The Shaman's Knife (9 page)

Living next door to the murder house, Annie should have a lot to tell me. She would know the comings and goings, and some might be important. Mother, what would she want to do when she was ready to leave Franklin House? I didn't want her coming back here with that she's-the-only-witness thing lurking in somebody's mind, especially if the somebody was still here.

Now I was walking past houses painted blue or yellow or a washed-out brown, all with snow banked up against their walls. Here and there the bow of a boat or a carelessly dropped ladder or pile of building materials, poked through the snowbanks. Every house had its two-hundred-gallon fuel-oil tank close by the kitchen wall. At one a komatik still hitched to a snowmobile was almost hidden by the carcass of a musk-ox, which no doubt soon would be skinned, and the tender and flavorful meat divvied up among the families of the hunters who had brought it in.

No matter how often I saw all this, being not often enough, the scene meant much to me. Children were on their way to school, obviously having left themselves enough time to play en route, the way I had sometimes done as a child, slipping and sliding here and there, enveloped in warm clothing, laughing a lot. In the bitter dark days of winter's minus forty or fifty, kids rarely played outside. It was still plenty cold, I'd figured minus twenty today, but the important change was to long hours of daylight. The kids could catch up.

Yet into all this, last Friday night, someone either with murder in his heart or anger that could lead to murder had walked between these houses . . . Murder in his heart? I stopped myself there. Did it have to be a man? It had been easy to slip into the idea that a man had done the murders. A tall-built woman could hurtle through the night as well as a big man. Now that I was fully awake I knew that I should have asked that tall one, Maisie, a few more questions.

I found myself among kids again, more and more pouring out of houses with a yell, some still chewing on whatever they'd carried away from the breakfast table. Wherever there was a slope they were riding toboggans or bits of cardboard, sliding to a stop and getting off to trudge back up to do it again. Two boys on mountain bikes were pedaling like mad down a road where two or three feet of glassy ice had been packed all winter by big snowplows and graders. They fought to steer through the skids and slides until they hit maximum speed, before easing on the brakes and trying to stay upright while whirling and inevitably falling—to get up laughing and do it again. There would be two months yet of gradual thawing until in June the ice retreated a few yards from the shore of the bay and on sunny days the more daring, these ones on the bicycles and their like, would swim in the icy water. In early July the ice would go out of the streams and fathers and mothers would take the kids and picnic inland and pick the swift-growing flowers.

A smiling girl walked by. “Hi!” she called. She had a hockey stick over one shoulder with skates and a hockey bag hanging from it; the skates bumping her back with every step. I called back, “Hi!”

I was almost at the shore of the bay when the road I was walking turned to the left just short of the two-story hotel. More houses lay to my left over toward the town's main buildings. Due west of the hotel was the rec hall and rink, the trading post, the Co-op, and the school (near a small building bearing a tattered old sign reading INTERNATIONAL LITERACY YEAR and a neater one reading LIBRARY). One side of the rec hall was two stories high, with office windows facing our way, and a sign reading HAMLET OFFICES. In there would be the settlement administrator and an office for the mayor.

Across the street and beyond the rec hall a small building bore a familiar insignia and flag, the RCMP detachment's one-room office. I walked in. There was a bathroom off to the side, door open. Near the bathroom door was a table with a coffeemaker, toaster. Underneath was a tiny refrigerator. On the wall behind Bouvier was a calendar and beside it a printout from the Climate Information branch of Environment Canada, showing sunrise and sunset times in this area. Bouvier was busy at his desk against some filing cabinets. He was wearing his parka. He looked up, smiling, pecking with two fingers at an old Underwood typewriter and smoking a cigar.

“This is a smoke-free zone,” he said. “Got a sign somewhere says that, but you can never see it through the smoke.” He got up. “Did you know that the plane was weathered in here last night?”

I was startled. Had I just assumed it had gone, or been so unconscious I didn't even assume? Second option rang true. “No, I didn't.”

