I left the detachment in bright sunshine. The day actually felt a little like spring. Coming off the detachment’s steps I ran hard and set my feet and slid along, waving my arms for balance.
Bouvier called from the doorway, “Not bad! Not bad!”
An old Inuk woman was coming the other way, laboring up the slope. She clapped her hands and called out something I couldn’t hear and we smiled at one another, passing a few feet apart.
There were a few houses to my left, the rec hall on my right, the squatty shape of the Sanirarsipaaq hotel ahead. Early April, a lot of winter ahead yet, but fifteen hours of daylight helped. I’d looked at the climate chart for today: sunrise 04:46, sunset 19:47.
The noonday sun glittered off a line of boats overturned for the winter along the shore of the settlement’s little bay. A half mile or so out on the ice I could see a hunter crouched immobile at a seal hole. I couldn’t see it, but his rifle or harpoon would be ready. The stillness was essential. The slightest movement, a change of shadow—result, no seal at that hole, it would go somewhere else for air. Beyond the hunter the jumbled pressure-packed ice of the McClintock Channel lay between this eastern shore of Victoria Island and, a hundred miles or so away, the western shore of Prince of Wales Island. One summer when I was a boy we traveled with two other families across the channel to Prince of Wales in an umiak—a good-size boat—looking for whales and walrus. We found some and had a good summer there, eating regularly.
As I neared the hotel a woman in a red dress towed an embarrassed-looking city-type man toward the middle of the road. He wore a yellow toque perched on top of his head, and under his open parka showed a scarf, shirt, necktie, and three-piece suit. A shyly smiling Inuit girl followed with a camera, focused, clicked it.
“There, now you can put that along with your huge expense account,” the woman said as the three of them laughed, slipped, and slid toward the hotel’s plywood door. The other two entered. The red dress and its occupant stopped at the door. “Hi there, Matteesie!”
Obviously, Margaret Johanson. We hadn’t met before but she would know who I was and what I was here for. So, by now, would nearly everybody in town. Because I once had been one of their own, they tended to know not only my name and rank and successes and failures but also to have taken sides in debates as to whether I was the great brain of Arctic crime or just dumb lucky.
As for Margaret, well, every Arctic settlement has its reigning beauty, or sex symbol, as the case may be. I thought she would be a bit of both. There was just enough weight on her that even the Inuit elders would approve, their traditional belief being that the fatter the woman the better. I figured her to be in her forties, with the ripeness that some women get when older. She’d probably look good in anything. Or nothing. That last was not a prurient thought, simply an observation.
She smiled, eyes lively, teeth as white as any in a toothpaste commercial but just crooked enough to provide a tiny clue about a non-yuppie background: no money for braces. “Well, do I pass?”
I smiled. “Caught looking.”
“Just leave your bag here, unless it’s full of secret codes and classified information. Or even if it is.”
I put down the bag and dropped my boots among others whose owners had obeyed the sign over the dining room entrance that read, LEAVE BOOTS HERE, THIS MEANS YOU!
The city-dressed man had disappeared to the left and down a couple of steps to join a group of others who were kidding him about what they’d tell his wife.
“What was the photo opportunity all about?” I asked. “Polaroid proof that everybody up here doesn’t wear caribou.” Following her down the steps, I was hit by a mixture of aromas: fresh baking, rich meat, coffee. Tables were scattered about. Three were full, two white and the other Inuit, probably all of both backgrounds being either government people or construction workers. Somebody told me once that seventy percent of all air travel in the north was by government people, which besides including me tells you a bit about civil service and native-organization expense accounts and why hotels like Margaret’s can charge $185 a day, including three meals and four to a room.
They had finished eating and were drinking their coffee or tea. Another table had one man at it, the hefty, gray-haired Inuk with a huge head whom I’d seen at the airport yesterday: Jonassie the shaman and carver. He looked somewhat apart from the others not only in appearance but in what he was doing: drinking tea while reading Monday’s News/North, where the front-page headline read, NO ARRESTS IN DOUBLE MURDER. He glanced at me, upended his teapot for a final few drops, drank that unhurriedly and folded his paper.
“Margaret,” he said as he passed her. “Matteesie.”
