One or the Other

by John McFetridge

  Gagnon said, “Where’s the other one?”

  Dougherty said, “I only saw these three. What did they do?”

  Gagnon laughed, “You don’t even know? Why were you chasing them?”

  “Someone called for a cop and I saw them running so I chased them.”

  “They robbed the jewellery store on Peel. Who called you?”

  Dougherty looked around and saw the guy with the accent and said, “Him.”

  “The taxi driver?”

  “I guess, if that’s what he is.”

  “The store owner pushed the silent alarm,” Gagnon said. “We came right away.”

  Dougherty stood up, groggy, and said, “That’s good.”

  “You’re drunk.”

  “I had lunch.”

  Gagnon said, “Okay, get back in the car, shit, we’ll take these guys in. You can sleep it off.”

  “We’re okay?”

  Gagnon said, “Come on, let’s go, forget it.”

  Dougherty got in the front seat of the cop car and watched as a couple more cop cars pulled into the lot and Gagnon took charge, getting the three thieves loaded into a couple of cars and then coming back and getting in behind the wheel.

  They didn’t say anything on the ride back to the station, and when Gagnon parked, Dougherty said, “Thanks.”

  “Hey, don’t thank me,” Gagnon said, “you taught me everything I know.”

  Inside the station, Delisle called Dougherty over to the front desk and said, “You got a call, a woman, she wants you to call her right away.”

  Dougherty took the small pink piece of paper with the message on it and walked into the detectives’ office. The number looked familiar but he couldn’t place it. He called and Legault answered.

  She said, “I had an idea. Can you meet me here?”

  “Where’s here?”

  “The ident office, Bonsecours Street.”

  “I’ll be right there.” He hung up and walked to the front desk, saying, “I’ve got to go.”

  Delisle said, “Yeah, you sleep it off, be back in tomorrow morning.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay,” glad that his years of service bought him a couple of mistakes and a few hours.

  Ten minutes later, Dougherty walked into the ident office and said, “So, what is it?”

  Legault said, “Maybe we should be looking for rapists, not muggers.”

  Dougherty said, “That’s your idea, you think it was a rape? A boy and a girl?”

  Legault stood up and walked towards Dougherty. She held out a picture, probably one of Rozovsky’s, a bunch of kids at a rock concert. The band was onstage in the background, too small to tell who they were, though they all looked the same to Dougherty, and in the foreground of the picture were four girls in a row, looking at the band, arms in the air and long hair down the middle of their naked backs.

  “Maybe he didn’t know that,” Legault said. “It was dark on the bridge, maybe he thought they were two girls.”

  She handed another picture to Dougherty, the same four topless girls, their arms in the air, but this time from another angle.

  An angle that showed two of them were boys.

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, that is a good idea, maybe that’s what he thought. So now we’ll look up anybody picked up for rape in that area.”

  “Most of the rapes won’t have been reported.”

  “We’ll start with the ones that have been.”

  Legault said, “Going back how far?”

  “We’ll keep going until we find what we’re looking for.”

  “Don’t you have to be somewhere else?”

  Dougherty said, “There’s no place I’d rather be.”

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  One more time, Dougherty was sitting at the back of a room full of cops listening to someone tell them a lot of things they already knew.

  This time it was about traffic and which streets are busy at what times.

  Captain Manseau was speaking English without much of an accent and he said something about morgues and hockey rinks and Dougherty looked up, paying a little more attention.

  “. . . have been identified as the best sites.” Manseau was tapping places on a big map of Montreal hanging on the wall.

  Beside Dougherty a guy said, “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit à propos d’une morgue?”

  “Il veut utiliser les arénas.”

  “Comme morgues?”

  Dougherty shook his head and got out his cigarettes. “It’s what he said.”

  Now Manseau was talking about Munich and the athletes murdered there and the high probability of an attempt at something similar in Montreal, maybe bombs or hijackings, and how they needed to be prepared.

  The guy next to Dougherty handed him a lighter and rolled his eyes.

  Lighting up and exhaling, Dougherty said, “They’ll want to bring in the army again.”

  The meeting was in English because there were RCMP officers present, officially as liaisons, which hadn’t gone over well. Like the rest of the Montreal cops, Dougherty felt the pony patrol should stay in Ottawa and guard the tulips on Parliament Hill. After all, they hadn’t lost one yet.

  Manseau was tapping the map again, showing the four arenas where the ice would be maintained over the summer and used as morgues if necessary.

  A cop near the front said, “Can we bring our skates for while we’re waiting, get a few games in?”

  “No,” Manseau said, as if the guy had been serious. “There will be stretchers on the ice.” Then he went on, giving the arenas code names and showing the routes emergency vehicles would take from hotels and games venues to the hospitals and then to the arenas.

  Manseau talked for a few more minutes and then said maybe it would be a good time to break for coffee.

  Dougherty stood up and handed back the lighter and said, “You’re looking good, Jacques,” and motioned to the guy’s leg.

