Black Rock (25 page)

chapter

twenty-four

Ruth said, “You didn't hear about the Women's Conference?” and Dougherty said, “No, why would I?”

“They had to call the cops.”

“What?” Dougherty was pretty sure he saw her smile a little.

They were walking across the McGill campus, the big green lawn spotted with small groups of students talking and reading. It was quiet and peaceful, a beautiful Saturday afternoon at the beginning of October, and Dougherty was thinking this was probably his father's idea of college life.

“The conference was divided between French and English, and some women from the French side came in and took over the English side — they grabbed the microphone and it got quite ugly.”

“Where was this?”

“Part of the Women in Business Conference at Man and His World,” Ruth said. “And that's irony, too.”

“What did they want?”

“They were mad at the organizers. One of them was French — one of the organizers I mean, maybe they all were, I'm not sure, they spoke English. Anyway the ones who came in were calling this one a traitor and other things, I didn't really understand. Someone slapped her.”

“Someone slapped the organizer?”

“That's when the police were called, but it was calmed down by the time they got there.”

“That's the way we like to time it,” Dougherty said. “Less for us to do that way.”

“Very funny,” Ruth said. “They had a point, though, the French women. Their side of the hall was smaller and yet they had a bigger crowd. There was a vote to change rooms but by then no one really wanted to.”

“What were you doing there?”

“What do you mean? I'm a woman.”

“Yeah, but not in business.”

“There were academics, too. One of the speakers was Dr. Marlene Dixon — she's also in the sociology department here.”

He said, “Are there a lot of women professors in sociology?”

“There aren't many professors, period, in sociology. It's a small department.”

“But you're going to be one?”

Ruth said, “Oh yes. I don't know about here, but somewhere.” She looked at Dougherty and said, “Yes, I'm going to have a career. I'm always going to work — does that surprise you?”

Dougherty said, “No. My mother's always worked, at least as much as she could once the kids were in school. She was part-time at the Bell: they call it the May Move when everybody moves and get new phone numbers, and she worked for a couple months every year for that. She worked during the war and then after she and my dad got married she kept working. It's a little different.”

“Not as different as you think — a lot of women work.”

“I guess so.”

“But at women's work.”

Dougherty said yeah, and Ruth said, “And police work isn't women's work.”

“There are women police officers.”

“Yes, but you couldn't have a woman for a boss.”

“A boss?”

“At the conference, one of the things they said was female police officers can only rise in rank above other women.”

“Yeah, I guess that's true.”

“And female constables aren't allowed to carry guns.”

“Yeah, that's right.” Dougherty said. He was going to say that the women were usually used only to deal with female suspects during arrests, when they had to be searched and booked, that kind of thing, but it didn't take a detective to see Ruth wasn't looking at it that way.

She said, “The conference was interesting, though. It was supposed to be about the choices for a woman after graduation — the hostesses at the pavilion are all heading into their last year of school. Did you know all of the managers and assistant managers at the pavilions are men but all of the hostesses are women?”

“No,” Dougherty said, “I didn't know that.” Man and His World was sort of leftover from Expo
67
, and Dougherty didn't really understand what it was about now that the World's Fair was long gone. La Ronde, the amusement park, was still there and there was an aquarium with dolphins and penguins, but the pavilions that had been built by countries from around the world were all — or almost all, he wasn't sure — given other purposes.

“Yes,” Ruth said, “so the choices they mentioned were marriage and staying home or a career, or a combination of both. But the audience wasn't all university students — there were a lot of working women,” she paused and looked at Dougherty, “like your mother, I guess. So for them the issues are things like daycare and opportunities at work, trying to get promotions or trying to get into men's jobs, where the pay is better.”

“Like constables with guns.”

“Even sergeants. Could you work for a woman sergeant?”

“Couldn't be much more of a girl than Delisle.”

Ruth said, “Very funny.”

They were at the Roddick Gates then, on Sherbrooke, and Dougherty said, “Do you want to get a drink?”

Ruth said, “Sure,” and Dougherty thought for a second and then said, “We might as well walk to Crescent from here.”

