When I got back to the detachment a little after ten the grey dawn was breaking and the snow thinning out. Two phone messages were waiting. One was timed 9:05, a few minutes after I’d left to see No Legs. It read: Call Inspector Ted Huff RCMP Inuvik. The other, timed three minutes later, was for me to call Maxine at the CBC.
I decided not to take them in order. Except when I was at her place and she might call to say she was just leaving the office and was there anything I needed, Maxine had never called me before, anytime, anywhere. No long-distance chit-chats for her even though, as she once confessed in an uncharacteristic moment, she’d often hope I’d call her. Pursuing me as if we were married or betrothed or even something lower on the Richter scale was not part of her style. I could only hope this variance from the norm was because of some super good news she had to impart. I dialed the CBC number.
She did not have super good news. When she heard my voice she said fervently, “Thank God!”
Before I had a chance to ask what we were thanking Him for, she said, “Gloria’s got to talk to you. She started to try to get you last night but . . .”
She sounded more upset than I’d ever known her to be.
“But what?”
“She didn’t know where you were, exactly, so made the call person-to-person figuring NorthwesTel could track you down. When she was spelling your name for the operator I guess Jules Bonner must have arrived outside our door. Next thing she knew, he kicked the door open and yelled that he’d heard who she was calling and grabbed the phone from her and hung up. Then he started bashing her around, which is about where I came in . . .”
Her voice sort of broke up and she was silent for a few seconds except for a muffled “Damn!” as she got control. “She told me they’d had an argument at his place a little earlier. She’d told him that now Morton was dead anyway, she wished she’d talked to you before you left. When she said that, he threatened her and must have followed when she left. When I got home from work I could hear this Jesus uproar and when I got in there he was beating the hell out of her.”
“With all the noise, wasn’t there any neighbour or somebody who’d help?”
After a pause, she said, “It wasn’t necessary.”
“You mean you scared him off? Right away?”
“Not right away. The bastard had to come to, first.”
“Whaddaya mean, come to?”
“I knocked him out, or pretty near. Down, anyway.”
“Jesus! How?”
“I hit him with one of my skis.”
Maxine is about five feet zero. I’d never kid her again about leaving her skis in the front hall.
“While I was trying to get Gloria back together he took off. I didn’t try to stop him. I wanted to call the Mounties, but she was pretty well in hysterics and anyway said she’d refuse flat to talk to them and pretty soon it didn’t matter much . . .”
Didn’t matter much? I thought it but didn’t say it.
“I was in the bathroom for just a couple of minutes and when I came down that new bottle of vodka you left was half gone and she was chug-a-lugging it. I had to wrestle her for it and then carry her to bed. But I phoned the inspector this morning from here in the office. He told me that they’d been looking for Jules on something else, he didn’t tell me what, left messages and so on, but hadn’t caught up to him.”
“I sure wish we’d been able to get on this last night,” I said.
She properly did not interpret this as a criticism. That makes her the opposite of the more common type, who live on imagined slights. I think of Maxine as lovable for this and other reasons. “Sure, but anyway she’s okay this morning.” Pause. “If being scared half to death can be called okay.”
“What scares her now? Bonner’ll know he’s in trouble. He won’t show up there again.”
No joking now. “One of the things he told her while he was beating her up was that if she spilled her guts to you, the same thing would happen to her that happened to Morton Cavendish.”
I felt the menace like a shiver.
“We could have tried harder or longer to get you last night, sure. But my life can’t . . .” She abandoned that in mid-sentence. I was pretty sure she had started to say that her life couldn’t be predicated on leaning on me, and then decided that would go without saying and therefore was better unsaid. “When we did try to get you this morning, Nicky Jerome told us to try Bear Lodge. The guy checked your room and said you’d gone out. Anyway, she still wants to talk to you. You having any luck with William?”
I said, “Not so’s you’d notice it. Can’t even find him. But I finally found someone who admits seeing him. Where’s Gloria now?”
“At home with all the doors locked.”
“I’ll call her,” I said. “I had a call from the inspector this morning but haven’t returned it. Probably about the same thing.”
