A Little More Free

by John McFetridge

  “But what?”

  “Well, somebody rifled the cash register.”

  “What?”

  “And a bunch of purses were stolen, the girls are talking about it over there.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay, well, tell them to come into the station tomorrow, okay? There’s nothing we can do now.”

  The bartender said okay and started to walk away and Dougherty said, “Hey.”

  “What?”

  “Try and keep them calmed down, okay?”

  The bartender nodded, said okay and walked back towards the crowd. Dougherty watched him go, thinking the guy was still in shock, but hoping he could talk to the regulars, at least.

  Then Dougherty saw his squad car on Dorchester, the front wheels up on the sidewalk, and he went to it and got on the radio to Station Ten and asked the only guy in the building to look up the arrest report on Gilles Eccles. “Drunk and disorderly back in July, I think.”

  “That’s all you got?”

  “There was one in the winter, too,” Dougherty said, “fight in Atwater Park, with a drug dealer, I think, coloured guy, I chased him down St. Catherine, he broke a window in that store,” Dougherty thought for a second and then said, “Cargo Canada. In the D&D there was another guy with him, Jimmy O’Brien, and probably another guy, I don’t know his name but I need an address for him, too.”

  Over the radio the cop said, “That’s all?” Sarcastic even now and Dougherty said, “As fast as you can.”

  The cop at Station Ten said, “Okay.” Then he said, “How bad is it?” and Dougherty said, “Bad.”

  “They’re saying on the radio more than a dozen killed.”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “more than a dozen.”

  Dougherty was standing beside the car holding the handset, the wire connecting it to the big radio on the dash stretched as far as it would go, looking over the scene. The two westbound lanes of Dorchester were blocked with squad cars, Union Street was filled with fire engines and there were hundreds of people just standing around.

  A few minutes later the cop at Station Ten was back on the radio saying, “Okay, I got an address for Eccles: NDG, below the tracks, no surprise there.”

  “What about the other guys?”

  “O’Brien is in Verdun but there’s no one else on the report. I’ll keep looking, last winter, and back.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay. What’re the addresses you have?” The cop read out the street addresses and Dougherty ran back to the detectives.

  “One’s in NDG and one in Verdun.”

  “The third?”

  “Still looking.”

  “Okay, get another officer and you each go and wait — maybe they’ll go home. If they do, bring them in.”

  The other detective said something and then the two of them spoke quietly to each other for a moment. Dougherty couldn’t make out what they were saying. Then the first detective nodded and said to Dougherty, “We’ll get a coroner’s warrant — with that we don’t need to charge him with anything right away. You pick him up and bring him to Bonsecours Street. We’ll find out if it was him.”

  “Okay.” Dougherty ran to his squad car. He found the rookie who had been directing traffic standing under a streetlight looking dazed and gave him the address in Verdun and told him to go and wait there. “Park around the corner, try and stay out of sight, but watch the building. If anyone goes in radio right away.” The kid nodded and got into a squad car and Dougherty watched him drive away, hoping he wouldn’t crash.

  Then Dougherty got into his squad car and backed out onto Dorchester. As he pulled away he looked into the rear-view mirror and saw firemen still working while some stood in small groups with cops, people wrapped in blankets sitting in the street.

  It was bad.

  Dougherty drove fast, the streets deserted at three in the morning, and got to Grand Boulevard in less than fifteen minutes. On the other side of the train tracks it was a wide, tree-lined street with nice, old brick houses, especially once it crossed Sherbrooke, but below the tracks Grand was a single block of three- and four-storey low-rent apartment buildings and some old fourplexes and walk-ups. Dougherty dumped his squad car behind some trucks in the parking lot of a landscaping company on St. Jacques and waited in the shadows across the street from Eccles’s building.

  He didn’t have to wait long.

  A grey Comet pulled up, and Eccles got out just after three thirty. Dougherty grabbed him. There was no fight, no struggle. Eccles had been drunk earlier but now he looked like he was in shock.

  Dougherty said, “So, you know how bad it is.”

  Eccles started crying, saying, “We didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Dougherty cuffed him and dragged him across St. Jacques to his squad car, put him in the back seat and then got on the radio and called it in.

  The cop at Station Ten said the detectives would meet him at HQ and Dougherty said okay.

  He drove all the way to Bonsecours Street in Old Montreal with Eccles sobbing in the back seat.

  An hour later Dougherty was standing in the parking lot behind the building having a smoke when Detective Carpentier pulled up in his own car, a Bonneville, and got out saying, “Mon Dieu.”

  Dougherty had known the homicide detective for a few years, had been with him when they’d arrested a man they thought had killed five women, and he’d never seen him so shaken.

  Carpentier looked at Dougherty and said, “On dit peut-être plus de trente?”

  Dougherty spoke French, too, saying, yeah, it looked like more than thirty, and the detective said again, “Mon Dieu.”

  Then Carpentier switched to English and said, “You have a suspect?”

  “Yes. There are two more: we’ve got a man waiting at one of the apartments and this guy” — he motioned towards the building — “will give up the other one.”

  “They were thrown out of the club earlier?”

  “They were drunk — the bouncer threw them out.”