Along the way Ruth told him a little more about the conference and then she told him all about a study she'd just read, how there were a million kids in Canada under fourteen with working mothers and how less than twenty-five percent of them were in proper daycares and how there was so much more to study that by the time they got to Winny's, Sir Winston Churchill's Pub on Crescent Street, Dougherty realized they hadn't talked about the murders or her progression theory or anything like that at all.

And Ruth seemed happy about that, so Dougherty didn't say anything about it.

They sat on the patio at Winny's and watched people go by on Crescent as the sun went down. Saturday night was hopping, as usual.

Later, after a couple of drinks, when they were crossing the street to go to a French restaurant, there was a loud bang and Ruth grabbed Dougherty's arm and he said, “It's just a car, a backfire.”

In the restaurant Ruth said, “At least there hasn't been a bomb here in a while,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, that's good.”

“Do you think that's over?”

“Who knows? Everybody's still watching the Middle East.”

“Those poor people,” Ruth said.

“Which ones?”

“All of them.”

After the hijackers blew up the three planes in the desert — a British TV crew filmed it and it had been showed about a million times, looking like a movie — the hostages were moved into the city, Amman. Then King Hussein declared martial law and the bombing started.

“They're calling it Black September,” Dougherty said.

“It's just awful.”

“Well,” Dougherty said, “maybe it'll give these guys something to think about; maybe terrorism doesn't look so good now.”

“You think so? That's what they're going to think?”

“I don't know. I hope so.”

Ruth said, “Yeah, let's hope.”

They skipped dessert and Ruth said, “You're too drunk to drive,” and hailed a cab. In the backseat she said, “But not
too
drunk,” and kissed him and he kissed her back and said, “How drunk are you?”

“Not at all.”

And the next morning neither one of them was too hungover, so they stayed in bed and made out again.

Dougherty left after lunch, Ruth kissing him goodbye at the door, still in her robe, the belt undone and his hands reaching in and touching her skin. She finally had to take his wrist and kiss his fingers and say, “I've got work to do.”

One more grope, one more kiss, and Dougherty left, thinking he liked this, this could be something really special.

The next morning the British Trade Commissioner was kidnapped from his house a few blocks away from Ruth's office at McGill, and Montreal was on the front pages of newspapers around the world.

And Dougherty got new evidence in the Brenda Webber murder.

PART THREE

chapter

twenty-five

Monday morning Dougherty started two weeks of days and was sitting at a desk in Station Ten at eight thirty when Delisle hung up the phone and said, “Dougherty, a call.”

“What is it?”

“A domestic, down the hill in St. Henri.”

There were two other constables in the station; Tur­cotte, drinking coffee and reading
Allo Police
, and the rookie, Gagnon, standing by the corkboard looking at the memos, but Dougherty didn't say anything to them, he just stood up and took the note with the address on it from Delisle and headed for the parking lot.

Dougherty was getting into a squad car when Gagnon came running out of the station house, saying,
“Attends, Dog-eh-dee, t'as un autre appel.”

“What do you mean, another call?”

Gagnon ran around the car to the passenger side and got in. “There's been a kidnapping at the Greek consulate.”

Dougherty was behind the wheel and pulling out onto St. Matthew. “What street?”

“Simpson,” Gagnon was staring at a piece of paper in his hand, “between Sherbrooke and Dr. Penfield.”

“I know.”

“
'ostie
,” Gagnon said, “a kidnapping.”

Dougherty drove fast, cut across traffic on Sherbrooke and up Simpson past the old Golden Mile mansions that had been turned into consulates and new high-rise apartment buildings. He wasn't surprised there'd been a kidnapping after the attempts on the Israeli and the American embassies, but he wondered, Why the Greeks?

Halfway up the block, two squad cars were stopped at angles blocking the street, and Dougherty pulled up and jumped out, running towards the building, then a cop came out waving him back towards the cars.

“C'est la mauvaise adresse.”

“What?”

“Dispatch make a mistake. It's not here — it's Redpath, the crescent.”

Dougherty and Gagnon got back in the car and followed the other two further up Simpson, a block on Pine Avenue and then up the winding Redpath Crescent at the base of Mount Royal.

They all stopped in front of an old stone house on the north side.

Dougherty got out of the car but held back as cops rushed up the stone steps to the front door. A couple of detectives were already there talking to two women, looked to be one in her twenties and one in her forties.

Gagnon got out of the car and said, “What should we do?”

