The telephone was in the entrance hall, I picked it up and said hello. The voice at the other end was the RCMP commissioner’s motherly, even grandmotherly, Québecoise secretary at headquarters in Ottawa. “Buster wants you, Matty.” She was the only person at headquarters who openly called the commissioner Buster. In turn, her nickname among the rest of us was Old Ironsides, mainly because she still wore massive “foundation garments.”
“Tell me what it’s for, so you can tell him you couldn’t find me if I don’t like it.”
She said, “No, but what he has in mind I think you’re going to like.” Pause. “Oh, he’s just picked up another line. I’ll put you through when he’s finished. Anyway, I wanted to say I’m real sorry about your mother and we’ve been wondering how she is this morning?” I told her what we’d been doing and she said, “Darn, that’s good, great that she feels up to it, sounds like fun!” And then, abruptly, “He’s taken another call. I’ll have to put you on hold.”
She had started with the RCMP as a teenage typist from her French-speaking home across the river in Hull, and had stayed through the reigns of several commissioners before Buster. One of her sons was in the force, too, which might have been why I’d got in the habit, whenever Buster called me directly, as he did from time to time, of trying to get an advance tip from her as to what it was about. Often enough it seemed she’d feel that a cop out in the blue somewhere, faced with God knows what, might benefit from a little preparation before dealing with the force’s highest of the high.
Also, she knew that Buster had practically invented me, in my present role. In my late twenties, after being an RCMP special constable in the north for years, I’d been accepted to take the full officer’s course at the RCMP training establishment in Regina. He was commanding officer there and from the start took a special interest in me.
Turned out, I found later, that after several stints in the Arctic himself, he’d written a lot of memos urging that more natives should be recruited and trained for general police work. A natural place to look for candidates had been among us specials, whose main work was not so much policing as helping white officers, doing the joe jobs around detachments, a dead end. When Buster’s memos bore fruit, I had been asked if I was interested and had jumped at it. In Regina, there were thirty in the class, and I was the only native. If I didn’t do well, I knew that I’d have to go back, maybe forever, to being a special.
I was determined not to forfeit this chance and as it turned out, I didn’t. At graduation, when Buster called us up, he did it as usual in reverse order to our final marks. As the marks got higher and higher and I still hadn’t been called, my tension and joy rose—and I was the last one he called to the podium. I remember that as I walked across the stage he watched me with an oddly quizzical look. When I stopped in front of him, hardly believing that I’d passed with the highest marks in the class, I came just to his malletlike chin. He’d played college football for Queen’s and then briefly pro for the Ottawa Roughriders before joining the police. I felt like a boy scout meeting a giant. Everybody was applauding except maybe a few who thought natives in the force should forever be there for chopping wood, cooking, doing dishes, hunting or fishing for dog food, translating on occasion, doing real police work only when there was no white man around to take charge.
But there was no doubt about Buster’s beaming “Way to go, Matteesie!” Then he added something I didn’t fully understand at the time: “We’ll be seeing one another as we go along.”
All I thought was, sure, we’re national police, we do police work right across the country. We tend not to be left in one place long. We’re bound to meet occasionally. I figured that was what he meant.
What I didn’t know was that he’d already got his next posting to become officer commanding the big Inuvik subdivision, with about five dozen all ranks from specials on up. He told me years later when we got to know one another better: “When you were walking toward me on that platform in Regina, I had a sudden thought that with all the territory we cover in the Arctic we should have a unit that specializes in native crime, and that you were the first guy who seemed to have the qualities to make it work.”
Actually, whether a native investigative unit was a good idea or not, it never really came about except in a somewhat different form—establishing at headquarters in the late 1980s the Community and Aboriginal Policing Directorate, a mainly aboriginal group to advise on setting up separate aboriginal police forces. As Buster went on and up to bigger jobs, we often met and discussed cases in accord with one of his specialties, talking man to man. But if anything was needed to finally cement the relationship, even move it to another level, it came late one night in Inuvik a couple of days before a royal tour was supposed to arrive. I was a sergeant by then, assigned to local security. He, with the rank of deputy commissioner, was in charge of security for the whole tour. He’d come early to Inuvik because a protest by western Arctic Inuit showed signs of erupting into militance, not against the visiting royals, but to use the media throng covering the royal visit as a vehicle to draw attention to a long-delayed land-claim settlement.
