Gloria looked like hell, for once. I have seen her after some nights that would have killed me (booze, sex and more sex, little or no sleep) when she still looked fresh and dewy-eyed. Her hair, which was much lighter than Maxine’s, worn high off her forehead and fluffy around the sides of her face, would look as if it had just been washed, nice and soft. Her face would look as if she’d never had a drink in her life; no baggy eyes, no lines, good white teeth, and only when you looked into her eyes could you see the trouble, whatever it was that made her live on the edge the way she did. In her late teens she’d changed from an easygoing kid to one who seemed the same on the surface but couldn’t let a goodlooking guy go by without looking at him the way some men looked at sexy girls.
Today the smudgy charcoal-grey skin around her eyes made her look as if she’d used too much makeup, but closer inspection showed she had none on at all. Her hair was stringy, brushed only cursorily or not at all. On one side her hair was in that kind of tangle that comes from sleeping on it wrong. We were in a fake English pub called the Caribou Arms, of all things. It’s a wonder it wasn’t called the Duke of Inuvik.
I’d caught a ride up in the morning with Nahanni Air, took a taxi in to the CBC, went to the newsroom, and asked Maxine if she knew where I could find Gloria.
Maxine shook her head. “I’ve been phoning home. No answer.”
We both knew that Gloria had had, or was having until yesterday, or checked into on a part-time basis, the most discreet affair in the history of the North. With Morton Cavendish, who was thirty years older.
“How did she take it?” I asked.
“As if she’d been hit by a bullet herself. I’d got home and we were listening to the news when it came on about him being killed. After she stopped crying she was like a sleep-walker. Put on her clothes and went out and didn’t come back.”
The phone was ringing. Maxine answered, listened, made a note. On the staff list at CBC-Inuvik her title was news assistant, a job she’d got after getting high grades in the communications arts course at Arctic College. The idea behind the course was that some day Inuit and Dene would do most of the reporting and announcing jobs now done by non-Native imports.
In a big city her job would have been handling weather warnings, traffic foul-ups, slipping an on-air guy notes reporting something like, “Tractor-trailer jack-knifed on the Richmond ramp. Police are on the scene.” Here she kept track of scheduled and unscheduled flights, taped people who wanted to send messages to outlying settlements, typed up notices for meetings (in Inuvik, there was actually a hobbyist type of dog-team club that had outings on weekends), manned the tape machine for voice reports from local correspondents about anything from a polar bear sighting to a homicide during a weekend party at Paulatuk.
At my invitation for a beer she quickly tidied her desk. “Good idea. Gloria’s maybe at the Mackenzie.” It was only one minute’s brisk walk away, but Gloria wasn’t there. Several other people we knew were. We were invited to grab empty chairs, but didn’t. Nobody asked me directly about Morton Cavendish but there were questions in a lot of eyes. We said maybe we’d be back. We tried a couple of other places before finding her at the Caribou Arms.
She was alone and wouldn’t speak. Just sat there. Maxine sat next to her and put her arms around Gloria’s shoulders and said, “Listen, sweetie, look, we both know what you’re going through. Let us help.”
Gloria just looked at her.
I asked if she knew where I could find William Cavendish. Her eyes might have indicated she knew, but she didn’t reply.
“When you left Maxine’s with William Sunday night, did you go with him to the Mackenzie?”
Finally, she spoke. “No, I wanted to, but we went to the Eskimo Inn and he had a couple more drinks and told me to wait for him there.”
“And he went to the Mackenzie?”
“He must have, because he took his father . . .” she paused and took a deep breath . . . “took Morton to the hospital, didn’t he?”
The Caribou Arms used to be a restaurant called the Raven’s Nest. It had served good food, some of the best in the North, Arctic char and musk-ox and caribou steaks, great French fries, strong coffee, but eventually it had closed due to some dispute about the building being sold, a new owner having different plans. Not much more than a year ago he had re-opened. He sold hamburgers and steak-and-kidney pie and the place was decorated like every other ersatz English pub in Canada. Apparently you could buy the whole deal in Edmonton, fake beams and fake velvet wallpaper, fake hunting prints and old maps of London on the walls and an expert in fake English pubs to put it all together until presto, it was the Caribou Arms. A can of English beer, Double Diamond or Bass Ale or Newcastle, cost $7.50.
