Black Rock

by John McFetridge

  “Was she hurt?”

  “A little, I think. We were all knocked over,” she waved her hand. “The ceiling was falling, the walls. The whole members’ lounge. I’m a hostess.”

  “Well,” Dougherty said, “maybe she was taken to the hospital.”

  A man came up to them and said, “Helen, my girl, you could say the stocks went up today, eh?” and laughed at his own joke. He was in his fifties and his suit was covered in dust, his tie loosened around his neck, and Dougherty was pretty sure he’d had a few drinks. Must have had a bottle in his desk.

  The woman, Helen, said, “Yes, Mr. Gillespie,” and smiled at him and he said, “We’re going to Michael’s. Come on, only doubles — we’re only drinking doubles.” She said she’d see him later and he walked away. She looked at Dougherty and said, “He’s in shock,” and Dougherty said, “He’s something.”

  Helen took another drag on the smoke and said, “Maybe a drink isn’t a bad idea,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, maybe, but not at Michael’s,” and they went to the St. James Pub, which was full of cops and firemen.

  The cops were talking in French about who could have planted the bomb. There were really only a few guys who could have done it, guys who’d been picked up over the last couple of years for other bombings and bank robberies, mostly out on bail now, and everybody was confident there’d be some arrests in a few days.

  Dougherty translated for Helen, and she said it was too bad the arrests couldn’t have been a few days ago, and he nodded. Then she said his French was very good, and he told her about his mother being from Bathurst in northern New Brunswick and how she’d moved to Montreal to work in a munitions factory during the war and met his father, who was in the navy.

  Helen said, “How romantic,” and Dougherty shrugged and said, “Yeah, I guess.” He’d never thought about it like that.

  Helen said she had no idea how she was going to get home, and Dougherty said he could drive her. “In your police car?” she said, and he said, “Sure, this seems like an emergency.” She lived in a new apartment building near the river in LaSalle. She invited him to come up but Dougherty said he did have to get the car back at some point and she said, “At some point,” and ran her fingers lightly down his cheek.

  It took more than a few days, but it was only a couple of weeks later that the Montreal police and the RCMP put together a task force and raided dozens of apartments in one night. Dougherty was with the first group of cops up the stairs to apartment number four on the third floor of a building on St. Dominique, a block off the Main. They banged on the door and it opened. A young guy, Dougherty’s age but with long hair and a scraggly beard, stood there in his underwear. The cops pushed past him and right away saw the wooden crates of dynamite — must have been two hundred sticks, detonators and booby trap wires.

  One of the cops told the guy to unhook the trap, and the guy said, in English, even though the cop spoke to him in French, “Fuck you.” The cop slammed his nightstick into the guy’s stomach, doubling him over, and then said, “Vide les autres,” and Dougherty and a couple of the other cops who were still in the hall started knocking on the other doors and waking people up.

  Dougherty drove a man and his wife, Greek immigrants, and their kids, twins, to Station Seventeen, the guy talking the whole way, saying, “Noise, noise all the time from them. Many times I take broom, bang on walls, all drums, guitars, not music — noise.”

  Even from the hall, Dougherty had seen guitars in the apartment. And posters on the walls, the usual stuff: Che Guevara, Marx, Trotsky. Nothing very original. Nothing very original with the explosives, either, the bomb squad guy, Vachon, said, like he was complaining, “Always the same, an alarm clock, two wires, a detonator and the dynamite. Not like Ireland with the booby traps.”

  The long-haired guy in the apartment took the fall for all his buddies, refused to name any of them, said he did everything by himself, which was really crazy when the next day a couple of cops in St. Leonard found 141 sticks of dynamite wired into two bombs under the Metropolitan Expressway. But he still wouldn’t talk.

  Dougherty and Helen dated for a while and he managed to get her onto the floor of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel where John and Yoko were having their Bed-In for Peace. But it turned into a fight when Dougherty said the Beatle hadn’t really chosen Montreal for the next stop after Amsterdam, he was only in town because the marijuana bust kept him out of New York.

