Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (23 page)

“We're not far from that,” Pengelly said.

“How far?” I asked.

“A mile or so. Easy enough on snowshoes, if they had any. Or, of course, William was out here with the snowmobile. Maybe he took them: they're his buddies.”

That's what Johns had said. Now I thought seriously about the tractor road. There's a precious few of them through the North, running for a few months in winter where no road vehicles at all can go through the rest of the year. When ice in rivers and lakes is solid enough to take the weight and the pounding, some years sooner and others later, but normally early January, the big rigs eat up the hard miles through Arctic days and nights, plunging through into icy lakes from time to time when they try to stretch the season too far into spring.

Their crews drink hard, sleep little, live lives of high recklessness and get paid accordingly. But one thing those drivers would not do is drive past a couple of men on foot in this winter wonderland and not stop. If anyone in that fix had some kind of a plausible story, such as they'd been on the plane that had been lost last week, the big rig crews would make room somehow. Anyway, going south they're usually empty. And one thing we could count on was that if Christian and Batten saw a cloud of snow approaching that meant a tractor train was heading north, they'd stay well out of sight. North would be people waiting.

“How's your radio?” I asked Stothers.

He smiled. “Oh, fine, thanks, Matteesie. Nice of you to ask”

He'd spent a couple of hours with Pengelly, of course. Learning jokey bad habits.

I said to Pengelly, “Will you call Inuvik and ask them to put out an alert on Christian and Batten for Blackwater Lake, Wrigley, Simpson, Providence, all the way along the road. Somebody could check what rigs have been through going south, and did they pick anybody up. Mention they're probably armed and dangerous.”

Pengelly looked at me. “You got charges in mind?”

“Conspiracy to commit murder.”

“You think Ted Huff will buy that?”

“Yes, if you tell him I've got enough supporting evidence.”

“Right.” Pengelly started plunging knee deep back to the Beaver.

“You got any painkillers in your emergency kit?” I asked Stothers.

“Nothing much.”

“Anything to drink?”

“Brandy,” Stothers said.

“Good.” I explained that I thought we'd get Johns to the drunken stage that some people call feeling no pain, employing for this purpose rapid infusions of either Stothers' brandy or my rum, whichever Johns preferred, to anesthetize his broken leg for the trip. We'd talked for a couple of minutes when Pengelly called from the Beaver, “Hey, Matteesie. The inspector wants to talk to you.”

I climbed into the aircraft and reported in.

“Pengelly tells me what you're thinking, these accessory or conspiracy to murder charges,” Ted said. “The job you did on the murderer, I'll need something on that now and full report later. We don't want to be caught short on any of this.”

“We won't be. I saw the guy kill Morton and I looked him in the eye after I killed him. Same guy. No doubt at all.”

I gave him an abbreviated version of the Billy Bob demise, and what Harold Johns had told me about Batten and Christian waiting for Billy Bob. To me, that made them at least accessories. A judge might rule differently, if you could find a judge insane enough, but there was definitely enough to pick them up on if we could find them, plus enough to pick up William on, and certainly enough to pick up Bonner.

“Nobody except Bonner and William had been where they could telephone Billy Bob and arrange that fast take-off to intercept Morton,” I said. “I still can't bring myself to believe it was William: And it was Bonner I saw on the phone.”

There was no waste air.

“How do you read the reaction in Fort Norman when we charge William?” he asked.

I said, “Well, they won't have long to stay shocked. There's probably a media balloon race on right now to see who gets in there first for the gory details. And non-details. There'll be enough media flying in to keep everybody in Fort Norman busy talking about what a nice boy William was, and they just couldn't believe he was mixed up in the murder of his own father . . .” I stopped. Luckily, caution sometimes sneaks up on one. “And maybe he wasn't, really. But once it was done he sure as hell could have helped more than he did. Maybe that charge should be obstructing justice, or however that one goes.”

From Ted came a sound of relief. “Good idea. Hell of a job you've done, Matteesie.” He paused. “There's something else. I hate to tell you, but I guess you should know—they've sent someone else to Leningrad on that thing there.”

I hadn't thought of Leningrad for days.

“The deputy minister asked me to pass on to you personally his regrets and to say there'll be other times.”

I should even think about a deputy minister, up to my ass in this?

I asked Ted to tell Thomas Nuniviak at Komatik Air that his Cessna was safe and if he wanted, in a few days somebody could bring him down for it. By then we'd be finished with it.

He said he would.

“Oh,” I said. “Would you also let the commissioner know that Harold Johns is okay, leg broken and not much else, apparently an innocent bystander, so the commissioner can pass that on to your friend and mine, the finance minister?”

