The Shaman's Knife (14 page)

At this point the mother rose hospitably and set out an extra cup, I assumed for me, and was carrying the teapot toward the kettle steaming on the stove. Davidee almost imperceptibly raised one hand in her direction. He had only been here a short time, not much more than an hour, but he was in charge.

She stopped and went back and sat down.

I had only moved a step or two into the room. Davidee's father was still staring at me without speaking. I have rarely seen a man in such open distress.

“We'll talk outside,” Davidee said.

I moved out of the doorway. He went past me, grabbed a parka off a hook, and stepped into his knee-highs. I followed.

What came next was the confusing side of Davidee. A few feet away from the door he stopped. “Look, you can see how it is in there,” he said, shrugging. “It's the old story, give a dog a bad name . . . What is it you want to ask me?”

“I want to check where you were on the night of the murders.”

“Not here, that's for sure.”

“Tell me.”

“I was at No Name Lake, I had permission to be there.”

“So I've heard from the RCMP in Cambridge. But No Name isn't all that far from here.”

“You don't think I could have been here and not be noticed? Davidee, the local pariah? You must be kidding. I've heard about what happened, sure. I also know that the police checked the whole town, took the names at the rec hall, and I simply wasn't there. Couldn't have been.”

“And you stick to that story.”

“I do.”

Again he was meeting my eyes with every sign of honesty, concern, and even a little bit of pleading. For the first time I could imagine a prison psychiatrist getting to know him, believing perhaps not in his innocence, but that he didn't deserve to be canceled out of the world he'd been brought up in. Anybody not knowing the background at all might be at least unsure as to whether at any given time he was telling the truth or led the league in acting out a lie.

I wanted to shake his composure, but so far didn't have the ammunition—and, I admitted to myself, maybe I never would have.

“Okay,” I said.

“You mean that's it?”

“For now,” I said, and as I turned away I thought I could see a sudden change in his eyes. Not fear. Rage.

When I was walking back down the hill through the steadily darkening night I realized I had nothing new on Davidee, except impressions, and Jonassie's words about his one time interest in shamanism.

At the detachment Bouvier appeared in the doorway to meet me, a walking question mark.

“You like a drink?” I said. “I've got some rum and as long as Margaret hasn't put somebody else in my room, we can at least sit and stare at one another.”

He grinned. “Not often I get an invitation like that.” I waited while he turned out the lights and locked the door. He was singing a tune I knew, but with different words.

“I've got nerves that jingle, jangle, jingle,” he sang, “as we go riding merrily along.”

 

The next morning at seven thirty the bathroom was empty and the whole place quiet. Everyone else had eaten and vanished. I must have been sleeping like the dead to have lasted through the boots, mostly those of construction workers, going up and down the halls. I shaved, brushed my teeth, and conducted my daily debate with myself as to whether to attack my gums with a little rubber pointed thing that made them bleed, as the dentist in Ottawa had told me I must do.

“You don't want to get gum disease, do you?” he said accusingly.

I said, “When you ask that, does anybody ever say yes?”

He didn't laugh, too bad, but I really did not want to get gum disease, so I obeyed him every morning until the gums bled. I spat and cursed and hoped no native would come in and ask me why I was making myself bleed, and should they call the shaman?

Margaret was not around the kitchen when I came down. The Inuit girl served me oatmeal porridge, fried fish, toast, and honey. She asked how my mother was and looked solemn when I told her I was about to call and find out the latest. I finished my tea and went outside into the frosty morning. The spring sun was already two or three hours into the sky, visible through a cold mist that softened the outlines of houses and what lay around them. A few kids were heading by circuitous routes to be early for school, some dressed Arctic-style in caribou-skin pants and mukluks with sealskin soles, others getting the jump on spring, as kids tend to do, with lighter clothes, store-bought anoraks, even a couple in Nikes. Most were getting in some sliding and wrestling on the way.

When I walked in, Bouvier was putting down the phone. “The forensics guy just phoned from the airport. Got in by chartered Beaver from Cambridge Bay. Wants to get at it.”

After a moment's thought I said, “Pick him up and bring him to Annie's.” In that I had a slightly ulterior motive. Bouvier and I both were very short on local knowledge, people, personalities. Annie already had been helpful. I thought the more she was personally involved, the better off we'd be. Her insights might point us in one direction or head us off from another.

When he was gone I called the hospital and got Dr. Butterfield.

“No change,” he said. I walked up the hill to where the police van was parking outside Annie's place.

In the kitchen, Annie poured coffee for Bouvier and Constable Joe Pelly, tea for me. Pelly was tall, thin, fair-haired, with an Adam's apple that bobbed up and down when he spoke or swallowed. As a graduate of the RCMP's tough forensics course, he would be well educated about fingerprints, footprints, material from under fingernails, minuscule shreds of clothing, weaponry, rigor mortis time spans, everything that might have a bearing on a case.

