Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery

by Scott Young

  On river ice, out of the bush, the snowmobile track was easier to follow. In most places it would show plainly, fresh snow over the original indentation. By that time I was mostly riding. I wasn’t quite in shape to snowshoe even as little as I had, and still have much in reserve. I was saving myself for the playoffs, if any. Just as I was thinking it would be a good idea to run until nightfall, we came around a bend and suddenly No Legs put up a hand, the stop sign. I scanned the horizon ahead for a reason and saw nothing. Edie pulled her dogs to a stop and they flopped down in their tracks, tongues lolling out, all except big Seismo. He sat imperiously on his haunches and stared intently ahead along the river course, ignoring the rest of us. Meanwhile No Legs was quickly maneuvering his sled off the komatik.

  Then I saw why. We had just crossed very fresh animal tracks, couldn’t have missed the animal by more than minutes, and if my first impression was correct it was an animal that some people who’ve spent a lifetime in the North have never seen. No Legs poled himself swiftly back to check even though he probably was sure anyway, because when we were all closing in on the tracks and Edie said confidently, “Wolf,” No Legs and I said together, “Wolverine.”

  Edie obviously wasn’t used to being contradicted, especially by two guys at once. “Sure looks like wolf to me.”

  “Five toes,” No Legs said.

  “Oh,” said Edie in a smaller voice, looking closer.

  So the three of us and a whole dog team are out in nowhereland looking for a guy who might know something about a murder that he hasn’t told anybody yet, and we’re doing nature study.

  “It’s easy to make the mistake,” No Legs said gently.

  “Not all that easy,” I said, relishing the task. I liked Edie, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy setting the Edies of the world straight once in a while. “All you do is keep in mind that the whole dog family, poodles, spaniels, wolves, faxes, coyotes and so on, has four toes. Everything in the weasel family has five—mink, marten, fisher, wolverine, ermine.”

  No Legs said, still gently but with a little grin, “So Edie, when some oil guy in Calgary gives you what he says is an ermine, count its toes before . . .”

  He let it die there, holding back from finishing the sentence in what some guys might have thought was a good enough and inoffensive crack . . . “before you jump into bed.” Maybe he was shy or maybe just shy with Edie, or maybe he instinctively knew, or at least believed, which is not the same thing, that even if a thing did have five toes, going to bed for an ermine was not Edie’s style.

  Which is how it happened that we were all standing there in the thin daylight right out of it, reaching for Thermoses and the food box when far ahead, unmistakably, exactly in the direction where Seismo had been staring for the full two or three minutes since we stopped, all of us could hear the merest whisper of a distant snowmobile.

  In the circumstances I don’t take too much credit for it, but I did come to, first.

  “The radio!” I said.

  Watching the snowmobile grow rapidly from a tiny dot to a larger dot, nothing between it and us but the snow-covered river ice, we raised Norman Wells.

  “Whaddaya got, Matteesie?” Pengelly’s voice crackled. “Over.”

  “Snowmobile in sight, coming our way,” I said. “We’re close to twenty miles south of the Bear, in the open, on the, ah, Big Smith River. Whoever it is will be here in less than a minute. Over.”

  “It’s William all right,” No Legs called.

  “Better leave the radio on,” said Pengelly. “Over.”

  I thought it was William, too, but couldn’t be sure yet; there could be other burly guys out on snowmobiles, even here. Whoever it was maybe had seen us for as long as we’d seen him, but probably not; he was looking through goggles and a windscreen and we weren’t. There was a point at which, I thought at the time, he did see us. The machine suddenly swerved, the kind of startled movement that might be natural in a lone man cruising along lost in thought when unexpectedly, even shockingly, he finds he has company. At first he steered at slightly less than his former speed on a course that would have taken him around us. All the while he was staring at us intently. His machine was at least a hundred yards past us when he slowed and stopped, stood up on the footrests, and pulled his goggles down to have a look with the naked eye.

