The Shaman's Knife (16 page)

“You get anything?” I asked. I meant, on the hunt.

He shook his head. “Nothing but a lot of shit from Davidee.”

“I thought you were friends from away back.”

“We used to be. Then I smartened up.”

I took a shot in the dark. “What were you two arguing about today?”

“Who told you we were arguing? Oh, Sarah, I guess. Anyway . . .” He paused. “I was going to come and see you even before I got the message.”

“What about?”

“Well, it seems to me . . .” he said, then stopped. “You would hear that him and me were good friends . . .”

I waited for the rest.

“We're not, anymore. I don't want you thinking that anything he's mixed up in, I'm automatically in it too.”

“What's he mixed up in?”

He paused as if wrestling with himself about what to reply. “Just that we're not friends anymore,” he said stubbornly.

“Okay, I'll tell you what I wanted to see you about. I understand you used to help Dennis collect what people owed him.”

“That's true. But I never done anything wrong. I'd just tell 'em, pay up or I'll beat the shit out of you.” He smiled very faintly. “That was always enough.”

“Always?” I asked.

“Always.”

“Was there anybody who owed Dennis a lot of money who might have got into an argument about it with him, enough to beat him up? Enough to get into the fight he had before he got killed?”

He was shaking his head even before I finished the question.

I tried another tack.

“Your alibi on the night of the murders . . . ” I began.

“Was that I was watching hockey at Davidee's parents' place and then went to the rec hall.”

“You went straight to the rec hall and stayed there until after Bouvier took the pictures, and then you went home?”

“That's it. The other guys there would back me up, I was playing snooker with some of them. When you guys, I mean the corporal here, and Barker, came in and did the searches, I didn't know what it was all about. None of us did. I didn't even know about the murders until the next morning.”

“Was Davidee in the rec hall any of that time? We know he wasn't when the pictures were taken.”

“All I know is, he wasn't there when I was there.”

I couldn't think of anywhere to go from there. “Okay,” I said, “and thanks for coming in.”

He nodded. “I just don't want you to think of me and Davidee any more as being friends. In fact, I beat the shit out of him this morning.”

I couldn't believe it—for about three seconds. Then I looked into Hard Hat's hard eyes and did believe it. “Why?”

“Something he said about my cousin Sarah. That she'd fuck anybody.”

Abruptly, he walked out of the door and slammed it behind him, leaving two very surprised cops staring at each other.

“You believe him?” Bouvier asked.

“Most of it,” I said.

 

I hadn't been paying much attention to the fact that we'd been closing in on Easter and that in our part of the world nobody, or very few, would be working that day, Good Friday. The hotel was very quiet when I woke up. I lay there counting, not sheep, but fragments of thought. Hard Hat: Was he grinding an axe, trying to distance himself from Davidee? Had he really beaten Davidee up? Mother; it was too early to phone Yellowknife and get the latest. That nagging only-witness worry wouldn't go away. Money: I wished we'd known earlier about the chance that money might be around with blood on it. Laundering money was not unknown elsewhere in the world, but not the way someone might have tried it in Sanirarsipaaq, believing the TV commercials and going at it with New Improved Daz. “Out, damned spot!” hadn't worked for Lady Macbeth either, and in those days there had been no forensic science to pick up traces no matter what kind of a cleaner was used. I could only hope that none of the smoking garbage barrels around town was burning money that someone knew would be incriminating.

After Hard Hat's visit, Bouvier and I had got into the money matter. Okay, we'd agreed, what people had in their pockets was beyond us, but money does tend to move out of pockets fairly fast. Most spenders aren't really into checking every little splotch. We'd start with cashiers at the Co-op and ticket takers at the bingo, food, and pop counters in the rec hall.

Some places would be closed Good Friday. “We can get them Saturday,” I had said, sounding a little like one of the hockey coaches often seen on TV in these days of spring and the constant playoffs.

Bouvier had picked it up, twinkling. “How about the collection plates Easter Sunday? Should be a real haul there.”

I rolled my eyes.

“Okay,” he had grinned. “For starters I'll see if the Co-op is still open.”

He hadn't called me later and I'd been tired, had gone to bed early. Now I thought again about Dennis's night visitors: Hard Hat's cousin Sarah, whom Hard Hat protected, Agnes Aviugana, Leah Takolik. Maisie.

The first three likely would be, at most, accessories, witnesses. Maisie was different. I went over again what she had told her mother, and the fact that Annie had placed her as being there only briefly one night and that before the murders. But “briefly” to one person could be translated as “long enough” by another. I remembered one of Margaret's lines, delivered fondly: “In some ways she's her mother's daughter.” That could have some bearing here. I saw Margaret as having been a chance-taker; perhaps she still was. In our occasional conversations, she'd mentioned a lot of places she'd lived when she was married. She hadn't got into and out of a marriage by playing everything safe before she wound up in Sanirarsipaaq.