When we shook hands I noticed that his were chapped across the knuckles, as happens when someone works outside a lot in cold weather. I mentioned that.

“My girlfriend and I are building a ski cabin.”

“Where?”

“In the Gatineau.” It was a region in northwestern Quebec, not far from Ottawa. “Our cabin is one of those jobs where logs are cut to a pattern and numbered, with lots of directions, arrows, and so on, so that any fool is supposed to be able to put one up.” He laughed. “But it ain't easy. For me anyway. I feel more at home doing what I've been doing so far on this case.”

“About the bodies,” I began, and stopped, because at the mention of bodies Annie got up and said she had to get to the office. Hastily pulling on her parka and boots, she declined Bouvier's offer to drive her to work. “With all due respect,” she said drily, “I don't want everybody to think I'm part of the police force.”

The door closed behind her. Pelly looked at me with a mild flick of the eyes. He'd noticed the abruptness of Annie's departure. “You were saying?” Pelly asked me.

“Did you find anything new, looking at the bodies?”

“Well, two things I could mention. Even before I got them out of the body bags they were starting to thaw a little.” Bouvier, leaning against the sink, suddenly looked sick, but if Pelly noticed he showed no sign, went on matter-of-factly. “Because of the weather delay night before last at Cambridge the dry ice the bodies had been packed in hadn't lasted all the way to Yellowknife. But basically what I could see was pretty close to what anyone would see right after they died. We'll need an autopsy to determine exact cause of death on both of them. The old lady, she was stabbed so many times it'll be a tossup which one did her in.”

Bouvier looked sicker. I didn't feel so good myself. I hated to think of an honest old lady carved up like that just for being alive and in the way.

“Any idea what the knife was like?”

“I'd think about average size for a hunting knife. There was one wound in her right thigh where the handle bruised the flesh, meaning the knife had gone in full length. But it didn't come out the other side of the thigh. Of course, there was pretty thick flesh there. Say a blade five, five and a half, six inches.”

Jonassie had said the blade was five and a half inches on his knife with the gyrfalcon handle.

“You said there were two things you could mention.”

“Yeah.” He looked thoughtful. “The money in Dennis's pocket had been put in there, like, laying flat. I mean, you take a stack of bills and pile them neatly and slide them into a pocket loose without folding, get what I mean? With all that blood, some of it was in that pocket. The bills that I saw had a lot of blood spread around, but mostly on what would be the bottom end, the end deepest in the pocket. There must have been half a cup of blood there. However, the top bill of what was left had a smear on one side consistent with somebody sliding some of the blood-soaked bottom stuff out and across it.”

He looked pleased with that deduction and had a right to be.

“Meaning if we do find money with a smear of blood on it, you'll be able to match it with what was left?”

“Well, the person who took it might have had time to wash the blood off when it was fresh, but there would be traces.” He stopped briefly, finished the last of his coffee, and looked baffled. “Thing I can't figure out is why only some of the money was taken.”

I'd been thinking about that and had one possible answer. “Maybe whoever it was thought that leaving some of the money would make it look as if there'd been no robbery at all.”

Whatever the case, our wondering about why Dennis had more than his pay now had another dimension. He'd had even more, and some of it would be bloodstained.

I looked at Bouvier. “I'll get on it,” he said.

I said, “First make a list of people in town who handle a lot of money and can keep their mouths shut.”

I meant, people who would not go blabbing around that the cops are looking for bloodstained money. We didn't want some kind of a general alarm to spook somebody into getting rid of the evidence.

Bouvier pushed his lips together into a tight straight line, reading my mind.

All this hadn't taken long, about long enough for Pelly to drink his coffee. He got up, put his cup in Annie's sink, and looked at me. Time for action. I couldn't put off any longer going to look at what I didn't really want to see. Each new scene-of-the-crime I had faced over the years had had its own horrors. I knew this one wasn't going to do much to help me fall asleep at night, either. I tidied the table, moved dishes to the sink and margarine and milk to the fridge, thought of Lois's compulsive neatness, of Maxine's more relaxed attitude. In microcosm, the story of my life.

“Well,” I said finally, “let's go.”

“I think I'll pass,” Bouvier said, not unexpectedly. “I'll go back and start on the money-with-blood-on-it angle.”

“One other thing,” I said, passing him the names that Annie had given me last night. “See if there's anything on those and tell them we want to talk to them.”

He glanced at the list thoughtfully. “Dennis's night visitors,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Maisie is a surprise. We did talk to them all briefly.”

I thought of Margaret's remark about Maisie being “strong as a horse” but clueless about men.

I had an afterthought. “If Corporal Barker phones to give us a pep talk from Waikiki, read the list to him and see what he says, especially about Maisie.”

