Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery

by Scott Young

  I just stared. I might have thought of something else to do or say if I’d had time, but he gave me no time.

  “Jesus!” he said. “I gotta find out about this!”

  As he spoke, he grabbed his two short poles and in a few swift strokes moved away from me, zooming along the street and out of sight. I started after him but changed my mind and went to the RCMP office instead. Pengelly was off duty. The special, Nicky Jerome, lived in a room behind the office. Nicky was a Slavey and the classic special; sturdy but small, bow-legged, with button-like eyes, happy in his work (I’d noticed earlier), and happy in his play—his feet now in felt boot liners resting on a footstool as he watched “Knots Landing” on television. The room was blue with tobacco smoke from his pipe, which I noticed was an Ontario-made Brigham, the kind I smoke myself. On the table at his elbow was a mug of steaming tea and a can of Erinmore mixture, which I smoke when I can’t get John Cottons Mild. A pretty classy special. Maybe he’d make inspector some day.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” I said.

  He waved that away politely, glancing back and forth between me and the TV screen.

  “Anything new?” I asked.

  His mind and eyes were on the TV show. “Abby’s been thinkin’ ’bout this guy from a long time ago, her first boy friend, and suddenly he shows up again.”

  “I mean, anything about William Cavendish?”

  He laughed merrily. “Oh, sorry, I thought you meant . . .”

  When I told him about meeting the man who hadn’t known about Morton’s death, Nicky kept on watching the TV but filled me in.

  “George Manicoche,” he said. “Don’ drink no more, but three, four winters ago, got drunk and lay down in a snowbank and damn near froze to death. His legs were froze stiff and they tried to save ’em but couldn’, had to take ’em off. Woulda lost his arms, too, prolly, but he had his hands tuck’ in around his balls where it was warm and that’s what saved his arms. Reason he wouldn’ know about Morton, well, this time o’ year he goes out two, t’ree days at a time, not very far from town. Got a little shack out there. Can’t really go far but he gets rabbits, you know, and the odd fox and udder stuff. Got a marten this year a’ready. It was Morton got him goin’ again. Kept kiddin’ him that he was still young and strong and now that he wasn’ drinkin’ he had to do somethin’ to fill in the time, so Georgie built hisself that sled. He put wheels on it in summer so he can get to his boat.”

  “Some guy,” I said, and didn’t mean it like a pat on the head.

  “Some guy is right” Nicky said, snapping off the TV, which had gone into a mile of credits. “Ever’body knows him. There’s another same name, no relation, up at Franklin, so aroun’ here nobody call him just Georgie any more. No Legs, that’s what he’s knowed as, by most.”

  I beat my way back through the storm to Bear Lodge. With my own whisky gone I went into the bar and ordered a drink. There were four others there, all sitting alone. They’d been calling back and forth between their separate tables when I came in, but not much was said after I arrived. That figured.

  When I finished my drink I went to bed and dreamed once again I was near an aircraft out in the snowy bush; but this time the three men arguing were in the aircraft’s fairly intact cabin. I was sure that they were arguing but looking on from outside I couldn’t hear a thing.

  The next morning about 8:30 I was lying in bed listening to the moan and howl of the wind when there was a tapping at the door. I got up and opened it. The man standing in the hall outside had been tending the desk when I checked in, and tending the bar when I had that drink He was middle-aged and had white hair, a flattened nose, and suspenders with a black and white zigzag pattern on them.

  He shoved an envelope at me. “Message,” he said, and waited curiously for me to open it while he explained, “No Legs Manicoche sent a kid along with it when the kid was on his way to school.”

  I decided I would open it in private. Couldn’t think of any reason why anyone else, even a neutral as this guy seemed to be, should be able to report what happened when I read it.

  “When’s breakfast?” I asked, still holding the unopened note.

  “Being served right now. Coming down?”

  “Maybe I better get my pants on first. Might scare the ladies.”

