A Little More Free Page 11

  “The Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada.”

  Parker stood up and walked into a kind of enclosed back porch and came out and dropped a book on the table. Mimeographed pages stapled together, really, with a yellow cover that had a map of Canada on it that looked like it was drawn by a kid. Along the bottom it said, Summer 1970 — Fifth Edition. Dougherty recognized the book: he’d seen a few when he’d been involved in apartment raids over the years, mostly looking for Black Panthers and other American radicals.

  “Sold a hundred thousand of these,” Parker said.

  Dougherty wondered if that’s what bought this farm but he didn’t say anything, he just kept watching Carpentier being understanding and developing a relationship, as the detective manual said. Dougherty smirked a little then, thinking, We’ve all got our manuals.

  Carpentier said, “And David helped the deserters?”

  “He helped everyone,” Penny said. “But he was good with the deserters.”

  “Can you think of anyone who might have known where David was last Saturday?”

  “I really can’t,” Parker said. “I’m sorry.”

  Carpentier stood up then and took a step towards the stove, holding out an empty mug and saying, “Thank you for the tea.” Dougherty hadn’t even touched his and he hadn’t noticed Carpentier drink his.

  Penny took the mug and said, “We didn’t have to talk to you.”

  Carpentier said, “Bien sûr.”

  Parker and Penny both came out of the farmhouse and stood by the door and as Dougherty walked around the Bonneville to get into the passenger seat he looked at them — at Penny — and she was staring at him.

  Parker said, “Give my regards to David’s mother, will you?” and Carpentier said, “Yes, of course.”

  But something about the way Penny was looking at him made Dougherty uncomfortable.

  He got into the car, and they drove in silence for a while, and then Dougherty said, “So, what now?”

  Carpentier said, “I don’t know, that’s about all we had.”

  “His mother didn’t know anyone else?”

  “Who?”

  Dougherty said, “Mrs. Murray, David’s mother.”

  “Oh,” Carpentier said, “no, this was all she had, the farm.”

  “And this guy’s name, Scott Parker.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  Dougherty said okay, and silence hung in the car for a moment. Then Carpentier said, “I’m sorry to drag you out here on your day off,” and Dougherty said, “No problem.”

  Carpentier said, “Saturday night coming up, you have plans?”

  “I have a date,” Dougherty said.

  “With that woman from Milton Park?”

  “No, with a stewardess.”

  “Oh,” Carpentier said, “that’s good, a stewardess.”

  But as they turned off Dunvegan Road and onto the Trans-Canada Highway Dougherty couldn’t help but think that Carpentier was being too chatty, too upbeat. Too quick to want to move on and talk about something else.

  And that look Penny had given him, Dougherty could still feel it.

  Now he was thinking it could have been the RCMP who tipped them about the farm. It could have been the CIA.

  Anything seemed possible.

  * * *

  The restaurant was called The Place for Steak on highway 20 in Pointe Claire. It was just as expensive as a place downtown would’ve been and it had Linton Garner on the piano in the lounge, but it was suburban all the way. Dougherty and Debbie Rankin were the youngest people in the place by ten years, it was all guys still in their suits from the office and housewives in dresses worrying about the babysitter back home.

  When they’d ordered their steaks and fried mushrooms and mashed potatoes and house salads with French dressing, Dougherty said, “So, did you grow up on the west island?”

  “Oh, no, I’m from Toronto.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  She looked at him over the top of her highball glass, rye and ginger, and said, “It’s exciting, Montreal. It’s where the action is.”

  “You like the action?”

  “Don’t you?”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, I do.” It was why he’d joined the police, to get in on the action.

  “I was sixteen when we came here for Expo. It was just a great party.”

  “It was,” Dougherty said, quickly figuring out this meant Debbie was twenty-one, a couple of years younger than he’d thought. Then he said, “I worked there.”

  “At the Canadian pavilion or Quebec?”

  “Not during the fair, before. I worked construction. The American pavilion, the dome.”

  “I remember going through that on the monorail, what was it called?”

  “Minirail.”

  “That’s it. It was so fun.”

  “The Minirail?”

  She smiled and almost winked at him, saying, “There was fun everywhere.”

  “So you moved to Montreal.”

  “I couldn’t wait to get out of the house. Tell the truth, I ran away a couple of times when I was still in high school.”

  Dougherty made an exaggerated surprised face and Debbie laughed.

  “I know? Hard to believe, eh? A real wild child.”

  “But you’re all grown up now?”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  They ate their steaks, skipped dessert and went back to Debbie’s new apartment in Dorval. As Dougherty pulled his Mustang into the parking lot behind the building someone yelled from a balcony, “Cool car,” and when he got out a woman yelled, “It’s Steve McQueen.”

  Dougherty looked over the roof of the car to Debbie and said, “Well, it’s his car, anyway.” and she said, “What do you mean?”

  “Bullitt.”

  As they walked towards the building, there was more yelling from the balcony and Dougherty said, “There’s a party going on,” and Debbie said, “There’s always a party going on,” and she didn’t seem unhappy about it.

