Black Rock (15 page)

Dougherty couldn't imagine Brenda Webber getting charmed by a guy like Bill, and looking at the pictures of the other victims, if it wasn't for that one mention of the Douglas Hospital he couldn't imagine any of these women being involved in the kind of hippie stuff the detectives were talking about.

Dougherty put the files back in the cabinet, feeling like he hadn't really learned much, except that now he really wanted to find this Bill and wrap his fingers around the prick's neck and squeeze until his head came right off.

And then kick it like he was going for a fifty-yard field goal.

Back in the ident office, Rozovsky said, “What's wrong?”

“What?”

“You look like you're going to kill someone.”

“I am.”

“Well, don't do it here — this place is crawling with cops.”

Dougherty didn't get it at first, and then realized Rozovsky was joking and that snapped him out of it a little.

“Where? I don't see any.”

Rozovsky held out a manila envelope. “That's true, they're all running around out there, something's happening.”

“Oh yeah?”

“They're getting tips about something — every cop in the place is working on it.”

Dougherty said, “Good,” and then he took the envelope. “That's why I'm doing this.”

chapter

thirteen

It happened Sunday.

Dougherty had the day off after a late night Saturday, breaking up fights outside discos and directing traffic around an accident on the corner of St. Catherine and Atwater, in front of the Forum. It was near the end of June and it was finally starting to get hot, high sixties and even into the seventies. Dougherty was glad for that but not looking forward to the stinking heat and humidity he knew was coming. The fights and fender-benders took on a sharper edge when that stifling heat came down like it did every August.

But Sunday morning was beautiful and Dougherty drove out to LaSalle with his envelope of pictures and waited around on Thierry Street for Giovani Masaracchia. As expected, the kid and his family came home from church just after noon, and even though Dougherty was wearing jeans and a t-shirt Giovani recognized him right away. The kid said something to his parents in Italian and the mom and the little sister went into the house, but the dad stayed by the car.

“I'm Constable Dougherty,” he said, and the dad said, “Yes?”

“I just want to show your son some pictures.”

The kid said something in Italian and his father said something back and then they went back and forth a few times until the kid waved him off. “I didn't tell them you were here before. He's not happy about that.”

Dougherty looked at the father and nodded and the father nodded back. Then Dougherty slid the eight-by-ten pictures out of the envelope and handed them to the kid. “Can you tell me if one of these looks like the car you saw?”

Giovani flipped through the pictures. “I don't know, I don't think so.”

“It didn't look like any of them?”

“It looked like all of them. Well, not this one,” and he eliminated the Galaxy. He flipped through the rest and said, “Sorry.”

“I know they're not the right colours, can you picture them white with a black roof?”

“Sure, but it's not any of these.”

The father said something in Italian and the kid said something back and then said to Dougherty, “It was more square at the back.”

“Not a fastback?”

“No.”

Dougherty took the pictures and slid them back into the envelope. He thanked the kid, shook the father's hand and asked if it would be okay if he brought back some more pictures.

“Sure.”

“You want to let your father know I'll be back?”

But the father was already nodding, and Dougherty realized he understood English pretty well.

“That's a good son you have there,” he said, and the father said yes.

Then Dougherty drove to the Point and looked around for Gail Murphy. There was no one at her house when he knocked, so he returned to Bonsecours Street and the ident office.

Sunday afternoon the place was quiet, but Rozovsky was there and when he saw Dougherty he said, “What are you doing here?”

“I need more pictures of cars. What are you doing here?”

“Working.”

“Okay,” Dougherty said, “let's work.”

“You're on your own this time. I've been told to clear up all the outstanding jobs and be ready.”

“Ready for what?”

“I don't know, but I told you something was up.”

Dougherty said okay and got to work.

Throughout the afternoon the building filled up with people, and Dougherty kept going out into the hall to find out what was going on. Around four o'clock a couple of desk sergeants checked in and started calling people in for overtime, but neither would tell Dougherty what was happening.

At six o'clock Rozovsky said his shift was over, but he made no move to leave. Dougherty told him he had only a couple more pictures that could be the car, so Rozovsky said he'd help, and by eight they had a dozen possibilities and the place was really buzzing. A few of the detectives on the CAT Squad were in the building, and Vachon and Meloche from the bomb squad stopped in but left a few minutes later with four constables on motorcycles leading the bomb truck.