  Jacques LeBlanc moved his arm up and down and said, “That was a day, eh?”

  “I can tell you now,” Dougherty said, “I was scared.”

  “You were scared? I was the one who got shot.” LeBlanc laughed and they started walking towards the door, following the rest of the guys into the lobby.

  “I had to clean you up,” Dougherty said. He hadn’t really, of course. LeBlanc and another cop, Maurice Brisebois, had arrived at a bank robbery and there was a shootout. LeBlanc was hit in the arm but he killed one of the robbers and Brisebois shot the other one, who lived.

  “It’s a long time ago now,” LeBlanc said.

  “Six years ago, not that long,” Dougherty said. “What are you doing now?”

  “They put me on a god damned desk. I guess I got okay at it, I’m still there.”

  “And now you’re here.”

  “All hands on deck.”

  Dougherty laughed. They were in the hotel lobby then. The conference room was a separate, one-storey round structure that looked like a spaceship from the outside, or at least Dougherty thought that was the idea. The hotel itself was a flat slab about ten storeys high, the whole thing probably put up for Expo and trying to look futuristic.

  LeBlanc said, “I think he’s hoping for something to go wrong.”

  “They are.” Dougherty motioned to a couple of guys standing off to the side by themselves, both with crew cuts, looking out of place among the Montreal cops with their slightly longer hair and moustaches, the Charles Bronson look.

  “They always get their man, isn’t that what they say,” LeBlanc said. “Even if there’s no man to get.”

  Dougherty said, “There’s always someone to get.”

  “You got that right,” LeBlanc said. “So, you a detective now?”

  “Temporary assignment.” Dougherty didn’t add, another one, but it probably cam
e across.

  “Looks like we’re all going to get a lot of overtime out of this, might be able to buy a cottage.”

  “Why should the construction workers get everything?”

  LeBlanc laughed and said, “Yeah.” Then he saw someone across the lobby and said, “I’ll see you back inside, eh.”

  Dougherty walked a little ways down the hall past the elevators to the pay phones. There were four in a row on the wall with no barriers between them. Not very private, but he picked up a receiver and dropped in a dime.

  The phone rang six times before Judy answered, saying, “Hello.”

  “It’s me, how you doing?”

  “I’m fine, how are you?”

  It was a good sign she was even asking.

  “You want to have dinner tonight?”

  There was a pause and Dougherty waited. They’d been seeing each other for years, they weren’t new at this, but with Judy finally finished school and now getting a job they were definitely heading into something different.

  She said, “So, you’re having a good day? Everything’s okay?”

  “I’m having a shitty day,” Dougherty said, “but that shouldn’t get in our way.”

  “No, it shouldn’t.”

  Another pause and again Dougherty waited. Looking down the hall, he could see all the cops heading back into the conference room but he just waited.

  “I want to go out and look at the school, I haven’t seen it yet.”

  “Okay, why don’t we take a drive and then have some dinner there. Where is it?”

  “LaSalle.”

  “Okay, we’re working office hours today, what do you say I pick you up around six?”

  “Okay.”

  Dougherty said okay and goodbye, and hung up. He walked back into the conference room, thinking LaSalle wasn’t exactly an underprivileged neighbourhood the way Judy had wanted but it also wasn’t a West Island suburb, so there was that. A little compromise.

  He could learn from that.

  * * *

  Judy said, “It’s got to be right up here.”

  They’d driven from downtown on the expressway and took the exit just before the Mercier Bridge that put them in the industrial part of LaSalle, among the big old brick buildings with huge smokestacks, the Seagram’s distillery, the Labatt’s brewery, General Foods turning coffee beans into instant coffee and smaller plants that made things out of plastic and metal. Made for some interesting smells. Dougherty was hoping coming into LaSalle this way would make it feel very working-class, nothing like the tourist views of Montreal, it was an industrial city, after all, but when they crossed the aqueduct the streets were tree-lined and the houses were mostly newer bungalows.

  “There it is.”

  Dougherty said, “It looks brand new.”

  “Few years,” Judy said. “Opened in ’72.”

  “Same as the one my brother goes to in Greenfield Park.”

  Dougherty slowed down as they passed. First there was a parking lot and then a big brick building.

  Judy said, “Tom at the school board called it the bunker.”

  “I can see that.”

  The windows were big enough, but staggered, not in rows, some kind of modern design Dougherty figured. The building was set back from the street a bit and there was a lawn around it, empty now at nearly seven in the evening, but he could picture kids hanging out and smoking.

  “Apparently it has an auto shop,” Judy said.

  As they came up on the sign that said LaSalle Protestant High School, Dougherty stopped the car. He said, “It’s got some classrooms, too.”

  “It’s not what I was expecting.”

  “Not too inviting?”

  “I mean, the neighbourhood is nice but the school does look a little like a bunker.”

  Dougherty said, “So, maybe it is a real problem school, lots of drugs and crime and teenage pregnancy.”