  “I doubt it,” he said. “None around who scare easy.” When I closed the door he was glancing back at me, moving away.

  The note was on a sheet of blank paper that looked as if it had been torn out of the back of a paperback book.

  I read it: “Sir. Thanks for help me. I here yer want William. I seed him. Come see me.”

  I hope Bear Lodge didn’t wait breakfast, or they’ll still be waiting. I went out a side door so I wouldn’t look like Ben Johnson trying for a new world getting-through-the-lobby record.

  At the detachment office Pengelly was holding the fort, as he put it, smoking a cigar and drinking coffee. I handed him the note and told him how I’d met No Legs.

  “You’ll probably find him where he and his sister live,” Pengelly said, looking ready to stub out his cigar if such drastic action would be helpful. “Sounds like a break, eh?” Eagerly, “Want me to come along?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He sighed and puffed his cigar alight again. “Okay. You know where the old fort is, and the old log Anglican church? Go down past that and you see a little white house with blue shutters. That’s it.”

  I didn’t know whether I should just walk straight there and let everybody in town know where I was going, which might not sit well if they figured No Legs was helping where they had refused to. But I couldn’t think of any other way, so I walked out into the wind and snow again. Anyway, it wouldn’t be light for nearly two hours and in the dark nobody but the school kids moved outside much. So the streets were deserted except for some ravens flapping around, and some chained dogs barking when I went by.

  I found the house, which like a lot of northern houses had a sort of small enclosed entry, like a vestibule, for containing the worst blasts from the outdoors before the inner door was opened. I tapped on the outside door. It was opened immediately by a pretty young woman. She had black bangs that hung right to the straight line of her eyebrows, and below that regular features, a slightly puggish nose, a wide mouth, sharply appraising eyes. Her brightly printed calico dress fell below her knees, where woolen pants led to felt boot liners that throughout the North are used as indoor footwear. Hers were scuffed and worn through at the heels.

  Obviously she was expecting me. Without smiling, she jerked her head, signaling me into the tiny vestibule out of the weather.

  I crowded in beside her. It was dark in the tiny area as she closed the door firmly against the cold and snow but in that few seconds I’d seen wall hooks festooned with heavy shirts, parkas, scarves and headgear, the floor strewn with boots. Then she opened the inner door into a warm kitchen smelling of fresh bannock and frying fish. The room had a good feel about it, made me feel comfortable before a word was spoken. A wooden table with its legs painted red and its top covered with red-checked oilcloth stood in the middle of the room. Sitting at one end on a battered wooden chair whose legs were braced with twisted wire sat No Legs. The grime of the night before was gone. He looked younger than I’d thought. His face was thin, even ascetic, and his muscular shoulders and upper arms seemed somewhat out of sync with his slight build. You sometimes see that upper body development in wheelchair athletes. His hair was in the standard ponytail.

  “I got your note,” I said, as his sister poured a mug of tea, set it at one end of the table and gestured that it was for me. There was a chair so I sat down.

  Without a smile, “Yeah. I figgered you had or you wouldn’ be here.”

  His sister put two big pieces of fried fish on a plate, hot bannock on another plate, and set it all in front of me where a place already had been set.
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  “I gotta ask you,” he said, “what you wanta see William for?”

  The North is not the place for skimming through the answer to a serious question, especially when the questioner’s face could be remembered from not many hours earlier, full of torture and anguish.

  I told the whole story as I knew it, starting with the bare bones of what I’d heard of Morton’s collapse in Inuvik and my sight of him two days later when he was carried aboard the aircraft. His eyes were intent on mine. He shook his head and grimaced when I told of the shots, my vain attempt to do something, the instant death.

  Obviously since our meeting last night No Legs had heard parts of this from his sister and maybe others. But some things he hadn’t been told, including the murderer’s escape by snowmobile, possibly heading this way.