But he didn’t stop, as might have been natural. She looked after him, shrugged, turned back to me, and waved toward an oilcloth-covered table set against one wall. “Help yourself. I’ll see about the soup situation.” I was being frankly inspected by those at the other tables. Some smiled at me, some just nodded briefly and went on cleaning up the last of their pie and ice cream. On the serving table were several two-cup teapots, the stainless steel kind that inevitably spill tea in several directions when you pour, along with mugs, saucers, assorted teabags, a jar of instant coffee, a jug of milk.
Unless a miracle had occurred, the milk would be from Milko milk powder, the only kind most Arctic people ever had unless they were in one of the big settlements. I never had fresh milk until I was twenty. I remember way back there sometime there was a rock song with a line, “I believe in miracles.” Hearing it improperly, I had thought the line was, “I believe in Milko.” I had thought that was nice for the Milko people, that kind of approval from a rock group, and wondered how much the plug had cost. Even now, some northern youngsters, getting real fresh milk for the first time, whine that it tastes funny.
There were baskets of sliced fresh bread, raisin-studded scones, a single doughnut, the remains of four pies, a tall plugged-in urn of the sort that dispenses hot water, a small glass-fronted cooler full of soft drinks in cans. A handwritten sign on the cooler door read “$1.50.” I took bread, still warm, scones, hot, and carried my plate to the table Jonassie had just left, which Margaret was clearing. The girl who’d carried the camera a few minutes earlier brought me soup, thick and peppery.
I was finishing the soup and my third hot buttered scone when Margaret emerged from the kitchen with a plate of steaming potatoes and a thick slice of musk-ox pot roast, all of it covered with rich brown gravy. She brought cauliflower with a cheese and curry sauce steaming hot in a separate dish, creamed corn in another.
The other tables emptied, guys sticking toothpicks in their mouths, taking drink cans from the fridge, one wit calling in an artificially prissy voice, “Anyone for tennis?”
Margaret had got herself some coffee and wandered over to look from the window beside me. It wasn’t a scenic delight: some plywood covered by tattered plastic, a pickup truck that apparently had been snowed in for a winter or more. A pair of snowshoes stuck into a snowbank had fallen over.
“I suppose you grow your own cauliflower,” I said.
Well, she did smile, and turn to me. “Behold the smartass Inuk.” She left the window and, on the way by, stopped by my table. “Want some company?”
“Sure do,” I said.
“Jesus,” she said, dropping into the chair opposite, “how come you didn’t say, ‘Especially in your case,’ or something to make a woman feel good.”
“Especially in your case,” I said.
“That’s better.”
Oddly enough, with that she immediately seemed to sag, as if her “Especially in your case” line had been something she did from memory and couldn’t be bothered building upon. For a little while, as I ate, she just stared into her nearly empty cup. From what I’d been able to see of her public manner, bouncy and provocative, I imagined that she didn’t often show the expression I was seeing now, as if her mind were miles away. When she looked up and caught my eye for an instant she seemed flustered, vulnerable.
“With Thelma and Dennissie running the kitchen, doin’ every damn thing, I’ve got soft,” she said. “Hard to get going again.” Pause. “Son of a bitch, eh?”
I didn’t reply, except to nod. I wanted her to keep talking. I wanted more about Sanirarsipaaq and its people from a nonpolice angle. If I didn’t get it soon I’d have to wring it out of somebody.
She mused, “I keep thinking that if I’d been able to give Thelma a room right here so she didn’t have to share a house with somebody who couldn’t protect her when it counted . . .”
“But Dennis worked for you, too.”
She raised her eyes. Looking into her shrewd, suddenly judgmental gaze, I felt that this wasn’t just a casual unloading; that maybe ever since she had heard I was in town she’d been weighing what she knew and how much she should tell. “Hiring Dennis was just me trying to help Thelma.”
“How do you mean?”
“She was worried about some of the people he hung out with. He’d done pretty well at school, saved some money from a job in Yellowknife, but then started to drift. Except for some part-timing, he was sort of bumming with the wrong kind of company. Of course, she didn’t know the half of it. But when my handyman took off for Edmonton last fall and I needed somebody else, Thelma asked me to take Dennis. Her idea was that if I would go for, like, hiring him, she would make sure that he didn’t goof off. God knows she did enough work for both of them, but he wasn’t bad, either, no trouble to me, Thelma saw to that. He’d wait tables and vacuum and clean rooms and run errands . . .”
