The Shaman's Knife (15 page)

“It's hard to be sure with all the sliding around but I'm not thinking sealskin, yet, except maybe the one that didn't get into the blood. When these prints get the full treatment they'll tell us some things I can't get at just yet.”

He glanced at his watch. “I'll photograph the upstairs and take up a lot of the carpet samples before I get out of here, but if I could make it to Yellowknife tonight I could have at least some preliminary stuff back to you tomorrow.”

I said, “How long do you need here?”

He looked around thoughtfully as if working out aspects I couldn't even imagine. “Gimme a few hours. Let's say three o'clock. The goddamn cement they use to stick this carpet down is hard to handle.”

He went upstairs. I could hear him gasp and swear in a low voice. Then he came back down. When I left for Annie's kitchen phone he was on his knees prying up a section of the kitchen linoleum with an instrument resembling a short square-ended spade, and using heavy curved-blade clippers to cut the tile into a manageable chunk.

I called the Yellowknife hospital again, got the same answer, no change. “I'll call you as soon as I have something,” the doctor said. “Depend on that.”

The other calls took a while. Pelly's Beaver pilot had gone to the hotel for a sleep. Margaret told me she'd have him out front at two forty-five, or sooner if we called again. I asked Bouvier to check the airport to make sure the Beaver was gassed up and ready to go, and told him to be ready at two forty-five to pick up the pilot and then us. The Cambridge Bay airport line was busy, but the RCMP line there wasn't. There were two more flights to Yellowknife that day, the sergeant told me, one scheduled and one charter. If Pelly's Beaver could get there by late afternoon, getting to Yellowknife that night should be a cinch.

When I walked back through the door, Pelly was putting chunks of stained and smeared carpet and linoleum into plastic bags and was getting ready to collect more. He glanced up and I told him the travel details.

On the way to the airport a little after three, with the sun high in the sky, I sat in the back of the van with Pelly. I liked both his youth and his professionalism. They went well together, as usual. Allied with open ambition.

“It's a break for me, getting a job like this,” he called over the roar of the heater. “Funny, we spend most of the forensics course on fingerprints. Miss a fingerprint match on a comparison exam and you're out, man, off the course! And then I wind up with this! Beats hell out of fingerprints!”

After a minute or two I said, “You mentioned a girlfriend, back in Ottawa.”

He nodded.

“See her often?”

Hint of a smile. “She says not often enough.”

“You know,” I said, “in the old days and not so old a man had to get RCMP permission to marry. They liked to keep a man single. Single guy could be moved around on short notice and cheap, without having to move a wife and kids, too.”

He glanced at me, grinning. “Well, my girlfriend and I haven't talked about marriage, so far, just about building us a ski cabin.”

I realized I'd said enough about the old days.

At the landing strip we drove the van out to park beside the Beaver. I could see some people in the terminal watching curiously. Pelly climbed in. Bouvier and I carried and lifted in to him the bags of what we hoped would be useful evidence.

“See you,” Pelly said. “I'll call.”

When Bouvier and I drove back into town the day was warming. There were quite a few people around, mostly kids playing. Bouvier said, “Corporal Barker called from Vancouver. I read him the list you gave me, the four girls. He didn't seem all that impressed. Said we'd already talked to them. Also mentioned what I already knew, of course, that two of them, Sarah and Agnes, were in his wife's grade-ten class at the school.”

Their being schoolgirls didn't rule out the main aspect that I was concerned about—sex as a motivating factor in murder. These girls plus Leah and Maisie were the only people we knew about who could tell us whether what happened in Dennis's room might somehow produce revenge motives which might in the end have led to dead bodies.

“In the first interrogation with these girls did you or Barker get to the point of asking, frankly, what their relationship with Dennis involved? I mean, about sex. If they'd had sex, for instance, were they willing? If unwilling, scared, or whatever, did they try to fight? Did they complain later to one another or to anyone at home?”

