A Little More Free

by John McFetridge

  The TV they’d set up for the game was showing the replay, and Dougherty realized it was a different goal, Henderson had scored another game winner, the series winner.

  Dougherty walked back outside, and now the city was the way he knew it best — celebrating.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  The squad room was crowded, there must have been twenty-five cops in it, mostly older guys, detectives in wrinkled suits smoking cigarettes and listening to the directeur, the top man in the police force, René Daigneault, explain how the new task force was going to be set up. It was going to be called the Commission d’enquête sur le crime organisé, and already Daigneault was calling it CECO.

  Standing at the back of the room by the door and only hearing half of what Daigneault was saying, Dougherty was just happy to be in the room.

  There was grumbling and a lot of foot shuffling when Daigneault talked about the Caron inquiry in the ’50s and how nineteen cops and the directeur, Albert Langlois, were charged with conspiring with organized crime and fired and it only settled down when he said that wasn’t going to happen this time.

  “Cette fois, nous allons après les vrais criminels, the big boys.”

  Dougherty saw Carocchia looking doubtful and wondered if he’d get to write press releases about any of this.

  There were a few women in the room, too, a couple Dougherty recognized from the Social Squad who knew their way around.

  It was looking like it could be a real inquiry, a real investigation.

  And it was another temporary assignment for Dougherty, but this time he felt he could make it work.

  * * *

  When Daigneault finished his speech and got a round of applause from the cops, they divided up into smaller groups, and Dougherty pushed through the crowd to where Ste. Marie was sitting on the edge of a desk. He said, “Ça regarde bien.”

  Ste. Marie smirked a little, and Dougherty heard Carpentier say from behind him, “It always looks good in the beginning, Constable.”

  Dougherty turned around and Carpentier said, “Detective-Constable.”

  “It’s temporary,” Dougherty said, but he liked hearing it.

  Carpentier said, “It will be permanent by the end of this assignment.” Then he looked at Ste. Marie and said, “Going after the big boys.”

  Ste. Marie didn’t look too impressed.

  “Maybe you’ll get Cotroni.”

  “Maybe.”

  “But you won’t be getting Rizzuto.”

  “Bastard.”

  “He’s gone,” Carpentier said to Dougherty. “Looks like South America — Colombia or Venezuela.”

  “I guess he’s got those paintings,” Dougherty said, “from the museum.”

  “Il va revenir,” Ste. Marie said. “He won’t be able to stay away.”

  “Yes, for sure. So, did you hear, charges laid today in the Blue Bird fire.”

  Dougherty said, “All three guys?”

  “Yes, each one charged for thirty-seven murders.”

  “Mon Dieu,” Ste. Marie said. Then he stood up and said, “Bon, au travail,” and walked towards the other senior detectives planning their squads.

  Carpentier said, “This is a good assignment for you, Dog-eh-dee.”

  “Thanks. And thanks for making it happen.”

  “You worked for it. So now,” Carpentier said, “a not-so-good assignment. We’re also making a murder charge today against your old friend Buckley, for Greg Herridge and David Murray.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yes, but I was wondering, would you like to call Mrs. Murray?”

  Dougherty thought, No way, no one wants to phone a woman to tell her about her son’s murder, but he said, “Yes, I’d like to be the one.”

  “Good.” Carpentier handed him a piece of paper with a phone number on it and said, “Come on, use the phone in the homicide office.”

  Dougherty followed him and realized it would be his first assignment as a detective-constable.

  * * *

  Judy said, “Just let me get these on,” and Dougherty watched her go to the back door where her workboots were sitting on a piece of newspaper. But she reached past the boots and picked up a pair of black shoes.

  “This is just like how we met,” she said. “The first time you arrested me, you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  She was walking past him then and said, “That’s how I’m going to tell our kids how we met.”

  Dougherty followed her out of the house to where she was standing beside his car and before he could say anything — and there was a lot he wanted to say — she was holding up a record album and saying, “Alice and Ian? A bootleg?”

  “It’s for my brother.”

  “He’s going to love it.”

  In the car, Dougherty said, “You sure you want to do this? Sunday dinner in Greenfield Park? We have to cross a bridge, you know.”

  “Sure,” Judy said.

  Dougherty put the car in gear and pulled away, thinking he had no idea how it was going to go, but it felt right.