He called me to his room at the Mackenzie Hotel. “Would you go and talk to them, see what you can do?” he asked.
I did. It turned out to be actually not all that difficult. The protesters included many Inuit that I knew well and respected, and they knew this. On the night before the royals were to fly in, at the meeting the Inuit held to plan their strategy, I managed to get to a microphone. Speaking in Inuktitut, I told them what I believed, that we as a people generally speaking didn’t have much to beef about. We had schools, medicare, social assistance; there was not an aboriginal people anywhere in the world who had been treated as well as we had.
“I support what you are trying to do, getting the land claims settlement, and would like to see it done faster, but I’m just asking that you find some other way than this to put pressure on the government. As you know, I am an Inuk. You are my people. But part of my police job is to see that whoever wants to see the royals in this once-in-a-lifetime visit to our land should get to see them, without violence or difficulty or anything that would damage our reputation as reasonable people.
“What I am asking is that you call off the public protest you have planned, which no doubt will get out on a lot of TV news programs but I don’t think will do anything to speed the land claims. What I am offering is that I will sign the document you have drawn up and hope to present to the royals. I will sign it as Sergeant Matthew Kitologitak, RCMP, senior native officer in charge of security.”
There was a deep silence, then murmurs for and against.
What really turned the tide was when I said, “It took me ten years to get to be a sergeant! You are my people. I’m signing your protest and maybe risking my job by doing that. You wouldn’t want to do something, some real disruption, that would have me broken back down to special constable, would you, back to being just Matteesie, the special?”
I don’t know whether that should have worked, but it did. My people like to laugh. They laughed! They came up and said, “Hey, Matteesie, what a comedown to be a special again! Maybe you’ll be lucky and get assigned to Paulatuk!”
Many reporters assigned to the royal tour had covered the meeting. My plea got a lot of mileage across the country. The idea that I had put my job on the line to support my own people had a sort of romance that the media loves—especially, I found, the English press, which has lots of experience in covering royals among distant tribes and falls gratefully on any change from the rather boring respectful norm.
On the appointed day the visit, including handing the royals our petition, went off without incident. When the press, the royals, the welcoming and farewell committees, and stray dignitaries gathered at the airport to fly out, Buster pushed through and stood in front of me with a little grin twitching at the corners of his mouth. All he said, shaking hands, was, “Well done!”
But the other effect was that the whole incident, the well-reported meeting, the flourish with which I signed the petition, the TV film of my people laughing and pushing forward to joke at me, made me a name, however briefly. In Cece MacAuley’s News/North column she termed me “a native who stood up to be counted, without turning his back on his people.” And she is Metis, not Inuit.
All of this, I think, also made it easier for Buster to push me along, give me breaks that I might not have got otherwise. Over the years, as he rose higher and his influence grew, he pushed courses at me that the force paid for, forensics at University of Toronto, criminal psychology at Michigan State, even a year at Princeton studying, as I used to say, the morning paper.
What he had in mind—laugh if you want to, some in the police did—was to make me a well-rounded native cop by moving me along in a way that made use of my Inuit beginnings but equipped me to operate in the white world. Whenever there was a case that he saw as being specifically Matteesie Kitologitak’s, quite often he jumped in personally instead of passing things along through deputy commissioners or superintendents or anyone else. I thought of him in command of the vast fortresslike headquarters in Ottawa, a huge job, but the Arctic, it seemed, was still his baby. When something up here sounded like me, usually it would be his voice I heard on the phone. We talked often. This time, after I had stood a while at the phone in the corridor at Franklin House, finally I was put through to him.
“Matteesie! How’s your mother?”
I told him what I’d told Old Ironsides.
