Black Rock Read online

  The kid’s friends started making fun of him, one kid said something in Italian and Giovani laughed, so Dougherty put on a serious look and said, “Hey, I know where you live,” then smiled when the kids all looked scared. Dougherty thanked Giovani again and watched as they returned to the schoolyard and their game.

  For the first time in three years there was no violence at the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade. There were just six floats, nothing like the elaborate parades of previous years. The route went through the east end only, from Laurier Park down St. Denis and into Old Montreal, no more going along Sherbrooke Street or St. Catherine, but there was a huge party all the way, thousands lining the streets and having a good time.

  Dougherty finished his shift just after dinner and went down to Old Montreal in time to see the parade arrive, followed by a crowd of people calling themselves Chevaliers de l’Indépendence chanting the usual separatist slogans and one that went, “Québec dans les rues,” but it didn’t really catch on. There were half a dozen motorcycle cops between the parade and the crowd following and at first Dougherty didn’t think that would be nearly enough. But the end of the parade was a bunch of kids with Quebec flags and as people filled up Place Jacques-Cartier just down the street from City Hall and police HQ, it was just a party. There were no riot cops anywhere and the cops who were on duty looked pretty relaxed.

  There was rock music and fiddle music and Dougherty was pretty sure he heard country music in some of the bars, and he saw women going in and out of the taverns that were supposed to be for men-only but no one complained. It was like Mardi Gras.

  So Dougherty walked back to Bonsecours and looked around police HQ, but he didn’t see anyone — Rozovsky wasn’t there and the homicide office was empty. But across the street the backroom of the restaurant was full of cops, detectives mostly, and Dougherty found Carpentier in a party mood, knocking back shots and beers and saying, “Maudits Anglais,” with a big smile when he saw Dougherty squeezing his way through the crowd.

  “It’s a party.”

  “It is,” Carpentier said, “and just a party,” and he held up his shot glass for a toast.

  Dougherty held up his empty hand and Carpentier drank the shot and said, “Bon, bière,” and waved until the waitress saw him. He held up two fingers and then shook his head and held up four fingers.

  “So, you don’t work the parade?”

  Dougherty said, “No, there was no overtime, no riot squad, nothing. Looks like it worked.”

  “Yes, looks like it.”

  Just before midnight, it started to rain and Old Montreal went from overflowing with people to pretty much emptied out in a few minutes. Even from the backroom of the restaurant across the street from police HQ the cops could sense that the party had broken up peacefully, and not too long after that the restaurant pretty much emptied out, too.

  When it was quiet Dougherty said to Carpentier, “I think I have the car.”

  “What car?”

  Dougherty pulled the evidence picture out of his pocket and unfolded it. “The Lincoln the kids saw, the one on the Point and one in LaSalle.”

  “That’s good, whose is it?”

  Dougherty shook his head. “I don’t know who it belongs to, I just know that it’s either a 1966 or 1967 Lincoln Continental.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s white with a black roof. The girl in the Point, Gail Murphy, she saw it again on the weekend.”

  “Saw it where?”

  “On Wellington Street in the Point.”

  Carpentier shrugged, and Dougherty said, “It could have been coming from the Arawana Tavern.”

  “Oh yeah,” Carpentier said, “by the Canada Packers and the CN yard.” He frowned. “So, maybe it’s just a guy has a beer after work.”

  “That’s the tavern where the Higgins Brothers hang out, where I saw my contact for the hash.”

  “So?”

  “So, there’s a drug connection here. Brenda Webber was going to buy hash and one of the women killed downtown was known to use drugs.”

  “Shirley Audette,” Carpentier said. “But I think it was pills, that’s not the same.”

  “But it’s something. It’s possible this guy driving the Lincoln gets his drugs from one of the Higgins brothers. They may know him.”

  Carpentier said, “But this guy with the Lincoln, he may not be Bill. He may not have anything to do with the murders.”

  Dougherty agreed. “Maybe not, but we should talk to him,” and Carpentier nodded and said, “Yeah, sure, but Desjardins and the homicide guys, they think it’s about the sex, not the drugs. None of the other women were on drugs.”

  “We should still talk to him.”

  “Get one of these Higgins brothers to tell us who he is?”

  “A few of us go down to the Arawana, we ask nice,” Dougherty said.

  Carpentier nodded and looked at the nightstick on Dougherty’s gun belt. “Use a little convincing if you have to?”

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s not enough.”

  “What?”

  “Look,” Carpentier said, “the mob guys, they’re just starting to get past the Italians and to these Point Boys — you heard Ste. Marie. Now he’s on the anti-terrorist squad and so are the homicide guys. Nobody has time to chase this wild goose.”

  “But this could be Bill.”

  “Yeah,” Carpentier said, “but probably not. You go busting in there now with nothing, you screw up some narcotics investigation.”

  “Is there one going on now?”

  Carpentier shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Is there even a homicide investigation going on?”

  “Watch it, kid.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m just …”

  “We all are,” Carpentier said, looking right at Dougherty. “But we do what we have to do.”