“I don't know.”

He wanted to say we should go back and find that domestic in St. Henri, and he was wondering how dispatch could make a mistake between the Greek Consulate and this house on Redpath Crescent that didn't look like any kind of consulate.

Then Detective Carpentier came out of the house and walked past Dougherty, motioning for him to follow him across the street to where a man stood by the three-foot-high stone wall in front of a house.

“Did you see a car here a few minutes ago?” Carpentier said.

The man said, “About half an hour ago.”

“What kind was it?”

“A taxi.”

“Which company?”

“I don't know.”

“What colour was it?”

“I'm not sure, blue? Maybe black?”

“What about its sign?”

The man thought for a moment and then said, “Yellow.”

Carpentier looked to Dougherty for help. “LaSalle?”

“Yeah, and there's another company that uses yellow,” but Dougherty couldn't think which one.

Carpentier looked back at the older man. “Did it go straight down the hill?”

“No, it was facing that way,” he said, pointing towards Mount Royal, “and when the men got in, it pulled a U and then went that way.”

“The driver was already in it?”

“I think so — I didn't really notice it until it was moving — there are always taxis on this street.”

Carpentier said okay and then turned to Dougherty. “Get his name and information, bring it to me,” and he headed back to the house, now swarming with cops.

“So, what's your name?”

“Fred Davidson, I'm the gardener.” He gave Dougherty his address in Verdun and the name of his employer on Redpath. Then he said, “Running around like chickens with their heads cut off.”

“Yeah,” Dougherty said, “that's what we do.”

He started back across the street, looking at the house, cops going in and out, everyone a little panicky. He didn't see the older woman or the woman in her twenties.

Gagnon was coming towards him then, motioning to the squad car. “We have to go; they're closing all the bridges.”

“What?”

“We got the Victoria.”

Dougherty started the car. “And we're looking for a taxi?”

“All they say to me was close the bridge.”

“So who is it? What happened?”

“A British guy. Something with the British government, he live there,” Gagnon said, motioning back to the house as they turned off Redpath onto Pine, heading for Atwater.

“And he was kidnapped?”

“Yeah, they say three men come into the house with guns; he was getting dressed.”

“It's going to be a long day,” Dougherty said.

They got to the Victoria Bridge a few minutes later, and Dougherty stopped at Mill Street and parked the squad car across the two lanes. He got out and started waving the approaching cars onto Mill Street.

A couple of cars made the turn, but then one stopped and a man leaned out the window and said, “What's going on?”

“Bridge is closed.”

“A bomb?”

Dougherty said, “I don't know,” and the guy waved, dismissing him, and drove down Mill.

Gagnon stepped up beside Dougherty. “It's going to get ugly,” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, wait till they find out all the bridges are closed.”

The Jacques Cartier a few miles east, the Champlain and then the Mercier — all of them had steady lines of traffic crossing all day.

But not today.

“And the tunnel,” Gagnon said.

“Yeah, if somebody remembered.” The Louis Hippolyte Lafontaine Tunnel in the east end. “And the bridges to Laval,” Dougherty said, “and the
2
-
20
off the west island.”

“Should we stop the taxis?”

“Yeah, if we see one with four guys with guns, we'll stop it.”

“How long do we stay here?”

“Till they tell us to go somewhere else.”

Dougherty leaned against the squad car and crossed his arms over his chest. All the drivers in the cars inching their way around the corner onto Mill Street, under the shadow of the Autostade, glared at him. A few gave him the finger and some swore at him. A couple asked if he knew what was going on.

In the early afternoon, a police motorcycle came along the sidewalk on Bridge Street and pulled up to Dougherty's squad car. The cop took off his goggles and said,
“Okay, ouvrez le pont.”

Dougherty said, “Finally,” and started to open the squad car door.

Gagnon came over and said, “Did we get them?”

The motorcycle cop said, “Who?” and Gagnon said, “The kidnappers.”

“No, we got a communiqué.”

“The manifesto?” Dougherty said.

“I don't know. They phoned in a bomb threat to the radio station, and when the bomb squad got there, it was only an envelope.”

Gagnon said, “Where was it?”

“Pavilion Lafontaine, the Université du Québec.”

“What do they want?”

