The Shaman's Knife (8 page)

“Let's get off Barker. That's history. But I sure as hell wish those bodies had been held until I got here.”

He replied mildly, “Well, the way Barker saw it, he and I both had had a good look at the bodies, saw what there was to see.”

I didn't let up. “I might have seen something neither of you saw! I just like to start at the beginning, and see what I'm dealing with. Also, sometimes when the bodies are natives, with me especially, I might see or sense something that white guys don't.”

He said softly, “White guys . . . You think I'm white?”

Oh, hell, I thought, and looked at him again, noticing his color, more than just ruddiness. Our people are usually smaller. His size had put me off.

“Tell me,” I said.

He grinned sideways at me. “Small Inuit mother, great big goddamn French-Canadian father.”

“Sorry.” I really felt a lot more than just the one word, sorry. Here I'd been doing something to him that I'd hated when it was done to me. When I was a kid working my first year or two as an RCMP special around Inuvik and Sachs Harbor and expressed an opinion above my station, I had often been dumped on by white cops, some of them okay, really, but others like Barker, the king-of-the-hill types. Some of the reasons for dumping on me might have been valid, but when someone said openly or even implied that, being a native, I couldn't really be expected to act like a real policeman, I would keep an impassive face. I thought at first maybe Bouvier now was doing the same, letting any resentment at my dumb mistake go away.

Actually, he was doing more than just letting it go. I could see the corners of his mouth twitching. Suddenly he shook his head and laughed aloud. “Wait'll I tell my wife! Jesus! Will she enjoy that about you thinking I'm not native.”

“Be sure to tell her I said I was sorry.”

“Oh, I will.” He laughed again. “From a goddamn racist white guy to a goddamn racist Inuk! What next?”

We rode in silence, both now smiling.

“Anyway,” Bouvier said, pulling out onto the road again. “About holding the bodies here until you arrived . . .”

I interrupted. “You gotta admit you sure got the bodies out of here fast.”

Bouvier said mildly, “Not fast enough for the Co-op. When we heard that you were in Yellowknife and on your way here, I did raise that point, that you'd want to see the bodies, and what difference would a day or two make in getting them out? He yelled at me for second-guessing him, so I backed off. He was really pressured, knowing a lot of people would joke about him leaving a big case. That made him determined to get everything done that he could do, like getting the bodies to forensics . . .”

The outskirts of the settlement showed fitfully ahead through the ground drift. I thought of the Twin Otter and its murdered cargo.

“When I brought that up about waiting for you, what he said was what the fuck could you see that we didn't? He also said that he didn't figure there was some royal fucking highness that moving the bodies had to be cleared with.”

It was about then that I began to come to my senses. I say, began. I still wasn't really thinking rationally. I'd got myself stoked up too high, in too short a time. It was Tuesday suppertime and since Monday breakfast I'd flown from Labrador to Ottawa and then to Edmonton and then to Yellowknife, where I was up half the night talking to my mother with her head hurting, and then to Cambridge Bay and then to Sanirarsipaaq. But there was something else—and it was my fault.

If I'd made one more phone call from Yellowknife to order that the bodies remain undisturbed until I got here, and if Barker had argued that crap about the Co-op freezer, I could have said to him loud and clear, “Clean out somebody's goddamn home freezer and put 'em in there until I have a look! Why is it that half the goddamn spouse-murderers you hear about in a year stash bodies in home freezers practically forever or at least until new tenants move in or some innocent visitor looking for the ice cream opens the freezer and raises the alarm? Yet I can't have
my
bodies stay in one place for even an extra goddamn day or two! Why? Answer me that?” I didn't actually say any of that. But it sometimes helps, making up speeches that I never actually get to say.

My angry reverie was interrupted by Bouvier. “You okay?”

Suddenly I was back in the police van on the road into town.

“What do you mean am I okay?”

“You're squirmin' around.”

