hand and on the other hand.

He would know the territory and he was friendly.

“If we can get them, how about coming with me?” I asked.

I hadn't seen a look like his before. It was like, through his eyes, without a sound, he was crying and cheering at the same time.

 

When I got back to the detachment a little after ten the grey dawn was breaking and the snow thinning out. Two phone messages were waiting. One was timed 9:05, a few minutes after I'd left to see No Legs. It read: Call Inspector Ted Huff RCMP Inuvik. The other, timed three minutes later, was for me to call Maxine at the CBC.

I decided not to take them in order. Except when I was at her place and she might call to say she was just leaving the office and was there anything I needed, Maxine had never called me before, anytime, anywhere. No long-distance chit-chats for her even though, as she once confessed in an uncharacteristic moment, she'd often hope I'd call her. Pursuing me as if we were married or betrothed or even something lower on the Richter scale was not part of her style. I could only hope this variance from the norm was because of some super good news she had to impart. I dialed the CBC number.

She did not have super good news. When she heard my voice she said fervently, “Thank God!”

Before I had a chance to ask what we were thanking Him for, she said, “Gloria's got to talk to you. She started to try to get you last night but . . .”

She sounded more upset than I'd ever known her to be.

“But what?”

“She didn't know where you were, exactly, so made the call person-to-person figuring NorthwesTel could track you down. When she was spelling your name for the operator I guess Jules Bonner must have arrived outside our door. Next thing she knew, he kicked the door open and yelled that he'd heard who she was calling and grabbed the phone from her and hung up. Then he started bashing her around, which is about where I came in . . .”

Her voice sort of broke up and she was silent for a few seconds except for a muffled “Damn!” as she got control. “She told me they'd had an argument at his place a little earlier. She'd told him that now Morton was dead anyway, she wished she'd talked to you before you left. When she said that, he threatened her and must have followed when she left. When I got home from work I could hear this Jesus uproar and when I got in there he was beating the hell out of her.”

“With all the noise, wasn't there any neighbour or somebody who'd help?”

After a pause, she said, “It wasn't necessary.”

“You mean you scared him off? Right away?”

“Not right away. The bastard had to come to, first.”

“Whaddaya mean, come to?”

“I knocked him out, or pretty near. Down, anyway.”

“Jesus! How?”

“I hit him with one of my skis.”

Maxine is about five feet zero. I'd never kid her again about leaving her skis in the front hall.

“While I was trying to get Gloria back together he took off. I didn't try to stop him. I wanted to call the Mounties, but she was pretty well in hysterics and anyway said she'd refuse flat to talk to them and pretty soon it didn't matter much . . .”

Didn't matter much? I thought it but didn't say it.

“I was in the bathroom for just a couple of minutes and when I came down that new bottle of vodka you left was half gone and she was chug-a-lugging it. I had to wrestle her for it and then carry her to bed. But I phoned the inspector this morning from here in the office. He told me that they'd been looking for Jules on something else, he didn't tell me what, left messages and so on, but hadn't caught up to him.”

“I sure wish we'd been able to get on this last night,” I said.

She properly did not interpret this as a criticism. That makes her the opposite of the more common type, who live on imagined slights. I think of Maxine as lovable for this and other reasons. “Sure, but anyway she's okay this morning.” Pause. “If being scared half to death can be called okay.”

“What scares her now? Bonner'll know he's in trouble. He won't show up there again.”

No joking now. “One of the things he told her while he was beating her up was that if she spilled her guts to you, the same thing would happen to her that happened to Morton Cavendish.”

I felt the menace like a shiver.

“We could have tried harder or longer to get you last night, sure. But my life can't . . .” She abandoned that in mid-sentence. I was pretty sure she had started to say that her life couldn't be predicated on leaning on me, and then decided that would go without saying and therefore was better unsaid. “When we did try to get you this morning, Nicky Jerome told us to try Bear Lodge. The guy checked your room and said you'd gone out. Anyway, she still wants to talk to you. You having any luck with William?”

