The Shaman's Knife (27 page)

This was shaping up like a textbook lecture, with a beginning and, I had no doubt, a middle and an end. He was doing aloud what I often do in my head, summarizing known facts, hoping an idea would jump out and pop me on the nose.

“As we discussed before, I think, a thorough check of boots the morning after the murders might have helped a lot,” he said. “I'm not criticizing the police work but that's a fact, and also, with everything else going on, a man would have had to be a real, uh, genius, to have acted as fast as the murderer would have had to. So let's forget that one for now, the murderer's tracks. Then we have tracks in blood that were made by the murdered people, slipping and staggering around, and we can forget those, too, for the moment.”

He stopped to consider something. Maybe notes. I heard a page turning.

“You with me?” he said.

“I'm with you—we can't draw any conclusions for now about the tracks made by the murderer and we forget the victims' tracks entirely.”

“Right. Out of the six sets of prints, that leaves us three, the small bloody ones and the two sets of latents I mentioned to you that must've been done before the murders, as if somebody had tracked clean snow onto a floor, say . . .”

“Like those nagging tracks on the kitchen floors in a set for a TV commercial,” I said.

He laughed. “Some Inuk bimbo with a mop showing how easy tracks can be wiped up with Glare, Bash, Purge, Stain-off, or whatever!”

“I won't interrupt anymore,” I said hastily.

“Okay. First the two sets of latents. Edmonton says both sets were made by winter boots normally worn by women. Lighter than men's boots, narrower, a different shape. Different heels. We couldn't get any revealing tread patterns or trademarks, but Edmonton says the sizes are as accurate as we can expect: the larger ones would be size eights, and the small ones size six. That ring any bells?”

“The size eight, maybe.” I was thinking of Monday night, standing with Maisie, noticing in passing that when we put our boots down side by side, hers were of equal length with my size eights. Small feet for a man.

“Who?” Pelly asked.

“Maisie Johanson, I don't think you met her. The size six I'll have to think about.”

“Okay,” he said. “Now the last one, the smallest footprint, is not in any of the categories I've mentioned. Could be worn by a male or female. Anybody that small probably would not have been strong enough to do all the damage that was done, but might just have happened into the scene during or after the murders.”

Then he got to the meat. “Let me tell you what I have. That small print was made by someone wearing a size five shoe, like one of those common running shoes that a lot of people wear . . .”

“Like maybe a Nike?” I said.

“I was going to say maybe like a Nike. But how'd you guess?”

“I got them in my hand right now.”

 

“Hi, Andy,” I said at three o'clock that afternoon, when I finally found him after hunting everywhere else, including another visit to his foster home, where I was told, “He was here a little while ago but he isn't now, fuck off.”

Andy looked at me bleary-eyed. He had been drinking either straight-world-type booze or vanilla extract or rubbing alcohol or shaving lotion, maybe mixed with the orange drink that had been in the pop can he was clutching. Or maybe he'd just had a dainty swallow of orange pop to cleanse his palate after sniffing glue or antifreeze or paint thinner or nail polish remover or any other poison he could lay his hands on.

“Hi, Matteeshie,” he mumbled. He was lying flat on his back in those thin clothes with nothing beneath his parka, amid the ice and snow that had been blowing all winter into the space under this overturned boat, along with enough candy wrappers and cigarette butts to indicate that he used the place often. He was even sheltered from the afternoon sun, which today felt warm. I'd wanted to be on his trail earlier, but it had been nearly noon before I could get started. By telephone from Cambridge Bay the judge, Charlie Litterick, had said sure, he'd delay the Yellowknife-bound departure of the Supreme Court's Citation until Thomassie got there. This was so that the Nikes, carefully wrapped and carried by Thomassie in the Cessna, could be handed in Cambridge Bay to the sheriff's office man, Bob, who would be met at the Yellowknife airport by Pelly.

When I'd finally got down to looking for Andy, my procedures certainly would not have ranked with great Mountie get-your-man operations of story and song.

A special I knew in Sachs Harbor a few years ago always had a stock reply when being complimented on some job or other. “Eeee-eee,” he would say, shrugging, and then in Inuktituk, “Like tracking a caribou with a nosebleed through a snowbank.” For a while I felt like that, tracking Andy around Sanirarsipaaq. Everybody had seen him from time to time.

At the Co-op Nelson told me Andy had practically fallen in when the door opened at ten a.m., had bought a can of some orange drink, and headed for the rec hall.

At the rec hall the old caretaker, smoking ruminatively in his chair by the door, told me with a polite, “eee-eee,” that yes, Andy had been there, mostly sitting in the furnace room, and had seemed okay but maybe had been drinking a bit or sniffing because, as the old man told me, there'd been a smell. He'd told Andy he didn't want that kind of stuff in there and Andy had said it was cough medicine and he'd go home and get the bottle to prove it. Then, the old man said, Andy had stumbled (
kunikaqtuaq
is the Siglit word) out of the back door of the rink. Going out by the front door would have been more public, if that meant anything.

