The Shaman's Knife (25 page)

I'd seen him bounce a few times after his skis hit. I told him to be careful, too, and asked, “How is that stuff for landing on?”

“Well, it ain't no Edmonton International,” he said, which is pretty hard to say in Inuktitut, so he said it in English, and was gone. As he took off, my radio suddenly squawked. “Matteesie. Bouvier. Come in. Over.”

“What's up?”

“I'm at the airport. Hard Hat is leaving on a flight in a few minutes. I asked him where to and he had some story about a relative being sick in Inuvik. Also said he hoped to get some welding work there. Obviously he didn't go out with the others. Should I hold him?”

This was a huge surprise. I had assumed that one of those with Davidee was Hard Hat, despite his earnest disclaimers to me that he was through with Davidee. That didn't alter what Debbie had told me about his movements on the night of the murders. But I wasn't ready to reveal what Debbie had told me—not with a vengeful Davidee still loose. I thought hard. “Tell him to register his whereabouts with our detachment in Inuvik,” I said, “and that we might need him back here in a few days. If he doesn't show we'll get him picked up. Scare him. Let him know he isn't off the hook, wherever he is.”

With that ticking over in my mind, a complication I hadn't foreseen, I headed west along the other snowmobile's track, dismissing Hard Hat for the moment. Whatever he had done or not done, Davidee had to be the key. We knew little or nothing so far about what kind of relationship Davidee had with Dennissie, and we hadn't had a chance to pin him down on threatening his parents into not mentioning him to the police. Obviously he had scared the hell out of a lot of people, including Hard Hat.

Then I went on to think about the stalwart and straight-ahead Lewissie Ullayoroluk's speculation that sometimes Andy Arqviq, the kid in the rec hall, might have been some kind of a dope runner. I wanted to track this down, in case dope turned out to have anything to do with the murders. I would have to press the kid. And what did it mean that Davidee had a powerful yen for Leah, the stunning-looking girl with the steady gaze and closed-in manner? Could that somehow be connected to what had really happened that night when the murders took place? But how? And how far could I get by pushing Davidee hard on his whereabouts that night without involving Debbie and putting her in danger?

Backtracking the other snowmobile now led me off the tundra onto the lake ice and straight across to what appeared to be an island, a low projection above what in summer would be the surface of the lake. The track came from behind the island. I could no longer hear the Cessna and was now a few miles from where Thomassie had taken off. I was approaching a danger zone. Then on the breeze, lighter now and westerly, I could smell something that was cooking, or had been cooked. I slowed to barely walking speed. I was almost upon the island.

As I rounded it close to shore, to my left I saw a small snow house, the yellow snowmobile, and Davidee. Simultaneously I heard a shot. Snow puffed and fell back a few feet to my right. Beside the snow house Davidee stood motionless, having lowered his rifle until it pointed at the snow in front of him.

I took my own rifle from its scabbard and laid it across my knees, steering with one hand as I drove slowly toward him.

He didn't make a move or a sound. He had an aspect of intense readiness, staring at me. I halted fifty yards away and dismounted, holding my rifle, ready to raise it quickly if he moved his.

“What the hell are you shooting at?” I yelled

He laughed. “I thought it was Tommy and Paulessie coming back, just thought I'd give them a scare.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “You knew what their machine looked like, and even if you're colorblind their machine wasn't towing a sled.”

“You don't think if I'd been shooting at you I would have missed.”

I raised my rifle quickly and fired a few feet to his left. He jumped, raising his rifle again menacingly. I kept walking toward him until we were only yards apart.

“If I'd been shooting at you I wouldn't have missed, either,” I said.

For long seconds we stared at one another, both sharply alert. I knew what I wanted. If he'd come out here partly to hide something that might be incriminating, bloodstained money, boots with blood on the soles, I'd find out.

Abruptly, his manner changed. “You come in that airplane I heard?” he asked.

That was not necessarily a dumb question, because he couldn't have seen and probably didn't know engine sounds well enough to identify a Cessna of a type too small to transport a snowmobile, let alone my sled.

“No. I came on the snowmobile. The aircraft is my backup against you doing something stupid.”

