The Shaman's Knife (10 page)

Bouvier looked thoughtful. “When I was going through the back files, there's a transcript of the Davidee case somewhere . . .” He pulled open a door and took out a folder. “Yeah.” He glanced at what was obviously a transcript, but went on to other papers. “Here's some of Barker's stuff at the time. Davidee was apparently big with the women, no names mentioned, but the guys he hung out with were, let's see, Donald Thrasher, that's Hard Hat, uh, Tommy Kungalik, and here's a surprise, Byron Anolak! Byron isn't that class of guy at all, not now, anyway. In fact, his girlfriend then and now is Debbie, the sister Davidee was convicted of raping.”

He looked up. “I didn't know this stuff! Byron is the father of the little girl called Julie you might see around here, she's nearly two now, real cute, her mom is Debbie, who really looks after her . . .” He laughed. “If you see a little toddler in a squirrelskin parka with pink sunglasses with the frames made heart-shaped, you know, like valentines? That's Julie.”

“Where do they live?”

Bouvier walked to a window, not the south one that faced the rec hall but a smaller one facing north. When he pointed, I could see a row of three houses straggling up a small rise.

“The one farthest from us of those three is his family's house, the new one they got after Debbie burned the other one. The judge tell you that story?”

“Yeah.” I looked up the snowy, icy hill. Two of the houses were the kind you see more often than any other in the north, the 512s. From here, these were indistinguishable from one another. Davidee's family's house was one of the newer models, bigger, with a peaked roof. A woman was out at the side scraping a sealskin. A man who looked a lot older was standing by, watching her and smoking a pipe.

I turned away from the window, back to the present. “Okay, the money found on Dennis's body,” I said. “Where does it fit in and how much was involved? What I was told from Ottawa was sort of confused.”

“He'd just picked up his weekly pay that night, according to Margaret Johanson at the hotel, two hundred bucks, mostly in twenties and tens. But something else we haven't been able to get a handle on yet could be important. When we were doing the check at the rec hall before anybody there knew that Dennis was dead, I asked if Dennis had been in earlier.

“One of the guys said yes, maybe around ten o'clock, and he was sure because Dennis had loaned this guy fifty a week before, and that night had collected the fifty, a fifty-dollar bill, and ten dollars' interest. Anyway, when we moved the bodies into the freezer on Saturday we found this roll of close to four hundred, mostly twenties, most stuck together, but there was no fifty.”

Of course, that could have gone in another transaction. Or whoever killed Dennis, maybe panicking, had grabbed some money but not all. What about the loan-sharking, though? If Dennis had been doing it on that cottage-industry level it wouldn't likely cause a murder. But maybe somebody could have been into him for a lot more. Maybe someone who had been in the rec hall for Bouvier's photo opportunity.

I said, “Okay, let's have the list of the guys in the rec hall. With your comments.”

He looked a little doubtful. “Trouble is, two months here, I don't know a hell of a lot about some of them. But Barker did keep a file of guys who'd either been under suspicion or actually charged in the last few years. I'll get it out. At least he kept it in alphabetical order.” He hunted, took out a folder, opened it, and nodded.

We worked at it for half an hour. I wrote down names and comments. Bouvier said he'd type it out later. It took up only two sheets of paper, the comments identified according to what Bouvier knew plus what Barker had on file.

1. Byron Anolak: Bouvier; Seems like a clean guy, has a bad limp from a birth injury, works part-time at the Co-op, did journalism at Arctic College and gets a little work stringing as a local correspondent with
News/North
. Seems a good father to Debbie's little girl, but lives with his own family so far. He and Debbie have applied to Sanirarsipaaq Housing to rent the empty house, number 1, next to Annie's. If either of them had some kind of government job they'd probably get it. Or poor old Thelma's house when it gets cleaned up.

2. Noah Akpaliapik: Barker; Works summers for Northern Transportation, an engine-room oiler. Once charged with drunk-driving a snowmobile, hitting a house. Sentence suspended.

3. Andy Arqviq: He's only fifteen or sixteen, Bouvier thinks, school dropout, hangs around the rec hall and Co-op a lot, runs errands, has a room with the fat white woman at number 5 in the row of houses where the murder took place. Does some crude carving and hangs around Jonassie Oquataq's house a lot watching Jonassie work at stone carvings. Barker file: “Juvenile delinquent.” Bouvier: “Not a bad kid in the circumstances. Our version of a city street kid.”