  “Okay,” Dougherty said, “so what are we doing?”

  Carpentier drank some beer. “We followed everything, we interviewed more than a hundred people, we talk to every informant, we ran over a thousand tips that got phoned in.”

  “So now we have this car.”

  “Sure, yeah, but so far the only connection is to Brenda Webber.”

  Dougherty nodded.

  “So,” Carpentier said, “see if you can find a connection to the others.”

  “How?”

  Carpentier shrugged. “Ask around, same as you did in the Point and Ville LaSalle.” He motioned to the picture Dougherty was still holding.

  “So,” Dougherty said, “it’s not worth the homicide detective’s time but my time is okay?”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  Dougherty leaned back in his chair and picked up his beer. Carpentier looked a little apologetic and said, “If things were normal, if we weren’t all on this task force, if we had more guys.”

  “But we don’t.”

  “So we have to do what we can.”

  “What’s my sergeant going to say if I spend all my time working on this?”

  “Delisle?” Carpentier laughed a little. “You’ll be the smallest problem he has.”

  “I’m serious,” Dougherty said. “Today during my shift I drove out to LaSalle. If I get caught doing that what do I say? Do I tell them you sent me?”

  “I’m not your boss.”

  “Exactly.”

  “What do you want me to say, Dog-eh-dee, don’t do it? You’ll do it anyway. Look, if you do get disciplined that’s good.”

  “It’s good to get disciplined?”

  “Yeah, sure it is. How’s the brass going to know your name otherwise?”

  “That’s not how I want them to know me.”

  “It doesn’t matter how, trust me.”

  Dougherty looked at the detective closely and saw there was
a story there, but he knew this wasn’t the time.

  “Look, ask around, see if anyone saw the car near any of the apartments of the other murder victims, that’s all. Just keep the picture with you and ask around when you get a chance.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay, when I get a chance.”

  The next day Dougherty started his day shift with the ­picture of the 1966 Lincoln Continental in his pocket, but before he got a chance to show it to anyone, there was an “all cars” call on the radio, and he raced to St. Denis, where a bank was robbed and shots had been fired.

  By the time Dougherty got to the Banque Canadienne Nationale branch on the corner of St. Denis and Roy there were already half a dozen squad cars and at least a dozen uniformed cops on the scene.

  And two cops had been shot.

  The ambulance arrived behind Dougherty, and he started telling people to move out of the way and led the two guys with the stretcher through.

  There was a body on the sidewalk with a huge pool of blood flowing into the street and a few feet away a uniformed cop sat leaning against the brick wall of the bank with blood streaming from his leg.

  Dougherty recognized him. “Hey Jacques, you okay?”

  Looking up the cop said, “Fuck, Dog-eh-dee, it fucken hurts.”

  “Yeah, I bet it does. What happened?”

  The ambulance guys were on him then, and Dougherty turned and saw the other uniformed cop. “Holy shit, Maurice, you, too?” Maurice Brisbois, Jacques LeBlanc and Dougherty had all gone through police training together. They were all twenty-four years old and had all worked out of Station Four as rookies.

  Now Brisbois was holding his handkerchief on his arm just below the short sleeve of his uniform shirt, but blood was dripping down his forearm. He shook his head and said, “We got a call, a teller managed to push the alarm. These two fucks came in with guns. They punched the manager — she’s over there.”

  Dougherty said, “You went in?”

  “We got here, we parked around the corner so they wouldn’t see us and we came up to the door, but we couldn’t see inside. Jacques went to the other side and they came out at that moment.”

  “He didn’t see them?”

  “You know how the witness, they all say it happen so fast?” Brisbois said, “Well, it fucking does happen fast.”

  Dougherty looked at the dead man on the sidewalk and said, “Nice shot,” and Brisbois said, “They ran out and started shooting before we even saw them, bastards.”

  “You got them both?”

  Brisbois motioned further down the sidewalk, in front of a deli, where the other bank robber was still face down with his hands cuffed behind his back. “I didn’t even see Jacques was hit until I had the cuffs on this one.”

  The ambulance guys had LeBlanc loaded on the stretcher and started to lift it. “Quel hôpital?” Dougherty said, and one of the ambulance guys said, “St. Luc.”

  Dougherty looked at Brisbois and said, “You better go, too.”

  “I’m okay.”

  “You better go.”

  Brisbois said okay and got into the back of the ambulance with LeBlanc and one of the paramedics.

  Dougherty worked the scene for a few hours. They found a car in the lane behind the bank with a blanket, a change of clothes for both men and a plastic bag of surgical gloves. They later found out that both robbers had been in prison until a few months before, the dead one for armed robbery, and their parole was scheduled to last well into the 1980s.

  One of the older cops on the scene said, “It’s good to have some normal fucking crime in this city.”

  “Bank robbery capital of North America,” Dougherty said, and the older cop said, “You got that right,” and laughed.

  Dougherty drove the squad car Brisbois and LeBlanc had been driving back to Station Four and waited around for a while before getting a ride back to the scene. It was late afternoon by then, almost time for Dougherty to punch out, and except for the bank still being closed, the street now looked like nothing had happened.

