One or the Other Read online

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  A couple of weeks later Dougherty was back working in uniform at Station Ten. The new law making wearing seatbelts mandatory had come into effect, and although there had been a lot of press to get people ready for it, Dougherty and the other cops were sent out on a ticket blitz.

  It gave him a chance to pull over every four-door sedan driven by a long-haired guy he saw, but he didn’t find Martin Comptois or Marc-André Daigneault.

  August ended and after Labour Day weekend things seemed to settle down in the city. Judy started teaching at LaSalle High, and Dougherty was mostly working days. He was the senior constable at Station Ten and spent some time helping Delisle with desk sergeant duties. “Being trained,” Delisle said.

  And then at a Sunday dinner at his parents’ place in Greenfield Park, of all places, Dougherty got the best lead yet.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-ONE

  Dougherty was standing on the balcony, watching people coming out of what he still thought of as the rocket ship church across the street.

  He took the small jewellery box out of his pocket and opened it. The wedding ring he’d bought from Fred Bergman. Dougherty was thinking that was when he was working the Brink’s truck robbery, back in the spring. It seemed like years ago now. And that investigation had gone nowhere. Well, not really nowhere. Dougherty shook his head thinking about it: they all knew it was the Point Boys, they just couldn’t pin it on anyone. Yet.

  Judy walked into the living room and said, “We going?”

  Dougherty snapped the jewellery box shut and said, “Yeah, you ready?”

  “In a minute.”

  She went back into the bedroom and Dougherty put the box back in his pocket. He was thinking there would never be a perfect time to ask so he might as well just do it now. Just hand Judy the ring and say, “What do you think?”

  Not much of a proposal.

  And, really, was it just so they could have a Sunday dinner with Dougherty’s parents that didn’t end with another fight with his mother?

  On the drive to the south shore Judy said, “I hope there’s no strike.”

  “You think there will be?”

  “I don’t know, it’s hard to say.”

  “My dad’s union settled,” Dougherty said.

  “They’re talking about a day of protest, a province-wide walkout. Not just teachers, all kinds of unions.”

  “One day wouldn’t be too bad.”

  Judy said, “I feel like I just learned all the kids’ names. I finally stopped mixing up Dawn and Denise just because they both wear glasses.”

  “It sounds like you’re doing fine?”

  “I have to admit, I like it more than I thought I would.”

  “That’s good,” Dougherty said. “Someone should like their job.”

  “How bad is it?”

  They were coming off the Champlain Bridge and turning onto Taschereau Boulevard. Dougherty said, “It’s fine. Paperwork, schedules, you know, important stuff.”

  “Someone does have to do it.”

  “Could you imagine working as a teacher without the classroom stuff, without talking to the kids? Just the meetings and the administration stuff.”

  “The older teachers,” Judy said. “They talk about that all the time, how much they hate the meetings, how they’re more childish than the kids.”

  Dougherty nodded.

  Judy said, “It won’t be forever, though, will it? You can still get into detective work?”

  “Sure.”

  As they were driving on a quiet street past well-kept lawns and flower beds in front of the houses, Dougherty said, “It is nice here.”

  Judy said, “Yeah, it is.”

  Walking up to the back door of the house Dougherty said, “Sounds like your parents’ place.”

  “My mother’s place.”

  Loud music coming from the basement.

  Dougherty shouted, “Hello,” as he walked into the kitchen but it was empty. He saw through the window both his parents in the backyard. He opened the fridge and got out a beer. “You want one?”

  Judy said, “No, thanks.”

  They went to the backyard and Dougherty’s father said, “Good, you found them.”

  Dougherty looked at Judy and said, “See, I could be a detective, I can find a cold beer in a fridge.”

  Judy said, “You could be a captain.”

  Dougherty’s father said, “Something going on?”

  “No, everything’s fine.”

  They sat in the backyard for a while and then moved inside for dinner.

  Once the food was on the table, they managed to coax Tommy out of the basement, and he sat down and stared at his plate, his long hair obscuring his face.

  Judy said, “So, how’s school?”

  “Fine.”

  “Teachers good?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Schedule okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  Dougherty laughed and said, “Did you want to lawyer up?”

  His mother said, “This is the most he’s talked in weeks.”

  Judy said, “Everybody makes such a big deal of your senior year but really it’s the low point. Things get a lot better when you finish high school and move on.”

  “If he had any idea where he was moving on to,” Dougherty’s dad said.

  “It’s only September,” Judy said, “you don’t have to decide now.”

  “But some vague idea might be good.”

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky,” Dougherty said, “maybe the school bus will get hijacked like the one in California.”

  “Édouard!”

  His mother glared at him, and Dougherty said, “Well, come on, all he does is grunt.”

  “Those poor children,” his mother said. “They were buried alive.”

  “They got out,” Dougherty said. “And we got one of the kidnappers, picked him up in Vancouver.”

