A Little More Free Read online

  “What?”

  “Jewish Defense League.” Rozovsky motioned towards the stage and then said, “No one’s in the mood for it, these people came to mourn.”

  Dougherty said yeah, and then moved a little closer to Rozovsky and said, “I’m working,” and Rozovsky nodded, understanding, and said, “Bomb threats?”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “not this, something else.”

  Rozovsky shrugged and said, “I’m working, too.”

  “Oh yeah, which newspaper?”

  “Don’t know yet, Canadian Jewish News probably, maybe get some out on the wire.” He looked around at the crowd, mostly older people, some kids, not many in their mid-twenties like Dougherty, and Rozovsky said, “It’s not a student rally, that’s for sure,” and Dougherty said no.

  Onstage a rabbi was leading a prayer and then the crowd sang a song Dougherty didn’t know. Rozovsky said, “‘The Hope,’ Israeli anthem,” and Dougherty said okay. Then the crowd sang “Oh Canada,” and Dougherty sang along a little with “True north strong and free” and “We stand on guard for thee.”

  As the crowd was walking away, Dougherty heard a man with a beard and a yarmulke saying, “It’s terrible — young men with their whole lives ahead of them, victims of a war older than they were,” and a woman saying, “We came from Poland to escape the hate, can’t we ever have peace,” and then he heard men’s voices saying that they should invade Lebanon and Jordan and bomb them into dust, finish it.

  Rozovsky said, “We can still catch the third period, hear Foster Hewitt mangle the Russian names.” and Dougherty said, “No worse than he mangles Yvan Cournoyer.”

  “Where did you park?”

  “I can’t,” Dougherty said, “I’m working.”

  “Oh yeah, you said.”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  Rozovsky said, “Sure, sure, top secret, very important,” backing away. He snapped Dougherty’s picture and then turned and walked into the crowd.

  Dougherty shook his head and watched him go, then watched the guy he’d followed to the vigil, Norm Mullins, a janitor at the museum, make his way through the crowd towards Queen Mary Road. He was an older guy, and Dougherty figured he was the same age as his father, mid-fifties. When Detective Boisjoli had given Dougherty the assignment he’d told him everything they knew about Mullins — his schedule at the museum, his address, the fact he lived alone. And that was it. Boisjoli said he thought the guy had been in the infantry in the war, but he wasn’t sure.

  Now Dougherty followed Mullins through the neigh­bourhood, mostly two-storey brick houses, duplexes and some apartment buildings. On Côte-des-Neiges, Mullins went into a dépanneur and came out a few minutes later with a paper bag that looked to have a couple of quart bottles in it — Dougherty guessed Molson Ex, but he couldn’t be sure.

  Then Dougherty followed Mullins to his apartment building and watched him go inside, saw the light in the basement window come on and then the flicker of the TV and then, standing on the sidewalk across the street from the apartment building, Dougherty felt that everyone was looking at him, that there were faces in every apartment window and every car that drove by was going too slow.

  Crazy.

  He walked back to Côte-des-Neiges and went into the first bar he saw, just in time to catch the third period, the game already tied 4–4. The place was crowded and Dougherty stood at the end of the bar closest to the door and ordered a draft.

  The bartender brought the beer and said, “You don’t want to see it, anyway,” and Dougherty realized he’d been looking out the window of the bar across Côte-des-Neiges to the apartment building.

  “Not bad, 4–4.”

  “We were up 3–1,” the bartender said. “could have been 8–1 if it wasn’t for that goalie, and their first two goals were short-handed. How do you do that?”

  Dougherty said he didn’t know, and the bartender said, “You watch them move, they’re always moving, and they throw the puck around all the time, all those short passes — you know what they look like?”

  “Organized?”

  “They look like Eddie Shore’s teams in Springfield.” He looked up at the TV on the shelf behind the bar and said, “Except they’re in a lot better shape than Eddie’s teams ever were.”

  An old guy sitting at the bar said, “We’d be in better shape, too, if it wasn’t pre-season — you think they could get away with this in March?” and the bartender said, “Yeah, I do.”

  There wasn’t any scoring in the third period and when the game ended the old guy said, “Well that’s okay, we’re just getting our legs, we’re going to win the rest of the games.”

  “In Moscow?” The bartender was shaking his head.

  Dougherty had been keeping an eye on the apartment building across the street, but he’d seen enough of the game to know the bartender had a point, the four games coming up in Moscow would be tough.

  “We win the next one in Vancouver,” the old guy said, “and go to Russia up two wins to one with a tie and that’ll do it.”

  The bartender looked at Dougherty as he was picking up his empty glass and said, “One for the road,” and Dougherty said no, put a two-dollar bill on the bar and said, “Keep the change.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  Outside the bar, Dougherty took another look at Mullins’s apartment, the light from the TV still flickering, and figured that was it for the night. He got on the bus and rode it down the hill to Sherbrooke, and then walked a couple blocks to Station Ten and was surprised to see the place hopping — half a dozen cop cars lined up out front on de Maisonneuve and plenty of guys coming and going.