So Maisie was still here. I'd been thinking maybe I shouldn't have let her go, and she isn't gone yet, and I'm a lot more awake.

“Weather never let up until around dawn, four-thirty or five,” Bouvier went on, and laughed. “Sadie was fit to be tied-her kind of nightmare! Barker loose in the fleshpots of Yellowknife!” He grinned. “And, of course, Maisie worried about her job interview. Anyway, they're leaving right away. Sadie just called. I'll drive her to the airport.”

“The redoubtable Sadie,” I said. “I'll come with you.”

“Redoubtable,” he said, grinning. “Wish I'd said that.”

She was waiting on the snowy steps leading from the door of her house, bags ready, a woman probably thirty-five, well formed, with dark hair and brown eyes that radiated both defiance and a kind of awareness that she'd stuck her neck out by interfering in her husband's job and everybody in Sanirarsipaaq knew it.

Could she possibly have another reason for getting out of here fast, away from the murders? She's a teacher. Could some of her kids have been involved somehow? I couldn't imagine how.

But even if that idea is for the birds, she's been here a few years and is married to the cop who'd been on the case first. She looks sharp, intelligent, sure to have some ideas. But one thing is for sure . . . two things, actually. One: asking Sadie to postpone this holiday would start World War III. The other: when I talked to Maisie now, if she struck a false note at all I would hold her.

While driving to the airport, I tried to make conversation with Sadie that might lead to a question or two. I struck out entirely. She just wasn't having any. “That's police business, not mine,” she said.

I thought of replying, “But I hear
everywhere
that you're quite influential.” Instead, prudence prevailed. Maybe I'm getting chicken in my old age.

At the airport I drove out on the tarmac and stopped alongside the Hawker Siddeley. Everybody else had boarded and there was plainly an air of let's-get-the-hell-out-of-here as O'Kennedy hurried down the steps to help. I thought of Maisie and her distracted manner, and of the pilot with the girl in Inuvik, and I thought, well, they'll have to stand a little more.

O'Kennedy must have read at least a bit of my mind. “You saw that lady longlegs in the crowd yesterday,” he murmured, out of earshot of Sadie. “Well, she's aboard. Wouldn't mind that one throwin' me over her shoulder and carryin' me off to some cave.” I had an idea from the way he spoke that he might have tried to make that happen and had struck out.

“She say when she's coming back?”

“She said something about seeing us again Friday. That's the next scheduled plane in.”

“Can I have a couple of minutes with her before you go?”

He looked amused. “Sure, General.”

I climbed in, noticing many I'd flown with yesterday. There was no sign of anyone new, like the half-bald guy. The layover had been a break for the mourners, getting out without having to wait for the Friday flight.

Maisie had a window seat. One beside her was empty but I sat on the chair arm, fielding her reaction—which was a surprised, “You going out again already?”

I trotted out my heavy artillery. Watching intently for reaction of any kind, I shook my head, kept my voice low. “That's not why I'm here at all. I've been thinking overnight that I shouldn't have let you go and now I've got a chance to remedy that. I have a feeling I should get you off this flight so you can tell me about Dennissie. Everybody says you were close. I want to know a lot that you must know—people he spent a lot of time with. Anyone who had tended to push him around or anyone he had pushed around. And especially . . .”—I paused—“your relationship with him.”

In swift succession she registered shock, dismay, disbelief. At the mention of relationship I thought I saw a shadow, a flicker, like a memory going by at speed and then suppressed as she wailed, “But my job interview! I'm going to be late as it is! I told the police everything I could think of . . .”

“But that was right after it happened,” I said. “You've had a lot of time to think since then. Were you ever in his house?”

Tears came to her eyes. They were real tears. “Yes, twice.” Her voice was even lower than usual. “Both times Thelma was there, too.”

“What were your visits about?”

She seemed nonplussed. “Just visits!”

“Were you in his room?”

She hesitated a split second. “No.”

