Black Rock
Page 3
They walked half a block to Dougherty’s squad car, and Carpentier said, “They know you.”
“Yeah.”
“But you’re not one of them?”
“English can be pure laine, too.”
Carpentier laughed and Dougherty realized he was older than he’d thought, well into his fifties, wearing a dark suit and an overcoat, looking like Joe Friday playing detective.
“They don’t want to believe,” Carpentier said, “that the girl is dead.”
“But you don’t know that for sure.”
Carpentier nodded but then he shrugged. “Not for sure, no, but …”
Dougherty said yeah.
Carpentier leaned against the squad car and got out his cigarettes. He lit one and took a deep drag then blew smoke at the sky. “You know her, Brenda Webber?”
“I knew her sister. How old is Brenda?”
“Fifteen.”
“So maybe she ran away.”
“Maybe. Lots of kids doing it.”
“But you think that this Bill killed her?”
“He’s killed three in the last six months.”
“Three?”
Carpentier looked at Dougherty and said, “Don’t you know?”
“I’ve heard something,” Dougherty said. “They were downtown, weren’t they? I’ve been chasing bombs.”
“You and every other cop in the city,” Carpentier said. “But we still have murders, you know.”
Dougherty said, “Yeah, I know, I was at a murder scene last night,” and Carpentier said, “The Westmount bombs, they kill somebody?”
“Not for lack of trying — seven bombs, but no. One girl, maybe ten years old, bomb went off in an office building on Sherbrooke and blew a hole in the apartment behind it; she was on the couch in the front room. She was hit with a lot of glass and bricks, but they got her to the Children’s Hospital. It’s just a few blocks away, looks like she’ll be okay.”
“Cocksuckers. Ten-year-old girl. Cowards.”
Dougherty said yeah, then he said, “The murder was a car bomb, blew it up just as it came across the Champlain Bridge.”
“Coming into Montreal?”
“Yeah, just past the tollbooths. Vachon said it was probably mobsters, used a radio transmitter.”
Carpentier nodded, took a drag on his cigarette. “What kind of car?”
“Olds, it was in pieces when I got there. Could’ve been a Cutlass, maybe a ’67 by the tail lights.”
Carpentier said, “Johnny Vaccaro, probably. Coming back from New York — he runs the heroin.”
Dougherty didn’t say anything. He was surprised Carpentier was so sure.
“Comes in from Marseilles, gets unloaded here. Your friends, the Irish working the port, give it to the Italians, they take it to New York.”
“That’s a book,” Dougherty said, “last year. The French Connection, they got those guys,” and Carpentier said, “Yeah, that’s right — so now there’s no more drugs,” and he threw his cigarette on the sidewalk. “Come on, drive me around. Let’s find my car.”
“Well, the Webbers live on Coleraine or Knox off Liverpool, did you start at their house?”
Carpentier opened the passenger door. “The first one, what you call it, Coleraine? They live there.”
“It’s just a couple blocks, just the other side of Charlevoix.” Dougherty started the car, pulled a U and headed south.
Coleraine Street looked the same as Fortune Street, where Dougherty grew up, the same rows of three-storey houses with iron stairs and railings winding up to the second floor. The Doughertys had lived on the first floor and he thought the Webbers did, too, but as he turned onto Coleraine he wasn’t sure.
Carpentier said, “This Bill, this guy killed the other women, you know what they call him?”
Dougherty drove slowly along Coleraine, looking at the parked cars but not seeing an unmarked, and said no.
“Vampire. You know why? He bite their breast. Michaelchuk say after they’re dead, he can tell by the blood or something.”
“I remember one,” Dougherty said, “there was talk about it at Ten, it was just before the strike.”
“Police action. We don’t call it a strike.”
“She had an apartment on Dorchester.”
“Shirley Audette, she live with her boyfriend.”
“He didn’t do it?”
