Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (18 page)

I waited. She was crying. It sounded like the edge of hysteria but there was sort of a happiness to her, too. I thought maybe she'd gone off her head, at least temporarily. She sure sounded like it.

“I talked to him,” she said. “He didn't look the same.”

I thought, bullets will do that to a guy, but didn't say it. I just waited, feeling I was in the presence of some kind of madness, whether drug-induced or alcohol-induced—who could say.

Now she was wailing. “I said to him, ‘What have they done to your nice face, painting you all up like this?'”

I've known people, my own people, who talked to their dead, or thought they did; that much I could cling to, even if with great difficulty. I wasn't exactly playing along, but I was caught up in it.

“What did he say?” I asked.

“Just like him. He said it was none of my business.” I could hear her sobbing, the crazy girl.

I talked to her for a while. It didn't have much effect. I told her to phone Maxine right away, it was important. When I hung up I just stood there a while. Finally I couldn't help smiling, with a catch in my throat, when the thought occurred to me that anyway, it was nice that Gloria thought Morton had answered her question. Always the gentleman.

Then I phoned Maxine to tell her to call Gloria. The line was busy. I phoned an old school friend I knew who was an operator for NorthwesTel in Inuvik and asked could she tell me if the call on Maxine's line was long distance from Yellowknife.

She came back on in seconds. “Yeah, it is, Matteesie,” she said. “How've you been, anyway?”

I said I'd been great, thanks, really great. “See you soon.”

After I'd hung up I phoned the RCMP in Yellowknife and got the home number of the sergeant who'd done the checking for me on Billy Bob Hicks/Dave Hawkinsville. I could hear a hockey game in the background. I told him I needed a light aircraft or helicopter for tomorrow to follow a lead I had and did he have anything there that could fly up and help out, helicopter preferred.

He said everything was tied up in air rescue right now, no sign of the goddamn Cessna, probably never find it now, especially if it had somehow got west of the Mackenzie into the mountains, where the grid search would go tomorrow. But anyway . . .

“What've you got in mind?” he asked.

I just told him I had a hunch on the Morton Cavendish murder, knowing those would be the magic words around Yellowknife right now. I said I needed something that would maybe have to land and take off a time or two, depending.

He didn't ask any more, which is one reason why we'd been friends ever since I was still a special and he was a young constable based in Tuktoyaktuk nearly twenty years ago.

“I can authorize a light charter if you can find what you want around there or Norman Wells,” he said. “You get them to phone me about billing,” and then added hastily, “in the morning,” and explained that with, “I'm watching the hockey game.”

I didn't know every outfit that flew around there so I looked in the Yellow Pages. There were plenty of display ads for companies large and small with addresses all the way from Edmonton to Tuk. I picked one that read, “Single-Engine Aircraft, Cessna, Beaver, Otter. Wheels, Skis, Floats.” The company name, Pine Tree, was unfamiliar but had a Fort Norman number. The office was closed, the answering machine informed me, but gave an after-hours number.

Ringing that, I heard the same hockey game in the background as a male voice with a slight accent said, “Stothers here.”

Then I knew who he was, Ian Stothers, English, a household name in these parts. Had walked away from a few crashes himself. I'd never met him but knew he'd been a pilot in at least a couple of wars, I think the 1948 one in Israel and then in Korea, so he'd be pretty well on in years.

I thought I'd match his crisp delivery, just to see how it rolled off the tongue. “Matthew Kitologitak here,” I said. “I'm looking for a charter in the morning.”

“You're the Inuit cop, of course. What kind of an aircraft?”

“Something ski-equipped and light, a Beaver would do fine.”

“What for and how long?”

I told him I'd need it for at least a few hours, maybe a few days, couldn't be sure of the details right now.

“Cash or Visa?” he asked.

“The Mounties in Yellowknife will authorize it,” I said, and told him my name and who to call about billing. “Call him in the morning,” I specified hastily.

“Morning suits me. I'm busy watching the hockey game. Wasn't even intending to answer the phone. What time you want to take off?”

“Daylight.” I'd have to be able to see William's trail. “I also have to ask that you don't mention anything about this, especially tonight.”

“Mum's the word,” he said. “Don't know who the hell I'd see tonight, anyway. They're all home watching the hockey game.”

I wondered who was playing but didn't ask. When dealing with the English it's important not to sound like an ignoramus. Didn't want to give Inuit a bad name.

“Who's the pilot going to be?” I asked.

“Me,” he said. “That okay?”

“It'll be a pleasure.” I hoped.

I hung up, thought a minute, then wrote a note to Pengelly and told him what I had in mind and who was flying me, in case he came in before I did in the morning. I asked him to keep it private. On this trip I didn't want surprise visitors.