  Then when the Montreal cops went on a one-day strike and the city exploded into another riot — taxi drivers kicking it off this time, not students — and a man was killed, Helen went back to dating stockbrokers.

  At the end of September, a bomb exploded at the back door of the mayor’s house just before dawn. It blew a huge hole in the foundation, destroyed an office in the basement and the mayor’s darkroom.

  The rest of the world was still going crazy — riots, hijackings and kidnappings on every continent. Charles Manson and his hippie family were arrested for seven murders in Los Angeles and at the beginning of May 1970 four students at Kent State University were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard.

  Late on a Saturday night at the end of May, a car coming across the Champlain Bridge into Montreal exploded as it passed the Nuns’ Island exit just past the tollbooths. There were already two squad cars on the scene when Dougherty got there, working alone because Gauthier was taking all his sick days before his retirement, and he ran up to a cop he recognized, Bergeron, who was dropping a road flare a good two hundred feet from the smouldering car.

  “What’s out here?”

  Bergeron pointed and it took Dougherty a few seconds to make out the severed arm on the pavement. They closed the road, traffic backed up across the bridge and for miles past that, and walked around with flashlights showing the detectives and the tech guys as much of the debris as they could find. It looked like there was only one guy in the car, which looked like an Oldsmobile, a Cutlass, Dougherty figured, by what was left of the roof and the pieces of the front grille.

  Dougherty watched the police photographer, ­Roz­ovsky, take a hundred pictures of the wreckage and dozens of every body part they could find and then stop and change lenses on the camera and then turn and aim it back towards the skyline of Montreal.

  One of the detectives said, “What’s that for?” and Rozovsky said, “It looks like a postcard.”

  “You can’t sell a picture you take while you’re on the clock.”

  Rozovsky snapped off a few more shots and said, “It’s for my personal collection.”

  “Yeah, your personal collection on the rack in every drugstore in town,” and Rozovsky said, “From your lips …”

  Dougherty was thinking it did look like a postcard; the ships in the port, the big old Sun Life building, the shiny aluminum Place Ville-Marie, the black tower of Place Victoria, all of them under the big cross on Mount Royal.

  The detectives finally arrived, and one of them asked Vachon if it was the FLQ, and the bomb squad guy said, “Non, c’est la mob.”

  “Certains?”

  One of the other bomb squad guys handed Vachon a piece of debris, and Vachon explained to the detectives that it was a radio receiver and that probably the transmitter was in a car behind the Cutlass. “Or over there,” he said, pointing to the row of tollbooths on the southbound lanes.

  The detectives talked among themselves for a while, and Dougherty overheard a little of what they were saying, trying to figure out who would take the case as most of the organized crime squad was working terrorism cases and the homicide squad was also stretched pretty thin.

  One of the detectives looked at Dougherty with that what are you still doing here? look on his face, and Dougherty walked back to the other uniformed cops, wondering if anyone was ever going to investigate this.

  The bomb squad wrapped up about four in the morning. Dougherty was moving his car to open up th
e road and let them head back to their offices at police headquarters when Vachon rolled the window of his station wagon down and said, “Westmount, right away. Number five Lansdowne Ridge, let’s go.”

  Dougherty turned on the flashing light on top of his car and peeled out, driving fast through the city. He took the next exit off the expressway, Atwater Street, and headed up the hill. He didn’t know exactly where Lansdowne Ridge was. Westmount had its own police force right there in the middle of Montreal, no way all those Anglos, the richest of the rich, were going to let Montreal cops in their business. When he got to Sherbrooke, Dougherty turned left and saw the Westmount police car waiting to lead them up the winding streets on the southwest side of Mount Royal.

  Number five Lansdowne Ridge was a big stone house over a hundred years old and it looked like the bomb had been placed in a basement window well. The explosion had blown into the house, destroyed some furniture and a big colour TV but didn’t seem to have done much damage to the building itself.

  An ambulance and a bunch of Westmount police cars were on the scene.

