One or the Other Page 19

  Dougherty looked at his watch and said, “What time will they be done?”

  “Supposed to be by seven,” LeBlanc said. “Doesn’t look like they’ll make it.”

  It was nine when the destruction finally finished and the last of the dump trucks headed to wherever they were going. Dougherty dropped LeBlanc off at the Métro and then drove to Station Ten to drop off the car.

  When he walked in, Delisle said, “You got a phone call from downtown.” He held out a small piece of pink paper.

  “Who was it?”

  “I’m not your receptionist.”

  Dougherty took the paper; it had the words While You Were Out across the top and boxes to check off for telephoned, came to see you, returned your call and a few other options. Delisle had just written a phone number across the bottom, and Dougherty was thinking it sure looked like he was a receptionist, but he didn’t say anything. He dialled the number and waited while it rang.

  “Bureau des homicides, bonjour.”

  Dougherty spoke French, using his official rank, “Constable Dougherty. There was a call for me?”

  “Oh yes,” the woman’s voice said, “just a minute.” There was a pause, and Dougherty could hear papers being moved around on a desk, and then, “We received a call from the Cornwall Police in Ontario. You were looking for a man named Martin Comptois.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  The homicide receptionist gave him the phone number and the cop’s name in Cornwall and then said, “Constable?”

  Dougherty said, “Yes?”

  “Well, it’s just they asked for Detective Dougherty.”

  “Yeah, it’s not official yet.”

  “I see.”

  “Thanks.” He hung up and dialled the number she had given him. When it was answered he spoke in English, saying, “This is Detective Dougherty in Montreal. I’m looking for Sergeant Meekins.”

  He was put on hold and waited a few minutes and then a man came on and said, “Meekins.”

  “Yeah, this is Dougherty in Montreal. You picked up a guy named Martin Comptois?”

  “Couple days ago. We just finished processing and we saw you were looking for him.”

  “I want to talk to him,” Dougherty said. “Will you be holding him for a while?”

  “He gets arraigned tomorrow, then out on bail if someone pays it. Otherwise he gets transferred to Kingston until his trial. What do you want to talk to him about?”

  “He might have been a witness to a murder, a double murder.”

  “Shit. Okay, well he’ll be here until tomorrow.”

  “What did you pick him up for?”

  “He was on a boat that was smuggling. We get a lot of that through the Indian reserve here. We’re hoping to get more out of him, but he’s not saying anything.”

  “He have a lot of dope?”

  “Not as much as we were hoping for — now it’s going to be a conspiracy to import. It’s getting complicated.”

  “If I drive out there today can I talk to him?”

  “Sure,” Meekins said, “he’s in our cells until he goes to court tomorrow.”

  Dougherty thanked him and hung up. He’d been planning to go home and get some sleep and then go to dinner with Judy, show her the ring and propose. He wasn’t thinking about finding the right place or the right time, now he was just thinking about getting it done. Of course, that made it more likely she would say no, but then he could say he asked. Then he laughed a little, thinking, As if that would satisfy my mother.

  “Hey, Delisle, how far is Cornwall?”

  “Couple hours, why?”

  “Can I take a car?”

  “You’re not on duty.”

  “It’s official business.”

  Delisle had come down to the end of the dispatch desk, and he tilted his head to one side and said, “Really? Official?”

  “Yes.”

  “Keep the radio on, in case we need the car back.”

  * * *

  Dougherty kept the radio on, but he also cranked up the AM, top forty from CKGM, heard all about getting some afternoon delight and how moonlight feels right and knockin’ on heaven’s door and all about the Olympic breakfasts they would be broadcasting every day during the Games. The morning man, Ralph Lockwood, was going to be the host, and Dougherty imagined there would be plenty of practical jokes and prank phone calls to delegates from countries where they don’t speak English.

  The Dylan song made Dougherty think of the concert he and Judy went to at the Forum a couple of years back. They were still feeling out the relationship, and Bob Dylan at the Forum seemed like a kind of compromise: it was the folk music Judy liked, but it wasn’t at the Yellow Door or some really intimate place, it was sixteen thousand people at the Forum, where Dougherty figured he could just blend in. He knew Dylan’s songs, the famous ones, but he wasn’t really a fan. And then it was a strange evening because he’d enjoyed the concert as much as Judy had. Dougherty liked the part with just the Band the best, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Stage Fright” and even most of the Dylan songs when the Band was onstage with him, and he liked to see Judy singing along to songs when he couldn’t make out the words. It was a cold January night, and they’d gone back to his place, a short walk from the Forum. Now that he was thinking about it, Dougherty realized it wasn’t really a compromise or finding common ground or something that sounded like the Paris Peace Talks, it was what couples did, they found things to do together.

  Heading west on the expressway, he passed the factories and breweries in LaSalle and then the rows of apartment buildings in Lachine and then the backs of post-war detached houses in Dorval. The houses got bigger and farther apart from one another in Beaconsfield and then Dougherty could see only the trees in Baie-D’Urfé, the houses on big lots too far from the highway.

