One or the Other Read online

  “The stadium.”

  “How many you need?”

  “Four.”

  “Yeah, I got four.”

  “You have any for the closing ceremony?”

  “Yeah, I can get those.”

  “Four?”

  “If you have two grand.”

  Dougherty handed over the cash for the four he was buying then and the guy handed him the tickets. He only had a couple more.

  “I can get it this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Dougherty walked away thinking, No you won’t be, buddy, you’ll be downtown in a cell. Then he tried to blend in with the crowd and still keep an eye on the young scalper. A minute later the kid was selling more tickets, this time to a white guy who looked like a boxer and a big broad-shouldered bald black guy. They took their tickets and headed straight for the stadium.

  After one more sale, the scalper turned and walked away, and Dougherty followed him.

  A few blocks away the guy went into a tavern. Dougherty waited a moment and then went inside and sat down at the bar, not looking at the back where the young guy had gone. The bartender came over and Dougherty ordered a beer and was thinking this was exactly what his father made fun of, getting paid to sit in a tavern and have a beer — a dream job.

  Why did he want to be a detective?

  He glanced to the back and saw the young guy standing in front of a booth. An older guy, maybe mid-forties, dressed like a tourist in a colourful short-sleeved shirt and a straw hat, was sitting in the booth and he didn’t ask the young guy to join him. They did have a transaction, though: Dougherty saw the tourist take money and hand the young guy more tickets.

  Then the young guy left without noticing Dougherty. He nursed the beer for twenty minutes and during that time two other young guys came and three more while he had another. They all went to the tourist in the back booth for less than a minute and then left.

  Dougherty walked to the pay phone by the door and called the number of the special squad at HQ and asked for Sergeant Latulippe.

  “Oui?”

  Dougherty told him that he’d followed one of the runners to a drop point and gave the address of the tavern on Rue Hochelaga and said, “He’s sitting in a booth in the back like it’s his office desk. He looks like a tourist.”

  “Can you stay until we get someone else there?”

  “Sure, but I’ll have to order another beer.”

  “We appreciate your sacrifice, Constable.”

  Dougherty hung up and went back to the bar. The TV mounted on the wall in the corner was playing a soap opera, and Dougherty called over the bartender and said, “Can you put the Games on?”

  The bartender walked over to the TV and turned the dial, clicking it a few spots until the inside of Olympic Stadium came on. Then the bartender brought Dougherty another beer and walked away.

  A few minutes later two men came into the tavern and Dougherty recognized one of them, Gabriel Dion, a constable he’d worked with a couple of years before.

  Dion and the other guy sat in a booth at the back, the one beside the tourist, and ordered rum and Cokes.

  Dougherty settled his bill and left.

  Back at Olympic Stadium there were still thousands of people milling around. There were musicians and people who had set up to sell their paintings and other crafts. Dougherty made his way through the crowd and spotted a couple more guys selling tickets.

  “So what did you do, quit?”

  Dougherty turned and saw a man with a red beard wearing an Expos cap and two cameras strung around his neck and said, “I’m working right now.”

  “I bet you are.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  Rozovsky held up one of his cameras and said, “I’m working.”

  “Since when are you in the sports department?”

  “The women’s hurdles, hundred metres.”

  “Pervert.”

  “It’s human interest,” Rozovsky said. “The girl who finished sixth is a story.”

  “She must be a beauty queen.”

  Rozovsky said, “No.” He paused, looked back at the stadium and said, “She’s the only one here who survived the attack in Munich.” He looked back at Dougherty. “But she doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “Can’t say I blame her for that.”

  Rozovsky nodded. “She did say she feels safe here.”

  “It’s all the overtime we’re getting.”

  “And those don’t hurt, either.” Rozovsky pointed to the entrance where half a dozen cops were holding big German shepherds on leashes. “Can they sniff for explosives?”

  “That’s what they tell me.”

  “You looking for terrorists?”

  “I was, now I’m looking for ticket scalpers.”

  “You need a ticket? I can get you in with my press pass.”

  “I’m looking to arrest them,” Dougherty said. “It’s a crime you know.”

  Rozovsky said, “It is? Has a ticket scalper ever been arrested in this city?”

  “First time for everything.”

  “We want the world to notice us,” Rozovsky said, “but not the real us.”

  “Maybe we’re just like everybody else.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a compliment or an insult.”

  Dougherty said, “Neither do I.”

  He spent the rest of the day buying more tickets from young scalpers and watching them head to the tavern on Hochelaga. He asked a few of them about tickets to rock concerts, especially to shows at Place des Nations, but none of them knew anything about that. Dougherty was beginning to think it was possible the story the brass was putting out on this one was true, these might actually be professional scalpers from out of town.

  When the final event was starting inside the Big O, Dougherty went to HQ and made a report to Sergeant Latulippe. They’d done well, found a few rungs on the ladder, and Latulippe was optimistic that over the weekend, the final days of the games, they would get the whole scalper ring.

