Black Rock Page 20

  Dougherty said, “Okay.”

  “But in many cases it progresses to more hands-on violence, stabbing, strangulation. And it often progresses from strays to a family pet.”

  Dougherty said, “More personal,” and Ruth said, “Exactly.”

  Then she said, “So now I’m wondering if these men are making the same progression from women who are available, like prostitutes, to someone more personal.”

  “These men,” Dougherty said. “How many are there?”

  “More all the time.”

  “Wow,” Dougherty said, “you really are doing some research here.”

  “Yes, we are,” Ruth said. “What did you think we were doing?”

  “I don’t know, it just seems like a … tough way to spend the day.” He motioned at the piles of files all over the office.

  Ruth said, “It’s important.”

  “Oh, for sure.”

  She paused a little but then got back to business. “In some cases where we have enough information we’ve seen that the first victims tend to be prostitutes.”

  Dougherty said, “Availability.”

  “They would be women who would get into cars with men they don’t know.”

  “And hitchhikers.”

  “Yes,” Ruth said, “we’ve seen that, too. But as we see more cases we see the progression.”

  Dougherty was getting the feeling that it was much more Ruth’s theory than Dr. Pendleton’s, but he didn’t say anything.

  “We’ve seen other men move from prostitutes to more personal victims and we think that’s what’s going on here.”

  Dougherty said, “We’re not sure Sylvie Berubé was a prostitute.”

  “That’s what I was hoping you could look into.”

  “Me? Shouldn’t that be the detectives?”

  Ruth tapped her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray, and Dougherty noticed for the first time she seemed a little nervous. He watched her wave her hand around a little, the smoke trailing behind, then she said, “The thing is, we’ve spoken to the detectives quite a bit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And, well, they’ve answered a lot of our questions and given us access to a lot of the investigation.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And this theory is really at the early stages.”

  “So,” Dougherty said, “this isn’t between Dr. Pendleton and the detectives, this is between you and me? So if the theory doesn’t pan out we look bad and not the higher-ups?”

  “Theories don’t look bad,” Ruth said. “They have to be tested, if they don’t pan out, as you say, that isn’t wrong, it’s part of the process.”

  “Sure,” Dougherty said, “but I can imagine the conversation, talking about limited resources and where they would be better spent and how you can chase this theory but you’re on your own.”

  Ruth took a drag on her cigarette and looked at Dougherty. “I don’t care about that.”

  He believed her. “Okay, so you want me to find out if Sylvie Berubé was a prostitute?”

  “Yes. At the time of the murder the detectives questioned the other people at her workplace, a club called Casa Loma. Do you know it?”

  “It’s on St. Catherine,” Dougherty said, “near the St. Laurent, about a block east. It’s actually a few bars in one: there’s a disco, there’s a bar called the Jacques Antonin and there’s the strip club. I’m guessing she worked in the strip club.”

  “Yes. The detectives interviewed a couple of the other dancers as well as the manager, a Marcel Théroux. They said she’d only been there a few weeks.”

  “But none of the customers?”

  Ruth looked in the file. “No, it just says she finished work and left and no one saw her until you.”

  Dougherty thought about the kids who’d actually found Sylvie Berubé’s body and the woman they’d told, one of their mothers he’d thought. But now he wasn’t sure.

  “Yeah, until me. If she was a prostitute she likely used the club for hookups.”

  “You keep saying ‘if.’ What makes you think she wasn’t?”

  “She was working, she was making money, but she didn’t seem to have a pimp. Maybe she worked the street a little before she got the job at Casa Loma, but we don’t know. Anyway, they probably did talk to some customers but if they didn’t get anything ­useful they wouldn’t put any names into the file — good upstanding citizens and all that.”

  “But you think she met someone at the club?”

  “Maybe somebody came to see her more than once, maybe one of the other girls or the bartenders noticed someone paying special attention to Sylvie.” Maybe someone saw a white Lincoln with a black roof.

  “It would be very interesting if she was working as a stripper when she met Bill,” Ruth said.

  “Why?”

  “Now that we’re working on the progression theory and looking at the victims, how they appeared to Bill is very important. If he’s progressing from prostitutes, or maybe from go-go dancers, to women involved in sex and drugs and so on, until he gets to his idealized woman. How Bill sees the women is important.”

  “If he saw Sylvie first as a go-go dancer or prostitute?”

  “Yes. We thought — the police thought — that Sylvie was a prostitute and Bill picked her up on the street, that was his first interaction with her.”

  Dougherty said, “It might have been like that.”

  “But he might have seen her first in the club. So you’ll ask?”

  “Yes,” Dougherty said, standing up and heading for the door, “I’ll ask.”

  “Eddie?”

  “Yes?”

  “You know that if I’m right it means there will be more murders.”

  If I’m right.

  Dougherty knew it was her theory.

  He said yes.

  chapter

  nineteen

  Dougherty found the hall in the Place Bonaventure Hotel and watched the waiters setting up for the closing banquet dinner for a few minutes until he heard a voice behind him say, “So, we finally get some overtime.”