  Dougherty was thinking it had gone without saying that after the war people had wanted to move farther from the city, away from the noise and congestion where they were stacked on each other in three- and four-storey flats, out to where there could be a little space between houses and some grass under people’s feet. It’s what Judy’s parents had done, what his own parents had done, but it was the last place Judy wanted to live.

  Then he crossed the bridge off the island of Montreal and an hour and a half later he was in Cornwall.

  It was a small town on the St. Lawrence River and on the other side was New York state. Driving along Montreal Road, Dougherty had the window down and the place smelled like sulphur and something burning. The big industry was pulp and paper; there was a huge Domtar plant and a lot of smaller factories.

  He found the police station, a nearly brand new four-storey brick-and-concrete building that also had cells in the back. The receptionist at the front desk called upstairs, and Sergeant Meekins came down to the lobby a few minutes later.

  Meekins was older than Dougherty, probably mid- to late thirties, and he had a thick head of hair, long sideburns and a moustache. He wore a light blue suit with a checkered tie and Dougherty thought he could as easily be selling furniture as booking criminals.

  He held out his hand and said, “How was the drive?”

  Dougherty shook hands and said, “Fine.”

  “It’s okay coming this way,” Meekins said, “but I don’t like going back — too much traffic when you hit Montreal.”

  “I guess I’m used to it.”

  “Don’t know how you can get used to sitting in traffic. Anyway,” he started walking towards the big winding wooden staircase and said, “what do you want to talk to Comptois about?”

  Dougherty followed and they walked up to the second floor. He said, “Couple of kids were killed, strangled and thrown off a bridge.”

  “Holy shit,” Meekins said, “that’s huge.” He stopped and looked back at Dougherty. “You’re here by
yourself?”

  “Comptois may be a witness, that’s all.”

  “All right, well, I’ll get him brought up to an interview room.”

  Meekins turned into his office and sat down behind the desk, picking up the phone and saying, “Yeah, bring him up now.” He hung up and said to Dougherty, “Just be a minute.”

  Dougherty nodded. He was still standing by the office door and he didn’t sit down. “So, he was smuggling dope?”

  “He was with some guys, yeah.” Meekins motioned out the window and said, “We’ve still got jurisdiction for the island, but it’s an Indian reserve. It’s right on the border so there’s a lot of smuggling.”

  “What do you mean you’ve still got jurisdiction?”

  “It’s all changing,” Meekins said, “OPP taking over, some kind of joint taskforce with New York and the Mohawks. You don’t want to know.”

  “No, I don’t,” Dougherty said, last thing he wanted to talk about was more politics. “The other guys, were they Americans?”

  “No, locals. Pretty junior members in the local club. Comptois was the only one from out of town. He was probably here to pick up the drugs and take them back to Montreal.”

  “They bikers?”

  Meekins shrugged. He got out a cigarette and said, “Probably higher up the chain of command they come into it, but they aren’t based here now. Yet.” He lit his smoke and said, “It looks like your boy Comptois is just a runner, came here to look over the organization and make a pickup.”

  “But he’s not saying a word.”

  “Claims he doesn’t speak English.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t.”

  Meekins shrugged, and Dougherty figured Meekins, like every other Anglo, probably believed that every French person in Quebec actually could speak English if they wanted to. Or if you spoke to them in English slowly and loudly enough it would rub off.

  “Well, if we can make the conspiracy case he might start talking Swahili — it’s real jail time, three to five for sure.” Meekins looked at Dougherty and said, “You think he threw those kids off the bridge?”

  “His name came up in the investigation. It’s a long shot.”

  “It always is,” Meekins said, “until one of the long shots comes through.”

  A man was at the office door then, and he said, “He’s in one.”

  Meekins stood up, saying, “Thanks,” and then to Dougherty, “This way.”

  They stopped a little ways down the hall at the door to interview room number one, and Meekins said, “You want to be interrupted, hold up your hand,” and he pointed to the observation room next door where he was planning to wait.

  Dougherty said, “It’s okay, I’ll just talk to him.”

  “I have to listen in,” Meekins said. “You know how it is.” He walked into the observation room and closed the door, and Dougherty nodded at the other cop who opened the door to the interview room.

  Martin Comptois looked about exactly the way Dougherty had expected him to: defiant, trying to look bored now that the initial shock of being arrested had worn off and he hadn’t been beaten and thrown into a pit.

  Dougherty sat down and said, in French, “I’m Detective Dougherty from Montreal. How you doing?”

  Comptois shrugged, looked away.

  Dougherty got out his cigarettes and held out the pack, and Comptois took one. Then Dougherty held up the lighter and said, “I almost missed you, you’re getting bailed out tomorrow.”

  “Yeah.” He was holding up his hand for the lighter.

  Dougherty figured Comptois was in his mid-twenties, a few years younger than Dougherty, and he also figured they were at about the same place in their stalled careers. Comptois was likely looking to impress a boss by not saying anything during his incarceration just as much as Dougherty was looking to impress his by working this investigation.

  He said, “I don’t care what happens in Ontario, I’m looking to find a friend of yours in Montreal.”