“When you call her,” she said, “let it ring twice and then cut it off and call again. Otherwise she won’t answer.”
I hung up, pondering. Bonner didn’t strike me as the physical kind even with someone he outweighed, and a woman at that. He must have the heat on him hard. But where from? Could what Gloria knew be so drastic that even a career non-combatant like Bonner would be pushed into threatening her life?
Ted answered his phone on the first ring after the switchboard announced me.
“Matteesie, we got something going here,” he said.
I told him that I’d been talking to Maxine and had heard about Bonner clobbering Gloria and threatening her life if she talked to me.
“What do you think she knows?”
“I don’t know until we talk to her.”
“She won’t answer the phone or the door,” he said. “What we’ve done after Maxine called is have a car parked outside the house, a plain car belonging to one of our people. There’s a guy in it. If Bonner shows up we take him. We want to ask him about those airport phone calls, anyway. Couldn’t find him, all day yesterday. If Gloria tries to leave we take her into protective custody.”
“I’ll call her and call you back.”
“What if she doesn’t answer?”
“She’ll answer. She and Maxine have a code. I’ll let you know what she says right away.” I hung up before he could ask me what the code was. I could imagine him yelling, “Hey! Matteesie!” and then banging up the phone, maybe angry, but I could survive that.
The phone in Maxine’s house rang twice. I cut it off and dialed again. When Gloria answered I could hardly tell it was her voice.
“It’s Matteesie,” I said.
“Oh, God, Matteesie,” she said. “It’s about Morton. I wish I’d been able to talk to you about that before you left.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She said brokenly, “I didn’t have the guts. I hadn’t put it all together.”
I made my voice as kind and reassuring as I could though I didn’t feel kind and reassuring at all, I felt close to something important, and wished I was there. Sometimes questioning someone who is near hysterics works if you can be there and keep everything calm, let it come out. While dialing, I’d switched on the tape machine to record the call. I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t want to spook her any more than she already was. The part of me that belongs to the police made that decision easy enough. I’d keep the tape myself until I figured out what to do with it.
She talked and I asked soft questions and she answered, sometimes slowly, but she answered. I had to fill in some parts from my imagination, but that wasn’t hard. It all took a while because sometimes she wailed and stopped and couldn’t go on. She wasn’t a rock, like Maxine.
As we talked, Pengelly came in and looked at me curiously and then wrote me a note: “There’s a woman teacher who sent a note to me, she’s trying to get in touch with you. Something about a dog team.”
He raised his eyebrows in a question.
I made the kind of a motion an umpire uses when he’s signaling that a base runner is safe at first. It was the best I could do on short notice.
The tape kept on rolling. Words, silences, the odd sob, from her; from me mmmhmmns, prompting here and there, soft questions. When I thought I had all I was likely to get I told her to sit tight, try to stay calm, Maxine would be home soon in her lunch hour, and also told her about the unmarked car standing by and that she was to phone me here at the Fort Norman detachment if she remembered anything more.
I gave her the phone number and in case she didn’t write it down reminded her that it’s also in the phone book.
She sighed at the end, “I feel better now, Matteesie. But I’m so sorry. Maybe I could have helped. Maybe I could have stopped something . . .”
She sounded as if she might be about to cry again but if so there wasn’t much I could do.
As I hung up Pengelly and Nicky Jerome were hanging on my every soft word, trying to figure it out. They’d have to wait. I dialed Inuvik. “I talked to Gloria and got it on tape,” I told Ted. “I’d better replay it for you so you can tape it.”
“Give me the gist first. The tape I’ll listen to later.”
Right away I had to make a decision about Gloria’s right to some personal privacy. But the stakes were high enough that I figured personal privacy didn’t apply right now. “I don’t know whether you were aware, but Gloria and Morton had been seeing quite a bit of each other—”
“You mean lovers? No, I wasn’t aware.”
