One or the Other Read online

  It took Bergman a second, but then the power window lowered and he said, “What do you want, Constable?”

  “Pull over.”

  Bergman shrugged and said, “I’m stopped.” Then he looked more confused and said, “And you’re not even on duty.”

  “Pull over.” Dougherty pointed to the gas station and when the light changed Bergman cut diagonally through the intersection and stopped in front of the dark garage doors. He cut the engine but didn’t make a move to get out of the car.

  Dougherty pulled up beside the Monte Carlo and got out and walked back to the trunk. He knocked on it like he was knocking on a door.

  Bergman got out of the car then and said, “You look like you want a gold chain. I have some beautiful pieces, just came in.”

  “I guess gold doesn’t break falling off the truck.”

  “You want a TV,” Bergman said, “I can get you one, Sony Trinitron, all solid state, fifteen-inch portable, five hundred bucks.”

  Dougherty said, “I can get it at Eaton’s for five-fifty.”

  “Three hundred, then, but I don’t make anything.”

  “I’m looking for bonds,” Dougherty said. “And Olympic coins. And cash, about two million dollars.”

  Bergman laughed. He was a big man, had a big belly anyway, but he wasn’t as tall as Dougherty. He said, “You think I look like a guy who has two million bucks, Constable?” Then he looked Dougherty up and down and said, “They make you a detective?”

  Dougherty ignored that and said, “I think you’re smart enough not to start throwing a lot of cash around. I think you’d lie low for a while, pretend like nothing changed for you, go about your business.”

  “How can I go about my business,” Bergman said, “if I keep getting pulled over by the cops?” He put the key in the lock and opened the trunk. “Olympic rings, twenty-four carat.” He held up a gold chain and a pendant, the five rings. “Or, you want to party?” The next gold chain had a tiny gold razor blade pendant.

  Dougherty said, “I want to know about laundromats.”

  “I know a good one on Côte St. Luc Boulevard.”

  “Do they clean money?”

  “Come on,” Bergman said. He looked at Dougherty and said, “This is out of my league, something like this.”

  “It’s out of everybody’s league,” Dougherty said. “But somebody did it. Who?”

  Bergman shrugged. He had another box in his hand and he said, “What about a watch? Got some nice ones, Swiss.”

  Dougherty grabbed the box and said, “What about the gun?”

  “What gun?” He looked at Dougherty and said, “The big gun from the robbery, what do you think I am?”

  Dougherty tossed the box of watches back into the trunk and said, “I know what you are.”

  “Oy vey, you think I’m schlepping around anti-aircraft guns?”

  “You could get one.”

  “I don’t deal in guns, you know that.”

  Dougherty had heard the rumour that one of the reasons Bergman was left alone to do his business was because he didn’t sell guns, but who could tell how hard and fast these unspoken rules were?

  “Who does?”

  “Look, you want to buy some chains, you want some earrings for your girlfriend, I can help you. Anything else . . .”

  “You can get anything.”

  “No, I can’t, really.”

  “You can find out.”

  He was looking sad, then, starting to get desperate. “Come on, Constable.” Then he looked a little hopeful and said, “How about an engagement ring? Make an honest woman out of that girlfriend.” He dug around in the trunk and then held out a ring box, blue like Birks but without the name. “It’s a beautiful ring.” He opened the box.

  “Yeah, it’s nice.” But Dougherty was mostly struck that Bergman even knew he had a girlfriend. He said, “How did you know I’m not married?”

  “Look at the diamond,” Bergman said, “it’s beautiful.” Then he looked up at Dougherty and said, “Come on, Constable, you know me, I know you, we work the same areas.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah.” He was looking at the diamond ring and thinking the fact he wasn’t married couldn’t have anything to do with not getting the full-time promotion to detective, could it? He’d heard the term “family man” tossed around but never really thought about it.

  “I can let you have it for five hundred bucks. That’s a thousand-dollar ring.”

  Dougherty said, “I might give you two hundred if you tell me who bought the gun. And I might not arrest you.”

  “You fucking guys.” Bergman leaned back against the bumper of his car and fumbled in his coat pocket for his smokes. He took his time lighting the cigarette and blowing smoke at the stars. “How long are you guys going to keep this up?”

  “Till we get the money back.”

  Bergman let out a burst of smoke, almost choked and said, “Way I heard it, that money went straight from Nun’s Island to Dorval and got on a plane.”

  “Where to?”

  Bergman shrugged. “Vegas? I don’t know. Bermuda?”

  “Who was it?”

  “For Chrissake, you know who it was, you’re shaking them down every day.”

  “We need some kind of evidence,” Dougherty said. “As long as we’re looking it’ll be bad for everybody.”

  “It’s always bad,” Bergman said. “But it’s getting worse. These fercockta Olympics, they’re getting to everybody.”

  “I might get some overtime.”

  “That’s it exactly,” Bergman said. “Everybody sees how much they’re spending, they get greedy.”

  Dougherty said, “So they were a little early with the robbery.”

  Bergman took a drag and blew out smoke. He watched it rise to the night sky and said, “They’re just planning. You know what they want it for.”