  Now Comptois was staring at Dougherty with the cigarette dangling from his lips, waiting for the light. He didn’t say anything.

  “A guy named André Marcotte.” No recognition from Comptois. “He got arrested for rape a few years ago. You were with him on the Jacques Cartier Bridge before it happened.”

  Comptois made a face, you expect me to remember that, and said, “A few years ago?”

  “But you still work Île Sainte-Hélène, you still sell drugs there, at the concerts and at La Ronde.”

  Comptois didn’t say anything.

  “And a few weeks ago, after a concert by Gentle Giant, there was another rape.”

  “I don’t know anything about any rapes.”

  “Just drugs.”

  He shrugged. “If you say so.”

  “I say you know about the rapes, too. I say you know who was there and you know who did it. I say you did it.”

  “Say whatever you want,” Comptois said. “You’re wrong.”

  But Dougherty didn’t think he was.

  “You saw a couple of girls headed for Longueuil so you grabbed them, but it turned out one of them was a boy. You strangled him and threw him off the bridge.”

  Comptois smirked and looked away like this was the craziest thing he’d ever heard.

  “Then you raped the girl and strangled her and threw her off the bridge. Her name was Manon Houle. The boy was Mathieu Simard. They both lived in Longueuil.”

  Comptois said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Dougherty was still calm, not raising his voice. He had all the time in the world. He said, “I didn’t pick you at random, Martin. I know you were on the bridge. I know you were selling dope. I know you raped Manon and killed her and Mathieu.”

  “I didn’t kill anyone!” Comptois slammed his hand on the table and glared at Dougherty.

  Dougherty looked back at him, calm and now a little understanding, nodding slightly. He handed the lighter to Comptois and said, “You didn’t mean to, you were just going to talk to them, sell them some dope.”

  Comptois took the lighter and said, “I never saw them. I wasn’t there.”

  “You were surprised Mathieu was a boy, and he said something to you, he laughed and you got mad.”

  Comptois lit his cigarette and exhaled smoke at the ceiling.

  Dougherty said, “It was an accident.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “Who was it?”

  There was enough of a pause that Dougherty knew — Comptois knew who it was. He knew all about it.

  Dougherty said it again, “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know anything about it, this is the first I heard of it.”

  “If you don’t tell me who it was,” Dougherty said, “I’ll pin it on you.”

  Now Comptois looked scared. It passed, though, and he said, “Bullshit. I don’t know nothing.”

  Dougherty took a moment, took a drag on his own cigarette and blew out smoke, flicked some ash in the tiny tinfoil ashtray and then said, “I’ve got plenty of time. You’ll be doing three years in the Kingston Pen for this, and one of your boys will give you up.”

  Comptois didn’t say anything.

  “You think you’re moving up,” Dougherty said. “You think if you do what your boss wants, you do your time inside and keep your mouth shut, you’ll get something for it. You think it matters what you do.

  “But everybody moves on, Martin. Nobody waits for you. You fall behind, you get stuck where you are. You get out of jail, you go back to what you were, you start over.” The way Dougherty felt every time one of his temporary assignments to detective ended and he went back into uniform. What he knew was waiting for him when the Olympics were over. “So when you get out, you won’t have anything Martin, you won’t have any friends. Why protect them now?”

&nbs
p; “I wasn’t on the bridge.”

  “Who was?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Dougherty was sure he did. He wasn’t sure if Comptois was actually involved in the rape and the murders, but he was sure the guy was there and knew who did it.

  “This won’t go away,” Dougherty said. “I won’t go away.”

  Comptois looked at him and shrugged. He didn’t believe it.

  Dougherty wanted to punch him in the face. Punch that fucking smirk right off him, but he also knew he was screaming mad inside because what Comptois believed might be true.

  Now Dougherty wished Legault were here. He’d been used to working by himself on the fringes of these investigations, but after a few of these interviews with Legault he was starting to see the benefits of a partner, of a good one.

  He said, “All right, have it your way.”

  Dougherty stood up and stubbed out his smoke in the ashtray. He took two steps to the door and knocked.

  The door opened and Meekins was standing there. “You done?”

  Dougherty looked back at Comptois and said, “Yeah, he’s done.”

  They walked down the hall back to Meekins’s office and the Cornwall cop said, “I didn’t realize you could speak French like that.”

  “In Montreal,” Dougherty said, “you have to. What do you think about Comptois?”

  Meekins turned into his office, and Dougherty waited by the door.

  “From what I got, he knows something.”

  “He does, doesn’t he.”

  “You rattled him, that’s for sure. But he still thinks he can beat this.”

  “He thinks he’s part of something bigger that’ll protect him. From what I can see he’s been selling drugs on St. Helen’s Island for a few years. He’s probably moved up and he expects to keep going.”

  “If he didn’t do it,” Meekins said, “whoever did is probably long gone, out to Alberta or something, cooling off. They all think they’re tough guys, but actual murder? It’s something else.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, for sure.” He nodded towards the desk and said, “What did he give you for an address?”