I said, “Not so's you'd notice it. Can't even find him. But I finally found someone who admits seeing him. Where's Gloria now?”

“At home with all the doors locked.”

“I'll call her,” I said. “I had a call from the inspector this morning but haven't returned it. Probably about the same thing.”

“When you call her,” she said, “let it ring twice and then cut it off and call again. Otherwise she won't answer.”

I hung up, pondering. Bonner didn't strike me as the physical kind even with someone he outweighed, and a woman at that. He must have the heat on him hard. But where from? Could what Gloria knew be so drastic that even a career non-combatant like Bonner would be pushed into threatening her life?

Ted answered his phone on the first ring after the switchboard announced me.

“Matteesie, we got something going here,” he said.

I told him that I'd been talking to Maxine and had heard about Bonner clobbering Gloria and threatening her life if she talked to me.

“What do you think she knows?”

“I don't know until we talk to her.”

“She won't answer the phone or the door,” he said. “What we've done after Maxine called is have a car parked outside the house, a plain car belonging to one of our people. There's a guy in it. If Bonner shows up we take him. We want to ask him about those airport phone calls, anyway. Couldn't find him, all day yesterday. If Gloria tries to leave we take her into protective custody.”

“I'll call her and call you back.”

“What if she doesn't answer?”

“She'll answer. She and Maxine have a code. I'll let you know what she says right away.” I hung up before he could ask me what the code was. I could imagine him yelling, “Hey! Matteesie!” and then banging up the phone, maybe angry, but I could survive that.

The phone in Maxine's house rang twice. I cut it off and dialed again. When Gloria answered I could hardly tell it was her voice.

“It's Matteesie,” I said.

“Oh, God, Matteesie,” she said. “It's about Morton. I wish I'd been able to talk to you about that before you left.”

“Why didn't you?”

She said brokenly, “I didn't have the guts. I hadn't put it all together.”

I made my voice as kind and reassuring as I could though I didn't feel kind and reassuring at all, I felt close to something important, and wished I was there. Sometimes questioning someone who is near hysterics works if you can be there and keep everything calm, let it come out. While dialing, I'd switched on the tape machine to record the call. I didn't tell her that. I didn't want to spook her any more than she already was. The part of me that belongs to the police made that decision easy enough. I'd keep the tape myself until I figured out what to do with it.

She talked and I asked soft questions and she answered, sometimes slowly, but she answered. I had to fill in some parts from my imagination, but that wasn't hard. It all took a while because sometimes she wailed and stopped and couldn't go on. She wasn't a rock, like Maxine.

As we talked, Pengelly came in and looked at me curiously and then wrote me a note: “There's a woman teacher who sent a note to me, she's trying to get in touch with you. Something about a dog team.”

He raised his eyebrows in a question.

I made the kind of a motion an umpire uses when he's signaling that a base runner is safe at first. It was the best I could do on short notice.

The tape kept on rolling. Words, silences, the odd sob, from her; from me mmmhmmns, prompting here and there, soft questions. When I thought I had all I was likely to get I told her to sit tight, try to stay calm, Maxine would be home soon in her lunch hour, and also told her about the unmarked car standing by and that she was to phone me here at the Fort Norman detachment if she remembered anything more.

I gave her the phone number and in case she didn't write it down reminded her that it's also in the phone book.

She sighed at the end, “I feel better now, Matteesie. But I'm so sorry. Maybe I could have helped. Maybe I could have stopped something . . .”

She sounded as if she might be about to cry again but if so there wasn't much I could do.

As I hung up Pengelly and Nicky Jerome were hanging on my every soft word, trying to figure it out. They'd have to wait. I dialed Inuvik. “I talked to Gloria and got it on tape,” I told Ted. “I'd better replay it for you so you can tape it.”

“Give me the gist first. The tape I'll listen to later.”

Right away I had to make a decision about Gloria's right to some personal privacy. But the stakes were high enough that I figured personal privacy didn't apply right now. “I don't know whether you were aware, but Gloria and Morton had been seeing quite a bit of each other—”

“You mean lovers? No, I wasn't aware.”