4. Ambrose Aviugana: Barker: Used to hang out a lot with Davidee Ayulaq, Donald Thrasher, and Tommy Kungalik, sometimes in trouble, all four charged but not convicted in 1987 sexual assault on a young female, Luci Kunnuk, who refused to testify, maybe because she was intimidated either by those charged or by disapproval of other girls who hung out with the same four. Bouvier: Since I got here Aviugana and Kungalik haven't been in trouble but spend a lot of time together, drinking, hanging out with girls. Make a little money hunting seals around here and caribou from a camp on a lake south of here.

5. Paulessie Goose: Bouvier; Big kid around nineteen or twenty. Took the heavy machinery course in Yellowknife. Works at house construction in summer and some road work and carpentry. Not noticeably a big drinker but had a skinful the night of the murders.

6. Jack Kritaqliluk: Son of Sanirarsipaaq mayor. No previous trouble on the record.

7. Tommy Kungalik: See Aviugana. Short and slightly built.

8. James Nirlungayuk: Nothing known by either Barker or Bouvier.

9. Simeonie Pakkiiuq: Charged three different times with assault on Davidee Ayulak. Beat him up each time. Always due to differences over girls. Regular churchgoer. Most sober person in rec hall on the night of the murders.

10. Donald Thrasher (Hard Hat): Barker's file: Has not been in trouble with the law since Davidee was convicted, but until then was considered to be Davidee's closest friend. Competed with Byron Anolak for Debbie's favors. His testimony for the defense at Davidee's trial was that Davidee was not to blame: “Debbie was always asking for it.” Also see 4 and 7 above.

I looked at Bouvier. He looked at me. I had the feeling we both were thinking, okay, we've got a list, so what?

“You see any signs of a natural-born murderer there?” I asked. He shook his head. “Could really be almost any of them, or none.”

I felt the same. Thumbnail sketches. Could have been part of a football team. Or an all-male musical.

Grasping at straws, I said, “Is any of those on the list the half-bald man we saw at the airport yesterday?”

“The guy who rode off with Hard Hat? Naw. I'd remember if he'd been there.”

So the sum total of the day so far had left me no closer to any solution, or even real suspicion. Only one thing is worse than having several equally likely suspects. That is having no suspects at all.

My unreasonable hunger drifted into my head again. I consulted the wall clock, which was closing in on eleven forty-five. I would check in at the hotel and then eat.

“I'm thinking of lunch,” I said.

Bouvier grinned. “It used to be funny. If noon or six o'clock came and Barker was still here the phone would ring and it would be Sadie, asking if he was here or should she try the hotel. He'd grab his parka and get out of here and I'd say, ‘No, he's just left here for home, Sadie.'” He shrugged, with the merest hint of a smile. “Every time he was late for a meal she'd be sure he was at the hotel.”

“She didn't like that?”

“You haven't met Margaret Johanson, the manager, yet?”

“No.”

“Well,” Bouvier said, as if no further explanation were needed.

“Anyway, I'm ready to eat. How about you?”

“I'll go when you come back so I'll be around if somebody calls up and wants to confess and throw himself on our mercy.” He lit another large black cigar with a wooden match. The flame glinted on his so round, smooth, and fully packed cheeks, and reflected cheerfully from his spectacles.

“Where are you staying? I forgot to ask.”

“I've been at the hotel but Barker asked me to stay at their house and look after things. After you get back I'll go have some soup and see whether the dogs have eaten the side out of the house. The detachment phone rings in at Barker's too, if you need me.”

Afterthought. “Where does Jonassie live?” I wanted to talk to him about the shamanism rumor and anything else he might tell me about Dennis and Thelma and life at Sanirarsipaaq.

“Up behind the library.” I knew where the library was.

I thought about Debbie. Such names for Inuit girls always struck me odd. Her Inuit name would be something else. But right through the north many girls, even most, adopted names that the mostly nonnative teachers could handle more easily. So far there'd been nothing much to suggest that Dennis might have been sexually involved in a major way (it was hard to be sure about Maisie), but any Inuit girl in the community would know, or have an opinion. He'd been by all accounts bright and enterprising (to judge by the loan-sharking), and certainly something else had caused tears to come to Maisie's eyes when she talked about him.