“He was at work. She was maybe on drug,” Carpentier said. “She had been in the Douglas, you know, l’hôpital psychiatrique,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, I know it. In Verdun.”
“The boyfriend say she have other boyfriends, too, that she like all kinds of crazy stuff, sex stuff. Hippies.”
They were at the end of Coleraine then, at Liverpool Street, and Dougherty said, “Your car doesn’t seem to be here.”
“No.”
Dougherty looked sideways at the detective and figured he’d had more to drink than just what he had at Nap’s, probably had a mickey in his pocket. Dougherty said, “Where was the first place you looked in the Point?” and Carpentier said, “The last place she was seen.”
“Where was that?”
Carpentier closed his eyes and leaned back, and Dougherty couldn’t tell if he was trying to remember or trying to fall asleep.
They turned onto Liverpool and Dougherty headed south towards Wellington, the main street through the Point and Carpentier said, “The boss?” Then he opened his eyes and looked at Dougherty and said, “Something about the boss.”
“Boss’s, it’s a store,” Dougherty said, “I know it,” and turned onto Wellington.
“He strangle them,” Carpentier said. “Marielle Archambeault, she was found in her apartment in the east end, Rue Ontario. She work in Place Ville-Marie, in a store, maybe he meet her there. That was November 23.”
Dougherty turned onto Fortune Street.
Back on his old street it did look just like Coleraine or Ash or Dublin or Charon, three-storey row houses, iron stairs bolted to the front.
“He kill Jean Way in her apartment on Lincoln. That’s Station Ten — you work that one?” Dougherty said no and Carpentier said, “January 26. She have a boyfriend, aussi. He find her but he didn’t do it.”
Dougherty was amazed how Carpentier could remember details, the names and dates and the circumstances, and he wasn’t sure he could ever manage that. All the cops he knew wanted to become detectives — get into plainclothes, work homicides and big-time frauds — but Dougherty wasn’t sure he could do it.
“There was a TV show,” Carpentier said, “on the CBC, national network, everything we had on Bill, we showed them everything. You remember it?”
“Didn’t see it.”
“They saw it here, those people at Nap. And we got lot of calls, hundreds, thousands, everybody know Bill but no one know him.”
Dougherty slowed down as they passed Boss’s, looking at the kids hanging out front drinking Cokes and eating chips, probably the same age as Brenda Webber, the boys with hair as long as the girls’. Only a few years younger than the women Carpentier was talking about.
“Do you see your car?”
Carpentier still had his eyes closed. “Brenda Webber did not come home on the night of May the twenty-eight.”
“Last Thursday,” Dougherty said.
“Were you working?”
“Two bombs that night,” Dougherty said. “One at the Reddy Memorial Hospital and one in a warehouse on Van Horne. No phone calls, they both exploded.”
“They were cover for the robbery,” Carpentier said, “at the Université de Montréal Student Centre.”
“What could they get at a student centre?”
Carpentier shook his head, still didn’t want to believe it, and said, “Fifty-seven thousand dollars.”
“What?”
“Not one of their forced donations?”
“Maybe, who knows. There’s my car.”
At the end of Fortune Street in the parking lot of École Jeanne-LeBer there was one car, a four-door Ford. Dougherty pulled into the lot and beside Carpentier’s car.
“The mother call police Friday, file a missing person report. She say that Brenda stay out all night before but she call the friends and they don’t see her.”
Dougherty was thinking he should say something in French to get Carpentier speaking French, he might be easier to understand, but the detective was still talking: “She left the house, she stop at Boss and no one see her after. The other kids, the friends, they don’t want to say where they were, but probably right here in this park smoking dope.”
There hadn’t been much dope smoking when Dougherty’s family moved out of the Point a few years earlier, but he wasn’t surprised to hear there was plenty of it now. Past the park were the CN rail yards and the garbage dump — Dougherty could still hear his mother warning him not to go near it because of the stray dogs. Rabid dogs, she’d said.
