Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery

by Scott Young

  He was slightly built and youngish, maybe thirty or a little more, with a lot of curly hair. In the old days when I was a special constable here I knew everybody, just about. The sergeant would say, “Go down and meet the plane, Matteesie.” No further instructions were necessary. When the plane came I would be standing there in the old airport building, a frame job about as big as a small bungalow, knowing everyone who got on and off, who met whom and who brought whom to the airport. I would go back and report. In writing, if the sergeant said so. You never know when a little information might be useful. Sometimes my reports would be useful. Then, or later. Or never.

  While I was thinking all this, a phone rang somewhere in the terminal. I could hear it faintly from back in one of the offices. Long ago in the old terminal a ground agent would have looked around to see if I was there and then yelled, “Hey, Matteesie! Phone!” But that was before the new terminal was built, with a desk for Canadian Airlines International, the major carrier, and all the smaller outfits. What happened now was a disembodied voice saying, “Attention, please. Will Matthew Kitologitak please pick up the white phone?”

  Curious eyes turned my way as I walked a few feet to the phone, thinking maybe it was Maxine.

  “Yes?”

  “Buster wants you, Matty. Just a minute.”

  The voice belonged to the only person I knew who regularly called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police commissioner “Buster,” that is, Buster’s secretary, who herself is known around Ottawa headquarters as Old Ironsides.

  Next voice was the commissioner’s: “Matty. I need a favor.”

  I could imagine Buster at the other end of the line. He’d played football in college and still was all muscle, still had lots of hair, going grey, still had a fullback’s shoulders and a jawline like a ten-pound iron mallet. He had served just about every place there was to serve, from Regina in Saskatchewan to Bonn in Germany to Yellowknife, NWT. I liked him mainly because he had never snowed me or in any way talked down to me, which your average Native in a country mainly full of white people is bound to find refreshing.

  But a favor he wanted? Be careful, Matteesie, I told myself. Two years ago, give or take a month, he could have ordered me, but now there were other considerations. I was on loan to Northern Affairs, nominally out of his direct control. It had been a battle when the Northern Affairs deputy minister came after me on the grounds that what I knew about the North plus the university courses the RCMP had sent me on were too valuable to the country to be limited solely to police work. At the time Buster, fairly new as commissioner then, had given in with a few words that I remembered now standing at the phone in the Inuvik airport: “Okay, Matteesie,” he’d said two years ago, “go ahead, you’ll do that outfit good . . . but I might have to call on you once in a while.”

  So since then instead of police work I’d been going to conferences where I was usually identified in the program as an Inuk, or sometimes by the more specifically Western Arctic designation Inuvialuit, but often was introduced by white guys who either called me an Eskimo, or started to do that and then wound up with something like, “urn, Matthew, um, Kitologitak, an Esk . . . um, In-you-it,” almost invariably using the plural Inuit rather than the singular Inuk. The farther they lived from the Arctic the longer they took to get used to changes in terminology that had come with the Native rights programmes. Now Northern Affairs had me scheduled for something that really excited me—I was to represent the department in a meeting of northern countries at the Arctic Institute in Leningrad, so any favor done for Buster would have to be a short one.

  “It’s about those people missing south of Fort Norman,” he said. “I’m told you don’t have to leave for that Arctic Institute thing for a week. Could you poke around for me?”

  I thought hard. “Poking around” meant police work. He knew better than I did that in other parts of the world, England and West Germany for two, the Mounties had anti-foreign-agent units that sometimes caused trouble for Soviet agents, to say nothing of vice versa. Mounties and the KGB might think alike on some matters but even after glasnost, they just weren’t brothers in arms, united in maintaining law and order in a friendly way throughout the world, and that’s all there was to it. If this “poking around” was something that brought much publicity, it might blow Leningrad for me. He knew that. But I was the one who had to bring it up: “I’ve got to keep in mind that it was sort of a victory that even a former Mountie was considered okay to sit in with their Arctic people. I’d hate to screw that up.”