“You sure?”

“Yes.”

I stared at her, almost believed her, and noticed the fascination with which others nearby were trying to hear her low voice.

I thought for a few seconds, weighing what she had said, and then abruptly changed my mind. I sometimes do that in interrogation, plant a small bomb and then defuse it. It's a matter of instinct. I had scared her. Letting her stew for a couple of days might produce more results than going on now, when most of my information was secondhand, or guesswork. Her home was here, with her mother. She'd said she was coming back. And if she didn't, with her looks she sure couldn't get far unnoticed. Might win the Wanted Poster of the Year award and become a collector's item.

“You're definitely coming back Friday?”

She nodded. “That's the next flight in.”

“All right. I'll be ready for you then. And you be ready, too.” She was dabbing at her eyes when I left.

Outside. I watched Sadie as major domo, telling O'Kennedy to be very careful with a bag marked fragile and getting the reply, “Oh!
careful!
So that's what
fragile
means!”

When she boarded and O'Kennedy was about to follow, I stopped him. “Something you said about Maisie,” I began. “A suggestion that she'd be a, um, real asset in fun and games, and I assume this isn't the first time you've run into her. Ever get close?”

“Once, for about five seconds.” I had an idea he didn't often look really rueful, but he did now, shaking his head. “She's a riddle. You take a look at her and think, hey, here's a live one . . . That's what I thought. One night at the hotel when we were on a layover we had the radio going in the dining room after dinner, some people dancing, nothing much else to do, and I danced with her and it was fine until I started to hold her closer and make a pitch and she just froze. In no time at all she's headed for the kitchen. A real surprise to me, I'm tellin' you. I don't generally get brushed off so fast, if at all.” He thought for a few seconds. “I heard about her and Dennis Raakwap being close before what we Irish call ‘unrest' hit Sanirarsipaaq and he got snuffed. He must've had something I didn't.” Another pause. “As you can tell, I've thought about her a lot. Sounds crazy with a looker like her, but the only answer I can come up with is that she's really inexperienced and Dennis knew the way around and didn't push. I mean, in my opinion Maisie just doesn't know how to handle the effect she has on men . . . What a fookin' waste!” He sighed. “Gotta go.”

I wheeled the van back toward town. I'd been thinking about giving mother time for breakfast, tea, a smoke, before calling Franklin House. Back at the detachment I got big Sophie on the phone and then mother, feeling soothed by mother's slow voice saying she was getting better every day, her head didn't hurt so much. I told her Annie was fine, the kids were fine, we had good caribou steak last night. The ordinary family things.

Then, it seemed, Dr. Quinn Butterfield had just dropped in to see her and wanted to talk to me.

All was well, he said, except, “I should mention, we had a call at the hospital last night that was a little strange. The night nurse who took the call said she was pretty sure it was a man, or anyway a person with a low or muffled voice. Wouldn't leave a name. Asked how your mother is and when she'd likely be well enough to be discharged. Hung up when the nurse asked for identification or a number she could call back on.”

The caller could have been anybody, of course. Erika or Maxine would have left their names, and they didn't have low voices. It occurred to me that Maisie did. I called my brother Jopie in Holman.

“Did you phone the hospital about mother last night?”

“No, why?”

I told him about the call. “Might be nothing, just somebody curious, but I'm worried. We all have to remember that she's the only one to see who charged out of that house after the murders. We
all
have to watch what we say about her and her movements from now on. She might be in a lot of danger—”

“How about getting a guard?” Jopie asked.

“We've got one, RCMP, posted at Franklin House. But this call I'm talking about was not to Franklin House but to the hospital, where they'd know more than anybody else about her condition, and when she might be discharged.”

 

Bouvier had been making tea. As he poured for me I was pacing and worried. A man, the nurse
thought
. But couldn't be sure. Voice muffled. I picked up the phone and called RCMP Yellowknife. The corporal on the switchboard put me through to Superintendent Abe Keswick's office. He wasn't in. I was transferred.

