Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery (5 page)

“Yeah, well, this is the way civilization hurts a guy.”

But I had a restless night. It was that line about the igloo. I got thinking of when I was a boy, forty years ago. Up on Herschel Island the first igloo I remember was built of driftwood. White people always thought igloos were built of snow blocks, like our inland people do, but the word
iglu
just means house and along the Arctic shore in some places a lot of driftwood floated in on the Mackenzie and Yukon rivers and my people naturally used it. We built some snow igloos when we were out hunting, but not when we were home.

Half awake in the cot in the corporal's office I remembered a lot of images of after we moved across the Beaufort Sea to the mainland—the lines of kayaks on the shore when the white whales were coming in and we'd go out in the kayaks and get beyond them so we could drive them into the shallows and kill our winter's food, we hoped. I thought of the big umiaks that we used when we were moving on the water as a family. I thought of all the families I'd lived with as a small boy after my father drowned out hunting and my mother took another man and he left her and she took another.

Once I had been loaned to another man and woman, supposed to be for a few weeks. It turned out to be two years before I got back to my own mother again. That sort of thing was not unusual. I thought of my grandma, who had bad sores on her feet and legs and had to be pulled on a sled wherever she went, winter and summer. I stayed with her on and off, several times.

I thought of school in Inuvik, like a barracks, all the other kids, like me, brought in by air from remote settlements to be educated. It was there that I learned to swear, as part of learning English. There are no swear words in our language, Inuktitut.

It was fun sometimes except when I went back to my mother in summer and it would take a while to get used to eating nothing but flesh again, seal, ducks, geese, muktuk, if the whale hunt had gone well, fish, once in a while a caribou.

One winter away from home I'd set snares for rabbits. Once when I was nearly starved I'd killed and eaten a white fox.

 

Gloria looked like hell, for once. I have seen her after some nights that would have killed me (booze, sex and more sex, little or no sleep) when she still looked fresh and dewy-eyed. Her hair, which was much lighter than Maxine's, worn high off her forehead and fluffy around the sides of her face, would look as if it had just been washed, nice and soft. Her face would look as if she'd never had a drink in her life; no baggy eyes, no lines, good white teeth, and only when you looked into her eyes could you see the trouble, whatever it was that made her live on the edge the way she did. In her late teens she'd changed from an easygoing kid to one who seemed the same on the surface but couldn't let a goodlooking guy go by without looking at him the way some men looked at sexy girls.

Today the smudgy charcoal-grey skin around her eyes made her look as if she'd used too much makeup, but closer inspection showed she had none on at all. Her hair was stringy, brushed only cursorily or not at all. On one side her hair was in that kind of tangle that comes from sleeping on it wrong. We were in a fake English pub called the Caribou Arms, of all things. It's a wonder it wasn't called the Duke of Inuvik.

I'd caught a ride up in the morning with Nahanni Air, took a taxi in to the CBC, went to the newsroom, and asked Maxine if she knew where I could find Gloria.

Maxine shook her head. “I've been phoning home. No answer.”

We both knew that Gloria had had, or was having until yesterday, or checked into on a part-time basis, the most discreet affair in the history of the North. With Morton Cavendish, who was thirty years older.

“How did she take it?” I asked.

“As if she'd been hit by a bullet herself. I'd got home and we were listening to the news when it came on about him being killed. After she stopped crying she was like a sleep-walker. Put on her clothes and went out and didn't come back.”

The phone was ringing. Maxine answered, listened, made a note. On the staff list at CBC-Inuvik her title was news assistant, a job she'd got after getting high grades in the communications arts course at Arctic College. The idea behind the course was that some day Inuit and Dene would do most of the reporting and announcing jobs now done by non-Native imports.

In a big city her job would have been handling weather warnings, traffic foul-ups, slipping an on-air guy notes reporting something like, “Tractor-trailer jack-knifed on the Richmond ramp. Police are on the scene.” Here she kept track of scheduled and unscheduled flights, taped people who wanted to send messages to outlying settlements, typed up notices for meetings (in Inuvik, there was actually a hobbyist type of dog-team club that had outings on weekends), manned the tape machine for voice reports from local correspondents about anything from a polar bear sighting to a homicide during a weekend party at Paulatuk.

At my invitation for a beer she quickly tidied her desk. “Good idea. Gloria's maybe at the Mackenzie.” It was only one minute's brisk walk away, but Gloria wasn't there. Several other people we knew were. We were invited to grab empty chairs, but didn't. Nobody asked me directly about Morton Cavendish but there were questions in a lot of eyes. We said maybe we'd be back. We tried a couple of other places before finding her at the Caribou Arms.

