The Shaman's Knife (11 page)

Margaret's eyes were angry. “It started right here in the kitchen! Maisie liked him in that sort of, well, I hate to say it this way, but it's the way I think of it, that sort of heiferlike way she has. Pay no attention to how she looks, like the miniskirt at the airport, for God's sake, it's just she craves attention, and when she gets the wrong kind, well . . .”

I thought she started something there then abandoned it.

“But she's inexperienced. Tall women have trouble anyway, unless they're models. In Calgary before she came up here she spent more time running marathons, competing, doing the high jump damn near onto our last Olympic team, than dealing with men. Strong as a horse, physically, but I don't know how I could wind up with a daughter so clueless about men. Dennis was a happy-go-lucky kind of a guy and she liked that. When he propositioned her, not in so many words, she didn't believe he was serious.” She looked at me wryly. “Or says she didn't. I guess I don't really know everything that goes on in her head.”

“She told you about him asking her to go home with him?”

She looked surprised. “Yeah. That's the only way I could know.” After a thoughtful pause, sarcastically emphasizing some words, she continued, “After he mentioned it the first time and she thought he was kidding, a couple of days later he came back to it, in Technicolor. There was no problem, his granny always went to sleep watching TV on the
downstairs
couch, his room was upstairs, if Thelma did wake up she always just went to her own room, she
never
even heard him come in,
never
woke up until morning, and they could thump away with some music up there, have some fun, so how about it? Dennis was a pretty confident guy in a lot of ways, even if he was also stupid in this deal, seeing Maisie as just another stray piece of tail. Especially
Maisie
, for God's sake.”

Piece of tail
was an expression I hadn't heard for a while. Used to be popular when I was younger—and when Margaret was younger.

“Anyway, she just laughed it off, but then began to hear around that not everybody, I mean, not every other girl she knew or knew of, did turn him down. Especially on booze nights. He'd get a couple of drinks into some girl and take her home with him.”

“I thought the booze committee was pretty tough about who could bring stuff in. Was Dennis considered an okay guy?”

She shrugged. “Once in a while, maybe once every few weeks, he'd apply and they'd let him bring in something, a case of beer or maybe a bottle of something. He never pushed it or applied every week or showed up drunk. Thelma didn't even know he drank. Thought he just got it for friends who couldn't.”

I thought of a way Dennis could have worked it. Maybe on the nights he did get something to drink it was when he had a girl lined up for his we'll-sneak-past-Thelma game. But it couldn't have been that way, at least involving a girl, on the night of the murders. No ordinary girl is going to work Dennis over the way he wound up dead. Then again, I thought, how ordinary is Maisie? Not very.

I kept on. Could Dennis possibly have taken two people home with him that night, a girl and another guy? Or just another guy? It didn't come clear, to me. He's going to take a guy home with him and they're going to get stinking and start fighting? I wondered if maybe the guy in the house with Dennis that night hadn't been a regular at all, but a first-timer, or maybe not there for sex or booze, but for some other reason or for a combination of reasons. Not for robbery, or Dennis wouldn't have been left with a fair amount of money, even if what we did find on him did not include the fifty that Bouvier had mentioned. We didn't know how much more might have been taken.

Margaret and I had both stopped talking.

Suppose that, for some reason I hadn't yet come up with, some guy just wanted to beat hell out of Dennis, wound up killing him, and then, coming downstairs, had heard a sound and realized that there was somebody else in the house?

Or maybe the noise upstairs had wakened Thelma. Two guys fighting to the death are almost certain to be much noisier than a guy and girl making love (the exceptions being those rare occasions, of sometimes treasured memory, when the reverse is true). If, for whatever reason, she had staggered half-asleep off the couch and yelled something, maybe even recognized the guy, and if he had thought of what he'd done with Dennis upstairs, he would have know that he had to shut Thelma up, too.

“It opens up an awful lot of possibilities,” I said finally, not naming them.

