Corporal Charlie Paterson of the Norman Wells detachment was a big guy, towering over me. And right now he was extremely agitated. The two of us were in the mildly graffiti-scarred men’s can at the terminal building. The corporal had locked the door behind us. “It’s the only goddamn private place short of kicking the airline people out of their effing office,” he said. He knew my face and name from when I had been full-time RCMP but thought when I went to Northern Affairs it was final. To him I was a civilian again. No doubt that made him feel free to act naturally, such as swearing a blue streak in a way he normally would not have in the presence of a superior, even one with brown skin and almond-shaped eyes, five feet six of sheer Native guile.
What I knew about him was that he was an officer on the way up, having been commended during his previous posting at Fort Simpson, especially for community work at the time of the Pope’s visit there. I can only assume that the Pope never heard Charlie let fly when he was mad. He’d seen Morton’s body. He knew how the murderer had gotten away. Charlie had been no more than a few hundred yards from the airport “and driving like a mad bastard,” according to his own testimony, when the fatal shots were fired. I could see he felt sure that without those few hundred yards he might instantly have taken his place among the storied Mounties who always got their man.
His luck had been all bad. An Ottawa call instructing him to meet me at the airport had come in while he was out hunting rabbits. “Every effing Tuesday we go out, me and the doctor and a guy from the oil company, hunting, fishing, having a few drinks, whatever!”
He looked defiant. “It’s community effing relations, you know!” But he didn’t even like that excuse himself. Furiously, as if looking for something to punch, he flushed both toilets with a crash and gurgle unparalleled in the history of plumbing.
“A really bad break,” I said, trying to soothe him.
“That’s not all! My effing duty constable left word with Nancy to tell me to call the office but she didn’t.”
“Nancy?”
“My wife. Of course, she didn’t know what the call was about, but anyway I got home and was cleaning the rabbits in the sink when right away she came into the kitchen and started yelling she’d just cleaned the sink, and I yelled did she think I was going out into minus thirty-five weather to clean some effing rabbits and she forgot the call, and . . .”
I’ll summarize the remainder. When the rabbits were bagged and in the freezer the corporal and his wife went to a choir practice adjudged to be urgently needed because of special Easter services some weeks away. The practice had been called for 5:30 p.m., with potluck supper and euchre afterwards. They were just warming up in the joyful, “Christ is Risen!” when Constable Ned Hoare appeared at the back of the church and without waiting for a break in the music roared, “Charlie! Call from Ottawa! You’re supposed to meet the plane! It’s coming in right now!” and Nancy said, “Oh, God, Charlie. I was supposed to tell you to call the office.”
“God damn it all to fucking hell,” the corporal groaned, apparently having forgotten to use the more genteel “effing.” “If I’d been here I might have been able to do something. Chase him, shoot him, whatever. The one day in the fucking week when for half an hour I’m away from the phone and this happens.”
I was fresh out of appropriate responses. “What do you sing in the choir?” I asked.
“Lead tenor!” he snapped, and then, less forcefully, “Okay, now fill me in.”
I told him what I knew. The murderer had used what looked to me like a Colt GM (for Government Model) .45, which in one form or another has been used in wars, revolutions, police actions and murders since about 1911. I own one myself. He had escaped on a Skidoo Elan, a machine I knew because it is a favorite among trappers—light, powerful, easy to handle and easy to fix. He (presumably he) had left it with the engine running on the tarmac about seventy-five feet from the aircraft steps and a little south of the terminal, toward the Okanagan Helicopters limited hangar. I’d seen the murderer running for the machine as I charged down the steps scrabbling for the gun that was at home in Ottawa in my bed-table drawer and which I hadn’t worn for two years. In seconds he was revving into high speed across the foot-deep snow, then across the main runway, last seen as a red tail-light dwindling to nothing in the dark and blowing snow. He’d been out of sight before anybody with a machine to make chase with could react, if that anybody had been of a mind to, which is never entirely certain when one man is armed and a prospective pursuer is not.
Going back to the airport I’d pulled a blanket over Cavendish’s head (he was dead), told the pilot I was RCMP and would take charge for now (he seemed relieved), and told everybody to get off the plane but stay in the waiting room, which is where they were now.