  “The money? They’re thieves, they rob banks, it’s what they do.”

  “I didn’t think they had it in them, either,” Bergman said. “Goyim from the Point.” He looked at Dougherty and said, “Never seemed that ambitious to me.”

  “What are you talking about, Freddie?”

  “Nothing, I don’t know. You didn’t get anything from me.”

  “I never do.”

  Bergman smirked at that and shrugged. “Three hundred and that engagement ring is yours. I can see you like it.”

  “What do you mean by ambitious?”

  “We’re going to host the biggest party in the world in a couple of months,” Bergman said. “The city will fill up like it did for Expo, more maybe.”

  “So.”

  “So,” he waved his hands around, “so, so, so, everybody’s going to be selling something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “They have to buy it first.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I don’t know, nothing.” He paused and Dougherty waited for him because he had the feeling the guy was actually trying to tell him something. “Let’s just say, maybe if you really want overtime this summer you should go into narcotics.”

  Dougherty said, “Shit.” It made sense. “They’re using the money for drugs.”

  Bergman shrugged like he didn’t know a thing.

  “Something big, though,” Dougherty said. “Hash by the ton?”

  Bergman made a point of looking in the trunk of his car, and Dougherty knew right away what he was getting at. “Coke.”

  Another shrug. “It’s not my business.”

  The gold chain with the little gold razor blade pendant was still on top of the box Bergman had opened earlier.

  “You’re sure about this?”

  “I don’t know anything, Constable,” Bergman said. “Or should I call you Detective?”

  “That I don’t know.
But if you want to keep working this summer you have to give me something concrete.”

  Bergman looked tired. He said, “You know a guy named John Sheppard?”

  “Let’s say I do.”

  “You might want to see if he was in Kentucky or Tennessee a couple months ago.”

  “All right,” Dougherty said. “And I want the ring.”

  “Two hundred and fifty bucks.”

  Dougherty said, “I thought you said two hundred,” but he was willing to go to two-fifty.

  Now he was feeling like he had something and he could make a move.

  * * *

  Ste. Marie said, “Good work, Detective,” and Dougherty said, “Thanks.”

  What was he going to say, it was just luck he happened to see Bergman on the Bonaventure at two in the morning? And he had an engagement ring Dougherty could use?

  He certainly wasn’t going to correct Ste. Marie calling him Detective, that felt too good.

  Then Ste. Marie said, “We’ve already checked the serial number with the manufacturer and we know the gun was sold in Kentucky to someone who said his name was John Fuller. Must be Sheppard.”

  Dougherty thought maybe they would set up some surveillance, get more wiretaps in place, something like that, but Ste. Marie said, “Let’s go have a talk with him,” and the convoy was on the move again.

  It was just before midnight. They hit Molly McGuire’s and the Cock ’n’ Bull, a dozen detectives walking into the small bars, and this time Dougherty felt a little more resistance. People who had just answered their questions before or who had told them to fuck off under their breath were now coming out and saying it, the bartender leading the way with, “You want to stick your nose up someone’s ass, stick it up each other’s.”

  Ste. Marie said, “See you next time,” on the way out, and even Dougherty was wondering how long they could keep hitting the same places, shaking down the same guys.

  In the car heading out to NDG, Dougherty said, “Maybe we should branch out.”

  Caron said, “Maybe.”

  They hit Nittolo’s Motel but none of the half dozen Italian guys had ever heard of John Sheppard. Or John Fuller.

  Driving to Peg’s, Caron said, “If we ask them, they’ve never heard of the Pope.”

  Peg’s was empty. Which seemed odd to Dougherty. He waited till Laperrière and a couple other cars pulled out and fell in behind them and then he said to Caron, “That seem right to you?”

  Caron lit a cigarette and dropped the match out the window, saying, “What’s right these days?”

  Gunshots went off, loud.

  “Holy fuck!”

  Caron ducked down behind the seat, and Dougherty turned a hard right, bumping up on the sidewalk. They were just pulling out of the parking lot onto St. Jacques, and there was only one more car behind them, Ste. Marie and Levine.

  Dougherty was out of the car and standing behind the open door with his gun in his hand. He could see the other car, the rear window shattered, both doors open and Ste. Marie and Levine with their guns drawn.

  There was no sound in the parking lot.

  Levine yelled, “On the roof!” and Dougherty started running around the side of the building. In the back it was dark, no lights at all, and Dougherty couldn’t see much. The back of the motel, parking spaces, a field and warehouses.

  He walked slow, staying close to the wall of the motel, gun in his hand.

  There, something moving. Dougherty yelled, “Stop!”

  Levine said, “It’s me, don’t fucking shoot.” Coming around the other side of the motel.

  “Shit.”

  “They’re gone.”

  Dougherty said, “You think more than one?”

  “Unless it was one guy firing two guns.”

  Dougherty took a step towards the bushes. Beyond that was the drop, couple hundred feet, down to the expressway.

  Levine said, “Come on.”

  “You think they ran down there?”

  “Probably over there,” Levine said, pointing at the backs of the warehouses. “Long gone.”