“How long did you wait for him?”
“It seemed like forever.”
She was wearing pants and a jacket of that stuff called acid-wash, blue with white streaks. Her blue parka with Arctic symbols on the fringe at the bottom and wolverine fur on the hood was thrown over a nearby chair. She had been drinking a vodka on the rocks, which was almost finished. When I was ordering she asked for a Coors Light. I really wanted to ask her in detail about her relationship with Morton Cavendish. Maybe if Maxine hadn’t been sitting there looking so worried, I would have.
Gloria watched me as I took a swallow of Double Diamond.
“I didn’t know you drank beer.”
“I don’t, much. But order a drink here and you have to get a triple or you can’t taste it.”
Gloria said with a faint smile, “You can feel it, though.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you were waiting for William and he didn’t come back. How long did you wait?”
“I don’t know. Long. I was just thinking to hell with it, I’d go home, he could find me there if he wanted, when Jules Bonner came along and told me to come to his place, that William would be over later, so I went with him.”
She paused briefly. “I had the impression that William had called Jules, or even gone to his place, and asked him to get me over there. When we got there Jules told me there’d been a big fight, William and his father, and Morton had collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital.”
“A fight about what?”
“I don’t know, but Jules still thought William would be along any minute.
“I got sleepy and Jules gave me a blanket on the couch and next thing I knew it was morning and the news had just come on the radio that”—again she paused and swallowed hard when she came to Morton Cavendish’s name—“Morton was in real bad shape and might have to be flown out. I felt like trying to see him, but I didn’t. Then I just stayed there. I felt rotten. I kept thinking I’d hear from William but I didn’t.”
I pressed a little.
“About the big fight Jules mentioned. Did he give you any idea at all what it was about?”
“No.”
“Any ideas?”
Deep breath again. “Every time William and his father got together they argued.”
“What about?”
She shrugged, opened her mouth, closed it, didn’t answer for a minute, then said, “Morton always wanted to know where William was getting money to live on, stuff like that. They just plain didn’t get along.”
“Was William violent with you when he was drinking?”
“Never.”
“Do you think he and his father ever came to blows. I mean, physical violence?”
She didn’t answer.
I said, “Either of you happen to know what doctor was on duty when they brought Morton in?”
Maxine nodded. “Bob Zimmer. He was quoted on the news.”
I asked Gloria if she had seen William at all since then.
She was back to shaking her head.
It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t seen him at the airport, either, where you might think he’d have gone, despite the fight with his father. He would have known that his father was being flown out.
“No idea where he went after he was at the hospital?”
Then it came in a burst, tears brimming in her eyes. “I tried all over, all day Monday. I couldn’t get Jules, even. A couple of other guys who hung out with the two of them a lot flew out that day on that flight that went down—you know, Harold Johns, well, he wasn’t really with them that much but I couldn’t find Albert Christian or Benny Batten either, because it turned out they’d gone with Harold, but of course nobody knew that until yesterday. Albert’s girlfriend, Julie, was the one who told the police who was with Harold on the flight. She was mad as hell.”
“What about?” I asked.
“Albert had taken her car without telling her and just left it out by the Komatik Air office where Harold took off.”
That was the first I had known that Johns didn’t take off from the airport. But that wasn’t unusual. These bush flying outfits often had riverside locations. That was handy in summer when they were using floats and when they switched to skis they’d do business out of the same locations. Saved money on airport office space, too. The river wasn’t solid ice everywhere right after freeze-up in the fall but now in January it would hold anything, let alone the kind of light planes Komatik Air had. I still figured Gloria knew more than she was telling me but maybe I could get it elsewhere.
I got up and said to Maxine, “See you later.”
She reached up soberly and patted my bum. “Take care.”
It was broad daylight when I left the Caribou. Three weeks ago, the month of dark days when the sun didn’t show at all had ended, and now there was about five hours of daylight. I walked down the street in sunshine and found Dr. Robert Zimmer, MD, in his office not far from the Inuvik General Hospital. In his waiting room were two little old Inuit ladies with wrinkled brown faces and toothless smiles. One was smoking a pipe. Both wore bright gingham shifts over the warm skin clothes beneath. These old ones and some of the younger Inuit, too, made the shifts themselves. They fell to about calf length and had fringed bottoms. I always think they look colorful on the street, neat and individual, dressed-up town Inuit.