Lovers was the term, all right, but I questioned to myself how serious Morton had been. Not as serious as Gloria, I knew that damn welt because as flaky as she was, she had this thing about being trusting and whole-hearted when she went to bed with anybody, seeing nothing but rosy futures ahead. I remembered that line of Maxine’s about the two times Gloria had gone to Edmonton thinking she was going to be married.
“Yeah, lovers,” I said, but still wanted to get in my slight cavil. “He insisted on being careful that they meet only in private, which—after all he’s a widower—makes me wonder how serious it was from his side. We can’t be sure exactly what kind of game he was playing with her, you know, lots old enough to be her father, if that matters, which it probably doesn’t, but she thought the sun shone out of him, and that’s what started this whole goddamn thing. In Inuvik, he’d get a room at the Mackenzie or sometimes the Finto or the Inuvik Inn, and they managed it without drawing attention. Also, a couple of times she’d go to where there was some conference that he was at.
“Last Saturday when he was there for some meeting or other, after it was over they met in a room at the Finto and when they woke up pretty early, after a while he started quizzing her about if she used drugs, and if so to cool it because he’d heard in Edmonton from somebody in the know that there was a big drug bust coming up in Inuvik.”
“Shit!” Ted said.
“Yeah, so much for security. But to look at it another way, all he’s doing is warning somebody he cared for. He wasn’t going out and spreading the word in a way that might have blown the whole thing—”
“You mean even quicker than it was.”
“Well, there’s that. But one thing Morton didn’t have was names.”
“Thank God for small mercies,”
“Yeah, but here’s the part that’ll kill you: when he’s laying it on real thick about how she’s got to watch herself, be careful who she associates with, because this ring is going to be smashed, etcetera, etcetera, she starts to cry.”
There was a silence. Ted didn’t need to hear more from me. “Oh, Jesus, no!” he groaned, “She knows who the guys are, or some of them, at least William, and thinks she should warn Morton?”
“Yeah. She didn’t know any details, she told me, like where the stuff was coming from or where it was going, but one time when she was at Bonner’s place and they thought she was asleep, she heard William telling Bonner that he wanted a bigger cut, and Bonner was to tell Christian that if he didn’t get better paydays, to count him out.
“Anyway, knowing what a blow it would be to Morton when he found that William was one of the guys to be picked up, she thought she should tell him. She says she only told him about William, thinking he could maybe get William disconnected in time. But what did happen surprised her. The way she described it is that he went very quiet. They were in bed. He got up and put on a dressing gown and turned the lights on. He thanked her but did not kiss her—‘I had to kiss him,’ she said, ‘but he just stood there, not mad, not unkind, just sort of gone somewhere’ is the way she put it. He did ask her not to mention this to anyone, but said nothing more—nothing about seeing her again, seeing William, what he was going to do, anything.”
We both had ideas about what happened next. For all Morton’s dead calm when he got the bad news from Gloria, maybe he hadn’t yet taken it in and even when he did, might somehow have hoped that she had made a mistake. I don’t know when it was that he decided to confront William and find out for himself, but that afternoon he called William’s place and left a message on the answering machine telling William to come to see him at the Mackenzie Hotel.
“Gloria told me that,” I said. “William had told her. Incidentally, Gloria was fairly good friends with William, but nothing more. She got a little indignant when I asked if she and William ever slept together, said there was no way she’d do that with Morton’s son.”
“Maybe she saw herself more as William’s stepmother,” Ted said drily.
I laughed. Had to. She wasn’t that flaky.
“But anyway, that afternoon, last Sunday, she and William had some drinks, at Bonner’s place. A lot of drinks. Some time in there apparently William checked his phone messages—his apartment is only a couple of minutes away—and found that his father was looking for him to come to the Mackenzie.
“When I met the two of them at Maxine’s around eight they were both walking pretty crooked but it was only later when they went downtown for something to eat and more drinks that William told her about his father’s message and that he had to go and see Morton at the Mackenzie.
“She knew what it was likely about, but he didn’t, of course, and complained that every time he and Morton got together they’d argue, especially when one or the other was half cut. He told Gloria he had half a mind just to ignore the message, say he never got it, and hope Morton would go away. But he didn’t ignore it. He went.
