Black Rock

by John McFetridge

  The woman at the front desk looked to be in her forties, with a lot of make-up, her hair in a huge bun and cat-eye glasses. “Hello, officer. I don’t recall a request to the men in blue.”

  “No,” Dougherty said, “I’ve got some questions for you. I’m looking for a car.”

  “A taxi, right?”

  It took Dougherty a second to realize what she meant, and he said, “No, it’s not about that.”

  “I thought every officer in the city was working on that.”

  “Not every one.”

  The woman raised her heavily painted eyebrows and said, “Well, I sure hope they catch those guys. Imagine, a kidnapping right in broad daylight in Montreal!”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “amazing.”

  “It’s not like this is Beirut or South America or some dictatorship or communist country.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  She looked a little peeved at being called ma’am. “Son, what car are you looking for?”

  “1965 or ’66 Lincoln that may have been here Friday night.”

  “Well, I don’t work Fridays or Saturdays, but I can check.”

  She picked up a big ledger, almost exactly the same as the other four or five Dougherty had seen in the last hour, and he was expecting the same no-Lincoln response when this woman said, “Oh yes, here it is. Actually it was me who checked them in on Thursday.”

  “Driving a Lincoln?”

  “I didn’t see the car myself,” the woman said, “but it’s in the register as a Lincoln.”

  “You sure?”

  “1966.”

  Dougherty tried to keep his voice calm. “Have you got the licence number?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “That’s great,” Dougherty said, rising up on his toes and balling his hands into fists. “Who’s it registered to?”

  “It’s a Mrs. Burke, of Toronto.”

  “Mrs. Burke? Are you sure?”

  “To be honest, I don’t think she really was Mrs. Burke and I don’t think the other Mrs. Burke was really her sister-in-law.”

  “It was two women?”

  “Oh yes, and they were very much together.”

  “Okay,” Dougherty said, “can you write down the name and contact information you have there, phone number and so on?”

  The woman got out a pen and a postcard showing a colour picture of the Motel Raphaël. She turned it over and wrote on the back, saying, “May I ask what this is about?”

  “You can ask,” Dougherty said, taking the postcard from her, “but I can’t tell you.”

  The woman looked just as annoyed as she did excited.

  Dougherty drove back along St. Jacques, past the Husband Transport yard full of trucks, past the forty-foot-tall sign of a man holding a muffler, past the Bon Voyage Taverne and the Donut King. He got nothing from the night clerks at the Gem or the Calibri Motels.

  It was a little after midnight, but the A&W drive-in next to the Rose Bowl was open. Dougherty used the radio attached to the pole to order a cheeseburger and a cup of coffee.

  There weren’t many cars on St. Jacques — a couple of trucks rumbled past and then Dougherty saw a taxi pull into the parking lot of the Nittolo Garden Motel across the street. He watched a couple of guys get out. The cab wasn’t black, it was blue, but the light on top was yellow, and Dougherty remembered the other company that used yellow signs was Hemlock, out of Verdun.

  A girl came out of the restaurant and walked to the squad car. Dougherty rolled the window halfway down, and she rested the tray on it and said, “Hey Officer.”

  Dougherty said hi, and then as she was walking away he called to her back. “Can I ask you something?”

  She stopped and only turned halfway around and smiled at him. Dougherty realized he was supposed to be looking at her ass in her hot pants uniform, which he hadn’t been. He really was tired. He said, “Has there been a guy in a Lincoln here recently?”

  “A what?”

  “A car, a Lincoln, a big square car, white with a black roof?”

  “Do you know how many cars I see?” she said, starting to giggle. “It’s a drive-in.”

  “Right, thanks.”

  Now she was really laughing and walking back to the restaurant, and Dougherty was thinking, Bullshit.

  He ate the cheeseburger, the Papa Burger they called it, and drank the coffee.

  It wasn’t a bad idea Carpentier had. Maybe the guy in the Lincoln — not Bill — was from out of town, staying in one of the motels here. Maybe he came into Montreal on business every once in a while and raped and murdered a woman while he was here. Maybe he was from Toronto. Maybe he was from New York and he stayed in a motel on the South Shore.

  Maybe it was all bullshit. Maybe not.

  As he was putting the hamburger wrapper back on the plastic tray attached to the car window, Dougherty glanced again at the two guys who’d gotten out of the taxi, and he realized one of them was Danny Buckley and the other was one of the Higgins brothers, and now there was a third guy with them.

  A car pulled up and Buck-Buck, Higgins and the other guy all got in the back, and the car pulled out again, fast.

  As it drove by, Dougherty saw the guy in the passenger seat but didn’t recognize him.

  Bullshit, just bullshit.

  chapter

  twenty-nine

  Tuesday morning at seven thirty, Dougherty walked into Station Ten, and Delisle told him to head over to Redpath Crescent.

  “Why? You think they’re going to kidnap the maid now?”

  “We need to show a police presence. Get over there and relieve the guys.”

  “You had guys standing in front of the house all night?”

  “And you’re going to stand there all day.”

  “I thought they said if their demands weren’t met by eight thirty that would be it.”