The doctor looked surprised. “Matteesie! Come in.” He spoke a few words in the Inuit tongue to the old ones that meant he’d see them in a minute and they grinned and nodded. He’d been here twenty years and had a twenty-three-foot launch with fish-finding gear that amused the locals. He also hunted caribou and polar bear and had a dog team; everything but a wife, who had left him years earlier to go back to Kitchener, Ontario.
He closed the door, went behind his desk, gestured to a chair and looked at me.
“It’s about Morton Cavendish,” I said.
“Somebody said you’d been around but took the plane out yesterday, Matteesie. I thought of you when I heard that terrible business. It was on the radio that you’d been right there beside him. You back in the police?”
“Sort of I guess I never really left.”
We both laughed. It really was pretty ridiculous, but it hadn’t taken long for people here to decide I’d gone civilian, moving to Northern Affairs.
At that thought I had a momentary flash of what kind of language I could expect from Buster when he found out what I was doing. Every once in a while, too, I thought of my superiors in Northern Affairs and how they’d dither over how the Russians would react if it came out that this certified Northern Affairs man, police work all behind him, was back getting involved the way I was.
But I couldn’t do anything about that now. Maybe it would never make the papers. A cop, without portfolio. The search for the downed plane was stalled today. Bad weather a few hundred miles south, which meant Norman Wells, Fort Norman, and beyond. I’d kept track on the radio. The weather was okay for the bigger aircraft but no good for tree-hopping while looking for something on the ground. Even without being able to fly, I got the impression from the radio reports that the searchers couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t found anything or heard anything. They’d assume that the pilot would have tried to come down on an open space and if anybody was alive they’d put out colored markers and run a homing device. As far as I knew nothing yet had been seen or heard. But as soon as something was, I could get there in a matter of hours. I was keeping Buster’s orders in mind, but meanwhile—a man was entitled to a hobby, right?
“What I wanted to know,” I said, “was what kind of shape Morton was in when you first saw him at the hospital.”
“Well, to start with, he must have had an angina attack before the stroke. He’d had angina before, you know, enough that he carried nitro pills with him. In fact, he still had some nitro clutched in one hand when he was brought in. But then sometimes he ate the damn things like peanuts. He must have either taken some, or been about to take some, when he had the stroke.”
“Was he conscious?”
“Not when I first saw him. Slipped in and out several times later. He tried to speak. Seemed desperate to tell me something. I tried to get him to write it, but he couldn’t hold a pencil.”
“Would he have come out of it?”
“Well, you can never tell, sometimes the first stroke is just the start and is followed by others—but I did tell people that I thought the chances were not too bad, if we got him to a good stroke facility, like Edmonton. Might take weeks of therapy but sometimes it’s quite amazing, a guy seems totally gone, but over weeks or months, he’ll come back.”
“Anything else you can tell me? About him, or William, or whatever?”
“When Morton was brought in the son was a little loaded, I’d guess. Smelled of booze, anyway. Scared, but then who wouldn’t be, seeing his father’s eyes rolling around like a pinball machine when he tried to speak? Morton had a big bruise on his forehead. I asked William about it and he seemed to be trying to think when it had happened, but he didn’t answer.”
“Was it consistent with a fall?”
“Could be.”
“Or being hit? Slugged?”
“Well, hell,” the doctor said slowly, “yeah, I guess so . . .” He looked at me more sharply. “Yeah, I guess so. I guess that’s all pretty academic, now. From what I hear, I guess the bruise wouldn’t show any more.”
When I left there I thought I’d better check in at RCMP headquarters. The RCMP “G” division covers the whole North, with about 240 men in four sub-divisions and thirty-nine local detachments, mostly headed by a corporal or a sergeant. The Inuvik sub has something close to sixty officers, being one of the busiest subs anywhere. The inspector was an old friend, Ted Huff. Damn near a foot taller than me. Very straight-ahead officer. But when I walked in to the ground floor of the two-storey headquarters building and three or four officers had finished making heavy jokes about me and the civil service, I found out that the inspector had taken the police Twin Otter over to Banks Island that morning for the christening of the first child of the corporal in charge of the Sachs Harbour detachment.
