Murder in a Cold Climate: An Inspector Matteesie Mystery

by Scott Young

  She paused a few seconds and continued somewhat tremulously, “Ever since, I’ve been thinking about us, and about all the bitching I do when you’re home.” Another pause, a tremulous laugh, “And sometimes when you’re not.”

  I simply didn’t know what to say, but I had to get something out. “Well, we can talk about that when I get home.”

  “I’ll try to be better. Be careful. Come back to me.”

  I hung up and thought of how Lois and I used to be. Couldn’t get enough of each other. For years now the opposite had been true. We could get enough of each other, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Yet marriage persisted. It’s a conundrum many face, men and women, and I didn’t have any more answers than I ever have.

  Then Charlie Paterson was hammering on the phone-cubicle door and saying, “For God’s sake, time’s a-wastin’!”

  I pulled myself together and pushed open the door. He didn’t use up time asking questions, commiserating about the Northern Affairs thing, making fatuous remarks about life is like that, and so on. What he did was fill me in, which is what I needed to jolt myself back to what had become once again my real world.

  As I knew, yesterday there’d been no air search for either the murderer or the lost aircraft. “Weather today’ll make it two in a row. Still no radio signals. Also, no murderer.” He’d organized six local volunteers for a snowmobile search that had covered a fair amount of territory and found nothing significant. “But there is something. Maybe plenty. I’ll tell you about it while I’m showing you what there is to see. Get your clothes on and I’ll pick you up in the parking lot near the front door.”

  In Inuvik the day before I’d gone straight from RCMP headquarters to the airport in the same German guy’s taxi. Travel in the North depends a lot on either planning well in advance, or getting lucky. I got lucky. An Esso Resources Citation, cruising speed 400 miles an hour, equipped to carry eight or ten passengers, flew north from Calgary three mornings a week and back in the evening. Usually the plane laid over for the day in Norman Wells. But as I walked into the Inuvik terminal an Esso flight was being called.

  At the moment I could see only one guy, youngish, heading for the door leading to the tarmac. I called, “Pardon me!” (not an old Inuit saying, but one year the Mounties had sent me on a course to Princeton, you know). He stopped. Yes, he was with Esso. He could have modelled for one of today’s keen young oil execs in a Petroleum Council of Canada commercial. Bright-eyed, clean-shaven, short hair. Also courteous, as oil company people long ago conceded is good policy in the North, especially when talking to anyone with dark skin, some with eyes set at a slight angle.

  “I’m with Northern Affairs,” I said, producing a card that testified to that side of my identity. “I have a watching brief for the department on the air search for the aircraft that’s missing and urgently need to get to Norman Wells. I wonder if . . .”

  Watching brief. Maybe I’d been in Ottawa too long.

  “Matthew Kitologitak.” he read from my card, and then smiled at me. “Not with the police any more?”

  I’d hate to be trying to travel incognito with some carnally intensive blonde in this part of the country.

  “Anyway, the answer is yes, we can take you,” he said. “Glad to.” He stuck out his hand. “I’m Milt Lawton.”

  Turned out that he’d been the sale reason for Esso’s flight extension to Inuvik today, here for a meeting with some administrators and elected officials from a group of northern communities. He was an adviser in the company’s public affairs department. Keeping up with the times was his business.

  The pilot, grey-haired, tall, fit-looking, was standing a few feet away. We were introduced. He looked at me, appraising, and nodded. Then the three of us tucked our heads into our shoulders and leaned against the bitter wind and ground drift snow walking out to the aircraft.

  This Milt Lawton had a very good grasp of how to conduct public affairs. With me, at least. I was tired and thirsty. We were scarcely airborne before he reached behind a seat and opened what looked like a cupboard door, muttering, “Wonder what we got here. . .”

  What they had included my favorite rum, Mount Gay. He chose vodka. We poured good ones, which seemed to get the talk going. His university degree was in geography. He wanted to know what I did normally at Northern Affairs. I thought it wise to mention vaguely the Arctic Institute in Leningrad as one of my concerns. A lot of people I run into, immediately on hearing that sometimes I deal with Soviet concerns in the Arctic, tell me what some junior hockey player just back thinks of the food and accommodation. Somebody should tell those kids that not all the world’s cultures are based on that of Swift Current, Saskatchewan. But this guy, even though it turned out he had played hockey, said, “I envy you. Never been there.”