Or most of them, anyway. Someone was trying the door of the toilet and complaining pitiably about the desperate state of his bladder.
The corporal barked, “Go outside and do it in a snowbank,” but the guy didn’t go away.
Wishing him well, and knowing that at least he wasn’t a Native or he wouldn’t have had to be told to do it in a snowbank, I went on. Before I left the aircraft I’d questioned the nurse, whose name was Hilda. She didn’t know much so I summarized drastically for Charlie. But the full account of my couple of minutes with the nurse went like this:
I’d asked, “When was it decided to fly him out?”
“Sometime yesterday. This was the first flight we could catch.”
“Do you know what kind of shape his son was in when he brought his father in the night before?”
“I don’t know. I’ve been on days.”
Then I came to the important part. “Who knew that he was being flown out on this flight?”
“Oh, a lot of people. People at the hospital, and people from CBC news who checked every few hours, and the girl reporter for the paper, News North. She came around—I mean, she’s stationed in Inuvik by the paper and I guess she’d been phoning the story in, he was so well known. So there’d be people in the paper’s Yellowknife office who would know, plus everybody who heard it on the radio.”
Her voice trailed off and she compressed her lips. I think delayed shock was hitting her. She faltered, “The doctors, you know, at the hospital, they said he was in and out of consciousness and tried to talk but couldn’t be understood, so even today when we were getting him ready, well, it was bad but certainly not hopeless.” She drew a deep breath, “Not like now.”
I still didn’t have the answer I was looking for. “Did anybody call looking for details that made you wonder?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, made you or anybody else suspicious about their questions? Like, exactly when he was being flown out?”
“Not that I took. I wouldn’t know about calls last night or calls the doctor took.”
It had been about that time in our conversation that Corporal Charlie Paterson came bounding up the steps of the plane, loudly lamenting his fate, then instantly charged back out to order Constable Hoare to get out there into the bush on a borrowed snowmobile, musing aloud as that tail light disappeared into the murk, “As much chance as a snowball in hell. That bush has more snowmobile tracks than rabbit tracks.”
I looked at him. “But we’d look real funny if we got helicopters out in the morning and found that the machine broke down or hit a tree or some damn thing half a mile away.”
“No kidding,” he said sarcastically. “I never would have thought of that on my own.”
Touché.
The fact that the murderer’s or anyone’s snowmobile had been left running out in the open wasn’t noteworthy. Half a dozen snowmobiles were sitting around right now among the pickups, taxi vans and two police cars. More were arriving every few minutes as word spread around town. Every vehicle had its engine running. In the North that was winter habit, like long underwear. Anything not left running would be too damn cold to get into and also might not start. The temperature outside right now was minus thirty-eight. In these parts in mid-winter, minus twenty is considered a heat wave.
When we were pretty well caught up on background the corporal unlocked the door. An old white guy, one hand with a tight grip on the front of his pants groaned, “Thanks a lot!” and shuffled past. Civilization at the crossroads.
A few feet along the passage to our right the area in front of the airline counter was maybe twelve feet by eighteen feet with a bench along the outside wall. An opening led to another squarish room where a nice-looking woman, about thirty, held a metal detector while blocking the door to the tarmac where the 737 was sitting. Both rooms were crowded with people in parkas and big boots, the air blue with cigarette smoke. Some were sitting on benches, some standing.
The buzz of voices fell silent. We stopped by the door of the small office off the check-in counters. Outside to our right the cars and pickups sat with motors running, the exhausts pluming in the frosty air. Lights could be seen moving on nearby roads. Down beyond the main road was the Mackenzie River with its more than 200 oil and gas wells, many in the river itself on artificial islands. The oil-town settlement of more than 600 people spread for miles along the river, the glow from burn-offs at the main Esso installations barely visible from where I stood. I somehow didn’t think the murderer had been from here, but there was no way of knowing yet.
“I think one at a time, whaddaya say?” the corporal asked.
“Sure.”
He faced the crowd. He didn’t have to ask for attention.
“No one leave the airport until we have names and addresses,” he said in a carrying voice. “This can be speeded up a lot if anybody knew the guy with the gun, positive identification preferred, of course, but even a suspicion we’ll listen to. Anybody with anything to say that might help, step right up.”