  “And you’re sure it was them?”

  Dougherty took a drag on his cigarette and tossed the butt on the ground. “He’s been crying since I picked him up, saying how they didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”

  Carpentier nodded and walked past Dougherty to the doors of the police station saying, “Well, they did.”

  The sun was coming up then, and a little while later the parking lot started to fill up with people coming to the morgue to identify bodies. Dougherty recognized a few people, had nodding acquaintances with them, a couple he’d been in classes with at Verdun High School.

  Then it was quiet for a few minutes, and Dougherty was thinking about going home when a car pulled up and a guy got out. Dougherty recognized him but couldn’t place him. The guy was by himself and as he came towards the back door and saw Dougherty he said, “She wasn’t at the hospital, she wasn’t at the Royal Vic or the General or the St. Luc.”

  As he was talking, Dougherty realized he’d seen him the night before, outside the Blue Bird looking for his fiancée.

  “They told me to come here.”

  Dougherty said, “Downstairs,” and as the guy pushed past him into the building, Dougherty touched his arm and said, “You by yourself?”

  The guy said yeah, and they looked at each other for a moment and then the guy went inside.

  A little while later Detective Carpentier came out and stared up at the blue sky. He lit a cigarette and said, “Do you know where they bought the gas?” and Dougherty said no.

  Carpentier didn’t look at him, he just kept staring at the sky and said, “A gas station on de Maisonneuve.” He took a drag and exhaled slowly, smoke coming out of his nose, and said, “Where his father was working. His father told him he was drunk and he should go home. One of the other guys …” Carpentier turned and looked at Dougherty and said, “You were right,
he gave them up: it was O’Brien and another, Jean-Marc Boutin.”

  Dougherty nodded, “Yeah, I know him.”

  “Oh yes, they are what the newspapers will call ‘known to the police.’ Going back years.”

  Dougherty said yeah.

  “They spent the day drinking, the three of them, on the South Shore, then they came to the club.”

  “Riley told me he kicked them out.”

  “They went to Club 67 — do you know it?”

  “On Crescent.”

  “Yes, that’s the one. They had a few more drinks and came up with their plan. The first gas station they went to wouldn’t sell them any so they went to where Eccles’s father was working. Eccles talked to him while Boutin filled the, how you say, canne de gaz, rouge?”

  “Jerrycan.”

  “Jerrycan. And they went back to the Blue Bird.”

  “Where are the other two?”

  “He doesn’t know, he says he left them at Torchy Wharf, you know it?”

  “La Tortue, yeah. It’s in Verdun, bottom of Allard Street.”

  “He doesn’t know where they were going — he thinks out of town.”

  Carpentier finished his cigarette and tossed the butt on the ground. Then he turned around and went back inside.

  A couple of cops came out and squinted into the sun. One of them said, “Tabarnak, je suis fucking fatigué.”

  The other cop, an older guy probably in his late forties, looked at Dougherty and spoke English, saying, “There were two birthday parties in that club. One guy was turning thirty-nine, he was there with his wife.” The cop moved his head a little, the smallest of motions towards the building and said, “They’re both here. Four kids at home. Orphans now. The other one was turning twenty-one.”

  The other cop, the tired one, said, “Deux filles là, quatorze ans.”

  Dougherty didn’t say anything but he wasn’t surprised to hear there were fourteen-year-old girls in a bar. Montreal, always a party town. Then he wondered if this would change that but didn’t think it was too likely.

  Then the older cop said, “Bon, better get some sleep,” and looked at Dougherty. “You work tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  The other cop said, “You working the game?”

  “What game?”

  “Quelle partie? Come on.”

  Dougherty shook his head and said, “Right, shit.” Then he said, “No, I’m on patrol.”

  “Me too, we’re watching it at the bar in the plaza, Alexis Nihon.”

  “Not Toe Blake’s?”

  “Hey, we might get a call, and it would be too crowded, too tough to get out of there.”

  Dougherty said, “That’s very conscientious of you,” and the other cop said, “Eh?”

  “That’s good thinking.”

  “Oh well, it won’t be much of a game, but fun to smack some commie bastards around, eh?”

  Dougherty said yeah, and the other two cops walked through the parking lot towards the Métro station. He’d forgotten about the Summit Series, as it was being called. After years and years of watching the Soviet so-called amateurs beat up on Canadian university kids at the Olympics and World Championships, Canada’s pros were finally getting their chance at some revenge. Four games in Canada and then four games in Moscow. First one tonight at the Forum in Montreal. Be good, Dougherty figured, give people something to cheer about.

  He walked to where he’d parked his squad car a few hours earlier when he brought in Eccles and as he opened the door he looked back at the building and saw a man coming out with his hands over his face. He was stumbling and shaking and Dougherty went to him, grabbing him by the arm and holding him up.

  The guy was crying, sobbing, and Dougherty realized he was the one who’d been looking for his fiancée.

  They stood there for a minute by the door and then Dougherty said, “Where do you live, where’s your family?”

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.”

  “Come on,” Dougherty said, “where do you live? I’ll drive you.”

  “No, it’s okay.” The guy took a deep breath and got himself under control. “I’m okay.”