She was alone and wouldn't speak. Just sat there. Maxine sat next to her and put her arms around Gloria's shoulders and said, “Listen, sweetie, look, we both know what you're going through. Let us help.”

Gloria just looked at her.

I asked if she knew where I could find William Cavendish. Her eyes might have indicated she knew, but she didn't reply.

“When you left Maxine's with William Sunday night, did you go with him to the Mackenzie?”

Finally, she spoke. “No, I wanted to, but we went to the Eskimo Inn and he had a couple more drinks and told me to wait for him there.”

“And he went to the Mackenzie?”

“He must have, because he took his father . . .” she paused and took a deep breath . . . “took Morton to the hospital, didn't he?”

The Caribou Arms used to be a restaurant called the Raven's Nest. It had served good food, some of the best in the North, Arctic char and musk-ox and caribou steaks, great French fries, strong coffee, but eventually it had closed due to some dispute about the building being sold, a new owner having different plans. Not much more than a year ago he had re-opened. He sold hamburgers and steak-and-kidney pie and the place was decorated like every other ersatz English pub in Canada. Apparently you could buy the whole deal in Edmonton, fake beams and fake velvet wallpaper, fake hunting prints and old maps of London on the walls and an expert in fake English pubs to put it all together until presto, it was the Caribou Arms. A can of English beer, Double Diamond or Bass Ale or Newcastle, cost $7.50.

“How long did you wait for him?”

“It seemed like forever.”

She was wearing pants and a jacket of that stuff called acid-wash, blue with white streaks. Her blue parka with Arctic symbols on the fringe at the bottom and wolverine fur on the hood was thrown over a nearby chair. She had been drinking a vodka on the rocks, which was almost finished. When I was ordering she asked for a Coors Light. I really wanted to ask her in detail about her relationship with Morton Cavendish. Maybe if Maxine hadn't been sitting there looking so worried, I would have.

Gloria watched me as I took a swallow of Double Diamond.

“I didn't know you drank beer.”

“I don't, much. But order a drink here and you have to get a triple or you can't taste it.”

Gloria said with a faint smile, “You can feel it, though.”

“Okay,” I said. “So you were waiting for William and he didn't come back. How long did you wait?”

“I don't know. Long. I was just thinking to hell with it, I'd go home, he could find me there if he wanted, when Jules Bonner came along and told me to come to his place, that William would be over later, so I went with him.”

She paused briefly. “I had the impression that William had called Jules, or even gone to his place, and asked him to get me over there. When we got there Jules told me there'd been a big fight, William and his father, and Morton had collapsed and had to be taken to the hospital.”

“A fight about what?”

“I don't know, but Jules still thought William would be along any minute.

“I got sleepy and Jules gave me a blanket on the couch and next thing I knew it was morning and the news had just come on the radio that”—again she paused and swallowed hard when she came to Morton Cavendish's name—“Morton was in real bad shape and might have to be flown out. I felt like trying to see him, but I didn't. Then I just stayed there. I felt rotten. I kept thinking I'd hear from William but I didn't.”

I pressed a little.

“About the big fight Jules mentioned. Did he give you any idea at all what it was about?”

“No.”

“Any ideas?”

Deep breath again. “Every time William and his father got together they argued.”

“What about?”

She shrugged, opened her mouth, closed it, didn't answer for a minute, then said, “Morton always wanted to know where William was getting money to live on, stuff like that. They just plain didn't get along.”

“Was William violent with you when he was drinking?”

“Never.”

“Do you think he and his father ever came to blows. I mean, physical violence?”

She didn't answer.

I said, “Either of you happen to know what doctor was on duty when they brought Morton in?”

Maxine nodded. “Bob Zimmer. He was quoted on the news.”

I asked Gloria if she had seen William at all since then.

She was back to shaking her head.

It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn't seen him at the airport, either, where you might think he'd have gone, despite the fight with his father. He would have known that his father was being flown out.

“No idea where he went after he was at the hospital?”

Then it came in a burst, tears brimming in her eyes. “I tried all over, all day Monday. I couldn't get Jules, even. A couple of other guys who hung out with the two of them a lot flew out that day on that flight that went down—you know, Harold Johns, well, he wasn't really with them that much but I couldn't find Albert Christian or Benny Batten either, because it turned out they'd gone with Harold, but of course nobody knew that until yesterday. Albert's girlfriend, Julie, was the one who told the police who was with Harold on the flight. She was mad as hell.”