I went to the rink's back door. That's where scrapings were thrown when the ice was cleaned. Nobody went that way normally unless he wanted a longer walk, or not to be seen.

Could Andy have known by then that I had taken his Nikes and would want to know where he had been the last time he wore them? So that he wouldn't want to chance running into me by passing in front of the detachment? There was only one way to find out.

I went back to number 5, where I found Big Mama laying for me. She had more to say than she'd had an hour or two earlier.

“I
thought
you was doin' somethin' up there!” she accused. “When he arrives he yells down and asks where the hell his Nikes are, really upset, musta wanted to sell 'em, and I yell back that the only guy up there was the little Eskimo Mountie. Then I thought he'd fainted it was so quiet up there and then he comes down and just goes out without saying a word . . . Did you take 'em, you bugger?”

She was glaring.

I glared back, thinking about the sequence of Andy's movements.

When he'd found his Nikes gone I was already working on getting Thomassie to the airport to start the shoes on the first leg of the way to Pelly and forensics. Maybe he even saw us take off in the van. That could have been when he bought something at the Co-op, then dropped out of sight.

I checked the rec hall again. He hadn't returned. This time I left his way, by the back door, and walked in widening half circles until I found amidst all the trampling in yesterday's snow an occasional small footprint heading down behind the hotel to the shore.

There they'd been easier to follow, the only prints since yesterday's snow. They had led me to this overturned wooden skiff.

I'd had to crouch even to see in where he was. As he lay there he was so out of it that his lower eyelids kept going up and meeting his upper eyelids coming in the other direction. It occurred to me that I could have taken him in just for being so smashed, but that was not really my line of work and would quickly get around—and I did not want anything to do with Andy to get around right then.

I looked the full length of him. His rundown cheap boots. The way his jeans hung forlornly against his skinny legs, the bones like sticks of kindling. The bravado of his shirt and parka both open showing the boniest chest in the Arctic. The pinched cheeks beneath a too-big woolen toque he'd acquired someplace. Knitted into the turned-up part of the toque was an arresting phrase: Costa del Sanirarsipaaq. In his own way, Andy had style.

It wasn't too difficult to sense that there was more to this now than locking him up and questioning him until he came clean about the blood on his shoes. What I wanted with Andy at the moment was an uninterrupted time to get him sober and get him to talk, to learn why he had been tracking around in that mess of blood, what he knew about that night that we didn't.

“Ish okay I call you Matteeshie, not Inshpector, or lord high?” he began, peering out at me and suddenly beginning to snore.

I went the rest of the way under the boat on my hands and knees. When I sat back against the far side I could not see out for more than a few yards. This boat was at the end of a row and thus sheltered from any casual onlooker. Nobody would go this far along the rough shore ice except on purpose, like me.

While Andy snored, one other development nagged at me a little. Erika Hall had phoned that morning from Cambridge Bay, where she'd been covering the end of the abduction trial Charlie Litterick had told me about, which had ended with the acquittal I had rather expected after talking to Charlie. I don't mean Charlie had his mind made up in advance. What I mean is that the tall young crown prosecutor I'd talked to in the Citation must have been unable to convince Charlie to reverse the amount of prejudging he
had
done. There's a difference there that only lawyers and judges know.

Erika adrift in Cambridge Bay had a choice between flying home with the court people to Yellowknife and calling up people there that she otherwise would see only fifty-two weeks of every year anyway until death or snow blindness did them part, or hitching a ride to Sanirarsipaaq for whatever journalistic or other adventure the murder investigation might hold. The choice apparently had not resulted in a hung jury.

“Matteesie!” she'd said on the phone just as I finished talking to Pelly. “Wash your face! Iron your pajamas! I'm on my way.”

That jauntiness was all part of her surface line, and I knew it. Right away she noticed that I wasn't playing.

“I shouldn't be joking,” she said, “but I just thought of coming up there to see how you're doing, and hear about your mother's funeral.”

What can you say when you want to get the hell off the phone without revealing too much of why?

“Maybe I got you at a bad time,” she said tentatively, probing.

Her antennae were very sensitive. At that moment I was itching to get the final word from Cambridge that the Nikes were on their way. Then I could go after whatever Andy Arqviq knew. So far only Bouvier and Pelly and I knew that we might be on the edge of something. I didn't want Erika Hall to know anything. I wanted her out of there, but not flying back to Yellowknife with the chummy Supreme Court group on the Citation. Bob, the sheriff's office guy, carrying something in a brown paper bag, is exactly the kind of thing that would have made Erika ask, right away, “What's in the bag?”

“Oh, just something Matteesie wanted taken to Yellowknife.”

“What?”

“Sorry, I can't tell you.”

What difference would it make if she did manage to track down a pair of bloodstained Nikes and make a headline out of it on
News/North
's Monday edition? Maybe none. But if I managed to have things happen at the pace I set, I would be happier.