  While Vachon and the rest of the bomb squad guys went to check it out Dougherty hung back with the Westmount cop, an older guy, looked to be in his fifties. Dougherty said, “Anybody hurt?”

  “The wife’s in shock, they’re taking her to the ­hospital. The kids, too. If it had gone off a couple hours earlier,” and he motioned to the smoking rubble in the basement, the rec room, and Dougherty said yeah.

  A few more Montreal cop cars pulled up, and Dougherty said, “Since when did you start letting us in here?”

  “Only for bombs,” the Westmount cop said. “Back when they were in mailboxes we’d call in the army, they’d take them out to a field and blow them up — one guy had his hands blown off, you remember that?”

  Dougherty said no, and the Westmount cop shrugged and said, “Now they want to treat them like a crime scene, try and get evidence, fingerprints, that kind of thing.”

  Dougherty said, “Makes sense,” and the Westmount cop said, “Yeah, like we don’t know who’s doing it.”

  Dougherty said yeah and started to get out his cigarettes when he heard a second blast. The Westmount cop said, “Shit, another one?” He got into his car and Dougherty got into his and followed.

  They could see the smoke rising a few blocks away, but Dougherty didn’t think he would have been able to find his way on these streets, all twists and turns and up and down.

  Another old stone house. Smoke coming out through smashed windows, man and a woman, both in their sixties or seventies, coming out as Dougherty and the Westmount cop rushed up, the Westmount cop yelling, “Anybody else in the house?” and the old man shaking his head, saying, “No, it’s just us.”

  Dougherty saw the blackened stones at the base of a retaining wall beside the house. The street had houses only on the south side, the north was a rock wall keeping back Mount Royal. Dougherty walked around the outside of the house, looking for another bomb or a package, something — he didn’t even know what, really. Beyond the house to the south was a steep drop-off and a great view of the St. Lawrence river and the South Shore. When he was on the small patio behind the house Dougherty realized that the idea behind the bomb was probably to knock out the retaining wall and have the house collapse on the ones below it down the hill, but the wall had held. He walked back out front of the house, saw the Westmount cop had the old couple in the back seat of his car, and just then Vachon pulled up and got out of his car saying, “Une autre.”

  Dougherty said, “That makes three,” and before Vachon could say anything there was another explosion.

  This one was just down the street. It was set in the retaining wall on the north side and blew huge chunks of brick through windows in the house across the street. Again the wall held.

  “They were trying for an avalanche,” Vachon said.

  The next bomb exploded twenty minutes later at the back of an office building on Sherbrooke a few blocks down the hill and blew out the windows of a couple of houses on Elm Avenue.

  By the time the sun was coming up a few thousand people had been evacuated and every Westmount cop and half the Montreal cops were scouring the neighbour­hood for more bombs. At ten o’clock a call came in that a man had found a suspicious package under his car, and when Vachon delicately pulled it out from under the Buick and opened it he saw fifteen sticks of dynamite wired to an alarm clock. Dougherty led the way — this driving fast through city streets starting to get old — to an open field off Côte-des-Neiges Road, where the bomb was dismantled.

  At noon the mayor of Westmount announced it was safe for people to return to their homes and then he invited the Montreal cops to join him at the Westmount City Hall for lunch. A couple dozen cops still on the scene took him up on the offer, and when Vachon pointed out that the alarm clock they’d taken off the dismantled bomb was stamped Made in China instead of the usual Made in Japan, the mayor decided they should have Chinese food and had his assistant call Ruby Foo’s.

  There was a lot of talk about a blue sports car with four bearded men in it that a few people said they saw just before the first bomb went off. Most of the cops weren’t too surprised. The usual suspects.

  “They all want to be Che Guevara.”

  When they were finally packing up to leave after lunch, another call came in. A boy had found a package on the patio behind his house and when he opened it he saw, as he put it, “A whole lot of dynamite.”

  Dougherty was about to get going when he heard, “Hey Dog-eh-dee,” and turned to see Delisle, the desk sergeant from Station Ten, walking up to him.