  He went on to say that he was just back from two years working in Saudi Arabia. I’m always learning things about the world that I had never suspected and this was one: in common with some other oil people assigned to Saudi, where restrictions on normal Western lifestyles can be rather severe, he and his wife had lived in Cairo during his Saudi stint.

  “It was just easier for her there,” he said, without elaborating. He’d flown to her there on weekends.

  He mentioned the Morton Cavendish murder, saying earnestly the truth, that it represented a great loss to the North. He’d known Cavendish and went on to talk about him with affection. I recognized that this was no patronizing knee-jerk reaction, being pretty fine-tuned to that brand of white talk.

  He didn’t know I’d been there when it happened. I didn’t tell him. There are advantages to being where the media is either no factor at all in daily lives, or has none of the unavoidably pervasive impact it has in big cities. We had our drinks and the hour passed quickly. When we were coming in to land I looked from the window nearest me. Lights along the Mackenzie at Norman Wells came closer and closer, twinkling like a mighty daisy chain against the snow-covered ice that ringed the drilling islands. The river bends west slightly here while keeping its general south-to-north course. The bright burn-off flare from the main Esso site marked the northwestern limits of the community’s seemingly careless space-eating sprawl. Dimmer lights from homes and cars and various business installations stretched for what seemed like miles, and probably was. As we touched down and rolled toward the terminal and stopped near where Cavendish had been murdered, Lawton said that his wife would envy him meeting Matthew Kitologitak. Imagine that. The world is a funny place.

  He wasn’t getting off. “Gotta keep my seat by the bar,” he grinned. “Where’re you staying tonight?”

  I said probably in a cot at the RCMP detachment.

  “I think we can do better than that, if you want,” he said, glancing the question at me. I guess my expression said yes. He wrote briefly on a notebook page, which he tore off and handed to me. “Tell the cab to take you to Mackenzie House and hand this to the guy in the office by the door. They usually have some spare rooms.”

  I had done as he instructed and was delivered by taxi, actually a nine-seater van, to a largish two-storey building near the centre of town. From the outside it was unexceptional; looking not unlike a spartan kind of hotel, which in a sense it was—living quarters mainly for Esso people coming to Norman Wells temporarily.

  But it was spartan with a lot of differences. To the left of the main entrance a grey-haired man in a stylish cardigan sat at a desk with today’s Edmonton Journal spread out in front of him. He read Lawton’s note, signed me in, gave me a meal card and room key, told me that breakfast was served from seven to ten, and pointed toward a nearby room where he said I could find coffee and snacks twenty-four hours a day.

  I carried my bag along a corridor past a bank of pay phones, then past a big lounge where some guys were playing pool on full-size tables and others in easy chairs were watching a hockey game on television. Another lounge room that I passed, empty, had an assort
ment of newspapers and magazines spread out on a table, plus, thoughtfully, an alternative TV set. Not everyone in Canada is addicted to hockey. I continued through a door, up some stairs, along to the end of the corridor and put my key in a door.

  The room was narrow, utilitarian, industrial transit-house gothic. It was complete with one bed, three well-thumbed paperbacks, a well-worn pair of Greb boots a previous incumbent had left in a closet, a shower stall, towels, soap and a sign giving the rules of the house—which informed me that drinking alcoholic beverages in Mackenzie House was okay, but to keep the noise down because people on different shifts might be sleeping.

  Accordingly, I was quiet. Decided not even to go get some ice in case it would clink too loud. I hadn’t realized until I had that drink on the plane that I was very tired. I took the Glenfiddich from my bag, poured a stiff one, added a little water, very little, and stood by the window looking out at a large open space of snow and not much else. The clump-like tracks of rabbits. The straight-line pussyfooting of a fox. I hadn’t eaten but as I stood there and sipped the drink I didn’t feel like going out again to find anything.