  Dougherty walked into the station and a young cop, the rookie Dougherty had directing the traffic at the Blue Bird fire, saw him and said, “’Eille, t’as manqué tout le fun.”

  Dougherty said, “What happened?”

  The rookie spoke French, telling Dougherty everybody on duty had gone on a drug bust at an apartment on Lincoln and the haul was huge.

  Dougherty tried to remember the kid’s name but he couldn’t, and the kid went on, saying there were five people in the apartment when they got there and two more came in while they were there, “Mauvais timing, eh?”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, some bad timing. What did you get?”

  “Liquid hashish, beaucoup.”

  One of the detectives, Lamothe, said, “Plus de cent mille dollars.” and Dougherty said, “Really? A hundred grand just in the apartment?”

  Lamothe said, “No, but we found a key to a locker at Gare Centrale, and it was there. Thirty pounds.”

  “And that’s a hundred thousand dollars’ worth?”

  “Ten bucks a gram,” Lamothe said. “On the street.”

  Dougherty said wow, but was thinking ten bucks seemed too much. He didn’t say anything and then the kid said, “Et aussi quatre livres de hash noir et du LSD, plus d’une centaine de tabs.”

  “All that was in the apartment?”

  “Oui.”

  Then Lamothe said, “Hey Dougherty, we’re processing them now and they’re all English. You want to play detective?”

  Dougherty said, “Okay.” He was still on duty, his shift had started at four when Mullins finished at the museum and would continue overnight. Then he remembered the rookie’s name and said, “Unless Aubé wants the practice.” and the kid said, “Non, ça va.”

  The drug dealers, the alleged dealers, the way Dougherty knew the detectives would say it, were in the cells at the back of the station house, six men and a woman — a girl, really. She looked like a teenager.

  Dougherty walked back and said, “Who’s next?” and no one said anything so he pointed at the guy closest and said, “Come on, write a confession, you’ll feel better.”

  The guy said, “I have nothing to confess.”

  “Of course not,�
� Dougherty said, unlocking the cell.

  At an empty desk in the bullpen, Dougherty put the blank report into a typewriter and rolled it into place. Sitting there in his jeans and old Leo’s Boys football jacket Dougherty felt like a detective. The guy sitting across from him was trying to look bored and annoyed, but Dougherty knew a few hours in the station and the guy would start to get nervous. Spend the night in Parthenais jail and he’d be a wreck. Dougherty said, “Name,” and the guy said, “Wilson, Duncan.”

  “Where do you live, Wilson, Duncan?”

  “The Holiday Inn.”

  “Not where you’re staying,” Dougherty said, “what’s your permanent address?”

  “That’s it, that’s where I live.”

  “The one on Sherbrooke?”

  “Yeah, just up the street.”

  “What’s the address?”

  The guy said he didn’t know, and Dougherty typed in Sherbrooke Street and figured he’d get the numbers out of the phone book later. Then he said, “You’re American, aren’t you?” and Duncan Wilson just shrugged.

  “How long have you been in Canada?”

  “A few months.”

  “Are you a draft dodger,” Dougherty said, “or a deserter?”

  “That’s not on your form.”

  “Are you here on a student visa?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a landed immigrant?”

  “No.”

  Now he was starting to look a little nervous, so Dougherty said, “Well, that’s okay, you’re American so your embassy will take care of you,” and Wilson, Duncan nodded, admitting that was true and maybe not liking the idea very much, but sitting in a police station he’d take it, and then Dougherty said, “Do you know a man named David Murray?”

  It caught him off guard and he shook his head and said, “No,” but Dougherty was sure he’d seen a reaction to the name.

  “Okay. Date of birth?”

  Ten minutes later Dougherty had all the basic information from Duncan Wilson and he took him back to the cells and brought out another guy and filled out his form.

  When all the arrest reports had been filled out and the suspects were piled into a paddy wagon and taken to Parthenais jail in the east end, Dougherty looked at the addresses and saw there were five Americans altogether: Duncan Smith, the girl and one other guy were from Brooklyn, another guy was from Clintondale, New York, and another guy was from Bethel, Vermont. One of the other guys lived on Prud’Homme in NDG and one guy said he was an engineer from some place called Gernersgade in Denmark.

  It was a little after midnight, Dougherty’s shift was over but before he clocked out a call came in about a dead body in the Atwater tunnel and he said, “Some rummy get run over?”

  The desk sergeant starting his overnight shift said, “No, the call said a young guy, still has the knife sticking out of his chest.”

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  The body was in the curb lane on Atwater, just as it came out of the underpass below the raised Ville-Marie Expressway.

  Detective Carpentier said, “If these guys were territorial I’d say this was a message,” and Dougherty said, “But these guys are — oh, I get it.”

  “St. Henri Dead Men,” Carpentier read, touching the dead man’s leather jacket with his toe. “Appropriate name. More than he wanted it to be, I would expect.”

  Dougherty said yeah. He was looking through the underpass and up the hill towards St. Catherine Street and the Forum and Atwater Park. “I guess they were moving up from St. Henri into downtown.”

  “It would be very tempting for them,” Carpentier said. “A bigger market for their hash and speed.”

