One or the Other

by John McFetridge

  The young cop said, “Eille, Dougherty, ici Gilles Lachapelle le driver du truck.”

  Lachapelle spoke French, saying, “You guys got here fast.”

  “Yeah, you okay?”

  Lachapelle touched the tips of his fingers to the spot just above his eye and said, “Like a high stick. I’ve had worse.” He smiled a little.

  Dougherty said, “Did they tape you?”

  “Yeah.” He rubbed his cheek where there was still a little tape and stringy bits stuck to his five o’clock shadow. “My mouth. And they taped my legs. They put me in the back of my truck.”

  “But you got away.”

  He held up his wrist with the handcuff still attached and said, “They didn’t close them right, the other end.”

  “How many were there?”

  “I don’t know,” Lachapelle said. “I only saw one, he was wearing sunglasses. The van backed into the lane, and one guy got out of it and came around the side. I honked at him and he opened the back doors, showed me that fucking thing.” He motioning towards the white van where Rozovsky was still taking pictures.

  “There must’ve been another guy,” Dougherty said, “in the back with the gun.”

  Lachapelle looked surprised for a split-second but then it was gone and he said, “Yeah, that’s right, he was wearing sunglasses, too, and a tuque.”

  “What colour?”

  Lachapelle smiled a little and said, “Bleu, blanc, rouge. Les Canadiens.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “He told me to open the door, so I did, and he shoved me down and got into my truck. He drove it here.”

  “Did he speak French or English?”

  “English.”

  Dougherty said, “You’re lucky they didn’t shoot you.”

  Lachapelle looked serious and said, “They would have.”

  “For sure.” Dougherty saw the ambulance pull into the parking lot, so he started to walk away, then stopped and said, “Hey, there was a half-ton in the lane, too. What was that doing there?”

  Lachapelle said, “Must have been so no one else could have come in. That lane is pretty narrow.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, I guess,” and walked away as the two ambulance guys got to Lachapelle.

  More cars were pulling into the lot then, detectives and a few reporters. Dougherty saw Detective Carpentier and walked over to him.

  “C’est arrivé très vite.”

  Carpentier spoke French, saying, “The guards hit the alarm at two forty and this guy called it in fourteen minutes later.”

  “He says he was handcuffed in the back of the van and his legs were taped. And his mouth. Didn’t take him long to get out.”

  “Didn’t matter,” Carpentier said. “They were long gone.”

  Detective Ste. Marie walked past Dougherty and Carpentier and said, “You sure you want to work homicide, look at all the excitement in CID.”

  “If you need any help,” Dougherty said.

  Ste. Marie said, “I’ll let you know,” without slowing down on his way to talk to Lachapelle.

  “Do you know how much they got?” Carpentier said.

  “No.”

  “Between two and a half and three million dollars.”

  “Not bad for fourteen minutes’ work.”

  “That kind of money all of a sudden floating around in town,” Carpentier said. “There’s going to be some homicides to work.”

  “Well, you know me,” Dougherty said, “un vrai gars d’équipe.”

  Carpentier laughed and said, “You’ve been talking to Olivier, that’s good.”

  “I’ve been talking,” Dougherty said. “He didn’t say anything.”

  “Now he knows who you are, that’s good.” Carpentier was looking at Ste. Marie talking to Lachapelle and said, “You believe him?”

  “I believe what he says happened.”

  “But you think he knows more?”

  “I asked him about the other truck in the lane, he said it was probably there so no one else could get in from that direction.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said, “it’s the kind of thing you think about when you’re planning a robbery.”

  “He say anything else?”

  “He said the guy spoke English.”

  “You believe that?”

  “Why not? There are plenty of English guys robbing banks in Montreal.”

  “Yes,” Carpentier said. “But it is going to send them in one direction.”

  “Maybe the right one.”

  “Maybe.”

  Dougherty said, “Well, we’ll see soon enough who has a lot of money on the street.”

  “Yes,” Carpentier said. “And there will be homicides for you to work. I’ll put in another word with Inspecteur Olivier.”

  Dougherty said, “Thanks.”

  He didn’t care if he was assigned to homicide, he just wanted to get out of uniform and be a full-time detective. He was feeling the door closing.

  And then all he got was another acting-detective job.

  Someone decided that the Brink’s job could only have been pulled off by professionals from out of town, probably Boston, and if they had any local help it was some of Dougherty’s old friends, the Point Boys.

  Still, acting-detective — better than nothing.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Ten o’clock in the morning, Dougherty was standing at the back of the room, what they were calling room 4.07 after the meeting room in the courthouse where the cops and lawyers got together to prep witnesses, but this room was in a private club on St. James, donated by someone high up in the Royal Bank just a couple of blocks away.

  Up at the front, Ste. Marie was saying that he believed the Brink’s job was pulled off by “Des professionnels de l’extérieur de la ville,” and Dougherty was thinking that was exactly what they’d said about the FLQ six years earlier, that all the bombs and armed robberies were done by professionals brought in from out of town.

