Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery

by Scott Young

  He took a swallow of rum and let out a derisive snort. “At first Christian said probably Wrigley, south of here. But when we got near Fort Norman, could have landed there, he pulled out a detailed map showing this place. He said William had drawn it for them and that this was where we were going. I was too busy flying to argue or use the radio, even if he’d let me. The weather was bad but I knew if the worst came to the worst I could always land on the big river, it’s close enough. You know, at that time this thing was still just a charter to me, a hairy one, but that’s what this country can be like.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said—I believe the word is—drily. “It wasn’t any cinch getting in, just at dusk, but I’ve seen worse. They told me to taxi in by the bank here, more sheltered. Seemed to make sense. That was the first night. It was the next day when I started asking questions. They were cutting trees and branches for camouflage. At first they just ignored my questions about that but then Batten said he was going to beat the shit out of me and Christian said don’t, they needed me sooner or later to fly the airplane. By then I knew I was in trouble. Christian, I thought he was a friend of mine, Jesus, did tell me we were waiting for somebody, didn’t say who, and then we’d take off. When William came, I thought maybe it was him we were waiting for, but looks like it wasn’t . . .”

  He paused. “Days before William got here we heard on the radio about Morton. I was sick about it, I knew Morton, I’d flown him a few times. When I looked at them they were grinning at each other, and Batten said, ‘Good old Billy Bob.’ Who’s Billy Bob?”

  “The man who killed Morton. The guy they were waiting for here.”

  Johns sighed. “Eventually something like that occurred to me as a possibility, but I didn’t say anything. I thought if I could ever get out of here, then I could figure out what to do. Sure as hell couldn’t do anything until then. I think if either of them had been able to fly a plane, I’d be dead by now.”

  He paused for a minute and drained his cup of rum. I shoved the bottle toward him again. He poured and drank. Then, despondently, he said what many a man has said, or thought, before him, “I wish I could have been a goddamn hero in this thing. It kept bugging me that I couldn’t figure out how. Then we got drinking one night, too much, and I told them they could rot before I’d even try to fly them out. When we were wrestling around that time, I got my leg caught in some webbing just as Batten took a dive at me. That’s when I broke my leg. I haven’t been able to move from right here since.”

  So things were coming together. As hard-hearted as it sounds, it wouldn’t be the first time a son had collaborated knowingly or unknowingly in his father’s murder. But maybe all he’d thought he was doing when he told the others about this place, even drew a map for them, was sending them to a good hideout. At that time his father was still alive. William could have been only trying to help keep the money safe, including what he thought was his share, until they knew where they stood. If the report they’d got about their operation being blown was true, they’re gone and scattered but their bankroll is intact. Otherwise they’ve just been on a little trip, they come back, and presto, they’re back in business.

  Then came Morton’s murder, arranged by Bonner in that series of phone calls. If the guesswork part of that scenario is true, William is left with two options: to go after his father’s murderer, or to go after money he thought was coming to him. He might not have even guessed at first that the two were linked.

  The part I still wasn’t sure about was the whereabouts of Christian and Batten. I’d been rather polite with Johns, so far. If Christian and Batten came rolling back in now, I was in trouble. I didn’t like that idea. I thought of a lot of other guys I knew, friends, people I’d worked with. This is precisely when they might slap a guy around, stick a gun under his chin and suggest, “Talk”

  Was I going to just sit here nodding and smiling while some refugee from Upper Canada College snowed me, or at the very least didn’t tell me all he knew, and as a result perhaps endangered my life?

  What if I took two fast steps and slapped his face when he wasn’t ready for it?

  The answer to the first question was yes: I was going to sit there nodding and smiling.

  But I do have my ways. “I’ll tell you something,” I said, “I killed Billy Bob Hicks out in the snow last night.”

  That got Johns’ attention: his eyes snapped up to stare at mine.