I watched the faces in the growing silence. Even when they’d been filing past me out of the plane I’d been thinking of things I wanted to know right away. Never mind motive. Who could even guess that, yet. Somebody had had to know, and let the murderer know, that Morton Cavendish was on this flight. You couldn’t load up a Colt GM .45, figure out how to shoot some poor unconscious man strapped onto a stretcher, back it up with an escape plan and then start meeting every flight on the off chance. It crossed my mind that I wasn’t really supposed to be here for a murder. My assignment had been a missing aircraft bearing someone that Buster was concerned about.
The corporal had waited a few beats. Nobody had stepped up.
“Okay. Come in to this office behind me one at a time. First, airport staff, then plane crew, then the rest. This all has to be done before the flight can go on. If you know anything at all, be sure you tell us now, not two days from now.”
The two of us went back into the little airport office. The corporal sat behind a desk. There were two chairs. I took one. Through a window I could see the silently waiting 737, gusty snow visible against its lighted windows. Beyond it, snow and ice particles could be seen in the runway lights blowing thick and fast. Beyond that was blackness entire, the impenetrable Arctic night.
A second constable was inside the aircraft. Having taken photos of the body from every angle he was supervising the cleanup.
Whether the body stayed here or went on to Yellowknife had not been determined, but when we were finished here the inspector at Inuvik, commanding the big RCMP subdivision that included Inuvik, Norman Wells and other surrounding territory, would let us know.
Just before the first person, the woman from the airline counter, came in, I asked the corporal, “Any word about that missing aircraft?”
He looked at me as if I’d gone nuts, asking about a missing plane when we had a murder on our hands.
The counter agent had streaky, fair hair and a very pale face. Before we even asked, she burst out, “There was a guy came in on the flight this morning that I didn’t know. A big guy. No luggage. I noticed him because he had one of those parka hoods that pretty near cover the face, and he went right out and took off in the taxi before anybody else left at all.”
She said that waiting for the flight to come through tonight she was sure the guy she’d seen this morning hadn’t been around. There’d been no one in the terminal except the few boarding passengers, nobody who had asked any questions in person or by phone about the incoming flight and whether it had a stretcher case aboard. We quizzed her but that was all she knew. When we figured she’d told us everything we could find out right then, we started on the others.
An Esso Resources guy said that the chain-link fence that fanned out from both ends of the terminal building ran along this edge of the airport to restrict access to loading and unloading areas. Several private concerns along the airport strip, Okanagan for one, also had to be entered through gates in the high fence. Theoretically no unauthorized person could get through one of those properties to where the murderer’s snowmobile had been parked, perhaps not for long. But the Esso guy also pointed out that the fence only ran along one side of the airport. Charlie obviously knew that. I had thought of that too. The other side, and the ends, were wide open. The man could have driven in unseen from the open bush and waited in the dark, watching the aircraft taxi in and then making his move.
Through the rest of the questioning, I just sat and listened. The corporal was thorough and well-organized. The profile that emerged pretty well matched my own recollection from the few seconds I’d been aware of the murderer at all.
The two baggage handlers, dressed for their frigid duties outdoors, had been getting their cart out to unload luggage when the man ran for the snowmobile and took off. The dark-haired stewardess who’d been closest to the action had a bruise on her right cheek from when she’d been flung out of the way but said nothing I did not already know. She said rather shakily that she’d been lucky to get off with a bruise, she might have been shot, too.
A young Metis woman who’d been among the boarding passengers, with a ticket to Yellowknife, said she had seen the snowmobile move slowly up as the plane was taxiing in, but had thought nothing of it.
Around seven the inspector in Inuvik called. The corporal filled him in and was told that the body should go on to Yellowknife when we were finished, and the nurse had better go, too, to be handy for questioning.
When the thirty-second and last person had filed in and out, at nearly eight, the pilot stuck his head around the office door and said, “When do you figure we can leave? We’ve plugged up the one hole in the aircraft as best we can. Any draft we didn’t get we can say is air conditioning.”
The corporal shrugged. “I guess go when ready.” He glanced at me. I nodded agreement. “I think we got the only two bullets that stayed inside. Find any more, let us know.”
“Will do.”
