One or the Other (18 page)

After a pause the receptionist said, “There was an incident on the bridge, the Jacques Cartier. I don't have any details, I just know Sergeant Legault was hurt and was taken to the Hôpital Charles-LeMoyne.”

Dougherty hung up and ran to his car.

“I had him,” Legault said.

Dougherty spoke French, saying, “What happened?”

She was lying on the bed, one arm and one foot in a cast, and she said, “I don't know.”

Dougherty was the only other person in the room. He was sitting on the edge of the empty bed next to Legault's and he waited.

She said, “I was coming back to Longueuil — I went to see Louise Tremblay.”

Dougherty wanted to ask if she had any information, but he didn't want to interrupt.

“I saw him, up on the . . .” She paused and then said, “La Tour Eiffel, you know?”

“The ironwork,” Dougherty said. “The spires.”

“He was climbing up when I stopped. I called to him, but he didn't hear me, he was too high, there was too much noise, the traffic, the river.”

“Yes.”

“When I climbed up it was so quiet.”

Dougherty realized she must have climbed very high up the spire.

“But then I didn't know what to say.”

“I know.”

Legault turned her head and looked at Dougherty. She said, “Have you ever seen a suicide?”

“A couple times I've been first on the scene,” he said. “In the Métro, a guy jumped in front of the train at Guy station. And one time, a British guy, a war veteran, shot himself in the head and I was the first one into the apartment where he did it.”

Dougherty was looking down, and when he lifted his head Legault was nodding.

Then she looked away and said, “I spoke to him. I even tried in English.” She almost smiled.

“Was he English?”

“I don't know, I don't think so.”

Again, Dougherty waited.

“He stopped climbing and looked back at me. I tried to say something, I tried to get him to talk to me, just to talk. I guess I didn't say the right thing.”

“Maybe there was no right thing,” Dougherty said.

“He wasn't young,” Legault said. “He wasn't a boy, he was a man. He was maybe forty or forty-five. He was wearing a white shirt and a tie but no jacket.”

“You always think there's something you can do,” Dougherty said, “that there's something more you can do. It's why we join, isn't it?”

Legault nodded and said, “I thought if I could just talk to him I could get him to climb back down, but he just looked at me.” There were tears in her eyes. “And then he just let go.” She was crying then, tears running down her cheeks. She lifted a hand to her face.

Dougherty saw a box of tissues on the table by the bed and pulled out a handful. He said, “It's the worst thing to see.”

Legault took the tissues and wiped her eyes but she was really crying now, barely able to speak, the words coming out broken. “He, he . . . passed right by me . . . looked right at me . . .”

Dougherty sat back down on the bed.

“I tried to grab him,” Legault said. “I reached out, we were so close. Then I fell.”

Dougherty didn't say anything. He thought about reaching out and taking her hand but he didn't. He figured he and Legault worked together, he wouldn't reach out and take LeBlanc's hand.

But Dougherty also knew that if he'd been on the bridge and reached out as the guy fell into the river so far below he'd be crying, too. He didn't think he'd ever admit that to anyone but he knew it was true.

Legault's husband walked into the room then, carrying a couple of paper bags from St-Hubert BBQ and Dougherty stood up and held out his hand, saying, “
Salut, tu dois être M. Legault.
”

They shook hands, and Legault said, “This is my husband, Réal,” and then to her husband, “this is the Montreal cop I told you about.”

Still holding Dougherty's hand, Réal looked at Legault and said, “
Anglais?
”

Dougherty continued speaking French. “I just stopped by to see how she was doing.”

Réal held up the bags and said, “I didn't know you were here, I only got two. She didn't want hospital food. I can share with you.” Réal was still wearing his work clothes, jeans and a t-shirt covered with white plaster and paint.

“No, that's okay,” Dougherty said, “I should be going.” He was thinking it was funny that he hadn't told Judy he was working with a female cop and Legault hadn't told her husband she was working with an Anglo cop.