  With the helmet and face-mask I still couldn’t be absolutely sure but No Legs was in no doubt.

  “Hey, William!” he yelled, poling his sled a few yards into the clear and then hoisting himself up as high as he could to wave. William couldn’t have heard the voice over his motor and a sudden chorus of howls and yodels from Edie’s dogs, but he’d know there was only one man around who poled himself along on a light sled. He came in slowly. His snowmobile was a big old Arctic Cat. Behind him on a small sled were lashed two extra gas cans, bed roll, tent, food box. Enough for quite a long trip. No gun unless it was a take-down model stowed under the seat.

  The snowmobile engine was just ticking over as he stopped a few yards away. I’m not sure that he’d ever seen Edie before, probably not, but something about the situation stopped her from saying anything. There was no, “Hi! I’m Edie! You must be William!” manner to her at all. His glance skimmed her and went right by the smiling face of No Legs as well, although I could see how excited No Legs was. This was his old friend and he wasn’t going to be denied. Not yet.

  “Cecilia told me to bring you back!” he called, and I had another thought: maybe there was something between William and Cecilia. Which would be natural, growing up friends in the same town, about the same age. Or might have been before he took to what I guess we have to call, in the circumstances, the bright lights of Inuvik. Also, it occurred to me that whatever I was after, and however Edie had been drawn more or less neutrally into what was just a different kind of weekend to her, No Legs probably saw William’s actions as understandable enough in a bereaved son, as so many others in Fort Norman did. But William didn’t reply in kind.

  He was staring at me, obviously badly upset, even though he didn’t have the kind of appearance that usually gave such emotions away. Physically, now that he was out of the lighter clothing he’d worn when I met him first, he looked like a biker who had challenged me once in Edmonton, powerful sloping shoulders, hair that was parted in the middle (he’d taken off his helmet) and pushed behind his ears to fall from there to his shoulders. A small amulet or badge hung on a chain around his size seventeen or eighteen neck and he hadn’t shaved for a few days, or was growing a beard to go with his droopy moustache.

  But he only looked tough until you looked closer. Then his face was drawn, sleepless-looking, and I thought there was a hint of fear in his eyes.

  “Where the hell you guys goin’?” he asked.

  “Looking for you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  Edie and No Legs had become the audience, non-participating. No Legs’ enthusiastic welcome had still not been acknowledged. William’s question was blunt. I answered as bluntly.

  “After your father collapsed there were questions that maybe only you could answer, but you weren’t around. After he was killed, there were a lot more questions. Everybody thought you might have some of the answers, but you still weren’t around.”

  Suddenly the radio crackled. No voice, just a crackle. William jumped and stared, now looking both scared and confused.

  “That radio open?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We called Fort Norman detachment when we saw you coming.”

  “How’d you know it was me?”

  “We didn’t.”

  “Better shut it off,” he said.

  I shook my head. “We might need to raise them again.”

  He still sat on his machine, motor idling, as if not certain what to do or say next.

  I gave him a chance. “I was on the aircraft when your father was shot.”r />
  His voice was abruptly passionate and angry. “I know! Hell of a cop you are! Why didn’t you stop it?”

  I didn’t answer that directly. He knew as well as I did that I couldn’t stop it, he couldn’t have, nobody could have.

  I said, “One of the things we thought you might be able to help with is, who’d want to have him killed. Is there anybody you know who might have done it just the way it was done, kill a man, get away by snowmobile, and disappear?”

  There was a slight hesitation, then unconvincing bluster.

  “How the hell would I know? If I’d known, maybe I could have stopped it from happening at all.”

  While William and I talked, No Legs looked from one to the other as if our tone puzzled him. Finally he broke his silence. “I’m really sorry, William. You know what your father was to me.”

  “I’m more than sorry!” William shouted. “Those bastards killed my father!”

  “It was only one guy who shot him,” I said.

