Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (15 page)

“Ah, well, what the hell,” Pengelly said. “We just came here in the fall a year and a half ago, you know. So last spring I'm pretty green and I get a call, maybe six in the morning, that there's a body in a snowbank down by the old fort. The guys who found it had been out drinking, that seems to happen a lot when the days get longer and there's a lot of steam to let off, and when I get to the alleged body what I find is that it isn't really a body at all, she's not dead, just
damn near
dead, had hell beaten out of her with this guitar.”

I sensed that I was in the middle of events beyond my control but I had to say it. “This guitar?”

“Yeah! This guitar! Actually, the guitar was very important in court later. What happened was there's this guy called Oscar Frederickson, an Icelander from Manitoba, lives with this Metis woman out on the other side of Bear Hock, near the winter road to Norman Wells, and he got a cheque for something, yeah, I remember, got an income tax refund from when he worked on the pipeline, and of course he and his lady—”

“That! God! Damn! Word!” exclaimed Bertha, enunciating each word separately, for emphasis. “Lady! Used to mean something. These days it means bugger-all! Except maybe somebody who gets laid a lot, if you ask me.”

“Finished?” Pengelly asked, after a pause.

Bertha nodded decisively.

“Okay,” said Pengelly. “Oscar and his
woman
come to town with the cheque and start boozing and spending the money, and one of the things he buys is this guitar. That's what sets off the riot. Some of the evidence in court was that they're in this dining room at Bear Lodge and she throws a bowl of barley soup at him and some of it got
into
this guitar, which really pisses him off, and she's yelling that he couldn't even playa goddamn ukulele, let alone a guitar and him yelling that he can learn, can't he, if every goddamn sideburn in the world can play guitar, he can learn it, and so on, and the upshot is when they get out of there and start lurching around the streets looking for the way home he beats the shit out of her with the guitar. Smashes this new guitar all to hell. Trouble is, he thinks he's killed her. On the way home he meets a guy, in fact, and tells the guy he killed his la . . . pardon me, woman. The guy he tells is the second one who phones me about it, two calls in about five minutes, and when we all meet at the so-called body, which by then has come to and is really hurting, the poor woman.”

“If this was any other story, it already would be too long,” Bertha said.

He sipped his rum and said, “So I get her to the nurse and she's got broken ribs and maybe concussion and for sure a broken nose, she's all beat to hell, so I've got to go out and bring Oscar in.

“So I go out there, it's April but the winter road is still in use, and I get as close as I can in the police van. I'm beginning to think a little about he's probably still drunk, maybe still drinking. Oh, yeah, it had snowed overnight, too. So I walk up his path in this fresh snow and I can see smoke coming from his chimney, so I know he's there. I mean, I think he's there. I go and knock on the door, and when nobody answers I open it. There's nobody there but there's coffee on, not even dripped through yet, which I take as being a clue that he hasn't been gone long. Then I notice that from his window I can see my van. So he'd seen me coming. Then I notice that in his gun rack there is no gun. Then I notice that the back door is slightly open. I have a look and can see in the fresh snow there's this one set of footprints, heading for the bush.”

My drink was empty and I didn't even notice. “So you came back and got help,” I said.

“That's what he should have done,” Bertha said. “The stupe.”

“I didn't even think about it, right away. I start following his tracks. When I get out of his clearing, there go the tracks off into the bush. That's when I begin to go slower and even stop and look hard at every bush or tree near where his tracks went, and suddenly I thought, shit, if he doubled back he might be fifty feet from me and I don't know it. I know he's out there, he's violent, he's got a gun and he thinks he's killed this, urn, woman he's been living with. So what's he got to lose by shooting me?

“I can tell you, I was damn scared. Every step I took it got worse. I thought I was going to, well, you know, mess my pants, I was so scared. I'm even thinking how loud a bang a gun would make on a quiet morning like that. So you know what I done?”

“Did,” Bertha said.

“What I done was yell as loud as I could, ‘Oscar!'”

“And from behind a tree not a hundred feet away comes this yell back! ‘What?' he yells.”

