Black Rock

by John McFetridge

  “The three behavioural characteristics are bed-wetting, setting fires and cruelty to animals.”

  “Bed-wetting?” Dougherty said and imagined what the detectives and inspectors in the homicide office would say if someone told them to look for bed-wetters.

  “Persistent bed-wetting, past the age of five.”

  Dougherty said, “Oh well, then.” Ruth ignored that and said, “And obsessive fire-setting and extreme cruelty to animals, killing animals.” Dougherty asked if any of the kids in the Manson trial had any of those traits, and Ruth said that Dr. Pendleton was hoping to talk to them. “Maybe I’ll get to go along.”

  That was about the most excited she’d looked in the restaurant and now, back at her apartment, Dougherty was thinking how he couldn’t figure this Ruth Garber at all. She wasn’t anything like his sister and the other kids at the pop festivals where he worked security. She also wasn’t anything like the secretaries in the offices they cleared out during bomb scares and got together with later in the bars. Ruth was serious and straightforward, even now as she was sitting back down on the couch and unwrapping the tinfoil ball. She set it down on the coffee table, squeezed some tobacco out of a cigarette onto a rolling paper and then picked up a penknife that was already blackened at the tip and started to slice off a piece of the hash. But she had to really put some pressure on it and the hash went flying off the table in two directions.

  “Shit,” Ruth said, and Dougherty laughed.

  “It’s a little brittle,” she said, getting down on her knees on the orange shag carpet and digging around. “What is it?”

  Dougherty saw the other half of the hash sitting on top of a carpet shag and picked it up. “He said Green Morrocan but I’m not sure he’s reliable,” and put it on the tinfoil.

  Ruth sat back on the couch, holding the penknife stuck into the other piece of hash, and picked up a book of matches. Before it got awkward, with her trying to light one with one hand while holding the penknife in the other, Dougherty fired up his Zippo and she met his eyes as she held the hash over the flame.

  Once she had it warmed up she crumpled it over top of the tobacco and Dougherty watched her tongue slip out between her lips and lick the glue on the rolling paper. The only other person he’d ever seen roll a spliff was a construction worker at Expo and that certainly wasn’t sexy.

  Ruth was, raising her eyebrows at him over the ­rising smoke as she inhaled and held it while she passed the joint. Dougherty took a deep drag and held it himself, waiting until Ruth slowly exhaled, her lips in a crinkled O.

  “It is pretty good,” she said, and Dougherty exhaled and said, “It is?”

  “You can’t tell?”

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  Ruth took another hit, held it, and then let it out. “But there’s probably a lot of other stuff you have done.”

  “A few things, yeah.” He took the joint from her, looking into her dark eyes, still so serious.

  Later, in the bedroom, she whispered in his ear, “It’s okay, I’m on the pill,” and Dougherty didn’t say ­anything. It was the first time he’d heard that since the hostess from the stock exchange, but he figured it was being said a lot these days.

  They kissed and Ruth pulled away and started to unbutton her blouse. Dougherty took hold of her hands and moved them away, but she said, “I can undo my own buttons,” and Dougherty was kissing her neck then and said, “But what’s the fun in that?” and kissed his way to her breasts.

  She stayed serious for a long time and only really let go near the end, digging her fingers into his back and pulling him down on her as hard as she could.

  Then, almost as soon as Dougherty flopped back on the bed, she got up and walked into the living room.

  Dougherty thought about getting up to see what she was doing but instead he lay there listening to her, thinking about her walking around naked. He could hear ashtrays being moved and his lighter being flicked, and a minute later Ruth came back with a pack of Peter Jacksons in one hand and a joint in the other. She climbed back onto the bed, inhaling deep, and handed the joint to Dougherty. “I didn’t see your cigarettes; you’ll have to smoke mine.”

  He said, “Sure,” and took the joint. Ruth sat cross-legged on the bed and took back the joint when he handed it to her, and Dougherty was thinking how he really couldn’t figure her at all.

  When the joint was done she picked up her smokes and waved the pack at him but he shook his head. “Not right now.”

  “Okay, fine,” she said and put the pack on the bedside table.

  It had been awkward like this after sex for Dougherty before, but usually that was when all he could think about was getting out of there. He didn’t want to get away from Ruth, and then he thought maybe it was because he wasn’t feeling all that close to her.

  And maybe he wanted to.

  So he said, “Where are you from?”

  “How do you know I’m not from here?”

  “Well, you’re not living at home, you’re paying rent, and you’re not living in the McGill ghetto and you’re not living up on St. Urbain — you’re way out here in the east end.”

  “It’s not way out.”

  He looked at her sideways and said, “Does anybody else in this building speak English?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Are there any other McGill students around here?”

  “I’m not some undergrad,” she said. “I’m finishing my Master’s.”

  “English Montrealers don’t move into the east end,” Dougherty said. “It’s that two solitudes thing, remember?”

  “What about a guy like you who’s both?”

  “I think my name’s a bit of a giveaway.”