  He just waited silently. He could spook some people with this technique of putting something on the table and just waiting, letting the proposal speak for itself. His long silence now showed he knew he was asking a heavy favor. But I was remembering that he had not referred to an “aircraft” being missing, but “people.” Someone on the plane must mean something to him or to people who could put the arm on him. Because his concern was in the North, he was calling on me. I felt momentarily rebellious. He always thought I was a mighty shaman, or something, and could solve anything in the Territories just by mashing up some ice-worms with the hambone of a polar bear and reading them like goddamned tea leaves.

  Usually, though, I was called in on murders. In which case, of course, I understood most crimes in the North better than would be the case with some white guy from Kingston, Ontario. For instance, I understood better why Native people sometimes did kill one another—one, to effect a change of home address for some female who was alluring to both killer and killee; or in the case of some still-nomadic Inuit it might be that some old and weak person who was a burden to the others and knew it, decided it was time to die and somebody thought the traditional way of letting such persons walk out into the tundra or onto the ice and freeze or starve to death somehow wasn’t as nice as a bullet in the temple; or whatever.

  If that kind of thing happened and was ignored, we, the Mounties, felt that it would cast a smirch on our reputation for always getting our man. The resultant cases usually were just exotic enough, being far away and involving no advertisers or their heirs or assigns, to make big headlines in papers that routinely covered your ordinary everyday city parking-garage murder in one paragraph under a roundup of other local briefs. In other words, in the world of northern crime I had become sort of a celebrity.

  It got so I’d be working in RCMP headquarters in Ottawa, writing papers, making speeches, fending off women who thought I was so cute with my round brown face and slanty eyes and all, and something would happen at Grise Fjord or Gjoa Haven or Paulatuk and Buster would be on the line telling me to go at once, if not sooner. But that had been before Northern Affairs got me.

  Taking everything into consideration, as the silence lengthened I thought, well, it isn’t as if I’m in a big rush to get home to Ottawa.

  “Can you give me any more on what I’m supposed to poke around about?” I asked.

  “Yeah. To start with, the pilot, Harold Johns, is the son of the finance minister. Now, I don’t owe the finance minister anything, but he called me because he thought I might have heard more than the media had. But I do know that the passengers might be guys we want, that we’d been watching there, or had been supposed to be watching. A bust was imminent. We have no intimation that the pilot had been involved, but that’s not impossible either.”

  I could see through the big window that the flight from the south, a 737 with the big identifying CANADIAN on the side, was taxiing to a halt in front. Soon it would be unloading and then ready for us to board and head south with stops at Norman Wells and Yellowknife before Edmonton. Norman Wells was maybe fifty miles north of Fort Norman, where the lost aircraft last was heard.

  I asked, “Would you have someone phone Lois and tell her I’m going to be delayed a few days?”

  So I was giving in, actually at the same time that I was rerunning my parting from Lois a few days ago in my head. Her main lines were, “What don’t yo
u stay home once in a while? Chicago, Holman, Leningrad . . . and I thought police work was bad!”

  “It’s my job, Lois.”

  “Listen to God! What about me?” Then tears.

  I could see her point. It was a lousy life for a woman. Lois and I were married in Edmonton. I don’t always want to remember why, but I have to; it was due to some kind of mild conviction (which soon disappeared without a trace, if you don’t count Lois as a trace) that marriage was important to be accepted in a white world. Five years with the police in Tuk and Inuvik on the mainland and a couple more at Sachs Harbor on Banks Island apparently had produced enough favorable reports from my superiors that I was targeted when some bozo high up at headquarters in Ottawa mused, perhaps aloud, “Before the human rights and equal opportunity people get at us, we better find some Natives good enough to take full police training.”