  The Swingles building, as the newspaper ad called it, was actually two four-storey buildings side-by-side with an outdoor pool between them. It was a warm evening for the middle of September and there were a few people standing around the pool with drinks in their hands but no one was in the water.

  Debbie took Dougherty’s hand and led him into one of the buildings through the back door, which was propped open with a brick, and up a flight of stairs to the second floor. Music was coming out of at least two apartments they passed — not the same music, but the same kind of music, anyway, lots of guitars and harmonies — and when Debbie opened an apartment door further down the hall, music was blasting there, too.

  As soon as they were inside Debbie disappeared into the crowd.

  For a moment Dougherty stood by the kitchen looking over the apartment and thinking how different everybody was from the people he’d talked to at the farm earlier. They were all in their twenties, but these people were dressed up — the women had their hair done in salons; they were wearing makeup and bright nail polish.

  Really, Dougherty was thinking how different they all were from Judy MacIntyre in her workboots back in Milton Park.

  Then Dougherty was wondering how he could be feeling so out of place in both places, both extremes. A woman came up to him with a drink in one hand and an unlit cigarette in the other and he got out his lighter. She smiled and said, “I’m Karen,” and he said, “I’m Eddie.”

  Karen leaned in to get her cigarette lit and then tilted her head back and blew smoke at the ceiling saying, “Do you fly for United?”

  Dougherty said, “No.”

  “There’s some kind of layover, a lot of people here are from United. Hey, you don’t have a drink!” She took his hand and pulled him into the crowded kitchen, and a
minute later Dougherty was drinking a rum and Coke and talking to a different woman.

  After a little while, he went looking for Debbie and saw her sitting on the arm of the couch, waving her cigarette as she talked but somehow as he was making his way through the crowd he ended up on the balcony with a few other people.

  One of the guys was saying, “Vegas is great: all the lights coming in, terrific airport.”

  “Better than L.A., that’s for sure.”

  “Do you fly for United?”

  Dougherty said, “No, I’m not a pilot.” The guy who’d asked the question was a little older, probably in his late thirties, and then he realized that most of the men at the party looked to be in their thirties. They could be young executives.

  The guy said, “What’re you doing here then?” and the other people on the balcony laughed and Dougherty said, “I came with Debbie. This is her apartment, isn’t it?”

  A woman said, “She moves fast,” and one of the other guys said, “You’re telling me,” and everyone laughed again.

  “I’m Frank.” He held out his hand and Dougherty shook it.

  “Eddie Dougherty.”

  “Which airline?”

  Dougherty said, “I don’t work for an airline,” and now he was enjoying the fact none of these people could tell he was a cop, he was starting to see the benefit of not feeling like he fit in with any single group of people, maybe he could fit in a little with all of them.

  “So,” Frank said, “what do you do?”

  A woman screamed inside the apartment, and Dougherty stepped forward towards the sliding door: a woman he’d seen dancing on the coffee table earlier looked like she’d slipped, but a guy caught her and was twirling her around, and now everyone was laughing.

  Dougherty didn’t see Debbie in the living room.

  Frank said, “That was fast, you a fireman?”

  Dougherty said, “Cop.”

  “Oh, the boys in blue. Dorval?”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “Montreal.”

  “The big time.”

  Dougherty shrugged and one of the other guys on the balcony said, “You carry a gun?”

  “When I’m working.”

  One of the women said, “Are you working now?”

  There was some giggling and a couple of women were looking at Dougherty and he felt the place tense up a bit, like when he was squaring off against some drunk in a bar.

  Frank made a kind of dismissive smirk and said, “You ever use it?”

  Dougherty looked at him, feeling it was a challenge but not wanting to get into anything, and said, “Not yet.”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  As much as he didn’t want to get into anything, Dougherty also didn’t want to let it go. If Debbie had been on the balcony he would have said something for sure but as it was he just kept looking at Frank, daring him to say something more.

  But then Frank laughed and said, “Jerry didn’t need a gun, just an axe,” and turned a little and raised his glass to the guy, Jerry, who raised his own back.

  Dougherty figured there was a story coming, something to show all these women how Frank and Jerry were the toughest guys, but he didn’t feel any need to ask for it, thinking he may not be a detective yet, but he could tell when a perp wanted to talk.

  A woman next to Dougherty said to Jerry, “You were on eight-one-two, weren’t you?”

  Frank said, “He sure was.”

  It was crowded on the balcony and the woman was leaning on Dougherty’s arm, so he turned a little to let her more into the conversation and she leaned a little more into him.

  “Calgary to Toronto,” Frank said. He looked at Dougherty and said, “This was last year, November — you probably heard about it.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Hijacking.” Frank said it seriously, gravely, nodding and looking into his drink and Dougherty said, “Seems like there’s one every week.”