Carpentier opened the car door and started to get out, then stopped and looked at Dougherty and said, “Tell Delisle I went home,” and got into his Ford and drove away.
Dougherty sat in the parking lot of Jeanne-LeBer for a few minutes. It was a nice Sunday afternoon — quiet, sunny — and even the Point was a pleasant place.
A few miles away from the terrorist bombs and the mobster bombs.
And maybe a few miles away from the strangled women.
Two days later a man working at a factory in LaSalle found the body of Brenda Webber.
chapter
two
Dougherty was checking in for his four-to-midnight at Station Ten when Sergeant Delisle called him over to the front desk and said, “You know where is the lift bridge on the Canal Lachine, in Ville St. Pierre?” and Dougherty said, “What is it with you, am I the only west-end guy you’ve got?” and Delisle said, “You know it?”
“Yeah, I know it.”
“On Rue Dollard?”
Dougherty said, “Yes, right, that’s it,” losing patience, and Delisle said, “Go and see Detective Carpentier.” Dougherty said, “Is he drunk again?” and Delisle said, “They find the body,” and Dougherty knew right away. “Shit.”
“Get going, don’t say anything to the press.”
Dougherty turned and walked out of the station, thinking that not talking to the press was about the first thing they taught him when he joined the force.
Rush hour was just about to start, and Dougherty drove down Guy and onto the 2-20 expressway heading west. Most of the west island traffic, the office guys heading out to suburban bungalows in Dorval and Beaconsfield and Baie-D’Urfé, hadn’t really started, and in only a few minutes Dougherty got off the expressway in Ville St. Pierre. He could see a couple of guys leaning up against LaSalle cop cars in the parking lot of the Transfer Restaurant and pulled up beside them.
One of the guys said, “C’est toi, Dog-eh-dee?” and Dougherty said yeah.
The guy tossed his cigarette and got in his car, saying, “Suis-moi,” and pulled out of the lot, crossed the lift bridge and turned left onto St. Patrick Street. Dougherty followed him for about half a mile along the canal, the south side of St. Patrick lined with factories and a truck terminal, and then they turned off and drove around a huge, vacant building and into the empty lot behind it.
Dougherty could see cars in the tall weeds, a cop car with the red light turning, an ambulance without any lights on, the coroner’s station wagon and Carpentier’s Ford. A flash went off as Dougherty got out of his car and walked towards the half dozen or so men standing in a small semicircle. Rozovsky was taking pictures of something on the ground.
Someone on the ground.
Dougherty stepped up beside Carpentier and the detective said in English, “It’s her, isn’t it?”
Even though Dougherty was expecting it, he was still stunned. At first he thought it was Arlene Webber and he said, “What?” but then he said, “Yeah, that’s Brenda Webber. She looks older than I expected.”
“As old as she’ll ever be,” Carpentier said. He looked at the coroner, Dr. Michaelchuk, leaning against the station wagon smoking a cigarette, and said, “We’ll get the priest; go talk to the parents and meet you at the morgue,” and Dougherty said, “No, she’s not Catholic. They went to Grace Church — it’s some kind of Protestant.”
“The minister then.”
“Reverend Barker.”
Michaelchuk tossed his cigarette and nodded to his assistant, and the two men started pulling a stretcher out of their car.
Carpentier looked around and spoke in French to the LaSalle cops, saying, “Can you ask around, see if anybody saw anything last night, maybe the night before,” and the cops looked at each other a little and shuffled their feet. There had been a lot of talk about merging all the police on the island of Montreal into a single force, but most of the suburban cities were against it and Dougherty had no idea how this kind of murder investigation would work.
After a minute one of the LaSalle cops said, “How do you know it was at night?”
