The kid was maybe fourteen or fifteen and Dougherty was a little surprised to see he was clean cut and seemed respectful. He figured it was because the kid was Italian, probably still translating for his parents.
Denison asked the kid if he’d seen a white car and the kid said yes, and Dougherty said, “With a black roof?”
The kid said, “Yes,”
“A big car?”
“Yes, a big white car with a black roof.”
“When was this?”
“In the morning, I was delivering my papers.”
Dougherty said, “The Gazette?” and the kid said yeah.
“My little brother has a Gazette route, too.”
“Around here?”
“No, on the South Shore, Greenfield Park.”
The kid nodded but didn’t say anything, and then Dougherty said, “But you remember the car?”
“Yeah, there’s not many cars around when I deliver.”
“You have to be finished by seven, right?”
“Yeah, but I’m usually finished before that. I have to help my mom make lunches.”
“So what time do you think you saw the car?”
The kid thought about it. “Well, I was just starting, and I was right here, so it must have been before six, maybe quarter to.”
“And what day was this?”
“I’m not sure.”
“But not Sunday, there’s no Gazette on Sunday.”
“And not Saturday, my little brother helps me then — we have all the flyers to deliver.”
Dougherty said, “Maybe Friday?” and Denison looked sideways at him, seemed to be trying to get him to realize something, but Dougherty didn’t know what. The kid said, “Yes, that’s right.”
Dougherty said, “But not this past Friday, it was the Friday before, right?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“That’s quite a while ago,” Denison said, and the kid said yeah and thought about it for a moment. “I think there was a story on the front page about a hijacking.”
Dougherty said, “Okay, so this was Friday morning and you saw the white car on Cordner. Which way was it going?”
The kid looked up the street and thought about it for a bit and then said, “That way,” pointing past the field towards Montreal.
“Okay, that’s good, thanks very much.”
The kid shrugged and started to turn away, and Denison said, “You better write down his name.”
Both the kid and Dougherty were looking at Denison and he said, “The boy’s name and address, you better write it down for your report.” Dougherty said, “Right, yeah,” and then asked the kid his name and had to make him spell it, “Masaracchia,” one letter at a time.
Denison walked back to Cordner with Dougherty and said, “That could be some good information,” and Dougherty said, “It sure could.”
“If it’s right.”
They were at Dougherty’s car then and he said, “What do you mean?”
“Just that he was trying very hard to be helpful.”
“That’s good, isn’t it? We’re not getting a lot of help on this.”
Denison said, “Yes, of course it’s good, it’s just … maybe he was trying too hard.”
“I can check on the hijacking, see what day it was.”
“Of course, it’s just …”
“What?”
“Maybe a detective, maybe someone a little more experienced in this kind of interrogation should talk to him.”
“If I can find one who’s not chasing bombs,” Dougherty said, “I’ll drive him out here myself.”
Denison nodded, understanding, and shook his hand goodbye.
Dougherty got in his car, pulled a U on Cordner, drove in the direction the kid said the big white car went for a few blocks and came to Lapierre. From there he could go north to St. Patrick and along the canal, either into Montreal or out to the West Island suburbs or south into more of LaSalle and Ville-Émard and Verdun. He could even keep going on Cordner to more factories and warehouses.
Anywhere.
Dougherty turned left and headed up to St. Patrick, anxious to get back to Station Ten.
Inside the station, the first thing Dougherty saw was Delisle hanging up the phone and saying, “There goes your overtime.”
“What?”
“Saint-Jean-Baptiste, it’s all getting covered out of Station Four and Six, and that concert at the Autostade is canceled.”
“The Festival Express?”
“The train, yeah.”
“No overtime downtown at all?”
“Regular shifts.”
Dougherty said okay, then Delisle said, “Detective Carpentier wants to see you.”
“Now?”
“After your shift, across from Bonsecours, the restaurant, there’s a room in the back. Be there after seven.”
Dougherty said okay, and started towards the break room looking for some coffee. “Where you going?” Delisle said. “We have a call.”
“Bomb?”
“Drunk and disorderly. We still do police work, you know.”
Dougherty took the address and left the station thinking, Yeah, fighting with drunks, real police work.
chapter
eight
It was almost ten by the time Dougherty got to the restaurant on Bonsecours Street, across from police HQ. The front room was filled with empty booths but the back room was packed with detectives and thick with smoke. He looked around for a minute and spotted Carpentier at a table in the corner with four other men, all looking like they owned they place, and made his way over.
He didn’t know what to say so he just stood there waiting for Carpentier to notice him. When he finally did the detective said, “Qu’est-ce qui t’es arrivé?” and Dougherty touched the side of his face and said, “Oh, seulement les drunks.”
Carpentier switched to English: “Are you on shift now?” And Dougherty said, “No, I’m on days. The fight started after lunch and kept going, all the way to the hospital.”
Carpentier was leaning back in his chair, looking him up and down, and Dougherty felt like he was standing in front of his old football coach after fumbling the kickoff, but then Carpentier said, “Sit down, you want a drink?”