“You want to stay there for a while, see her out of the woods? I know we had you ticketed for Sanirarsipaaq, but that was before we knew she’d been hurt in that damn thing. But I’ve just been looking at the preliminary report from the detachment. Not much in it. Whatever the reason, we sure as hell need somebody else on the scene fast.”
He was giving me the opening, and I knew it.
I took a deep breath, and said my piece honestly. “Tell you the truth, sir, there’s nothing much I can do here. I can always get back in a hurry if . . . if I’m needed. And one more thing . . .”
“What’s that?”
“I’d go crazy here if we kept on getting zeros out of Sanirarsipaaq. What I mean is, yeah, I’m on my way, quick as I can.”
“Good man! That makes me feel a lot better.” Brief pause. “Ah, one other thing. I know you left in a hell of a hurry after getting back from Nain. Is there anything that needs doing around your house that I can send somebody to help Lois with?”
A kid shovels the walk and the drive. She’s got a car. Maybe somebody who would kiss and hug a lot as we once did, who would send her flowers and take her to bed would help. “Can’t think of anything,” I said.
At that moment I heard another phone ring in his office and he said, “Look, I’ll be out for a couple of hours, but get me for sure again before you leave, I’ve just got a note handed to me saying there’s some other stuff on the case coming in.” Abruptly, he hung up.
I saw my mother to her room, a single, and into bed, and touched her sore head gently and told her I was going to Sanirarsipaaq. She just nodded as if that was no surprise, no more than she had expected from her son the policeman. Tiptoeing out, waving back at her from the door, I then skipped an invitation for lunch with Erika, who had hung around waiting. We walked down the street together. She kissed me warmly when we parted in front of the Yellowknife Inn.
“Good for my image,” she said, “neckin’ with the great Matteesie in public.”
“Not bad for mine, either.”
“Thanks for the help, Matteesie.”
A few yards down the street she turned and waved. I like people who do that, rather than marching off as if that’s that. Sometimes the way Erika acted made me thoughtful about where we might go from here if I didn’t already have Lois and Maxine. But I know that although men and women being attracted to one another outside of marriage is a fairly well known human condition, usually not acted upon, out in the open it looks like a bad thought, like that line in one of Leon Redbone’s songs, “She ain’t Rose. But she ain’t bad. And Rose ain’t here.”
For shame, Matteesie.
In downtown Yellowknife, RCMP G Division headquarters, Justice Department offices and courts, other government offices, the liquor store, drugstore, hotels, bars, the Wildcat Cafe, the ramshackle News/North building, bums, shopping, travel agencies, you name it, are all a short stroll apart.
I checked in at headquarters and went straight to Superintendent Abe Keswick, with whom I’d worked often over the years. When I requested a guard put on my mother twenty-four hours a day he stared at me, startled, and then got it.
“Sole witness,” he said.
“Right.”
“We’ll start it right now.” He picked up his phone.
From his office I went to records to read whatever was on file about the last few days in Sanirarsipaaq, including the same file Buster had received by fax. I learned little I didn’t already know, except that the young man who had been murdered, Dennis Raakwap, had a couple of hundred dollars in his pocket at the time. Meaning on the face of it that robbery didn’t seem to have been the motive. There was also a mention in an internal memo from someone in G Division personnel that with Barker going on leave and Corporal Alphonse Bouvier having been there only a few weeks from Spence Bay as his replacement, the detachment could use someone else, pronto. Buster and I had solved that one in our phone call. I read also that a forensics specialist would be moving in as soon as possible, maybe a couple of days, to check out the house. The file said that the bodies would be flown out under guard and turned over to forensics, all of that being procedure, by the book. Unless I got there before they left, I wouldn’t have a chance to look at them myself and maybe see a few things Barker and Bouvier hadn’t noticed—so I should get there today. Fast.
There’s one thing I didn’t do right then, but only realized later that I should have: send an order that the bodies were not to be moved until I’d seen them.