  “You know a taverne dans le Point, s’appelle Nap?” he said in his Franglish and Dougherty said, “Yeah, Nap’s — Napoleon’s. I know it.”

  And Delisle said, in English, “Go down there and get Detective Carpentier.” Being in Westmount must have thrown him off.

  One of the bomb squad guys standing nearby packing up equipment said, “Is he drunk again?”

  Delisle said, “Bring him au dix.”

  By then it was three o’clock Sunday afternoon. Dougherty had been on shift since he started the four to midnight on Saturday and he was wiped. But he got in his car and drove down the hill to Point St. Charles, his old neighbourhood. Only a few miles away but it felt like a million, the big stone houses replaced by three-storey walk-ups, wrought-iron staircases on the outside. No front lawns here.

  Dougherty had lived in the Point until his last year of high school when his parents bought one side of a duplex across the river in Greenfield Park.

  Nap’s was on Hibernia Street, almost on the corner of Mullins, near the Grand Trunk yard. On a weekday most of the drinkers would be men who’d just got off a shift in the yard or one of the factories along the Lachine Canal, but Sunday afternoon the place had some women in it, too, and they were doing most of the shouting Dougherty heard as he walked in.

  As soon as they saw him, one of the women said, “Jesus Christ, is that little Eddie Dougherty?”

  There were maybe a dozen people in the place but the room wasn’t very big so it looked tight. Detective Carpentier was standing at the far end of the bar and he wasn’t hammered, but he’d had a few, no doubt. Some men were standing by the back door, blocking it, and Dougherty knew some of them, guys his father’s age. There were younger guys in the bar, too, guys Dougherty’s age, and he looked at one of them who was standing behind the others and said, “Buck-Buck.”

  The woman who’d recognized Dougherty said, “You know what this asshole is doing here?”

  Dougherty kept staring at Danny Buckley for another couple of seconds, letting him know things were different now, Dougherty wasn’t the little kid getting smacked around on his way home from École Jeanne-LeBer, the only kid on the street going to the French school. Then he looked at the woman and recognized her, Mrs. Malley.

  She said, “He
’s looking for that Bill, the man killed those girls downtown.” She kept looking at Dougherty as if he’d be as outraged as she was. When he didn’t say anything she yelled, “Brenda Webber’s not dead!”

  One of the other women said, “He comes down here, as if Millie isn’t going crazy enough.”

  Dougherty knew the Webbers: Arlene had been in his class and now he was thinking that Brenda was one of her sisters — there were six or seven Webber kids, mostly girls — and Millie was the mother.

  A man’s deep voice came from the back of the room. “You don’t even know, do you?”

  Dougherty couldn’t see who said it, but he felt everyone turning on him, staring him down. It wasn’t that different from being the scared kid cornered between the sheds in the back lane, Buck-Buck and his friends giving him a beating, telling him his father knocked up a French whore and nobody wants the stupid half-breed kid.

  Silence, everybody staring at Dougherty, and he stared back, looking them over, trying to recognize as many faces as he could. He was sweating and starting to shake a little.

  Mrs. Malley looked at him and said, “Brenda Webber is missing. She’s been missing for three days.”

  Another woman said, “You should be looking for her.”

  Dougherty looked at Carpentier, and Mrs. Malley said, “You should be looking for Brenda, not him, not a guy looking for a murderer. Brenda’s not dead.”

  One of the men said, “Useless pigs.”

  The place felt like it was about to explode.

  Then Carpentier pushed away from the bar and started through the crowd, saying, “Come on, Constable, let’s go.”

  Mrs. Malley said, “Yeah, you get out of here,” and then the others all had something to say: get out, pigs; run away; why don’t you do your job; get the hell out of here.

  Outside Nap’s, Dougherty was still nervous and kept speaking English, saying, “Where’d you park?” and Carpentier answered in English, “I don’t know.” He looked around and said, “I was walking around. I don’t know this neighbourhood.”