Black Rock

by John McFetridge

  Dougherty shrugged and was feeling out of his depth again.

  Then Carpentier said, “Can’t hurt, I suppose,” and Dougherty said yeah. He didn’t want to leave the office on that so he said, “Hey, I was talking to Dr. Pendleton’s assistant.”

  “The girl with the glasses?”

  Dougherty said yeah, and Carpentier said, “And the big tits under those sweaters she wears?”

  “Yeah, right. Anyway, she asked me a lot of questions. That’s okay, right?”

  Carpentier nodded, “Dr. Pendleton has some connections.” He raised his eyebrows and motioned slightly upwards with his chin. “High up, you know?”

  “It was just the usual stuff.”

  “What else could it be?”

  Dougherty said, “I don’t know,” but he was thinking about the bed-wetting and wondered if Dr. Pendleton had told his connections about that.

  Just then another detective came in, saying, “Henri, viens ici, faut que tu entendes ça,” and Carpentier said, “Okay, j’arrive,” and stood up to leave. He turned at the doorway, looked back and said, “Don’t wait too long to buy more dope from your friend. Be a good customer.”

  “Yeah, for sure,” Dougherty said and watched the two detectives leave.

  Something was up. He could tell, he could feel it.

  But as his father would say, that was above his pay grade, so Dougherty went to the big filing cabinet against the east wall of the office.

  The first file Dougherty read was Shirley Audette’s. She’d been murdered on October 3, 1969. Eight months ago, six months after Dougherty had been called to the scene and discovered the body of Sylvie Berubé on the other side of the city.

  Looking at the picture of Shirley Audette, Dougherty saw the similarities to Sylvie Berubé right away: white women, early twenties, attractive. And strangled.

  Shirley Audette’s body was also found in a lane, this one right behind her apartment building on Dorchester, between St. Mark and St. Matthew, about four blocks from Station Ten. She was wearing red pants and a turtleneck sweater and a brown leather vest. She was twenty years old.

  She was also five weeks pregnant. Dougherty was surprised to see that. He couldn’t remember it from any of the press, although there had been very little press when Shirley Audette had been killed. There was also a note that said she had been treated at the Douglas, a psychiatric hospital in Verdun Dougherty only knew from all the jokes about the place he had heard growing up.

  The file also included the transcript of an interview with Shirley Audette’s boyfriend that said the two lived together in the apartment but the boyfriend was at work all night. He said she had called him at three in the morning and they spoke for a few minutes — she was scared being alone — and then he called her back at five and there was no answer. In the interview the boyfriend said Shirley sometimes took part in what he called “rough sex” with a man he didn’t know. The detective interviewing him asked if she did it for money, but the boyfriend said no. In the margin someone had written, drugs?

  Dougherty looked at the pictures of Shirley Audette taken at the morgue, and other than the mark around her neck the only other mark on her body was where her breasts had been bitten. One of the pictures was a close-up and Dougherty could see distinct teeth marks around the nipple that went almost completely through the skin.

  And that was pretty much it. The boyfriend’s story about being at work checked out and there wasn’t anything else.

  The Marielle Archambeault file was just as thin, and the little information in it was starting to look familiar. Also twenty years old, she worked in a jewellery store in the mall under Place Ville-Marie and she was strangled on November 23, barely two months after Shirley Audette. The next day when Marielle didn’t show up for work, her boss went to her apartment and got the landlady to let him in. The apartment was neat; there was a typewriter on a small desk and a novel by Françoise Sagan on an end table. Marielle was found on the couch and she was wearing brown pants and a green blouse with three buttons missing. Her bra had been ripped apart but put back on her body. There were no signs of a struggle or forced entry.

  She’d also been strangled. And her breast had been bitten.

  This time there was no boyfriend to talk to and the other women at the jewellery store didn’t seem to know much about Marielle’s personal life. Like Sylvie Berubé, she had only moved to Montreal a few months earlier. The only thing coming out of the interviews was that one of the women thought she’d heard Marielle say she was meeting a man named Bill after work.

  The first detective on the scene had recognized the similarities to Shirley Audette — right away they knew they were dealing with the same murderer.

  But they didn’t go public with that information until after another woman was killed.

  Dougherty couldn’t figure out why he hadn’t heard about these murders, right downtown, last October and November, six months ago.

  Then he remembered that was during the massive police prep for the Grey Cup game, everybody so worried it would be such a great target for bombs, the city full of English from across Canada. People were worried; it was all they talked about. Trudeau was at the game, there were lots of threats against him and the more threats there were the more he insisted on going and not being surrounded by security, so there were hundreds of cops in plainclothes in attendance.

  The prep had gone on for weeks, Dougherty’d logged lots of overtime then — around-the-clock watches on the Autostade, guarding the parade floats after the bomb squad cleared them, sweeping the hotels, escorting the Miss Grey Cup contestants. Anything that should normally have taken two cops had six.

  The Grey Cup being the national championship, the only really Canadian championship, not like hockey with American teams in it, did seem like it could be a real target. The game hadn’t been held in Montreal since before the war, more than thirty years ago. There’d been talk of cancelling it, or at least some of the events. Dougherty remembered the Santa Claus Parade was cancelled.