From the bed, Legault said, “Thank you for coming.”

“No problem. I'll come back tomorrow.” He looked at Réal and said, “My parents live in Greenfield Park, I'm visiting them.”

“Okay, sure. Nice to meet you.”

They shook hands again and Dougherty left.

Instead of taking the busy Taschereau Boulevard, Dougherty drove through the quiet residential streets of Greenfield Park. His parents liked it out here in the suburbs: the Park had a small-town feel even though it was just across the bridge from Montreal. They moved there from Point St. Charles when Dougherty was in his last year of high school and he commuted to Verdun High rather than enrolling in the local Royal George High School. At the time it was a small school, and it went all the way from grade one through to the end of high school, but a few years ago the new English high school was built.

The street Dougherty drove down was lined with identical red-brick side-by-side duplexes surrounded by green lawns, exactly like the one his parents had bought. The whole area was a housing development that went in at the same time as the Greenfield Park Shopping Centre, which still bragged it was the biggest indoor mall on the south shore, though Dougherty wasn't sure if that was still true. He never really spent any time in the Park: the day they moved in, it felt too small for him, too isolated, but he was starting to see the appeal of that small-town feel, not quite twenty thousand people and almost all of them English-speaking, surrounded by a couple hundred thousand French speakers in Longueuil, St. Hubert and Brossard. Even in the suburbs it was the two solitudes.

He parked in front of his parents' house on the corner and went in through the back door that led into the kitchen. His mother was at the sink putting the last dish on the drying rack, and she said, “Eddie, I didn't know you were coming. Do you want some supper?”

He didn't want her to go to the trouble so he said, “No, that's okay, I just ate.”

“You sure? It's no trouble.”

His father had stepped into the kitchen from the living room then and said, “Of course, if you're looking for dessert there isn't anything.”

“That's okay, I'm fine.” It was a running joke when Dougherty was growing up: after every dinner his father would ask if there was anything sweet and his mother would say no. By the time Dougherty moved out, they were still saying it, but it had long stopped being funny and had taken on an edge. Dougherty held up a bottle in a paper bag and said, “I got you this. There's going to be a strike.”

His father said, “You didn't have to do that,” but he took the bottle. “How much do I owe you?”

“It fell off the back of a truck. I'm working at the Queen E, watching them unload.”

His mother said, “What happened?” She looked stricken.

Dougherty laughed. “No, I'm still on the force, that's what they've got me doing, looking for mad bombers and hijackers hiding in laundry trucks.”

“You getting overtime?” his father said. He was pulling the bottle out of the paper bag and looking at the label, Captain Morgan's dark, his drink. “I'll make us a couple.” He looked at his wife and said, “Do you want one?” and she said, “Just a small one.” Another running gag that wasn't funny anymore.

Dougherty sat down at the kitchen table and said, “I was out here visiting someone at the Charles-LeMoyne, a Longueuil cop I'm working with. Tried to stop a jumper on the bridge and fell, ended up in the hospital.”

“Is he hurt bad?”

“She,” Dougherty said. “Yeah, she broke an arm and a leg.”

His father brought a rum and Coke, Pepsi really, to the table and handed it Dougherty. He took a sip — just enough Pepsi to give it some colour.

Going back to the counter, his father said, “What are you working on in Longueuil?”

“Didn't I tell you, a couple of kids were killed. Well,” he said, “we think they were killed. They washed up downriver — one on the Montreal side and one on an island.”

Dougherty's mother sat down and said, “Île du Fort?”

“No, I don't know that one, it was Île Charron.”

His mother said, “
La même chose
, they change the name.”

“You think they were killed?”

“The bodies were in the water for a while,” Dougherty said, “so it's hard to tell. They were strangled, but they were alive when they hit the water.”

His mother closed her eyes and said, “
Mon Dieu, quel âge ont les enfants?
”

“Dougherty said, “Fifteen, sixteen.”