  “We might get lucky.” Dougherty started walking.

  Caron came around the side then and said, “Hey, let’s go.”

  Back in front of the motel, the cops were standing in a tight group, the cars in a semi-circle facing the building with their headlights on and doors open.

  Laperrière was saying, “This is fucking bullshit.”

  Ste. Marie said, “Come on,” and led them all back into Peg’s.

  They stayed there drinking till the sun came up. Laperrière and Ste. Marie started the talking but then they got quiet and didn’t say much. The rest of the detectives were full of what they were going to do to the bastards when they caught them.

  Dougherty sat a little off to himself and watched. He nursed a couple of beers. He didn’t disagree with anything they were saying, he just didn’t feel like part of this group.

  When they finally left, walking out into the sunshine in the parking lot, Ste. Marie said they’d take the rest of the day off, it was Sunday morning then. “We’ll get back to it Monday morning,” he said, getting into his car.

  Dougherty drove Caron home, dropping him off at a bungalow in Ville St. Laurent and then got home and had a couple hours’ sleep before picking up Judy and heading out to the West Island for dinner with her parents.

  He had the engagement ring in his pocket and he’d been thinking of ways to ask her the question. At first he thought he would just do it casually, maybe even while they were driving, take out the ring and say, “What do you think, should we get married?” But then he thought, no, she wouldn’t really like that. She wouldn’t say she didn’t but it didn’t seem to really be Judy these days. Dougherty might joke sometimes that she’d come a long way from her radical days, but he didn’t really think that was true. She was still trying to help people, still trying to make a difference in the world, still talking about social justice and working for it but she was living her own life, too.

  So Dougherty figured while they were out in Point Claire maybe they’d go for a walk, some park near where she grew up and he’d ask her there.

  It was a good plan and it might have worked. But then the last thing Judy wanted to talk about was getting married.

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  On the drive out to the West Island for the once-a-month Sunday dinner, Dougherty started to understand the draw of the suburbs, leaving the city behind, really feeling like you were getting away. Train tracks ran alongside the expressway, and he wondered what it would be like to commute into the city in the morning and ride back at night, reading the newspaper and not thinking about work again until the next day.

  Every once in a while, as they passed through Dorval, Dougherty caught a glimpse of the river at the end of a couple of blocks of houses to his left and he thought living by the water could be good.

  He said to Judy, “You sure you don’t want to teach out here?”

  “I’m sure.”

  They drove through the Dorval circle, passing the exit to the airport, continued on the expressway till the St. John Boulevard exit and pulled off into Point Claire. Near the train tracks the houses were mostly older, pre-war, a couple had once been farmhouses before the housing developments started popping up. Dougherty was thinking it would be nice to move into a brand new house on a brand new street.

  He said, “Was your house new when you moved into it?”

  “Yeah, the whole street was new. Exactly the same.” She was looking straight ahead, not at the houses they were passing as they moved into the newer area. “Well, there were maybe three designs but they weren’t very different. At all my friends’ houses, I knew exactly where the bathroom was.”

  Dougherty said, “They look different now, though.”

  “Not really.”<
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  Pulling up beside a station wagon on the driveway, Dougherty said, “It is nice here.”

  “You think that because you didn’t grow up here.”

  They walked up to the front door of the bungalow, and Dougherty was wondering where Judy’s father’s Buick was when her mother opened the door and said, “Oh dear, I forgot to call you.”

  Judy said, “What’s going on?”

  Her mother was standing in the open doorway and she didn’t say anything for a moment, and then Judy’s sister Gillian came out, saying, “No dinner tonight, Dad moved out,” and kept going, walking down the driveway and along the sidewalk away from the house.

  Judy said, “What’s she talking about?”

  “I meant to call,” her mother said, “I’ve just been so busy. Come on in, we’ll order St-Hubert or something,” and she turned around and went inside the house.

  Judy stood in the driveway looking at Dougherty for a minute, then she said, “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” and walked into the house.

  Dougherty followed and once inside the house he heard rock music playing in the basement and figured Judy’s youngest sister, Abby, must be there. He walked into the kitchen at the back of the house, where Judy’s mother was leaning against the counter with a drink in her hand, saying, “It was coming for so long, you must have expected it.”

  “No, Mom, I didn’t expect it, why would I expect it?”

  “All we did was fight. Or ignore each other.”

  “He just moved out? Where is he?”

  Dougherty had avoided calling Judy’s mother by anything; Mrs. McIntyre hadn’t seemed right and he didn’t want to call her Audrey. He figured it was because of the odd living situation between him and Judy. They weren’t living together, or living in sin, as his mother would’ve said, but the fact they often spent the night at one another’s apartment was an open secret their parents just didn’t talk about. Up until this moment it had been about the most awkward thing between them. Dougherty had felt like they were in limbo, waiting for Judy to graduate and get a job and then they’d settle down and things would be easier, but now he was thinking he wasn’t so sure.

  But for some reason it made calling Judy’s mother Audrey easier, so that’s what he did, saying, “Is there anything we can do, Audrey?”