“Who was he was mixed up with that she didn’t like?”
“She didn’t know. She just had an instinct. For instance, she didn’t know about how much he dealt with Hard Hat, Donald Thrasher, at all.”
“What about him?”
“I don’t know all of it. What I do know is that Dennis got paid two hundred a week at the hotel. I don’t know when the loan-sharking started, I’ve got an idea Hard Hat was in on it. Anyway, people would borrow money from Dennis, a week at a time, high interest, and Hard Hat—”
“—would help collect the money,” I said.
Surprised, she said, “How did you know?”
“If Dennis was the kind of basically harmless guy that everybody says, he’d need an enforcer.”
She nodded. “Yeah. The way I first suspected was that Hard Hat sometimes called Dennis here. I don’t think he ever showed up at Thelma’s house, at least not when she was aware. She’d go home after work every night, you know, turn on the TV, half the time fall asleep, wouldn’t know who was going in and out . . .”
She stopped there. I was wondering a little about how she knew all this. Where she stopped was not where her thoughts stopped, I was pretty sure. Somebody running a hotel, especially in a small settlement, comes to know most of what there is to know. Like the closeness between Dennis and Hard Hat, which Bouvier hadn’t mentioned at all, even when we were looking right at Hard Hat at the airport. If Barker had known, surely it would have been on the record, especially after the murders. Meaning that, in public, anyway, Dennis and Hard Hat must have been very discreet. Barker was the man who had said so often, “This is my town,” with the implication that he knew everything that was going on. Or did he just not care about Dennis’s loan-sharking, thinking it was just loans between friends, too small-time to worry about?
“Did Thelma ever indicate to you that she was worried, either for herself or for Dennis? Anything else that bothered her a lot?”
Quietly, “This thing with Hard Hat would have, if she’d known about it.”
By now we were alone in the room. I didn’t push. If I was right that she simply wanted to talk to me as a policeman, eventually she’d get to her main reason.
She started out, “You really wanta listen to, well, guesses?”
“Yes.”
She took a deep breath. “Well, you met my daughter at the airport. She got pretty emotional about Dennis being killed. When the flight had to layover and she came back here, she told me about meeting you, which led to other things. That’s when I started to think about talking to you. Maisie doesn’t really fit in here . . . What I mean is, totally different kind of person, different interests. She doesn’t hang out with the local kids maybe as much as she should, or could, but through Dennis got to know some of them and learn or guess things, like about the Hard Hat connection—which incidentally, sometimes resulted in beating up guys who couldn’t pay but were scared shitless to let the police know why they were beaten up.”
A lot here was new. But so far, how could it lead to Dennis and Thelma being murdered? The enforcer doesn’t usually bump off his meal ticket.
I’d try another tack: Dennis and Maisie. “For him to let her know, or guess, all that, they must have been pretty close.”
She considered one more time what she was saying and where it was leading, made a face, shook her head, let out a long breath.
“That’s what stopped me! If I’d told all I know to Steve Barker he’da been out with all guns blazing and it woulda got all over town, what was going on and who’d blown the whistle. Next thing Maisie would be involved, or might be involved, other kids treating her like shit, which they can do. She doesn’t deserve that.”
I didn’t quite get it. This sounded like more than just the loan-sharking.
There was another long pause. Then new territory suddenly arrived on the agenda.
Margaret gave a sigh, then her eyes met mine. “One of the things she told me after the murders was that Dennis sometimes took girls home with him at night after Thelma was asleep. The way Maisie knew this was that he’d tried to get her to go with him.”
Margaret’s eyes were angry. “It started right here in the kitchen! Maisie liked him in that sort of, well, I hate to say it this way, but it’s the way I think of it, that sort of heiferlike way she has. Pay no attention to how she looks, like the miniskirt at the airport, for God’s sake, it’s just she craves attention, and when she gets the wrong kind, well . . .”
I thought she started something there then abandoned it.