Dougherty said, “Get in the car or I'll leave you here,” and Gagnon made a face at him, but Dougherty already had the car started and was pulling away.

A guy in one of the cars stuck in traffic yelled,
“Merci, tabarnak,”
out the window as he almost jumped the curb and raced past Dougherty towards the bridge.

Back at Station Ten, Dougherty had to park on de Maisonneuve because there were cop cars all over the place. The station was full of cops, and Dougherty squeezed his way to Delisle at the desk.

“What the hell?”

Delisle came over, shaking his head. “They called in every cop in the city. We're pulling over every taxi and then they get the note and it says to stop all police activities.”

“So we stopped?”

“We pulled the uniforms in. We're going out in plainclothes.”

“Unbelievable.”

Delisle shrugged. “We've had three more bombs called in, all false alarms.”

Dougherty looked around the crowded station house at all the cops and didn't recognize anybody — they all looked mostly like guys from the suburbs.

“So, who was it?”

“Who was what?”

“Who was it they kidnapped?”

“Where have you been?” Delisle said.

“Pissing people off at the Victoria Bridge,” and for a second he thought he saw Delisle smile.

“You're lucky they didn't run you over. It was some British government guy, something Cross.”

One of the cops nearby said, “James Cross, the trade commissioner.”

Delisle looked at Dougherty and nodded. “That's him.”

“I saw a couple of women at the house.”

“The wife and the maid,” Delisle said. “The maid has a daughter in the house, too.”

“Four men with guns?”

“Three with guns went into the house,” Delisle said. “One waited in the cab. He probably had a gun, too.”

“So now we're pulling over taxis?”

“It's all we have.”

“What happened with that domestic?”

“What domestic?”

“In St. Henri,” Dougherty said. “I was headed there this morning before I got sent on this.”

Delisle shrugged. “I don't know, nothing, I guess.”

“Damn.”

“Go get changed,” Delisle said. “Start looking for taxis.”

Not liking it at all, Dougherty started pushing his way through the crowd towards the locker room.

As he was squeezed between a couple of cops he caught a piece of a sentence, “pull her into his car, but she …” and he turned and grabbed the guy by the shirt collar. “Where!”

The cop pulled Dougherty's hands off him. “Hey, watch it!”

Dougherty let go but kept staring at the guy, “What happened? You said a guy tried to pull a girl into his car?”

“What's it to you?”

“It's important,” Dougherty said. Everybody was looking at him then. The crowd had parted a little to give them room if they were going to start throwing punches and Dougherty, calmer now, said, “It could be important, where was it?”

“In NDG.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

Sunday. “Did you take the report?”

“There was no report.”

It was too crowded in the station house, so Dougherty said, “Come here,” and led the way out into the parking lot. There were a lot of cops there, too, but they had more room.

Dougherty said, “Look, I'm sorry. I'm working on something, and it could be connected.”

“I don't see how,” the cop said. Out in the sunlight Dougherty realized the cop was older than he'd thought, probably in his fifties, and he looked like he could be used in one of those cops-talking-to-kids ads, smiling and being their friend.

“I'd like to check,” Dougherty said. “I'd like to talk to the girl — what's her name?”

“I'm not sure.”

Dougherty was having trouble keeping calm. “You didn't write it down?”

“I was talking to the mother, she told me about it.”

“Okay,” Dougherty said, “who's the mother?”

“You don't walk a beat, do you?” the older cop said.

“No.” He didn't even know they still had cops walking beats. Now he was realizing that this cop was English and he was thinking the guy would probably just like to be left alone out in NDG till he retired.

“Okay, when you walk a beat you get to know people. Do you know Westhaven Village?”

“No.”

“Upper Lachine Road and Elmhurst, by the dairy?”

Dougherty said no.

“All right, there are apartment buildings there. The mother was on a balcony, we got to chatting. It's what you do when you walk a beat.”

“And she told you a guy tried to pull her daughter into a car.”

“And the girl got away, yeah.”

“The apartment is on Elmhurst?”

“First floor.”

Dougherty said, “Okay, thanks.”

He pushed his way back through the station, and as he passed the desk Delisle said, “You're not changed,” and Dougherty said, “I've got something I need to do,” and walked out the front door.

Every cop in the city was working this kidnapping: they wouldn't miss one person.