“You're something new around here,” he said mockingly. “I don't think Barker has ridden that machine five miles out of town in all the years he's been here.”

“Maybe there was no need,” I said. “Law-abiding place like Sanirarsipaaq.”

He smiled at the sarcasm. “So what are you doing out here?”

“Looking for you.”

“Why?”

“You can guess why.”

He still hadn't moved. “You mean, I done something bad, coming out to hunt caribou? I didn't know I had to get permission. There isn't anything like the booze committee running hunting, you know, telling people when they can and when they can't.”

Well, I couldn't stand there passing the time of day. I thought of my mother knocked down, sprawled and hurt when someone, maybe Davidee, or maybe somebody he knew about, had run her down.

“I think you either killed Dennissie and Thelma or know who did,” I said. “You got no alibi that will stand up. You weren't supposed to be in Sanirarsipaaq on the night of the murders, but you were. Also you've got your reputation, which has half the town scared to stand up and say what a shit you are, and that something like killing two people for whatever reason or no reason at all is right in character for you.”

He had remarkable composure. “You can't prove any of that.”

“When I'm finished tracking down a few loose ends I think I can,” I said. “For instance, when we find the other two guys who were here with you and hear why they ran out of here—probably, if they got any sense, because they didn't want to get involved in whatever it is that you're going to do next—we'd be a little closer.”

I could see the flush of anger. “Those stupes. Out not two days, haven't fired a shot, and they get all screwed up about getting back . . .”

For a moment he seemed to be unraveling a little. But he must have felt that, too, and imposed his will. His next words were an almost funny attempt to act innocent.

“Who won the hockey playoff?” he asked. “We don't hear a thing out here.”

“Get out of the way,” I said, approaching with my rifle at my shoulder, but pointing down. “Put your rifle down. On the ground.”

For a second or two he resisted. Rage flashed across his face. At that instant the drone of the Cessna sounded, growing fast. The Cessna banked into sight from behind the island, flying low with Thomassie visible, staring down. It roared overhead, as much as a Cessna 185 can be said to roar, circled once, and then set down on the lake and taxied in.

Davidee slowly and carefully put his rifle on the ground.

“I'm going to look in your snow house and search you and your snowmobile,” I said, raising the rifle so that it pointed at him.

The Cessna stopped a few yards from us. Thomassie jumped down and looked at Davidee's rifle on the snow.

“What's doing?” he asked mildly.

I handed him my rifle. “Hold this gun on him while I do some checking. If he makes a move, don't wait, shoot.”

Davidee was looking from one of us to the other. “You couldn't get away with it,” he said.

“Don't bet.”

I walked to the snow house, a tawdry affair, kicked down the entrance tunnel and crawled in on hands and knees, feeling vulnerable but trusting Thomassie to cover. Inside, a primus stove was still warm, under a pot half full of stew. A sleeping bag had been flung across caribou skins on a crude sleeping shelf.

I searched thoroughly. No boots, no nothing. No marks anywhere to indicate that anything had been hidden in the walls.

When I emerged, neither Davidee nor Thomassie had moved.

“Satisfied?” Davidee mocked.

“Not quite. Throw your parka on the ground.”

He didn't argue. I knew then that he didn't fear a search at all.

I searched his parka pockets, then patted him down as he stood absolutely still. There were no lumpy signs of anything hidden. In his pants pockets he had a few fives and tens, none showing any sign of blood, and two unopened packages of Accord Red cigarettes. I opened the seat of his snowmobile. It contained the usual spare drive belt, wrenches, screwdrivers, a fresh sparkplug still in its package, and a clean hunting knife of an ordinary store-bought variety.

“Nothing, eh?” he asked.

He was clean. He'd traveled over miles of tundra where he could have hidden almost anything but a battleship. The thought was depressing. But he'd had others with him on this trip, and if he'd hidden anything, he'd know that didn't mean it was safe. I took my rifle back from Thomassie and held it loose but ready. I knew that this was pretty well it, for now.

“What next?” Thomassie asked me.

“Nothing much. Davidee is going to come in with me and answer a few questions.”

“I'm not ready to come in,” he protested.