“Sure.”
The detective waved across the crowded room, and Dougherty saw the waitress, who didn’t look old enough to be in the bar, nod.
“So, do you have anything?”
“I might, yeah.”
“Don’t tell me someone saw the car?”
“Maybe.” Dougherty put his constable’s hat on the table, but then, looking at the number of empty beer bottles and highball glasses, he thought better of it and held it in his lap. “A kid, a boy, maybe fourteen, delivering newspapers in the morning thinks he saw the car.”
“Where?”
“Where you said to look, in LaSalle, near where the body was found.”
“What do you think?”
The waitress was at the table then, putting a Molson Export and a shot glass in front of Dougherty, and he reached for his wallet but Carpentier stopped him. “We’re letting homicide pay for one last night.” He motioned for him to continue, and Dougherty said, “I can’t really tell, the kid was trying very hard to be helpful.” He decided he wasn’t going to say anything about the retired LaSalle cop helping him out.
“It’s possible,” Carpentier said. “Maybe he was younger than fourteen — not many kids want to help the police anymore.”
“I think the kid’s family hasn’t been in the country very long.”
“Have you shown the girl pictures of cars, figured out what kind it was?” Before Dougherty could say anything, Carpentier looked past him and waved across the room, saying, “Hold on, here’s Ste. Marie,” and then ca
lling, “Robert,” pronouncing it the French way, Ro-bair.
Dougherty turned and saw a middle-aged guy in a wrinkled suit push his way through the crowd to the table and hold his hand over Dougherty’s head to shake with Carpentier.
The other three guys at the table were involved in a heated discussion in French, one of them doing most of the talking but the other two jumping in and disagreeing every few words. Ste. Marie patted one of the guys on the back and the guy held up his hand to wait, but Ste. Marie looked back at Carpentier.
“Robert, j’te présente le constable Doe-er-dee.”
It was too crowded for Dougherty to stand up, so he just held up his hand. Ste. Marie shook it and said, “Call me Bob,” with almost no accent at all.
Carpentier yelled at the other detectives at the table to clear some room, and Ste. Marie squeezed in beside Dougherty as Carpentier was saying, “Bob has also been assigned to the anti-terrorist squad.”
“Like everybody else,” Ste. Marie said, not looking too happy about it.
Carpentier said, “You coming from Cleo’s?”
“Fuck you.”
Carpentier laughed and Dougherty had no idea what they were talking about and didn’t want to ask. They’d already slipped into English, probably an old habit from back when they were rookies and there were still Scotsmen in senior positions.
Carpentier lit a cigarette. “The apartments upstairs are rented by hookers — Cleo is the madam. Sometimes from homicide you see them in the windows.”
“Sometimes,” Ste. Marie said, “you see a lot,” and Carpentier laughed.
Ste. Marie looked at Dougherty then and said, “Mais t’es un vrai anglais, vraiment?”
“My mother’s French,” Dougherty explained.
“Québécois, or did your father bring her back from France after the war?”
“From New Brunswick.”
Ste. Marie said, “Almost Québécois,” and Dougherty thought, Well, yeah, a lot closer than I’ll ever be, even though I was born here, but he didn’t say anything, the difference between Québécois and Quebecker getting further apart every day.
Carpentier said, “He’s working my murder investigation,” and Ste. Marie said, “Tabarnak, a murder he’s working?”
“The girl from last week.”
“That’s one of Bill’s, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Carpentier said, “and the kid has something.”
Ste. Marie was looking at Dougherty then.
“A car. One of the girl’s friends told me she saw a car in the neighbourhood she thought was suspicious.”
“Why suspicious? She ever see it before?”
“A couple of times, maybe, but doesn’t think it’s local.”
Ste. Marie said, “What do you mean, local?” and Carpentier said, “Point St. Charles,” and then nodded at Dougherty. “He’s from there.”
Dougherty saw Ste. Marie nod like that meant something, maybe explained why an English guy joined the police instead of going to McGill, but he let it go and said, “I know her brother.”
Ste. Marie said, “The victim or the witness?”
“Both.”
Then Carpentier said, “But that’s not all,” and motioned to Dougherty to continue.
“Right. The body was … left in LaSalle, behind an old naval repair yard on St. Patrick.”
“HMCS Hochelaga.”
“That’s right.”
“Where I learned English,” Ste. Marie said.
Dougherty didn’t know what to say to that so he just went on. “I talked to a kid who lives nearby and he saw a car that could be the same one in the morning when he was delivering the Gazette.”
“That’s not bad,” Ste. Marie said. “That could actually be something.” He looked at Carpentier and said, “You training this kid?” and Carpentier said, “Yeah, in all my spare time.”
“What kind of car?”
Dougherty said he wasn’t sure yet, “Both kids said a big white one with a black roof.”
“Convertible?”
Dougherty said, “Not sure.”
Ste. Marie said, “Okay. In the Point these days the new cars usually have some connection to the Point Boys — they’re bringing in a lot more dope now, making some real money.”