  But the game was played. And all the events went on as usual, just with massive security. People did come from all over the country, the Calgary fans set up their pancake breakfasts on the sidewalks and took their horse into the hotel like they did at every Grey Cup, the Ottawa fans were everywhere, the Saskatchewan fans in green were out in force.

  And nothing happened.

  It was only after the game when everybody started to relax that they found a bomb, a big one, ten sticks of dynamite, in Eaton’s department store. Dougherty remembered the Christmas decorations were up and they emptied the place, thousands of people spilling out onto St. Catherine Street, and when Vachon came out with the device — still in the shoebox he’d found it in under a counter in the jewellery department on the fourth floor — the Sally Ann Santa rang his bell and everybody — French and English — cheered. Dougherty remembered Vachon telling people it was the first time he’d ever had a crowd cheer for him.

  The next murder came in January 1970.

  Dougherty picked up the Jean Way file and read it, and as he did the sadness passed and he started to get angry. He read the same details again. Jean Way was twenty-four years old and had been strangled, but her breasts had not been mutilated. Dougherty read on and found out that Jean Way had a boyfriend who had come to her apartment on Lincoln, also a few blocks from Station Ten, to pick her up for a date but there was no answer. The boyfriend left, but when he came back a couple of hours later, he found the apartment door slightly open. He went in and found Jean naked on her bed.

  The detective’s theory was that the first time the boyfriend came to the apartment the killer, Bill, was still inside. When the boyfriend left, Bill took off and didn’t bite her breasts and put Jean’s clothes back on as he had the other victims.

  Other than the boyfriend’s claim about rough sex and the question about drugs in Shirley Audette
’s file, there wasn’t any mention of “crazy sex stuff” anywhere else, but now Dougherty was starting to understand what Ruth was talking about when she’d said Dr. Pendleton might be called as an expert about brainwashing in the Manson trial. The detectives believed the women had been charmed by Bill and were willing participants right up till the end.

  Dougherty couldn’t imagine Brenda Webber getting charmed by a guy like Bill, and looking at the pictures of the other victims, if it wasn’t for that one mention of the Douglas Hospital he couldn’t imagine any of these women being involved in the kind of hippie stuff the detectives were talking about.

  Dougherty put the files back in the cabinet, feeling like he hadn’t really learned much, except that now he really wanted to find this Bill and wrap his fingers around the prick’s neck and squeeze until his head came right off.

  And then kick it like he was going for a fifty-yard field goal.

  Back in the ident office, Rozovsky said, “What’s wrong?”

  “What?”

  “You look like you’re going to kill someone.”

  “I am.”

  “Well, don’t do it here — this place is crawling with cops.”

  Dougherty didn’t get it at first, and then realized Rozovsky was joking and that snapped him out of it a little.

  “Where? I don’t see any.”

  Rozovsky held out a manila envelope. “That’s true, they’re all running around out there, something’s happening.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “They’re getting tips about something — every cop in the place is working on it.”

  Dougherty said, “Good,” and then he took the envelope. “That’s why I’m doing this.”

  chapter

  thirteen

  It happened Sunday.

  Dougherty had the day off after a late night Saturday, breaking up fights outside discos and directing traffic around an accident on the corner of St. Catherine and Atwater, in front of the Forum. It was near the end of June and it was finally starting to get hot, high sixties and even into the seventies. Dougherty was glad for that but not looking forward to the stinking heat and humidity he knew was coming. The fights and fender-benders took on a sharper edge when that stifling heat came down like it did every August.

  But Sunday morning was beautiful and Dougherty drove out to LaSalle with his envelope of pictures and waited around on Thierry Street for Giovani Masaracchia. As expected, the kid and his family came home from church just after noon, and even though Dougherty was wearing jeans and a t-shirt Giovani recognized him right away. The kid said something to his parents in Italian and the mom and the little sister went into the house, but the dad stayed by the car.

  “I’m Constable Dougherty,” he said, and the dad said, “Yes?”

  “I just want to show your son some pictures.”

  The kid said something in Italian and his father said something back and then they went back and forth a few times until the kid waved him off. “I didn’t tell them you were here before. He’s not happy about that.”

  Dougherty looked at the father and nodded and the father nodded back. Then Dougherty slid the eight-by-ten pictures out of the envelope and handed them to the kid. “Can you tell me if one of these looks like the car you saw?”

  Giovani flipped through the pictures. “I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

  “It didn’t look like any of them?”

  “It looked like all of them. Well, not this one,” and he eliminated the Galaxy. He flipped through the rest and said, “Sorry.”

  “I know they’re not the right colours, can you picture them white with a black roof?”

  “Sure, but it’s not any of these.”

  The father said something in Italian and the kid said something back and then said to Dougherty, “It was more square at the back.”

  “Not a fastback?”

  “No.”

  Dougherty took the pictures and slid them back into the envelope. He thanked the kid, shook the father’s hand and asked if it would be okay if he brought back some more pictures.