I was wondering, if it hadn't been for Buster's original phone call about Johns, would I be here at all? Probably. I would have been flying out on the same aircraft even if I'd been heading back for Ottawa.

“Will do,” Ted said.

After the over and out I sat there in the Beaver for a minute thinking not so much about Leningrad as about how quickly one obsession can be replaced by another, if a guy has that kind of a mind. Which I have, in what I think of as my unobtrusive way.

Stothers had been waiting outside while Ted and I talked, Stothers being that kind of a gentleman. He climbed in looking rather thoughtful.

“You know we can't take off out of here with much load,” he said.

I said I figured that.

He nodded. “I imagine you want me to take Johns back, get him to the hospital, probably straight to Norman Wells, if he's as bad as you say. I'll have to strip right down, leave extra gas and supplies here, everything dumpable. We can get it later,”

“Right.”

“I'll tool up and down and make a runway for myself.” I'd foreseen that. Soft snow was a help in landing on a short runway, acting as a brake, but could be very dicey on take-off.

“So what are you and Pengelly going to do?” he asked.

I didn't tell him precisely. I didn't know for sure, but had a couple of odd ideas scratching around in my head. “We've got some checking to do around the aircraft. Also, I want to see if a snowmobile can get from here to the tractor road, and if not look for signs of anybody going up to their ass in snow trying it on foot. We'll probably overnight here and pick up the body on the way back.”

“I wondered about wolves getting at it,” Stothers said.

I shrugged. I really didn't care. Tell the truth, I was feeling rather flat. Maybe a half-eaten frozen body as an exhibit in a murder trial would make the
Guinness Book of Records
and I'd go down in history. “Right now I'll bring my snowmobile down here and we'll get Johns out to the Beaver,” I said.

I had taken a step or two, hating to think of being out here with God knows what going on and us without a radio, wishing that Stothers or Pengelly had thought of bringing a spare when they might have suspected mine was kaput (but nobody's perfect) when Stothers called, “Hey!”

I turned. He handed me a plastic shopping bag.

“What's this?” I asked, looking in to see a two-way radio. Good thing I'd kept my criticism to myself. He grinned as if he'd read my thoughts. As I snowshoed across toward the snowmobile, he started his engine. He had been twice back and forth lengthwise along the pond's surface, flattening the snow, before I reached the machine and idled dead slow back to the Cessna.

“Hey, Smokey,” I said to the dog. He wagged his tail, still howling.

Inside, Pengelly obviously had been working hard on his phase of the feeling-no-pain project. I'd told him to have no more than one social drink himself if he had to, just to get the process going. He was chatting up Johns as much as possible, maybe even getting a few angles I'd missed while Johns had been sober. Johns now was slurring his words rather nicely. Every little bit helps.

I told them Johns would go out with Stothers, soon to be in the arms of nurses, doctors, and people with notebooks and TV cameras and tape recorders. Pengelly and I would stay and mop up.

“So it's you and me for the snowmobile,” Pengelly said cheerfully. “Tomorrow, eh? A night here. I mustn't give away all the rum.”

“That leaves
you
on the snowmobile, at least after we pick up Billy Bob's machine,” I corrected. “I'll drive that and of course you'll have the other passenger.”

“But there isn't any other . . . I mean, who? . . . Oh, shit!” he said.

I asked if he'd seen Billy Bob's snowmobile anywhere around, when going by.

“Yeah, it's over a hill to the south. Little camp. You didn't see it?”

“Didn't look,” I said. “Does it have a sled?”

He said it had. “Must have liberated one somewhere.”

“Well,” I said, “because I don't know what shape that machine is in, we'll load everything that needs to go back on mine and you drive it. I'll take the other.”

I didn't know yet exactly where I was going to take it.

In a half hour, long shadows from the hills to the west were falling across what Stothers now had looking like something a plane could take off from.

Stothers took his final run and taxied back and gave me a thumbs-up sign. He was ready. Pengelly and I carried Johns out gingerly. I wished we had as a stretcher the sheet of plywood we'd used as an unloading ramp—ages ago, it seemed, but in reality only yesterday morning.

