Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (16 page)

“I'm more than sorry!” William shouted. “Those bastards killed my father!”

“It was only one guy who shot him,” I said.

He realized he'd used the plural, but recovered quickly.

“There's no way one guy could have organized it!”

“That's what we think, too,” I said. Then I hesitated. There were things I could have said about what we suspected, the theories we had. They might do as bait to get him talking, but depending on where he stood in this thing, might do the reverse—scare him off.

So I didn't mention the downed aircraft, Harold Johns, Albert Christian, Benny Batten, Jules Bonner or anyone who could have been named Billy Bob Hicks or Dave Hawkinsville. Instead, I played it completely straight.

“If you can help us in any way, we oughta sit down where we can talk. That's why I came to Fort Norman. When we couldn't find you and knew you'd come this way, I decided we'd better try to catch up and try to persuade you to help.”

I was trying to skate around a little, obviously. But I also was sure that wasn't going to work.

“So how'd you know where to look for me?”

I told him that when he couldn't be found in town, we'd had to look elsewhere.

No Legs obviously couldn't stand the futzing around. “I saw you go, William,” he said. “I was comin' in from my trapline and saw you and Smokey . . . Hey! Where's Smokey, somethin' happen to him?”

William turned to look at him, his expression stricken, but he didn't answer. No Legs looked at him hard, even opened his mouth to press the question, but in the end said nothing more.

“Why did you take off like that?” I asked.

He took a little time answering. When he did, his rancor was gone. That didn't mean he was telling the whole truth or even part of the truth. But it was at the very least a social note.

“I just felt I had to get away by myself for a while. I couldn't do it around home. Too many people would want to talk, to tell me what a wonderful man my father was . . .”

He slowed to a stop, then, “Which he was, I know. But there were things I had to figure out and I wanted to do it on my own.”

At that point I had some figuring to do, too. William had got away from Inuvik without giving the answers the case needed. He'd got away from Fort Norman, possibly for the same reasons. I didn't want to have to chase him any more. That meant we couldn't leave him speeding away now wherever he wanted to go, while we plodded back along the trail admiring Seismo doing his thing. I felt that wherever he had been was important to know, but I also knew that with the distance he could have traveled at snowmobile speed it might be another day or two away by dog team and that being out two days was Edie's limit; she had to be back in school Monday.

I had to make up my mind, and what I decided was that William should not get away from us again. If I had to, I could come out by snowmobile myself or by helicopter and backtrack along his trail. I also wondered what the hell had happened to Smokey, the wonder dog that No Legs had been telling me about. His disappearance just made no sense whatever.

I picked up the radio and said, “Pengelly? Over.”

“Yes, sir. Over.” That sir was something new.

“You've probably heard us talking to William. Over.”

“Yeah, but it woulda been a hell of a lot easier to tape if you'd all gathered around the goddamn microphone. Got you, all right, and the engine on William's snowmobile, but not a hell of a lot else. What's happened to Edie, she been struck dumb? Over.”

I didn't bother answering that one. “I just want to let you know what the plan is. I think the best idea is for me to come back in with William on the snowmobile. Over.”

“Like hell!” William exclaimed. “I'm loaded. I can't take a passenger.”

I spoke to him reasonably. “You got room. That's a big machine. Your best course is to co-operate, help us any way you can.”

I felt like adding that if he'd helped us earlier, we might be getting somewhere instead of out on a frozen river having dumb arguments. But I didn't. I also thought of pointing out that he could be in trouble otherwise, but didn't. “Let's get going.”

I could tell he was torn between doing as I asked, which he didn't want to do, or taking off and chancing the consequences. In the end he got off his snowmobile and stamped around the way a man does after a long snowmobile ride.

I looked at Edie and No Legs.

They nodded. Neither of them spoke.

“See you back at the ranch,” I said.

As I spoke, I moved a few steps and swung myself onto the snowmobile behind William—before he could argue any more. It would be an easier ride, I knew, if I could have held him chummily around the waist in the traditional style of a guy out with his kid or a lover or at any rate someone he liked, but I didn't really feel that was appropriate in the circumstances—so I reached down and clutched as much as I could of the seat cover.