  “I think if Billy Bob had managed to get here, after killing me first, he wouldn’t have believed you when you said you didn’t know where Batten and Christian are. I think he would have done little things like grinding the two parts of your broken leg together, to refresh your memory. I think he might well have ended up killing you and killing the dog, then have gone looking for Batten and Christian. Now I’m asking you a question and if what you tell me eventually turns out to be a lie and people get killed, you’ll be the first. I guarantee it.”

  Then I asked, “Are Batten and Christian still around here?”

  He gave the smallest negative head-shake I’d ever seen. Moved about an inch each way. Yet I didn’t think he was scared anymore. My threat to kill him seemed to have restored his courage. It sometimes happens that way.

  “You can believe me or not, I don’t give a damn which,” he said. “I haven’t seen them for three days now. I’ve got no reason not to believe William when he said he took them to the tractor road. None of them are pilots. One of the things I told them was there was no way I could fly this Cessna out of here on this short a take-off run with a full load, like there’d be with them plus the guy they were waiting for aboard. I think after that they’d grab any chance they thought might get them away with the money.”

  While I was thinking that over for angles, Johns repeated what he’d said before. “William told me he’d come back. I’ve been expecting him. Did he tell you how to find me?”

  I was shaking my head. William hadn’t done a damn thing helpful, especially that one.

  As I was replying, “No, I found you on my own,” I heard an aircraft in the distance.

  I reached over to grab Komatik Air’s rifle from under Johns. A safety precaution. I was beginning to believe him, but no use taking chances. When I pulled at the gun I was in a hurry and did it roughly. His face went chalk white. I stared and then gently slid my hand over the part of the sleeping bag I’d dislodged when I yanked the rifle out. His bent right knee was pointed one way but the toes on that leg pointed in the exact opposite direction. I winced. Moving that setup might make anybody’s face go chalk white.

  I laid the rifles in the doorway, jumped out of the Cessna, floundered out of Smokey’s range to tie on my snowshoes, then went back for the guns. I was still under cover. From the south the aircraft noise was getting very loud.

  Then, flying at no more than a hundred feet directly over where I’d left the snowmobile, I could see first that it was a Beaver and then saw Stothers’ horn-rimmed glasses on the pilot side. I couldn’t make out who was in the passenger seat. Both were staring downward as intently as if my snowshoe trail down that hill and across the pond had been entered in the compulsory figures at the Calgary Olympics.

  I ran out in the open and waved. The waved back madly. Then I walked swiftly back, opened the Cessna door, told Johns that the arrivals were friendly, we’d soon get him out to a hospital, and heard him call weakly, “Good.”

  By the time I got back to where I could see, Stothers was circling the length of the pond in a careful tour of inspection. That done, he banked out of sight beyond the north rim.

  On the way back he came over the peak at least six feet above his normal wolf-harassing altitude, then with the way clear below he practically fell out of the sky, flying that Beaver like a kid riding a bicycle instead of an old guy with wars and women and God knows what all behind him. Nobody could have touched down closer to shore than he did. Maybe in some things it’s the o
ld guys who do it best.

  Considering that there are no brakes on a ski-equipped Beaver, Stothers made a masterful assumption that the deep snow would stop him fast enough that he wouldn’t plow into the bank at the end of his run. He stopped just short, then turned and taxied along to where I stood. The passenger was Pengelly, who got his door open, jumped down, sank up to his knees in snow, and floundered forward.

  I expected he’d say something smart-ass like, “Dr. Kitologitak, I presume?” but for once he was out of quips.

  “Jesus, Matteesie, who’s that back at the blue flag?” I told him.

  “I just got a fast look at him with the binocs when we circled low, afraid it might have been you.” Then, deadpan, “I could pretty well see what you did to him. I’m sure he had it coming, but . . .”

  “But what?” I asked.

  “You still okay for ammunition?”

  I said something very rude.

  Stothers hadn’t even said hello. He was staring at the Cessna and saying, “Well, well.” He slogged over closer to look at the coverup job, then walked in and kicked loose snow from around one of the plane’s skis.