“It’s sort of a mercy flight,” one constable said. “Young Lester over there, his wife had a bad time giving birth and her parents down in Kingston were all worried. They tried for weeks to get her to fly back to civilization with the baby, I guess they figure Kingston is pretty civilized. She’s a good type and stood them off. But it is lonely at Sachs, you know, her in the North for the first time, more housebound than ever because of the kid. I think the inspector just figured it was a nice day and he’d go over there and show that the brass cares.”
He’d be back in an hour, they figured. I said I’d be back about the same time. In front of the Mackenzie Hotel a couple of taxis sat with their engines running.
“Know where Komatik Air hangs out?” I asked the first driver.
“Sure do. Hop in.”
I got in the front seat. In the North, a passenger is thought to be from Toronto if he chooses to ride in the back seat when he could be up with the driver.
This one looked at me closely. He was middle-aged, originally German, and had been here since 1962 that I knew of. “Hey, you’re that guy used to be the special, eh? Matteesie, got to be famous since you left, eh?”
I try not to let it go to my head.
He made a skidding turn to head west on Distributor Street toward the river, back past police headquarters and Arctic College. He turned right at Franklin and soon was in streets I’d once known well from taking drunk girls home and picking up guys for beating up wives, and so on. Once or twice a murder. Natives like to be by a river. This area by the riverbank had become their part of town, Slavey and Loucheux and Eskimos. Sometimes in those early days there’d be ten to a one-room shack, and like as not some girl who had taken secretarial training and got a government job would get up in the morning and have to step over the sleeping people to dress and then walk a mile or so to work, where she’d compete with white girls who only had to walk through a heated tunnel from their subsidized apartments to get to the office. Sometimes, too, when these same Native girls faced going back to the crowded shack at night they went to the beer parlor at the Mackenzie instead. It had been a great system for transforming eager teenagers into twenty-seven-year-old hags.
Komatik Air’s office was in an old prefabricated building called a 512 because that was their square footage. A lot were shipped in when the town was created in the early 1950s. Yellow light shone faintly from a window. A pickup truck stood by the door, with the engine plugged in to an electric cord leading to an outlet on the building’s outer wall.
A weather-worn Beaver was out on the ice near the shore, with a tarpaulin draped over its engine like a tent. There’d be a heat-pot in there to keep the engine from freezing up. The pilot like as not would have an old felt hat tucked away inside the cabin for straining gasoline when he had to gas up from some cache of a few dozen barrels on the shores of some frozen lake. I told the driver to wait, and knocked on the door.
A voice called, “It’s open.”
The man behind the desk was an Inuk, about my size, five feet six, and with a face that lit up like a beacon.
“Matteesie!”
“Thomasee!”
He came around the desk a little shyly because I’d been gone a long time and he wouldn’t be as sure as he once had been. He stopped a few feet from me. “I haven’t seen you since the time I picked you up with that old trapper away out on the Barrens south of Paulatuk! Him and his furs and that Loucheux woman he lived with, dead as a white girl’s ass.” Abruptly he looked stricken. “Jeez, I’m sorry, Matteesie. I forgot your wife is . . .”
Then we hugged one another. Thomasee Nuniviak. About my age. Born around Letty Harbour on the Arctic shore and raised like I had been, more muktuk than caribou. We’d been at school here together. He’d gone to Yellowknife for the engine course and worked for others around aircraft and then got his pilot’s license. He ran water into a kettle and plugged it in. We caught up. It was a little while before I asked, “Heard anything about your aircraft?”
He shook his head. “Not a damn thing. That what you’re here about? I heard you’re with Northern Affairs now. You hear anything?”
“No. But I’m interested.” I told him why, the Harold Johns connection. “I’m told he didn’t say where he was going.”
“Damn right he didn’t. I’d like to ask him why.”
He busied himself with mugs and teabags. The water boiled. He poured mine first and politely shoved over a can of condensed milk that had two holes punched in the top. I added some to the tea.
“Did he, uh, goof off like this often?”