“What about?” I asked.

“Albert had taken her car without telling her and just left it out by the Komatik Air office where Harold took off.”

That was the first I had known that Johns didn't take off from the airport. But that wasn't unusual. These bush flying outfits often had riverside locations. That was handy in summer when they were using floats and when they switched to skis they'd do business out of the same locations. Saved money on airport office space, too. The river wasn't solid ice everywhere right after freeze-up in the fall but now in January it would hold anything, let alone the kind of light planes Komatik Air had. I still figured Gloria knew more than she was telling me but maybe I could get it elsewhere.

I got up and said to Maxine, “See you later.”

She reached up soberly and patted my bum. “Take care.”

It was broad daylight when I left the Caribou. Three weeks ago, the month of dark days when the sun didn't show at all had ended, and now there was about five hours of daylight. I walked down the street in sunshine and found Dr. Robert Zimmer, MD, in his office not far from the Inuvik General Hospital. In his waiting room were two little old Inuit ladies with wrinkled brown faces and toothless smiles. One was smoking a pipe. Both wore bright gingham shifts over the warm skin clothes beneath. These old ones and some of the younger Inuit, too, made the shifts themselves. They fell to about calf length and had fringed bottoms. I always think they look colorful on the street, neat and individual, dressed-up town Inuit.

The doctor looked surprised. “Matteesie! Come in.” He spoke a few words in the Inuit tongue to the old ones that meant he'd see them in a minute and they grinned and nodded. He'd been here twenty years and had a twenty-three-foot launch with fish-finding gear that amused the locals. He also hunted caribou and polar bear and had a dog team; everything but a wife, who had left him years earlier to go back to Kitchener, Ontario.

He closed the door, went behind his desk, gestured to a chair and looked at me.

“It's about Morton Cavendish,” I said.

“Somebody said you'd been around but took the plane out yesterday, Matteesie. I thought of you when I heard that terrible business. It was on the radio that you'd been right there beside him. You back in the police?”

“Sort of I guess I never really left.”

We both laughed. It really was pretty ridiculous, but it hadn't taken long for people here to decide I'd gone civilian, moving to Northern Affairs.

At that thought I had a momentary flash of what kind of language I could expect from Buster when he found out what I was doing. Every once in a while, too, I thought of my superiors in Northern Affairs and how they'd dither over how the Russians would react if it came out that this certified Northern Affairs man, police work all behind him, was back getting involved the way I was.

But I couldn't do anything about that now. Maybe it would never make the papers. A cop, without portfolio. The search for the downed plane was stalled today. Bad weather a few hundred miles south, which meant Norman Wells, Fort Norman, and beyond. I'd kept track on the radio. The weather was okay for the bigger aircraft but no good for tree-hopping while looking for something on the ground. Even without being able to fly, I got the impression from the radio reports that the searchers couldn't figure out why they hadn't found anything or heard anything. They'd assume that the pilot would have tried to come down on an open space and if anybody was alive they'd put out colored markers and run a homing device. As far as I knew nothing yet had been seen or heard. But as soon as something was, I could get there in a matter of hours. I was keeping Buster's orders in mind, but meanwhile—a man was entitled to a hobby, right?

“What I wanted to know,” I said, “was what kind of shape Morton was in when you first saw him at the hospital.”

“Well, to start with, he must have had an angina attack before the stroke. He'd had angina before, you know, enough that he carried nitro pills with him. In fact, he still had some nitro clutched in one hand when he was brought in. But then sometimes he ate the damn things like peanuts. He must have either taken some, or been about to take some, when he had the stroke.”

“Was he conscious?”

“Not when I first saw him. Slipped in and out several times later. He tried to speak. Seemed desperate to tell me something. I tried to get him to write it, but he couldn't hold a pencil.”

“Would he have come out of it?”

“Well, you can never tell, sometimes the first stroke is just the start and is followed by others—but I did tell people that I thought the chances were not too bad, if we got him to a good stroke facility, like Edmonton. Might take weeks of therapy but sometimes it's quite amazing, a guy seems totally gone, but over weeks or months, he'll come back.”

“Anything else you can tell me? About him, or William, or whatever?”

“When Morton was brought in the son was a little loaded, I'd guess. Smelled of booze, anyway. Scared, but then who wouldn't be, seeing his father's eyes rolling around like a pinball machine when he tried to speak? Morton had a big bruise on his forehead. I asked William about it and he seemed to be trying to think when it had happened, but he didn't answer.”

“Was it consistent with a fall?”