William revved the engine and threw it in gear.

I yelled to Edie, “Tell Pengelly we should be along in an hour or so.”

At the look of them, events moving too rapidly for them to grasp fully without the discussion they no doubt would have on the way back in, I suddenly felt it was time for a little levity.

“And you two behave yourselves, now!”

At least I'd finally made Edie go goggle-eyed.

As we took off I could see them standing there, apparently in silence. In my last sight of them, Seismo was on his feet looking majestic, Edie was picking up the lead line, and No Legs was pointing after the odd couple on the snowmobile. Suddenly it seemed to me they were both laughing like hell.

 

There is a form to any murder investigation. Even in the Arctic, where life is supposed to be more simple, you start out knowing not much except that somebody is dead. Then, unless there happens to have been a witness, you try to determine how the person was done in, and by whom. Except with some poisons, identifying the means of murder usually isn't all that difficult—bullet, knife, axe, hammer or some other form of violence nearly impossible to mistake. When you reach the “by whom” stage in an investigation that is really well-organized, as opposed to some guy flying by the seat of his pants, you start a case book on paper or in- a computer or both.

The official case book on this one, no doubt someone else was keeping. I keep mine in my head, where insights, intuitions, wild guesses, daydreams or merry little breezes of any other nature have never been turned away. Some of these were of little obvious pertinence, such as my sense even now, bouncing along on the back of William's snowmobile, that No Legs and the formidable Edie might just decide not to try getting back tonight. Of course, that had nothing to do with the murder as such, except it had led to putting two people together who even in this small community didn't seem to have noticed one another much before.

I liked No Legs for what so far had been careful insights, and because in the North a man's warm kitchen might tell you more about him than what he'd read or how many legs he had.

Edie, on the other hand, struck me as one of those women who know what they want and when they want it and aren't shy about directing their efforts to that end. At a guess, I certainly wouldn't place her at the truly objectionable end of that scale. I'd known a few of those, having almost offended one once (or was it twice?) by singing my Paul Robeson imitation of “Pull that barge, lift that bale,” while lying there unclothed and ready listening to the detailed instructions on how, and with what, I was to make love.

While thinking these warm thoughts I was jolted back rudely to the real world. A sudden turn almost threw me off the snowmobile. I saw that we'd almost hit the bank at a turn in the river. Obviously William hadn't been paying attention.

“Watch where you're going!” I yelled.

“Fuck you!” he threw over his shoulder.

So I concentrated for a while. Riding the back of a snowmobile behind a reckless, angry, maybe scared and possibly vengeful man quickly joined my list of pleasures to avoid. It was cold. The clear day had slid into an exceedingly frosty twilight. Even with my big mitts, I would sometimes have to hold on with one hand while I flexed some feeling back into the fingers of the other. Then it occurred to me that if I'd had a chance at this kind of ride when I was a kid I would have been yelling, “Faster! Faster!” From there I forced my thoughts back in a warmer direction, just as when long ago I would try to ignore miles of tundra by living in my head.

The fact remained that the sane way with darkness coming on would be for Edie and No Legs to make camp in the shelter of this river bank, let the primus stove warm the tent while it warmed the caribou stew we'd brought along, lay out the bedrolls—with mine as an extra—and then cuddle up. I hoped so, anyway. When two people are especially warm toward one another, as they had so quickly become, it seems a pity to stand on ceremony. William and I must have thundered along for a mile or so while I translated that warming thought into me, a girl I'd known in my youth at Paulatuk, and a nice warm igloo out on the Barrens.

Then there was once when I was jolted again. I was pressed closely against William's back. Couldn't help it. That's all the room there was. And suddenly I had a distinct feeling that he was in the grips of something uncontrollable: his back was heaving the way it might when a man is stifling sobs. It was only for a minute or less, but it shook me, forced my mind back to the main event. Unless I misread the signs completely on our only other meeting, with Gloria at Maxine's, he was one of those unfortunates who couldn't run his own life very well, but probably would have wished to have his father proud of him; could do battle with his father over how he lived his life, but would have given anything to have his father say once, just once, “Good job, son.” Or, “Thanks, son.” But also was just enough of a fumbler that he could have unwittingly played some part in his father's death that would haunt him to his own dying day.