Also, of the four on Annie's list, only Maisie's size and physique were unusual. This was no happy-go-lucky Inuit kid. She might have been the only one wary enough (crafty enough?) to make sure that she
usually
(except that once when Annie saw her) would not be observed when she was taking a chance. She wouldn't be roaring up on the back of a snowmobile giggling and falling over her feet. That thing in Calgary might have been isolated, the only time that she took that kind of a chance with a man. But who was I kidding? There wasn't much on two legs that she had to be afraid of physically. And not one of the other kids had beaten up a full-size Calgary football player, as far as I knew. “Strong as a horse,” I thought again.

I ate a leisurely breakfast, almost alone in the dining room. No sign of Margaret. The sun was well up. When I came out, I looked across the almost empty settlement. Even the kids seemed to be sleeping in, no school today. At the detachment the van was parked outside, meaning Bouvier was on duty. I walked down the hill from the hotel to the jumbled ice of the seashore. Out a mile or more I could see an almost daily sight, the man motionless at a seal hole. He was too far away for me to see whether he was using a rifle or a harpoon. If it was a rifle, as the seal's head broke water it would be an instant goner, a floater, the man hauling it out. If he was using a harpoon there'd be a line on it. Either way the seal meat was food, and the skin became clothing; taking from nature only what was required, the rule of thumb that most natives at least
tried
to live by.

I leaned against one of the overturned snow-covered boats and for the moment decided that work could wait. Looking out at the seal hunter, I thought about the seasons for hunting in the sea; seals could be anytime, geese when they came back in the spring to nest (natives weren't bound by the game laws banning spring hunting), walrus, various kinds of whale from the beluga and narwhal to the mighty bowheads. I grinned, remembering once when I was a constable, soon to be married to Lois. I was checking something in the main library at the University of Alberta when I'd happened across a reference to bowheads. Bowheads, I read, had been known to reach a length of sixty feet and a weight of fifty tons-one hundred thousand pounds! I had laughed aloud, couldn't help it. Everybody in the otherwise silent library had looked up, some glaring.

But I couldn't keep it in. “Some bowhead whales,” I said loudly, “grow to be sixty feet long and weigh one hundred thousand pounds!”

“My God!” exclaimed a huge man far along the table from me.

“Are you
sure
?” This a cry from a handsome woman with mixed gray and blond hair, parted in the middle.

“Quiet, please!” hissed the librarian.

“Godalmighty,” came a voice from far back in the stacks. “Imagine two like that making love!” This being followed by shouting, laughing, hooting questions and comments about tidal waves and the size of sexual organs.

So I could laugh about bowheads. Killer whales were the ones that gave me a shiver even now. They traveled in gangs. All creatures great and small hid when they approached. In igloos at night long ago there'd often be stories about how in summer killer whales would tip an ice floe from below to send basking seals or walrus or polar bears or Inuit hunters into the sea. When this happened near shore they'd been known to follow their prey right into shallow water; then, more than half-beached, they would wiggle their way back into deeper water and play with their catch like cats with mice, flinging seals and walruses (and perhaps a few stray members of the Save the Whales committee) into the air and catching them again before they actually killed and ate.

It was nice sitting there in the April sun, the Arctic world silent all around me except for the sound of an aircraft over by the landing strip and the snore of a couple of snowmobiles far away on the tundra. Then I gradually noticed a shrill and piercing whistle, the kind that some people make by joining their first and fourth fingers at the tips, placing them against the folded-back tip of the tongue, and blowing hard.

I had no idea the whistling was directed at me. The thoughts of long ago, of bowheads and killer whales, story time in the igloo, and me as a young constable laughing aloud in a library, had insulated me, briefly, against the fact that so many parts of this murder investigation were going around and around like a perpetual-motion roulette wheel, the ball never stopping on a number.

When I stood up I could see in the sky an approaching black cloud that meant the sun wouldn't be lasting for long. On the radio last night there'd been warning of a bad storm heading our way, with a caution for pilots and hunters that conditions would make any kind of travel hazardous. As I stretched, turned, and registered again the shrill repetitive whistle, I saw Bouvier leaving the detachment steps and hurrying toward me. When he saw me move he stopped. His hand came down from his mouth and the whistling stopped. “Hey, Matteesie!” he yelled. “Phone!”

When I got there the receiver was on the counter. Bouvier was studiously not looking at me. I picked it up and said, “Matteesie here.” The sergeant who was secretary to Superintendent Abe Keswick, top man at G Division headquarters in Yellowknife, said quietly, “Just a minute, please, Matteesie.”

Abe Keswick came on immediately and said, “I'm sorry to bring bad news, Matteesie.”

I knew. I had had it in my mind when I picked up the phone. “Your mother died very suddenly just an hour ago,” he said.