When Pelly and I stepped outside, Bouvier was gone; nobody was in sight. I didn't know how curious the neighbors might be, this long after the event, but all adjoining windows faced out, not sideways, and there were no other homes close enough for me to see if anyone was watching. I shoved the key into the lock and opened the door, Pelly right behind me.

The house's heat had been at minimum since the night of the murders, so although there was an odor it was more musty, cold, and clammy than repugnant. Dried blood looked black against the cheap gray carpeting, especially black in what appeared to be footprints. If somebody spilled a pail or two of blood on a floor and it splashed and then you struggled in it, fought through it, and killed some poor woman who might have struggled a bit until she fell back, it would look like this.

Pelly's instant cursing seemed private, almost inaudible. “I didn't get the idea that she had had this much chance to fight back,” he said finally. His professional reaction quickly followed the human one as he put down his bag of tools. “There's a real goddamn mother lode of tracks here, though,” he said. “We should try to step where the, urn, others didn't.”

We took off our shoes. He padded over toward the kitchen, turning on an overhead light on the chaos there, and then dropped to his knees in the doorway and unlimbered his camera, taking endless close-up photos as he slowly traversed the downstairs rooms and entrance hall.

I don't really have a system in a killing where there isn't much to go on. I rarely take notes. I listen and smell and see. Leaving Pelly working in the kitchen, I turned on more lights and climbed the steps to the second floor.

By staying close to the left wall I avoided the crazy pattern of splotches and stains on the stair carpet and wall on the right side. When I reached the second-floor landing and faced its three doorways, left (Dennis's room), center (bathroom), and right (Thelma's room), it was easy enough to figure the pattern of the bloodstains there: anyone hurtling out of the lefthand bedroom, Dennis's, would naturally wind up on the other side.

The bathroom, directly ahead, looked undisturbed. Whoever had made that mad dash away from Dennis's body had certainly not stopped to clean up. Clean towels, folded neatly, hung from a metal rack screwed into the wall beside the washbasin.

The bedroom door to my right was open. From where I stood, the hall light showed Thelma's neatly made single bed. It had no headboard, simply a mattress on a boxspring that had short screw-on legs, the bed covered by a multicolored and cheerful-looking patchwork quilt. I pushed the door wider open and stuck my head in. There was no sign that anyone had been in the room since the last time Thelma made it up. A nice Inuit doll of a sort made in the north and sold in souvenir shops had been placed on the pillow so that it leaned against the painted drywall.

Dennis's bedroom door was closed. I couldn't remember anyone saying whether it had been open when Barker and Bouvier first walked in last Friday night. If so, it had been closed after they removed the body. Tracks leading from that room to the landing were not complete footprints, as was the case on the ground floor, but looked more the way mud or dung, or blood, for that matter, anything that tracks, might look if someone had been slipping and sliding, in a hurry.

I opened Dennis's door and closed it again quickly. The smell in there was not like it had been below; this was human excrement, and urine, and general foulness, along with a lingering aroma of stale beer and wine or whisky. I opened the door again, turned on the light, and walked in, stepping carefully. I had seen animals killed, caribou torn to pieces by wolves, once a dog being torn apart by a wolverine, polar bears harassed by dogs and finished off by Inuit hunters, but never anything like this; tangled sheets and blankets on the double bed dried into weird shapes by the blood and excrement that stuck this part to that part and then dried, clothes and bedding torn and flung around, foulness everywhere. Hanging over a full-length mirror on the wall beside the dresser was a shirt that seemed to have been hung there clean and ironed and then splashed and fouled from below but not all the way up. One sleeve and the collar were as pristine white as when Thelma, presumably Thelma, had ironed the shirt.

From downstairs, Pelly: “How you doing up there, sir?”

“Coming down.”

Pelly was kneeling in the blood-splashed hall, flashlight in hand, now engrossed more or less impersonally. “I've never even heard of a case with stuff like this,” he said, waving at the mess around him in a kind of awe. “If the people who did it are still here and still wearing boots, maybe we've got them.”

“Them?” I said.

“Some of the boots were big but there are smaller prints, too, maybe a woman or a boy. Here, look.” He knelt carefully on a bit of carpet and pointed to an unmistakably small but smeared shoe print. “I'd say there are three or four distinctly different prints, including a faint one not associated with blood, one of the smaller ones—could have been just wet, as if someone came in out of the snow.”

Even not-so-good prints in the right hands could yield details of size, make, extent of wear, and the way a person walks as indicated by where the wear occurs. Finding out where a specific piece of footwear was sold might take some doing in a city, but it would be easier to trace if it had been bought here or here-abouts.

I asked, “Any of the prints look like sealskin?” Our women still make boots in the age-old style, with warm caribou uppers and maybe insoles, but outer sales of sealskin, which doesn't react to damp the way caribou skin does. It also would not have a manufacturer's brand name helpfully stamped into the sole.