I'd talk to Debbie. I had to find a trail that led somewhere.

An unrelated thought: Charlie the judge had made clear that Debbie and Davidee had lived in the family house after the rape and until the fire and subsequent trial. Rapist and rapee living in . . . what? Harmony? Almost incredible. Hatred maybe. But strange things happen, not only in the Arctic. There were the parents. Stoical whites were not the only people who faced what there was to face and still got up in the morning. From the detachment window I looked at their house, the usual fuel-oil tank alongside, a yellow snowmobile and a Honda three-wheel ATV parked nearby, an old forty-five-gallon barrel out front smoking from a load of burning garbage. No human in sight. Children from those and other families would be in, sitting down to eat, maybe in front of television, maybe never thinking any more about the old Davidee nightmare.

Taking it all in, I suddenly got the special feeling I sometimes have when I'm hunting something or someone, and getting close. It came on me like a sudden shiver along my spine.

 

I left the detachment in bright sunshine. The day actually felt a little like spring. Coming off the detachment's steps I ran hard and set my feet and slid along, waving my arms for balance.

Bouvier called from the doorway, “Not bad! Not bad!”

An old Inuk woman was coming the other way, laboring up the slope. She clapped her hands and called out something I couldn't hear and we smiled at one another, passing a few feet apart.

There were a few houses to my left, the rec hall on my right, the squatty shape of the Sanirarsipaaq hotel ahead. Early April, a lot of winter ahead yet, but fifteen hours of daylight helped. I'd looked at the climate chart for today: sunrise 04:46, sunset 19:47.

The noonday sun glittered off a line of boats overturned for the winter along the shore of the settlement's little bay. A half mile or so out on the ice I could see a hunter crouched immobile at a seal hole. I couldn't see it, but his rifle or harpoon would be ready. The stillness was essential. The slightest movement, a change of shadow—result, no seal at that hole, it would go somewhere else for air. Beyond the hunter the jumbled pressure-packed ice of the McClintock Channel lay between this eastern shore of Victoria Island and, a hundred miles or so away, the western shore of Prince of Wales Island. One summer when I was a boy we traveled with two other families across the channel to Prince of Wales in an umiak—a good-size boat—looking for whales and walrus. We found some and had a good summer there, eating regularly.

As I neared the hotel a woman in a red dress towed an embarrassed-looking city-type man toward the middle of the road. He wore a yellow toque perched on top of his head, and under his open parka showed a scarf, shirt, necktie, and three-piece suit. A shyly smiling Inuit girl followed with a camera, focused, clicked it.

“There, now you can put that along with your huge expense account,” the woman said as the three of them laughed, slipped, and slid toward the hotel's plywood door. The other two entered. The red dress and its occupant stopped at the door. “Hi there, Matteesie!”

Obviously, Margaret Johanson. We hadn't met before but she would know who I was and what I was here for. So, by now, would nearly everybody in town. Because I once had been one of their own, they tended to know not only my name and rank and successes and failures but also to have taken sides in debates as to whether I was the great brain of Arctic crime or just dumb lucky.

As for Margaret, well, every Arctic settlement has its reigning beauty, or sex symbol, as the case may be. I thought she would be a bit of both. There was just enough weight on her that even the Inuit elders would approve, their traditional belief being that the fatter the woman the better. I figured her to be in her forties, with the ripeness that some women get when older. She'd probably look good in anything. Or nothing. That last was not a prurient thought, simply an observation.

She smiled, eyes lively, teeth as white as any in a toothpaste commercial but just crooked enough to provide a tiny clue about a non-yuppie background: no money for braces. “Well, do I pass?”

I smiled. “Caught looking.”

“Just leave your bag here, unless it's full of secret codes and classified information. Or even if it is.”

I put down the bag and dropped my boots among others whose owners had obeyed the sign over the dining room entrance that read, LEAVE BOOTS HERE, THIS MEANS YOU!

The city-dressed man had disappeared to the left and down a couple of steps to join a group of others who were kidding him about what they'd tell his wife.

“What was the photo opportunity all about?” I asked. “Polaroid proof that everybody up here doesn't wear caribou.” Following her down the steps, I was hit by a mixture of aromas: fresh baking, rich meat, coffee. Tables were scattered about. Three were full, two white and the other Inuit, probably all of both backgrounds being either government people or construction workers. Somebody told me once that seventy percent of all air travel in the north was by government people, which besides including me tells you a bit about civil service and native-organization expense accounts and why hotels like Margaret's can charge $185 a day, including three meals and four to a room.