  Then, going back, I told of the part involving William, that he had been with his father but hadn’t told anyone about what happened just before his frantic call for an ambulance. And also that some people William had hung out with had fled Inuvik the next day in an aircraft that might have come down around here in the Monday storm.

  “I heard that plane,” he said. “I was in my shack. It seemed low.”

  I said that maybe William couldn’t tell me anything, but maybe he could.

  “Like what?”

  “An enemy that no one else knew about. Some trouble that no one else knew about. I don’t know, but after he left his father in the hospital he didn’t attempt to see him again. I thought that was strange. If he and his father had a quarrel that brought on the attack, which is possible, because other people told me that he and his father had not been getting along, I think”—feeling my way—“if they did have a serious argument, maybe even coming to blows that led to the father’s attack, it might have had something to do with the other people getting the hell out of there, even though they left before William did. Only William knows some of those answers.”

  No Legs was silent, very still. It could have been only a minute or two but seemed longer. An old clock sat on a shelf near the stove. Its ticking sounded loud even against the only other sound, the moaning of the wind outside.

  Finally he compressed his lips in a straight line and nodded. “William troubled Morton. Was there drugs involved?”

  Nothing had been said between us about drugs, yet he’d asked the question.

  “Have you got any reason to believe there might have been?” I asked.

  A long blowing out of air, puffing his cheeks with his breath and then letting it out slowly. “Last time Morton was here, jus’ maybe a week ago, he seemed worried. He didn’ talk about William and drugs, but he talked about drugs, and that they were gettin’ in somehow. At first I thought maybe he thought I was usin’ drugs, or might have them offered to me, and was tryin’ to tell me, don’t. But I ast him straight out if that was it and he said, ‘Hell, no! I know you got too goddamn much sense.’ But I thought he knew somethin’ he wasn’t tellin’ me. You know, those meetin’s he was always gain’ to, he picked up things. You never had to draw Morton a map.”

  I let the ensuing silence grow. I didn’t want to be talking when I should have been listening. He still hadn’t told me when he’d seen William. I knew he’d do that when he felt the conversation had reached that stage. I had the feeling he and I both had spent parts of our lives sitting in silence for as long as it took, so the opening would be there when there was something to be said. His sister refilled my tea mug. No Legs shoved the condensed milk can in my direction.

  “So you been lookin’ for William for that, to ast about if he had a fight with Morton.”

  It was a statement, not a question.

  “That’s it.”

  “When I seen him was yesterday,” he said. “It wasn’t long after the Nahanni flight come in, cause I heard it both comin’ and goin’. Anyway, I was on my trapline along the Bear River there and was on’y about half through, I mean I had the rest of the traps to check. He was on a Skidoo.”

  “Were you close to him? I mean, did you talk to him?” He shook his head. “It was snowin’ bad and I was two hunnerd yards away, anyway, upriver from him so he wouldn’ even see my tracks. I hardly saw him for more’n what it’d take a fox to cross a trail, he was gain’ fast, but it was him.”

  I hardly knew how to ask, but I had to. “Could you really be sure at that distance, with the storm and all? What I mean is, one guy on a snowmobile looks a lot like another.”

  “It was his dog I reco’nized.”

  I noticed his sister’s head move suddenly. Under the black line of her bangs she gave him a sharp look. The doubt that I thought I’d noticed from time to time in her eyes, as if she had been weighing what No Legs said and what I said, was gone. She went back at her knitting more slowly and raised her eyes to me and then back to her brother.

  “That dog, you couldn’ mistake,” No Legs said. “When William was aroun’ here all the time, before he starts spendin’ most of his time in Inuvik, he had a dog team, an’ that was his lead dog, Smokey.”

  I know about lead dogs, the differences between the good, the bad and the average. I’ve seen some of each, from a lead dog one of my uncles owned that was so undependable that the only thing my uncle could do was shoot him and buy another, to a lead dog another uncle had that would take you home from wherever you were in the worst blizzard ever to hit the earth.