Pengelly drove the snowmobile out to the Beaver. I walked alongside and steadied the groaning passenger. It struck me as sort of funny what was happening in this total Arctic solitude, or what should have been solitude. Here was a snow-covered bowl not much bigger than a football field, surrounded by hills, with a plane about to take off carrying a well-inebriated man who, presumably unwittingly, had flown a couple of drug dealers out of danger. Setting up a howl was Smokey the faithful dog. That shape hidden from most eyes was an aircraft belonging to an Inuk school chum of mine. Back on the trail was a dead man who, one hoped, would still be there tomorrow in a piece large enough to satisfy any lawyer who cried habeas corpus when the trial came up of four others who had been engaged in both drugs and murder. I wondered if I'd forgotten anyone. Didn't think so. I thought of Maxine, Gloria, Lois and Edie; No Legs, Charlie and Nancy Paterson, Bertha Pengelly and others. Meanwhile Stothers was gunning his engine to a high pitch before he let it jump away, yanked it into the air, seemed to hang on the propeller, losing air speed, wings wavering perilously. Then he missed the north ridge by a few feet, and was gone.

“Hey!” called Pengelly.

“What's on your mind?” I called back

“The cocktail hour.”

While I was walking toward him, the radio I was carrying suddenly squawked. I opened it up. “Matteesie here. Over.”

“Inuvik here.” I didn't know the voice. “We've traced Jules Bonner as far as Calgary and lost him there. No sign of Christian and Batten. Can't find William Cavendish. Over.”

“What do you mean, you can't find William? I know he didn't make the first plane back to Fort Norman after the memorial service but how the hell can he disappear? Over.”

“He went to the airport in time but didn't board the regular Canadian. Instead, he hitched a ride on a light charter that was in, going to Wrigley and Simpson. He got off at Wrigley. Trying to find him there right now.”

Pengelly had been standing in the doorway of the Cessna, listening to both ends of the conversation.

“You know where William will be right now, eh?” he said.

“Yeah. Heading for here.”

“He won't know that we found this place or anything else that's happened.”

“That's right.”

“So what do we do, get somebody else out here?”

That was the opposite of what I had in mind.

 

“Great goddamn cocktail hour this is,” Pengelly yelled over my shoulder from behind.

You pretty well have to yell, on a snowmobile, or not talk at all. I preferred not to talk at all, so I didn't answer. Not that I figured the hills had ears. It is just that taciturnity on the trail is a cultural heritage of great antiquity, which no doubt is why none of the early explorers ever recorded in his diary meeting up with an Eskimo windbag.

“I said, ‘Great goddamn cocktail hour this is!'” Pengelly roared again.

I gave the throttle a little twist, upping the speed and shutting him up. Speeding across the snowy wastes at night in a snowmobile isn't all that bad, given the conditions we had. Clear sky, full moon, frosty breaths whipped out and gone. We were both in parkas with the wolverine fringe covering much of the face, heavy pants tucked into kneehigh boots, face-masks, gauntlets reaching almost to our elbows. We'd been lucky. There'd been no snow and not a great deal of ground drift in the last twelve hours since I'd driven in. That made my trail easy to follow in the headlight.

That morning I'd had to be wary, drive dead slow every time I rounded a bend or topped a rise. Never knew what was ahead. Now I could drive much faster because I knew exactly what was ahead: a blue towel on a stake marking a body.

Only one thing slowed us now and again: the sled bouncing along behind us was heavier than it had been this morning. We'd loaded it not only with what we needed, including extra fuel, but also with everything else that might have given away who had been in or near what I now was identifying in my mind as William's Secret Garden. The various tracks would tell him everything except, who? There'd been an aircraft, a snowmobile, someone on snowshoes—but who?

I remembered the book
The Secret Garden
from childhood, the first one I'd ever had read to me. The teacher read it to our class in my first school term at Inuvik, I didn't remember a lot of details, except that it was a place where a little girl went but nobody else knew about. William had been coming out here winter and summer since his teens, No Legs had told me. It was William's place to be alone. I wondered if Morton had ever come out here with him. More probably, being a good man, he had simply accepted that there was a place where his son liked to go, by himself.

I could imagine William coming here in spring or fall, months when the tractor road was just an impassable cut through the bush. He'd be trying to miss the worst of the mosquitoes and black flies, maybe traveling by outboard or canoe against the slow current of the Big Smith or maybe close to the east bank of the Mackenzie. Along the shores and in the walk in from either river the brief summer's flowers would be a gentle, varied carpet leading to his secret place.

I didn't know where that had been. Maybe it wasn't right on the pond. More likely, I thought, it was between the pond and the banks of the Mackenzie. There he'd have been able to camp and fish and hunt the days away with nothing else moving except an occasional barge tow on the river or some of those venturesome couples or families who'd planned for a year and got themselves outfitted in Simpson or Wrigley to travel downriver, camping at night, taking home movies to show back home in Chicago or wherever.

