Black Rock (22 page)

“Neither are you.”

“I don't need it. Keep the crowds back while I work, will ya.”

It was still dark and eerily quiet in the park and Dougherty said, “Yeah, sure.”

Rozovsky's flashbulbs went off as the sun came up and the pigeons and the buses started to arrive, and a few people stopped to look. Dougherty and the other uniform cops moved everyone along, telling them there was nothing to see and that they didn't know what had happened.

After almost an hour Dr. Michaelchuk came and took the body away and the homicide detectives got back into their sedan and drove off.

Dougherty wanted to talk to them, but he settled for Rozovsky, who was packing up his cameras.

“Hey, has this happened before?”

Rozovsky didn't look up. “A murder? Gee, I don't know, this may be the first one in Montreal in two hundred years.”

“The throat slashed and the knife stuck in his chest,” Dougherty said. “The homicide guys looked liked they'd seen it before.”

Rozovsky stood up, slinging his camera bag over his shoulder, and said, “You work homicide long enough you see everything.”

Dougherty was thinking Rozovsky looked no older than he was and certainly hadn't been on the job any longer, but then he figured he'd probably started right away taking pictures at murder scenes and working out of Bonsecours Street, so he was more of an insider.

“Have
you
seen anything like this?”

“I've seen a few stabbings.”

“The knife left?”

“Saw one last month,” Rozovsky said, “but it was in a kitchen, guy stabbed his wife, that's not what you mean is it?”

“No,” Dougherty said, “I mean, what do they think this is?”

Rozovsky started back towards his car on St. Catherine. “Do you remember last year, a guy was killed in Parc des Hirondelles?”

“No.”

“Montreal North. He was stabbed fifty-five times.”

“Maybe I remember something about that,” Dougherty said.

“He was in a motorcycle gang, the Popeyes.”

They were on the sidewalk now, and Rozovsky had the trunk of his car open. “The guys who killed him were in another gang, the Devil's … somethings.”

“This has something to do with that? A revenge thing?”

“Don't know,” Rozovsky said. “Could be. Or it could have to do with selling drugs. Maybe this guy wasn't supposed to be in this park.”

Dougherty said, “Oh okay,” thinking that was possible. They'd killed him in a way word would get around, other dealers would hear about it. “Who's supposed to sell here?”

“Who knows.” Rozovsky shrugged. “Everybody's getting in on the drug business now.” He walked around his car and opened the front door. “Keeping us busy, that's for sure.”

chapter

twenty

Ruth said, “I wonder if he's CIA?” and Dougherty said, “What do you mean?”

Ruth pointed to the newspaper and said, “‘Agency for International Development'; what do you think?”

“I don't know.” Dougherty looked at the article. It said an American named Daniel Mitrione had been kidnapped in Uruguay and the Tupamaro Guerrillas had demanded the release of
150
political prisoners. “Does every country have terrorist groups these days?”

“It comes with American imperialism, I think.”

Dougherty had a cup of coffee held halfway to his mouth and said, “Do you believe that?”

“I believe they believe it.”

Dougherty said, “Yeah, I guess so.” They were ­sitting at Ruth's kitchen table drinking coffee and ­eating toast.

“I thought you'd have bagels,” Dougherty said.

“I can't find any around here.”

“No, you have to go up to St. Viateur or Fairmount.”

It was Sunday morning. Dougherty had finished his last night shift a few hours earlier and waited until ten o'clock to call Ruth to tell her he'd been asking around about Sylvie Berubé. Before he could say he hadn't really found out anything useful, Ruth had invited him over for breakfast.

“He had nine kids.”

Dougherty said, “Who did?” and Ruth said, “The American killed in Uruguay.”

“Well, maybe he was CIA and maybe not, but nine kids, he was sure Catholic.”

Ruth got up and took a couple steps to the stove and stopped with her hand on the coffee pot. “Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Catholic.”

Dougherty put the paper down and looked at her. “Oh, I thought for a minute you meant CIA. Yeah, I'm Catholic. Well, my mother is, you know, so I am. My father never converted, he's Protestant, so they couldn't get married in the church — they had to get married behind the altar or something like that. We're all kind of lapsed, I guess you know, we go to mass on Christmas and Easter, that kind of thing.” Then he looked back at the paper and said, “Wow, they shot this guy and then left him in the trunk of a car.”

Ruth poured them both more coffee. “I guess you've been asked to do that kind of work, though, undercover?”

“No, I haven't.”

“I just figured …”

Dougherty said, “Figured what?” and Ruth said, “Well, pretty much every student group back home thinks they have members who are really cops, FBI, that kind of thing. Must be the same here.”

“I guess so.”

“I remember when they had the demonstrations at Columbia.”

“Was that after Martin Luther King was killed?”