“Never before. Good pilot. No problems with Harold at all.” He paused. “Policee been down, too, asking the same. The only thing I can think is he didn’t know exactly where he was going to end up. Like maybe this Albert Christian comes in and says he wants to go to Arctic Red and somewhere else from there, he’ll let Harold know at Arctic Red, so Harold would figure he could phone when he got there and tell me what was going on.”
“But he never called.”
“No, but hell, you know, where he got to, if it’s south of Fort Norman, there ain’t many goddamn phone booths! Anyway, all I can do is hope.”
“You know the guys he took, Batten and Christian?”
He pursed his lips and let out a long hiss of air. “That’s what bothers me. I don’t know Batten except to see. But Christian had done one or two trips with us before, down to Wrigley once, another time to Old Crow. Don’t know exactly what for. But we don’t generally ask. A guy’s got money and wants a flight, we take him, maybe bring him back. You know how it is.” He grinned. “That girl whose car Christian left here, she was some mad. She would’ve killed him. Didn’t plug in her car, didn’t leave a note, nothing. They must have been in a hurry, is all I can figure.”
“How far could they get without refueling?”
He didn’t have a useful answer. “You know, depends on flying conditions. But he knew where the gas caches are.”
Obviously that was the least of his worries. It seemed he trusted Harold Johns.
“The police think Christian and Batten have been bringing in drugs. Maybe even on one of your flights.”
He looked anxious. “The policee who was here asked questions that seemed to lead in that direction. All new to me. But it worries me. For sure.”
“How about survival gear?”
He answered as I expected. It was in every plane. A guy could lose his license if it wasn’t. The standard pack was a two-layer tent, primus stove, axe, snow knife for making an igloo, one Arctic-grade sleeping bag per passenger and pilot, watertight match container, candles, dried food, extra parkas if passengers didn’t have their own, a rifle. If you’re not hurt when you go down, you can hang out safely as long as you stay put. The cold wasn’t as bad as the wind but basically you had to stop loss of body heat. A tent or an aircraft cabin would be shelter enough. Even a candle will heat up an enclosed space.
At least I knew a little more. And the contact might somehow help later. I finished my tea and told him I was going to Fort Norman and I’d phone him if I learned anything important. He regretted that I didn’t have time to sit and talk. I was regretful, too. I was getting to be so damn efficient, no longer operating on what some people call northern time. Meaning time doesn’t mean anything. Have to watch that.
“Next time,” he said as I was leaving, “stay longer. I’ll always drive you back uptown. You don’t have to have a taxi waiting like a white man.” I accepted the rebuke.
It was past four, the sun getting low. “Inspector Huff is back,” the receptionist called as I headed upstairs to Ted’s big office on the second floor. He crushed a few small bones in my hand to indicate that he was glad to see me. We went back a long way, all the way to basic training in Regina. We were friends but not like the “Matteesie!” and “Thomasee!” of a short time earlier; the same rank, but in my head I deferred to him because while I had always been as close to a lone wolf as an officer in the Mounties can be, he was officer commanding five dozen good, or mostly good, people. I still thought of myself as plain Matteesie and thought of him as The Inspector. He knew none of this. I didn’t envy him but I think sometimes he envied me.
Now, while his secretary brought coffee, Ted enthused about his trip to Banks Island. The corporal’s wife had been so pleased at his surprise visit that after the christening he’d taken her out in the Twin Otter to see some of the musk-ox herds he’d seen on the way in only a few minutes from Sachs Harbour. “Never saw so many! Every place you look—musk-ox! It’s old stuff to you and me but when we’d fly over a herd and they’d get scared and get in a circle facing out to protect the young in the middle, it was something new for that young lady. Glad I went.”
Then he waited for me to open the bidding.
I didn’t really have to specify what I was there for. He knew that Buster had called me originally about the missing plane. My involvement at the time of the murder, he knew as well. I got right to it.
“I don’t want you to think I’m meddling,” I said.
He laughed. “Once a cop . . .”
I filled him in on who I’d talked to, and then: “I’d really like to talk to William Cavendish.” I was hoping he’d know more about William’s whereabouts than I did, and I was right. To a point.