As the pilot lingered there was a moment of thoughtful silence between the three of us. A man had been killed and we could only get on with our jobs. When the pilot turned away he could be heard saying to the woman who did the security checks, “Okay, they can move out now.”
Paterson and I looked at each other. “Not much?” I said.
“Not much.”
Then for the first time I mentioned that my original assignment, the reason he’d been supposed to meet me, was the missing aircraft and the request from Ottawa that I nose around.
He was surprised. “You mean you’re still on the force, sort of?”
“Sort of, is right. Really just as a favor, but when the commissioner asks a favor . . .”
“Do you think the business between you and Ottawa could have anything to do with this?” Meaning, the murder.
“All I know is that I’m to nose around—for what, I’m not sure even yet until I check back. I thought you might know.”
“I don’t.” He sounded slightly hurt. “But I don’t like the idea of them feeling we need help in something before we’ve even had a chance.”
I really didn’t mind Charlie Paterson at all, rather liked him. Still, it always sort of amused me when a white man in the North got his itsy-bitsy dignity injured.
“Well, you did sort of screw up today,” I said.
I was rather glad that, after a sharp glance, he laughed.
“And I always thought you Eskimos were supposed to be nice guys, kind, for Chrissake! But I’ll tell you one goddamn thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’ve just resigned from that effing choir.”
So I rode over to the RCMP office with Corporal Paterson. It was about five minutes away. Hoare still hadn’t come back from his chase job. The office was just off the main street in a small building standing by itself, nothing else around. Paterson unlocked the door. A sign on the door gave the hours when the office would be open, and a phone number for emergencies.
The other constable was at work, typing his report about what he’d found inside the aircraft. I took one of the chairs while Paterson paced, thinking. He tended to think aloud, and loudly.
“What a goddamn break!” he groaned. “There’s been snowmobilers out all day up hill and down bloody dale on the off chance that Cessna came down north of Fort Norman instead of south, like most people think. Not only me and the doc and the Esso guy are out shooting rabbits, but the bush is full of volunteer good guys, you know the mix—the serious ones out to serve suffering humanity and the guys who’ll take any excuse to get away from the wife. There’ll be so many snowmobile tracks . . .”
He let it die there and I had a mental image of the maze of snowmobile tracks through the bush looking like the string games we used to playas kids.
Something had been nagging at me. “That snowmobile wasn’t carrying anything that I could see. No saddlebags, no extra gas, nothing. As if he either makes one fast run somewhere, and doesn’t need any gear for living in the open, or . . .”
“Or?”
“Or he had fuel and other stuff stashed where he was going to hole up,” I said.
“Or stashed a few miles out where he could pick it up on the way to God knows where.”
“Yeah. All of those. Another thing, you probably thought of this”—behold the ancient Native custom of buttering the white man—“is that wherever he’s going, if it’s far at all he needs gas. Maximum on that machine with a five-gallon tank is sixty-five to seventy miles. About forty, if he has a three-gallon tank. We could telex to everybody, notice boards, post offices, schools, whatever, that if anybody loses gas or gas cans they should report it to you forthwith.”
He nodded, sat down, and started to type. “That’s one thing we can do right away. Jeez, I like that word, forthwith.” He grinned. “It’s me, know what I mean?”
The phone began to ring. The corporal answered it and handed it to me.
“Ottawa,” he said. “Who’s Buster?”
I listened for a minute and then said, “Yes, I was on the same aircraft.”
Listened again, then: “Corporal Paterson will be reporting what we know to Inuvik in a few minutes. It isn’t a hell of a lot more than you’ve got. Yeah, we can ask them to copy it to you. Now, can you tell me more about the other thing, what I’m supposed to be here for?”
Buster instructed me to stay clear of the murder, that was regular police work, the other was what needed my touch. My touch! I didn’t reply directly to that piece of official advice. I had my own ideas. I listened for two or three minutes, taking notes, then said, “Okay,” and hung up.
“That the commissioner?” the corporal asked, impressed. He was at the counter, lighting a cigar, peering through the smoke.
I nodded.
“Anything you can tell me?”
“Yeah, there was just a flash on the news back east about the murder. About the other thing, the guys on the missing plane, the pilot’s father is the finance minister. The other two or maybe three are suspects in a drug deal supposed to be worth about half a million bucks. Our drug people think they have been paid and have the money with them.”