“How about I arrest you on a charge of obstructing justice by withholding or falsifying evidence about two murders?”

For a long minute or two he hesitated. He might have been weighing a possible escape—getting on his snowmobile and making a run for it, daring me to shoot. His snowmobile, with no sled to tow, was faster than mine. But he would know that he'd only be postponing. With an aircraft to shadow him, in the long run he wouldn't have a chance.

 

There was a certain shock value to our procession back into Sanirarsipaaq just before sunset, which is a little after eight at that time of year. A fascinated throng (at least nine people) rushed out of the airport building to see us go by. One was the old Inuit lady who'd been ducking as the wingtip almost hit the window the day I arrived. She was wearing a bright calico Mother Hubbard gown over her parka. Beside her was Father Lovering, who had interrupted his annual visit with Jonassie to officiate at my mother's funeral and burial, and had now returned, as he'd told me he would, and was standing with Jonassie. All watched more or less transfixed as we chugged in past three parked aircraft, the distinctive insignia of Aklak Air and Nahanni Air contrasting with the weather-worn Komatik Air marking on Thomassie's Cessna.

Among the locals one could almost discern in bubbles above a few heads, “Why the hell is Davidee driving policee's skidoo? And why is Matteesie driving Davidee's?” This had really been the only precaution open to me. On his own machine, Davidee might have outrun me if he'd felt like getting back first to strike the fear of God into anyone he thought might need to be told to keep their mouths shut—such as Hard Hat, who he probably didn't know yet had vamoosed out of there. On the slower police vehicle towing a heavy sled, he didn't have the option of outrunning me. I had the satisfaction of noticing that, for once, he looked worried. After one quick glance at the crowd, possibly to see if Hard Hat was on hand, he kept his eyes straight ahead.

When we pulled up at the detachment, I told Davidee that he was not to leave town or his parole would be revoked.

“You mean you haven't got a charge,” he said.

“It means I'm not charging you right now,” I said.

“Which means you know you couldn't make it stick.”

I obviously had run out of the need for empty threats. I called up a line I must have heard once in a play or an old movie. Richard Harris, adjusting his naval officer's cap? Groucho Marx, stroking his mustache? “Let's wait and see, shall we?”

Davidee's parents were watching from up the slope as he got aboard his own machine, zoomed past them, parked, and, after a long look back at me, jerked his head at his parents to follow him inside.

Bouvier, appearing on the detachment steps in his shirtsleeves, had seen only the last part of this. I'd given him bare details by radio, with Thomassie adding an embellishment or two from his perspective as commander in chief of my air force. Bouvier followed me in, brimming with some excitement of his own. “A fifty-dollar bill with bloodstains on it has shown up at the Co-op,” he said. “Apparently somebody took it in before we'd alerted them and didn't notice any staining—one side was clean—and tucked it under the change tray and forgot it. So it wasn't in the pile in Nelson's office when I checked.”

I never have much of an idea where my own money goes, but expect other people to be more careful. “Seems strange to me that fifty dollars could be mislaid without that fussy bastard blowing his stack. Don't they check cash against cash register tapes?”

Bouvier grinned. “He's very defensive about that, going on about temporary help and kids who can't count and say their cash is balanced when it isn't. But anyway, he did call as soon as he found this fifty with the blood on it. Wanted to know what to do. I told him you were on your way back in and he shouldn't do anything until you got back tonight and he heard from you.” Reminding me of one of my favorite song lines, “Do nothing till you hear from me.”

We had tried to keep the hunt for bloodstained money reasonably quiet, figuring that if we brought the whole weight of our mighty two-man detachment into an open search, and somebody had more, they might decide to swallow, hide, burn or otherwise destroy the rest. Now with the fuss around the Co-op staff, the business about money with blood on it would be all over town.

“He's at his office now, waiting,” Bouvier said. “They're closed, but I told him to wait.”

The formerly unaccommodating Nelson Akpaliapik was a small, round and serious man. He had a lot more of the co-op spirit this time. I think he'd got into the swing of things, seeing himself becoming famous by helping the Mounties get their man. He obviously thought Bouvier had been slow off the mark in cautioning him to do nothing without my input. “The longer you leave a thing, you know, the more people don't remember,” he complained. “But I can tell you one thing.”