  Until then I’d been what is known as a “special.” At the time that was really only police pidgin for an Eskimo, Indian or halfbreed who’d help around a detachment, translating, interpreting, cooking, catching fish or shooting caribou for dog food, or whatever, without getting in the way of anyone more upwardly mobile. The term still is police pidgin for Inuit (used to be Eskimos) or Dene (used to be Indians) or Metis (used to be halfbreeds) filling that role. In fact, many of the good Native specials, given the opportunity, decide not to play the mainstream game, preferring life the way they live it, among their own people.

  Anyway, when I met Lois in Edmonton I was a constable, no longer a special, working “south” for the first time and trying to fight culture shock. None of my own people were around to impress on me that a beautiful and lissom fair-haired girl who didn’t know muktuk from mukluks was one thing, and that her ardor might not last once the novelty wore off. But the God-given Eskimo advantage of being able to walk away from a troublesome woman, any time, was another thing entirely—to be valued more than gold, or mighty herds of musk-ox or stacks of polar bear skins. My father or uncles or one of my grandfathers might have thought to give this advice but they were 2,000 miles north at the critical time and anyway thought I must be pretty smart or I wouldn’t already be such a distinguished policee. The end result over the years had been a disappointed and bickering wife from whom some day I might walk away.

  Also, I admit it, if someone asked me in the middle of some stupefyingly boring conference, I might admit that I did occasionally miss police work.

  “Sure thing!” Buster said. “Glad to phone Lois for you!”

  I said, “Flight goes out in a few minutes. I’ll get off at Norman Wells and call you from there.” There was a police detachment under a corporal at Norman Wells. Presumably by the time I got there Buster might be able to tell me more.

  “Good man!”

  I put down the phone and went back into the growing crowd outside. A “bust” pretty well had to be a drug bust. The word was hardly ever used any other way. I noticed the guy with the curly hair again. When I was on the phone he’d been glancing at me and then away, glancing and then away. This continued while he used a pay phone. I could tell by the number of coins he used that at least one call was long distance.

  Finally he came over. “I’m sorry to stare, but I heard you called to the phone. I used to see you here a long time ago. Are you still with the Mounties?”

  “Do I know you?”

  “Not really. Jules Bonner.” He shot me a sharp glance.

  Right away I remembered. Late 1960s. Joe Bonner, his father, a drunken assistant in the administration here, had taken to screwing every Native stenographer or clerk he could lay his hands on. In at least one case, he’d promised career advancement in return for sex. But had done so to the wrong person—Maxine. Enter the cops, including me. That’s when Maxine and I met. Jules Bonner couldn’t have been more than twelve or fourteen then.

  “Where’s your father now?” I asked.

  Bonner shrugged. “Dead.”

  At that moment the flight was called. Bonner stayed with me while I hoisted up my all-purpose traveling bag, big and black and heavy. I hate waiting for checked luggage, so I don’t check any. I didn’t think about it much, but my impression was that Bonner was on the same flight. Then an old Loucheux woman I knew spoke to me. She was with a well-dressed younger man whom I recognized from photos—he was her son, a lawyer connected with land claims negotiations. That was a reminder of how deeply buried in history were this Bonner’s father and guys like him. They went back to the days when taking advantage of Natives was a way of life. Not any more. If any of those old fur traders came this way for the first time now with their glass beads and mirrors, they’d wind up picked clean, walking back to Montreal. We Natives had negotiators who were doing it year after year while the government people, especially the politicians, were here today and gone tomorrow with always some new guy trying to learn the ropes.

  When I turned away from the old Loucheux and her son and shuffled into the line of people handing in their boarding passes, I noticed that Jules Bonner wasn’t on the flight after all. He was standing outside of the security area, again holding a telephone but not using it while he watched us board. That puzzled me briefly—there weren’t any more flights out today—then he went out of my mind.

  We straggled in twos and threes across the snowswept tarmac. Boarding was through the rear of the aircraft. Inside as we slowly climbed the steps a tiny stewardess with long dark-brown hair was repeating to each passenger, “please keep clear the first three rows of seats you come to.” This instruction was hardly necessary for the seats on the right side of the aisle. All nine—three abreast for three rows—had been folded down to form a fairly-flat platform. The three rows on the left side of the aisle were being kept clear for no obvious reason. I took the aisle seat on the fourth row just ahead of and across the aisle to the left of the turned-down seats. It wasn’t what I’d got in seat selection but on a half-full flight that wouldn’t matter much. I was just curious.