“From then on, it’s partly her guesswork, but you gotta figure she knew them both pretty well, William was drunk when he left her in the bar and it was late in the evening so probably Morton had had some, too. She figures that when William arrived, Morton probably just asked the question and then, however the answer went, there was a huge shouting match, maybe even some shoving, and sometime along there Morton collapsed. But meanwhile just his question, the way he’d have put it, drug gang and so on, would have alerted William. He must have been beside himself, certainly not wanting his father to die, but knowing that only a few minutes of consciousness could do a lot of damage to everyone involved if his father decided that way. We just don’t know what was in the mind of either of them.
“From the hospital William went to Bonner’s place. Gloria was there, but had passed out in a bedroom upstairs. She didn’t even know William had been there, until morning. But I think we have to figure that William told Bonner right away, this would be sometime after midnight, that his father knew enough to blow the whistle on them. Then Bonner would get word to Christian—”
“And the balloon goes up,” Ted said. “Goddamn.”
I was remembering the news reports Monday saying that Morton, although conscious for brief intervals, was in critical condition. Doc Zimmer had told me that around noon Bonner called and was told in what would be the Doc’s most reassuring tones, thinking it was going to be passed on to William, that even though Morton couldn’t speak or write right now in his brief periods of consciousness, he might recover with the kind of care he could get at the stroke facility in Edmonton.
“That must have been when murder first got on the rails as a possibility,” the inspector said softly.
Well, people have been killed for less; and probably with less trouble, come to think of it. Christian must have known exactly where to turn for a hit man. Serious drug guys have that in reserve, just in case. They learned it from the Colombians. God knows there are enough drug-related killings to indicate that anybody in the racket must know where the hired gun types are to be found, at short notice. I don’t have to put my collar on backwards to tell a continent brought up on “Miami Vice” that the drug business isn’t all nice guys with ponytails and granny glasses listening to their old folkie records. Even though anybody like Christian running drugs from Texas to the Arctic and then back to southern Canada would be fairly small potatoes, well below the enterprise’s chief executive officer, he’d have to be able to act when threatened. Still, it had never really seemed likely to me before that in the Mackenzie River Valley it could happen this fast.
Now I did think of the simple logistics of lining up a contract killer familiar with both handguns and snowmobiles, briefing him in a fairly substantial way, and having the job done between one night and the next. Central Casting would have thrown up its hands and said, “You’ve gotta be kidding.”
It would help if he knew the Norman Wells airport setup, but it wasn’t necessary: all the other four knew. And there had been lots of money to offer. Fifty thousand, say, could get many a nasty thing done.
Christian would have known that as long as Morton was in hospital, bumping him off and getting away with it would be just about impossible. But even on Monday noon everybody was being quite open at the hospital about Morton maybe being moved. That would give Christian, if he was calling all the shots, the idea that bumping him off at Norman Wells was possible. But because he wasn’t going to be there, he would tell Bonner everything to do; to keep a close check on Morton’s condition, when he’d be moved, how, and when to make the phone call to put into effect what Christian already had decided they’d do, maybe even making the arrangements on spec.
I’d been thinking all that to myself. This phone call had been like a conference, with silences. Now I said the obvious. “He must have known somebody to call who could get to Norman Wells Tuesday before the first flight that could carry Morton.”
“Then as a safety backup,” Ted said, “he decided he and Batten would get out right away, Monday afternoon, with the money, thinking it would be easy enough to come back if Morton died naturally, or if murdering him took the heat off. It all figures, even the part about leaving William and Bonner behind. Not a bad plan. They’d have no drugs, no large amounts of money, really not a hell of a lot we could hang a charge on. We had to catch them with evidence or there was no goddamn case. We didn’t know then about the likelihood of half a million bucks.”
We’d pretty well covered it all, except, as I put in, “The only hitch being that on the flight out they seem to have disappeared out in the bush somewhere, maybe dead for all we know. Or maybe alive, figuring out their next move.”
I still didn’t mention my theory that maybe they were waiting for the murderer to show up and then all go together.