  “Yeah, well, the demands have been rejected. ‘Wholly unreasonable,’ they say.”

  “Who’s they? What will happen to Cross?”

  Delisle shrugged. “The government has asked for a negotiator to be named.”

  Detective Boisjoli arrived then, saying, “Les maudits flics du CN, tabarnak.”

  Dougherty said, “Qu’est-ce qui s’est passé?”

  “None of your business what happened,” Delisle said. “Get over to Redpath Crescent.”

  Boisjoli said, “The CN got rob last night, hijack, two trucks.”

  “Where, Turcotte yards?”

  “Yeah, they took two truck full of cigarettes, three hundred grand they say it’s worth. In and out in five minute, they take the two truck and they steal two car.”

  “What time?”

  “Middle of the night.”

  “How many were there?”

  “Why?” Boisjoli said. “You know something?”

  “How many?”

  “Five, wearing mask, they handcuff a guard and four employee. They know exactly what they do.”

  “God dammit,” Dougherty said, “it’s the Point Boys.”

  Delisle said, “This isn’t yours, Dougherty,” but Boisjoli was already in his face, saying, “How do you know?”

  “I saw them last night; I was at the A&W on St. Jacques. Five of them met up at Nittolo’s and left in one car.”

  “Who did you see?”

  “The only ones I recognized were Danny Buckley and one of the younger Higgins, not sure which one.”

  Boisjoli said, “I don’t know this Buckley. The CN cops are in the way, of course — they know it was inside job. Could be these Point Boys, câlisse.”

  Dougherty asked Delisle, “Do you want me to find Buckley?”

  “No, Dougherty, you go to Redpath Crescent right goddamned now.”

  Boisjoli said, “I take from here — if I need you
, I know where to find you,” and he was out the door.

  Redpath Crescent was lined with cars, mostly reporters by the looks of the sandwich wrappers and Coke bottles and paper coffee cups piled up on the dashboards and seats, and Dougherty had to park the squad car a few houses down from the Cross place.

  There were about a dozen uniform cops in front of the house, a couple by the door and the rest on the lawn and the sidewalk. Detectives were going in and out.

  Dougherty found Mancini and another constable he didn’t know standing at the curb. “You guys been here all night?”

  “Since yesterday afternoon.”

  “Okay, well, beat it. But talk to Delisle. If this is still going on tonight you’ll probably be back.”

  “It won’t be,” Mancini said. “We’re out picking up guys now.”

  “That’s not what it says in the paper,” Dougherty said, motioning to the headline on the paper clearly visibile on the back seat of a car parked half on the sidewalk and half on the street: “Police stop hunt, fear man’s safety.”

  “Yeah,” Mancini said, “because the kidnappers asked us to. Says we don’t want to make them jittery.”

  “You think they’ll believe it?”

  “You think they believe anything they read in the paper?”

  “They must,” Dougherty said, “it’s what got us into this mess.”

  Then the car door opened and a man got out and stretched, looking like he’d slept all night in the car. He said, “I wrote that article.”

  Mancini nodded at the other constable and said, “Viens avec moi,” and they walked back down Redpath. Dougherty called after them, “Talk to Delisle and come back tonight.”

  “You’re English,” the reporter said.

  “So are you.”

  The guy laughed. “I guess I am.”

  Dougherty squinted at the byline on the story and said, “Keith Logan.”

  “Right. I also wrote the one about how Cross needs his medication.” He waved the paper around. “Do you have any idea how to spell Serpasil-apresoline?”

  “No, but it’s for high blood pressure,” Dougherty said. “My father takes it.”

  “Everybody’s on this,” Logan said. “Wiltshire had to call embassies. The Cubans and the Algerians both said they have no connection to or knowledge of the FLQ.”

  Dougherty said, “I guess they do now.”

  “They’re a little late. Did you know this was the Year of the Kidnapping?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I, but we’re all over it now.” He flipped a few pages and read, “Nineteen-seventy — year of the terrorist kidnapping.” He stopped and looked at Dougherty. “We’re not supposed to call them terrorists here — though, we call them Felqists.”

  “We don’t call them freedom fighters?”

  Logan almost smiled, but then deadpanned, “Not yet. So, in the last year there have been twelve kidnappings. Well, there’ve probably been a lot more but they were local. These are the twelve ‘diplomats and foreign citizens,’ as we say.”

  Dougherty was reading over Logan’s shoulder now. “Are they all South American?”

  “Yeah,” said Logan. Then he laughed, “Oh, that’s in poor taste.”

  “What?”

  “Look at this ad, ‘She used to be a hippie.’ Look at the drawing.”

  “‘But then she got hips,’” Dougherty read from the ad for the Stauffer Figure Salon on the West Island.

  “Who does the hippie look like?”

  “Like they all do,” Dougherty said, “a chick in a flowered dress with a guitar.”

  “That’s right,” Logan said, “like Janis Joplin. The recently deceased Janis Joplin.”

  “Oh right.”