  No food, and a second drink, might have been responsible for my uneasy night. I’d had nights like that before when I was on a case. I hadn’t really been on a case for a long time, but as I drifted in and out of sleep I was out in the bush with three other men in a blizzard. We had made a shelter against the wreck of an aircraft. It was damn cold. The other three were arguing but I couldn’t hear what about. Even while still half-asleep I was thinking this certainly wasn’t the kind of thing I needed to consult Dr. Freud about: I was hunting for three guys in a crashed aircraft, what else would I dream about? If I’d dreamed that I’d just scored seven straight goals to give the Montreal Canadiens a 9–8 win over the Edmonton Oilers, that would have required professional interpretation. After all, I’m a Toronto Maple Leafs fan.

  I awoke to sounds of doors closing and boots clumping. I showered, dressed and, very hungry, found the dining room simply by following the crowd. While I moved my tray along the food-laden hot tables of bacon, sausages, ham, scrambled eggs (and a guy who’d cook eggs any other way you ordered), breaded fish, English muffins, hot cakes, French toast, hash browns and French fries, I ate a smoked sausage with my fingers. Then I was among the Danishes, muffins, every known packaged cereal, juices the same, coffee, cream, milk, hot water, tea (loose as well as bags).

  I took my loaded tray to an empty table by a window and as I ate, watched as men moved along the line. They’d serve themselves grandly, meagerly, or in between, then look around for company and carry the tray to this table or that. Some glanced at me but none came to mine.

  There weren’t many Dene or Metis that I saw, but that didn’t mean much; Norman Wells was about eighty percent white, I knew from someplace. Not like Fort Norman fifty miles south, which was almost all Dene and Metis. Maxine had said once, “In Fort Norman we got about two hundred and fifty people. No goddam”—smilingly—“Inuit at all, maybe twenty white people at the most.”

  Some of the men, after eating, filled paper bags with fruit, doughnuts, muffins, cartons of fruit juice and milk. These must have been for between meals, because on a table at the end of the food line other well-filled bags were labeled with names, obviously pre-ordered lunches. I thought that if I was ever out of a job and hungry I would try to get on with Esso Resources at Norman Wells.

  Finally so full of food that I could think about murder again, I’d made my phone calls and then Corporal Charlie Paterson was hammering the phone booth door. I went back to my room and zipped up my down vest, pulled on my parka, placed my fur hat squarely on my head with the ear flaps hanging loose. It was still a couple of hours before daylight. Outside, Charlie was waiting. I climbed into the van beside him.

  “How about something to eat?” he grinned.

  Ridiculous idea. He must have known.

  As we pulled out of the parking lot the headlights of a line of school buses came the other way. I hadn’t noticed the Territorial school across the street the night before, just seeing another dark building. But you couldn’t miss it now, with all the life, bundled-up kids yelling and horsing around, kids leaping down from the buses to mingle with those who probably lived close and therefore were arriving on foot.

  Charlie honked his horn and wound down his window to call, “Hi, there!” to a boy who looked about twelve.

  “My kid,” he explained. “Good kid. Takes after his old man.”

  “I don’t have any kids,” I said. “Yeah, you told me.”

  I hadn’t told him, but that didn’t matter. Early in marriage I had cared, but got over it.

  Snow mixed with sleet was rattling against the van’s roof in gusts. “Great goddamn search weather,” Charlie said. As we reached the town’s main street he turned right for a few yards and then left into the closest thing Norman Wells has to a commercial plaza. The parking area was a square of hardpacked snow and ice. Several cars and pickups and snow machines sat with vapor rising from the running engines. The lot was flanked on three sides by buildings set in the form of an open U; coffee shop, Bay store (tradition ally groceries and everything else from parkas to felt boot liners), Northwest Territories office, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, Norman Wells Inn and others whose signs I couldn’t read in the dark.

  “What are we looking for?” I asked.