  The dead guy, the Dead Man, was on his back, a big knife still buried in his chest but there wasn’t much blood on the street so Dougherty said, “He was killed somewhere else and dumped here?”

  “Looks like it,” Carpentier said. Then he looked at Dougherty in his jeans and football jacket and said, “You’re not on duty?”

  “I was on surveillance but he went to bed. I was at the station house when this call came in.”

  “Now you want to work this one, too?”

  “I wanted to talk to you about something else, about David Murray.”

  Carpentier moved away from the body and towards his car. The two northbound lanes of Atwater had been blocked by a patrol car and the traffic, what there was of it, diverted into one of the southbound lanes through the underpass. A couple of uniformed cops were directing the cars, keeping one lane moving in each direction.

  At his car, Carpentier lit a cigarette and said, “We haven’t even spoken to the roommates yet, what did you find out?”

  “Nothing really,” Dougherty said. “But I helped process some drug dealers who were picked up tonight and most of them are Americans.”

  “Oh, I see,” Carpentier said, “and David Murray had no status, no landed immigrant papers, no student visa.”

  “He had to make a living somehow.”

  “He was already in the underground.”

  “He was already sneaking back and forth across the border.”

  Carpentier smoked and said, “They were all Americans with the drugs?”

  “No, there was a guy from NDG and another guy from Denmark, but all the others, five of them, are Americans.”

  “It’s interesting,” Carpentier said.

  Dougherty was glad the detective agreed and said, “It’s worth looking into.”

  “Yes,” Carpentier said. He leaned back against his car and looked around and said, “All these drugs, it’s not good.”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “it’s not.” He looked at the detective, thinking for the first time that Carpentier was looking old, and the next thought that came into Dougherty’s head was that he was counting on Carpentier to get him a promotion. He felt a sharp pang of guilt for being so selfish. Standing over a dead guy around the same age as he was and all Dougherty could think about was how that could help him at work. Shit.

  Then Carpentier said, “Bien, do you want to come with me tomorrow, talk to the roommates?”

  “If you want.”

  Carpentier smiled and said, “Come on, it could be good for you, do a little detective work.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay.” Then he motioned back to the Dead Man and said, “What about him?”

  Carpentier said, “Un à la fois, novice,” and Dougherty thought, Yeah, sure, one at a time, but I’m not a rookie anymore.

  * * *

  The next morning, Dougherty was called in to Bonsecours Street at eight a.m. along with the other cops who were working surveillance of the museum staff and the detectives who were running the investigation.

  They were told there hadn’t been any new evidence, but now the museum staff was saying maybe the thieves had been more selective than they’d thought.

  Standing at the front of the room Detective Boisjoli spoke French, saying, “The museum director has now, grudgingly, admitted that the burglars chose,” and he checked his notebook and read, “an interesting selection from an interior decorating point of view.” The cops in the room chuckled and Boisjoli said, “So, it appears they were working to order. Likely the men who entered the museum were local but know nothing about art.”

  Dougherty was looking around the room at the other young cops in plainclothes, all as excited as he was about their surveillance assignment and all trying to look just as blasé about it. A couple of guys he’d never seen before really did look like they could be university students, their hair was already touching their collars, and they hadn’t shaved in days.

  “It’s the Rembrandt,” Boisjoli said, “that’s the key. In the past few months Rembrandts have also been stolen from museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Tours, France.”

  One of the student-looking cops held his han
d up a little, and when Boisjoli nodded at him, he said, “Do either of those look like inside jobs?”

  Boisjoli nodded. “In Massachusetts two men walked into the museum when it was open, put the Rembrandt, two Gauguin, and a Picasso into bags, put on ski masks and walked out. They weren’t reported immediately because people thought they were part of the construction crew.”

  There was a lot of murmuring about another museum under construction and then Boisjoli said, “Both museums being under construction may be coincidence. There was no construction in Tours, they simply smashed a window.” He checked his notebook again and said, “At that time a Rembrandt and a Jan van Goyen was stolen.”

  “So,” one of the other detectives said, “we’re looking for a fan of Rembrandt?”

  Cops laughed and Boisjoli said, “The museum director said these paintings would be appropriate in a single collection. Also, there have been some recent arrests of art thieves, one in Italy and one in London, England, an art dealer, William Horan, who was selling stolen paintings, two of which belonged to Queen Elizabeth.”

  The cop next to Dougherty leaned closer and said, “Volés à ta reine,” and Dougherty said, “She’s not my queen,” but the guy didn’t seem to get it — Irish, English, all the same to him.

  “The paintings are probably in the collection of a Greek tycoon or a Texas oil millionaire, something like that,” Boisjoli said, “but the thieves are probably still in Montreal.” He looked at the detective who’d made the joke and said, “Anything on the men who were watching the museum?”

  A couple of guys said, “What?” so the detective said, “We have been told that for a couple of days there were some men on the roof of the apartment building next to the museum, sitting on lawn chairs, smoking cigarettes.” He shrugged, clearly not putting much weight to the report. “We did find a lot of cigarette butts on the roof, but that’s all. No one in the building knows anything about it, and the only description we have is that they were wearing sunglasses.”