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  A Little More Free uses many historical events to tell its story. Most Canadians my age or older can remember where they were when Paul Henderson scored the winning goal in the final minute of the final game in the Summit Series (I was in a grade seven classroom in Centennial Regional High School), but not so many of us seem to remember where we were for the first game of the series (my brother’s apartment in Moncton, New Brunswick — he was on duty that night with the RCMP, but he stopped in a few times for updates).

  The fire at the Wagon Wheel nightclub, usually referred to by the name of the club on the main floor of the building, the Blue Bird Café, is also not so well known. Most of what’s described in this book actually happened. In August 2012, a permanent memorial for the thirty-seven victims was unveiled in Phillips Square. (The building that housed the Wagon Wheel and the Blue Bird Café no longer exists.) A story from the Canadian Press looking back at the original story said, “Somehow, it barely made a ripple — not even in the local media. The death of working-class kids in a country-and-western bar happened to have occurred on the eve of a far more famous event that captured the nation’s imagination: the beginning of the 1972 Canada-Soviet hockey series.”

  Also, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts was robbed, although that happened in the early hours of Monday, September 4, not Sunday. The stolen paintings and jewellery have yet to be recovered.

  Montreal had been awarded the 1976 Summer Olympics in 1970 and was watching closely, along with the rest of the world, as eleven Israeli athletes were murdered in Munich in September 1972.

  There are no reliable figures for the number of Americans who came to Canada rather than be drafted into the American armed forces to fight in Vietnam, or who simply came to Canada to continue to protest what they saw as an unjust war. The numbers range from 60,000 to a quarter of a million and include men and women. The term “draft dodger” has generally been replaced by “war resister,” as most of the people who came to Canada weren’t avoiding the draft but were protesting the war. There are a few very good books on the subject, but it is still a contentious issue and more needs to be written, I think. A good place to start is Jack Todd’s 2001 memoir, The Taste of Metal: A Deserter’s Story.

  Claire Helman’s 1987 book The Milton-Park Affair offers some very good background on the story of what was, at the time, as the subtitle says, “Canada’s largest citizen-developer confrontation.” The mass arrest of fifty-six people protesting the development was a turning point in 1972. Phase One, what is now the LaCité complex, was built but plans for more towers and more destruction of existing homes was stopped. After decades of expropriation for the construction of new buildings, expressways and Expo (the destruction of Griffintown may or may not have been a result of
Expo), the people of the Milton Park Citizens’ Committee should be remembered.

  Of course, A Little More Free is a novel and many of the characters are entirely fictional. Any mistakes in the research are entirely mine. I’d like to thank everyone who helped in the research of this book:

  My sister, Susan Bentley, and my cousin Linda McFetridge, who had both been to the Wagon Wheel and remember the tragedy well, and the many, many people I pestered with questions: Randy McIlwaine, Michel Basilières (whose father appears in The Milton Park Affair), Roy Berger, Jacques Filippi (who continues to do what he can with my awful French), Peter Rozovsky, Dana King, Keith Logan, Kristian Gravenor and everyone at ECW Press: Jack David, Michael Holmes, Erin Creasey, Crissy Calhoun, Scott Barrie at Cyanotype (for the fantastic cover), Rachel Ironstone, David Caron, Jenna Illies and, for the incredibly thorough and thoughtful editing that made this book what it is, Jen Knoch.

  And, of course, my wife, Laurie Reid.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  John McFetridge, author of the Toronto Series, has also co-written a short story collection, Below the Line, and wrote for the CTV series The Bridge. He was born in Montreal and now lives in Toronto with his family.

  THE TORONTO SERIES BY JOHN McFETRIDGE

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  Copyright © John McFetridge, 2015

  Published by ECW Press

  665 Gerrard Street East, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4M 1Y2

  416-694-3348 / info@ecwpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  McFetridge, John, 1959–, author

  A little more free / written by John McFetridge.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77041-264-4 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-77090-793-5 (pdf); ISBN 978-1-77090-794-2 (epub)

  I. Title.

  PS8575.F48L58 2015 C813’.6 C2015-902791-8

  C2015-902792-6

  Editor for the press: Jen Knoch

  Cover design: Scott Barrie | Cyanotype

  Cover images: Bluebird Café © Dennis Robinson/The Globe and Mail; foggy club © KN/Shutterstock; hand with gun © katalinks/Shutterstock; burning document © Rob Hyrons/Shutterstock

  Author photo: Jimmy McFetridge

  The publication of A Little More Free has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays. Ce livre est financé en partie par le gouvernement du Canada. We also acknowledge the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.