I stopped squirming and wiped the frosty condensation off the window on my side. We were passing houses with chained dogs curled up, backs to the wind, beside old komatiks that maybe once in a while were still pulled by dog teams instead of by the snowmobiles and all-terrain vehicles parked at every door. In all the ice and snow and wind I suddenly had a random thought that I still liked this better than spring in the south, with crocuses coming out and empty beer and rye bottles and Big Mac containers beginning to peep shyly through the other crap in the ditches. And people on my street thinking they'd better get the snow tires off.

“You got a family, Bouvier?” I asked.

He was making a turn and almost blew it, maybe surprised to hear from me. “Yeah. Four boys. Why do you ask?”

“When the ice goes out do you take 'em fishing?”

“Well, I've never had a springtime here, you know, but around Spence Bay in the summer me and the wife and kids would pack a cooler with beer and food and take a tent and lots of fly dope, and go out to a lake a few miles inland and stay out until we had enough Arctic char to fill the freezer.”

My belligerence was gone. Probably we were both glad. He slowed almost to a stop and let the momentum carry the van a few yards in neutral before he turned the wheels a little. When they caught he eased back into four-wheel drive to get up a small rise before he skidded, again in neutral, this time to a stop alongside a solitary terraced row of townhouses.

They stuck up like sore thumbs, looking laughably out of place, the only dwellings of their sort in town.

He waved one arm in that direction. “That's where your mother was staying with Annie Kavyok. Annie's probably home from work. The kids'll be home from school either now or soon. I've got the key to the place next door where the bodies were. Turned the heat way down or it'd be smelling pretty bad. Still ain't no hell as it is. Wanta have a look?”

I thought about it. “Maybe. Better give me the keys, just in case. I'll leave my bag in the van and pick it up later.”

I got out. I think Bouvier was glad to see me go. I would be, in his place. But look on the bright side. Barker was gone, about to enjoy, if that's the word, a holiday lumbered with a wife who for some reason had him by the balls. Not to mention missing his big chance to solve a couple of murders all by himself and show Matteesie the big-shot Inuk that this really was
his
town. The dumb bugger.

Bouvier reversed out of there and disappeared in a cloud of snow particles. I stood for a few seconds and just looked. There was no one around outside, but suddenly I felt very good. The weather was getting worse instead of better. I didn't care, I was headed for family.

The older I got, the more my relatives meant to me. Maybe if I'd been born a lot sooner or a lot later I never would have left the north. But then maybe I'd never have had the other times, good and bad, making my way in the police, going on courses to universities, loaned once for a couple of years to Northern Affairs. I thought of a battered old book I'd found secondhand and still had; one of those old orange-colored Penguins. It's called
An Anthology of War Poetry
, published around 1942, one chapter per war, poems going back centuries, from the “heigh ho, off we go,” stuff of old wars right down to the last two chapters covering World War I and part of World War II. Names went through my head: Robert Graves. Wilfred Owen. Siegfried Sassoon . . . And fragments. “Scarlet majors from the base . . .” (I've met civil servants like that. And some policemen.) There was one about a soldier being scolded for his uniform being dirty and replying, “It's blood, sir,” and being told, “Blood's dirt.”

I wondered where those thoughts came from—“blood's dirt”—and walked slowly toward the terrace of five two-story townhouses where there had been a lot of blood, some of it related to me. Maxine rented one in a row like this in Inuvik. I walked toward the unit with a brass number 2 on the door, and knocked. Immediately within there was a rush of footsteps. The door was flung open by a boy, behind him a girl a little younger, both yelling, “It's Matteesie!”

Then I could see Annie coming from the kitchen at the rear, bulky and broad-hipped, with long gray-black hair parted in the middle, an old-looking wool cardigan unbuttoned and hanging loose, a skirt of some heavy material, embroidered sealskin slippers on her feet.

Without a word, she clasped me to her, a person of my own blood making me welcome.

“Come in, Matteesie! Come in!” she said. I followed her back into the warm kitchen where she set out tea things and biscuits, soon pouring tea and pushing the milk jug and sugar bowl toward me. I hadn't felt so much at home for a while.

“And your mother, our dear
anaanak
?” she asked, using the Inuktitut term for grandmother. I told her a little of what had happened that morning and that mother still had the bad headache, but at least had been moved to Franklin House.