  “Wouldn’t be hard to get this thing out of here,” he said ruminatively. “Good thing there wasn’t some warm weather, a thaw and then more freeze, or this thing might have been locked in here until breakup.”

  Then he turned to me and scratched his beard on the left side of his face, that habit he had. “What did you find, Matteesie?”

  I told him Harold Johns was inside the Cessna with a badly broken leg; that William’s dog, chained to a tree, was what was sounding like a whole six-dog team: and that Christian and Batten were not in evidence, one theory being that they’d gone out to the tractor road.

  “We’re not far from that,” Pengelly said.

  “How far?” I asked.

  “A mile or so. Easy enough on snowshoes, if they had any. Or, of course, William was out here with the snowmobile. Maybe he took them: they’re his buddies.”

  That’s what Johns had said. Now I thought seriously about the tractor road. There’s a precious few of them through the North, running for a few months in winter where no road vehicles at all can go through the rest of the year. When ice in rivers and lakes is solid enough to take the weight and the pounding, some years sooner and others later, but normally early January, the big rigs eat up the hard miles through Arctic days and nights, plunging through into icy lakes from time to time when they try to stretch the season too far into spring.

  Their crews drink hard, sleep little, live lives of high recklessness and get paid accordingly. But one thing those drivers would not do is drive past a couple of men on foot in this winter wonderland and not stop. If anyone in that fix had some kind of a plausible story, such as they’d been on the plane that had been lost last week, the big rig crews would make room somehow. Anyway, going south they’re usually empty. And one thing we could count on was that if Christian and Batten saw a cloud of snow approaching that meant a tractor train was heading north, they’d stay well out of sight. North would be people waiting.

  “How’s your radio?” I asked Stothers.

  He smiled. “Oh, fine, thanks, Matteesie. Nice of you to ask”

  He’d spent a couple of hours with Pengelly, of course. Learning jokey bad habits.

  I said to Pengelly, “Will you call Inuvik and ask them to put out an alert on Christian and Batten for Blackwater Lake, Wrigley, Simpson, Providence, all the way along the road. Somebody could check what rigs have been through going south, and did they pick anybody up. Mention they’re probably armed and dangerous.”

  Pengelly looked at me. “You got charges in mind?”

  “Conspiracy to commit murder.”

  “You think Ted Huff will buy that?”

  “Yes, if you tell him I’ve got enough supporting evidence.”

  “Right.” Pengelly started plunging knee deep back to the Beaver.

  “You got any painkillers in your emergency kit?” I asked Stothers.

  “Nothing much.”

  “Anything to drink?”

  “Brandy,” Stothers said.

  “Good.” I explained that I thought we’d get Johns to the drunken stage that some people call feeling no pain, employing for this purpose rapid infusions of either Stothers’ brandy or my rum, whichever Johns preferred, to anesthetize his broken leg for the trip. We’d talked for a couple of minutes when Pengelly called from the Beaver, “Hey, Matteesie. The inspector wants to talk to you.”

  I climbed into the aircraft and reported in.

  “Pengelly tells me what you’re thinking, these accessory or conspiracy to murder charges,” Ted said. “The job you did on the murderer, I’ll need something on that now and full report later. We don’t want to be caught short on any of this.”

  “We won’t be. I saw the guy kill Morton and I looked him in the eye after I killed him. Same guy. No doubt at all.”

  I gave him an abbreviated version of the Billy Bob demise, and what Harold Johns had told me about Batten and Christian waiting for Billy Bob. To me, that made them at least accessories. A judge might rule differently, if you could find a judge insane enough, but there was definitely enough to pick them up on if we could find them, plus enough to pick up William on, and certainly enough to pick up Bonner.

  “Nobody except Bonner and William had been where they could telephone Billy Bob and arrange that fast take-off to intercept Morton,” I said. “I still can’t bring myself to believe it was William: And it was Bonner I saw on the phone.”

