Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (3 page)

When all passengers were aboard there was a delay. Then, glancing from the window, I saw an ambulance rolling slowly around the nose of the aircraft toward the entry steps. Others were craning to look from windows on that side. The rear gate of the ambulance opened. Two attendants stood beside the vehicle's power platform as it slid out bearing a heavily wrapped stretcher.

The next hour or so I was to re-examine agonizingly in the next few days, weeks. But at the beginning there was nothing unusual. In the North many a normal commercial flight became a mercy flight of some kind. A doctor at Tuk or Sachs Harbor or Holman might judge that a patient urgently needed specialist treatment available only in Yellowknife or Edmonton. Hospitals were more suited to desperate human needs the farther one went south.

I stood up to watch. One of the pilots had come back from the flight deck. He stood near me. Others in forward seats wandered back to look but kept out of the way. The ambulance men, one backing up, negotiated the steps and laid the stretcher, a long tapered shallow aluminum basket, lengthwise on the sort of platform formed by the folded-down rows of seats. I couldn't see much of the man on the stretcher but what I could see was enough. Part of his face showed, his nose, forehead, and a good deal of white hair; his eyes were closed. Morton Cavendish. I felt a deep pang of sadness to see him so helpless, the man who had helped so many in the North. Including me. He was lying on his right side, his cheek on a pillow, his legs seeming to be slightly bent at the knees. A plump, dark-haired nurse put a heavy satchel on one of the empty seats across the aisle from the stretcher. A tall young ground agent edged past her, glancing at the stretcher's burden.

“Okay,” he said to the ambulance men, dismissing them, then spoke to the stewardess with the long dark-brown hair.

“Seat-belt extensions?”

She nodded, her eyes briefly intent on his. From an overhead compartment she handed him several strips of sturdy webbing eight or nine feet long. At each end the webbing had two straps, one bearing a seat-belt fastener and the other a socket.

“That enough?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

He laid one extension diagonally lengthwise from left to right across the blankets covering the stretcher, another in a criss-cross from right to left. He fastened all four ends to the regular seat-belt receptacles, tightened all straps, then laid another strap across the middle of the stretcher around the hips, fastened it at both ends, pulled it snug, and stood back.

“That should be okay,” he said.

The stewardess gently tested the stretcher for play, found little, and nodded.

“See you,” he said to her over his shoulder as he turned quickly to the exit.

The plane took off. I sat back thinking about the phone call from Ottawa and wondering who was on the missing aircraft, whether I knew any of them. When the seat-belt sign went off I got up and sat on a chair arm to have a good look at Morton Cavendish. If he was sometimes conscious, this wasn't one of the times. He was motionless except for the rise and fall of the blanket as he breathed. His breathing was regular but seemed somehow faulty. With each intaken breath his blanket would rise slowly an inch or so, then drop like a stone as he exhaled. He never changed position in the slightest, except for his breathing. The hefty nurse reached across the aisle, removed soggy face tissues from beside his mouth and moved in some dry ones.

I didn't want to distract the nurse but when the dark-haired stewardess wheeled up with the drinks cart I jerked my head at the unconscious man. “Where's Morton going?”

“Edmonton.”

I thought of the tragedy of it, a man who seemed in his prime, late fifties, on the verge of seeing huge improvements in the lot of his people, improvements that he had helped to bring about. Father of the drinking man I'd met at Maxine's two nights ago. I'd liked him the many times I met him, cheerful and human, waving off thanks, disarming his opponents simply by being honest and consistent even when negotiations were at their toughest. He'd always been respected, more than ever now when victories had been won and others were in sight.

The nurse felt under the blanket at his midriff. I thought at first she might be checking to see if he had wet himself but then briefly saw his motionless right forearm as she held the wrist and glanced at her watch, taking his pulse.

After adjusting the covers again she reached into her satchel and took out an oxygen bottle about eighteen inches long, with a mask attached. She put the mask over his mouth and nose and adjusted a strap around his head to hold the mask in place. Then she tucked the oxygen bottle securely under the webbing at his waist. His breathing seemed to me exactly the same as it had been without the oxygen.