From there, we spoke in Inuktitut. Nothing of what was said about the murders differed in any important detail from what my mother had said. The kids acted out the thumps and shouts, falling over one another to get the message across. Annie's voice and expression were full of regret as she said, “I missed all that part, fell right asleep as soon as I got home. I keep thinking if I'd been not so tired, this terrible thing might not have happened.”

Strangely enough, as we talked on and on, comfortably, I had a strong feeling that Annie was holding back something and that perhaps eventually I would hear more. I didn't press it. I had no more than skimmed the reports made by Barker and Bouvier, when they had originally questioned Annie and her children. Rather than go over the same information twice, I thought I would read or listen to everything available. There would be lots of time to come back to her on some points.

“We have room if you wish to stay here,” Annie said. “That blizzard outside is getting worse, instead of better.”

Very politely and reasonably, I explained, “Phone calls, official stuff, it'll all be handier if someone is trying to reach me and I'm at the detachment or the hotel.”

“Well, at least have supper, you have to eat!” My stomach was saying yes and my head was saying no, droning away less and less convincingly that I had so much to catch up on, and should get at it.

She took out four caribou steaks, put on a frying pan with the heat on high, dropped in what seemed to be the last of her butter and leftover fried potatoes, kept turning them, moved them to the oven with bannock when they were hot, heated canned corn, dropped frozen peas into boiling water, threw the steaks into the smoking pan. It was wonderful. We kept talking as we ate. When I took my last bite of caribou I'm pretty sure I seemed wide awake. I still was intending to go . . . and then, while we were drinking tea, my eyelids went closing, closing, closed.

She led me upstairs like a sleepwalker and showed me a turned-down single bed. I didn't ask whose it was.

“I'll phone Bouvier,” she said, I think, or I dreamed that, as well as her saying, “The murders will still be here for you tomorrow.”

Vaguely hearing the storm pounding against the walls and windows, I almost got my clothes off. When Annie closed the door and I lay back on the bed to struggle out of my pants, my head hit the pillow by mistake and I don't remember any more. When my eyes opened again the sun was shining through the uncurtained window and no doubt had been for hours. Sunrise was at about five up here at this time of year. I must have got my pants the rest of the way off in the night. Annie had breakfast ready, strong tea, fried Arctic char, fresh-from-the-pan bannock, margarine, and strawberry jam from a two-pound can. I was thinking that it had been a long time since I had lived like that, eating when hungry, sleeping when tired.

It is hard to describe how I felt outside in bright sunshine. The blizzard had blown itself out during the night. I put on sunglasses against the white glare as I ran through what I knew versus what I should know. Yesterday I'd been a zombie. Now I was getting the feeling I always had in the early days of a case, weighing everything, turning over what I knew and looking for a door to go through, a crack that needed widening.

I would go to the murder house. I would question Annie about the habits of the two who had been murdered. I would poke around the edges of what more there was to know about the striking Maisie. Maybe I shouldn't have let her go until I talked to her myself. The half-bald man, the way he had turned his glance at me so quickly away . . . why? The fact that Bouvier didn't know him was mildly surprising. The cheerful guy with the hard hat who had driven him away stuck in my mind for no good reason. Instinct I paid attention to. I needed logical suspects. If the case had been open-and-shut it would be over by now. Usually if you don't get on a fresh trail right away it is hard slogging, hard digging, looking for lies and evasions and things that don't match.

For now, I walked, sometimes on traveled roads, sometimes cutting through between houses, mostly laid out in streets with a comfortable amount of room between them. One street was all A-frames, six of them, the roofs alternating between red and brown. In front of each was a rusty barrel for garbage, painted with the house number. Caribou skins hung from one clothesline. Here and there sealskins were stretched on frames or bits of plywood. Besides snowmobiles, most houses had Honda all-terrain vehicles, usually the old three-wheelers now outlawed in southern Canada as being accident-prone. One of the newer four-wheelers (safer but twice the price, so not so plentiful) had a pile of caribou skins on the back.