“So would I. Last night after we got word about the murder we tried all the bars, eating places, people he knew. Everybody said they hadn’t seen him. Of course, some of them must have been lying. He had to be here somewhere. In hindsight, we should have put a man at the airport. He flew out on Nahanni this morning with a ticket for Fort Norman.” Ted looked at me with a grin. “I guess this is all on Northern Affairs business, eh?”
“Oh, sure,” I said.
He didn’t ask any more questions, but I did. A suspicion suddenly began rattling around in my head looking for a way out. It had been born as abruptly as Ted saying where William had been heading that morning by Nahanni Air—the same place where a plane carrying his friends might have gone down without sending out any emergency signals.
“Do you think there’s a connection between what happened to Morton Cavendish and those guys that took off in that Cessna that’s down?”
“Same old Matteesie,” he said. A compliment, I’m almost sure.
“Well?”
“Maybe not directly,” he said. “But William was thick with the two guys Johns flew out of here. In fact, if they were making a run for it with their bankroll as Edmonton tells us, I was surprised that William wasn’t with them. Hours after they flew out we got word that would have had us pick four of them up. But of course they actually left two guys behind, at least so far. So we held off.”
“Left behind William and who else, Jules Bonner?”
He winced. “Jesus. How’d you know about that poisonous little bastard?”
I told him about Bonner being sent by William to look after Gloria the night Morton was stricken, and being in the airport making phone calls the day I left. I knew they might have been nothing, might have been to a girl friend or somebody not connected at all to the rest. But somebody had had to line up a hit man, even if only on spec, and later let him know what flight to do it on. I wondered if the phone company could help. Didn’t think so, with a pay phone, but worth a try.
There was something else I wanted to think about further. I’m not usually secretive, even about theories, when I’m dealing with someone who might need only a shred of fact or fancy to fit into other facts or fancies and get nearer to an answer, but for now I’d gone about as far as I wanted to go.
“You got any theories about the murder?” I asked.
Ted shook his head. “Morton had enemies, of course, people who think he sold out on land claims here and there, or others who think he’s been too inflexible. But as far as we know they’re only people who go to meetings and argue. Not dangerous. As far as I can gather there was nothing he’d done to anybody that would get a professional hit man sent in from somewhere.” He paused. “Well, and there’s this. Women liked him. That’s one thing we’re following up, looking for jealous husbands or whatever. There’d been stories about this conference or that, people with a lot in common being together for several days, doing a little drinking at nights. Things do happen, like people getting so friendly they go to bed together.”
“It’s got a lot of ragged edges,” I agreed, rather redundantly.
But women? I knew the reputation. Handsome widower, well known, popular issues, I’d seen him surrounded by some pretty good looking women around the Chateau Laurier at Ottawa conferences I’ve been at. I suppose some people would think that he was a womanizer. Either that, or a lot of the women he ran into were manizers, if that’s a word, and it probably should be.
I didn’t mention Gloria yet. If anybody was going to question her seriously, I wanted it to be me.
Ted shrugged and picked up what he’d been saying. “But that’s just guessing. Until we come up with a motive, what we seem to have is a murder, period, plus a coincidence that some drug dealers his son had been thick with have gone off without taking the son along, maybe even doing him out of his split. Maybe William was being double-crossed, maybe Jules Bonner was, too, but how is that going to get his father killed?”
At that point, looking thoughtful, he picked up a pencil and made a note. I couldn’t read it.
We sat for another minute or two. I was thinking again about Bonner and his phone calls from the airport. The only other key I could think of was William Cavendish.
“I take it you’re fairly sure that the guys who flew out had their bankroll with them?” I asked.
“I don’t know what else they’d do. We know a deal was made. We knew the money came in and the drugs went out.”
That line surprised me. Drugs going out? Before I could ask, Ted gave the answer.
“Unfortunately we didn’t know how it was being done until it was done. The tip actually came from Texas, if you can believe it. We’ve got some of our people in the US now, as you probably know, working with the US Drug Enforcement Agency. It seems a guy flying an oil company long-range executive jet was loading a shipment of assorted illegal substances, as they call them now, mostly hash, a little cocaine, for a flight he regularly made up here, and he got busted along with one of his suppliers. One of the ground crew apparently got religion and blew the whistle. This had been going on for at least three trips, flying a lot of stuff north, setting down on a remote landing strip to drop the stuff where it would be picked up by the gang working this end.”
