One or the Other (19 page)

He was hoping for a laugh but his father just said, “Yes, I do.”

“Okay, fine.” Then Dougherty didn't say anything for a moment. When it started to get awkward he said, “We're going to get married. I really do have the ring.”

“Why don't you stay in your apartment until then? Just keep the apartment.”

“I don't know,” Dougherty said. “We went out to look at the school and we saw an apartment for rent, it just kind of happened.”

“It hasn't happened yet.”

“I didn't think it would be such a big deal, we're not kids.”

His father didn't say anything.

Dougherty let out a sigh and stood up, saying, “All right, well, I better get home. Big day tomorrow watching the maids make the beds.”

“All right.”

Dougherty walked to the back door and stopped and said, “It's going to be okay.”

“I know.”

Outside it was starting to get dark, and the streets were quiet. Dougherty drove through town again instead of heading straight to Taschereau. It was all flat, must have been farmers' fields before it became suburbs, though there were also older houses in Greenfield Park, wooden houses that probably dated back a hundred years. Dougherty passed Royal George School, an old red-brick building that was now Royal George Elementary and had a few portable classrooms in the parking lot for the last of the Baby Boomers.

Without thinking about it, he realized he was taking Victoria Bridge into the city instead of the newer Champlain that hooked up to the expressways. This was more like driving through town. What he was thinking about was the way people were committing to one another these days. Did it make a difference if Cheryl and her boyfriend got married or if he and Judy got married? They'd still be together, they'd still be committed to one another.

As he crossed the bridge, going over the section that lifted for the locks so the roadway was always close to the river, so different from the Jacques Cartier Bridge, he was thinking about Legault in the hospital and how she said she was a separatist. The politics didn't really mean anything to Dougherty, what flags flew, what areas called themselves a country, where the borders were. He crossed into the United States often enough — going camping with his parents when he was a kid, going to the drive-in when he started dating, he and Judy had been to Vermont so many times it didn't feel like another country.

Anyway, it really didn't seem like separation was going to go anywhere, it felt like another thing leftover from the '60s.

But marriage seemed like the right thing. Dougherty was thinking it did make a difference, it wasn't the same as living together. He was going to ask Judy to get married. They weren't anything like her parents — it was totally different.

Then the Olympics started and he was working twenty-four hours a day.

First there was the dismantling of the Corridart, a four-mile-long art installation by sixty artists along Sherbrooke Street leading from downtown to the shiny, almost-finished Olympic Stadium.

The exhibits had taken months to put up along the street, and a few days before the opening ceremony the mayor ordered them taken down and hundreds of cops stood guard in the middle of the night while all the art was thrown into dump trucks and taken away.

Dougherty was one of a few dozen detectives walking the street and sitting in unmarked cars looking to see who came by to protest. There was a lot of shouting and a couple of people had to be kept away by uniform cops but no one was arrested.

In the car, watching what looked like a three-storey building being pulled down, LeBlanc said, “Why is that art?”

“I don't know, it looks just like that building,” Dougherty said, pointing to a real three-storey brick building on the next block. The real building and the façade on the front of aluminum scaffolding looked exactly the same. Except the façade was being ripped down and tossed into dump trucks.

LeBlanc said, “Why is it being torn down?”

“I don't know.” No one did, the order was simply to take it all down. Dougherty heard rumours that the mayor, after years and years of constant praise for everything from Expo 67 to the Métro to the expressways, was finally being criticized. Corridart had been up for six days and was supposed to be up throughout the Olympics. There were even two stages set up along the way that were supposed to have hundreds of performances. But some of the art pointed out how much money was being spent on a two-week sporting event hardly anyone really cared about and some of it was about housing, but most of it was too abstract for Dougherty. He thought there was probably some truth to the criticism, but he also figured the mayor was probably due for some pushback. All that building that went on the past few decades wasn't all sunshine and roses.

Dougherty met Judy when she was protesting a plan to kick thousands of people out of their homes that were then going to be bulldozed to put up huge apartment buildings and condominiums, and while they had managed to stop some of the development — only phase one got built — that was one small victory in years of losses: Griffintown in the Point was lost, a bunch of the east end was torn up to make way for the Ville-Marie Expressway and a lot of houses in NDG were lost for the Décarie Expressway. There were protests, of course, but the people were tossed out and the new buildings and roads were built.

Now the Olympics felt like the final straw, the last big build that people were willing to put up with, and the artists of Corridart were going to let everyone know.

“We'll be getting overtime every day now,” LeBlanc said. “From now till the end of the Olympics.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“It's good. We're not getting a raise this year. We can't go on strike like everyone else.”

“No.”