Bouvier was smoking one of his cigars but through the cloud of smoke I could see his amusement. “We just didn't get that deep into it. Sadie was upset about Sarah and Agnes even being questioned. Maybe some of that rubbed off on Steve. Anyway, he wants you to call him. He's a little pissed off, leaves here on Tuesday, gets weathered in at Cambridge so they miss one flight and he's still only in Vancouver . . . although he did say they're getting out later today.”

I called. I wasn't going to, but then decided it was a courtesy I could afford. Theoretically he would rather be here than there. In years to come when people talked about the case he would not relish having to um and ah and admit that he'd been in Honolulu at the time.

Barker picked up the phone on the first ring. I could imagine his big and burly figure, pug-nosed face, the paunch, and had the idea that his wife was sitting there all set to listen to him running his empire from afar, but he started off just like any tourist, “Great weather here, Inspector! Seventy-five today, sunny, shirtsleeves, now if we hadn't missed our goddamn airplane, sorry honey . . . not you, Inspector! . . . Anyway, Bouvier told me what you've got in mind about these girls and sex and so on and I just thought I should put in my two cents worth . . . that isn't the kind of thing we're looking for.”

He rushed on. “So what if Dennis had been banging, sorry honey, some of them or at least trying? If you're thinking of some girl's boyfriend going over there and bumping off Dennis because he'd made a pass at their girls, there's not a chance! The picture we've got of the guy that did the murders is that he's gotta be big enough to beat the shit, sorry honey, out of Dennis, who was big enough to fight back and obviously did, and then out of old Thelma. She might have slept a lot but was strong as an ox, and certainly wouldn't have taken the kind of beating she did from some highschool kid mad about Dennis cutting in on his girl.”

He did have a point. Even several points. But they weren't necessarily at odds with what I thought was important.

“How about some father or big brother?”

“Well, you gotta find a girl first who'd been getting laid,” he began, forgetting to say “sorry, honey.” “Then even if she got pregnant, that kinda thing happens and if every time it happened we had a murder or two out of it, there'd hardly be anybody left in town. That just isn't the kinda thing that leads to murder . . .”—he finished with a flourish—“around my town, anyway!”

Polite is polite, but I was becoming tired of polite. I didn't raise my voice. Didn't have to. But I laid it on the line.

“Considering that it is now nearly six days since the murders happened and we haven't got a goddamn thing”—I thought of saying sorry honey, but didn't—“I want to know who Dennis made it with and whether it had ever caused any arguments or fights and whether anybody knows anything, from earlier, about going into that house after Thelma had gone to sleep. When we find out a few of those things we'll know more than we do right now.”

“Okay,” Barker said grudgingly. “But when we do get a break I'm goddamn sure it's not going to be through those kids we've been talking about. More likely to be somebody we haven't even hit on yet.”

“All right,” I said, belatedly soothing. “You know the town. As you sometimes say, it's your town. So what's your opinion on this: Could anybody from the rec hall with a cooked-up alibi leave there, commit the murders, get cleaned up, and then get back to the rec hall without anybody knowing he'd been gone?”

Barker, flatly: “How can anybody know for sure? To make it stick someone would have to have seen the guy somewhere that contradicted the alibi.”

“In lieu of a better idea, I still wouldn't rule that out,” I said. “Well, that's up to you.”

“I didn't get a chance to talk to you before you and your wife had to leave”—a little dig—“about that list of the guys Dennis was loan-sharking with, guys that must have been paying up, maybe more substantially than we know yet, maybe one with a money-based grudge against Dennis.”

“So what about those guys?”

“I don't find any record that they were interviewed.”

“It's there somewhere, all small-time stuff, tens, twenties, one fifty. No reason for some big grudge.”

“All right,” I said. “We'll check harder, and maybe get more.” The mildest rebuke of my life, but he'd get it. “That brings us to something else. I don't get the idea from anything anybody has said that Dennis was the kind of guy who could strong-arm somebody who didn't pay up.”

“That's right!” Barker said. “I mean, whenever there've been fracases around the rec hall or anywhere else, Dennis might be on the fringes but in all the assaults and that kind of thing due to boozing or whatever, we never had to lay a glove on him.”