“What's that?”

“There's one guy in town you can rule out.”

“Who?”

“Davidee Ayulaq.”

What the hell did that mean? “Why rule him out?”

Nelson's normally benign expression flushed with annoyance. “The sonofabitch owed us money since before he went to jail, so when he did come back I told him he had to pay up. He kept telling me that he was getting some money soon, a guy owed it to him, but I told him no credit until it was paid. Not only that. I stuck a note at every cash desk that not only was his credit cut off, but if he ever tried to pay cash we were to take the money and apply it against his old bill.”

So Nelson had put a candle to the devil, as our elders would describe it, and he'd got away with it.

“You're a hard man, Nelson.”

“Thank you,” he said modestly. “Of course, I figured out that when he wanted something real bad he'd get somebody to get it for him. His father came in a few days ago with a welfare check and bought things like ammunition, which I knew wasn't for him—he hasn't been out hunting for years—and cigarettes, Davidee's brand, Accord Red. The old man doesn't use cigarettes, smokes a pipe.”

“Can I see the fifty?”

“Sure.” While he fumbled with the lock to the top drawer of his desk he said, “Also, urn, I'm pretty sure that Dennissie, the late Dennissie, poor guy, did something the same just before he was killed. He doesn't smoke, but one day before we even knew Davidee was back in this vicinity I happened to be around one day when Dennissie was buying Accord Red.”

The father doing Davidee a favor under duress was one thing, but involving Dennis was something else. I turned that over in my mind. Davidee had told Nelson that somebody owed him money. The somebody could have been Dennis. That would fit with the way Davidee had demanded money from Byron and got chased with a gun for his pains.

Nelson handed the fifty across his desk to me.

Like most people, when I handle money I usually look mainly at the numbers. I had never really studied one of any denomination before. Now I noted that the main color of the fifty is red. One side of this one was mostly clean and crisp, showing a crest that from the top included the standard Canadian Anglo-French mix, the crown of England, a lion and a unicorn, a Union Jack, a fleur-de-lis, three red maple leaves growing off one stem, and the words
A Mari Usque Ad Mare
. In the middle was a red line of print reading “Fifty 50 Cinquante” and the word
Canada
, along with head and shoulders of a longtime and now long-dead prime minister, not identified by name on the bill but unmistakably (as I learned in school), William Lyon Mackenzie King.

There was very little stain on that side, only an almost unnoticeable blotch along the end that must have been in the bottom of Dennissie's pocket.

But when I turned the bill over, there it was. A blackish smear ran across the “Cinquante 50” message, as well as an irregular smudge across the bill's rear centerpiece, which is a perfect inward-facing circle of red-coated Mounties on black horses, holding their lances high, a depiction of the RCMP's famous musical ride, performed at many a formal ceremony in Canada, an old Mountie trademark.

“Can I use your phone?” I asked Nelson.

He shoved it over.

I called the hotel. “Margaret,” I said, “when you paid Dennissie that night, did you give him any fifties?” Earlier, Bouvier had checked this with her. No harm in checking again.

Instantly she answered, “No.”

“You're sure?”

“I am absolutely sure, because he asked me not to. He said he was going to need smaller bills, something about people owed him some money, he'd have to make change, I suppose that sharking he was doing. I gave him probably six or seven twenties but also smaller stuff . . .” Then, after a very brief pause: “Why? You got a fifty with blood on it?” I said we had and she immediately said, “On Davidee?”

I had to smile. So she suspected Davidee too. “No such luck.” Nelson thought I was smiling at him—maybe thought the smile meant that I was getting somewhere with his valuable help—and he smiled back hopefully. Actually I was smiling because nothing in this case ever seemed to fit together.

Nelson stopped smiling when I told him I would have to take the fifty as evidence but would give him a receipt that he could turn in along with his bank deposit.

“Where the hell do you put a receipt from the RCMP into a bank deposit?” he asked.