  Frank looked up quickly, eyes narrowed, but then he broke into a smile and said, “Yeah there is. This one, Jerry was the captain.” He motioned a little towards Jerry but kept looking at Dougherty. “About a half hour out of Calgary a young guy, about your age, comes up to the cockpit, he’s got a sawed off shotgun and ten sticks of dynamite. You ever see a stick of dynamite up close?”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “I have.”

  Frank looked at him for a second, but Dougherty knew he wouldn’t ask about it.

  “Guy said he was with the IRA,” Frank said. “Wanted to go to Belfast and be a freedom fighter. Oh, and he wanted a million and a half dollars.”

  Dougherty said, “Figures,” thinking about the time he saw all the dynamite a couple years earlier when the freedom fighters in Montreal wanted a half a million dollars in gold and a trip to Cuba. “They always want money.”

  “They do,” Frank said. Then he turned around and looked at Jerry and said, “And what did good old Air Canada manage to put together, a hundred grand?”

  “Fifty.”

  “Fifty grand,” Frank said. “But that was good enough for this kid, so they land in Great Falls, Montana, and pick up the money and a navigator to get them to Ireland.”

  “The kid,” Jerry said, “tells me to go down to three thousand feet. He’s got a package, brown paper wrapped up with twine.”

  Frank said, “He’s got a plan. He tells Annabelle,” he looked around and said, “I thought she was here?”

  “She will be,” one of the women said, “she lands later.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “So, this kid, he takes Annabelle to the emergency exit and says, ‘open it.’ Jerry goes to see what’s going on. The kid tells him he’s taking the money and he’s jumping. He starts to unwrap the package he’s got.”

  “But it’s tied too tight.”

  Jerry and Frank were both starting to laugh, and Dougherty was getting the feeling that he was the only one who hadn’t heard the story but no one was going to interrupt.

  “The twine around the package, it’s tied too tight,” Frank said, “he can’t get it off. So Jerry here says to the kid, ‘how about this?’ and holds up the fire axe. And the kid looks at him and thinks he’s helping, so he puts down the shotgun, and when he looks up again … pow, right in the head with axe.”

  And everyone on the balcony laughed.

  Then the woman leaning on Dougherty said, “Did you kill him?”

  Jerry said, “Naw, but there was a lot of blood, wow, I didn’t expect so much.”

  “You should’ve killed him,” Frank said. “He’s probably out now.” He looked at Dougherty and said, “Right? All these left-wing judges.”

  “I don’t know,” Dougherty said. “But I guess that’s where D.B. Cooper got the idea.”

  Frank laughed and said, “There’s no way that guy survived the jump.”

  A woman said, “But they haven’t found him,” and Frank said, “They’ll find his body someday.”

  The tension was gone on the balcony then and Dougherty went back into the apartment looking for Debbie. He asked a couple of people if they knew where she was but no one did.

  He felt like he could stay, he might even get lucky with one of these women in the Swingles building, but Dougherty slipped out without anyone noticing.

  Driving back into Montreal he was thinking that being able to blend in with lots of different groups would sure help with the surveillance and undercover and lots of other police work but it might not be the best way to live his life.

  Not that he had much say in the matter.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  A woman leaned a sign, cardboard nailed to a hockey stick, against the wall. The hand-painted letters said, No More Craters in Vietnam and No More Demolition in Milton Park.

  Dougherty said, “What’s the connection?” and the w
oman said, “No connection, just all part of the same thinking.”

  She held the door, the yellow door, but Dougherty put his hand on it and said, “After you.”

  The woman smiled and said, “You cops are so polite,” and Dougherty started to say, How do you know, but he stopped when she said, “Oh, come on in.”

  He followed her into the club.

  Sunday night, just after eight, and the place was starting to fill up. Carpentier had called Dougherty a few hours earlier and told him that David Murray’s friends were going to have a wake for him and Dougherty should attend.

  Now he was standing by the back wall of the Yellow Door Coffee House looking at all the people, probably fifty of them, all about Dougherty’s age but seeming so different from him. They didn’t all have long hair and they weren’t all young but they were comfortable in the surroundings and Dougherty wasn’t.

  He was hoping it didn’t show when the woman he’d held the door for came up and stood beside him and said, “If you’re going to stand here like this you might as well have worn your uniform.”

  “I have to put it in the laundry sometime.”

  “You don’t have more than one?”

  There was a microphone set up at one end of the room. There wasn’t really a stage, but there was a piano and a little open space and now a couple of guys were trying to get everyone’s attention. One guy had a guitar and he started to strum and then both guys leaned up to the mike and sang, “In this dirty old part of the city,” and the whole place cheered and sang along with the next line, “Where the sun refused to shine.”

  Dougherty hadn’t recognize the song without the bass line intro but he was almost singing along when they got to, “We gotta get out of this place, if it’s the last thing we ever do.”

  He’d never heard it as a folk song. But every bar band he’d ever heard had mangled it. This was the first time that Dougherty really heard the words about watching his father’s hair turn grey, working and slaving his life away and how I’ve been working, too, babe, every night and every day. On the job almost ten years and now those words meant more than the part about the girl being so young and pretty.