“‘She isn't dead! She's gonna be all right!'”

“There was a pause and then he called, half crying, I could tell, ‘You're not shittin' me?' “

“So I said I wasn't, and he came out and got into the van with me and came back to the detachment to get charged and then I drove him and his, urn, you know, home.”

Well, so much for that. It surfaced in my mind once in a while, helping me pay attention to what lay ahead. We came out of the bush and started along the ice of a smallish river. “This here's the Big Smith,” No Legs called. “Runs into the Bear back apiece.”

On river ice, out of the bush, the snowmobile track was easier to follow. In most places it would show plainly, fresh snow over the original indentation. By that time I was mostly riding. I wasn't quite in shape to snowshoe even as little as I had, and still have much in reserve. I was saving myself for the playoffs, if any. Just as I was thinking it would be a good idea to run until nightfall, we came around a bend and suddenly No Legs put up a hand, the stop sign. I scanned the horizon ahead for a reason and saw nothing. Edie pulled her dogs to a stop and they flopped down in their tracks, tongues lolling out, all except big Seismo. He sat imperiously on his haunches and stared intently ahead along the river course, ignoring the rest of us. Meanwhile No Legs was quickly maneuvering his sled off the komatik.

Then I saw why. We had just crossed very fresh animal tracks, couldn't have missed the animal by more than minutes, and if my first impression was correct it was an animal that some people who've spent a lifetime in the North have never seen. No Legs poled himself swiftly back to check even though he probably was sure anyway, because when we were all closing in on the tracks and Edie said confidently, “Wolf,” No Legs and I said together, “Wolverine.”

Edie obviously wasn't used to being contradicted, especially by two guys at once. “Sure looks like wolf to me.”

“Five toes,” No Legs said.

“Oh,” said Edie in a smaller voice, looking closer.

So the three of us and a whole dog team are out in nowhereland looking for a guy who might know something about a murder that he hasn't told anybody yet, and we're doing nature study.

“It's easy to make the mistake,” No Legs said gently.

“Not all that easy,” I said, relishing the task. I liked Edie, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy setting the Edies of the world straight once in a while. “All you do is keep in mind that the whole dog family, poodles, spaniels, wolves, faxes, coyotes and so on, has four toes. Everything in the weasel family has five—mink, marten, fisher, wolverine, ermine.”

No Legs said, still gently but with a little grin, “So Edie, when some oil guy in Calgary gives you what he says is an ermine, count its toes before . . .”

He let it die there, holding back from finishing the sentence in what some guys might have thought was a good enough and inoffensive crack . . . “before you jump into bed.” Maybe he was shy or maybe just shy with Edie, or maybe he instinctively knew, or at least believed, which is not the same thing, that even if a thing did have five toes, going to bed for an ermine was not Edie's style.

Which is how it happened that we were all standing there in the thin daylight right out of it, reaching for Thermoses and the food box when far ahead, unmistakably, exactly in the direction where Seismo had been staring for the full two or three minutes since we stopped, all of us could hear the merest whisper of a distant snowmobile.

In the circumstances I don't take too much credit for it, but I did come to, first.

“The radio!” I said.

Watching the snowmobile grow rapidly from a tiny dot to a larger dot, nothing between it and us but the snow-covered river ice, we raised Norman Wells.

“Whaddaya got, Matteesie?” Pengelly's voice crackled. “Over.”

“Snowmobile in sight, coming our way,” I said. “We're close to twenty miles south of the Bear, in the open, on the, ah, Big Smith River. Whoever it is will be here in less than a minute. Over.”

“It's William all right,” No Legs called.

“Better leave the radio on,” said Pengelly. “Over.”