“But she’s inexperienced. Tall women have trouble anyway, unless they’re models. In Calgary before she came up here she spent more time running marathons, competing, doing the high jump damn near onto our last Olympic team, than dealing with men. Strong as a horse, physically, but I don’t know how I could wind up with a daughter so clueless about men. Dennis was a happy-go-lucky kind of a guy and she liked that. When he propositioned her, not in so many words, she didn’t believe he was serious.” She looked at me wryly. “Or says she didn’t. I guess I don’t really know everything that goes on in her head.”
“She told you about him asking her to go home with him?”
She looked surprised. “Yeah. That’s the only way I could know.” After a thoughtful pause, sarcastically emphasizing some words, she continued, “After he mentioned it the first time and she thought he was kidding, a couple of days later he came back to it, in Technicolor. There was no problem, his granny always went to sleep watching TV on the downstairs couch, his room was upstairs, if Thelma did wake up she always just went to her own room, she never even heard him come in, never woke up until morning, and they could thump away with some music up there, have some fun, so how about it? Dennis was a pretty confident guy in a lot of ways, even if he was also stupid in this deal, seeing Maisie as just another stray piece of tail. Especially Maisie, for God’s sake.”
Piece of tail was an expression I hadn’t heard for a while. Used to be popular when I was younger—and when Margaret was younger.
“Anyway, she just laughed it off, but then began to hear around that not everybody, I mean, not every other girl she knew or knew of, did turn him down. Especially on booze nights. He’d get a couple of drinks into some girl and take her home with him.”
“I thought the booze committee was pretty tough about who could bring stuff in. Was Dennis considered an okay guy?”
She shrugged. “Once in a while, maybe once every few weeks, he’d apply and they’d let him bring in something, a case of beer or maybe a bottle of something. He never pushed it or applied every week or showed up drunk. Thelma didn’t even know he drank. Thought he just got it for friends who couldn’t.”
I thought of a way Dennis could have worked it. Maybe on the nights he did get something to drink it was when he had a girl lined up for his we’ll-sneak-past-Thelma game. But it couldn’t have been that way, at least involving a girl, on the night of the murders. No ordinary girl is going to work Dennis over the way he wound up dead. Then again, I thought, how ordinary is Maisie? Not very.
I kept on. Could Dennis possibly have taken two people home with him that night, a girl and another guy? Or just another guy? It didn’t come clear, to me. He’s going to take a guy home with him and they’re going to get stinking and start fighting? I wondered if maybe the guy in the house with Dennis that night hadn’t been a regular at all, but a first-timer, or maybe not there for sex or booze, but for some other reason or for a combination of reasons. Not for robbery, or Dennis wouldn’t have been left with a fair amount of money, even if what we did find on him did not include the fifty that Bouvier had mentioned. We didn’t know how much more might have been taken.
Margaret and I had both stopped talking.
Suppose that, for some reason I hadn’t yet come up with, some guy just wanted to beat hell out of Dennis, wound up killing him, and then, coming downstairs, had heard a sound and realized that there was somebody else in the house?
Or maybe the noise upstairs had wakened Thelma. Two guys fighting to the death are almost certain to be much noisier than a guy and girl making love (the exceptions being those rare occasions, of sometimes treasured memory, when the reverse is true). If, for whatever reason, she had staggered half-asleep off the couch and yelled something, maybe even recognized the guy, and if he had thought of what he’d done with Dennis upstairs, he would have know that he had to shut Thelma up, too.
“It opens up an awful lot of possibilities,” I said finally, not naming them.
Suddenly Margaret yawned and looked at her watch. “God,” she said, rising quickly. “I’ve got to clean up in here and set tables for tonight.” I stood up, too, suddenly feeling a little surprised that she’d let Maisie fly out of here when she could have used both help and company. Whose idea had it been for Maisie to get away from the heat for a while?
“Had she planned this trip for long?”
Margaret shook her head. “Applied for a job and got called in for an interview.”
“What kind of job?”
“Librarian. She took library science in Calgary.”
Margaret was on her feet, looking rather forlorn. I have these impulses sometimes, with people I like—wanting body contact, nothing necessarily major, just touching a hand or whatever.
She was looking at me, smiling, guessing. “Don’t,” she said.