I didn't have much packing to do. Most of it had been done for the trip with Edie and No Legs. I'd pick it all up in the police van in the morning. Nicky could run me out to the air strip. I tapped on Nicky's open door. He was watching “Dallas.”

“Yeah!” he said, swinging his feet to the floor. “Hey, inspector, come in.”

He puffed on his pipe and kept one eye on the set while I told him I was going out in the morning on a charter, didn't know for sure how long. Had my own clothing, snowshoes, bedroll, match container and toilet paper but from him I'd need the radio, Thermoses, tea, a kettle, primus stove, fuel, rifle, ammunition, tent. I paused there, figuring. “And food for . . . better make it, ah, food for four days . . .”

“Four days!” Nicky said, laughing. “Where the hell you goin', inspector, Calgary?”

I was on my way out of his room when there was a commercial break. The screen showed a 747 or some other giant airplane filling up at an Esso gas pump. He jumped up convulsively, light dawning, and called after me, “Hey, inspector!”

I took a few steps back into his room. “Yeah?”

“Gasoline! The commercial reminded me! You know the message early in the week about if anybody gets some gas stolen on them, they're to let us know right away?”

I felt a rush of adrenaline.

“Did the corporal ever tell you his story about the Icelander, ah, Oscar Frederickson, beatin' the hell out of his lady friend wit' this guitar, lives out in a shack other side of Bear Rock near the winter road? Well, he was in a little while ago, on foot. Mad as hell. Was supposed to come in tonight and have a few drinks and watch the hockey game, they haven' got TV out there, and he and Delphine got on the snowmobile and went about a hunnerd yards and it quit. Outta gas, although he knew he'd filled it day before yesterday, last time he used it. So they walk back to get a coupla gas cans he has in a shed behind his place and they're gone, too. Jeez, was he mad. Says if he ever catches the sonofabitch he'll kill him.”

 

Oscar Frederickson was six feet two or three, with the kind of hair that from boyhood on is so fair as to be almost white. In contrast, his cheeks looked like shiny red apples, a natural fair-skinned ruddiness with an assist, I guessed, from rye whisky. He was waving a glass of that right now. I figured him at around a hard-living fifty. His belly hung over thick woolen pants held up by suspenders of the kind that firemen and police used to wear, and some still do.

Blustering was his style. When I wondered aloud if the guy who liberated his fuel supply could have sneaked up to the house in daylight, Oscar fired back at me as if such a stupid idea was beneath contempt. “Y'nuts or somethin'? No guy is gonna come t'my house in broad daylight knowin' that when he bends over to suck on the hose and get the siphon gain' the next thing he's gonna get is a charge of number six shot up the ass.”

That greatly amused his Delphine.

“New kinda hemorrhoid operation, eh, Oscar?” she said, smiling broadly for only an instant before she remembered to hide her mouth. The gesture was almost graceful, raising one hand so that the forefinger touched her upper lip lightly and the other fingers hid her ruined teeth. Black hair hung stringily down her back. When I looked at her a sense of sorrow swept through me. I thought she was not old enough to be so used up. It happens more to Natives than to whites.

We were in their cabin just off the winter road to Norman Wells. Nicky hadn't known for sure where Oscar had been headed to watch the hockey game when he stopped in to report the gasoline theft, but in Fort Norman two or three phone calls usually will locate someone unless they would prefer not to be located.

In minutes I was parking the police van at a house brightly painted red and white, one of an identical dozen or so laid out in the flats on either side of where the street dipped downhill toward the river bank. I knew such houses, had lived in them, played cards in them, argued drunk and sober in them. They and brightly painted others up and down the river and along the Arctic coast came north in sections by barge or on the winter roads, each to be assembled on pilings that had been hammered down to solid permafrost. Not only the colors, shape and size were the same, but so was fuel supply; each had a 200-gallon oil tank on one outside wall. Igloos can be individual. So can teepees, riverbank shacks, hovels, lean-tos. But not buildings that a government provides. When I was walking to the door none of this was going through my head. It was just there in the marrow of my bones.

The hockey game was just over, as was a bottle of rye. I asked Oscar to come and show me the scene of the crime.

“Hell, we can tell you what there is to know right here,” Oscar argued, at first. “Don't have to go home to do that.”

I said it would help me to see for myself, maybe get an idea of the place and the bush around it, in case there was a place the thief could have hidden while he watched the house until he figured it was safe to come in and steal the gas.

It was only when I said I'd drive them home right now in the police van, save them the walk, that Oscar got up, drained his drink, and laughed, “Let's go.”