  “It’s not nice to talk about.”

  “It’s a happy ending.”

  Tommy stood up and said, “I’m done,” and went back into the basement. The music started up right away.

  After they’d eaten the pie Judy had picked up at Steinberg’s on the way over, they cleaned up and Dougherty’s father made himself a rum and Pepsi and Dougherty had another beer.

  Sitting in the living room, Dougherty’s mother said to Judy, “Are they all like that, the students these days?”

  “Most of the boys are,” Judy said.

  “None of them have any ambition?”

  “A few, I guess, but most of them have no idea. They are just kids.”

  “When you were a kid, you had no ambition?”

  Judy smiled and said, “Well, according to my parents I had too much ambition, always trying to change the world.”

  “I wish Tommy would change his underwear.”

  Dougherty laughed. “He’s fine.”

  “He’s not.” His mother really looked worried. “He never talks to us. He’s out so late.”

  “He’s home today.”

  “He’ll go out later, stay out so late. Some nights he comes home after midnight, we don’t know where he is.”

  Dougherty looked at his father and said, “Have you asked him?”

  “He just says he’s out.”

  Dougherty stood up and said, “I’ll talk to him.”

  He went down the basement stairs, like going into a cave, and switched on the light.

  Tommy said, “Hey.” He was lying on the floor in front of the stereo.

  Dougherty said, “Mom’s worried.”

  “So.”

  “So’s Dad.”

  Tommy got up on his knees and moved towards the stereo.

  “Apparently you don’t talk. And you stay out late.” />
  “What?”

  “They don’t know where you are.”

  “Where am I going to be?”

  Dougherty said, “You tell me.”

  Tommy was flipping through his records. “I’m just around, come on, what’s she thinking?”

  Dougherty drank some of his beer and said, “She’s worried about you, you’re going to CEGEP next year and then university. Have you thought about what you want to do?”

  “You, too?” Tommy looked over his shoulder at Dougherty and then back to his records. He slid one out of the cardboard sleeve and carefully put the black vinyl down on the turntable. He said, “I have no idea,” as he lowered the arm.

  Dougherty could see the cover of the album on the floor, a man’s face took up pretty much the whole thing and it was all green and trying to look demonic.

  “You have no idea at all?” The music blasted out of the speakers and Dougherty said, “What’s this?”

  “‘Go to Hell.’”

  “What?”

  Tommy said, “Not you, that’s the song.” He held out the album cover and Dougherty took it.

  “Nice.”

  Tommy turned the volume down a little and said, “This album’s not as good as Welcome to My Nightmare.”

  Dougherty said, “No, of course not,” and Tommy almost smiled.

  “I’m not even out that late,” Tommy said. He thought for a moment, nodding along to the music, the words about how you were something that never should have happened and you should go to hell. “I went to the Nazareth concert and we were late coming back from that.”

  “Was it at Place des Nations?”

  “No,” Tommy said, “the Forum.” He did smile a little then and said, “We did get off the Métro at Île Sainte-Hélène, though, that was a blast. The place was so quiet and it took so long for another train to come. We were freaking out.”

  “How stoned were you?”

  “We weren’t,” Tommy said. He shrugged. “I wasn’t, anyway. It was like a horror movie, I kept imagining something coming out of the tunnel, out of the darkness. It was like Willard.”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “there are rats in the tunnels.”

  Tommy was smiling now. “Cool, I’ve never seen one. I want to get a movie camera.”

  “A movie camera?”

  “Yeah, a Super 8. I want to make a horror movie.”

  “Rats in the Métro?”

  “Yeah. Just standing around in that empty station is scary.”

  “It was built for big crowds,” Dougherty said. “For Expo, and there were huge crowds.”

  “Yeah, but now on a winter night, when all of Île Sainte-Hélène is empty, that place is creepy.”

  Dougherty said, “It can be.”

  “Oh yeah, add a little scary music, it’d be cool.”

  “I thought you wanted to be in a band?”

  Tommy shrugged. “It’s not so fun anymore.”

  “But you went to the concert?”

  “Yeah, Kim sold me her ticket.” Tommy was nodding to the beat again, now the song was about how you gotta dance, you can’t stop dancing, and he said, “She should be in a band, she goes to every concert. Well, she used to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She used to go to every concert, but now she doesn’t want to go to any. She sold me her ticket to Nazareth and she offered me the one she bought for the Doobie Brothers. She slept all night at the mall to get the tickets first.”

  “At Alexis Nihon?”

  “No, at the Greenfield Park Mall, the ticket counter’s at the Miracle Mart. But now she’s getting rid of all her tickets.”

  “Just like that.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy said. “I heard something happened.”

  Dougherty said, “What happened?”

  The cop was seeping into his voice, and Tommy looked at him and said, “I don’t know.”

  “But you heard something?”

  “Not really, just a rumour.”

  “What was the rumour?”

  Tommy looked nervous. “I don’t know, just something happened to her after the last concert she went to.”