I kept thinking that Bonner should be picked up again if only because, apart from William, he seemed the only one available who might know something about the murder that I didn't. Yet.

The ride seemed interminable, as well as wild. William had the advantage on me in every respect—the handlebars to hang on to, a sight of what lay immediately ahead. When the terrain was rough he could see a bump coming and be ready while each jolt was a total surprise to me and my spine, which rattled up and down like a pogo stick. I tried craning my neck around him to give myself some warning, but he was too bulky. When I did manage to get a brief look at what was coming up, it was never reassuring. The meager daylight was failing. In the growing dusk the headlight beam jerked back and forth, up and down, now dissolving into the darkening sky and now flashing across a stretch of river bank or scrubby trees.

The only break I got was that William avoided the stretch of fairly rough bush that had hidden him for a while on the way out two days before. This time he stayed on the river where he could make better time. I finally just hung on and let my thoughts wander on what I didn't know of Christian, Batten and Johns, the three I'd never seen except on that wall of photos and clippings in Gloria's room.

Christian, oddly enough, looked Mediterranean—Lebanese, Greek, whatever. His hair was very dark and fitted his head like a skullcap, close to his eyebrows on both sides, and going down into a moustache and beard. The whole effect was of a poker face framed in dark hair, wide at the cheekbones but narrowing at both the forehead and the chin. Batten was a different bird altogether. He had thick grey or white hair in sharp contrast to black (or at least dark) eyebrows, a round face, a smallish mouth that in the photo was open, as if he'd been talking, showing stained and crooked lower teeth. His eyes were unrevealing but his whole expression was not an attractive one; not mean, just closed.

The photo of Johns had shown a handsome man, dark brown hair falling over his forehead on the right side, brushed over his ear on the left. Thin face, long nose, wide mouth, deep set eyes, and unseen but at least as important, a background that—despite the single outburst of bad behavior that had lost him his job in the east and brought him out here—was geared to traditional values.

They were either down and alive, down and dead, or down with some alive and some dead. In the North that image of a crumpled plane in the bush, or out on the Barrens, or on some lake ice, was familiar. Yet relatively few crackups were fatal. Experienced bush pilots were usually so good, lakes, rivers and open spaces so plentiful, that one would never get into trouble without planning immediately what he was going to do about it.

If they had landed safely, kept radio silence and all three were in it together, the money would be enough reason for not using their radio. Until they were really desperate, and even then, rescue would be a dirty word if it meant both they and the money wound up in custody. But how could they manage to avoid that, without outside help? And who could be the outside help? Did that come back to William?

But maybe the three of them weren't partners. If Johns was as dependable as my old friend Thomas Nuniviak said, he would want to be operating his crash finder. The others wouldn't, meaning Batten and Christian against Johns, maybe in a real battle of wills, strength, even brutality.

I thought all that, bouncing along at high speed with William on the snowmobile. That one show of emotion was not repeated that I could notice. I wondered if he just didn't give a damn what happened next as long as he didn't have to face squarely what had happened in the recent past.

When we reached the first lights of the town's outskirts I yelled, “Stop at the detachment office where we can talk.”

Instead, we zipped past the detachment and on through the nearly empty streets until he braked by a small house. When he turned off the machine, the silence was deafening. For a moment we just sat there. Then a door opened and in the light I could see the tall figure of Paul Pennycook, who'd visited me at Bear Lodge on Thursday night with the advice that William's fuckin' business was his own fuckin' business, which I now was doubting more than ever.

Abruptly, all my other emotions dissolved into anger. I climbed off stiffly, as close to making an unwarranted—at least by the real evidence so far—arrest as I'd ever been. If I'd ever had much sympathy for William it was gone now. I faced him. Pennycook watched us from the door.

“You can walk the rest of the way,” William said flatly.

I didn't give my next move any thought, just decided that I wasn't getting anywhere being polite. Maybe leveling with him would produce an effect that nothing else had.