“Inspector Sutherland,” a female voice said.

“Matteesie,” I said, and told her what was worrying me: “In fact, she wouldn't know the killer,” I explained, “hasn't a clue, except that he, she, or it knocked her down. Would you put out a memo to that effect, so that our own people won't be talking as if she's important to the case? Abe Keswick arranged a guard at Franklin House to check visitors. Could you get a report? Has anybody been nosing around?”

“Right. You getting anywhere there?”

“Just plugging along, so far.”

“I'll get back to you about Franklin House, but I was going to call you this morning. Two things. Forensics will have a man there either tonight or tomorrow, as soon as he's looked at the bodies.”

I was surprised. “He didn't look at them last night?”

“They were held up in Cambridge by that storm you had, too. They're just on their way here now.”

So much for Barker's goddamn speed at getting the bodies out of here. “You mentioned two things. What's the other?”

“Inuvik picked up a guy drunk and carrying drugs who came in from Sanirarsipaaq Saturday. Don't know any more details yet.”

“Any bloodstains on his money or anywhere else on him?”

“I don't think so or it would have been reported. I'll tell Inuvik to have a good look. If there's any I'll call.”

“Okay. I'm going to put out a memo, copied to everybody in G Division, to search every arrest looking for bloodstained money, and look hard, because attempts might be made to wash it off.”

“Right.”

“Oh, one other thing,” I said. “Will you tell Inuvik there's a woman due in there this morning from here. Maybe a material witness. Named Maisie Johanson. Tall, urn, white, noticeable legs—”

“Why, Matteesie!” she snorted. I got it. Noticing legs is sexist, of course.

“It's just what you'd notice first,” I said firmly. “Anyway, she knew the murdered guy well. I'm going to talk to her Friday.” I figured Inspector Sutherland would be wondering how come I let Maisie go today, so I said, “She lives here, her mother runs the hotel, and she said she'd come back. You gotta believe somebody.”

Bouvier had been listening. I told him the Yellowknife end of the conversation.

“What was the money Dennis had on him, anyway?” I asked. “I mean, what kind of bills?”

“Mostly twenties and tens, it's written down somewhere how much of each, all covered with blood.” Suddenly he grinned. “‘Covered with blood!' When I'm typing the report Steve is looking over my shoulder and I keep using ‘covered with blood' this and ‘covered with blood' that and Steve explodes—” Bouvier did an imitation—“
‘For Christ's sake . . .
everything's
covered with blood! Whaddaya expect with people bleedin' upstairs, downstairs, and in the fuckin' kitchen
.'”

I wanted to stay on the track. “If there's more about the money tell me when we get to it. Go back to the beginning.”

Bouvier opened a file folder and consulted some notes, then left the file open but didn't read from it directly. “Well, back to the night, last Friday when the weekly liquor came in. On booze days we always had one guy on duty right here in the office, usually me.

“Okay, at twelve sixteen a.m. I get a call from a guy who lives out past that row of houses. Byron Anolak. He said he'd been heading home and had found an old lady, didn't know who she was, lying outside one of the houses. I grabbed the camera and jumped in the van and got out there—”

“Grabbed the camera?”

Bouvier looked rather pleased. “Yeah. It's a habit I developed in Spence and a couple of other places. Amazing how many times a photograph stimulates the memory when some guy gets up in court and says he was home sound asleep when whatever he's up for happened . . . . Now, to save time I'll tell you not only what I got right then from Byron, but also what he added later.” The second mention of Byron's name rang the bell. I remembered Erika telling me the
News/North
stringer here, Arctic College journalism grad, was Byron Anolak.

“One door, number three, was open. Byron said he thought the old lady was from there and had just fallen or something, so he started in to number three to see if he could get help and was just a step or two inside when he saw all the blood. He ran home, maybe a hundred yards, and called here and then he went back and hammered on the door to number four on the north side of the place your mother was found. The people there came to the door and said no, she wasn't from their place, she was from number two. Said they'd been watching television and had heard some noises but nothing they thought was serious considering that it was booze night.