I guessed that years ago, before Davidee did his time, he might have been both the loan shark and the enforcer. If so, when he left he might have turned the business over to Dennis. Or maybe it was just a matter of Dennis filling the void and arranging with someone (Hard Hat?) to be the enforcer. But Davidee, being Davidee, here secretly off and on for the last few weeks, might have felt the business was just on loan, there for him to pick up again now that he was back.

“If Dennis was that clean, it might mean that he had somebody else doing his enforcing for him,” I said. “Who do you think? Name or names. Somebody to put the heat on.”

Bouvier had been mainly studying his half-finished cigar, glancing at me from time to time with an encouraging smile. Now he came over and stood writing a note that read, “Hard Hat. Maybe in recent weeks Davidee taking over?”

Barker, slowly: “I've thought about Hard Hat. I mean, he's a real asshole, sorry honey, but it shouldn't be too hard to find out what connection he had, if any. And to get back to the murder night, we did check him out first. He'd been at Davidee's parents' house watching the hockey game most of the evening and then went to the rec hall. Davidee's parents backed him up, and never mind the kind of son they had, they are decent people.”

Davidee's parents backed up Hard Hat?
I had assumed that Hard Hat's own family had backed his alibi. I came close to blowing up.

“For Christ's sake, Barker! Don't you think that in this place everybody, including Davidee's parents, maybe even especially Davidee's parents, are so scared shitless that they'd say anything either Hard Hat or Davidee told them to say?”

Bouvier voted by nodding vigorously. Motion carried.

But one more question suddenly, to me, seemed vital. “So when Davidee's parents gave Hard Hat the alibi, how about Debbie? Did she back them up?”

“She wasn't there when I talked to them,” Barker said. “She was out somewhere and didn't come back until later.”

“Oh, shit,” I said, and hung up.

I put down the phone thinking that for a lot of that conversation I hadn't been getting anywhere, like at one of those police seminars where nothing new comes up but everybody does a lot of showoff talking and then a lot of eating and drinking, after which I'd go to bed thinking, what a bloody waste of time. But in this case, Davidee's parents turning out to be Hard Hat's alibi was like a pinpoint of light in a dark tunnel.

I tried the hospital one more time. No change. “I'll call you as soon as there is,” Dr. Butterfield said.

Bouvier said, “What now?”

“I'm going looking for Hard Hat.”

“He might not be too easy to find. Want some help?”

We checked the rec hall first, on foot. Not there. Then we drove the van to his house, a good-size A-frame, one of the newer ones, down the shore from the hotel. A three-wheeler Honda was parked outside. The usual trash barrel languidly trailed some acrid smoke into the otherwise clear air. The door was answered by a lively looking young woman with a woolen toque perched on top of her head.

“Hi, Sarah,” Bouvier said. “We're looking for Hard Hat. He here?”

Sarah shook her head.

“Do you live here, too?” I asked.

She smiled. “Just when my parents are away—they're out on a hunt. But cousin Donald isn't with them. He went sealing with Davidee.”

She was the first one I'd met in all of Sanirarsipaaq who didn't call him Hard Hat. Also, I noted, she had spoken his name fondly.

“They good friends?” I asked.

The slightest of shadows showed in her eyes. “Sometimes, but when I came here about noon Davidee said something and Donald yelled something back at him.” There was no use asking her where they'd gone or when they'd be back. Hunters came back when they finished hunting, not by any schedule.

She didn't look especially apprehensive; in fact, it was more as if she wished to please. “Don't know where they went,” she offered, “but it was on Davidee's Skidoo. Maybe if they kept on arguing they won't be gone long. Want me to tell him you're looking for him?”

“Will you do that?”

“Sure.”

When we were driving away, Bouvier asked, “You looking for him for what I think you're looking for him for?”

“Wouldn't be surprised. I want to know who was into Dennis for more money than he could pay.”

An hour later at the detachment, I was surprised. The door opened and Hard Hat came in. I thought, it's strange the way that hat suits the rest of him, sort of a feisty-looking welterweight. The first time I saw him at the airport I'd thought that he had a particularly cheerful expression. He didn't look all that cheerful now. I wondered what he and Davidee had been arguing about.