I took a can of ginger ale from the cooler on the way by. We walked along the dining room and up the two steps to the half-door leading to her tiny office. The lower half had a slice of shelving on top, a flat place to hold the register she gave me to sign.
“None of what you said will come back on you,” I said.
“I’m counting on that. How’ll you manage it?”
“I’ll manage.” Bouvier and I could ask around, starting with girls Dennis hung out with, put some heat on them if we had to.
Handing me a key with the number four on it, she said, “This opens the front door, too. I lock it when I go to bed. As for the rest . . . an Irish friend of mine sometimes says, the height of good luck to you.”
“The friend’s name wouldn’t be Kieron O’Kennedy, would it?”
“Jesus,” she laughed. “And he overnighted here only once!”
I walked up six steps to the landing, turned, went another six steps to the second floor. Number 4 was at the end of the building. The room door was wide open as is usual in the north when a room has been cleaned but not occupied. What was not usual was that in a chair by the window was Jonassie. He must have come upstairs after he left the dining room. That was nearly an hour of patient waiting, figuring that I’d either come up or he’d see me from the window heading for the detachment and follow me. Whatever the case, obviously he was serious about wanting to talk to me.
“Hi,” I said.
He was smoking a pipe. The smoke hung in the room. He shifted the pipe from his right hand to his left as he rose and said, “I’m Jonassie, the carver.”
I’d been familiar with the name and reputation, but until yesterday not with the face. I could imagine him wearing the carver’s mask against the stone dust while working inside, or outside bundled up in the cold working with axe and crowbar and maybe wedges on a piece of stone until he found the shape he was looking for, the stone’s inner spirit that told good carvers what to aim for. I knew carving better than I did shamanism, but I’d heard a Winnipeg Art Gallery curator say that Jonassie’s carvings always had a shamanistic content and that this was regularly remarked upon by curators and collectors.
“You are also a shaman,” I said.
I saw a glint of humor in his eyes.
He nodded. “And I hear,” he said, “on the radio, no less, from Yellowknife and Inuvik and other places, that police are proceeding on at least a rumor that there is some shamanistic connection to these murders. So I thought I should introduce myself and say that I know you by reputation and would be happy to help in any way I can.”
I looked around. There were four glasses on the dresser. I fleetingly remembered the cocky young defense lawyer on the court’s flight to Cambridge, and his scorn for four to a room. It also occurred to me that Jonassie could be a suspect, a man very strong in his body. At this point anybody in Sanirarsipaaq with the size and strength had to be among the suspects. Still, the rumors about shamanism being involved in the murders could be best checked out, for now, with the shaman himself.
“I would like to talk to you,” I said.
He jerked his head toward the open door. I read that as telling me that our talk should be more private. “Maybe if you would drop in to my home a little later?”
That suited me very well. “I’ll stop at the detachment for a few minutes, then come to see you.”
As it turned out, that meeting turned out to be considerably delayed. When I got to the detachment the door was locked and the phone inside was ringing. By the time I picked up the receiver, Bouvier was doing the same at Barker’s house.
“I got it,” I said, and he hung up.
“Matteesie,” a familiar voice said. “Charlie Litterick. You making any headway there?”
I thought of Hard Hat’s involvement with Dennis, and the unfocused feeling I now had about Maisie and Dennis. “Certainly nothing more than circumstantial,” I said.
“Well, here’s some more of the same. Circumstantial, I mean. After the court recessed for lunch I was doing a brisk walk out towards the old DEW line site to work up an appetite and clear my head about the case I’ve got here. On one of the back streets who do I see but the guy I was telling you about when we flew in here, Davidee Ayulaq! I’d told you he was tucked away in the pen at Prince Albert, so I thought I’d better let you know he’s around. I don’t know any more than that, yet. But he was eligible to apply for parole after serving two-thirds of his sentence, meaning thirty-two months. That would be five or six weeks ago, and he must have got it. When I saw him he was fifty, sixty yards away starting a snowmobile, not looking my way, but when he was pulling his helmet on I couldn’t mistake that half-bald head.”
Half-bald head!
“I’m running a check right now to see what happened. I’ll hope to call you back in a few minutes.”