  A few of the cops were planning to go to the hospital and take Brisbois and LeBlanc out for a beer. They invited Dougherty along, so he drove his squad car back to Station Ten and took the Métro back to St. Denis Street.

  It was two in the morning when Dougherty stumbled back to his apartment, and he was still a little drunk and a lot hungover when he checked in for his shift at eight.

  In the afternoon he managed to show the picture of the Lincoln to a few people who lived in the same apartment building as Jean Way but no one recognized the car, so after work Dougherty checked on LeBlanc in the St. Luc hospital — they’d taken the bullet out of his thigh and told him he’d never play for the Canadiens, not even goalie, but he’d be back at work in a week. Then Dougherty showed the picture around Marielle Archambeault’s apartment and no one recognized it there, either.

  But he did run into Ruth Garber.

  chapter

  sixteen

  She said, “Are you working here now?”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “I’m off-duty.”

  Ruth looked him up and down and Dougherty said, “I haven’t changed yet, I was visiting someone in the hospital — a cop was shot during a bank hold-up, did you hear?”

  They were standing on the sidewalk on Ontario Street, Ruth coming out of a dépanneur with a small bag of groceries and she said, “I heard something about it. One of the robbers was killed?”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, but not before he got off quite a few shots. Both cops were hit, actually, but LeBlanc took one right in the thigh, lost a lot of blood.”

  “You know him?”

  “Both of them, yeah. We went through training together and we all worked out of Station Four before I got transferred. He’s going to be okay.”

  “That’s good.”

  Dougherty said yeah, and then didn’t know what to say. Ruth was looking at him the way she always did, open, expectant, waiting for something, but he had no idea what. He couldn’t believe this was a woman he’d been intimate with and then just walked away from, and now they’d run into each other and were chatting as if they were acquaintances from work or something.

  But he felt something, for sure.

  He motioned to the groceries. “Looks like you haven’t eaten yet, you want to have dinner?”

  “Now?”

  “Sure.” He looked around and saw a little Italian restaurant across the street and said, “That looks okay.”

  “I’ve never eaten there.”

  “So let’s try it.”

  “I have to put some of these things in the fridge.” And that was it, they walked around the corner and Dougherty waited on the street while Ruth went up the wrought-iron stairs to the second floor and disappeared inside. A moment later she was back and they walked over to the restaurant.

  Dougherty ordered the rigatoni with meat sauce and Ruth had lasagna, and they were both a little surprised how good it was.

  Over coffee Dougherty showed Ruth the picture of the Lincoln and asked her if she’d seen it around.

  “This is about the Bill murders?”

  Dougherty said, “Yes, I’m showing it to people around all the victims’ apartments.”

  Ruth said, “Why didn’t you tell me about this?”

  “Tell you?”

  “This is the car the murderer is driving?”

  Dougherty said, “No, well, we don’t know. I think it might be.”

  “Dr. Pendleton is supposed to be kept up to date with this investigation.”

  “This isn’t officially the investigation.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know that Detective Carpentier is on the ­anti-

  ­terrorism squad now?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. Who’s taken over the investigation?”


  Dougherty drank some coffee. “The rest of the homi­cide squad, I guess, but Carpentier still has me running around. I found a kid near where Brenda was last seen and another kid near where the body was found who both think they saw this kind of car around the right time.”

  “This is important.”

  “Maybe, but probably not. Carpentier didn’t think it was enough to get a homicide detective chasing it all over town.”

  “But you’re doing it.”

  “Yeah.” Dougherty looked at the picture for a moment and then he looked at Ruth and said, “Have you seen a car like this around here?”

  “No, like I said, I didn’t live here when Marielle Archambeault was killed.”

  At the sound of the name Dougherty glanced around the restaurant but there was only one other couple and they were deep in conversation. Their waiter was now sitting in a booth by the cash, reading the paper, and Dougherty didn’t see anyone else in the place.

  “I was thinking about what you said about that guy who killed the woman in New York.” He couldn’t remember the name and he was looking at Ruth for help, but she was just looking back at him. “The one where everyone just watched.”

  “Kitty Genovese.”

  “Right. I was thinking about what you said about the guy who killed her just driving around all night, driving for hours.”

  “That’s what he said, that he just drove for hours.”

  “Well, I thought maybe this guy could have done that, too. Brenda Webber’s body was found near an exit off the 2-20, the expressway through town. Some of it used to be the old highway 2, that’s what the name means, it’s highway 2 and the number 20 expressway. The Décarie is the number 15, the Bonaventure Expressway is the number 10, like that.”

  Ruth said, “Oh, I see. I don’t drive.”

  “And Sylvie Berubé’s body was found in the east end, near the exit for the Ville-Marie Tunnel.”

  “So?”

  “Well, it’s the same road, really — it’s the 2-20.”

  “And you think Bill may have been driving around.”

  Dougherty said, “Maybe,” but now that he was hearing it out loud it didn’t seem important or unusual enough to mention.