  “Sure.”

  “You want to let your father know I’ll be back?”

  But the father was already nodding, and Dougherty realized he understood English pretty well.

  “That’s a good son you have there,” he said, and the father said yes.

  Then Dougherty drove to the Point and looked around for Gail Murphy. There was no one at her house when he knocked, so he returned to Bonsecours Street and the ident office.

  Sunday afternoon the place was quiet, but Rozovsky was there and when he saw Dougherty he said, “What are you doing here?”

  “I need more pictures of cars. What are you doing here?”

  “Working.”

  “Okay,” Dougherty said, “let’s work.”

  “You’re on your own this time. I’ve been told to clear up all the outstanding jobs and be ready.”

  “Ready for what?”

  “I don’t know, but I told you something was up.”

  Dougherty said okay and got to work.

  Throughout the afternoon the building filled up with people, and Dougherty kept going out into the hall to find out what was going on. Around four o’clock a couple of desk sergeants checked in and started calling people in for overtime, but neither would tell Dougherty what was happening.

  At six o’clock Rozovsky said his shift was over, but he made no move to leave. Dougherty told him he had only a couple more pictures that could be the car, so Rozovsky said he’d help, and by eight they had a dozen possibilities and the place was really buzzing. A few of the detectives on the CAT Squad were in the building, and Vachon and Meloche from the bomb squad stopped in but left a few minutes later with four constables on motorcycles leading the bomb truck.

  Dougherty grabbed a couple of smoked meat sandwiches from the place across the street, and when he got back he told Rozovsky there were people on the fourth floor.

  “Big shots on Sunday night? I told you.”

  A little after nine, word had spread through the building that the CAT Squad and a couple dozen cops from the Quebec Provincial Police Force had raided a cottage in Prévost, north of the city, and they were bringing in four people. And a lot of dynamite.

  Dougherty went down to the lobby to watch them bring the suspects in — three men and a woman, all in their early twenties, all with the same long, stringy hair and the same pissed-off look — and move them into separate interrogation rooms.

  By then, the lobby was full of reporters and cops, and Dougherty managed to push through the crowd to Detective Carpentier and say, “Congratulations.”

  “We got some good tips,” Carpentier said.

  “No trouble at the scene?”

  “It was under surveillance for a while,” Carpentier said.

  “Lot of dynamite?”

  Carpentier laughed. “Three hundred pounds — Vachon almost shit himself. He’s like a kid at Christmas.”

  Then more detectives came into the lobby carrying sawed-off shotguns and holding up bags they told the reporters were full of revolvers.

  Carpentier leaned a little closer to Dougherty and said, “And cash, almost thirty grand.”

  “Bank robberies?” Dougherty said.

  “Looks like it was from the Université de Montréal. Remember, the student centre was robbed a few weeks ago?”

  “That was over fifty grand, wasn’t it?” Dougherty said, “I remember that night, two bombs went off.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Shit. So why was the raid now?”

  Carpentier motioned towards the crowd by the front desk, the reporters trying to get at Marcel St. Aubin, the chief. “Because of what he’s not going to tell them now. There was going to be a kidnapping. The press release was at the chalet.”
<
br />   “That’s old, isn’t it?” Dougherty said. “Last winter, they were after that guy from Israel.”

  “This was a new one,” Carpentier said. “It was to be the American consul general, a guy named Harrison Burgess.”

  “Shit.”

  “It’s much the same. Same demands, same manifesto.”

  “Are these the same guys? They’re out on bail, aren’t they?”

  “Yes, those ones are, but these are different.”

  “But local,” Dougherty said, “not foreigners like the mayor said.”

  Carpentier lit a cigarette, inhaled, blew smoke at the ceiling and shook his head. “I still think there are no more than twenty or thirty assholes doing all this. You know how many cops we have on the task force now?”

  “But even twenty guys can do a lot of damage.”

  Carpentier nodded, but Dougherty could see he wasn’t convinced, maybe remembering that in the old days they would’ve just rounded up as many of them as they could find and beat the shit out of them: hang them off the Jacques Cartier Bridge by their ankles and scare them silly.

  “Well,” Dougherty said, “it’s still a surprise they were going after an American.”

  “Why not?” Carpentier said, “Americans are getting kidnapped in South America.”

  “Yeah, but we’re not South America.”

  Now the reporters had turned and moved towards the front doors to watch Vachon and Meloche coming in with wooden boxes of dynamite. Vachon waved the questions and pushed his way through the crowd.

  “We’re not?” Carpentier said.

  The front page of the Gazette Monday morning was a picture of a cottage under the headline “Bombers’ cache found.”

  After he’d checked in for his eight-to-four, Dougherty walked down St. Matthew and sat in the greasy spoon, ­reading the paper while he ate poached eggs on toast. He wasn’t surprised to see that Carpentier was right. There was no mention of the planned kidnapping or any connection to the arrest four months earlier of ­different people with the same manifesto and the same ransom note.

  Pete emerged from the kitchen. “You think they’ll do it?”