A hundred feet in one direction were the back ends of the factories, St. Patrick Street, the canal and then the 2-20 expressway, and Dougherty knew someone could have dumped Brenda Webber here and been miles away in a few minutes. They could’ve taken the 2-20 west to the suburbs or all the way to Toronto; they could’ve taken it east into Montreal then north on the Décarie Expressway up to the Laurentians or south over the Champlain Bridge to the Eastern Townships or even to New York State thirty miles away.
Dougherty said, “Maybe someone in those houses saw something,” pointing across the empty lot to a row of brand new, squat, two-storey houses — fourplexes with flat roofs that looked like cinderblock buildings, newer versions of the houses in the Point, but with the stairs to the second floor on the inside.
“Seems far away,” Carpentier said, “but you might as well ask around.”
There were stakes in the ground of the empty field, where new roads and probably more of the squat houses were going to go in, so it did seem unlikely anyone had seen anything.
Dougherty said, “Who found her?” and Carpentier motioned to a group of men standing by the back of one of the factories.
“Saw the birds circling and one came closer and saw the scarf.”
Brenda Webber had been left face down, naked, with something tied around her neck that looked like a scarf, but Dougherty said, “It’s a bedsheet.”
“He wins the booby prize,” Rozovsky said and stood up from taking a picture. “Torn into strips, it looks like.” He started to raise his camera but stopped. No postcard shots here.
“All right,” Carpentier said, “let’s go get this Reverend Barker.”
Dougherty stood for a moment and watched the coroner and his assistant move the stretcher closer and then start to pick up Brenda Webber’s body. The torn bedsheet caught on a rock on the ground and slipped off easily as the girl’s body was lifted, and Dougherty noticed she was still wearing her black running shoes.
Carpentier was in his car then, and Dougherty got into his squad car and led the way. Grace Church, corner of Wellington and Fortune, a big old red brick building. Reverend Barker was in his office and recognized Dougherty as soon as he walked in. “Édouard, young man, what brings you here?”
Dougherty said, “My mom’s still making me go to mass, Reverend. This is business.”
Reverend Barker had hold of Dougherty’s hand, shaking it, and said, “Oh?”
“Brenda Webber.”
Reverend Barker nodded and let go of Dougherty’s hand. “I’ll get my coat.”
It was only a couple of blocks t
o the Webber house but Dougherty drove and Reverend Barker sat in the passenger seat and asked for anything Dougherty could tell him.
“It’s as bad as you can imagine — she was naked, tied up, dumped in a field behind a factory off St. Patrick in LaSalle.”
Reverend Barker nodded. That was all he needed and then they were in front of the Webbers’.
There was a small boy, maybe five years old, sitting on the front steps pushing a Matchbox car around and he looked excited to see the police car and to see Dougherty in his uniform getting out of it. At that moment a young woman emerged from the ground floor apartment, saw Dougherty, smiled and said, “Eddie,” and then she saw Reverend Barker getting out of the car and Carpentier getting out of his own car he’d double-parked and said, “Oh no.”
Reverend Barker took both her hands in his. “Arlene, is your mother home?” and the young woman nodded and Barker walked past her into the house.
Dougherty said, “Where’s your father?” and she looked at him for moment and then said, “He’s at work, he’s working a double,” and Dougherty said, “Domtar?” She shook her head and said, “Packers.”
Then they heard the scream from inside the house, the wailing, the sobbing, and Arlene turned and went inside.
Carpentier said, “Mon dieu, it could be the same girl,” and Dougherty said yeah.
A few people who had been sitting on their balconies or on their front stoops were starting to move closer to the Webbers’. Dougherty recognized a few faces, some parents of kids he’d known. Even after his family moved to the South Shore, Dougherty finished his last year of high school in Verdun and still hung out with his friends from the Point. He’d thought he’d stay friends with them forever but when he’d started working construction instead of going into one of the factories or the railroad or working the port unloading ships they’d started to drift and when he’d joined the police that was it. He knew going to the French elementary school made him different when he started at Verdun High in English and the Point didn’t really like anyone different.