Dougherty grabbed a couple of smoked meat sandwiches from the place across the street, and when he got back he told Rozovsky there were people on the fourth floor.

“Big shots on Sunday night? I told you.”

A little after nine, word had spread through the building that the CAT Squad and a couple dozen cops from the Quebec Provincial Police Force had raided a cottage in Prévost, north of the city, and they were bringing in four people. And a lot of dynamite.

Dougherty went down to the lobby to watch them bring the suspects in — three men and a woman, all in their early twenties, all with the same long, stringy hair and the same pissed-off look — and move them into separate interrogation rooms.

By then, the lobby was full of reporters and cops, and Dougherty managed to push through the crowd to Detective Carpentier and say, “Congratulations.”

“We got some good tips,” Carpentier said.

“No trouble at the scene?”

“It was under surveillance for a while,” Carpentier said.

“Lot of dynamite?”

Carpentier laughed. “Three hundred pounds — Vachon almost shit himself. He's like a kid at Christmas.”

Then more detectives came into the lobby carrying sawed-off shotguns and holding up bags they told the reporters were full of revolvers.

Carpentier leaned a little closer to Dougherty and said, “And cash, almost thirty grand.”

“Bank robberies?” Dougherty said.

“Looks like it was from the Université de Montréal. Remember, the student centre was robbed a few weeks ago?”

“That was over fifty grand, wasn't it?” Dougherty said, “I remember that night, two bombs went off.”

“That's right.”

“Shit. So why was the raid now?”

Carpentier motioned towards the crowd by the front desk, the reporters trying to get at Marcel St. Aubin, the chief. “Because of what he's not going to tell them now. There was going to be a kidnapping. The press release was at the chalet.”

“That's old, isn't it?” Dougherty said. “Last winter, they were after that guy from Israel.”

“This was a new one,” Carpentier said. “It was to be the American consul general, a guy named Harrison Burgess.”

“Shit.”

“It's much the same. Same demands, same manifesto.”

“Are these the same guys? They're out on bail, aren't they?”

“Yes, those ones are, but these are different.”

“But local,” Dougherty said, “not foreigners like the mayor said.”

Carpentier lit a cigarette, inhaled, blew smoke at the ceiling and shook his head. “I still think there are no more than twenty or thirty assholes doing all this. You know how many cops we have on the task force now?”

“But even twenty guys can do a lot of damage.”

Carpentier nodded, but Dougherty could see he wasn't convinced, maybe remembering that in the old days they would've just rounded up as many of them as they could find and beat the shit out of them: hang them off the Jacques Cartier Bridge by their ankles and scare them silly.

“Well,” Dougherty said, “it's still a surprise they were going after an American.”

“Why not?” Carpentier said, “Americans are getting kidnapped in South America.”

“Yeah, but we're not South America.”

Now the reporters had turned and moved towards the front doors to watch Vachon and Meloche coming in with wooden boxes of dynamite. Vachon waved the questions and pushed his way through the crowd.

“We're not?” Carpentier said.

The front page of the
Gazette
Monday morning was a picture of a cottage under the headline “Bombers' cache found.”

After he'd checked in for his eight-to-four, Dougherty walked down St. Matthew and sat in the greasy spoon, ­reading the paper while he ate poached eggs on toast. He wasn't surprised to see that Carpentier was right. There was no mention of the planned kidnapping or any connection to the arrest four months earlier of ­different people with the same manifesto and the same ransom note.

Pete emerged from the kitchen. “You think they'll do it?”

Dougherty said, “Yeah, I do.”

“Legalize pot, really? The hippies will go crazy.”

Dougherty looked up, quizzical, from the paper and Pete pointed to another headline, the one right beside the lead story that read, “Policy on pot' due for house battle today,” and said, “Oh, I don't know about that.”

“That Le Dain Commission really blew it up,” Pete said. He filled Dougherty's mug with coffee and poured himself a cup. It was just after nine and the place was empty.

“Yeah.”

“Hey, how's it going with that girl you were in here with, the one with the glasses.”

“Okay, I guess.”