  “Your parents, man, where are they?”

  The guy took a couple more breaths, struggling to get air in and out, and then he said, “LaSalle, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

  “I’ll follow you.”

  The guy said he was okay again and walked to his car in a daze. Dougherty got into the squad car and followed him, onto the expressway at Berri, west through the Ville-Marie Tunnel and then to de la Vérendrye Boulevard through Verdun and into LaSalle.

  When the guy pulled up in front of a two-storey duplex on 9th Avenue, Dougherty pulled over, too, and watched the guy go into the house. There were other people inside. It was quiet for a minute and then Dougherty heard the crying.

  * * *

  “Sixty-five cents for a pint? We should arrest you.”

  “You’d like to try, you would.” The waitress had an Irish accent and Dougherty thought she sounded a little like his grandmother, but the wench outfit with the low-cut white blouse and the short skirt took away that image pretty quick.

  Gagnon, who’d complained about the price, was saying, “It’s fifty cents at the Royal,” and the waitress said, “Ah, but they don’t treat you so well,” and Dougherty had a feeling her joking around was just about over as she put down six pint glasses, three in each hand. The place was packed with guys watching the game and the waitresses were hopping.

  Dougherty handed her a couple of two-dollar bills and a single and said, “It’s my round, thanks.”

  Canada had scored thirty seconds into the game, Phil Esposito banging the puck out of the air and past a Russian goalie nobody’d ever heard of.

  Dougherty started his shift at six but got sent on a call right away and by the time he finally parked his squad car on Atwater across from the Forum he heard the eighteen thousand people inside cheer the second goal. It was looking like the rout everyone predicted, but by the time he got to the Maidenhead bar at the Métro level of the Alexis Nihon shopping plaza across from the Forum, the Soviets had scored to make it 2–1.

  Now Gagnon was saying it was great to see the commies get put in their place but one of the older cops, a guy named Duclos that Dougherty had never seen outside the station, said, “They’re starting to look better, look at the way they move as a unit.” Every guy at the table, half a dozen cops all in uniform, told him he was crazy.

  Then just before the first period ended the Russians scored a short-handed goal off a two-on-one and Duclos said, “How do you get a two-on-one killing a penalty?”

  The cops made Duclos buy the next round.

  Dougherty got sent on another call. He had his walkie-talkie on his belt and when the call came in he looked around and saw he was the only one with a radio.

  Duclos shrugged and said, “If you lose it or if you break it, you have to buy a new one out of your own pay,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, I know the rule,” and Duclos said, “So, leave it in the station like everybody else.”

  The call was actually in the plaza — a couple of kids had grabbed some jackets from the Jean Junction and run. Dougherty brought Gagnon with him and they ended up chasing the kids up three flights of stairs and then back down, past the Miracle Mart and the Steinberg and the Vieille Europe food store and the poster shop and the movie theatre and finally caught them at the turnstiles to the Métro, almost at the doors to the Maidenhead.

  Gagnon said, “You made us miss the game,” and one of the kids said, “Screw you.”

  They were both teenagers, boys with long hair wearing t-shirts with images of rock stars with long hair, confident that they were still minors and nothing serious would happen.

  Dougherty told Gagnon to take the jean jackets back to the store and he took the kids to
Station Ten and dumped them in a cell. They were mouthy when he dragged them out of the Alexis Nihon but they got quieter in the squad car and had nothing to say at all in the cell. Dougherty figured it might make an impression and it might not, hard to tell these days, but it was pretty much all he could do. He phoned the manager of the store and sure enough the guy was just happy to get the jackets back and didn’t want to have to go to court if it looked like the kids’ parents could afford a lawyer. Dougherty told him, “Yeah, it looks like they can, addresses are in Westmount,” so he let them go and drove the couple blocks back to the Maidenhead.

  And was shocked to see the Soviets were leading 4–2.

  The bar was quiet, shocked silence.

  Duclos said, “It’s 110 degrees in there and Sinden is only playing three lines.”

  Canada got one back but the Soviets scored three more and the game ended 7–3 for the commies. Huge upset. Unbelievable.

  Gagnon said, “So much for eight games to none.” The prediction every hockey expert had made. Eight easy wins for the Canadian professionals.

  One of the other cops said, “Well, they’ve been training all summer, we’ve been playing golf,” and a few guys tried to agree but it was half-hearted. The game hadn’t been close.

  “Oh, we’ll win a couple,” Duclos said, “but the bubble has burst.”

  “We’ll win the next seven games.”

  “All right,” Duclos said, “we have to do some crowd control,” and he led the way out of the shopping plaza and onto Atwater.

  The crowd was coming slowly out of the Forum. The people were upset about the loss but it looked to Dougherty like they were more in shock. And maybe when they got out of the steam bath that the inside of the Forum had become and into the cool night air they calmed down. Whatever it was, the crowd wasn’t rowdy — they looked like the living dead.

  Dougherty’s radio crackled again and he took it off his belt and pressed the button, saying, “Go ahead.”

  The sergeant at Station Ten, Beauchamps, told him there was something suspicious on the stairs coming off Mount Royal at Peel and Dougherty said, “Suspicious?”