“Le même que Tommy.”

Dougherty nodded. He drank his rum and Pepsi and got out his cigarettes. “They were coming back from a concert on Île Sainte-Hélène. They walked over the bridge.”

Dougherty's father handed him a lighter and got out his own Player's Plain.

His mother looked at his father and said, “Does Tommy go to concerts there?”

“I don't know.”

Dougherty said, “Where is he?”

“Out. Around, somewhere.”

For the first time, Dougherty started to feel the emptiness in the house. He hadn't spent a lot of time there even when he'd lived there, a couple of years after high school and the first couple of years after he joined the police force, but all his friends were still on the island in the Point and Verdun. Although with these days of being more honest with himself he'd have to admit he didn't really have many friends from high school. He was thinking maybe the move to the south shore was more of a break than he'd realized at the time, but then he thought, No, it had a lot more to do with joining the police. The police were the enemy in the Point and Verdun.

Dougherty's mother said, “He gets in trouble at school.”

“It's July,” Dougherty said, “he's not getting in trouble now.”

His mother shook her head and said, “No.”

“So, he only has one more year, right?”

His mother got up from the table and started dragging a dishcloth over the sparkling clean countertop.

His father said, “He's got no idea what he's going to do then.”

“Does he have to know that now?” Dougherty said, “He's got plenty of time.” He wanted to say compared to the teenagers he arrested Tommy was completely fine, but then he realized he didn't really know Tommy that well — he still thought of him as ten years old.

“How's Judy?” his father said, changing the subject.

“Good,” Dougherty said. “She got a job.”

“That's great.”

His mother turned from the counter and said, “Where is it?”

“It's in LaSalle, at the Protestant school.”

His father said, “Full time?”

“Yeah, it looks good.” Dougherty finished his drink and his father picked up the empty glass and went to the counter to make another one.

Dougherty said, “So, she's getting an apartment there, in LaSalle.”

With his back to Dougherty his father said, “That's good, is it near the river or in the Heights?”

“Near the river. Between the river and the aqueduct. It's a nice neighbourhood.”

His father put the glass down in front of him, and Dougherty said, “I'm going to move in, too.”

His mother said, “To LaSalle.”

“Yeah, LaSalle. To the apartment.”

“Vivre ensemble?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Not married?”

“Her parents just broke up, I told you that, remember? Her father's got an apartment downtown. It doesn't seem like a good time to get married.”

“Mais c'est bien de vivre ensemble.”
It wasn't a question.

Dougherty tried to laugh it off and say, “It's not a big deal, we're going to get married. I got a ring.”

His mother walked out of the kitchen.

“I really didn't think it would be such a big deal.”

His father spoke quietly, saying, “Why would you think that?”

“I just figured after Cheryl did it.”

And then he realized his parents still didn't know Cheryl was living with her boyfriend. After graduating from Concordia University, his younger sister had moved to Calgary, two thousand miles away. They both found work there when they couldn't in Montreal, and that was bad enough for his parents. Now Dougherty felt guilty for letting the living arrangements slip. But really, he couldn't believe anyone still believed Cheryl's story about living with a girlfriend.

His father just said, “Don't tell your mother.”

Now he was laughing out loud, the nervous tension driving it but he also was starting to find the whole thing ridiculous. “All right, sure, if you don't want to know, we'll keep secrets.”

“It's been hard enough on her with Cheryl so far away.”

“How's she going to feel when she finds out?”

“She doesn't have to find out.”

“The truth always comes out,” Dougherty said. “That's what my whole job is based on.”

His father said, “This isn't a police investigation, it's family.”

“That's what most of them are.”

Then his father didn't say anything. He drank his rum and Pepsi and lit another Player's Plain.

Dougherty said, “If Cheryl was here she'd be giving you a hard time for still smoking, especially unfiltereds, after the open-heart surgery. You don't miss that, do you?”