Easy to see it all happening. Our border is like a sieve. There’s no way every aircraft of executive size or smaller can be kept track of every inch of its flight plan. I thought right away of the old Canol road. When the Americans got worried in 1942 that the Japanese would shut off the coast as a supply route to US forces in Alaska, they’d built this highway and pipeline starting across the river from Norman Wells and leading through the mountains to Whitehorse in the Yukon. The Canol project was abandoned when the war ended and is pretty near impassable now, except for hikers in summer and all-terrain vehicles in winter. But it had lots of small air strips that could be cleaned up enough to land for a few minutes, transfer the contraband to a light plane or ATV and take off again for the legal destination. Maybe even one like Inuvik, with a customs office.
“Once in the North and safe,” Ted went on, “anybody could take it south in planes, trucks, boats, whatever the hell you’ve got. They’d turn it over for cash in Edmonton, Calgary, Winnipeg, then come back here with money for the next shipment.” He grinned. “Nobody sniffs or searches baggage when a guy is going from Norman Wells to Edmonton.”
The idea of the North supplying the south with drugs struck me as pretty ingenious. And also a little funny. “Who ran the show?”
“Seems to have been Albert Christian. He’s the really smart one of the four, one of those guys people instinctively like, or can be influenced by. Call it charisma, if he’d been a politician. Makes friends and influences people. Seemed to have money. Talked about looking for a place to set up a flyin hunt and fish camp or some other tourist-oriented business. But if so, was still looking.”
“Where’s he from?”
“He said Winnipeg. We’re checking that now, because Winnipeg was one of the drug destinations from up here.”
“What about the pilot?”
“We just don’t know. A cut above the other guys in education, manners, if that means anything. Early thirties. I know about the trouble he was in back east. But he’s been clean as far as we’re concerned.”
“And the other guy that flew out with him, Benny Batten?”
“Used to be a football player. A centre, mostly. Had a shot with Green Bay about twenty years ago, just out of college, but mainly played for Canadian clubs, including about two games with Edmonton ten years ago before they cut him and he came here to work in construction. He did take work—usually as a big equipment driver, bulldozers and so on. Same as William. We had Batten once for punching out an American geologist who called him a no-talent palooka. I think he’d be mainly just muscle. Bonner did casual white collar work—clerking at the Bay and elsewhere. We think Bonner did some of the thinking and handled some contacts along the line, maybe he and William together. Actual dealing up here would be nothing. Too risky for their main operation. Not enough drug users in the Territories to support much of a drug operation. The known dribbles in Inuvik, Yellowknife, Norman Wells were mostly connected to whites. Our drug people used to figure any drugs we came across were being brought in mostly by users. Now it’s obvious the big money was in getting major stuff flown in here the way I’ve said, and then shipping south.”
It all sounded reasonable. If true, it explained why the downed aircraft hadn’t put out markers and radio signals. It might even explain why Christian and Batten had taken a powder so suddenly: that they’d suspected strongly, or been tipped, that the police were closing in. If that was true and any of them were left alive, they’d know that a rescue would send them right back into the arms of the RCMP.
But unless there’d been a police leak, what could have scared them to the extent of feeling their only hope was to get the hell out of here somewhere and split up and try to lose themselves down south?
“So why do you figure that only half the gang went out with the money?” I asked. “Or three fifths of the gang if Johns is in on it.”
“You got me,” Ted said. “One possible theory is that they fought among themselves over something, maybe even over who could have been responsible for blowing the whistle on them. Another could be that at the last moment there was something left to be done around here.”
“Such as bumping off Morton Cavendish?”
“Could be. But I sure as hell can’t figure out where he’d be mixed up in the thing at all.”
“Would NorthwestTel have any way of checking if Bonner phoned long distance from the airport and if so, where to?”
Ted grinned, picked up the piece of paper he’d made the note on, and held it up so I could see. “Check NorthwesTel. Question Bonner Re airport calls.”
There was a silence. Like Kansas City in the song from Oklahoma, we’d gone about as far as we could go.
Then he looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes. “So where does your Northern Affairs business take you next, Matteesie?”