Shaman Pass (4 page)

CHAPTER FIVE

SILER MADE IT TO the village first and was already hurrying out of the Public Safety Building when Active pulled the purple Yamaha up in front.

“No Calvin,” Silver said as Active turned the key and the snowmachine coughed itself into silence. “His grandmother told my guys he’s out hunting caribou.”

“Hmmph.” Active pulled off his sunglasses and stowed them in a shirt pocket. “Since when?”

“Since early this morning.”

“Hmph.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s go talk to her.”

“Yeah.”

Active unlocked the trooper Suburban nosed up to the Public Safety Building, reached in, and started it. While the elderly rig warmed up, he put Uncle Frosty’s harpoon and Victor Solomon’s parka on the floorboards behind the driver’s seat. Then he took off his own parka and tossed it on the front seat. Then he took off the Refrigiwear overalls and tossed them on the backseat. Then he put the parka back on and saw Silver watching the performance.

“You ever notice,” Active asked, “how even the simplest thing gets complicated in the Arctic?”

“Goes with,” Silver said as he climbed in the Suburban’s passenger door. “You’re so busy taking care of the little shit, you never have time to worry about the big shit.”

“You get used to it after a while?” Active slid behind the wheel, slammed the door, and turned on the heater. The engine was still too cold to provide any warmth, but the blower did produce a loud squeal.

“Resigned is more like it,” Silver bellowed over the noise. “You should have plugged in the engine heater.” He pointed at a row of electric sockets set along the side of the Public Safety Building.

“The troopers are conserving energy this week,” Active said.

SILVER DIRECTED him to Dolly Maiyumerak’s place, a tiny house with dark green tar paper on the walls and roof. A pony-sized husky emerged from a snow-covered oil drum with one end sawed off, and rumbled deep in his throat as they got out of the Suburban. The limit of his chain was marked by a circular archipelago of yellow stains cobbled with brown droppings on the hard-packed snow.

“That Kobuk?” Active asked.

Silver nodded. “Mackenzie River husky. They’re about half wolf.”

Active looked at the gigantic husky. There were a few bone splinters on the hardpack around his barrel. They could have been anything from chicken to seal to caribou. Or dog. “I can see how feeding him could get to be a problem.”

Silver chuckled and they started for the house. Kobuk’s rumble escalated to a snarl and he lunged toward them, stopping dead just before the chain jerked him up. Up close, Active could see that Kobuk had a lot of silver-gray fur, and yellow wolf eyes.

“Thank God that chain’s not any longer,” Silver shouted over Kobuk’s roar.

They skirted the husky’s circle and went in through the
kunnichuk
. Active knocked on the inner door.

There was a stir inside, a pause, and then the door creaked open a few inches and an old woman with a cigarette and a hearing aid glared out at them. She swung her gaze from Silver to Active and then back to Silver, to whom she nodded curtly. “I tell them other guys already, Calvin’s not here. You could come back later.”

Active flipped back his parka hood, introduced himself, and put out his hand. The old woman took it with great reluctance, and no pressure. It was like shaking a glove full of loose bones.

“You’re that Eskimo trooper, ah?”

He nodded and lifted his eyebrows, hoping the Eskimo yes would get him a few points with Dolly Maiyumerak.

“You’re just like
naluaqmiu
trooper, that’s what I hear.” The glare deepened.

“Can we come in, Mrs. Maiyumerak?” Active asked. “So we could ask you a few questions?”

“I told you, I already talk to them other guys.”

“It won’t take long. Can we come in?”

The old woman was silent a long time. Then, “You could ask ’em out here.”

Active pulled his hood up. It was cold in the
kunnichuk
. Their breaths made plumes in the air. “Calvin went hunting this morning, you said?”

The woman lifted her eyebrows.

“And when did he leave?”

“I don’t know, seven-thirty maybe. ‘Mukluk Messenger’ is on Kay-Chuck when he’s leaving, I think.”

“Do you know where he went?”

She shrugged. “Wherever them caribous are, I guess. I tell him we need some meats, he just say he’ll get some caribous. He never say where he go.”

“What about last night? Did you see him last night?”

“Why you ask all these questions? He already tell them other cops he never take that Uncle Frosty.”

Apparently she hadn’t heard about Victor Solomon’s murder. Active glanced at Silver, who gave the tiniest of nods. Active calculated for a moment, then concluded there was little reason to conceal the already too-public details of the murder.

“This isn’t about the burglary. Last night Victor Solomon was killed with a harpoon that was stolen along with Uncle Frosty.”

He watched as Dolly Maiyumerak’s frown vanished, her face locked into a mask of inscrutability, and she gazed silently out the window of the
kunnichuk
. Active had seen the mask before. It appeared when an Eskimo confronted a
naluaqmiu
who asked too many questions.

“Mrs. Maiyumerak?”

She took a deep drag on her cigarette, exhaled, took another, swung her gaze to the two men and spoke, her words wreathed in smoke. “My grandson’s home all day yesterday till maybe five or six in the afternoon. Then he’s over to his girlfriend’s till after I go to bed. I guess I hear him come in little bit after midnight maybe, then he get up around six-thirty to go hunting. He never kill Victor Solomon.”