Carpentier said, “They’re bringing it in themselves?”
Ste. Marie a cigarette and exhaled, adding to the thick cloud hanging over the room. “It’s still the Italians but some of us, too,” he said, motioning to himself and Carpentier, meaning French guys. “Bringing in hashish. The Higgins brothers still have the port so everybody has to deal with them, but now there are more drugs and more players.”
Carpentier said, “Hash users are not the same as heroin users,” and Ste. Marie nodded, “The same jazz musicians and the boys down around Rockheads, but now also students. And the dealers are different, too. We got a guy last month bringing in thirteen pounds of hashish from Beirut he said was for personal use. We got a guy last week — an American student nineteen years old — coming in from Tel Aviv with hashish claiming he was ‘terrorized’ into doing it.”
“Maybe he was,” Carpentier said.
“Maybe.”
Dougherty said, “Are the Higgins brothers the Point Boys?” and Ste. Marie said, “Yes. And there are others, they come and go. The Point Boys aren’t like the Italians — they’re not so structured, not so famiglia. It’s not like guys have to join and work their way up, become made or anything like that.”
Dougherty didn’t say anything but he was pretty sure the Higgins brothers and the rest of the guys in the Point were only working with guys they knew, guys they’d known all their lives like Danny Buckley and the Murphys.
“The Italians have been bringing drugs through Montreal for years, the Corsicans in Marseilles to Montreal and then it goes to New York. The Irish have always had the port in Montreal and took their piece to pass it through. But now that it’s hashish and marijuana and there’s so much more, they want a bigger piece.”
“Is this why Johnny Vaccaro was killed on the Champlain Bridge?” said Dougherty. Ste. Marie looked at Dougherty over the rising smoke of his cigarette and said, “How do you know that?”
“I was on the scene. He was driving a Cutlass, blown all over the road by the tollbooths.”
“That’s right, he was coming back from New York.”
“Did the Point Boys kill him?”
Ste. Marie shrugged. “Who knows? Nobody’s talking. Could have been internal. The Italians don’t always get along — there’s some from Sicily some from Calabria. It could have even come from New York.”
“You’d think they’d be too busy counting their money,” Carpentier said. He knocked back his shot and then looked at Dougherty and said, “They’ve had a piece of every construction in this city for the last ten years: look what they had — Expo, the Métro, the Champlain Bridge.”
“The expressways,” Ste. Marie added, “Décarie, Metropolitan, Bonaventure.”
“The office towers: Place Ville-Marie, Place Bonaventure, Place Victoria.”
“All that construction.”
Dougherty said, “I worked construction at Expo, the American pavilion.”
“Oh yeah, you pay union dues?”
Dougherty shrugged. “Or you don’t work.” Another fight he’d had with his father a few times before their unspoken truce.
“And now,” Carpentier said, “we get the Olympics — more construction.”
“Yes, but the Olympics,” Ste. Marie said, “can no more lose money than —” and Carpentier joined in with “a man can have a baby,” and they both laughed.
Then Carpentier said, “Bon, about the hashish.” He drank some of his beer and looked at Ste. Marie. “The victim from the Point was buying hashish.”
“In the Point?”
“We think so, yes. The last place she was seen was the dépanneur. She bought cigarettes and rolling papers.”
“Did she already have the hash?”
“We don’t know. There was none in her system when she died.”
“How do you know that?” Dougherty said, and Carpentier said, “It’s in the coroner’s report, haven’t you read it?”
“No, I didn’t see it, I mean, I’m at Station Ten, I couldn’t …” and Carpentier said, “Of course, yeah, you’re not actually in homicide, I forget.” Then he turned back to Ste. Marie. “Her clothes were not with the body, so we don’t know.”
“But the drug connection is good,” Ste. Marie said. “Some of the other victims were also taking drugs, weren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Just hashish?”
“And other drugs.”
“So,” Ste. Marie said, “Bill is a dealer?”
“Maybe.”
“Well,” Ste. Marie said, “that’s something.”
“Can you ask some of your informants, see if they know any dealers driving big white cars?”
Ste. Marie shrugged. “It’s a homicide investigation, can’t they do it?”
Carpentier looked around the bar. “When they get to it.”
“It’s the same for us,” Ste. Marie said. “I can ask the guys who are still left. You know how many we have working the mob?”
Carpentier nodded, what could he say, and Ste. Marie said, “And then there’s the Mounties, did you hear?”
“What?”
“Complete shakeup, they’re shipping out almost every guy they have in Montreal.”
Carpentier said, “Why?”
“Officially? Because they don’t speak French, but really, it’s because of their guy, what’s his name, arrested last year with the heroin.”
“Oh yeah,” Carpentier said, “Kozlik.”
Dougherty remembered something about an RCMP officer being charged with drug smuggling, something about a girlfriend in New York who maybe had mob connections but he didn’t know the details.
“So now they have guys on the street who’ve been behind desks for years.”
Black Rock Page 10