Ruth put the coffee pot back on the stove. “It started before that. We didn't really get the riots after the assassination in New York like they did in Chicago and Washington and wherever.”

“Were you involved in any demonstrations?”

“Why, do you have a file on me?”

“Should I?” Dougherty said, but he was smiling a little when he did.

Ruth said, “It's not funny, you know,” and Dougherty said, “I know.”

“But no, I wasn't involved in any of the demonstrations. NYU didn't shut down.”

“You don't agree with them?”

“I don't like the war in Vietnam, but that's not really what it was about at Columbia, not at first,” she said. “Anyway, I was more worried about missing class.”

“They don't seem worried about that here,” Dougherty said. “They're walking out all the time.”

“Some of them.”

“Yeah, some of them,” Dougherty said. “The ones I see.”

“The police don't really see the kids who are going to class and working hard.”

Dougherty said, “No, I guess we don't. Anyway, that's not what I called you about. I talked to someone about Sylvie Berubé.”

“What did you find out?”

“I don't think she was a prostitute.”

“But you're still not sure?”

“There weren't many people who remembered Sylvie. There weren't many people still there who were working when she was — it's been over a year. There's a big turnover, girls leave all the time.”

“And new ones come in.”

Dougherty said yeah. He'd surprised himself with how easily he'd gone into the Casa Loma and asked around, how easily he'd walked the Main. How he liked the way people looked at the uniform and were a little scared of him. And then he'd wanted to call up Ruth right away.

“But I did find someone who said she knew her.”

“And you believe her?”

“I do, yeah. Woman named Nathalie. It's funny, what she remembered was that Sylvie was shy.”

“Shy?”

“The bar, it's a topless joint,” Dougherty said, “and Sylvie was a waitress. But she wore pasties.”

“Pasties?”

“Yeah, turns out there's a place here in town on Mansfield, Johnny Brown's. He's the pastie king of Canada, has a whole catalogue.”

“I don't know anything about that,” Ruth said.

“Neither did I, but I got the whole rundown from Nathalie. They also make custom pasties but they're more expensive. The dancers have to wear them but the waitresses don't.”

“What?”

“Something to do with stage performing, from burlesque, I guess, but there was never any law about the rest of the staff. So some waitresses wear them and some don't and Sylvie always wore pasties.”

Ruth drank a little coffee and then picked up her cigarettes and said, “Well, if Bill saw her nearly naked in a bar he wouldn't have thought she was shy.”

“He would have found out if he'd tried to talk to her.”

“If she really was shy.”

“And if she spoke English.”

“What?”

Dougherty said, “English people think every French person in the province speaks English, but it's not true. If Sylvie had only recently moved here from the Gaspé chances are she didn't speak much English.”

“But the others did,” Ruth said.

“Did they?”

“Marielle Archambeault worked in a store in Place Ville-Marie, she'd need English for that, wouldn't she?”

“In PVM,” Dougherty said, “yeah. And the others were English.”

“This fits,” Ruth said. “It's possible he didn't even speak to Sylvie, he just pulled her into his car. Then as he progressed he spoke to the others.”

“Getting more personal.”

Dougherty thought for a second he saw Ruth smile a little, but she was looking very serious as she wrote in her notebook.

“The others were sexual deviants.”

“What?”

“Yes,” Ruth said, still writing, not looking up, “they may have been sex-cult fetish devotees, that would make it easier for Bill to talk to them, before he moved on to someone more … innocent.”

“Brenda Webber.”

Ruth stopped writing and looked up. “Yes.”

Dougherty said, “It could be.”

“You know what else?” Ruth said. “It could explain the biting, and the lack of biting.”

“How?”

“The pasties are glued on, aren't they?”

“I'm not sure. I guess so.”

“So if Sylvie had them on at work and there was still glue on her breasts and he tasted it … and then by Brenda Webber, who was closer to his ideal, closer to an innocent girl, then he didn't bite her.”

“You think Brenda was his ideal girl?”

“A representation of an ideal.” She looked at Dougherty then and said, “Well, I'm not sure yet, this is still early stages. But this will certainly be a fascinating interview when you catch him.”

Dougherty said, “Yeah.”

Ruth stood up and said, “You will catch him,” and Dougherty stood up and said, “I hope so.”

“Oh, you have to.”

Ruth started cleaning up the table and Dougherty was suddenly very tired, being up all night finally catching up. He said, “Okay, well, I've been on nights for a couple of weeks and I just finished a shift a few hours ago so I think I should get some sleep.”

Ruth said, “Sure, of course,” and walked him to the door.

But Dougherty rode the Métro back downtown, knowing he wasn't going to get any sleep. Not for a long time.