Paterson slammed one hand on the desk. “This pisses me off! How come all this happens on our own turf and we don’t know a goddamn thing about it?”
“Ottawa’s tip came from Edmonton.”
“Shit! Half a million bucks, out there in the snow someplace. Any names?”
“Harold Johns is the pilot. Apparently he came out here a couple of years ago after some trouble in Ontario, flying Ontario government aircraft. He punched some reporter he’d been drinking with. This happened during some minister’s special trip by government aircraft to open a hospital up north, and sort of clouded up the political publicity side of the thing, as far as the media coverage went, so he was fired.”
“We get quite a few like that, trying to lose themselves up here. They’re not usually any more trouble than anybody else. How about the others?”
“No names yet.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Make some phone calls and then maybe get the hell out of your hair.”
He grinned. “Just when I was starting to like you a little.” “We got an aircraft around here?”
“Not our own. We can call one in from Inuvik or one of the other bigger detachments when we need it. Or charter. What have you got in mind?”
What did I have in mind? A good question. Coming in here tonight, I’d been thinking of going on the fifty miles to Fort Norman tomorrow to get in on whatever search was going on by land. There’d probably be snowmobiles out to have a look and back up the air hunt by Search and Rescue, which Buster had just told me on the phone hadn’t found anything today. Tomorrow’s forecast, he’d been told, was very iffy in the way of flying weather.
But now, to me, whether I had official sanction or not, the murder came first. Everybody else might be working on it, sure, but I was the one who’d seen the murder, seen the murderer, and had also seen William Cavendish only a few hours before his father collapsed. I wondered at what point in the evening William had left Gloria and gone to see his father. And if he’d been right there when his father collapsed. I wondered where she’d been for the rest of the night and if she knew anything I should know.
“You know a William Cavendish, originally from Fort Norman?”
“Yeah. We’ve booked him once or twice, nothing violent, not a bad guy. Mainly drinks too much.”
I told the corporal about meeting him the night Morton Cavendish had collapsed and my curiosity about what happened next.
“So?”
“So I think I’ll go back to Inuvik and see what I can find out, not only about this but the other thing, too. Like, names of the other guys. After all, somebody’s got to know something.” I thought a minute. “That Canadian International 737 goes north through here about noon tomorrow—anybody flying sooner that you know about?”
He thought a minute. “Maybe. You might try Northwest Territorial, they have a sked, and there are others in and out. Buffalo Air, Aklak, Nahanni—any of them on charters probably would take you if they’re going that way and have room. Best go to the airport first thing in the morning and see what’s flying.”
I thought about it. Obviously there was no better way. “Is there a cot here I can use?”
“Yeah, a rollaway in my office. But Nancy and I got room at our place.”
“Thanks, but I’ll be on the phone a bit and maybe getting some calls back in. Cot’ll be fine.”
He got to work on his report. I picked up the phone, but didn’t learn much. The RCMP duty officer in Inuvik said that they’d found the charter on the missing aircraft to be rather irregular. The Cessna was owned by a three-plane outfit called Komatik Air, flying a Beaver, the Cessna that was missing, and a single-engined Otter. Whoever was in the office became the office staff. This Harold Johns had just left a note saying a sudden charter had come in for a flight south, he didn’t give a destination. He’d left the prepaid fee in cash but not the name of the booker. Inuvik thought maybe it had been a guy named Albert Christian. They’d had Christian’s name in connection with a drug deal they were watching and he didn’t seem to be around today. They had a man out trying to learn more.
I phoned Maxine and asked if she knew anything about the people aboard. She said Gloria knew them, they were friends of William Cavendish. Maxine didn’t know their names, but could ask Gloria when or if she came in. I thought of Maxine in that big chair she used all the time, beside the phone, in front of the TV.
That was about all I could think of to do at the moment. The corporal finished his report. The constable had gone home. I wasn’t ready for the rollaway yet. I had a big forty ouncer of Glenfiddich in my bag. I’d bought it duty-free in Chicago but it had lasted.
Normally I drink Mount Gay rum and Schweppes Ginger Ale, but I didn’t have any of either with me.
“You feel like a drink?” I asked the corporal.
“I sure as hell do. What’ve you got?”