Silver spoke now. “It’s common knowledge they didn’t get along, Dolly. Victor always called your grandson
anaq
.”

She squinted in negation. “Maybe Victor need killing then. But Calvin never do it.”

“Who’s his girlfriend?”

“That Queenie. What’s her last name?” The old woman looked at Silver. “You know, she call bingo at the Lions Club?”

“Buckland? Queenie Buckland?”

The old woman lifted her eyebrows.

“Could we come in and look through your grandson’s room?” Active asked.

She looked at Silver and rolled her eyes. Active turned in time to see that Silver was doing the same.

She opened the door wide and gestured at the interior of the house. It was a single room, and not a very big one at that. One corner was closed off with a curtain that concealed, judging from the smell, a honey bucket. Otherwise, the space was undivided.

“That’s my room over there.” Dolly pointed at a single bed against one wall. “And that’s Calvin’s room.” Now she pointed with a shiny, smoke-yellowed finger at a sofa against another wall. “And this my kitchen.” She pointed at a two-burner camp stove sitting on a scarred plywood counter under some equally scarred plywood cabinets. “You done looking now?”

Active thought for a while about what to say. “I’m sorry for your trouble” came to mind but didn’t quite seem to fit.

“Thank you. Will you call us when your grandson gets home?” He handed her a business card.

She squinted a no and pushed it away. “I’ll tell him to call you if he want to.”

Active put the card in his pocket, and followed Silver out of the
kunnichuk
. “Your guys talk to the girlfriend already?” Active asked when they were back in the Suburban.

Silver shook his head. “Just Dolly. Queenie’s virgin territory, so to speak.”

THEY FOUND Queenie Buckland stocking the Pepsi machine at the Lions Club bingo hall in preparation for that night’s game. She was tall, fat, and broad-shouldered, like a linebacker with breasts. A heavy jaw gave her face a certain menacing gravity, redeemed only by laughing eyes. She wore sneakers, jeans, and a T-shirt that said IF YOU LIKE MY HEADLIGHTS YOU’LL LOVE MY BUMPER. Like Maiyumerak, she had a tooth missing in front, and Active found himself wondering how it affected their kissing.

When they asked if she had seen her boyfriend the day before, her answer matched Dolly Maiyumerak’s account: Calvin had shown up around six with a sheefish and she cooked it for dinner.

“How long did he stay?” Active asked.

Queenie popped a Pepsi and took a swallow. “Let’s see, seem like we watch that Millionaire program, then we you-know couple hours, then he go home around midnight, maybe one o’clock.”

“You-know?” Active asked.

“Uh-huh.” She lifted her eyebrows and smiled a big smile that showed them the gap where her tooth had been. “You know.
Quiyuk
.”

“A couple of hours of
quiyuk
,” Silver said when they got to the Suburban. “You wouldn’t think it, the scrawny little shit.”

Active grunted. “You believe her?”

“About the two hours?”

“About the rest of it.”

Silver shrugged. “She could be lying for him. Just like Dolly could.”

Active turned it over in his mind, thinking of Victor Solomon dead on the ice, of Calvin Maiyumerak’s rusty snowmachine and ramshackle dogsled, and the one-room home of Dolly Maiyumerak. “What’s the deal with Dolly and Calvin anyway? Why do they live like that? Where are his parents?”

“They live out in Ebrulik. I guess when Dolly got too old to take care of herself, Calvin’s dad, Dolly’s son, sent him down here to live with her. Apparently Calvin’s mother can’t stand the old lady so she couldn’t move up to Ebrulik. You know how it is with mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law.”

“I’ve heard.”

“But Calvin’s basically feral,” Silver said. “He likes to live the old way as much as he can, won’t take a regular job. Except for this business about Inupiat sovereignty, I don’t think he has much idea what goes on in the outside world. He traps in the winter and commercial fishes in the summer. Dolly gets some social security and some welfare and sews the mittens and ruffs from whatever it is he catches, and they get by. Somehow.”

Active started the Suburban and headed for the Public Safety Building. “If you could call it that.”

Silver nodded. “Tough life. They’re tough people, I guess.”

“Tough enough to kill Victor Solomon?”

Silver was silent, thinking it over. “Yeah, I believe so. I think Calvin just plain hated old Victor. And, you know, there’s the talk about him killing dogs with his bare hands.” Silver shook his head.

“Victor used to call him
anaq
, huh?”
Anaq
was included in Active’s limited but growing vocabulary of Inupiaq words. It meant shit. “To his face?”

Silver nodded. “And in public. Like when Victor had us throw Calvin out of that tribal council meeting. ‘Haul away this piece of
anaq
before I throw it in a honey bucket’ is what Victor said when we showed up.”

“Well, that’s pure Eskimo.”

Silver nodded. “Plus, Calvin probably figured Victor would go out and find Uncle Frosty on the tundra and bring him back and then work out some way to get Calvin thrown in jail for the burglary. He had to know it wouldn’t end as long as Victor was alive.”

Active thought it over as the Suburban rolled smoothly up Third Street, the only paved road in Chukchi. “I have to find Calvin,” he said finally.

“Yeah,” Silver said. “I guess you do.”