Lovers was the term, all right, but I questioned to myself how serious Morton had been. Not as serious as Gloria, I knew that damn welt because as flaky as she was, she had this thing about being trusting and whole-hearted when she went to bed with anybody, seeing nothing but rosy futures ahead. I remembered that line of Maxine's about the two times Gloria had gone to Edmonton thinking she was going to be married.

“Yeah, lovers,” I said, but still wanted to get in my slight cavil. “He insisted on being careful that they meet only in private, which—after all he's a widower—makes me wonder how serious it was from his side. We can't be sure exactly what kind of game he was playing with her, you know, lots old enough to be her father, if that matters, which it probably doesn't, but she thought the sun shone out of him, and that's what started this whole goddamn thing. In Inuvik, he'd get a room at the Mackenzie or sometimes the Finto or the Inuvik Inn, and they managed it without drawing attention. Also, a couple of times she'd go to where there was some conference that he was at.

“Last Saturday when he was there for some meeting or other, after it was over they met in a room at the Finto and when they woke up pretty early, after a while he started quizzing her about if she used drugs, and if so to cool it because he'd heard in Edmonton from somebody in the know that there was a big drug bust coming up in Inuvik.”

“Shit!” Ted said.

“Yeah, so much for security. But to look at it another way, all he's doing is warning somebody he cared for. He wasn't going out and spreading the word in a way that might have blown the whole thing—”

“You mean even quicker than it was.”

“Well, there's that. But one thing Morton didn't have was names.”

“Thank God for small mercies,”

“Yeah, but here's the part that'll kill you: when he's laying it on real thick about how she's got to watch herself, be careful who she associates with, because this ring is going to be smashed, etcetera, etcetera, she starts to cry.”

There was a silence. Ted didn't need to hear more from me. “Oh, Jesus, no!” he groaned, “She knows who the guys are, or some of them, at least William, and thinks she should warn Morton?”

“Yeah. She didn't know any details, she told me, like where the stuff was coming from or where it was going, but one time when she was at Bonner's place and they thought she was asleep, she heard William telling Bonner that he wanted a bigger cut, and Bonner was to tell Christian that if he didn't get better paydays, to count him out.

“Anyway, knowing what a blow it would be to Morton when he found that William was one of the guys to be picked up, she thought she should tell him. She says she only told him about William, thinking he could maybe get William disconnected in time. But what did happen surprised her. The way she described it is that he went very quiet. They were in bed. He got up and put on a dressing gown and turned the lights on. He thanked her but did not kiss her—‘I had to kiss him,' she said, ‘but he just stood there, not mad, not unkind, just sort of gone somewhere' is the way she put it. He did ask her not to mention this to anyone, but said nothing more—nothing about seeing her again, seeing William, what he was going to do, anything.”

We both had ideas about what happened next. For all Morton's dead calm when he got the bad news from Gloria, maybe he hadn't yet taken it in and even when he did, might somehow have hoped that she had made a mistake. I don't know when it was that he decided to confront William and find out for himself, but that afternoon he called William's place and left a message on the answering machine telling William to come to see him at the Mackenzie Hotel.

“Gloria told me that,” I said. “William had told her. Incidentally, Gloria was fairly good friends with William, but nothing more. She got a little indignant when I asked if she and William ever slept together, said there was no way she'd do that with Morton's son.”

“Maybe she saw herself more as William's stepmother,” Ted said drily.

I laughed. Had to. She wasn't
that
flaky.

“But anyway, that afternoon, last Sunday, she and William had some drinks, at Bonner's place. A lot of drinks. Some time in there apparently William checked his phone messages—his apartment is only a couple of minutes away—and found that his father was looking for him to come to the Mackenzie.

“When I met the two of them at Maxine's around eight they were both walking pretty crooked but it was only later when they went downtown for something to eat and more drinks that William told her about his father's message and that he had to go and see Morton at the Mackenzie.