I can't remember in detail what was said from then on, only that Abe Keswick's voice was gentle. She had had a seizure that morning and simply died in a matter of minutes, her frail old body unable for once to fight back. Dr. Butterfield had tried to get me but couldn't get through, and he had an operation scheduled so he'd called the RCMP. “The doctor told me there was no doubt that the seizure was related to her head injury,” Abe said.

Caused, my own mental voice taunted me, by someone I was making little or no progress toward identifying.

He let a silence grow, then went on. “As soon as storm conditions allow—it's okay here but they've got a doozer blizzard going at Cambridge, all flights cancelled, and it's heading your way—we'll send an aircraft to pick you up.”

I put down the phone. Bouvier said, “Your mother?”

I nodded. I felt numb. Tears were running down my cheeks. Bouvier's voice had a break in it too as he put his arm around my shoulder and said, “I'm awfully sorry.”

I walked out of there through the growing storm and down to the shore again and then along to where I could sit with my back against a huge slab of ice that hid me entirely from anyone else's sight. All flights cancelled meant that Maisie wouldn't get in today, and neither would Bouvier's photos, but those were the least of my worries.

I wept painful tears during that next hour or so, but also made decisions. Grief is a strangely nonexclusive emotion. Sobbing would give way to a fairly cool appraisal of what I had to do next. Then I'd lose control again. Gradually the grief left me more and more space to think of the job so far not done. Getting my mind back to work wasn't lack of respect, awareness, remorse. I wasn't some college kid crying over the loss of someone who in that social structure might be known as “my mom.” My mother's soul no longer was in her thin old tattooed body, the single eye would never glitter with amusement again, and for that I grieved, even as I thought that, as far as I knew, the only RCMP aircraft available to pick me up would be the Beaver that Pelly had left on yesterday, not fast, not great in really bad weather.

Well, I could only hope. When I pulled myself together I'd make a few calls, simple enough: Maxine, Lois, brother Jopie in Holman. That one call to Holman would do for my half-brothers and half-sisters and other relatives there.

Holman was the principal settlement in the region where our mother's dialect, Kangiryuarmiutun, was spoken, and where she had lived among other Kangiryuarmiut since her nomadic days. Jopie and I would meet in Yellowknife, I thought (in the end it didn't happen that way) and do what had to be done. Then I'd come back to finish the case that had resulted in her death. I did not know when the finish would come, tomorrow or a month from now, but it would come.

Maxine I'd call because she had cared about my mother.

Lois, well, certainly Lois, because if I did not call Lois she would know why and would feel even more deeply wounded because she would know deep, deep down that essentially her wound was self-inflicted. Twenty years of lack of interest do not a high priority mourner make. My brother at Holman wouldn't be working today at his job in the musk-ox meat co-op. Maybe I could catch him at home, if he wasn't using the holiday to do some hunting.

For some reason I can't explain, now that my mother had died, my emotional wish for revenge had abated. I would find out whoever was responsible for her death, but it was her being hurt that had bothered me so much originally, and she didn't hurt anymore.

I'm not sure how long I sat on that slab of shore ice. Certainly for an hour or more. The sun was gone and the weather had turned sharply colder, the sky growing heavier with the storm approaching. Even under ideal circumstances ice floes are not made for sitting. What made me get up was growing discomfort from the cold.

Rising and stamping to get the feeling back in my legs, I remembered speaking at a seminar in New Mexico on the similarities between Navaho and Inuit customs and tribal beliefs. Along the way I'd talked some about living in an igloo as a child. At the end the audience had been invited to ask questions.

“Mr. Matti, uh, oesio,” an earnest middle-aged man had said, “how can you people possibly live like what you've talked to us about, sittin' on ice or snow ledges in th'igloo all the time while the storytellin' is gain' on, an' that, without gettin' hemorrhoids?”

I had explained earlier, but apparently in vain, about the layers of skins insulating us from such a painful fate.

“An excellent question,” I groaned, and shuffled off as if in pain, imitating the hemorrhoidal two-step.

The memory brought a smile and helped. A little.

I walked along the shore and turned up the slope. Through the blowing snow I could see Bouvier on the steps of the detachment, looking my way. I had the feeling he'd been there off and on all this time, watching for me. I kept on going past the hotel and rec hall to the detachment. I wanted Bouvier to know that I was back in the real world. He might have wondered. Although we didn't know one another all that well, just his waiting and watching conveyed a sense of caring.

Neither of us spoke. As we walked into the detachment together the phone on the counter rang. He reached for it, but I shook my head and he left it. I didn't want a phone call. I'd answered the “what next?” question in my mind, and wanted action to start now. “You've had some calls,” Bouvier said. “Your mother's death has just been on the radio, CBC Inuvik. What the guy said told me things I didn't know about you and your mother.”

Probably meaning that Maxine had written the item.