A lot of people have wondered about that, from time to time when their money has been seized as evidence. Usually it is connected with a drug deal. Some guy, nabbed in a hotel room or parked car or something full of hash or whatever, the dealer nabbed with him, both redhanded, turns out to have a lot of cash on him. I've seen it happen. He's there to buy and now he's blabbering, “Ah ba, ah ba,” as he tries to think of a plausible reason to be carrying that kind of a roll.

I told Nelson that the money would be returned to him.

I also wondered how much more might still be around.

“One thing you could do—” I began.

“You mean, besides explain to head office why I'm short fifty,” he interjected disconsolately.

“—is tell all your cashiers that this bloodstained money has turned up and for them to look on both sides of any bills they take in for the next little while. And if they find any, I'll tell you what . . .”

“What?” Nelson said suspiciously. He apparently didn't see this anymore as a story to tell his grandchildren about how he'd once helped the Mounties get their man.

“Any more you find, I'll have to take that, too.”

“For how long?”

“Until there's a trial and it's all over with.”

“Oh, hell,” Nelson said. “First the goddamn . . . I don't mean god damn . . . I mean first the bodies in our goddamn freezer, and then this.”

When I got back to the detachment through the deep dusk, I saw immediately that Bouvier had something more. I was becoming fond of the twinkle in those big owlish eyes when he had news. “Jonassie was at Davidee's house last night trying to do something for Davidee's father.”

“How do you know this?”

“When you were at the Co-op Debbie came in and asked me to tell you. Jonassie and several others, you know how a shaman's intervention goes, some of the elders, including Annie and others from the Inumerit, were there when she got home last night and until daylight this morning.”

“What ‘something' was Jonassie supposed to do?”

“The old man was talking suicide. Debbie's mother called Jonassie in.”

I thought of that sad-looking man whose latest worry must have been his lie on behalf of Davidee. According to Debbie, he had been living for years in a kind of long-running tragedy. A feeble excuse for a father, sure, but I felt ashamed that I'd seen only that as defining him. Sometimes when a person even seems suicidal to those close to him, the shaman is called in. I wondered if that was the case here; or if Debbie's father actually had tried to end his life.

Some try until they do succeed. Even considering what Debbie had told me about him, I didn't see her father as being that focused, but what did I know? One of my mother's childhood friends, grown old, unable to hunt, depressed at a feeling of uselessness, tried to hang himself on a rope pushed through the tiny airhole in the top of an igloo and tied to an oar resting as a brace on the roof. A son came home unexpectedly and cut him down, still alive. All the family told the old man that his strength would come back and he would hunt again, that they needed his presence and his advice. He must promise not to try again. He promised. The next time the hunters came home from hunting, again they found him hanging, same snow house, same rope, same oar, this time dead.

Maybe when he was younger, Debbie's father had thought his nightmare would end. Now, wasted away, he must believe it wouldn't, and his despair had caused his wife to call the shaman. I knew people in the force who at one time, maybe not now when I'd won a few, would have been scornful about me taking shamanism seriously. But the man must have been very afraid. How would Davidee be taking the news right now, knowing that he, Davidee, was the true reason for the shaman being called in? Should I go there immediately, or go to get Annie's reaction, or go to the shaman himself?

In the end, I chose none of those options. When I left the detachment I walked out into the tundra fringing the settlement; it was totally dark now. Hearing wolves in the distance and the occasional snore of a snowmobile in the town, I was thinking of shamanistic seances that I had witnessed as a boy and later. I put myself into the house where Debbie and her parents and Julie and Annie and others, perhaps Byron, last night had witnessed Jonassie fighting with age-old means the threat of the man taking his own life. It would be late, fully dark, all blinds drawn, only an eerie dim light showing those present in a circle as Jonassie, masked and with his body covered with skins and his own shamanistic charms, came out of the shadows, his leggings hung with rattles that sounded and danced as he summoned up his helping spirits. Chanting and singing and dancing, he would have gone eventually into a trance in which he described spirit conversations he was having, beginning with his familiars, the gyrfalcon and the Arctic fox, dancing his intricate steps and shaking his charms and asking the spirits for help, then, over time, many hours, describing the trip his soul was making as he moved deeper and deeper to seek help from the greatest spirit of all, the goddess Sedna, who lives at the bottom of the sea.