  He realized he’d used the plural, but recovered quickly.

  “There’s no way one guy could have organized it!”

  “That’s what we think, too,” I said. Then I hesitated. There were things I could have said about what we suspected, the theories we had. They might do as bait to get him talking, but depending on where he stood in this thing, might do the reverse—scare him off.

  So I didn’t mention the downed aircraft, Harold Johns, Albert Christian, Benny Batten, Jules Bonner or anyone who could have been named Billy Bob Hicks or Dave Hawkinsville. Instead, I played it completely straight.

  “If you can help us in any way, we oughta sit down where we can talk. That’s why I came to Fort Norman. When we couldn’t find you and knew you’d come this way, I decided we’d better try to catch up and try to persuade you to help.”

  I was trying to skate around a little, obviously. But I also was sure that wasn’t going to work.

  “So how’d you know where to look for me?”

  I told him that when he couldn’t be found in town, we’d had to look elsewhere.

  No Legs obviously couldn’t stand the futzing around. “I saw you go, William,” he said. “I was comin’ in from my trapline and saw you and Smokey . . . Hey! Where’s Smokey, somethin’ happen to him?”

  William turned to look at him, his expression stricken, but he didn’t answer. No Legs looked at him hard, even opened his mouth to press the question, but in the end said nothing more.

  “Why did you take off like that?” I asked.

  He took a little time answering. When he did, his rancor was gone. That didn’t mean he was telling the whole truth or even part of the truth. But it was at the very least a social note.

  “I just felt I had to get away by myself for a while. I couldn’t do it around home. Too many people would want to talk, to tell me what a wonderful man my father was . . .”

  He slowed to a stop, then, “Which he was, I know. But there were things I had to figure out and I wanted to do it on my own.”

  At that point I had some figuring to do, too. William had got away from Inuvik without giving the answers the case needed. He’d got away from Fort Norman, possibly for the same reasons. I didn’t want to have to chase him any more. That meant we couldn’t leave him speeding away now wherever he wanted to go, while we plodded back along the trail admiring Seismo doing his thing. I felt that wherever he had been was important to know, but I also knew that with the distance he could have traveled at snowmobile speed it might be another day or two away by dog team and that being out two days was Edie’s limit; she had to be back in school Monday.

  I had to make up my mind, and what I decided was that William should not get away from us again. If I had to, I could come out by snowmobile myself or by helicopter and backtrack along his trail. I also wondered what the hell had happened to Smokey, the wonder dog that No Legs had been telling me about. His disappearance just made no sense whatever.

  I picked up the radio and said, “Pengelly? Over.”

  “Yes, sir. Over.” That sir was something new.

  “You’ve probably heard us talking to William. Over.”

  “Yeah, but it woulda been a hell of a lot easier to tape if you’d all gathered around the goddamn microphone. Got you, all right, and the engine on William’s snowmobile, but not a hell of a lot else. What’s happened to Edie, she been struck dumb? Over.”

  I didn’t bother answering that one. “I just want to let you know what the plan is. I think the best idea is for me to come back in with William on the snowmobile. Over.”

  “Like hell!” William exclaimed. “I’m loaded. I can’t take a passenger.”

  I spoke to him reasonably. “You got room. That’s a big machine. Your best course is to co-operate, help us any way you can.”

  I felt like adding that if he’d helped us earlier, we might be getting somewhere instead of out on a frozen river having dumb arguments. But I didn’t. I also thought of pointing out that he could be in trouble otherwise, but didn’t. “Let’s get going.”

  I could tell he was torn between doing as I asked, which he didn’t want to do, or taking off and chancing the consequences. In the end he got off his snowmobile and stamped around the way a man does after a long snowmobile ride.

  I looked at Edie and No Legs.

  They nodded. Neither of them spoke.

  “See you back at the ranch,” I said.