I thought it was William, too, but couldn't be sure yet; there could be other burly guys out on snowmobiles, even here. Whoever it was maybe had seen us for as long as we'd seen him, but probably not; he was looking through goggles and a windscreen and we weren't. There was a point at which, I thought at the time, he did see us. The machine suddenly swerved, the kind of startled movement that might be natural in a lone man cruising along lost in thought when unexpectedly, even shockingly, he finds he has company. At first he steered at slightly less than his former speed on a course that would have taken him around us. All the while he was staring at us intently. His machine was at least a hundred yards past us when he slowed and stopped, stood up on the footrests, and pulled his goggles down to have a look with the naked eye.

With the helmet and face-mask I still couldn't be absolutely sure but No Legs was in no doubt.

“Hey, William!” he yelled, poling his sled a few yards into the clear and then hoisting himself up as high as he could to wave. William couldn't have heard the voice over his motor and a sudden chorus of howls and yodels from Edie's dogs, but he'd know there was only one man around who poled himself along on a light sled. He came in slowly. His snowmobile was a big old Arctic Cat. Behind him on a small sled were lashed two extra gas cans, bed roll, tent, food box. Enough for quite a long trip. No gun unless it was a take-down model stowed under the seat.

The snowmobile engine was just ticking over as he stopped a few yards away. I'm not sure that he'd ever seen Edie before, probably not, but something about the situation stopped her from saying anything. There was no, “Hi! I'm Edie! You must be William!” manner to her at all. His glance skimmed her and went right by the smiling face of No Legs as well, although I could see how excited No Legs was. This was his old friend and he wasn't going to be denied. Not yet.

“Cecilia told me to bring you back!” he called, and I had another thought: maybe there was something between William and Cecilia. Which would be natural, growing up friends in the same town, about the same age. Or might have been before he took to what I guess we have to call, in the circumstances, the bright lights of Inuvik. Also, it occurred to me that whatever I was after, and however Edie had been drawn more or less neutrally into what was just a different kind of weekend to her, No Legs probably saw William's actions as understandable enough in a bereaved son, as so many others in Fort Norman did. But William didn't reply in kind.

He was staring at me, obviously badly upset, even though he didn't have the kind of appearance that usually gave such emotions away. Physically, now that he was out of the lighter clothing he'd worn when I met him first, he looked like a biker who had challenged me once in Edmonton, powerful sloping shoulders, hair that was parted in the middle (he'd taken off his helmet) and pushed behind his ears to fall from there to his shoulders. A small amulet or badge hung on a chain around his size seventeen or eighteen neck and he hadn't shaved for a few days, or was growing a beard to go with his droopy moustache.

But he only looked tough until you looked closer. Then his face was drawn, sleepless-looking, and I thought there was a hint of fear in his eyes.

“Where the hell you guys goin'?” he asked.

“Looking for you,” I said.

“For what?”

Edie and No Legs had become the audience, non-participating. No Legs' enthusiastic welcome had still not been acknowledged. William's question was blunt. I answered as bluntly.

“After your father collapsed there were questions that maybe only you could answer, but you weren't around. After he was killed, there were a lot more questions. Everybody thought you might have some of the answers, but you still weren't around.”

Suddenly the radio crackled. No voice, just a crackle. William jumped and stared, now looking both scared and confused.

“That radio open?”

“Yes,” I said. “We called Fort Norman detachment when we saw you coming.”

“How'd you know it was me?”

“We didn't.”

“Better shut it off,” he said.

I shook my head. “We might need to raise them again.”

He still sat on his machine, motor idling, as if not certain what to do or say next.

I gave him a chance. “I was on the aircraft when your father was shot.”

His voice was abruptly passionate and angry. “I know! Hell of a cop you are! Why didn't you stop it?”

I didn't answer that directly. He knew as well as I did that I couldn't stop it, he couldn't have, nobody could have.

I said, “One of the things we thought you might be able to help with is, who'd want to have him killed. Is there anybody you know who might have done it just the way it was done, kill a man, get away by snowmobile, and disappear?”

There was a slight hesitation, then unconvincing bluster.

“How the hell would I know? If I'd known, maybe I could have stopped it from happening at all.”

While William and I talked, No Legs looked from one to the other as if our tone puzzled him. Finally he broke his silence. “I'm really sorry, William. You know what your father was to me.”