Suddenly Margaret yawned and looked at her watch. “God,” she said, rising quickly. “I've got to clean up in here and set tables for tonight.” I stood up, too, suddenly feeling a little surprised that she'd let Maisie fly out of here when she could have used both help and company. Whose idea had it been for Maisie to get away from the heat for a while?

“Had she planned this trip for long?”

Margaret shook her head. “Applied for a job and got called in for an interview.”

“What kind of job?”

“Librarian. She took library science in Calgary.”

Margaret was on her feet, looking rather forlorn. I have these impulses sometimes, with people I like—wanting body contact, nothing necessarily major, just touching a hand or whatever.

She was looking at me, smiling, guessing. “Don't,” she said.

I took a can of ginger ale from the cooler on the way by. We walked along the dining room and up the two steps to the half-door leading to her tiny office. The lower half had a slice of shelving on top, a flat place to hold the register she gave me to sign.

“None of what you said will come back on you,” I said.

“I'm counting on that. How'll you manage it?”

“I'll manage.” Bouvier and I could ask around, starting with girls Dennis hung out with, put some heat on them if we had to.

Handing me a key with the number four on it, she said, “This opens the front door, too. I lock it when I go to bed. As for the rest . . . an Irish friend of mine sometimes says, the height of good luck to you.”

“The friend's name wouldn't be Kieron O'Kennedy, would it?”

“Jesus,” she laughed. “And he overnighted here only once!”

I walked up six steps to the landing, turned, went another six steps to the second floor. Number 4 was at the end of the building. The room door was wide open as is usual in the north when a room has been cleaned but not occupied. What was not usual was that in a chair by the window was Jonassie. He must have come upstairs after he left the dining room. That was nearly an hour of patient waiting, figuring that I'd either come up or he'd see me from the window heading for the detachment and follow me. Whatever the case, obviously he was serious about wanting to talk to me.

“Hi,” I said.

He was smoking a pipe. The smoke hung in the room. He shifted the pipe from his right hand to his left as he rose and said, “I'm Jonassie, the carver.”

I'd been familiar with the name and reputation, but until yesterday not with the face. I could imagine him wearing the carver's mask against the stone dust while working inside, or outside bundled up in the cold working with axe and crowbar and maybe wedges on a piece of stone until he found the shape he was looking for, the stone's inner spirit that told good carvers what to aim for. I knew carving better than I did shamanism, but I'd heard a Winnipeg Art Gallery curator say that Jonassie's carvings always had a shamanistic content and that this was regularly remarked upon by curators and collectors.

“You are also a shaman,” I said.

I saw a glint of humor in his eyes.

He nodded. “And I hear,” he said, “on the radio, no less, from Yellowknife and Inuvik and other places, that police are proceeding on at least a rumor that there is some shamanistic connection to these murders. So I thought I should introduce myself and say that I know you by reputation and would be happy to help in any way I can.”

I looked around. There were four glasses on the dresser. I fleetingly remembered the cocky young defense lawyer on the court's flight to Cambridge, and his scorn for four to a room. It also occurred to me that Jonassie could be a suspect, a man very strong in his body. At this point anybody in Sanirarsipaaq with the size and strength had to be among the suspects. Still, the rumors about shamanism being involved in the murders could be best checked out, for now, with the shaman himself.

“I would like to talk to you,” I said.

He jerked his head toward the open door. I read that as telling me that our talk should be more private. “Maybe if you would drop in to my home a little later?”

That suited me very well. “I'll stop at the detachment for a few minutes, then come to see you.”

As it turned out, that meeting turned out to be considerably delayed. When I got to the detachment the door was locked and the phone inside was ringing. By the time I picked up the receiver, Bouvier was doing the same at Barker's house.

“I got it,” I said, and he hung up.

“Matteesie,” a familiar voice said. “Charlie Litterick. You making any headway there?”

I thought of Hard Hat's involvement with Dennis, and the unfocused feeling I now had about Maisie and Dennis. “Certainly nothing more than circumstantial,” I said.