  When all passengers were aboard there was a delay. Then, glancing from the window, I saw an ambulance rolling slowly around the nose of the aircraft toward the entry steps. Others were craning to look from windows on that side. The rear gate of the ambulance opened. Two attendants stood beside the vehicle’s power platform as it slid out bearing a heavily wrapped stretcher.

  The next hour or so I was to re-examine agonizingly in the next few days, weeks. But at the beginning there was nothing unusual. In the North many a normal commercial flight became a mercy flight of some kind. A doctor at Tuk or Sachs Harbor or Holman might judge that a patient urgently needed specialist treatment available only in Yellowknife or Edmonton. Hospitals were more suited to desperate human needs the farther one went south.

  I stood up to watch. One of the pilots had come back from the flight deck. He stood near me. Others in forward seats wandered back to look but kept out of the way. The ambulance men, one backing up, negotiated the steps and laid the stretcher, a long tapered shallow aluminum basket, lengthwise on the sort of platform formed by the folded-down rows of seats. I couldn’t see much of the man on the stretcher but what I could see was enough. Part of his face showed, his nose, forehead, and a good deal of white hair; his eyes were closed. Morton Cavendish. I felt a deep pang of sadness to see him so helpless, the man who had helped so many in the North. Including me. He was lying on his right side, his cheek on a pillow, his legs seeming to be slightly bent at the knees. A plump, dark-haired nurse put a heavy satchel on one of the empty seats across the aisle from the stretcher. A tall young ground agent edged past her, glancing at the stretcher’s burden.

  “Okay,” he said to the ambulance men, dismissing them, then spoke to the stewardess with the long dark-brown hair.

  “Seat-belt extensions?”

  She nodded, her eyes briefly intent on his. From an overhead compartment she handed him several strips of sturdy webbing eight or nine feet long. At each end the webbing h
ad two straps, one bearing a seat-belt fastener and the other a socket.

  “That enough?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  He laid one extension diagonally lengthwise from left to right across the blankets covering the stretcher, another in a criss-cross from right to left. He fastened all four ends to the regular seat-belt receptacles, tightened all straps, then laid another strap across the middle of the stretcher around the hips, fastened it at both ends, pulled it snug, and stood back.

  “That should be okay,” he said.

  The stewardess gently tested the stretcher for play, found little, and nodded.

  “See you,” he said to her over his shoulder as he turned quickly to the exit.

  The plane took off. I sat back thinking about the phone call from Ottawa and wondering who was on the missing aircraft, whether I knew any of them. When the seat-belt sign went off I got up and sat on a chair arm to have a good look at Morton Cavendish. If he was sometimes conscious, this wasn’t one of the times. He was motionless except for the rise and fall of the blanket as he breathed. His breathing was regular but seemed somehow faulty. With each intaken breath his blanket would rise slowly an inch or so, then drop like a stone as he exhaled. He never changed position in the slightest, except for his breathing. The hefty nurse reached across the aisle, removed soggy face tissues from beside his mouth and moved in some dry ones.

  I didn’t want to distract the nurse but when the dark-haired stewardess wheeled up with the drinks cart I jerked my head at the unconscious man. “Where’s Morton going?”

  “Edmonton.”

  I thought of the tragedy of it, a man who seemed in his prime, late fifties, on the verge of seeing huge improvements in the lot of his people, improvements that he had helped to bring about. Father of the drinking man I’d met at Maxine’s two nights ago. I’d liked him the many times I met him, cheerful and human, waving off thanks, disarming his opponents simply by being honest and consistent even when negotiations were at their toughest. He’d always been respected, more than ever now when victories had been won and others were in sight.