  It was a little after nine when Dougherty got to the apartment in LaSalle and Judy was on the couch reading a paperback.

  She said, “There’s some lasagna in the fridge, you can heat it up.”

  Dougherty got out the glass tray and left the tinfoil on it and put it in the oven. He walked into the living room and said, “How was your day?”

  “Good. I’m just about finished my class prep. It’s a lot of work.”

  “What’s that?” He motioned to the book.

  Judy was holding the paperback in one hand, her thumb holding it open and she seemed to have forgotten it. “My mother, she’s crazy.” Judy held up the book so Dougherty could read the title, When I Say No I Feel Guilty.

  “At least it’s not I’m Okay, You’re Okay.”

  “Oh she has that one, too,” Judy said, sitting up. “She’s got a stack of them. She’s a changed woman.”

  “I bet she is.”

  “You can see for yourself on Sunday, she invited us over to watch the closing ceremony. She’s having a party.”

  “Can’t make it, I’m working.”

  “You said you were getting the weekend off?”

  Dougherty was back in the kitchenette getting a beer out of the fridge. “I got a new assignment.” He walked back into the living room. “Scalper squad.”

  “All weekend?”

  “Closing ceremony tickets are going for five hundred bucks.”

  “So, who cares? The tickets aren’t stolen.”

  Dougherty put the beer bottle to his lips and took a long drink. Then he said, “I really just took it so I can talk to the scalpers. I’m still looking for those guys from the Jacques Cartier Bridge.”

  Judy said, “The murderers?”

  �
��Yeah.”

  “But you really don’t know if those kids were killed.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “And there isn’t even an investigation going on.”

  “Just mine.”

  “Do you really think doing exactly what they told you not to do will get you a promotion?”

  “I don’t know,” Dougherty said. “I don’t care. I don’t think I’m getting a promotion anyway.”

  “Oh great, so what are you doing?”

  “You know what I’m doing.”

  “No, I don’t. I don’t have any idea what you’re doing.”

  Dougherty shrugged and drank more beer.

  Then he said, “We talked about this.”

  “We talked about doing a job. What we both have to do now.”

  “Yeah well, this is it.”

  “No,” Judy said, “this isn’t your job.”

  “I’m not going to explain it to you again.”

  Judy was standing up. “Yeah, if you could.” She threw the paperback on the couch and walked out of the living room. “I’m going to bed.”

  The bedroom door slammed.

  Dougherty sat at the table eating the still-cold lasagna out of the glass dish. Through the living room window he could see the top of the church across the street, the round white top that looked like a rocket ship.

  Then he slept on the couch and left for work before Judy got up.

  * * *

  All day Friday at the stadium Dougherty bought tickets and followed scalpers. He asked more of the kids about tickets to concerts and a few offered to find some for him, but he could tell it wasn’t something they’d done before so it wasn’t any use to him.

  Inside the stadium the big excitement was an American, a guy named Bruce Jenner, winning the decathalon and becoming the world’s greatest athlete. One of the young scalpers said, “He’ll be on a Wheaties box before we get home,” and Dougherty said, “Where’s home?”

  The kid said, “You know what I mean,” but Dougherty was pretty sure the kid’s accent was American, not quite Boston but somewhere in New England.

  Saturday afternoon Dougherty bought tickets to the gold medal soccer game that night. The scalper really didn’t know much about it, “Poland and East Germany,” the guy said, “I guess they’re good.”

  “Sure they are,” Dougherty said. “East Germany beat the Russians and Poland beat Brazil to get into this game.”

  “Hundred bucks a ticket is a steal then.”

  “Hundred for two is better.”

  The guy said, “Okay,” and Dougherty made the buy. Then as he was headed into the stadium he ducked into a security office and made his report.

  Galluccio was in the office and he said, “We’re picking everybody up in half an hour. Looks like sixty guys.”

  Dougherty said, “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, we’ll be processing them all night. All this overtime, I’m going to buy a Camaro. What are you going to get?”

  “I was thinking the down payment on a house.”

  “Oh yeah, I forgot,” Galluccio said, “you’re an old married man.”

  “I’m not married.”

  Galluccio shrugged, “You might as well be. If you were Italian you’d have the ceremony and get the down payment at the party.”

  Dougherty didn’t want to tell Galloosh he’d probably be living by himself again in a few days. He hadn’t talked to Judy since their fight. Moving in together may have been a mistake.

  Late in the afternoon they started picking up the runners and the next level up, the guy Dougherty had spotted in the tavern on Hochelaga and a couple of other guys like him. They used the whole twenty-one-man scalper squad and twenty more uniform cops. The entire force was working the final weekend of the Olympics, and from what Dougherty saw of the young guys he figured Galloosh better get his Camaro quick before they sold out and there wouldn’t be one on a lot for a hundred miles around Montreal.