Five o'clock in the morning in the parade room at Station Ten, Detective Boisjoli stood in front of a dozen uniformed cops and pointed to a couple of eight-by-ten pictures thumbtacked to the cork board.

“These are the two Americans, consider them armed and dangerous.”

Dougherty was standing at the back of the room looking at a copy of the Canada-Wide Alert issued by the RCMP and he didn't see “armed and dangerous” on it anywhere. He saw smaller versions of the two pictures, of David Sylvan Fine and Leo Frederick Burt, and that they were wanted in the bombing of the Army Mathematics Research Center in the Sterling Building on the University of Wisconsin campus.

Boisjoli was saying, “We have information that both of the fugitives are here in Montreal. We have reliable intelligence among the draft-dodger community here.”

The Canada-Wide Alert said they may have been seen in Peterborough, Ontario — a lot closer to Toronto than Montreal — but if they were in Canada they could be anywhere.

“They killed one man with the bomb,” Boisjoli said.

Beside Dougherty another young cop in uniform said,
“Maudits hippies.”

The Americans in the pictures didn't look like ­hippies to Dougherty — they had short hair and deer-in-the-headlight looks on their faces. They looked about twelve years old.

“
Bon
,” Boisjoli said, “we'll get them while they're asleep.”

“We could go at noon,” one of the detectives said, “they'd still be asleep,” and the cops laughed on their way out.

Down the hill to St. Henri. A three-storey row house. Dougherty and a couple of other uniforms sent around back through the lane, past the shed to the back door. Wait a few seconds, the sound of the front door being busted open in the early morning silence. Bust open the back door.

“Okay, wakey-wakey, let's go!”

Boisjoli and the other detective followed uniform cops in through the front door. Dougherty stood by the back door and looked down the long hallway, watching the cops stream in the front and bang the walls with nightsticks.

“Everybody up, let's go!”

A bedroom door opened and a naked man stepped out into the hall, saying, “What the hell are you doing?”

He was grabbed right away, arms pulled behind his back, face slammed into the wall.

“Let go of him!” A woman, wrapped in a sheet, coming out of the bedroom was grabbed and shoved against the wall.

A cop pushed past them into the bedroom and said,
“Eille, une autre,”
then pushed another woman into the hall.

Another bedroom and two more people, a man and a woman, and they were all shoved down the hall into the living room.

Dougherty stayed in the kitchen. It was clean but cluttered. The table was too big for the room and there were too many chairs. Most of the cupboards had no doors and were filled with pasta and rice and big cans of beans and soup like a restaurant would have. There was a pot on the stove so big it covered two burners.

In the living room there was shouting about fugitives and lawyers and rights.

There were the usual posters thumbtacked to the walls — Che and Jimi. The apartment could have been anywhere from London to Paris to New York to Rio. There were local posters, too, announcing meetings of the Company of Young Canadians and the St. Henri Workers' Committee and concerts raising money for the Milton Park Defence Fund with Jesse Winchester at the Back Door. On the front of the fridge was a smaller poster that Dougherty had seen in many apartments he'd been in, it was probably all over the world, too. It was a sunset with words over it: “I do my thing, you do your thing. I am not in this world to live up to your expectations. You are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it's beautiful.”

This time, though, Dougherty noticed one more line on the end that he didn't remember seeing on any of the other posters: “If not, it can't be helped.” That didn't sound like these activists — can't be helped — they were always talking about helping someone, changing something.

A cop came out of the bedroom, dropped a ­pamphlet on the table, saying, “
'ostie
, every fucking time,” and walked back towards the living room.

Dougherty picked up the pamphlet and the words across the front were familiar:
“Stratégie révolutionnaire et rôle d'avant-garde.”
He'd seen it as often as the “I do my thing” poster.

The pamphlet was only ten pages and talked about how a revolution was fought in three stages. The first, radicalization of spontaneous agitation, was the demonstrations, occupations, strikes and bombs, and Dougherty figured Montreal had all of those covered in the past year. The second stage was organizing the masses for armed uprising, and then it said the third stage, the revolution, would be militarily and politically inseparable as in Vietnam.

Dougherty thought, Shit, Vietnam, isn't that what these people are trying to avoid? Other parts of the pamphlet talked about how they needed to be more like the Black Panthers and “prepare themselves for armed combat, for urban guerilla warfare.”

The other cop came back into the kitchen, holding a girl by the arm. “They're not here.”

For a moment Dougherty thought about saying something about that “reliable intelligence in the draft-dodger community,” but it passed and he said, “So what are you doing?”

“We're taking these ones in.”

“What for?”

“Boisjoli says he'll think of something on the way.”

The cop let go of the girl, and Dougherty realized that meant she was all his. She'd gotten dressed, pulled on some jeans and a blouse, but she was barefoot and her hair was all over her face. “Okay, let's go,” Dougherty said.