  Judy was still looking at the school and she said, “We can hope.”

  Dougherty didn’t know what to say, but he was finally learning that meant don’t say anything.

  Judy turned and looked at him. “You think I’m serious?”

  Dougherty wasn’t sure, but he said, “Of course not.” He put the car in gear and drove slowly. Just past the school was an empty field with a large pile of dirt that looked like kids had been riding their bikes on, and past that were some new houses being built. These weren’t bungalows, though, they were fourplexes with flat roofs built right up to the sidewalk, no front lawns, small balconies on the second floor and garages underneath.

  Dougherty said, “Now you just have to hope there’s no teachers strike.”

  “Maybe a work to rule,” Judy said, “but a full strike is unlikely. There’s so many strikes now: the pilots, the nurses, the x-ray techs.”

  “Hydro guys,” Dougherty said. “Liquor stores going out soon.”

  “Is that for sure?”

  “Ninety percent, we’ll know in a few days.”

  “Better stock up.”

  Dougherty said, “I’m sure my father has.”

  “So it doesn’t look like the teachers will go on strike,” Judy said. “Not the Protestant board, anyway.”

  There was a fairly new shopping centre on the left, Le Cavalier, with a Woolco department store and a Dominion grocery store at each end, and on the very next block another shopping centre, Place LaSalle, looked a little older with a Miracle Mart department store at one end and a Steinberg’s grocery store at the other. After the second shopping centre, they came to an intersection with an apartment building on one corner and a round white building that came to a point on the other. It looked like the top of a spaceship. As they got closer, Dougherty saw the sign that said St. Jean Brebeuf Catholic Church.

  Dougherty said, “We should celebrate. You want to go to the Bar B?”

  Judy said, “There’s probably a restaurant in the mall.”

  “Okay.”

  As they were turning the corner, Judy said, “Places for rent in that apartment building.”

  “It’s a little far from downtown, way out here,” Dougherty said.

  He was pulling into the parking lot of the mall and driving around to the front of the building, and Judy said, “Yeah, it’ll be hard to get all the way out here every morning.”

  There was a brasserie in the mall, and Judy and Dougherty both ordered the special, hot chicken sandwiches with mashed potatoes and gravy. From their booth they could see out into the mall, teenagers going in and out of the record store and the poster store, middle-aged couples with groceries.

  Judy said, “What would you think about getting an apartment out here?”

  Dougherty was drinking his beer, and he took an extra gulp to keep himself from answering too quickly. Then he said, “You and me?”

  “We’ve been talking about it, getting a place together.”

  “Living in sin, yeah.” Dougherty was thinking that for the last few days they hadn’t been talking at all, never mind talking about moving in together. “You want to?”

  “It would be convenient.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah,” and Judy said, “More for me, I know, but you work all over the city. It could be a home base.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Okay.”

  That seemed to decide it.

  Then Judy said, “So, how’s the Olympic security detail?”

  “As boring as it sounds.”

  “What happened to the murders?”

  “Officially they belong to Longueuil and we were just helping out.”

  “Are you still?”

  “I’m on the Olympic thing now.”

  Judy finished her beer and said, “But this is you we’re talking about.”

  The waitress came to the table and asked t
hem if they wanted any dessert, saying, “We have apple pie and lemon meringue.”

  Judy said, “No, thanks,” and Dougherty said, “Just the bill, please.”

  The waitress did the final tally on her pad, tore off a sheet and put the paper down on the table.

  Then Dougherty said, “Okay, yeah, I’m going to keep working with Legault, the Longueuil cop. She had a pretty good idea that the original crime was a rape and not a robbery.”

  “She had? The Longueuil cop is a woman?”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, so?”

  “You didn’t mention that.”

  “If you say so.”

  Dougherty got out his wallet and looked at the bill. He started getting out some money and knew he was just trying to delay — he knew he’d avoided telling Judy that Legault was a woman and he’d even run over a couple of scenarios in his head about telling her, thinking he might go on the offensive and say something about how he figured she’d be happy to see a woman in the investigation but even he knew how patronizing that would be.

  Then he said, “The whole thing is messed up, two police forces, there’s all kinds of politics. Legault is actually youth services, so she started it when they were missing kids.” He counted out the money and a tip and left the bills tucked under his plate. “There’s a good chance the detectives are going to say one kid killed the other one and then committed suicide so they can close it.”

  “You did mention that,” Judy said.

  “Look, I’m sorry if I didn’t say anything about Legault being a woman.”

  “No, you’re right,” Judy said. “It shouldn’t make any difference. It should be a good thing, really, that she’s still working it.”

  “They’re really just letting her stay on as a gofer,” Dougherty said, “but I think she may be right.”

  “She’s good?”

  Dougherty shrugged. “Sure. She keeps working it, that’s good.”

  “Will she get in trouble?”

  “Probably. I mean, if they do close it and we keep working it and they’re wrong, they’ll look bad.”

  “But you’ll catch a murderer.”