  “My paper, jeez. I’m surprised they didn’t run this ad yesterday next to the story about Joplin dropping dead. Anyway, yeah, twelve kidnappings since last September. In most cases they traded them for political prisoners and let the kidnappers go to Cuba or Algeria.”

  “See? These guys have been reading the papers.”

  Before Logan could say anything, a man in an expensive suit walked up and pointed at Dougherty. “Officer, why aren’t you clearing the street?”

  Dougherty said, “Good morning.”

  “Don’t give me that attitude, young man. These cars have been double-parked up and down this street all night, these … reporters have been walking on the lawns, standing around all day, leaving garbage — it’s got to stop.”

  Dougherty said, “It’s a public street,” and the man leaned in closer and said, “What’s your name, Officer?”

  Logan pulled a notebook and a pen out of his pocket. “What’s yours?”

  The man ignored Logan and glared at Dougherty. “I’m calling your sergeant.”

  Dougherty shrugged and said okay.

  The man walked away, and Logan said, “That was fun, we should hang out more.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, I’d like that.”

  Logan laughed. “Sarcastic bastard.”

  “Hey, any idea who that is?” Dougherty pointed to a woman in her early twenties being taken into the house by a detective.

  “I think it’s the daughter,” Logan said, “Susan.”

  “Susan Cross?”

  “No, she’s married.” Then Logan smiled. “And a little out of your league.”

  “I thought the daughter was a little kid.”

  “No, that’s the maid’s kid.”

  “She still here?”

  “The kid or the maid? The maid probably is, house needs to be cleaned even more now with all you cops walking all over it.”

  “The maid had the gun shoved in her face. You think they’re making her work?”

  “You can be sarcastic,” Logan said, “and yet you can’t recognize it.”

  “You know, they tell us in training not to talk to reporters.”

  Logan said, “Do you know when the last kidnapping was in Montreal?”

  “I didn’t know there was ever a kidnapping in Montreal.”

  “Twelve years ago. Two-year-old kid, one of the Reitmans, was kidnapped by the maid.”

  “You think this maid is in on it?”

  Logan shrugged. “No idea. But the Reitman kidnapping was kept out of the news, wasn’t even in the papers, and the baby was abandoned in Ottawa. The maid was arrested in Toronto.”

  “These guys,” Dougherty said, “will be arrested here in Montreal.”

  “Yeah, and sent to Cuba.”

  “No way. They’re not going anywhere.”

  “Hey,” Logan said, “who’s that?”

  Dougherty looked at the front door of the house and saw a couple of detectives walking out in a hurry. “Social Security squad.”

  “I guess that’s better than the Night Patrol.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dougherty said, “the Night Patrol guys’ll be talking to informers.”

  “Yeah, talking.”

  “Sarcasm?”

  “Maybe it’s irony this time. I’m never sure.”

  “What’s that one?” Dougherty pointed to the newspaper and Logan said, “Seems pretty clear: ‘Lull reported in Medicare controversy.’”

  “So the doctors aren’t going on strike?”

  “When it’s doctors we don’t say strike.” Logan scanned the article and read, “‘20 to 30 percent of the specialists have withdrawn services.’”

  “That’s a lull?”

  “It’s not all of them.”

  “Not yet.”

  Dougherty looked up and down Redpath Crescent, all the cops and reporters in front of all the big stone mansions, everyone too late to do anything.

  And Logan said, “All right, I better get back to work.” He climbed into his car and started the engine. He looked bac
k at Dougherty and said, “Anything else going on?”

  “Nothing.” Dougherty shook his head and said, “Not a thing.”

  chapter

  thirty

  When Dougherty and the rest of the day shift got relieved, just after six, he walked down the hill to the McGill campus and found Ruth in her office. He knocked on the slightly open door. “I just happened to be in the neighbourhood.”

  She smiled, happy to see him, then looked serious. “Were you … at the house?”

  “All day.”

  “Those poor people.” She picked up a cigarette that was burning in a big glass ashtray on her desk. “How are they doing?”

  Dougherty stepped into the office. “Okay, I guess. Another couple came from the British embassy in Ottawa. I think they knew the Cross family from before.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Yeah. Anyway,” Dougherty said, “you were right.”

  “I was?”

  “He tried to grab another girl.”

  It took her a second to make the connection, which surprised Dougherty a little, but then she said, “Dammit. I knew it, dammit.” She leaned forward and stubbed out the cigarette, mashing it long after it was out. “Is she all right? Did you see her?”

  “Yeah, I talked to her. She says she fought him off and got away.”

  Ruth pushed papers aside on her desk. “He’s going to try again.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s the progression. Damn. I knew it.”

  “Your theory.”

  Ruth said quietly, almost to herself, “Not like anyone took it seriously,” and Dougherty said, “What?”

  “Nothing, never mind.” She looked at him and said, “He’s going to try again.”

  “I believe you.”

  She looked at him and nodded a little. There was a lot going on here that Dougherty had no idea about, he could tell that, but he knew now wasn’t the time to try to get into it.

  Then Ruth said, “Why are they doing this?”

  Dougherty said, “Doing what?” He was startled by how angry she looked but in a flash it was gone. Then her face darkened and she shook her head.