They had finished eating and were drinking their coffee or tea. Another table had one man at it, the hefty, gray-haired Inuk with a huge head whom I'd seen at the airport yesterday: Jonassie the shaman and carver. He looked somewhat apart from the others not only in appearance but in what he was doing: drinking tea while reading Monday's
News/North
, where the front-page headline read, NO ARRESTS IN DOUBLE MURDER. He glanced at me, upended his teapot for a final few drops, drank that unhurriedly and folded his paper.

“Margaret,” he said as he passed her. “Matteesie.”

But he didn't stop, as might have been natural. She looked after him, shrugged, turned back to me, and waved toward an oilcloth-covered table set against one wall. “Help yourself. I'll see about the soup situation.” I was being frankly inspected by those at the other tables. Some smiled at me, some just nodded briefly and went on cleaning up the last of their pie and ice cream. On the serving table were several two-cup teapots, the stainless steel kind that inevitably spill tea in several directions when you pour, along with mugs, saucers, assorted teabags, a jar of instant coffee, a jug of milk.

Unless a miracle had occurred, the milk would be from Milko milk powder, the only kind most Arctic people ever had unless they were in one of the big settlements. I never had fresh milk until I was twenty. I remember way back there sometime there was a rock song with a line, “I believe in miracles.” Hearing it improperly, I had thought the line was, “I believe in Milko.” I had thought that was nice for the Milko people, that kind of approval from a rock group, and wondered how much the plug had cost. Even now, some northern youngsters, getting real fresh milk for the first time, whine that it tastes funny.

There were baskets of sliced fresh bread, raisin-studded scones, a single doughnut, the remains of four pies, a tall plugged-in urn of the sort that dispenses hot water, a small glass-fronted cooler full of soft drinks in cans. A handwritten sign on the cooler door read “$1.50.” I took bread, still warm, scones, hot, and carried my plate to the table Jonassie had just left, which Margaret was clearing. The girl who'd carried the camera a few minutes earlier brought me soup, thick and peppery.

I was finishing the soup and my third hot buttered scone when Margaret emerged from the kitchen with a plate of steaming potatoes and a thick slice of musk-ox pot roast, all of it covered with rich brown gravy. She brought cauliflower with a cheese and curry sauce steaming hot in a separate dish, creamed corn in another.

The other tables emptied, guys sticking toothpicks in their mouths, taking drink cans from the fridge, one wit calling in an artificially prissy voice, “Anyone for tennis?”

Margaret had got herself some coffee and wandered over to look from the window beside me. It wasn't a scenic delight: some plywood covered by tattered plastic, a pickup truck that apparently had been snowed in for a winter or more. A pair of snowshoes stuck into a snowbank had fallen over.

“I suppose you grow your own cauliflower,” I said.

Well, she did smile, and turn to me. “Behold the smartass Inuk.” She left the window and, on the way by, stopped by my table. “Want some company?”

“Sure do,” I said.

“Jesus,” she said, dropping into the chair opposite, “how come you didn't say, ‘Especially in your case,' or something to make a woman feel good.”

“Especially in your case,” I said.

“That's better.”

Oddly enough, with that she immediately seemed to sag, as if her “Especially in your case” line had been something she did from memory and couldn't be bothered building upon. For a little while, as I ate, she just stared into her nearly empty cup. From what I'd been able to see of her public manner, bouncy and provocative, I imagined that she didn't often show the expression I was seeing now, as if her mind were miles away. When she looked up and caught my eye for an instant she seemed flustered, vulnerable.

“With Thelma and Dennissie running the kitchen, doin' every damn thing, I've got soft,” she said. “Hard to get going again.” Pause. “Son of a bitch, eh?”

I didn't reply, except to nod. I wanted her to keep talking. I wanted more about Sanirarsipaaq and its people from a nonpolice angle. If I didn't get it soon I'd have to wring it out of somebody.

She mused, “I keep thinking that if I'd been able to give Thelma a room right here so she didn't have to share a house with somebody who couldn't protect her when it counted . . .”

“But Dennis worked for you, too.”