“So what's new in the case?” she asked.

“Well, it isn't solved yet.”

“Really? You losing your touch?”

“Could be.”

“You sound too cheerful for that to be true.”

“We must have a bad connection.”

Maybe it didn't make any difference in the long run. There's no doubt that Erika's instinct would have told her that Sanirarsipaaq was a pretty good place to be right then. In some kind of a reflex action, knowing that she was on the trail, I phoned Maxine and told her there was nothing certain yet, but I thought I was getting close and would let her know more, when there was more. Whatever happened, I didn't want Erika Hall to scoop her. If that is managing the news a tiny little bit, so be it. I owed Maxine.

Anyway, what happened was that Erika did get a ride to Sanirarsipaaq with Thomassie and landed just about the time I found Andy Arqviq. I learned later from Bouvier that she was looking for me and not finding me when I was sitting well hidden under the overturned boat.

I am not great at talking to the young. Or so Lois says, anyway, and can produce chapter and verse in support of her own opinion. She says I talk too much to kids when I should be listening, and listen too much when I should not be letting the little demons (her phrase) dominate the conversation. All this might be true. But now I was in a situation not covered in Lois's or anybody's manual on how to be better at talking to the young.

I was neither talking nor listening. Sitting on the snow and ice under that boat while Andy Arqviq snored, I watched the dribble from the corner of his mouth, which he sometimes wiped at clumsily without opening his eyes. I wondered what he was like, inside. I couldn't even make a stab at answering that from what I'd seen in his room. Not counting the bloodstained Nikes, there was nothing personal there at all. Maybe he had nothing personal.

I remembered his cocky walk in the rec hall a few nights ago, the first time I'd seen him. I'd never seen a bantam rooster, had only heard the phrase and imagined a strutting little bird.

Maybe I really am no good at talking to the young, I thought. But I have a certain amount of experience with Inuit orphans, kids who had to scramble just to stay alive, few of them really fitting the common concept of childhood but often with a spark of decency in them somewhere. Maybe, I thought, the ones I am no good at talking to live in one of the yuppie parts of Edmonton or some other city and never have to do anything tougher than walking behind a lawn mower on nice green grass, or getting their driver's licenses routinely when they are sixteen so they can use the old man's car.

Maybe “spark of decency” would be too strong a phrase for Andy, but did he have something similar? Why would he get stoned? And here I am under an overturned boat, which is where this fifteen-year-old kid goes to be alone. I remembered reading once about another very small Eskimo orphan whose name, or the name people used, translated as “the Little Shit.” Later in life he'd turned out to be a great hunter.

Andy's eyes came open again very slowly. He groaned when he saw me. He didn't speak. He was still not much more than semi-conscious. His eyes closed again. Not only so young but so ludicrously small, he could have been a jockey if he'd lived almost anywhere in the world except where he did.

I knew where my thoughts were going and I didn't care, this was what was going through my mind under that boat with little Andy Arqviq, whose Nikes had bloodstains on the soles.

First, it was physically impossible for him to have killed Dennis the way it was generally conceded to have happened: beaten him to death. It was almost as impossible for him to have killed Thelma the way she had been killed, mainly with stab wounds but with a lot of physical strength involved as well. On the other hand, assume that at some stage in that wild night, before the police arrived, maybe even before the murderer fled, Andy had been in the house. Which would make him either a material witness to murder or an accomplice to murder.

I would be willing to accept that he had gone to the house with no knowledge of what was happening. But if so, why?

Andy's slow-moving eyelids were open again. I had to make up my mind. Either Andy and I crawled out of here and walked past the hotel to the detachment where he would be held and safe until he had answered the questions, or I let him go but kept a string on him while charges were decided upon. Not a murder charge. Maybe not accessory to murder. Maybe material witness.

“What are you going to do?” he asked, voice tired and far away.

“I'm thinking,” I said.

One way of doing it would be to crawl out of there and yell at somebody to go and get Bouvier, and take Andy to the detachment for what we could call routine questioning.

Another way would be just to march off the shore with Andy as if I were right on the tail of the murderer and didn't have time to look to left or right. I didn't like either of those methods. Words suddenly streamed across my consciousness: He had nothing whatever to do with the actual murders! I was amazed to realize that I had reached that conclusion just by shivering under a boat looking at the pitiable state of this boy so full of illegal substances that it would have been a danger to low-flying aircraft to light a match in his vicinity.

So okay, he's not the murderer. I went on from there. As impossible as it seemed, he might have had some legitimate reason to be leaving his footprints in blood and then not volunteer what he did know that might have helped identify whoever did do it. Behind all this was my extreme reluctance to march him across what passed for Sanirarsipaaq's main square obviously in custody, perhaps for the only crime that was on anybody's mind right then. He might have to spend the rest of his life here with that image in the settlement's consciousness . . . and he was only fifteen.