  This time at least Ste. Marie added that, “Probably they were working with a local gang.”

  Dougherty was among about a dozen cops crammed into the room. He didn’t have all the details, but he understood he’d been assigned to a special squad of detectives, and he recognized most of them as guys who’d worked out of Station Ten or somewhere else on the west side of downtown. They were all older than Dougherty except for one, Paquette, and it was hard to tell about him with his longer hair and moustache and how comfortable he looked sitting on the edge of the table in his leisure suit as if he’d never worn a uniform.

  Then Ste. Marie introduced the man who would be running the special squad, “Detective-Sergeant Marc-André Laperrière from the Bureau des enquêtes criminelles.”

  Laperrière said, “Merci, Robert. Bonjour, les gars, bienvenue au big time.”

  There was appreciative grumbling in the room, all the detectives glad to be part of it, but Dougherty was wondering how the team was put together.

  Laperrière went on to say that because this was now the biggest robbery in North America they weren’t taking any chances. “At this stage we believe the local involvement was from the Point Boys and west end criminals,” which Dougherty figured was his way of saying Anglos and then the make-up of the room started to make more sense. These were probably all the English detectives left on the force and whatever French guys had worked English neighbourhoods.

  “This robbery was very professional,” Laperrière said. “It was timed to the second and perfectly carried out. The last time a Brink’s truck was robbed like this was in Boston and we know of the connection between the Point Boys and criminals in that city.”

  Dougherty was thinking, Well, we know they’re all Irish but that’s not much of a connection. Then he was trying to re
member when the Boston robbery happened, and Detective Levine said, “Boston was over twenty-five years ago.”

  Laperrière looked around the room to see who’d spoken and then said, “Yes, it was.” It was quiet for a few seconds and then he went back to speaking French, saying, “It is also possible that there may have been help from inside the bank or even from Brink’s.” He paused again and looked around the room and then said, “They may even have had help from someone on the police force. For these reasons this squad will meet only in this room, we will use code names on the radio, and only use the radio if absolutely necessary.”

  Dougherty was hoping they weren’t basing all this on the driver of the truck saying the guy spoke English to him and the fact there was also a Brink’s robbery years ago in Boston. It could’ve just as easily been the Dubois brothers or Italians or someone they didn’t even know about yet.

  “Now,” Laperrière said, “what we have so far. This was the seventh drop-off and pickup of the day. The guards loaded ninety-two zippered and tagged leather bags full of cash, bonds and Olympic coins. The gun in the back of the van, the anti-aircraft gun is,” he glanced down at his notes for the first time and read, in English, “an air-cooled Browning M2 .50 calibre machine gun with a forty-five-inch barrel mounted on a tripod and a bandolier of three hundred rounds of armour-piercing cartridges. U.S. army-issue weapon.”

  One of the detectives said, “Ça marche?”

  “It’s being tested,” Laperrière said. “But it certainly looks like it does. We’re checking to see where it came from.” He glanced at his notes again. “The driver, Lachapelle, was in the army in Korea, that’s how he knew the gun and knew it could pierce the armour of the Brink’s truck.”

  Dougherty figured that was awfully convenient and expected one of the detectives to say something, but no one did.

  Laperrière said, “The van, the white Econoline, was stolen on February 18th in the north end and the licence plate was stolen March 11th. And that’s about all we have. Now, you’re going to partner up and get assignments. Any questions?”

  There weren’t any, at least no one asked any, and then Ste. Marie paired them up, calling two names at a time. Dougherty was thinking he might be teamed with Paquette, keep the young guys together, but heard, “Caron avec Dog-eh-dee,” and saw an older detective step towards him, holding out his hand.

  “I heard you were in the bank that was held up yesterday?”

  They shook hands and Dougherty said, “Day before, yeah, on St. Catherine.”

  “You know me? I’m Denis Caron.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah, of course.” He was surprised Caron was speaking English, with almost no accent, but that seemed to be this assignment. “You were on the hold-up squad.”

  “Until I started working exclusively fraud,” Caron said. “I guess that’s why I’m on this, the bankers know me. Did you recognize the guys in the bank?”

  “Pete McCallum was one of them,” Dougherty said. “And Rod Kieran was in Eaton’s.”

  “He have his bag of marbles?”

  “Yeah.”

  Caron shook his head, and Dougherty thought he even smiled a little. “Didn’t waste any time.”

  “I heard McCallum was going to Toronto.”

  “Let’s hope this was his stake and he’s gone now.”

  “Yeah, let’s hope.”

  “So,” Caron said, looking around the wood-panelled room, “this is going to be interesting.”

  “Not much to go on.”

  “We’ll shake the trees, something will fall out.”

  “When are we going to start?”

  “Tonight, I think,” Caron said. “Probably Peg’s, you know it?”

  “Sure,” Dougherty said, “motel on Upper Lachine Road, no, St. Jacques.”

  “Have you ever stayed there?”