She raised her eyes. Looking into her shrewd, suddenly judgmental gaze, I felt that this wasn't just a casual unloading; that maybe ever since she had heard I was in town she'd been weighing what she knew and how much she should tell. “Hiring Dennis was just me trying to help Thelma.”

“How do you mean?”

“She was worried about some of the people he hung out with. He'd done pretty well at school, saved some money from a job in Yellowknife, but then started to drift. Except for some part-timing, he was sort of bumming with the wrong kind of company. Of course, she didn't know the half of it. But when my handyman took off for Edmonton last fall and I needed somebody else, Thelma asked me to take Dennis. Her idea was that if I would go for, like, hiring him, she would make sure that he didn't goof off. God knows she did enough work for both of them, but he wasn't bad, either, no trouble to me, Thelma saw to that. He'd wait tables and vacuum and clean rooms and run errands . . .”

“Who was he was mixed up with that she didn't like?”

“She didn't know. She just had an instinct. For instance, she didn't know about how much he dealt with Hard Hat, Donald Thrasher, at all.”

“What about him?”

“I don't know all of it. What I do know is that Dennis got paid two hundred a week at the hotel. I don't know when the loan-sharking started, I've got an idea Hard Hat was in on it. Anyway, people would borrow money from Dennis, a week at a time, high interest, and Hard Hat—”

“—would help collect the money,” I said.

Surprised, she said, “How did you know?”

“If Dennis was the kind of basically harmless guy that everybody says, he'd need an enforcer.”

She nodded. “Yeah. The way I first suspected was that Hard Hat sometimes called Dennis here. I don't think he ever showed up at Thelma's house, at least not when she was aware. She'd go home after work every night, you know, turn on the TV, half the time fall asleep, wouldn't know who was going in and out . . .”

She stopped there. I was wondering a little about how she knew all this. Where she stopped was not where her thoughts stopped, I was pretty sure. Somebody running a hotel, especially in a small settlement, comes to know most of what there is to know. Like the closeness between Dennis and Hard Hat, which Bouvier hadn't mentioned at all, even when we were looking right at Hard Hat at the airport. If Barker had known, surely it would have been on the record, especially after the murders. Meaning that, in public, anyway, Dennis and Hard Hat must have been very discreet. Barker was the man who had said so often, “This is my town,” with the implication that he knew everything that was going on. Or did he just not care about Dennis's loan-sharking, thinking it was just loans between friends, too small-time to worry about?

“Did Thelma ever indicate to you that she was worried, either for herself or for Dennis? Anything else that bothered her a lot?”

Quietly, “This thing with Hard Hat would have, if she'd known about it.”

By now we were alone in the room. I didn't push. If I was right that she simply wanted to talk to me as a policeman, eventually she'd get to her main reason.

She started out, “You really wanta listen to, well, guesses?”

“Yes.”

She took a deep breath. “Well, you met my daughter at the airport. She got pretty emotional about Dennis being killed. When the flight had to layover and she came back here, she told me about meeting you, which led to other things. That's when I started to think about talking to you. Maisie doesn't really fit in here . . . What I mean is, totally different kind of person, different interests. She doesn't hang out with the local kids maybe as much as she should, or could, but through Dennis got to know some of them and learn or guess things, like about the Hard Hat connection—which incidentally, sometimes resulted in beating up guys who couldn't pay but were scared shitless to let the police know why they were beaten up.”

A lot here was new. But so far, how could it lead to Dennis and Thelma being murdered? The enforcer doesn't usually bump off his meal ticket.

I'd try another tack: Dennis and Maisie. “For him to let her know, or guess, all that, they must have been pretty close.”

She considered one more time what she was saying and where it was leading, made a face, shook her head, let out a long breath.

“That's what stopped me! If I'd told all I know to Steve Barker he'da been out with all guns blazing and it woulda got all over town, what was going on and who'd blown the whistle. Next thing Maisie would be involved, or might be involved, other kids treating her like shit, which they can do. She doesn't deserve that.”

I didn't quite get it. This sounded like more than just the loan-sharking.

There was another long pause. Then new territory suddenly arrived on the agenda.

Margaret gave a sigh, then her eyes met mine. “One of the things she told me after the murders was that Dennis sometimes took girls home with him at night after Thelma was asleep. The way Maisie knew this was that he'd tried to get her to go with him.”