  As I spoke, I moved a few steps and swung myself onto the snowmobile behind William—before he could argue any more. It would be an easier ride, I knew, if I could have held him chummily around the waist in the traditional style of a guy out with his kid or a lover or at any rate someone he liked, but I didn’t really feel that was appropriate in the circumstances—so I reached down and clutched as much as I could of the seat cover.

  William revved the engine and threw it in gear.

  I yelled to Edie, “Tell Pengelly we should be along in an hour or so.”

  At the look of them, events moving too rapidly for them to grasp fully without the discussion they no doubt would have on the way back in, I suddenly felt it was time for a little levity.

  “And you two behave yourselves, now!”

  At least I’d finally made Edie go goggle-eyed.

  As we took off I could see them standing there, apparently in silence. In my last sight of them, Seismo was on his feet looking majestic, Edie was picking up the lead line, and No Legs was pointing after the odd couple on the snowmobile. Suddenly it seemed to me they were both laughing like hell.

  Chapter Eight

  There is a form to any murder investigation. Even in the Arctic, where life is supposed to be more simple, you start out knowing not much except that somebody is dead. Then, unless there happens to have been a witness, you try to determine how the person was done in, and by whom. Except with some poisons, identifying the means of murder usually isn’t all that difficult—bullet, knife, axe, hammer or some other form of violence nearly impossible to mistake. When you reach the “by whom” stage in an investigation that is really well-organized, as opposed to some guy flying by the seat of his pants, you start a case book on paper or in- a computer or both.

  The official case book on this one, no doubt someone else was keeping. I keep mine in my head, where insights, intuitions, wild guesses, daydreams or merry little breezes of any other nature have never been turned away. Some of these were of little obvious pertinence, such as my sense even now, bouncing along on the back of William’s snowmobile, that No Legs and the formidable Edie might just decide not to try getting back tonight. Of course, that had nothing to do with the murder as such, except it had led to putting two people together who even in this small community didn’t seem to have noticed one another much before.

  I liked No Legs for what so far had been careful insights, and because in the North a man’s warm kitchen migh
t tell you more about him than what he’d read or how many legs he had.

  Edie, on the other hand, struck me as one of those women who know what they want and when they want it and aren’t shy about directing their efforts to that end. At a guess, I certainly wouldn’t place her at the truly objectionable end of that scale. I’d known a few of those, having almost offended one once (or was it twice?) by singing my Paul Robeson imitation of “Pull that barge, lift that bale,” while lying there unclothed and ready listening to the detailed instructions on how, and with what, I was to make love.

  While thinking these warm thoughts I was jolted back rudely to the real world. A sudden turn almost threw me off the snowmobile. I saw that we’d almost hit the bank at a turn in the river. Obviously William hadn’t been paying attention.

  “Watch where you’re going!” I yelled.

  “Fuck you!” he threw over his shoulder.

  So I concentrated for a while. Riding the back of a snowmobile behind a reckless, angry, maybe scared and possibly vengeful man quickly joined my list of pleasures to avoid. It was cold. The clear day had slid into an exceedingly frosty twilight. Even with my big mitts, I would sometimes have to hold on with one hand while I flexed some feeling back into the fingers of the other. Then it occurred to me that if I’d had a chance at this kind of ride when I was a kid I would have been yelling, “Faster! Faster!” From there I forced my thoughts back in a warmer direction, just as when long ago I would try to ignore miles of tundra by living in my head.

  The fact remained that the sane way with darkness coming on would be for Edie and No Legs to make camp in the shelter of this river bank, let the primus stove warm the tent while it warmed the caribou stew we’d brought along, lay out the bedrolls—with mine as an extra—and then cuddle up. I hoped so, anyway. When two people are especially warm toward one another, as they had so quickly become, it seems a pity to stand on ceremony. William and I must have thundered along for a mile or so while I translated that warming thought into me, a girl I’d known in my youth at Paulatuk, and a nice warm igloo out on the Barrens.