“I might get a new car,” LeBlanc said.

It was starting to get light out, and Dougherty was watching a few people coming towards them down St. Famille Street looking like they were ready to make trouble.

“Maybe a Datsun. You ever drive a Datsun?”

“No.”

“Or a Peugeot, my uncle has a Peugeot, it's all right. Maybe a Renault. You ever work youth services? They drive Renaults.”

There were three people coming down the street, and Dougherty tensed up as they turned onto Sherbrooke.

“You like American cars? Maybe a Duster.”

“Those guys look like trouble to you?” Dougherty pointed at the three men, all of them maybe twenty years old, skinny with long hair and wearing t-shirts and jeans.

“Yeah,” LeBlanc said, “if you're a plate of bacon and eggs. They look like they worked all night and they're going to breakfast.”

“What did they do all night?”

“They look like a cleaning crew.”

Dougherty watched the three young men cross Sherbrooke and head farther south towards St. Catherine. They glanced at the destruction going on for miles along the street and kept walking.

LeBlanc said, “Are you back this afternoon, four to midnight?”

“No,” Dougherty said, “I'm off for a couple of days.”

“You took time off now, with all this overtime? You crazy?”

“What about those guys,” Dougherty said, pointing. “What are they doing?”

“The bus driver?”

“No, those guys beside him.”

Three people standing by the open door of the bus, the driver with a cup of coffee in his hand.

LeBlanc said, “You do need some sleep — you're starting to sound like the Mounties, you see bogeymen everywhere.”

Dougherty looked at his watch and said, “What time will they be done?”

“Supposed to be by seven,” LeBlanc said. “Doesn't look like they'll make it.”

It was nine when the destruction finally finished and the last of the dump trucks headed to wherever they were going. Dougherty dropped LeBlanc off at the Métro and then drove to Station Ten to drop off the car.

When he walked in, Delisle said, “You got a phone call from downtown.” He held out a small piece of pink paper.

“Who was it?”

“I'm not your receptionist.”

Dougherty took the paper; it had the words
While You Were Out
across the top and boxes to check off for
telephoned
,
came to see you
,
returned your call
and a few other options. Delisle had just written a phone number across the bottom, and Dougherty was thinking it sure looked like he was a receptionist, but he didn't say anything. He dialled the number and waited while it rang.

“Bureau des homicides, bonjour.”

Dougherty spoke French, using his official rank, “Constable Dougherty. There was a call for me?”

“Oh yes,” the woman's voice said, “just a minute.” There was a pause, and Dougherty could hear papers being moved around on a desk, and then, “We received a call from the Cornwall Police in Ontario. You were looking for a man named Martin Comptois.”

“Yes, that's right.”

The homicide receptionist gave him the phone number and the cop's name in Cornwall and then said, “Constable?”

Dougherty said, “Yes?”

“Well, it's just they asked for Detective Dougherty.”

“Yeah, it's not official yet.”

“I see.”

“Thanks.” He hung up and dialled the number she had given him. When it was answered he spoke in English, saying, “This is Detective Dougherty in Montreal. I'm looking for Sergeant Meekins.”

He was put on hold and waited a few minutes and then a man came on and said, “Meekins.”

“Yeah, this is Dougherty in Montreal. You picked up a guy named Martin Comptois?”

“Couple days ago. We just finished processing and we saw you were looking for him.”

“I want to talk to him,” Dougherty said. “Will you be holding him for a while?”

“He gets arraigned tomorrow, then out on bail if someone pays it. Otherwise he gets transferred to Kingston until his trial. What do you want to talk to him about?”

“He might have been a witness to a murder, a double murder.”

“Shit. Okay, well he'll be here until tomorrow.”

“What did you pick him up for?”

“He was on a boat that was smuggling. We get a lot of that through the Indian reserve here. We're hoping to get more out of him, but he's not saying anything.”

“He have a lot of dope?”

“Not as much as we were hoping for — now it's going to be a conspiracy to import. It's getting complicated.”

“If I drive out there today can I talk to him?”

“Sure,” Meekins said, “he's in our cells until he goes to court tomorrow.”

Dougherty thanked him and hung up. He'd been planning to go home and get some sleep and then go to dinner with Judy, show her the ring and propose. He wasn't thinking about finding the right place or the right time, now he was just thinking about getting it done. Of course, that made it more likely she would say no, but then he could say he asked. Then he laughed a little, thinking, As if that would satisfy my mother.

“Hey, Delisle, how far is Cornwall?”

“Couple hours, why?”

“Can I take a car?”

“You're not on duty.”

“It's official business.”

Delisle had come down to the end of the dispatch desk, and he tilted his head to one side and said, “Really? Official?”