  It was Maurice Brisbois, back in uniform and looking pretty good for a guy who’d been shot in the arm a couple of weeks ago.

  Dougherty said, “For this, of course.”

  “What is it exactly?”

  “The International Conference of Police Associations.”

  “So that’s why they told us not to arrest any hookers this week.”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “they’re getting overtime, too. Is it raining yet?”

  Brisbois shook his head as he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, took one out and held open the pack to Dougherty. “This goddamned summer; it’s July and we haven’t had one nice day.” He lit his cigarette and handed the matchbook to Dougherty. “Not one day has it been over seventy degrees.”

  “You watch, though, August’ll be stinking.”

  “And me with no more vacation this year.”

  Dougherty said yeah, and was thinking how he hadn’t taken any vacation at all this year and didn’t have any planned. Now he was thinking he might take a few days off and really work the Brenda Webber case, ask around Casa Loma about Sylvie Berubé and show the picture of the car. He could see Carpentier’s point: he really didn’t have anything much yet. It would be a waste of time for a homicide detective.

  Brisbois said, “You working after this?” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, nights for two weeks, you?”

  “I just finished a shift.” He looked into the banquet room. “You think they’ll give us dinner?”

  “Maybe when it’s over we can go into the kitchen.”

  “For the leftovers?”

  “Do you want to go get something now?” Dougherty said, “I think I can keep an eye on the waiters myself.”

>   “You sure? Some of them look like they’re ready to snap.”

  “They do have all those butter knives.”

  “You want me to bring you something?”

  “Don’t worry about it if it’s a hassle.”

  They had about a half hour before the big shots would start to arrive, and then they’d be standing by the doors, listening to speeches and watching guys eat, until close to midnight. After Dougherty would head out to finish his shift.

  There was a newspaper on a bench a few feet down the hotel hallway so Dougherty sat down and read about a hijacking in Greece. Olympic Airways 747 flying from Beirut to Athens had been taken over by six people, including one woman, which Dougherty noticed the article mentioned was a blonde wearing a yellow blouse. The hijackers had machine guns, pistols and hand grenades, and when the plane landed in Athens they demanded the release of seven people in jail in Greece in exchange for the forty-five passengers.

  Dougherty wondered if the seven people were like the prisoners in the ransom notes of the two kidnapping plans they’d found in Montreal — bank robbers and guys who’d set off bombs in stock exchanges and university buildings and people’s houses.

  What really surprised Dougherty, though, was that the prisoners had actually been released. Then the forty-five passengers were let go and the plane took off with the hijackers and a guy from the Red Cross who volunteered to be a hostage. They landed in Cairo and that was that.

  “What is it?”

  Dougherty looked up to see Delisle, looking uncomfortable in a suit and tie. “You look pissed off,” he said.

  Dougherty said, “They’re letting sergeants in there?”

  “By invitation only.” Delisle headed for the banquet room and looked back, saying, “You go straight from here to your shift.”

  Dougherty waved him away and returned to the paper. A few minutes later Brisbois returned and handed him a smoked meat sandwich wrapped in green waxed paper. “Probably better than the rubber chicken they’ll be serving in there?”

  Dougherty said yeah, and it probably was.

  By then cops were already filing into the banquet room and it wasn’t long before the speeches started. The radio guy who served as host for the evening said there were cops from 133 different forces present, and he made jokes about the crime rate in Montreal being the lowest this week that it had ever been. He got heckled quite a bit, but he handled it well.

  The highlight of the night was the speech by George Springate, former football player with the Alouettes, former cop, and now the Member of the National Assembly from, as Dougherty knew he insisted, Point St. Charles, even though he was really from Westmount.

  Brisbois said, “He looks like a kid,” and Dougherty agreed.

  Springate gave a rousing speech, for sure, a real politician, and of course mentioned how he’d been a cop for ten years a couple of times. But he also talked about some real issues. Dougherty listened carefully when Springate said, “Stay on the job and face reality. Solutions will not be found with on-the-street justice.”

  It wasn’t the first time Dougherty’d heard talk about a strike — hell, everybody else was going on strike, from the longshoremen to the posties to the city workers. Even the doctors were threatening to walk out if the government went ahead with Medicare — but this was the first time someone was talking about a police strike in public.

  There was a lot of grumbling in the room, though Dougherty noticed almost all of it was from the Montreal cops, or maybe the Canadian cops. He didn’t think many of the American cops were going along with the strike talk, but when Springate said, again, that he knew what cops were up against, the grumbling did spread.

  Brisbois leaned in close to Dougherty. “He was a cop? Did you know that?”

  “I heard something about that, yeah.” They were both shaking their heads.

  Then Springate said, “The danger, sure, but also the lack of gratitude, the lack of co-operation and the apathy makes cops totally dissatisfied and frustrated. Society has backed you into a corner, and you, in turn, have built a wall around yourselves.” That got the room quiet again. “But that has to change. No cop goes out looking to crack a skull. Walking off the job will only offer up a welcome mat for armed thugs, looters and rapists, child molesters and mobs. And don’t say that won’t happen … look at Montreal, October 7, 1969.”

