One or the Other Read online

“Yeah, if they know.” Then Dougherty said, “How’s the mall?”

  “It’s okay. I saw the pinball arcade where my students will go when they cut class.”

  “Good to know.”

  Judy took a drag on her cigarette and said, “I’m nervous.”

  “Why?”

  “Standing up in front of a classroom full of kids.”

  “You could sit down behind the desk.”

  “It’s not that . . . oh, very funny.”

  Dougherty said, “You stood up in front of lots of classes in your placement.”

  “Not lots. And there was another teacher in the back of the class.”

  “You’re going to be great, and you know it.”

  “Weren’t you nervous? The first time you drove a police car by yourself?”

  “Yeah, but I was no good at it. You’re good at this.”

  She blew smoke at the ceiling and said, “What do you know?”

  Dougherty sat down in the only other chair and said, “I know you.”

  He reached for the pack of smokes on the table, but Judy put her hand on top of his and said, “Can that wait awhile?”

  “Why?”

  She stood up, still holding his hand, and led him to the bedroom.

  When they finished and were both having a smoke, Dougherty felt good, he felt like they were living together and that it was something.

  Then the phone on the wall in the kitchenette rang, and he thought about just letting it ring, but he got up and answered it and the shit hit the fan.

  CHAPTER

  SEVENTEEN

  Dougherty walked into Toe Blake’s Tavern through a thick cloud of blue smoke and saw Detective Carpentier sitting by himself, a glass of draught on the table and a newspaper in his hand.

  Dougherty said, “I got here as fast as I could.”

  “I thought you lived just around the corner?”

  The waiter was at the table then, a middle-aged guy in a white shirt, like the waiters always wore at Toe Blake’s.

  Dougherty ordered a draught and sat down. “I moved to LaSalle a few days ago.”

  “You didn’t move to Longueuil?”

  Dougherty knew from the second he’d heard Carpentier’s voice on the phone — “I need to talk to you right now” — that it was something serious but all the way downtown, driving too fast, he had no idea what it was about. Now he was starting to figure it out, but he didn’t say anything.

  Carpentier put the newspaper down and said, “You’ve been spending a lot of time in Longueuil.”

  It wasn’t a question so Dougherty didn’t say anything.

  “They’re pissed,” Carpentier said. “Captain Allard called me.”

  Dougherty wanted to say he was working the case, he was doing good work, but he knew this wasn’t the time.

  “You overstepped, you shouldn’t have talked to that kid.”

  Dougherty nodded.

  The waiter set the glass of beer down on the table and Carpentier motioned to a small pile of change. The waiter counted the cost of the draught and a good tip for himself.

  “They had already talked to the kid.”

  Dougherty wanted to say, Yeah, but they . . . and there was nothing he could say after that.

  “You were supposed to help,” Carpentier said. “Do what you were told.”

  To keep from saying something he knew he’d regret, Dougherty picked up the beer and drank.

  “Okay, I know,” Carpentier said, “that you had some good leads, some of those drug dealers and those losers, they look like maybe they could have done it.”

  Dougherty looked over the top of his glass and said, “Yeah, they do.”

  “I know you want to work this, you’ve never been afraid of hard work.” Carpentier drank some of his own beer and put the glass down on the table. “You want to be so bad on the first line, you want to be on the power play.” He motioned to the pictures of the old Habs on the walls — Maurice Richard and Doug Harvey, Dickie Moore, Jacques Plante — and said, “But I’m your entraîneur, I’m your Scotty Bowman. I make the lines.”

  Dougherty nodded. He drank the rest of his beer and put down the empty glass and said, “I know.”

  “This Longueuil cop, this woman cop, she said it was her idea, she was going to talk to the kid and you went along.”

  “That’s not true,” Dougherty said. “I took her along, have you seen her? She’s got a cast on her foot.”

  “You made it look like we don’t trust them, like we think they can’t even interview a witness.”

  Dougherty nodded. When Carpentier had first called him he’d been scared he was in trouble for something but now he was getting angry. He wanted to order another beer, mostly just so he’d have something to do with his hands, but he didn’t want to say anything and he didn’t want to look away from Carpentier. He wanted to argue with him, to say he was right to talk to the kid and he wanted to keep talking to the dealers, but he didn’t. He just sat there.

  “This is their case, this is how they’re going to handle it.”

  “Even if they’re wrong?”

  Carpentier took his time and said, “I need to know that you can play on the team, on whatever line you’re told to play on.”

  “That kid didn’t sell any cocaine to Mathieu Simard.”

  “You don’t know that.” And then, before Dougherty could say anything, he said, “It doesn’t matter, this is what they want to do.”

  “They just want it to go away.”

  “It’s done,” Carpentier said.

  Dougherty said, “Okay.”

  “This isn’t Dirty Harry,” Carpentier said. “This is your job. You have your Olympic assignment?”

  “Yeah, I’m working the Forum. Gymnastics first and then boxing.”

  “That’s good, you can see that Cuban everybody’s talking about. See if he’s really any good.”