“Some Glenfiddich.”
“Jeez, you rich or something? That stuff costs about fifty bucks up here.”
“Twenty-three dollars in the duty-free,” I said, hauling the big triangular bottle out of my bag.
He rinsed out two glasses in the bathroom just off the office. When he came back I handed him the bottle. He poured a fair drink. I did the same while he read the label, “Single malt, what the hell does that mean? ‘Produced by the fifth generation of an independent family company.’ Hey, how about that, eh? Having booze right in the family.”
We both took it straight, although it’s okay with a little water, too. After a couple of sips I said, “You glad to get away from Simpson?”
“Hell, no, I loved it there.”
“But a lot of trouble from time to time. In a lotta towns in the North you hear the people saying, ‘We don’t want to wind up like another Simpson.’”
“Well, yeah, but . . . ah, I lived there, you know, just a kid. My father managed the Bay store. I never quite got over thinking about it that way, even with all the changes.”
It was all very low-key, leading nowhere, but it was companionable.
“Like, when were you just a kid there?”
“We left in the early ’60s. Back then, you know, there were Native families living right where the government buildings are now, including the jail and our headquarters.”
I didn’t say anything. So he’d been there when the population was about one third of what it is now, and more than half at least seasonally nomadic. I’d been there once when I was a special. In those days most of those Indians and Metis worked traplines in winter not all that far from town. Very handy. Then in spring around breakup of the two rivers—that’s where the Liard runs into the Mackenzie—they’d shoot muskrats for the skins and after the ice went out they’d move to summer quarters on one of the rivers and fish and hunt until freeze-up. They had their houses handy to the rivers then and sure as hell didn’t have booze and welfare problems, at least not like now. But like in some other northern communities the easy way of doing things was all shot out from under them by the town planners. The authorities needed buildings to be authoritative from, including a new combined jail and RCMP headquarters, and the best sites, the planners decided, were all taken up by the Native homes. So naturally the Natives were moved to a part of the community that wasn’t handy to anything. In Simpson the highway from the south, brought in to serve mainly the purposes of oil exploration and other developments, did the rest. Now it was the place nobody wanted to emulate.
We finished the drinks. He declined another and rose. “Sure you won’t bunk in at our place?”
“I might be back before you know it,” I said.
“Good.”
While he was doing a few final things I made up the cot. The sheets were clean and ironed. The corporal was amused at my pajamas. “I thought you guys just stretched out in the igloo with a few branches and stuff covered with caribou skins on an ice shelf, or something.”
“Yeah, well, this is the way civilization hurts a guy.”
But I had a restless night. It was that line about the igloo. I got thinking of when I was a boy, forty years ago. Up on Herschel Island the first igloo I remember was built of driftwood. White people always thought igloos were built of snow blocks, like our inland people do, but the word iglu just means house and along the Arctic shore in some places a lot of driftwood floated in on the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers and my people naturally used it. We built some snow igloos when we were out hunting, but not when we were home.
Half awake in the cot in the corporal’s office I remembered a lot of images of after we moved across the Beaufort Sea to the mainland—the lines of kayaks on the shore when the white whales were coming in and we’d go out in the kayaks and get beyond them so we could drive them into the shallows and kill our winter’s food, we hoped. I thought of the big umiaks that we used when we were moving on the water as a family. I thought of all the families I’d lived with as a small boy after my father drowned out hunting and my mother took another man and he left her and she took another.
Once I had been loaned to another man and woman, supposed to be for a few weeks. It turned out to be two years before I got back to my own mother again. That sort of thing was not unusual. I thought of my grandma, who had bad sores on her feet and legs and had to be pulled on a sled wherever she went, winter and summer. I stayed with her on and off, several times.
I thought of school in Inuvik, like a barracks, all the other kids, like me, brought in by air from remote settlements to be educated. It was there that I learned to swear, as part of learning English. There are no swear words in our language, Inuktitut.
It was fun sometimes except when I went back to my mother in summer and it would take a while to get used to eating nothing but flesh again, seal, ducks, geese, muktuk, if the whale hunt had gone well, fish, once in a while a caribou.
One winter away from home I’d set snares for rabbits. Once when I was nearly starved I’d killed and eaten a white fox.