  There was no waste air.

  “How do you read the reaction in Fort Norman when we charge William?” he asked.

  I said, “Well, they won’t have long to stay shocked. There’s probably a media balloon race on right now to see who gets in there first for the gory details. And non-details. There’ll be enough media flying in to keep everybody in Fort Norman busy talking about what a nice boy William was, and they just couldn’t believe he was mixed up in the murder of his own father . . .” I stopped. Luckily, caution sometimes sneaks up on one. “And maybe he wasn’t, really. But once it was done he sure as hell could have helped more than he did. Maybe that charge should be obstructing justice, or however that one goes.”

  From Ted came a sound of relief. “Good idea. Hell of a job you’ve done, Matteesie.” He paused. “There’s something else. I hate to tell you, but I guess you should know—they’ve sent someone else to Leningrad on that thing there.”

  I hadn’t thought of Leningrad for days.

  “The deputy minister asked me to pass on to you personally his regrets and to say there’ll be other times.”

  I should even think about a deputy minister, up to my ass in this?

  I asked Ted to tell Thomas Nuniviak at Komatik Air that his Cessna was safe and if he wanted, in a few days somebody could bring him down for it. By then we’d be finished with it.

  He said he would.

  “Oh,” I said. “Would you also let the commissioner know that Harold Johns is okay, leg broken and not much else, apparently an innocent bystander, so the commissioner can pass that on to your friend and mine, the finance minister?”

  I was wondering, if it hadn’t been for Buster’s original phone call about Johns, would I be here at all? Probably. I would have been flying out on the same aircraft even if I’d been heading back for Ottawa.

  “Will do,” Ted said.

  After the over and out I sat there in the Beaver for a minute thinking not so much about Leningrad as about how quickly one obsession can be replaced by another, if a guy has that kind of a mind. Which I have, in what I think of as my unobtrusive way.

  Stothers had been waiting outside while Ted and I talked, Stothers being that kind of a gentleman. He climbed in looking rather thoughtful.

  “You know we can’t take off out of here with muc
h load,” he said.

  I said I figured that.

  He nodded. “I imagine you want me to take Johns back, get him to the hospital, probably straight to Norman Wells, if he’s as bad as you say. I’ll have to strip right down, leave extra gas and supplies here, everything dumpable. We can get it later,”

  “Right.”

  “I’ll tool up and down and make a runway for myself.” I’d foreseen that. Soft snow was a help in landing on a short runway, acting as a brake, but could be very dicey on take-off.

  “So what are you and Pengelly going to do?” he asked.

  I didn’t tell him precisely. I didn’t know for sure, but had a couple of odd ideas scratching around in my head. “We’ve got some checking to do around the aircraft. Also, I want to see if a snowmobile can get from here to the tractor road, and if not look for signs of anybody going up to their ass in snow trying it on foot. We’ll probably overnight here and pick up the body on the way back.”

  “I wondered about wolves getting at it,” Stothers said.

  I shrugged. I really didn’t care. Tell the truth, I was feeling rather flat. Maybe a half-eaten frozen body as an exhibit in a murder trial would make the Guinness Book of Records and I’d go down in history. “Right now I’ll bring my snowmobile down here and we’ll get Johns out to the Beaver,” I said.

  I had taken a step or two, hating to think of being out here with God knows what going on and us without a radio, wishing that Stothers or Pengelly had thought of bringing a spare when they might have suspected mine was kaput (but nobody’s perfect) when Stothers called, “Hey!”

  I turned. He handed me a plastic shopping bag.

  “What’s this?” I asked, looking in to see a two-way radio. Good thing I’d kept my criticism to myself. He grinned as if he’d read my thoughts. As I snowshoed across toward the snowmobile, he started his engine. He had been twice back and forth lengthwise along the pond’s surface, flattening the snow, before I reached the machine and idled dead slow back to the Cessna.

  “Hey, Smokey,” I said to the dog. He wagged his tail, still howling.