  “That dog o’ William’s, if I had a team, would be my pick of all the dogs I ever seen or heard of,” No Legs went on. “I mean, William sometimes now does bad things, but if he never done another thing right on this earth, that lead dog would stand up. He picked ’im out of a litter when he was jus’ a pup a month old.”

  Talking about dogs was like replaying my own boyhood, when dogs could mean life or death and were brought up carefully. To me dog talk was like remembered music, hours-long discussions of dogs by friends and relatives and people now dead or far away, dimly seen faces along the igloo’s sleeping benches with wind battering the smooth snow walls outside; a woman listening while trying to coax a few willow twigs into enough heat to boil a kettle for tea.

  “William let Smokey run with the team when he was on’y a few months old, just to build speed and be able to stick with the others. Morton was home then and he’s the one taught William what to do, and when. Smokey was maybe a year ol’ when William harnessed him aroun’ the middle of the team so he’d learn how that part worked. I think he was near two when William began hookin’ him in right behin’ the lead dog, a good one but gettin’ old, Morton had trained ’im. It wasn’ more’n a few trips before Smokey learnt what a lead dog done. I remember the first time Smokey went on the lead himself. Morton told William ‘Take him out on a half-day trapline, with the old dog leadin’. Then when you come to head back, harness Smokey in the lead and see if he can follow the fresh trail back home.’ And he did.”

  I broke in, couldn’t stand not to, even though I knew it wasn’t new to them, actually old, like it was to me, knowledge that’s in the blood.

  “It’s all slow but sure,” I said. “First the dog follows a fresh trail like that, only half a day old, and soon he can do one not so fresh and soon he’s watchin’ when he goes anywhere, even a two or three day or longer trapline, so he’ll know how he came and how to get back.”

  I stopped and No Legs resumed. “When William sold his dogs he could’ve got twice’t as much if he’d let Smokey go too. But he wouldn’. Allus said if he had a dog team again he wanted Smokey for lead. He’d take him everywhere, everytime he went out, winter or summer. Trained him like he was a house dog. Say, ‘stay!’ and he’d stay. Say, ‘go home!’ and he’d go. Say, ‘git in the boat, Smokey, and sit!’ and he’d jump in and sit in the bows.”

  His expression was one of pain, regret, maybe for himself or maybe for William, how could I tell?

  “I could mistake William, but not Smokey,” he said. “Th
ere was that Skidoo, and there was Smokey runnin’ alongside or out front, like showin’ he could still do the job better.”

  I had no more questions but we kept talking. Their parents, they told me, both were dead. This had been their house when they were children and their buddy William was in it a lot. We sat there another hour or so, I don’t know why except that I had some dog stories, too, like one about how along into April when the snow sometimes got crusty out on the trail and would cut the dogs’ feet, we’d make moccasins for them . . .

  No Legs: “What of?”

  “Seal-skin or canvas, but seal is best because with canvas you’d be lucky to have it last a day.”

  Then we both produced examples of how some hunters and trappers had the patience to teach a mediocre dog until he was some use, and others had no patience and would be whipping a good dog until he was no good. I told about my father, the one who drowned when I was young, and how people often told me he never bought a dog in his life; was given a male and female when he was fifteen and raised every one he owned after that, training them so good that people were always wanting to buy or make a good trade for breeding stock.

  I finally stopped, realizing I had done an awful lot of talking, my reward being that they were easier with me, all stiffness gone.

  “I didn’ know Eskimos was such big talkers,” No Legs said, and his sister giggled and looked to see how I would take it.

  “Inuk,” I said.

  “You goin’ after William? I don’ know where he was gain’ but he ain’t back or I would know, or Cecilia.”

  I had been thinking about it even when I was talking. With the weather still too bad to fly, following him through new drifts by snowmobile wouldn’t be any bed of roses. But somewhere in the dog conversation I’d had an idea. What the hell, there was nobody here to say, Matteesie, don’t be a fool.

  “Anybody still around here with a good team?” I asked.