A few seconds of silence ensued before he sighed, “Well, I guess that’s it, Matteesie, except for finding the bastards. We can hold Bonner on the assault business with Gloria when we catch up to him. But until the search planes can get into the air again, which looks like tomorrow, from the forecast, we’re up the creek on Christian and Batten. And what about William?”
The inspector’s question was still hanging there when a woman came into the detachment office, shoving back her parka hood. She was young, fit-looking, somehow like one of those women who run, not jog, a few miles a day. When I heard her ask for me, I had an idea she was the dog-team lady. She had a very determined expression.
I answered Ted’s question about William. “Having trouble catching up to him, too. Keep you informed.”
“Please do that.”
I also decided not to tell him my dog-team idea right then, but hung up and went over to the counter, smiling my best smile.
She was smiling, too. I soon found that she almost always smiled. It had nothing to do with having a kindly disposition. “I’m Edie McDonald,” she said. “I teach at the Chief Albert Wright School and have a dog team, as I believe you’ve heard.”
I liked her looks. Good mouth, no makeup, curly brown hair cut short but not too short. A big nose. Once I read that people with big noses are almost invariably forceful and rather prying, which might be the derivation of the derogatory tone one uses when referring to people who stick their noses into things. Until I got to know Edie McDonald I thought that was probably just an old wives’ tale, like women being the weaker sex.
I also soon found that most of the time, no matter how tough she was being, she smiled, putting people off guard and leading them to think of her as that nice Edie McDonald. Until they found out differently.
“That man with no legs came over to the school a little while ago and said you were interested in borrowing my dog team for some important police business,” she said.
“That’s No Legs Manicoche,” I said, figuring she should know his name. Did I say I liked her smile? Nice big white teeth. She seemed very much the co-operative type. Might even think I was cute.
“No Legs. Very descriptive,” she said, smiling at me winningly. “Imaginative, even. I used to know a man with only one leg, but they called him Stumpy, which I thought was not very precise.”
I like chatty women. Actually, I know a lot of them,
“Anyway,” she said. “About my dog team, the answer is, no bloody way.”
I’m afraid I stared. I also spluttered. It is somewhat of a tradition in the north that people pull together, help one another, trust the police not to ask favors unless they are important. A stranger appears out of the blizzard and you share what you have to eat and drink.
Edie McDonald was not like that at all.
“This probably surprises you,” she said.
“Yes, it does,” I said. It was no trouble to look hurt. I felt hurt. “I’m here on a murder investigation. There’s a man I have to question who has gone off into the bush south of here on a snowmobile. I don’t know where he was heading so I don’t know where to go to look for him. But I know that a good dog team has a lot of advantages in a search like that.”
“They’re a hell of a lot quieter than a snowmobile,” she said.
“Right.”
“And they tend to go where someone else has been. I mean, left to their own instincts they like to follow a trail if there is one, which there won’t be much of after all this wind and snow.”
I agreed with that, too. So I knew that any pitches I could make she already knew and didn’t have to be told.
“A good man has been killed,” I said, and even that seemed to come out lamely. “His son has disappeared and might be in trouble himself. I just thought you might like to help.”
Talk about lame. I could catch out of the corner of my eye that Pengelly was trying to hide a smile. Nicky Jerome wasn’t even trying to hide his. They must have run into Edie McDonald before.
“Let me tell you,” she said, never ceasing to smile. “When I first came north, I didn’t know my ass from third base. I also got bored to death. I almost even took up knitting so I’d have something to do besides drink and deal with guys making passes at me. I mean, I could have stayed in Calgary and done all that.”
I thought of remarking that I imagined she would be very good at it and no doubt, with her looks, would have lots of practice.
I might have said that to some women. But it would not be smart, I felt, to say it to this one.
Just as well. “That was four years ago,” she said. “Then I decided, screw this. I’d always had dogs at home. Show dogs. Show dogs were no use here, some bloody husky would eat them, and then I read an ad in News North. Six-dog team for sale. Easy terms to responsible person. I went to have a look. They were skin and bones, they always cost a lot to feed, but at least the guy who owned them had done the best he could until he realized he really couldn’t afford them, what with his wife having to stop work when she had a baby.”