In less than five minutes, just as Bouvier arrived, the phone rang again. “Damnedest thing,” Charlie sighed. “I told you Davidee is a great con man. Conned his parents about the early rapes, conned the police there—Barker, I guess—the second time. If that girl hadn’t burned the house down, he . . . well, anyway, he did the same con job in the pen. Read some law books and convinced some fruitcake prison psychiatrist that never mind the way the old Inuit used to do it, in modern Canada it was cruel and unusual punishment not to let him go home after paying his debt to society, as the saying goes.
“This psychiatrist spread the word around to a few other bleeding hearts in the civil liberties game. They got a lawyer. When the parole was granted and he was still bound by his sentence not to return home, he had to name where he would be living so he could report weekly to a parole officer, in this case RCMP. He told them Cambridge, because it was the closest RCMP to Sanirarsipaaq, as close as he could get legally. Meanwhile his, uh, support group took my banishment stipulation to court on the grounds that this was discrimination, an extra penalty applied only to one group, natives, and they won. I guess that means that when the paperwork of transferring his parole from Cambridge to Sanirarsipaaq goes through, you’ll have him there.”
I said, “I did see him, a few seconds only, at the airport here Tuesday. I wondered who the guy was who was half-bald.”
“But Barker would know!”
I spoke again the immortal words, “Barker ain’t here.”
Bouvier got in on the last of the conversation. I filled him in on what I knew, and phoned RCMP Cambridge. Anybody paroled has to check in regularly at a designated parole office and cannot leave town without permission. Reporting is commonly once a week at the start, rising to less frequent periods if he keeps to the schedule and keeps his nose clean. It turned out that, originally, before the banishment thing was settled in his favor and Davidee was paroled to Cambridge Bay, he’d reported faithfully. Now that the court had ruled that he could return home, the paperwork was being done to transfer his parole point to Sanirarsipaaq.
“In fact, it’s supposed to come through today,” the corporal at Cambridge said. He was a Six Nations Indian from Ontario and a tough cop. “We’ll be faxing it up and then he’ll be your baby.”
I said, “While you’ve had him did he ever ask for permission to leave Cambridge at all? Like to come here?”
“No. Not to Sanirarsipaaq. He knew he wouldn’t have got that, of course. He did get leave every week to go to a camp north of here at a place called No Name Lake, to do some trapping and hunt caribou. He said he wanted to make some money, instead of depending on welfare. I even liked him some for that attitude.”
The good con man at work. No Name Lake is about halfway between Cambridge and Sanirarsipaaq. My guess was it would take no more than a few hours of fast snowmobile travel to get from there to either place. So every time he’d had leave he could have been coming here from No Name but not showing his face.
I was on the point of saying that I’d seen him here yesterday, but changed my mind in time. Obviously, he had broken parole at least that once. But I didn’t want him picked up on that technicality. I’d rather have him here where I could talk to him. I wanted to know where he’d been last Friday, when murder had been done and he was supposed to be in Cambridge. I wondered about times before last Friday, when he might have been here taking up again with the guys Barker’s files identified as being his special buddies.
I said to Bouvier, “Find out how long it takes a fast snowmobile to get from here to No Name and from there to Cambridge.”
“Will do.”
I told him about seeing the shaman at the hotel.
“I’d better go see him or he’ll think I’m not coming.”
I was halfway to the door when the phone rang again. Bouvier called, “Inuvik. For you.”
“Constable Joyce, sir,” a youngish voice said. “Uh, maybe I overstepped something here, but you know, your call to sort of keep track of this woman, Maisie Johanson?”
“What about her?”
“I was doing some work on the computer, running the name of a guy here we caught with drugs. When that was done, just for something to do I ran Maisie Johanson. Got it on the screen now. Used to live in Calgary? Well, I’ll read it to you . . . ‘Charged with assault causing bodily harm—’” He laughed and said, “Sorry, sir, I have to laugh at this . . . ‘Bodily harm, in the savage beating of Calgary Stampeders football player, Jerome Radalafski, whose collarbone was broken in the affray. She pleaded self-defense, that Radalafski had tried to have sex with her against her will, which he’d been charged with, too. This happened during a victory party after a game. While she was defending herself vigorously, by her account, Radalafski fell through a window of the second-story motel bedroom where she’d been taken not knowing they were going to be alone in there.’”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Judge gave ’em both probation.”