The first stop, Norman Wells, was about an hour south of Inuvik. In flight there'd been more light, especially at 33,000 feet, but as we landed it was nearly dark. When the aircraft taxied to a stop, people hurried past me to line up for the exit. Everybody always seems to want to be first out of the door. Let 'em. I was in no hurry. There were always a few extra minutes between passengers getting off and others getting on.

The doors opened. As the aisle cleared I leaned over to haul my bag out from where I'd jammed it under the seat in front. When I straightened up, reaching for my parka and fur hat on the empty seat beside where I'd been sitting, I had my back to the exit steps. Add to that the matter of planting my hat firmly in place as a safeguard against the wind blowing outside, and getting one arm into my parka.

Then as I turned, reaching for the other sleeve, I saw a man coming aboard, fast.

In the instant when I was thinking that people boarding aren't usually that quick, he pulled off one of his big mitts to reveal a black-barrelled automatic pistol. Without a moment's pause, he fired three rapid shots point blank into Morton Cavendish's head.

As I flung myself at him, he straight-armed the little stewardess flat on her back across the screaming nurse, both blocking the aisle in front of me. I jumped onto the seat behind mine and used its back to swing myself over the two women, then leaped down the steps, too late.

 

Corporal Charlie Paterson of the Norman Wells detachment was a big guy, towering over me. And right now he was extremely agitated. The two of us were in the mildly graffiti-scarred men's can at the terminal building. The corporal had locked the door behind us. “It's the only goddamn private place short of kicking the airline people out of their effing office,” he said. He knew my face and name from when I had been full-time RCMP but thought when I went to Northern Affairs it was final. To him I was a civilian again. No doubt that made him feel free to act naturally, such as swearing a blue streak in a way he normally would not have in the presence of a superior, even one with brown skin and almond-shaped eyes, five feet six of sheer Native guile.

What I knew about him was that he was an officer on the way up, having been commended during his previous posting at Fort Simpson, especially for community work at the time of the Pope's visit there. I can only assume that the Pope never heard Charlie let fly when he was mad. He'd seen Morton's body. He knew how the murderer had gotten away. Charlie had been no more than a few hundred yards from the airport “and driving like a mad bastard,” according to his own testimony, when the fatal shots were fired. I could see he felt sure that without those few hundred yards he might instantly have taken his place among the storied Mounties who always got their man.

His luck had been all bad. An Ottawa call instructing him to meet me at the airport had come in while he was out hunting rabbits. “Every effing Tuesday we go out, me and the doctor and a guy from the oil company, hunting, fishing, having a few drinks, whatever!”

He looked defiant. “It's community effing relations, you know!” But he didn't even like that excuse himself. Furiously, as if looking for something to punch, he flushed both toilets with a crash and gurgle unparalleled in the history of plumbing.

“A really bad break,” I said, trying to soothe him.

“That's not all! My effing duty constable left word with Nancy to tell me to call the office but she didn't.”

“Nancy?”

“My wife. Of course, she didn't know what the call was about, but anyway I got home and was cleaning the rabbits in the sink when right away she came into the kitchen and started yelling she'd just cleaned the sink, and I yelled did she think I was going out into minus thirty-five weather to clean some effing rabbits and she forgot the call, and . . .”

I'll summarize the remainder. When the rabbits were bagged and in the freezer the corporal and his wife went to a choir practice adjudged to be urgently needed because of special Easter services some weeks away. The practice had been called for 5:30 p.m., with potluck supper and euchre afterwards. They were just warming up in the joyful, “Christ is Risen!” when Constable Ned Hoare appeared at the back of the church and without waiting for a break in the music roared, “Charlie! Call from Ottawa! You're supposed to meet the plane! It's coming in right now!” and Nancy said, “Oh, God, Charlie. I was supposed to tell you to call the office.”

“God damn it all to fucking hell,” the corporal groaned, apparently having forgotten to use the more genteel “effing.” “If I'd been here I might have been able to do something. Chase him, shoot him, whatever. The one day in the fucking week when for half an hour I'm away from the phone and this happens.”

I was fresh out of appropriate responses. “What do you sing in the choir?” I asked.

“Lead tenor!” he snapped, and then, less forcefully, “Okay, now fill me in.”