“Want me to drive for a while?” Pengelly yelled. I knew the feeling. He had a firm grip around my waist, but being a passenger on a snowmobile isn't exactly going first class.

“No. We're almost there.” As he'd come in by air, he didn't have the little landmarks I was using. The ride didn't seem as long to me.

Soon we came to where I'd turned away from my camp and the remains of Billy Bob to look for William's tracks. I cut to less than half speed climbing a rise. There in my headlight was the stake with the blue towel on top.

I stopped at the crest of the rise. The idling engine seemed almost silent after the noise of hard driving. Pengelly jumped off, flapping his arms against his body for warmth.

“Where's his snowmobile from here?” I called.

He pointed out the direction and got back aboard. It wasn't more than two or three hundred yards along, north a hill or two from William's trail. The key was in it. I'd figured on that. When I'd searched him there was a fair amount of Canadian and US currency, but no key. When you leave a snowmobile to kill someone, you don't bother taking the key.

“Now we hope it goes,” I said, pumping the primer and then pulling the starting cord. The engine burst into life and after a minute idled smoothly. I got on and drove, Pengelly following on the other machine. Near where Billy Bob's body lay we pulled in to park with the headlights focused on the grotesque snowy lump under its blue towel marker.

“We gonna camp here?” Pengelly called hopefully.

This was where I had to start explaining, so I did.

Pengelly was incredulous. “If you're going back there, why the hell didn't we just hide out someplace and wait for him?”

“The dog,” I said. “It is a smart dog and it has seen us go and heard us until the sound faded right away. He will believe that we are gone.” I could tell that Pengelly didn't share my belief in the necessity to outwit Smokey. “If we were anywhere around there, the first thing the dog would do when William let him loose was run straight to where we were.”

“Yeah, but what's going to stop him doing that just because you're back there by yourself?”

I realized we could be there all night debating the capabilities of dogs. Sometime, I wouldn't mind.

“Look,” I said, “I'm sorry about this, but I'm going back and you're going on.”

“You're pulling rank!” Pengelly said, full of incredulity. “Jesus!”

“Think of it this way,” I said, “Bertha will be pleased.”

He started to say something that started with an f and had to do with Bertha, but realized it was not applicable in the circumstances, swallowed hard and let it go.

I tried to placate him a little while repacking the sleds.

“When William arrives—
if
he arrives—he could stonewall us until hell froze over, or until a plane arrived to take us all out, and we'd be no further ahead than we are now. I'd like a chance to see what he does if he's sure he's alone.”

Meanwhile I was loading my tent, sleeping bag, gas, food, primus, axe, guns and everything else I'd need for a few days, onto Billy Bob's trailer and putting everything else on the trailer Pengelly would tow back Pengelly had fallen silent, helping me, his big jaw sticking out glumly, bereft of wisecracks. Finally we pulled Billy Bob's body out of its snow covering and tied it, in all its frozen-stiff awkwardness, on the top of the load Pengelly would pull.

While doing this I looked once more into the face of the man I had killed. When I'd looked at him the first time, right after those three shotgun blasts, his body was loose and slack with a lot of blood splashed on his face.

Now I could see that the real mess was more from the neck down. I must have stood there for a minute or more looking at him. I was thinking that here was somebody his mother no doubt loved, which goes to show you. Maybe others, too. Still, I was thinking of the time I killed a polar bear so close to me that when he fell dead, he fell partly on me. I was also thinking of a time I'd found a wolverine in one of my traps. He was busy chewing his trapped leg off so he could get away and when I came up on him he turned and tried to spring at me, snarling. I remembered that in killing the polar bear and again in killing the wolverine, both times I'd said something, always said it when I killed an animal or bird. I'd said, “I'm sorry,” and felt it. But when I looked at Billy Bob now I was thinking of that instant when he'd placed that .45 against Morton Cavendish's unconscious head and fired. Three times. Same number I'd fired into him. And I knew I would never be sorry.

His sprawled legs and arms made handy places to lash the ropes around and pull them tight.

“I'll keep in touch,” I said to Pengelly. “I'll call you as often as I can, but don't you call me. And tell everybody else, Inuvik included, not to call me.”

He got it. I didn't want the radio suddenly squawking just when it would blow my cover, or interrupt (I could only hope) something that would answer all the questions.

“All set?” I said.

“Yep.” he said. “How about you?”

“Ready to go,” I said.

I could see him in the light of our headlights as he looked at me across Billy Bob's body, and grinned.

“You forgot to pack the ammunition,” he said, and handed me two boxes of shotgun shells.