  “You think you have to choose to be one or the other?”

  Dougherty shrugged. It wasn’t something he’d thought about and not something he wanted to be thinking about at that moment. He really wanted to know more about Ruth and then it hit him. “You’re American.”

  “So, what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s not supposed to mean anything, it’s just most of the Americans I meet these days are men. You know, draft dodgers.”

  “Would you go to Vietnam?”

  Dougherty shook his head a little and said, “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. My dad joined the navy in 1938 but when I said something about joining the army he wasn’t too keen on it.”

  Ruth was still sitting cross-legged and looking at him. “Why was it okay for him but not you?”

  “I asked him that and he just said, ‘Nazis.’”

  “Not much you can say to that.”

  They were quiet for a minute and then Dougherty said, “Marielle Archambeault was killed a few blocks from here.”

  “I know,” Ruth said.

  “Is that what got you interested in this neighbourhood?”

  “No, I was already working for Dr. Pendleton.”

  “Studying murderers?”

  “Yes. I started here last September. I came here to work with him. I’d read all his papers and I saw a talk he gave at Columbia.”

  “Is that where you went?”

  He thought he saw the beginning of a smile and she said, “NYU.”

  It was quiet then, but Dougherty wanted to keep listening to Ruth talk.

  “Why do you want study murderers?”

  She looked at him and for a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer but then she turned sideways and picked up her pack of smokes from the bedside table and said, “Kitty Genovese.”

  Dougherty shrugged and Ruth lit her cigarette and blew out the match, then said, “ ‘Thirty-Seven Who Saw Murder Didn’t Call the Police.’ That was the headline.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember now. New York, right?�
��

  “Yeah, Queens.”

  “Is that where you’re from?”

  “No, the Bronx, Christopher Columbus High. I was a junior — we talked about Kitty Genovese a lot.”

  “That no one called?” Dougherty shrugged. “People get scared.”

  “No, it wasn’t that no one called the police, that’s what all the newspapers were talking about, that’s what all my friends were talking about. What I remember is that when they caught the guy, when he went to trial, the only reason he had for doing it, the only motive he said he had was that he wanted to kill a woman. That’s all he had to say. He drove around for hours that night looking for a woman to kill and found Kitty Genovese.”

  She took a drag on her cigarette, and Dougherty held up his hand and she handed it to him and he said, “That’s strange.”

  “What’s strange?” She held out her hand for the cigarette.

  “The driving around all night.”

  “What do you mean, did you find something?”

  “Maybe, I don’t know.”

  “What is it?”

  “Maybe a car, we don’t know if it’s anything.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “It was just when you said driving around all night. I’ve been looking for a car because a girl in the Point said she saw one and then a kid in LaSalle said he saw one that could be the same one, but it was when you said driving around looking for a woman I realized Sylvie Berubé was found right by the entrance to the Ville-Marie Tunnel and where Brenda Webber was found you can see the expressway, the 2-20, and that’s actually the same road.”

  “So he was driving back and forth?”

  “It’s probably nothing. The reason the car stood out a little in the Point is the place isn’t really somewhere you pass through, you know? Even if you’re taking the Victoria Bridge you don’t really go into the Point.”

  “And the other three women were all killed downtown.”

  “Shirley Audette was killed on Dorchester. There’s an on-ramp to the expressway right there and Jean Way’s apartment was on Lincoln — you can take Guy or Atwater.”

  “Well sure,” Ruth said, “you can drive anywhere.”

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what he did.”

  “What he’s doing.”

  Dougherty said yeah, thinking, Right, this guy has killed five women, why would he stop now? “They were all downtown, right? Even Marielle Archambeault, who lived around the corner here, he met her at Place Ville-Marie, didn’t he?”

  “She worked in a jewellery store,” Ruth said. “He picked her up there. That’s how we know his name is Bill — she mentioned it to one of the other women at the store.”

  “So he killed those three in their own apartments but Sylvie Berubé and Brenda Webber he didn’t.”

  “Brenda Webber lived at home, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah, and she was a lot younger than the other girls.”

  Ruth slid off the bed then and picked up her glasses as she walked back into the living room. “I’m just going to write some of this down.” She came back with a notebook and a pen. Still naked.

  Dougherty was going to say something about how good she looked under the jeans and loose blouses she wore, like a Playboy centrefold, but it didn’t seem like the time. And it didn’t seem like the kind of thing Ruth Garber cared about.

  She wrote a few things down in the notebook and then said, “Also there were no mutilations on Brenda Webber’s body, were there? He didn’t bite her breasts?”

  “No, he didn’t.”

  She nodded, wrote a few words on the notepad and then flipped it shut like a stenographer.

  Then she took off her glasses and looked at Dougherty. “Are you going to stay the night?”

  He couldn’t tell if she wanted him to or not, if it made a difference to her one way or the other but then without really thinking about it he said, “Of course,” and thought he saw her start to smile.