  “Câlisse, they never forget that,” Brisbois said.

  “They’ll never let us,” Dougherty said. The one-day wildcat strike, the Murray Hill riot. A man killed.

  Springate was wrapping up now: “You say you want the right to strike? I say, if you’re not going to use it, then why the fuss? Do you want merely to hold the threat of terrorists over the heads of negotiators and the public? And if so, then you don’t deserve to have it.”

  “Tabarnak.”

  Dougherty was wondering now if they might have to do some actual work at this event. There was some polite applause, but mostly there were a few hundred pissed-off cops sitting there with their arms folded across their chests, dead eyes staring Springate off the stage.

  The radio guy walked back onstage and pretended to have a heart attack, then leaned up to the mic. “I thought some of you guys were supposed to take Springate out and get him laid?” A few cops laughed and the emcee kept going, cracking more jokes and moving away from Springate as quick as he could.

  Dougherty watched the room, feeling the tension let go, then he said, “I never saw him play football and I never worked with him on the force, but that guy sure seems like a natural politician.”

  “A long and glorious career ahead of him,” Brisbois said.

  The banquet finally broke up a little after eleven and representatives from 133 police forces in North America set out to test Montreal’s hard-earned reputation as a party town.

  For Dougherty it was a quiet night until about three thirty in the morning when he got the call about the dead body in Atwater Park.

  It was a white male in his mid-twenties. He was on his back, looking up at the statue of Giovanni Caboto, or John Cabot as was carved in the stone, but his eyes were blank.

  There was no one else around.

  Dougherty looked at the streets circling the park: four lanes of Atwater with no traffic, the Forum across St. Catherine with its twin escalators lit up to look like hockey sticks behind the glass wall, the empty bus stops on Closse and the Children’s Hospital to the south.

  And no sounds.

  Dougherty looked up at the statue and said, “So, did you see anything?” and the stone Cabot stood there with his long coat flowing and one hand held up to his eyes, looking off into the distance. “No, you’re still looking for that shortcut to China, aren’t you.”

  Then Dougherty looked at the dead guy and said, “Shit.”

  He jogged back to the squad car, which he’d left pulled up on the sidewalk on St. Catherine, and got on the radio to dispatch, telling them that, yes, there was a dead body in Atwater Park. He listened to the dispatcher telling him to secure the scene but cut her off with “Roger, over, yeah, I got it,” and walked back to the statue.

  The next person to walk into the park was a rookie beat cop, a kid named Mancini, who looked at the body and said, “Tabarnak, y’en a du sang!”

  Dougherty said, “ Yeah, a lot of blood.”

  It covered the dead guy, from his neck to his crotch, and spread out beyond the base of the statue.

  Mancini said, “La drogue?” and Dougherty looked at him, about to say “what the hell kind of question is that,” when he realized the kid meant a drug deal, not an overdose.

  “Peut-être.” Maybe.

  Mancini said, “Ou les tapettes?”

  Switching to English, Dougherty said, “Fags? It’s possible, I guess.”

  Another squad car pulled up and a couple more uniformed cops got out. Then the detecti
ves started arriving.

  The first, of course, were the Night Patrol, four big men getting out of a sedan. “Eh, it’s Humphrey Bogart,” Mancini said.

  They did look like they were from another era in their trench coats and fedoras, scowls and arrogance, from a time when people were afraid of cops and confessions could be beaten out of anybody. Before students had long hair and lawyers, and before everyone started talking about their rights.

  The Night Patrol guys lit cigarettes and talked among themselves for a few minutes until it looked like they had it all figured out, then one of them asked Mancini what he found.

  Mancini looked at Dougherty, who just shrugged and gave him a go-ahead motion. Mancini told them the body was exactly as they’d found it.

  Dougherty took a few steps away from the statue and looked across St. Catherine Street towards the Forum at the white sign on the corner where the events were listed: a James Brown concert, boxing, wrestling, a Led Zeppelin — whatever that was. Summer in the city.

  Another sedan pulled up on St. Catherine and two men got out. Dougherty walked towards them and met them by the edge of the park. “Homicide?”

  The younger one nodded. “I’m Detective Laurier. This is Inspecteur Bouchard. What have we got here?”

  “Young man, early twenties, throat slashed and stabbed in the chest.”

  Inspecteur Bouchard said, “Slashed and stabbed?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Did you see a woman in the park?” Laurier said. “A woman called it in.”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “but I was further down St. Catherine, past Guy, when the call came in. I pulled a U and came this way,” he pointed to show how he came the wrong way on the one-way street, “and I passed a car with a man and a woman in it.”

  “Young woman?”

  “Yeah, twenties, I think.”

  “What kind of woman?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Laurier shrugged a little. “Like a hippie or like a secretary?”

  “Oh,” Dougherty said, thinking about it, “like maybe she was going to a discothèque, kind of dressed up.”