“Yes.”

“Keep the radio on, in case we need the car back.”

Dougherty kept the radio on, but he also cranked up the AM, top forty from CKGM, heard all about getting some afternoon delight and how moonlight feels right and knockin' on heaven's door and all about the Olympic breakfasts they would be broadcasting every day during the Games. The morning man, Ralph Lockwood, was going to be the host, and Dougherty imagined there would be plenty of practical jokes and prank phone calls to delegates from countries where they don't speak English.

The Dylan song made Dougherty think of the concert he and Judy went to at the Forum a couple of years back. They were still feeling out the relationship, and Bob Dylan at the Forum seemed like a kind of compromise: it was the folk music Judy liked, but it wasn't at the Yellow Door or some really intimate place, it was sixteen thousand people at the Forum, where Dougherty figured he could just blend in. He knew Dylan's songs, the famous ones, but he wasn't really a fan. And then it was a strange evening because he'd enjoyed the concert as much as Judy had. Dougherty liked the part with just the Band the best, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Stage Fright” and even most of the Dylan songs when the Band was onstage with him, and he liked to see Judy singing along to songs when he couldn't make out the words. It was a cold January night, and they'd gone back to his place, a short walk from the Forum. Now that he was thinking about it, Dougherty realized it wasn't really a compromise or finding common ground or something that sounded like the Paris Peace Talks, it was what couples did, they found things to do together.

Heading west on the expressway, he passed the factories and breweries in LaSalle and then the rows of apartment buildings in Lachine and then the backs of post-war detached houses in Dorval. The houses got bigger and farther apart from one another in Beaconsfield and then Dougherty could see only the trees in Baie-D'Urfé, the houses on big lots too far from the highway.

Dougherty was thinking it had gone without saying that after the war people had wanted to move farther from the city, away from the noise and congestion where they were stacked on each other in three- and four-storey flats, out to where there could be a little space between houses and some grass under people's feet. It's what Judy's parents had done, what his own parents had done, but it was the last place Judy wanted to live.

Then he crossed the bridge off the island of Montreal and an hour and a half later he was in Cornwall.

It was a small town on the St. Lawrence River and on the other side was New York state. Driving along Montreal Road, Dougherty had the window down and the place smelled like sulphur and something burning. The big industry was pulp and paper; there was a huge Domtar plant and a lot of smaller factories.

He found the police station, a nearly brand new four-storey brick-and-concrete building that also had cells in the back. The receptionist at the front desk called upstairs, and Sergeant Meekins came down to the lobby a few minutes later.

Meekins was older than Dougherty, probably mid- to late thirties, and he had a thick head of hair, long sideburns and a moustache. He wore a light blue suit with a checkered tie and Dougherty thought he could as easily be selling furniture as booking criminals.

He held out his hand and said, “How was the drive?”

Dougherty shook hands and said, “Fine.”

“It's okay coming this way,” Meekins said, “but I don't like going back — too much traffic when you hit Montreal.”

“I guess I'm used to it.”

“Don't know how you can get used to sitting in traffic. Anyway,” he started walking towards the big winding wooden staircase and said, “what do you want to talk to Comptois about?”

Dougherty followed and they walked up to the second floor. He said, “Couple of kids were killed, strangled and thrown off a bridge.”

“Holy shit,” Meekins said, “that's huge.” He stopped and looked back at Dougherty. “You're here by yourself?”

“Comptois may be a witness, that's all.”

“All right, well, I'll get him brought up to an interview room.”

Meekins turned into his office and sat down behind the desk, picking up the phone and saying, “Yeah, bring him up now.” He hung up and said to Dougherty, “Just be a minute.”

Dougherty nodded. He was still standing by the office door and he didn't sit down. “So, he was smuggling dope?”

“He was with some guys, yeah.” Meekins motioned out the window and said, “We've still got jurisdiction for the island, but it's an Indian reserve. It's right on the border so there's a lot of smuggling.”

“What do you mean you've still got jurisdiction?”

“It's all changing,” Meekins said, “OPP taking over, some kind of joint taskforce with New York and the Mohawks. You don't want to know.”

“No, I don't,” Dougherty said, last thing he wanted to talk about was more politics. “The other guys, were they Americans?”

“No, locals. Pretty junior members in the local club. Comptois was the only one from out of town. He was probably here to pick up the drugs and take them back to Montreal.”

“They bikers?”

Meekins shrugged. He got out a cigarette and said, “Probably higher up the chain of command they come into it, but they aren't based here now. Yet.” He lit his smoke and said, “It looks like your boy Comptois is just a runner, came here to look over the organization and make a pickup.”