He came from Manitoba, he told me while we drove out of town on what led to the winter road. “Delphine here comes from there, too, but farther north, where the government flooded them out.”

“How do you mean?” I asked.

“Power development,” she said, and seemed about to tell me which one, there's hardly a Native band in the north of the provinces as well as in the Northwest Territories that hasn't had to fight progress and sometimes lose, except that Oscar cut her off. Icelanders I've met are often blunt, direct. He was just plain objectionable. He wouldn't live in this god-forsaken place at all, he interrupted Delphine, except that his wife, who lived in Winnipeg now, would never think of looking for him here.

“She come in the front, I go out the back,” Delphine said, looking serious. “That for sure.”

Apart from his innate boorishness, Oscar, when addressing me, spoke very loudly, slowly and clearly; a non-nostalgic reminder of my childhood when seismic crews and summer groups of artifact-hunting archeologists and some crew members or passengers on the supply ships usually seemed to figure that if they spoke loudly enough we Natives would understand.

There was no more than a path into their place so I had to park on the road, presumably not far from where Pengelly had been the time he came out to deal with his noted case of the near-lethal guitar.

With Oscar talking and laughing loudly at his own jokes (“You know what we call siphon hoses where I come from? Indian credit cards, haw haw!”) we walked maybe two hundred yards into the bush, lighting the way with two flashlights. The snowmobile stood where it had stalled after using the few drops of gas the siphon couldn't reach.

Inside, the log shack was one well-cared-for room. Blankets and patchwork quilts were laid neatly on a double mattress and springs set on peeled poplar logs in one corner. There were two old overstuffed chairs, three or four wooden ones, a table covered with red-and-white oilcloth, a battery radio. Delphine lighted two kerosene lamps and started a fire to heat water for tea. Oscar came outside with me while I shone around with my flashlight.

I couldn't see much except the imprint where the snowmobile had been parked, halfway inside the woodshed. I checked the sight line. It could have been seen from the road, meaning the intruder would have recognized this as a place where snowmobile fuel almost certainly would be available. Right beside it, Oscar said, had been the two red five-gallon gas containers, one full and one empty.

“The bastard must've come in last night,” he said, repeating himself for the third or fourth time. “I wasn't out here yesterday. Delphine was, to get wood, and she noticed the gas cans weren't here but didn't mention it, says she just figured I'd moved them somewhere else, the dumb prick. So the way I figure, whoever did it siphoned all the gas out of the snowmobile into the gas can that was empty and then took both it and the full one.”

“You seen anybody around lately that you didn't know?” I asked.

“Hell, no. I see anybody I don't know I ask their name.”

Then a thought suddenly hit him. “The cans have my name on them in black paint. You should be hunting around in town, dammit. That's probably where the guy who took the gas went from here, right?”

“Hard to say,” I said.

“Where the hell else could he be unless he came from the bush and went back into it? He'd be in town, and red gas cans with my name on them can't be that easy to hide unless he ditched them somewhere in the snow.”

I decided it wouldn't be fair, even to Oscar, not to let him know why we were taking the trouble.

“He might have been someone we're looking for,” I said. “You heard about the guy that killed Morton Cavendish at Norman Wells. He got away on a snowmobile that had no extra gas containers.”

Oscar's mouth fell open as he got the drift.

“He might have had gas stashed somewhere on the winter road and couldn't find it, or did find it and holed up for a couple of days, then got lost and used up too much gas, and knew if he wanted to get away from here, wherever he was headed, he needed a lot more gas. If it was that guy, he would have been desperate enough to take a chance on stealing some. He had a gun, too, remember. A Colt .45. And knew how to use it.”

On Oscar's face as it showed dimly in my flashlight beam, a dramatic change of expression was taking place, from know-it-allness to something I really couldn't read. “Jesus,” he said.

I drove back into town. So, this was something. But if it was the first sign of the man who had shot Morton Cavendish, there was still all the bush and tundra to think about in trying to figure out where he'd go from here. From now on I could be looking for two snowmobile tracks, William's and one other.

At noon the next day, Sunday, I was sitting in the passenger seat of a clean trim Beaver flying south along the Big Smith River. Ian Stothers in the pilot seat to my left was wearing, astonishingly enough, a shirt and tie under a couple of sweaters. I'd liked him immediately, one of those Englishmen whose sharp edges had been rubbed off and was just easy to be with. He had thin longish hair to his collar and a straggly growth of facial hair that started at his cheekbones, flowed easily into his moustache, and seemed untrimmed without being untidy. He wore horn-rimmed spectacles, which he took off occasionally, letting them dangle around his neck on a loose leather thong that looked like a retired lace from an old workboot.