I stuffed them into my parka pockets, laughing, couldn't help it. Trust Pengelly to exit laughing.

An hour later, I stopped and made camp, still miles from the pond. The moon now was playing peek-a-boo with the clouds, but with that and my flashlight, I could see well enough as I unhooked the sled and pulled it around parallel to the snowmobile and lashed the tent between the two vehicles as I had—jeez, was it only last night?—so that I was protected from both sides against wind and weather.

Inside and snug I started the primus. Snow translates into water at the rate of about ten to one so periodically I reached my plate out through the flap and got more. When I had enough boiling water I made tea, dropped in a package of boil-in-the-bag beef stew, drank tea while it got hot, slit the bag with my Swiss Army knife, poured its contents into my plate, dipped in frozen bread, ate ravenously, cleansed the plate with snow and crawled into my bag.

Last thought I had was to hope that William had caught a fast transport going north from Wrigley, or had bummed, borrowed or stolen a snowmobile to bring him here. I couldn't envision any other option he had, having left Johns not dealt with and knowing that by now Smokey would be famished. If I was right, sometime soon he would be arriving at the Cessna, seeing where the Beaver had landed and taken off, signs of my snowmobile arriving and departing, and my snowshoe trails. He'd be trying to figure out what all that activity meant, who was involved, where they'd come from and how much they knew. And he'd be thinking that he didn't have much time.

When he came back—that's when I wanted to be either watching, or following. On that thought, I slept like a baby.

It was therefore a very long and disappointing day, the next one. When I woke and was still for a minute or two I thought that only a week ago Morton was alive and none of this had happened; I'd wakened in Maxine's bed with the sound of the shower running and thought I'd walk down with her in the dark and then loaf around until I had to catch the plane.

I rolled over and looked outside. Heavy grey cloud seemed to fall right to the deck, off to the east. A little wind was blowing, a little snow falling. The temperature, I guessed, was maybe ten below, practically sweltering.

I must have had some kind of premonition that morning.

Otherwise why would I start thinking about William's dog? Let's see, I thought, William was here Saturday with, at least in the very early stages, Christian, Batten and Johns. Why he left after getting Christian and Batten off to an early start, couldn't say, maybe thinking he had to attend to his father's funeral, but probably he had fed Smokey well before leaving. Working dogs can go days without food. Water supply isn't a factor. They constantly gulp snow. For seven or eight months of the year they never see water as such. But remembering how Smokey had seemed to warm to me a little when I threw him that corned beef, I put a few extra frozen meat-bags into my backpack. The sun was a rosy glow to the south-southeast when I packed the rest of the food into the animal-proof (well, let's not count barren-ground grizzlies) food box, lashed down everything lashable, added the rifle to my backpack, and set off on my snowshoes at an easy trot.

My plans were fairly simple. I was heading for a spot a little east from the north end of the pond. The prevailing wind was from the northwest, meaning I'd be downwind from Smokey. I figured about an hour would take me to where I could edge up into some of the trees overlooking the pond.

My intention was to be well off William's course when he appeared, as I felt was certain, from southwest of my look-out point. With the wind direction and the vast silence all around me, I was sure I'd be alerted by any sound from the tractor road, either a big rig or a snowmobile. I could see through the binoculars that most of the time Smokey was curled up in a snowbank near the Cessna. He got up once in a while to trot the length of his chain and howl.

It all worked, with the exception of William. Hours passed. I heard nothing and saw nothing. I ate chocolate biscuits, drank tea that went from hot to warm to cool to cold, sometimes paced stiffly around for a few minutes out of sight of the Cessna. Around five in the afternoon, temperature falling with the close of day, I had to ask myself I say, Matteesie, what now? I obviously couldn't stay in this stake-out all night.

The snowshoe run back to my tent warmed me up fine everywhere, even between the ears—giving me time to consider that maybe it was all over, everyone in the bag, and I'd spent that day in the snowbank for nothing. Almost believing that and thinking, Well, I tried, I grabbed the radio.

“Matteesie here. Over.”

Pengelly's voice was relieved. “Hey! What's happening? Over.”

Even those few words told me I was still in business for tomorrow. Somehow, I was relieved. I don't like to work a thing hard and not be in at the end.

I told him what I'd done, batting zero.

He told me: No sign of William, Batten or Christian. No more sign of Bonner. Inuvik, meaning Ted Huff, was worried about me and wanted to know how long was I going to stay out if nothing happened?

“Not forever,” I said. “A day or two more if it's still a dead end.”

I could be ordered back, Pengelly said. The commissioner had pressured Ted on that but Ted had said it should be left to me.