I looked at air schedules. Not good. Regular commercial flights by First Air went to Sanirarsipaaq a few times a week, but from Iqaluit in the eastern Arctic, not from Yellowknife. There was one today, west from Iqaluit with stops at Igloolik, Pelly Bay, Spence Bay, Gjoa Haven, Cambridge Bay, and Sanirarsipaaq before terminating in Inuvik. Meaning that to catch that flight I had to get to Cambridge Bay, with no scheduled flight that I knew of that would get me to Cambridge from Yellowknife.
I went to the headquarters dispatcher, a sergeant I knew well. He asked about my mother. I told him, hurriedly, then asked, “Anything flying today to Cambridge quick? Charter, medivac, anything?”
He looked at me sharply the way some people do when dealing with a problem that must be solved fast. “You wanta get to Sanirarsipaaq. Just missed a Twin Otter charter from here straight in there a few hours ago. Well. We still got one chance.” He picked up his phone and dialed. “Shit. Busy.” Immediately he began to dial again. “If this works it’ll be very sudden. Get your luggage into the hotel lobby. I’ll call you there in a few minutes.”
The hotel was only a minute or two away. I was in the lobby checking out when the desk clerk said, “Matteesie, call for you,” and passed me the phone. It was my friend the dispatcher. He’d known when he spoke to me that a Cessna Citation had been chartered to fly the Supreme Court of the Northwest Territories out to begin a trial in Cambridge Bay starting tomorrow morning. What he hadn’t known was whether there was a spare seat, or someone he could bump. Whatever he’d done, there was room for me. The Citation would drop the court in Cambridge but couldn’t go on with me to Sanirarsipaaq because it had to head back right away for another charter somewhere else. It was due to leave in less than an hour. I should get to the airport right away. He gave me all that very fast.
“It’ll be a tight squeeze at Cambridge,” he said, “but I’ll get on to First Air to hold their Sanirarsipaaq flight there for you.”
“Thanks, pal.”
“No problem.”
Some busy guys are like that. Work their ass off and then shrug. All in a day’s work.
I passed the phone back to the hotel clerk, thinking. Buster had asked me to call him back. In case it took time to track him down I’d be better calling from the airport. If I didn’t get him from there I could call from Cambridge Bay.
On the taxi ride to the airport I pored over again in my mind what I knew of the case so far, coming to admit that the stakes were partly personal, even a lot personal. I’m normally objective about my work, but I had a totally unobjective hatred for whoever hurt my mother. The murders weren’t all that nice, either, and I would pay attention to that, but also I wanted to look into the eyes of whoever had knocked my mother on her back ninety bloody years of living after she’d been born in an igloo on the shore of Herschel Island. My intent did not involve beating hell out of someone. If it came to that, I might get the hell beaten out of me, which would be counterproductive. I wanted it to be cold turkey, looking into guilty eyes, letting whoever it was known that retribution would be swift.
Not a hell of a lot to ask. Especially when I knew deep down that if my mother’s frail condition had got worse and she had not lived, I might be tempted to kill whoever was responsible. Tit-for-tat murders do not all happen in Northern Ireland, or in the hills of Kentucky. Blood feuds were part of many an Inuit settlement’s past.
The Citation was on the tarmac. Its pilot, a fit-looking middle-aged man with silvery hair under his cap, was watching for me in the terminal. Somebody else (it turned out to have been Erika) had been bumped from the flight, Buster’s emissaries being very high in the priority line. “The court hasn’t arrived yet,” the pilot said crisply. “When they get here follow them out right away and we’ll go. Weather is chancy as hell around Cambridge right now.”
I went to the pay phone and called Buster. Old Ironsides said she’d find him. A minute or two later Buster came on.
“Matty! Look, I have something else to tell you. Might be important. Our press relations officer has had a lot of calls from media people in the east asking who they can call in Sanirarsipaaq for an update on those murders. He’s been giving out the detachment’s phone number because as we both know, some officers on the scene like to get their own names in the paper. This morning one of the reporters called Sanirarsipaaq with questions about shamanism. He specifically asked Bouvier about a rumor that the murders had a shamanistic connection. You know reporters. Two murders and shamanism too, they’ll be peeing their pants. This guy wouldn’t say where the rumor came from.”