I told him what I knew. The murderer had used what looked to me like a Colt GM (for Government Model) .45, which in one form or another has been used in wars, revolutions, police actions and murders since about 1911. I own one myself. He had escaped on a Skidoo Elan, a machine I knew because it is a favorite among trappers—light, powerful, easy to handle and easy to fix. He (presumably he) had left it with the engine running on the tarmac about seventy-five feet from the aircraft steps and a little south of the terminal, toward the Okanagan Helicopters limited hangar. I'd seen the murderer running for the machine as I charged down the steps scrabbling for the gun that was at home in Ottawa in my bed-table drawer and which I hadn't worn for two years. In seconds he was revving into high speed across the foot-deep snow, then across the main runway, last seen as a red tail-light dwindling to nothing in the dark and blowing snow. He'd been out of sight before anybody with a machine to make chase with could react, if that anybody had been of a mind to, which is never entirely certain when one man is armed and a prospective pursuer is not.

Going back to the airport I'd pulled a blanket over Cavendish's head (he was dead), told the pilot I was RCMP and would take charge for now (he seemed relieved), and told everybody to get off the plane but stay in the waiting room, which is where they were now.

Or most of them, anyway. Someone was trying the door of the toilet and complaining pitiably about the desperate state of his bladder.

The corporal barked, “Go outside and do it in a snowbank,” but the guy didn't go away.

Wishing him well, and knowing that at least he wasn't a Native or he wouldn't have had to be told to do it in a snowbank, I went on. Before I left the aircraft I'd questioned the nurse, whose name was Hilda. She didn't know much so I summarized drastically for Charlie. But the full account of my couple of minutes with the nurse went like this:

I'd asked, “When was it decided to fly him out?”

“Sometime yesterday. This was the first flight we could catch.”

“Do you know what kind of shape his son was in when he brought his father in the night before?”

“I don't know. I've been on days.”

Then I came to the important part. “Who knew that he was being flown out on this flight?”

“Oh, a lot of people. People at the hospital, and people from CBC news who checked every few hours, and the girl reporter for the paper, News North. She came around—I mean, she's stationed in Inuvik by the paper and I guess she'd been phoning the story in, he was so well known. So there'd be people in the paper's Yellowknife office who would know, plus everybody who heard it on the radio.”

Her voice trailed off and she compressed her lips. I think delayed shock was hitting her. She faltered, “The doctors, you know, at the hospital, they said he was in and out of consciousness and tried to talk but couldn't be understood, so even today when we were getting him ready, well, it was bad but certainly not hopeless.” She drew a deep breath, “Not like now.”

I still didn't have the answer I was looking for. “Did anybody call looking for details that made you wonder?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, made you or anybody else suspicious about their questions? Like, exactly when he was being flown out?”

“Not that I took. I wouldn't know about calls last night or calls the doctor took.”

It had been about that time in our conversation that Corporal Charlie Paterson came bounding up the steps of the plane, loudly lamenting his fate, then instantly charged back out to order Constable Hoare to get out there into the bush on a borrowed snowmobile, musing aloud as that tail light disappeared into the murk, “As much chance as a snowball in hell. That bush has more snowmobile tracks than rabbit tracks.”

I looked at him. “But we'd look real funny if we got helicopters out in the morning and found that the machine broke down or hit a tree or some damn thing half a mile away.”

“No kidding,” he said sarcastically. “I never would have thought of that on my own.”

Touché.

The fact that the murderer's or anyone's snowmobile had been left running out in the open wasn't noteworthy. Half a dozen snowmobiles were sitting around right now among the pickups, taxi vans and two police cars. More were arriving every few minutes as word spread around town. Every vehicle had its engine running. In the North that was winter habit, like long underwear. Anything not left running would be too damn cold to get into and also might not start. The temperature outside right now was minus thirty-eight. In these parts in mid-winter, minus twenty is considered a heat wave.

When we were pretty well caught up on background the corporal unlocked the door. An old white guy, one hand with a tight grip on the front of his pants groaned, “Thanks a lot!” and shuffled past. Civilization at the crossroads.

A few feet along the passage to our right the area in front of the airline counter was maybe twelve feet by eighteen feet with a bench along the outside wall. An opening led to another squarish room where a nice-looking woman, about thirty, held a metal detector while blocking the door to the tarmac where the 737 was sitting. Both rooms were crowded with people in parkas and big boots, the air blue with cigarette smoke. Some were sitting on benches, some standing.