“What I want to know first,” I said, “is if you know you're a suspect in some drug dealing in Inuvik.”

Of course he knew, if Gloria was right. She was sure his father had challenged him on that point. I believed her.

He looked uncomfortable but he still said, “Like hell I am!” “I also want to know if you and your father came to blows that night before he collapsed, and what the fight was about, and where he got the bruise on his head that he had when he was brought into the hospital and Doc Zimmer made a note of.”

He stared at me with a flash in his eyes of what I took to be deep apprehension. We were standing two feet apart, by the snowmobile. I decided to keep right on.

“I also want to know if you have any idea where Albert Christian and Ben Batten were going along with half a million dollars of drug money when Harold Johns flew them out of there in that Cessna that disappeared.”

He glowered. “That's all you want to know, eh?”

“For now.”

“Fuck off,” he said.

But I had the plug out. I didn't mind Pennycook hearing. Might help. Somebody had to convince William that stonewalling was getting him nowhere. The convincer might as well be me.

I yelled, “You've been treated like a guy who has just lost his father and should be given some breaks! You wouldn't know a goddamn break if it farted in your face.”

We were now practically nose to nose, or would have been if my nose had been about six inches higher.

“So I'm telling you that if you don't at least try to help us work on who the hell killed your father, you are going to have to get a goddamn court order even to go to his funeral, and that's a promise.”

For a few seconds I thought he was going to swing at me, but he didn't. It was strange to see in such a powerful-looking man, but his face suddenly crumpled and he fumbled, “Look, I'm upset, I feel terrible about all this, I'll try to talk to you in the morning.”

He turned and took a couple of steps toward the open door where Pennycook still was listening, but keeping out of it.

I called to his retreating back, thinking that when he seemed to be on the run one more shot was in order, “Okay, that'll give me a chance to get on the radio and find out whether we've managed to trace Billy Bob Hicks.”

He wheeled slowly and carefully, now really looking like a man who was trying to avoid acknowledging a telling blow.

“Who the hell is Billy Bob Hicks?” he asked, without conviction. He was bushed, confused, beset. I almost felt sorry for him.

“You know who he is and what he's like. You know he's a friend of Christian and Batten.”

“But what's he got to do with me?”

“You tell me.”

“So you don't know nothin'!”

I hesitated. I thought I'd given him enough. He would have some drinks and do some talking, maybe brave talking, maybe sad talking, but I thought maybe that all through his long evening and night, he might have to pause now and again and wonder if he was playing his cards right.

Pennycook had stayed back through this but now he walked a few steps toward us with what almost seemed like a shy smile. “Hey,” he said to me, “you were just on TV.” He turned to William. “The guy might help, William,” he said. “Jesus, he's supposed to be awful good, according to the piece on the CBC.”

Imagine that, the CBC making me credible to even one guy in Fort Norman.

William just turned away. I let him go. As I walked slowly back to the detachment, I racked my CBC-endorsed brains for the key to unlock what he knew but wasn't saying.

Maybe the thought of a key abruptly made me wonder again about his dog Smokey. If No Legs hadn't made such a point about the way William felt about that dog, I might not have thought of him again. Which, as it turned out, would have been a mistake.

By then it was deep dusk. Soon it would be pitch dark. I figured that if and when Edie and No Legs came in, she would head for the detachment. But given the relative speed of dogs versus snowmobile, that couldn't be for two or three hours. They had powerful flashlights. If they had kept going, William's trail was fresh enough that even a mediocre lead dog would have a chance. If that big Seismo was as good as he seemed, they'd get here sooner or later.

It turned out to be sooner rather than later. Around 7:30 I could see her coming, driving her team hard. I went to the detachment door just in time to see her go past. No Legs, riding the komatik, waved. She didn't even look my way, let alone stop to tell me thanks for an excellent day in the open air or any other appreciative things that might have occurred to her. In fact, she didn't even slow down. In a few minutes she drove past again, going in the other direction, toward her own place. Her outfit no longer included No Legs.

“Well, well,” I deduced shrewdly (the CBC would be proud of me), “somehow I have offended Edie.”