  “He might be for three rounds,” Dougherty said. “Scoring points with punches, doesn’t matter how hard they are.”

  “It’s the Olympics,” Carpentier said. “That’s the rules.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah.”

  Carpentier picked up the newspaper and said, “You might get some action, some terrorists escaped from prison in Germany.”

  “In Germany?”

  “Four women from the Baader-Meinhof gang. One of them,” he looked at the article and said, “Inge Viett was on the list of prisoners the guys who hijacked the plane to Uganda wanted released. Probably connected to the guys who killed the athletes in Munich.”

  “You think they can really get to Montreal?”

  “I think no amount of overtime will be spared.”

  Dougherty stood up and said, “Thank you.”

  “Keep your head down for a while,” Carpentier said. “We’ll talk after the Olympics.”

  Out on St. Catherine Street it was a warm summer evening, about ten o’clock by then, and Dougherty walked back to where he’d parked his car. He was mad, he wanted to scream and punch something, well, someone, really — himself most of all. He knew Carpentier was right, he’d overstepped. He should have known there’d be consequences.

  He got into his car and started driving back to LaSalle. He wasn’t sure what to do but he was looking forward to talking to Judy. Maybe they wouldn’t even talk about it, they’d talk about something else, play the record he bought, the side with “Lay Lady Lay” and “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” Forget about all this work shit.

  * * *

  Saturday morning was controlled panic. There were hundreds of uniform cops at Olympic Stadium trying to keep the crowd moving as 75,000 people all seemed to show up at the same time. Everyone had to be inside the stadium by two thirty when the doors would close and the thousands of athletes would make their way from the village. Even t
hose few blocks were lined with tens of thousands of people.

  Dougherty was across town at the Forum.

  Most of Station Ten was set up in what they were calling the security office, a room at the end of the hall past the dressing rooms and coaches’ offices, next to the media room. The Hockey Night in Canada signs were still on the walls, covered up by black curtains, and the same big TV cameras would be used for interviews.

  The security room was small with bare concrete-block walls and a cement floor. Sergeant Delisle had set up as if it were Station Ten except his desk had half a dozen phones instead of two and there were two TVs mounted on the wall, one showing the Canadian broadcast in French and one the American broadcast on ABC, though the sound was turned down on both.

  There were half a dozen cops in the security room, all dressed casually, which meant slacks, sports coats and shirts but no ties. Another two dozen uniform cops were on duty around the building, including two on each door. There were no athletes, they were all at the opening ceremony at Olympic Stadium, but even when Dougherty had arrived at nine that morning there were quite a few support staff making last-minute checks to the gymnastics equipment, all the parallel bars and pommel horses and balance beams and a few other guys were still working on the electronic scoreboards and making a few last-minute light bulb replacements.

  Now, at two thirty in the afternoon, the ceremony was starting and Delisle turned up the volume on the small black-and-white TV.

  One of the cops said, “Eille, le Radio-Canada, okay.”

  Delisle turned down the volume on the ABC broadcast and turned up the volume on the French broadcast, saying, “C’est la même chose.”

  “Oui, maintenant, mais pas plus tard.”

  When the World Youth Orchestra finished “O Canada,” Delisle said, “Bon, ça commence.”

  Dougherty was sitting on a stool by the door with his back against the wall, thinking after everything that had gone on in the six years since Montreal had been awarded the games, all the fears after Munich, all the politics with China and Taiwan, all the construction problems putting together so many buildings and the giant stadium, after all that and so much more it did feel good to see it all coming together. He was proud of his city, the eyes of the world on it for a moment and it looked good.

  The team from Greece was the first into the stadium, as always, and there was another huge cheer from the crowd.

  Dougherty was thinking he could slip out of the security room and no one would notice. Or he could say he was doing a patrol and no one would say anything and he could take off for a few hours, go watch the rest of the ceremony with Judy at her parents’ place. Her mother’s place, he could hear her saying, just her mother’s now.

  Delisle said, “Il n’y a pas du tout de pays Africains?”

  “Quelques-uns,” one of the other cops said, “mais pas beaucoup.”

  “Et pourquoi déjà?”

  One of the cops said something about the African nations boycotting because New Zealand had sent a rugby team to South Africa and another cop interrupted to ask if South Africa was here and the first guy said, no, they’ve been kicked out of the Olympics, that’s why the other countries are boycotting, because everybody is supposed to boycott South Africa.

  “Pourquoi?”

  “Apartheid.”

  Then Dougherty was thinking he could just slip out to a bar, just across the street in the Alexis Nihon Plaza, he could grab a pint at the Maidenhead, but then he’d just be watching the same thing on a different TV.

  “Eilles, Tabarnak, c’est les États-Unis pis y’a une annonce!”

  On the French broadcast, the American team, the biggest one in the Games, was coming into the stadium but the ABC broadcast was showing a commercial for Budweiser. The cops in the security room were laughing, and Dougherty realized the Americans hadn’t realized that their team wouldn’t be the United States, they were les États-Unis, much earlier in the alphabet. It was kind of funny, but Dougherty wasn’t laughing.