“Well, here's some more of the same. Circumstantial, I mean. After the court recessed for lunch I was doing a brisk walk out towards the old DEW line site to work up an appetite and clear my head about the case I've got here. On one of the back streets who do I see but the guy I was telling you about when we flew in here, Davidee Ayulaq! I'd told you he was tucked away in the pen at Prince Albert, so I thought I'd better let you know he's around. I don't know any more than that, yet. But he was eligible to apply for parole after serving two-thirds of his sentence, meaning thirty-two months. That would be five or six weeks ago, and he must have got it. When I saw him he was fifty, sixty yards away starting a snowmobile, not looking my way, but when he was pulling his helmet on I couldn't mistake that half-bald head.”

Half-bald head!

“I'm running a check right now to see what happened. I'll hope to call you back in a few minutes.”

In less than five minutes, just as Bouvier arrived, the phone rang again. “Damnedest thing,” Charlie sighed. “I told you Davidee is a great con man. Conned his parents about the early rapes, conned the police there—Barker, I guess—the second time. If that girl hadn't burned the house down, he . . . well, anyway, he did the same con job in the pen. Read some law books and convinced some fruitcake prison psychiatrist that never mind the way the old Inuit used to do it, in modern Canada it was cruel and unusual punishment not to let him go home after paying his debt to society, as the saying goes.

“This psychiatrist spread the word around to a few other bleeding hearts in the civil liberties game. They got a lawyer. When the parole was granted and he was still bound by his sentence not to return home, he had to name where he would be living so he could report weekly to a parole officer, in this case RCMP. He told them Cambridge, because it was the closest RCMP to Sanirarsipaaq, as close as he could get legally. Meanwhile his, uh, support group took my banishment stipulation to court on the grounds that this was discrimination, an extra penalty applied only to one group, natives, and they won. I guess that means that when the paperwork of transferring his parole from Cambridge to Sanirarsipaaq goes through, you'll have him there.”

I said, “I did see him, a few seconds only, at the airport here Tuesday. I wondered who the guy was who was half-bald.”

“But Barker would know!”

I spoke again the immortal words, “Barker ain't here.”

Bouvier got in on the last of the conversation. I filled him in on what I knew, and phoned RCMP Cambridge. Anybody paroled has to check in regularly at a designated parole office and cannot leave town without permission. Reporting is commonly once a week at the start, rising to less frequent periods if he keeps to the schedule and keeps his nose clean. It turned out that, originally, before the banishment thing was settled in his favor and Davidee was paroled to Cambridge Bay, he'd reported faithfully. Now that the court had ruled that he could return home, the paperwork was being done to transfer his parole point to Sanirarsipaaq.

“In fact, it's supposed to come through today,” the corporal at Cambridge said. He was a Six Nations Indian from Ontario and a tough cop. “We'll be faxing it up and then he'll be your baby.”

I said, “While you've had him did he ever ask for permission to leave Cambridge at all? Like to come here?”

“No. Not to Sanirarsipaaq. He knew he wouldn't have got that, of course. He did get leave every week to go to a camp north of here at a place called No Name Lake, to do some trapping and hunt caribou. He said he wanted to make some money, instead of depending on welfare. I even liked him some for that attitude.”

The good con man at work. No Name Lake is about halfway between Cambridge and Sanirarsipaaq. My guess was it would take no more than a few hours of fast snowmobile travel to get from there to either place. So every time he'd had leave he could have been coming here from No Name but not showing his face.

I was on the point of saying that I'd seen him here yesterday, but changed my mind in time. Obviously, he had broken parole at least that once. But I didn't want him picked up on that technicality. I'd rather have him here where I could talk to him. I wanted to know where he'd been last Friday, when murder had been done and he was supposed to be in Cambridge. I wondered about times before last Friday, when he might have been here taking up again with the guys Barker's files identified as being his special buddies.

I said to Bouvier, “Find out how long it takes a fast snowmobile to get from here to No Name and from there to Cambridge.”