A couple of firemen from across the street came in and Pete moved down the counter, saying, “You fellas ready for a long shift? You bring your pillows?”

Dougherty drank the coffee and read the article about the pot battle. The Le Dain Commission had filed its interim report on the non-medical use of drugs and now the NDP and Conservatives were asking Trudeau and the Liberals if they were going to move marijuana out of the Narcotics Control Act and into the Food and Drugs Act, in effect making it legal. Dougherty liked the quote from the Minister of Health, John Munro, who said that the question of legalizing marijuana was “the symbolic battleground for a fight between the generations.”

Not like the actual battleground of bombs and bank robberies and riots and kidnapping plans.

Dougherty read another story on the front page about a battleground that wasn't just symbolic: “Devlin party turns into stone fight.” The article stated that “police wielding clubs and nightsticks charged a crowd after a celebration of Miss Bernadette Devlin's election turned to stone-throwing.” Northern Ireland.

Pete came back then. “You have to love the quiet ones.”

“What?”

“You know the type — when she finally looks up from the books and takes off the glasses she goes wild.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Dougherty wouldn't exactly call what Ruth had done
wild
, but he had liked it.

“You play your cards right, you'll find out.”

“I'm not very good at cards.”

“You better learn.”

Dougherty said, “Yeah, I'll see what I can do,” and dropped a two-dollar bill on the counter.

Walking back to Station Ten, Dougherty thought about Ruth Garber and how Pete was sort of right — she did change when she took off her glasses, at least a little. But she was also so different from the girls Dougherty had known, he wasn't sure what to do next. When he'd left the morning after their date, they hadn't made any plans to see each other again. He really had no idea if she wanted to, and he didn't even have her phone number.

The station was quiet when Dougherty arrived. Delisle looked up from the newspaper he was reading, and Dougherty expected to be sent out on a call right away. But the sergeant just nodded and went back to the paper, the same one Dougherty had been reading at Pete's. Beside it on the desk was the French paper,
Le Devoir
, so Dougherty picked it up and looked at the front page. No scare headline about the bombers' cache, no picture of the cottage, no mention of the raid at all. And nothing about the Le Dain Commission and marijuana. The top stories were about the federal government considering wage and price controls, and a hijacking in Iran.

“Is there anything in there about a hijacking?” Dougherty said, and Delisle said, “Yeah, I think so,” and flipped back a couple of pages. He turned the paper so Dougherty could see the headline on page
10
: “Teens skyjack Iranian plane.” Above it, in smaller letters, it said, “Shah's nephew aboard.”

“Think we'll get hijackings next?”

“If we do,” Delisle said, “it'll be the Mounties' problem.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Delisle continued to read the paper. “Choquette is having a press conference this afternoon.” The Quebec Minister of Justice, Jérôme Choquette.

Dougherty said, “Another task force?”

“Commission of Inquiry. He's getting some lawyer from Quebec City to run it. Says under the Fire Investigation Act they can find out from the ones arrested at the chalet yesterday who set off all the other bombs.”

“We don't need a lawyer from Quebec City for that,” Dougherty said. “We just have to take them down into the cells and ask them nice.”

“You got that right, but he can't say that to the press, can he? How many riots do you want?”

“Will you give me any overtime?”

“You want to work the parade?”

Dougherty said sure, and Delisle said, “Too bad, it's all in the east end.”

The last time Dougherty worked a Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade was in '
68
with the riot. Last year's had violence, too. A huge crowd, five, maybe ten thousand people followed the parade along Sherbrooke and finally rushed a float and flipped it over right in front of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel. Twenty people arrested, four cops ended up in the hospital, but Dougherty wasn't working. And now this year the parade was only going to be in the east end. Dougherty figured that might help or it might make it worse.

The phone rang then and Delisle picked it up, listened for a minute, then said, “Okay, okay,” and hung up. “Go over to Ogilvy's — they picked up a shoplifter and he started a fight.”

“At least it's not a bomb.”

Dougherty drove the squad car a few blocks to the big department store and parked in a no parking zone on St. Catherine.

Inside Ogilvy's, Dougherty found a salesgirl and asked her where the manager's office was, and she said, “Just past the elevators, way over there.” He thanked her and she said, “I know where the cafeteria is, too, if you're looking for lunch,” and giggled.