“The man there seemed either deaf or confused, but the woman and Byron carried her in to number two, Annie's place. The two kids were playing cards, and Annie was just coming downstairs, the noise had roused her.

“The kids said that your mother, their granny, they called her, had gone next door to check some noises and hadn't come back.”

“What about Annie?” I interrupted. I'd heard this from Annie herself. But sometimes recollections differ in detail.

“She said she'd come home earlier and told the kids to finish the hand they were playing, which they were doing when she went to bed. Must be a good sleeper . . . Anyway, I called Barker from there. He got over fast on his snowmobile. I heard it coming and met him outside. When we started through the door . . .” He actually shuddered.

“Okay, so you're going through the door,” I prompted. He pulled himself together and went on.

“There were no lights on but we could hear a low moaning to our left, that's where the TV is.”

“On or off?”

“Off. We turned the hall light on, pushed the switch up with my flashlight so we wouldn't be lousing up any prints. First we found old Thelma on the couch in the living room. She was still alive then, but seemed unconscious. The moaning was mixed with a sort of bubbling in her throat. Bleeding all over, godawful mess. We tried mouth to mouth but no good. She never did come to. We went up to the bedroom, where we found Dennis's body. As far as we could see he'd been stabbed or kicked to death, or a mixture of the two. Blood all over. . .”

“How long were you in the house that time?”

“Me, five minutes, max. Then we didn't want to disturb anything by using the phone there so Barker sent me to Annie's house to phone and get the nurse to come see your mother. He stayed in the other house because somebody had to . . . and he thought I could talk to your mother in Inuktitut.”

Bouvier shook his head with a sort of sorrowful clucking sound, and let out a long breath.

“On the way there I suddenly thought of what I'd just been doing, the mouth to mouth, the bubbling noise, and threw up all over my god damn boots, which didn't improve things a hell of a lot.” He was in control again, talking with no more emotion than a guy giving the hockey scores. “I cleaned them off in the snow and went in. Your mother was sitting at the kitchen table, very groggy and confused, kept saying she just wanted a cup of tea.” He stopped. “A really game old lady,” he offered, and looked at me. I nodded.

“I did try to talk to her but I don't really talk her dialect, I guess, or she don't talk mine. But the kids and Annie listened to her too and we made out that she didn't remember anything after being knocked down. I asked, ‘Who by?' ‘Don't know,' she said.”

“Exactly that? In English?”

“No,” he said, exasperated. “Would she suddenly start talking English? She said ‘
Mi
.' It's the same in some dialects. Meaning ‘I don't know,' right? I went back to tell Barker. There were people from other houses hanging around by then, packing down the snow so that there was no way we could separate them and compare them with the tracks inside. He told them to go home and nobody try to go in the house or he'd lock them up and throwaway the goddamn key. We asked Byron Anolak to stand guard, he's a responsible guy, and I'd relieve him later. Meanwhile we figured next thing to do, and fast, was check around town and see who was still up.” He thought about that, with a ghost of a smile. “Thought we might get lucky, I guess, find a guy staggering along covered with blood.”

“Did anybody outside the house at that time know what had happened, that people had been murdered?” I was thinking, could the word possibly get around enough that whoever did it could hide his tracks?

He shrugged. “Must've guessed whatever had happened was serious, but nobody spoke up when we asked if they'd heard anything, and if so, what? The people in number four were saying ‘No hear 'em, no see 'em.' Number one is empty. There's a big white woman in number five, gets paid to take in orphans and strays, kids like that. Said she didn't hear a goddamn thing, her exact words, because she'd been asleep until all the uproar got her up.