  Or maybe that’s just what he wanted to see.

  chapter

  twelve

  Rozovsky said, “You’re banging a member of the tribe?”

  “What?”

  “Ruth Garber — she’s Jewish, right?”

  “I don’t know, we didn’t talk religion.”

  Dougherty didn’t want to tell Rozovsky that what they did talk about was murderers — multiple murderers — and that Ruth Garber knew a lot more about them than Dougherty did. Probably more than any of the cops on the force.

  Rozovsky was pulling pictures out of the stack of files on the desk. “Trust me, it’ll come up. So how far back are we going?”

  “I don’t know, five years?”

  “Five years, you know how many cars that is?”

  “We don’t have to get every one. We can probably start with a few, narrow it down.”

  “Why don’t you go to some lots, get some brochures?”

  “Yeah, I can do that, too,” Dougherty said, “but it could be a couple years old and these kids didn’t see it in a showroom.”

  Rozovsky sighed. “I’ve got a lot of work to do, you know. Don’t you?”

  “Here,” Dougherty said, holding up a picture, “anything that looks like this.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Buick Skylark. No wait, Wildcat.”

  “Oh yeah, that was used in a bank robbery at the Rockland Shopping Centre. See the scrape along the side? There was a chase on the Metropolitan Expressway, remember?”

  “Vaguely. If it was white it would be a big white car with a black roof, wouldn’t it?”

  “Like this.” Rozovsky held up another picture, and Dougherty said, “What is it?”

  “Chevy. Impala, I think.”

  “Was it in a bank robbery, too?”

  “No, it was broken into. It could take days to find pictures of all the possible cars.”

  “Five or six will do. I just need to show the kids and see if they pick the same one.”

  “Here,” Rozovsky said, “this one’s even white.”

  Dougherty took the picture. “Nice car, Galaxy.” He put the picture with the others they’d pulled from the files and said, “Two or three more should do it. Have you got any Pontiacs? Maybe a Grand Prix or a Ventura?”

  “I told you,” Rozovsky said, “they’re not in here by car. These are evidence photos.”

  “But you can remember.”

  “They’re all over the place, they’re not filed by car, they’re filed by case.”

  “So?”

  “So, some of them are victim’s cars like that one, cars that were broken into or vandalized, and some were used in crimes and some were stolen vehicles.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay, but we don’t need everything. I can start with a few and eliminate some, narrow it down. Have you got a Buick?”

  “Somewhere.”

  “That mobster on the Champlain bridge, he was driving a Cutlass, right?”

  “I’ve got plenty of pictures of that one,” Rozovsky said, “but it was in about a hundred pieces.”

  “But mobster cars, they’re big. There must be plenty of pictures of them.”

  Rozovsky said, “Not as many as you’d think,” but he was walking back to the row of filing cabinets. Dougherty started out of the office, saying, “Okay, this is a good start, thanks. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.”

  Dougherty could hear Rozovsky complaining about not having time for this, but he knew he’d get the pictures together.

  Down the hall the homicide office was empty except for Carpentier sitting at his desk, going through notebooks. Dougherty stood at the door, watching as the detective flipped the pages and dropped notebook after notebook into a growing pile. The longer Dougherty stood there, the more awkward it got, but he didn’t want to barge in on the dete
ctive. Then he saw Carpentier stop and reread a page of a notebook, nod and then write something down.

  Carpentier looked up. “Constable Dougherty.”

  Dougherty started into the office. “You find something?”

  “Maybe, don’t know yet.” Carpentier shrugged and leaned back, the wooden chair creaking as it tilted and rolled a few inches. He rubbed his eyes, then looked up at Dougherty. “Something some guy said three months ago, didn’t seem like anything at the time, now maybe there’s something to connect it to.”

  “Working the informants.”

  Carpentier nodded. “Now that we have the task force and a lot of money to spend everybody is selling something.”

  “Some of it could be good.”

  “Oh yes, some of it. A lot to go through.” Carpentier started to pick up another notebook but stopped and looked back at Dougherty. “What about your informant, the drug dealer in the Point, how is that going?”

  “Pretty good, I think. I bought some hash off him.”

  “That’s good. What did you do with it?”

  Dougherty hadn’t expected that. “I flushed it,” he said, and Carpentier said, “Good.”

  “That’s all I did, I didn’t ask him about anything else.”

  “No, you don’t want to do that yet,” Carpentier said. “Buy a little more from him, get him to think he has a cop in his pocket. You may need to give him something.”

  “Like what?”

  That shrug again. “Maybe the next time we raid the bars you can tip him off, something like that.”

  “Okay, yeah, sounds good.”

  “This could be good for you,” Carpentier said, “if this guy is close to the Higginses. Does he seem close?”

  Dougherty thought about it a little. “He seems close. I think he’s a little brighter than the younger Higgins brothers.”

  “If he can tie his own shoes that puts him ahead of those two. So, become his friend.”

  “Okay.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’m getting pictures of different kinds of cars to show the kids, see if they can recognize the make.”

  “Why?”