  “Just showing you the lay of the land. A guy fitting the general description of your buddy the murderer was here the day of the shooting, so he could be the guy the ground agent told us about who came in on the northbound flight. He started out with coffee and something to eat over at”—jerking his head in that direction—“the Norman Wells Inn. Sat by himself After a while, not long, the waitresses say, maybe thirty minutes, he went over to the pay phone, which rang a couple of minutes later and he answered it.”

  “Waiting for a call at a specific time, right?”

  The corporal looked at me. “Don’t know what I’d do without your Native intuition,” he said.

  “I’m famous for it.”

  “So I’ve been hearing—anyway, after the call he left. Nobody could say what he left in, as far as I could check. Or which way he went. But what seems to have been the same man arrived maybe fifteen minutes later at the Mackenzie Valley Hotel, which sort of sits by itself farther south along on the road you take to the airport. He had a double Scotch, then more coffee. After a while, same thing with the phone, he took a call on the pay phone there, again as if he’d been waiting for it. It was only a short call, the guy on the desk happened to notice.”

  That might have been about the time Jules Bonner in Inuvik made what I’d thought must be a long distance call, from the number of coins he used.

  “After that call,” the corporal went on, “he left. The desk clerk, a lazy bugger, did stroll to the window and notice that the guy was driving a Skidoo Elan. That’s the model you thought it was, remember? Lots of pep. The clerk noticed because he’s got one the same.”

  I asked, “If it’s our guy and he’s not from here, where would he get the snowmobile?”

  “Rented, for Chrissake,” the corporal said with what sounded like a tone of disgust, but not with me. “Somebody early in the day phoned the dealer here saying he was from Esso and wanted to rent a snowmobile that afternoon. The dealer thought it was a local call but probably it wasn’t. The guy showed up just a little while after the plane from the south came in, gave a name, no doubt phony, Esso tells me they have no record of a John Williams, paid a one-hundred dollar deposit, seventy dollars to be returned when he brought the machine back, and took off.”

  “And never brought the machine back,” I said.

  “You got it. Oh, yeah, and the dealer tells me it has a five-gallon fuel tank, meaning more range than the three-gallon jobs. Anyway, seems like it’s the same guy we traced until he left the Mackenzie Valley Hotel with the clerk
watching. He said the guy turned right as if he was going back into town but a few minutes later an Elan went by in the other direction and he could’ve sworn it was the same guy. That time he definitely drove out of town.”

  “Where does that road go?”

  “If he went a bit and turned left, which we gotta figure he didn’t, it goes to the airport. If he keeps on going, it’s called the D.O.T. road. I’m going to show you.”

  He circled the van to get back on the main road and turned left. A few minutes later he slowed at a driveway where a sign read MACKENZIE VALLEY HOTEL, a building whose lights we could hardly see through the snow and dark of a little after nine a.m. Then we drove on until we saw a sign pointing left, reading airport. He drove past that without turning and continued a bit until we came to another intersection. To our right a road sloped gently downhill toward the river. We turned left, away from the river.

  “Now this road,” he said as we were driving along it a couple of minutes later, “can you figure out where we are right now?”

  Best I could do was guess, but I did know the airport runway would take 737s, which meant it had to be close to 6,000 feet long.

  “We must be on the edge of the airport, maybe close to the end of the runway.”

  The van, just crawling along, stopped.

  “Right. Now, if the guy on the snowmobile kept on going this way he coulda been heading for Nahanni Air’s float base, but there’s nobody around there in winter. Past Nahanni Air this road goes to the stone quarry where the oil company’s contractors get the stone to make the artificial islands they drill from. But nobody in his right mind goes up to the quarry just for fun. In winter, anyway. Which means there’s no reason for a guy on a snowmobile to go up this road by himself.”

  “I have a feeling you’re going to say, ‘However . . .’” I said.

  “Smart bastard. However, if he came this far, right where we’re stopped now, and turned left off the road he could go through that bit of bush”—we both looked that way but couldn’t see much except blowing snow—“he’d come out on the airport with the fence no problem because his end run had taken him around it. Then he could cruise along without lights to get so close that when the flight came in, all he had to do was move up a little, wait for the steps to come down and the people come out, then run over and do it.”