The buzz of voices fell silent. We stopped by the door of the small office off the check-in counters. Outside to our right the cars and pickups sat with motors running, the exhausts pluming in the frosty air. Lights could be seen moving on nearby roads. Down beyond the main road was the Mackenzie River with its more than 200 oil and gas wells, many in the river itself on artificial islands. The oil-town settlement of more than 600 people spread for miles along the river, the glow from burn-offs at the main Esso installations barely visible from where I stood. I somehow didn't think the murderer had been from here, but there was no way of knowing yet.

“I think one at a time, whaddaya say?” the corporal asked.

“Sure.”

He faced the crowd. He didn't have to ask for attention.

“No one leave the airport until we have names and addresses,” he said in a carrying voice. “This can be speeded up a lot if anybody knew the guy with the gun, positive identification preferred, of course, but even a suspicion we'll listen to. Anybody with anything to say that might help, step right up.”

I watched the faces in the growing silence. Even when they'd been filing past me out of the plane I'd been thinking of things I wanted to know right away. Never mind motive. Who could even guess that, yet. Somebody had had to know, and let the murderer know, that Morton Cavendish was on this flight. You couldn't load up a Colt GM .45, figure out how to shoot some poor unconscious man strapped onto a stretcher, back it up with an escape plan and then start meeting every flight on the off chance. It crossed my mind that I wasn't really supposed to be here for a murder. My assignment had been a missing aircraft bearing someone that Buster was concerned about.

The corporal had waited a few beats. Nobody had stepped up.

“Okay. Come in to this office behind me one at a time. First, airport staff, then plane crew, then the rest. This all has to be done before the flight can go on. If you know anything at all, be sure you tell us now, not two days from now.”

The two of us went back into the little airport office. The corporal sat behind a desk. There were two chairs. I took one. Through a window I could see the silently waiting 737, gusty snow visible against its lighted windows. Beyond it, snow and ice particles could be seen in the runway lights blowing thick and fast. Beyond that was blackness entire, the impenetrable Arctic night.

A second constable was inside the aircraft. Having taken photos of the body from every angle he was supervising the cleanup.

Whether the body stayed here or went on to Yellowknife had not been determined, but when we were finished here the inspector at Inuvik, commanding the big RCMP subdivision that included Inuvik, Norman Wells and other surrounding territory, would let us know.

Just before the first person, the woman from the airline counter, came in, I asked the corporal, “Any word about that missing aircraft?”

He looked at me as if I'd gone nuts, asking about a missing plane when we had a murder on our hands.

The counter agent had streaky, fair hair and a very pale face. Before we even asked, she burst out, “There was a guy came in on the flight this morning that I didn't know. A big guy. No luggage. I noticed him because he had one of those parka hoods that pretty near cover the face, and he went right out and took off in the taxi before anybody else left at all.”

She said that waiting for the flight to come through tonight she was sure the guy she'd seen this morning hadn't been around. There'd been no one in the terminal except the few boarding passengers, nobody who had asked any questions in person or by phone about the incoming flight and whether it had a stretcher case aboard. We quizzed her but that was all she knew. When we figured she'd told us everything we could find out right then, we started on the others.

An Esso Resources guy said that the chain-link fence that fanned out from both ends of the terminal building ran along this edge of the airport to restrict access to loading and unloading areas. Several private concerns along the airport strip, Okanagan for one, also had to be entered through gates in the high fence. Theoretically no unauthorized person could get through one of those properties to where the murderer's snowmobile had been parked, perhaps not for long. But the Esso guy also pointed out that the fence only ran along one side of the airport. Charlie obviously knew that. I had thought of that too. The other side, and the ends, were wide open. The man could have driven in unseen from the open bush and waited in the dark, watching the aircraft taxi in and then making his move.

Through the rest of the questioning, I just sat and listened. The corporal was thorough and well-organized. The profile that emerged pretty well matched my own recollection from the few seconds I'd been aware of the murderer at all.

The two baggage handlers, dressed for their frigid duties outdoors, had been getting their cart out to unload luggage when the man ran for the snowmobile and took off. The dark-haired stewardess who'd been closest to the action had a bruise on her right cheek from when she'd been flung out of the way but said nothing I did not already know. She said rather shakily that she'd been lucky to get off with a bruise, she might have been shot, too.