  Almost sixty guys were taken into custody, and when the processing started Dougherty realized he still had the two tickets to the gold medal game in his pocket so he slipped away and found a pay phone and called his father.

  “It’s short notice, but would you like to go see the gold medal soccer game?”

  “You got tickets?”

  “A bonus for all the overtime. We can meet at the stadium.” Dougherty looked at the tickets and said, “Gate twelve, it’s on the east side.”

  Dougherty knew his father wouldn’t take the Métro. He’d been driving that phone company van all over the city for thirty years, he knew every street and every lane and every parking spot there was. Sure enough, half an hour after he got off the phone with him, Dougherty was standing outside Olympic Stadium and his father came walking up from Viau Street.

  They got a couple of beers and found their seats. Dougherty was glad he hadn’t really paid a hundred dollars for them, they were pretty high up and in a corner, but once they were sitting he looked around and said, “This place actually looks pretty good.”

  “It’s worth a billion dollars, easy,” his father said and they laughed.

  The place was packed, seventy-one thousand people according to the notice on the big scoreboard, and loud.

  The game was East Germany; they hit the post in the first minute, scored in the seventh minute and again in the fourteenth.

  Dougherty’s dad said, “Looks like a rout. And Poland won the gold last time.”

  In the second half the Germans took their foot off the gas and Poland scored but the Germans pulled themselves together and started using long passes over the top to keep the ball in the Polish end. Germany scored one more and that was it, 3–1 final and another gold medal for East Germany.

  “It’s been good for the commies,” Dougherty said when the medal ceremony ended and people starting filing out of the stadium. “The Soviets and East Germany, one and two in the medals.”

  “West Germany won a lot of medals, too,” his father said. “If they were one country they would’ve finished first.”

  “Lucky for us that’ll never happen.”

  They stopped for one more beer at a tavern a couple of blocks from the stadium.

  Dougherty’s father said, “Are you working tomorrow?”

  “I thought I was but we made all the scalper arrests today. Turns out the ring was from Boston, or near there, someplace called Somerville, Massachusetts. Guy running it is a travel agent and he had a connection in the organizing committee, got a few thousand tickets two years ago.”

  “Thinking ahead.”

  “Back then we didn’t think the stadium would be finished or the Games would really happen.”

  “Now Bourassa’s a hero for saving the day.”

  “I wouldn’t call him a hero,” Dougherty said, and his father smiled. The premier of Quebec was sure trying to take the credit since his government had stepped in and taken over the Olympics from the city. “But he might call an early election.”

  “That’s the rumour. Quick before the separatists get ahead in the polls.”

  The tavern was full but Dougherty felt it was oddly quiet for the end of the Olympics.

  His father said, “So, tomorrow, you and Judy want to come over for dinner? Even though you’re living in sin, your mother still likes Judy.”

  Dougherty said, “We got the same invitation from her mother, but I said I couldn’t make it.”

  “But now you can?”

  “I don’t think so, not the way we left it.”

  “You have a fight?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dougherty’s father leaned back in the small wooden tavern chair and drank some beer. Then he said, “It’s none of my business, but you two have a lot going on.”

  “We do?”

  “You moved in together, you’re w
orking all the time, Judy starts a new job in a couple of weeks.”

  “She was in a classroom for months last year as a student-teacher, it’s not like she’s never done it before.”

  “It’s a new job in a new school,” his father said. “And before she even starts they’re talking about going on strike. It’s got to be getting to her.”

  “Why?”

  “And her parents splitting up, that’s got to be tough.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with Judy.”

  “Nothing?”

  Dougherty finished off his glass of draught and said, “Yeah, okay, I didn’t think about it like that.”

  “Usually when you fight it’s not about what it’s really about.”

  Dougherty nodded. “Maybe you’re not just a pretty face.”

  His dad finished off his own beer and put the empty glass on the table.

  * * *

  It was just after eleven when Dougherty got to the apartment in LaSalle.

  Judy was sitting at the dining room table with a bunch of textbooks spread out, making notes. She looked up when he came in the door and then went back to the books.

  Dougherty said, “Look, I’m sorry.”

  Without looking up Judy said, “I thought love meant never having to say you’re sorry.”

  Dougherty said, “You thought that movie was as stupid as I did.”

  He opened the fridge and got out a beer. “You want one?”

  She looked at him and said, “That’s it, that’s your whole apology?”

  He got another beer and brought them both to the table. “Are we really mad at each other?”

  “I’m really mad at you.”

  “Okay, but not because I’m still working the homicide, because I was acting like that’s the only thing that’s important.”

  “If you say the words ‘self-actualized’ or anything else out of my mother’s stupid self-help books I swear I’ll hit you with this bottle.” She picked up the beer and took a drink.

  Dougherty said, “I’m not working tomorrow, you want to go to your mother’s?”

  “No, I don’t want to, but we’re going to.”

  “Okay, sounds good.”

  They went to bed and made out.