“That's when we went separately, me in the van and Barker on the snowmobile, to see what we could see. Covered the town. Saw nobody. Of course, whoever done it had plenty of head start. It was no more than eight or ten minutes before we both arrived at the detachment. When I'd hustled out of there after Byron's call, there were still lights on at the rec hall. It's supposed to close at eleven, but on booze nights that rule is relaxed a bit. Helps keep the drunks in one place so if anybody is falling-down drunk at least they won't freeze to death in some snowbank.

“When we got there the superintendent, he's not that old but not that husky, either, not the bouncer type, was just sitting in his chair, watching some guys play pool. Said when he'd tried to close up at twelve thirty some guys who'd been drinking got ugly and said they'd beat the shit out of him. We asked him if anybody had come in with blood on him, or anybody at all after midnight.”

“What did he say?”

“That they were in and out, he couldn't remember specifically. Anyway, finding the rec hall open was a break in a way. Nobody there seemed to know what had happened. Of course, somebody could have been faking that, but they kept asking what the hell were we doing anyway, what right did we have to search them, and take pictures. Barker told them they'd better fuckin' well stand still and answer the questions or he'd get 'em for something, sometime, and they knew he would.”

“So you took the names.”

“Right. Ten of them. Listed right here.” He tapped his folder.

“Blood?”

It was rather a basic question. Bouvier told me that with a look and then went on. “No blood. Several had knives, but most people carry knives. From our list and photos at least we'd know who was there right then and we could check where they'd been earlier, if we had to.”

He paused for a minute and then said, “Barker told me later that one guy there, Thrasher, the one you saw in the airport wearing the hard hat, woulda been a sure suspect, crazy bastard sometimes, except we wind up giving him a goddamn alibi by listing him as being at the rec hall, a little stoned, but clean. I mean, his clothes were clean.”

Bouvier rubbed one hand over his big face, then took off his spectacles and wiped the lenses with Kleenex.

“Seems this Thrasher once did a little time for beating up a girl after she'd brought a rape charge against him, but before it got to court. Don't really know the details. Anyway, the fact that the superintendent at the rec hall couldn't say for sure when anybody had come in meant we couldn't narrow that part down at all. If he was going to remember anybody arriving you'd think it would be Hard Hat, most noticeable.”

“Unless Hard Hat wasn't wearing his hat.”

“But he was. I've got him in some of the pictures.”

I thought about it. Of course, he could have come in not wearing the hat, put it on after he got there. Also, the murderer could have run somewhere, maybe even home, ditched one set of clothes, put on others, then mingled with the crowd at the rec hall.

“We asked each guy separately how long he'd been in the rec hall. Thrasher said he'd been watching the hockey playoff on television until it was over, and then he decided to go to the rec hall. Two guys backed him up on when he arrived. Others named other places they'd been. When we checked, all those stories stood up.”

“Did you check alibis together or what?”

“We took five each. We've got a list of them, with notes. I took the first five and Barker took the rest.”

I thought it over. It sounded like everything possible had been done according to the book, the name-taking, checks on where guys had been if they weren't at the rec hall all evening. The photos were an extra.

“How long before you get back prints of the pictures you took?”

“Should be on the Friday plane. I got that Irishman to take them with him and give them to a guy I know at Inuvik who works for
News/North
. I phoned him this morning and he said he'll print 'em fast, and give blowups to O' whatsisname to bring back.”

I was respecting Bouvier more and more.

“I take it they're group shots.”

Bouvier shot a sharp glance at me. “Yeah.” Then sardonically: “Of course, if I'd known you wanted portrait-type stuff . . .”

I got up and wandered around the room. It was only eleven, and I'd had a big breakfast, but already I was thinking about lunch. Time changes sometimes do that to me. It was past lunch time in Ottawa.

I turned back to Bouvier. “When I was talking to Judge Charlie Litterick on the court flight to Cambridge he told me about a case a few years ago when he'd sent up a guy for four years for raping his sister. Davidee AyuJaq. Do you know who he'd hung out with around here, I mean other guys big in the violence line, including rape?”