Even more telling, from when we met in the frosty dawn of ten a.m. and minus forty-two he never once said old chap, or old boy, or right-o. Certainly he'd never make it socially among the English transplants I'd observed in Victoria, B.C. back in the 1970s when I'd been part of security on a Royal Tour.

When we were moving the engine-warming heat-pot and pulling off the heavy canvas cover that kept the heat in where it would do the most good, I even kidded him a little. “I thought the only pilots who wore shirts and ties were flying 747s,” I said.

“A nasty habit, I admit” he grinned.

Airborne with the heater going full blast, he in his sweaters and I in my old goose-down vest with Maxine's red nail polish dotted here and there to stop the down from escaping through holes made by pipe ashes, back when I used to smoke more, we were fairly comfortable.

Our parkas were stashed in the back on top of my supplies and his standard emergency gear, including some extra fuel.

At first we flew at around 500 feet. No more than ten or twelve minutes from the airport we'd picked up the heavy double north-south trail of William's snowmobile and Edie's dogteam, easily followed from this altitude. The Beaver could cover in that short a time what had taken the dogteam a couple of hours. In another few minutes I pointed down to where we had stopped the dogteam and held our little nature-study session over the wolverine tracks before we saw William approaching. Stothers eased down a couple of hundred feet to circle the place before following again what was now the less distinct single trail left by William's snowmobile.

“I flew down here, y'know, the first day we could fly after the murder,” Stothers called over the engine noise. “I thought of this river right away as one place Harold Johns might try to make if he was in trouble. He'd know it. I also swung farther east to Lac Ste. Thérèse and flew south to Blackwater Lake, and Keller, all places you could put down a Cessna 180 on.” Those were just names on a map, to me. “But of course it isn't that Cessna you're thinking about so much . . .”

He let that trail off, but looked sideways at me. “Unless maybe young Cavendish was looking for the Cessna, too.”

“That's my guess,” I said. Maybe I had a valuable assistant, here. “What about landing places farther right, toward the Mackenzie?”

“But we're still following the snowmobile track, I take it?”

“Yes. I was just wondering.”

“I think Johns was too good to try over there if he was in trouble. If he wasn't, and knew where he was heading, maybe. I've met him a few times, y'know. He picked up the gen on bush flying a lot faster than some new ones do. The mountains along this side of the river are no picnic. There's one peak not a lot west of us right now that's better than 4700 feet. Not the way anybody with any sense would go, looking for an emergency landing.”

I looked off to my right toward the rougher country of the Franklin Mountains, and wondered.

William's snowmobile track ran steadily along the narrowing river. There was really very little to see except the track, and a few animals from time to time. Once Stothers banked and pointed down at a wolverine running across the open tundra. Neither of us had to say the word. There's no mistaking that distinctive humping bear-like gait.

Soon we came upon a herd of caribou, maybe 200 animals, crossing the river diagonally. On the other side of where they were crossing we could see no resumption of William's track

“We'll circle and see if we can pick it up,” Stothers called, and again dropped the Beaver to 200 feet. It was while the Beaver went wide of the caribou herd that I could see the wolves. They'll often shadow a herd like this. If you ever wondered where the phrase wolf-pack came from during naval warfare in World War Two, it would help to fly over a herd of caribou attended by wolves. Stothers pointed down at them, his jaw set in a way quite unlike his normal benign expression.

The wolves, eight or nine of them, perhaps one family or two, were in a mile-wide arc out of sight of the moving herd, just as submarines shadowed convoys in the Atlantic. If the herd changed direction and moved toward the wolves on one side, they would fall back, outwards, to adjust, staying approximately the same distance away, on all sides. They wouldn't attack the herd itself but were alert for signs of stragglers. When a sick or injured or unwary animal fell behind or wandered off, they'd suddenly move in for a kill, all the wolves on that side racing in to attack simultaneously. From the air as we made a complete circle, the scene below looked like a gigantic target with the loosely-bunched herd in the middle the bull's-eye.

Stothers pointed down again at a single wolf loping along, keeping station. Then Stothers lined up the plane with the course of the wolf and suddenly we went into the Beaver version of a screaming dive to come at the wolf from behind. We were hardly twenty feet above the snow when the Beaver rocked over to the right as Stothers tried to hit the wolf with the right-hand ski. From my window a few scant feet above I could see the wolf plainly as it flattened itself the way a dog will do to avoid a blow, head turned sideways, teeth barerd, as the ski skimmed by.

“Missed,” Stothers said.

My breath was coming harder than I generally allow to happen. “Not by far.”