There she smiled brilliantly. “‘It’s an ill wind’ . . . anyway I bought them, along with some harness and a broken-down komatik.”
“And you got them in shape,” I said winningly. Any compliment in a storm. “What did you feed them?”
“Frozen fish. You can get them in Inuvik at a dollar per fish. Then I bought a good pickup in Edmonton and drove it to Inuvik over the Dempster Highway and fitted it up so that I had six dog cages in the bed of the truck. The fixed-up komatik rode on top of the cages. Took me months to get the whole outfit operative, dogs healthy and all. Then every winter weekend and sometimes in between I’d go out with the few other people in Inuvik who had dogs, and I had fun. But I got tired of Inuvik. Too civilized, too many civil servants. Guys I’d rejected before were making passes the second time around. So when the job in the school here came up I applied for it and got it. Last summer I put the whole outfit on a barge, pickup, dogs, dog feed and all, and came down here where there’s more places to go that aren’t full of people.”
It was a long speech but apparently she had enjoyed making it.
“After all that,” she said, “you can understand my dogs aren’t for loan or hire. I drive them myself; nobody else does. But I thought instead of just saying no, I should explain why, and that’s why.”
There are some people you can argue with and maybe convince, I had just about decided on the evidence that she wasn’t one of them. Which meant, almost, that that was that. But then I had one final crazy idea. What the hell—I really didn’t like the idea of going after William on a snowmobile. With him long gone by now, God knows where, I didn’t think I’d have a chance.
“So what you’re saying is that nobody but you drives your dogs, but you like getting out and around and doing interesting things.”
She smiled. “You’re a quick learner.”
“Okay,” I said, “how about we provide all the dog food and guarantee in writing return of your dog team and equipment in exactly the condition everything is in now, you to be the judge of that, and you come along and drive.”
She looked at me piercingly. For the first time she wasn’t smiling. I had an idea I was being summed up mainly from the standpoint of, could she stand my company?
“You know something about dogs?” she asked, and then the smile returned. “That’s probably a dumb question.”
I nodded. Twice, to cover both the question and the related opinion.
“You got a deal,” she said.
Pengelly and Nicky broke up in the background.
“Right now,” she said, looking at a big gadget-filled wrist watch she wore with the face of it on the inside of her left wrist, “I’m due back in school for one o’clock. We could get the outfit ready after school tonight and go tomorrow.”
She was scarcely out of the door when the phone rang again.
“It’s for you, I can tell,” Pengelly said. “What you need is a bloody social secretary.”
Gloria now had her voice well under control. “I remembered something,” she said. “Last summer there was a big guy here. I remember him because he said he was from Nashville, but had never been to the Grand Old Opry, couldn’t stand country music, liked hard rock better, like Black Sabbath. He was a friend of Batten’s, they’d known one another in the States, and Christian seemed to know him, too. The three of them were drinking at the Inuvik Inn. When William and I got there and we were introduced the guy said that where he came from any woman who wasn’t white would screw anything that moved, and is it the same with you, sweetie? William jumped up and there would have been a fight but Batten held them apart, and then we left.
“Anyway, his name was Billy Bob Hicks. One night a month or two later when Batten was high and happened to mention Billy Bob and William said he was an asshole, Batten told William not ever to say that to Billy Bob’s face. He said that one guy in the world he’d never fool around with was Billy Bob, because he shot first and asked questions afterwards, and if he hadn’t done that once too often he’d still be tending bar in Nashville, instead of Yellowknife. I just thought it was a lot of drunken Yankee bullshit at the time. Now”—she paused—“I’m not sure. Maybe I’m crazy, but I been thinking about him, and I can imagine him doing . . . that . . . to Morton.”
“Tending bar in Yellowknife,” I said. “You know where?”
“No, but people would know him. He’s really tall. When he was here he had his hair cut long at the back and short on top and he has a long jaw, I remember his jaw. And he blinked a lot, as if he couldn’t see very well. And he sort of slouched when he walked.” She stopped and there was a silence. “Thought I should tell you.”