  “Where was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think, Tommy!”

  “Shit, I didn’t do anything.”

  Dougherty took a breath and said, “Sorry, it’s just it might be something. Do you know which concert it was?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” He thought for a moment and then said, “It could’ve been ELO.”

  “Was it or not?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “Where was that concert? Did you go?”

  “Yeah, I went, it was,” he closed his eyes and then opened them and said, “that one was at Place des Nations.”

  Dougherty nodded and spoke quietly and calmly, trying to sound casual. “So, what happened to Kim?”

  “I don’t know, she didn’t leave when we did.”

  “She stayed behind?”

  “Yeah, her and . . . some other girls, they tried to go backstage.”

  “Did they get backstage?”

  “I think so. Dawn said they did.”

  “Who’s he?”

  “No,” Tommy said, “D-a-w-n, Dawn Stark, a girl at school.”

  Tommy was looking away and Dougherty figured this Dawn was a girl Tommy liked. He said, “That’s all you know? After that concert Kim didn’t want to go to any more?”

  “Yeah, she sold all her tickets.”

  “Did Dawn say anything else?”

  Tommy looked up and said, “No.”

  “When did she tell you this?”

  “Friday,” Tommy said. “We went to see a movie, The Man Who Fell to Earth.” He looked at Dougherty and said, “At the York, all right?”

  “I’m sorry,” Dougherty said. “But this might be important.”

  “Important?”

  “It’s probably nothing,” Dougherty said. “But, did she say anything about the bridge, the Jacques Cartier?”

  Tommy said, “Hey, that would be another good location for the movie, way up on the bridge, that would be cool.”

  “Did she say anything about that?”

  “What? No.” Tommy slid on his butt back to the stereo and lifted the arm cleanly. It didn’t make any scratching sound. He put the vinyl back into the sleeve and started flipping through the records again.

  “Okay,” Dougherty said. “Well, thanks, this might be helpful. What’s Kim’s last name?”

  “Cunningham.”

  Tommy put another album on the turntable. This time the music was spacier, more psychedelic. He said, “This would be creepy in an empty Métro station, wouldn’t it?”

  Dougherty stood up and said, “Yeah, it would.”

  Tommy said, “Ummagumma.”

  Dougherty had no idea what he was talking about. He went back upstairs.

  In the kitchen, Dougherty’s mother was wiping down an already clean counter. The kitchen was spotless, it practically glowed it was so clean.

  He said, “Tommy’s fine, Ma.”

  She stopped wiping and looked at him, and for a second Dougherty was worried about her. She said, “You sure?”

  He tried to laugh it off and said, “Yeah, I’m sure, it’s just a girl.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t look so surprised, he’s not that ugly.”

  “No, it’s just, he never said.”

  “Well there you go,” Dougherty said, “maybe one of your kids will get married.”

  She punched him in the arm. “Commence pas ça, c’est pas drôle.”

  But Dougherty was laughing. He walked into the living room where his father was in his usual spot at the end of the couch, rum and Pepsi in his hand, and
Judy was in the La-Z-Boy. She was saying, “Wait, this is here in Montreal?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  Dougherty said, “What is?”

  Judy said, “Guy with Legionnaires’ disease.”

  “Here? How many guys died in Philadelphia?”

  His dad said, “Twenty-six so far.”

  “Yeah, but not for a while,” Dougherty said. “It’s over, isn’t it.”

  “We’ll see what happens to this guy. He’s in the General, they say he was in Philadelphia right after the Legionnaires.”

  Dougherty said, “This is why you don’t hang out at the Legion?”

  His father said, “I go to the Legion sometimes.”

  Dougherty said, “Right.” Then he said to Judy, “You ready?”

  She stood up saying, “Sure.”

  Dougherty’s father said, “You want one for the road?” holding up his drink.

  “I better not, gotta work in the morning.”

  “You’re on days again?”

  “I may be on days forever,” Dougherty said.

  “That’s good.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, sure.”

  His father was walking towards him then, saying, “You’ve been working a lot of overtime, it would be good to work straight days for a while.”

  “I don’t remember you ever turning down any overtime.”

  “Maybe I should have.” He reached out and gave Dougherty’s arm a squeeze.

  Dougherty said, “I think we needed the money.” He was surprised. It wasn’t like his father to talk like that, that kind of regret.

  His father looked at Judy and said, “I hope your parents are okay. Anything can happen, you know.”

  Judy said, “I guess so.”

  Dougherty said good night to his mother, and when they were in the car he said to Judy, “What was all that about your parents?”

  She rolled the window down a little and blew out smoke. “Your dad thinks they might get back together.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I was hoping they’d both be happier.”

  “Aren’t they?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. I mean, that’s the idea, right? You split up and it’s better for everybody. But what if it isn’t?”

  “I guess you get back together,” Dougherty said.

  “You really think that’s possible?”