  “Does anyone stay there?”

  “Not for more than an hour.”

  “What are we going to do there?”

  “Look around, see if we can find two and a half million dollars.”

  * * *

  Judy said, “So this could be a good opportunity?”

  “For the guys who got the two and a half million bucks it is,” Dougherty said.

  They were having dinner at a little Portuguese place on St. Urbain, around the corner from Judy’s apartment. She poured the last of the red wine into her glass and said, “And it could be for you.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

  “Not very enthusiastic.”

  He was thinking that there’d been a lot of these opportunities in the almost ten years since he’d joined the force but none of them ever panned out, why should this one, but he just said, “It’s going to be a lot of work, I think.”

  “Overtime?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure how it’s going to be run. They’re vague on the details right now.”

  “This is the biggest armed robbery in North America,” Judy said. “Le crime du siècle.”

  “And we’ve got nothing.”

  “But you’re on the special squad.”

  “Yeah,” Dougherty said. “They’ve decided it was the Point Boys, and it might be, some of them may be in on it, so they got all the Anglo cops they could.”

  “How many is that?”

  “Under a hundred years old? Me and Levine. And he hasn’t been out of the office in ten years.”

  “Anglos don’t join the police anymore?”

  “And some guys they’re calling bilingual.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Knock down some doors, I guess. See who all of a sudden has a lot of extra cash.”

  “Well,” Judy said, “it’s close to what you want, it’s detective work.”

  “Another temporary assignment.”

  She leaned back and smiled at him a little and said, “Yeah, but you like it.”

  And she kept looking at him until he smiled a little and said, “Yeah, I do, so what?”

  “Nothing. It’s just,” she paused and took a drink of her wine, “I never thought it would make me happy to see a policeman happy about his work.”

  “Well, this isn’t beating up protesters, this isn’t bashing hippies,” Dougherty said, winking. “This is real bad guys.”

  Judy said, “Yes.” She was still smiling a little, and Dougherty figured she was thinking about her protest days, seemed so long ago now but was really just a few years.

  Then he said, “Speaking of opportunities,” and let it hang for a moment and then Judy said, “I still haven’t heard from the PSBGM.”

  “So, one of these days you’re going to have to apply to the other school boards. South shore, West Island.”

  “There is no way I’m teaching at the high school I went to,” Judy said. “This isn’t some Welcome Back, Kotter thing, it’s not going to happen.” She took a drink of wine and said, “Three blocks from my parents’ house? No way.”

  “Those West Island schools are good.”

  “I’m not going to teach a bunch of suburban kids who don’t care about anything I’ve got to say.”

  Dougherty said, “Okay,” and then didn’t say anything. He didn’t see any point in going over it again, having another fight about Judy wanting to teach in the Point or Little Burgundy, how those kids wouldn’t care about anything she had to say, either. He still found it so strange, his own parents had done such a good thing getting out of the Point so his sister and little brother could go to a decent high school.

  Then she surprised him and said, “I might apply to the south shore board.”

  “But you don’t want to teach suburban kids.”

  She shrugged a little, and Dougherty shook his head and said, “Don’t tell me you think Greenfield Park is underprivileged?”

  “There are part
s, those row houses — what did you call them, the terraces? Other parts of the south shore.”

  Dougherty was laughing now and he said, “Maybe that school in Châteauguay, gets the kids from Caughnawaga. You want to teach on a reserve?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He took the last bite of his barbecue chicken and said, “You want some dessert? Cheesecake, maybe?”

  “Let’s go for a walk, maybe get something later.”

  “I’m on tonight, we’re meeting at nine.”

  “You see,” Judy said, “you’re moving up already.”

  Dougherty said, “Yeah,” and he was hoping that was true. Then he said, “Look at you, you like it.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.” She leaned in closer and said, “Come on by when you’re finished, if it’s not too late.”

  They were smiling at each other, playful, and Dougherty said, “Okay.”

  By the time he had finished it was way too late.

  * * *

  They didn’t find two and a half million dollars, but they did find seven revolvers, four sawed-off shotguns, dozens of boxes of ammunition, canvas money bags from the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and the Bank of Montreal, stolen American Express traveller’s cheques, blank Quebec driver’s permits and a pound of hashish — all in room fourteen.

  In the restaurant beside the motel office, Peg O’Reilly told Laperrière she had no idea where any of that stuff came from. “Room fourteen hasn’t been rented out in months.”

  There were three customers in the restaurant at one in the morning when the cops had shown up, and they were still there, sitting at a table drinking coffee with Peg.

  Laperrière said, “We’re going to keep coming back.”

  “Could you at least pay for a cup of coffee then,” Peg said.

  Dougherty was standing by the door to the motel office. He recognized the three guys at the table: one was a Higgins brother, an older one, and Peaky Boyle was beside him, shaking his head with his usual half-annoyed, half-don’t-give-a-shit look, and Big Jim Sadowski sat there scowling, looking like he wanted to get into a fight with all eight cops.