  The American team was still coming into the stadium when the commercial break ended, so they caught some of the athletes waving to the crowd.

  A few minutes later the biggest cheer so far rang through the stadium and Delisle said, “That’s for Entebbe,” and motioned to the TV where the small Israeli team was coming into the stadium. The TV announcer said that the flag-bearer, sprinter Esther Roth, was a survivor of the Munich attacks and the flag she carried had a small black ribbon at the top in commemoration. The rest of the team had black ribbons on their lapels.

  Delisle said, “Shit, I hope no one tries anything here.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, I hope not, too,” and no one else said anything. Now that the Games had started, now that it was real, Dougherty didn’t get the feeling that anyone really wanted to see any action, least of all himself. Even though being in on the action was the reason he’d joined the police force almost ten years earlier: he’d wanted to drive fast cars and break up bar fights and stop bank robberies. If he was really honest with himself he’d have to admit he’d wanted to be John Wayne, he’d wanted to be a hero.

  He still did, really, but his idea of what that was had changed. He didn’t want to be Dirty Harry, like Carpentier had said, he didn’t want to break all the rules and do it all on his own and run around chasing people and shooting at them, that had definitely changed.

  On the TV the Soviet team was coming into the stadium and a barrel-chested guy was carrying the flag — holding his arm straight out parallel to the ground and not moving it. Dougherty couldn’t imagine holding a flagpole like that for a minute, never mind the entire ceremony like this guy was doing it.

  Then he was thinking what had changed was meeting the families of victims. When he’d been looking for the guy who’d killed Brenda Webber and he talked to the Webbers, that was personal because he’d grown up a few streets over from them, he was in Brenda’s sister Arlene’s class in high school, but even if it hadn’t been personal it still would have had the same effect. Dougherty was sure of that now. When someone gets killed, no matter who it is, the family suffers, no matter what kind of relationship they had before, no matter how strained it was or how distant they seemed. People always feel there’s time to save a bad relationship, things will change and people will see eye to eye. He’d heard that so many times, how people thought they had more time. But death was final. That was why he wanted to work homicide. Sitting there watching the ceremony on TV, he started to understand it himself for the first time.

  There was a huge cheer as the Canadian team came into the stadium, and Dougherty stood up and said, “I gotta go to the can.” No one said anything as he walked out of the office.

  Down the hall Dougherty found a row of phone booths. He dropped in a dime and dialled.

  A teenage girl answered, “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself. Can I talk to Judy?”

  “I don’t know, can you?”

  “Is she there?”

  “One minute.”

  Dougherty was thinking maybe it was playful, maybe it was Gillian joking around, saying what her mother would say to her if she used “can I” instead of “may I.” But there was an edge to it.

  Judy said, “Hi.”

  “How’s it going?”

  “About as well as can be expected, I guess.”

  “I wish I could be there.”

  Judy laughed and said, “No you don’t. You’d rather work a night shift downtown by yourself than spend five minutes in this house.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.”

  “My mom’s doing her best stiff upper lip but she’s had too many stiff ones.”

  “Tense?”

  “The sarcasm is.”

  “Gillian’s there,” Dougherty said. “That’s good.”

  “I think she’s stoned, her and the boyfriend.”

  “
Well, everybody else in town is, it seems like.”

  Judy said, “Yeah, you’ll probably arrest my father later. He asked me if I knew anyone who could get him cocaine.”

  “Has he tried any bar in the city?”

  There was a pause and Judy said, “I used to think they were happy, my parents, happily married.”

  “They probably were,” Dougherty said. “At the time.”

  “I guess so.” There was another pause, and then Judy said, “How do people do that, how do they go from being happy to being so unhappy.”

  “I don’t know. Why, you worried it could happen to you?”

  “No,” Judy said, “I’ve never been that happy.”

  “I don’t know about that, I’ve seen you pretty happy.”

  “How do you know I’m not faking it?”

  “Good enough for me,” Dougherty said. “I’m gullible that way.”

  “You’re the least gullible person I’ve ever met,” Judy said. “No one ever gets away with lying to you.”

  “People lie to me all the time.”

  “But you always know,” Judy said.

  Dougherty wanted to keep joking around, say something like, So you better watch your step, but it didn’t feel right. He said, “You want me to pick you up in Pointe-Claire when this is over?”

  “No, I’ll catch a bus, meet you back at the apartment.”

  “You sure? Once I’m on the highway it’s no problem. We could grab a bite somewhere.”

  Judy said, “My mom will insist on some kind of dinner, but if you don’t mind driving out here.”

  “I don’t mind. It’ll probably be seven before I get there.”

  There was some talking in the background, Judy’s mother saying something to her and then Judy said, “Yes, I see it,” and then to Dougherty, “Do you see that? The torch is coming into the stadium.”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “I’m at a pay phone, who did they get to carry it?” Another one of the potential controversies about the Olympics, who would be the torchbearer, everything getting so political.

  “My mom’s saying I should be excited because it shows equality, it’s a boy and a girl.”