I phoned Yellowknife and got a sergeant I know and said, “I’m going to describe a guy to you, maybe from Nashville, southern accent anyway, maybe a bartender there, name might be Billy Bob Hicks.”
I repeated Gloria’s description.
“Well,” the sergeant said, “that fits a guy who’s worked for two or three places around town, but the name is wrong. This one’s name is Dave something. I’ll find out for you.”
“Can I hang on?”
“Sure.”
He was back in a couple of minutes. “Dave Hawkinsville. What do you want to know?”
“Where he was Tuesday and Wednesday.”
“I’ll call you back”
He called in about an hour. I was sitting by the phone eating part of Pengelly’s lunch. Normally he ate at home, he said, but his wife, Bertha, worked two days a week in the Child Development Centre and Friday was one of her days. Bertha Pengelly’s salmon salad sandwiches had more onion and mayonnaise than Nancy Paterson up in Norman Wells put in hers, but were equally good. It really helps to know guys whose wives are not above making good, or even excellent, sandwiches.
My sergeant friend in Yellowknife detachment said, “The guy I mentioned, Hawkinsville, flew to Edmonton Monday on Northwest Territorial’s evening flight. They fly two a day to Edmonton, the morning one to Edmonton International and the evening one to Edmonton Municipal, so that’s where he’d go, to Edmonton Municipal. Seems it was sort of a surprise to the place he worked, but people do decide things’ suddenly around here sometimes, especially when it comes to getting out in January. Told a couple of people he wouldn’t be back, but to think of him lounging on the beach at Waikiki. His ticket was just to Edmonton, one way. People said he got a phone call at the bar around one or so in the afternoon, bought his ticket about two. Took all his stuff from the hotel where he was staying, so I’d guess he was serious.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And damn it.”
“Take it easy, Matteesie.”
About an hour later I called the sergeant back. “Look.” I said, “this is a long shot, but it’s on the Morton Cavendish murder and long shots is all we’ve got. You don’t have a picture of that guy Hawkinsville, do you?”
“No. I checked. He’s been clean here. Not squeaky clean, but no charges. A Metis woman complained he’d tried to do it to her, but there really wasn’t enough to lay a charge on.”
I said, “Know anybody who was on the Tuesday Canadian Airlines flight from Edmonton that goes through there in the morning?”
“I’m pretty sure I could find somebody. You mean the guy might have come back?”
“It’s worth a check. Like I told you, a long shot.”
But long shots do come in sometimes. The sergeant called back at four to say that a bank loans officer who knew Hawkinsville slightly from drinking at a place where he’d worked thought she had seen him on the Tuesday morning flight from Edmonton. “But she was coming off a holiday and was slightly hung over herself, she says, and walking along an aisle she was past him before she really took a good look, and then she figured she must be wrong. This guy on the plane didn’t have a moustache and Hawkinsville did.”
Of course, he could have shaved it off. Making at least two men in the world, him and me, with no moustache. “Know anything about his habits?” I asked. “I mean, interests?”
“No. What is it you’re looking for?”
“A guy who’s at home on a snowmobile and knows something about the bush and maybe has an interest in guns.”
“Well, the snowmobile fits. He left his here with a dealer, for sale. I don’t know anything about an interest in guns. You think he might be the guy who shot Morton?”
“I’m just guessing. A fairly flimsy tip.”
“Better put it on a telex. Then more people around here can be watching, or might know something.”
So I asked him to put it on telex to Edmonton, asking for a check of the flight crew in Canadian’s Tuesday flight north for anyone who might remember seeing a guy of the following description on that flight, or any Edmonton counter agent who sold him a ticket from Edmonton to Norman Wells or beyond for that flight, and to ask around for any other Yellowknife-bound passenger who might have noticed him.
His height, southern accent, slightly hunched walk and habit of blinking, as described by Gloria, could be Dave Hawkinsville or Billy Bob Hicks or both in the same skin.