I wondered if Erika Hall was maybe stringing for an eastern paper and had raised the shamanism matter.
“Anyway,” Buster went on, “Corporal Bouvier stonewalled the guy but did call our information officer to say that sometime overnight a note addressed to Barker was found pinned to the notice board at the rec hall. Nobody saw it being put there. The note wasn’t signed, but named and blamed a shaman named Jonassie . . . know him?”
“Jonassie Oquataq, yeah. He’s a shaman, all right, and a master carver. He did that green soapstone polar bear and walrus item in your office. Has stuff in the best Inuit art collections in the world—Winnipeg Art Gallery, UBC, National Gallery, and others.”
I didn’t mention right then to Buster a rather light note, when talking about shamans: that this shaman’s twin brother was an Anglican priest in some other community, I wasn’t sure which. The Anglicans had opened their ranks to Inuit, with a good deal of success that the Catholics couldn’t possibly counter because Anglican priests can get married, or whatever. To your average Inuit, that makes some sense, while they feel that Roman Catholic celibacy rules are not quite of this world. Which might, of course, be the idea.
“Anyway,” Buster went on, “this note said that this Jonassie had used his shamanistic powers to cause the murders. Not sure whether the media knows about that yet, but” . . . drily . . .“no doubt they soon will.”
Two things you could say about anyone trying to hook shamanism into the murders. One possibility was that the note-writer was Inuit and believed that shamans had that kind of power. The other was that if a guy involved in the murders was trying a red-herring game, bringing in the threat of voodoo-type shamanism was a way to go. Even people who didn’t believe in shamanism have been known to feel a shiver at the idea that shamans can influence the relationship between humans and their environment, and cause a man to die without ever feeling ill, or a woman to rise from a coma.
I shrugged. A crank note, what the hell? But on second thought maybe not from a crank. There was what Erika had said about their stringer hearing rumors. If someone was writing accusatory notes, they could be spreading rumors, too. Or what they believed to be facts.
Buster went on. “One more thing I see in my morning report came in from Sanirarsipaaq on a bad line, or whoever transcribed it didn’t seem to get it right. It seems to say that the guy who was murdered, and who worked at the hotel, had just been paid, but that the money we found on him was more than his pay. Of course, he could have had the extra on him when he was paid.
“But that’s where the stuff gets puzzling—saying something not clear at all that there actually might have been more money than that in his pocket when he was killed, or being killed, because some bills were bloodstained and others not, as if somebody took some money but not all, screwing up the bloodstain patterns.”
Luckily, I didn’t have to solve that puzzle right then. Across the lobby I saw the Citation pilot storm in from the tarmac and glare around. When he saw me at the phone he came toward me jabbing his index finger meaningfully at his watch. The gesture was an unmistakable, “Come on, for Chrissake!”
Buster was still talking. I interrupted. “Sir,” I said, “I’ve gotta go, plane’s leaving, pilot’s going nuts at me.”
The pilot was right beside me and heard that as I hung up. But I needed another minute or two. “Look, I’m sorry, but it’s murder business, the judge’ll understand,” I said. “I’ll be right with you.”
He stamped off and didn’t look back. The next call was still at least partly murder business. I was giving the Inuvik CBC number to the operator, praying that Maxine would answer on the first ring, which she did. “I’m off to see the wizard,” I said. “If you hear anything meaningful from your million sources, will you call me in Sanirarsipaaq? Either the hotel or the detachment.”
She laughed. “Million sources, sure,” she said.
I trotted out to catch up to the pilot. “Sorry about that,” I called, tucking my head down against the driving snow and taking two steps to his one. “I saw the sheriff, court clerk, court reporter, crown attorney, defense lawyer go out, some others with them, but I must have missed the judge. Didn’t know I was the last.”
Letting me go up the Citation’s steps first as if otherwise I might disappear on him, he growled, “That’s what they all say.”