Black Rock (4 page)

“Really, Eddie?”

She was looking right at him, shaking a little, not angry or resentful, just wanting an honest answer.

And he didn't want to lie to her so he didn't say anything.

chapter

three

The loud, clanging bell of the phone woke Dougherty from a deep sleep. He stumbled out of bed and took the three steps into his kitchenette, thinking he must have slept all day and was late for his four-to-midnight. He hadn't been able to fall asleep for hours when he'd got back from the Point, the sun was just coming up when he finally nodded off. When he picked up the receiver and said, “Hello,” it was his mother's voice saying, “Is it true?”

“Ma, wha— is what true?”

“Brenda Webber,” his mother's French accent drawing out the name and he said, “Yeah, it's true.”

“You see her?”

Dougherty sat down on the only chair in the place, a wooden kitchen chair that came with his furnished room. “Yeah, I saw her. How do you know?”

“It's in the
Gazette
. Tommy saw it.”

“Front page?”

“No, the front page is the dynamite and the machine guns they find in the garage. Tommy, after he finish his route he read the paper.”

Dougherty stood up and retrieved his smokes from the pocket coat, saying, “I thought he just read the sports.”

“He read the whole paper.” She didn't sound too happy about it. Tommy was her youngest — her baby, almost twelve — and Dougherty was getting ready for her usual speech about how the kid should be out playing in the fresh air but she said, “Poor Millie,
mon dieu
.”

“I took her and Mr. Webber to the station to identify the body.”

“Mon dieu.”

Dougherty lit his cigarette and looked for his watch but couldn't find it.

“When will be the funeral?”

“I don't know, Ma. When I left last night Reverend Barker was still there. I guess he's going to take care of it.” Dougherty wasn't sure what day it was and had to count back to Sunday and then forward to Wednesday and then he said, “Friday, I guess. Would that be right, three days?”

“Protestants,” his mother said, “I don't know.”

“What time is it?”

“Nine thirty. I'm on my coffee break — I have to go back to work. You coming Sunday?”

“If I'm not working.”

He hung up and found his watch. Nine thirty-five; he'd had maybe two hours' sleep. He went back to bed but felt wide awake, blowing smoke at the ceiling. The single room was barely big enough for the bed, the dresser and an armchair but it had a private bathroom and for thirteen dollars a week it was in a three-storey walk-up on Pierce, half a block up from St. Catherine Street, only a couple of blocks from Station Ten.

And then he thought he knew what it was about Brenda's body that seemed odd. Not odd, familiar. He got up and looked for some clothes but everything he had was ready for the laundry, which he'd do if he made it to his parents' on Sunday, so he put on his uniform and headed out. He found his car, a five-year-old Mustang with just over eighty thousand miles on it, parked a block over and drove down to Bonsecours Street in Old Montreal.

On the third floor, Dougherty asked the desk sergeant at the
section de l'identification judiciaire 
if Rozovsky was in, and the sergeant didn't even look up from the newspaper he was reading, just motioned towards the offices.

Rozovsky was standing in front of a desk, looking at a big leather-covered book and he said, “I'm looking at the requests now.” He looked up and saw it was Dougherty. “Oh, it's you.”

“You got a minute?”

Rozovsky looked like he was still in his twenties, barely, maybe a couple of years older than Dougherty, but he had a full beard and his hair was a little too long to be a cop, a uniform cop anyway. Maybe a ­detective could get away with his hair touching his collar like that, though Dougherty had no idea why anybody would want to.

“One minute.” Rozovsky put a piece of paper in the front pocket of the book and looked at Dougherty, waiting.

“That girl last night, Brenda Webber — I've seen something like that before.”

“Like what?”

“A girl tied up with a bedsheet. It was last year, I was working out of Eleven.”

“The deepest, darkest east end and your name is Dougherty? Whose cereal did you piss in?”

“Found her in a lane behind that little restaurant on the corner of Craig and Wolfe.”

Rozovsky said, “That's still there — it didn't get bulldozed for the expressway where the Ville-Marie Tunnel lets out,” and Dougherty said, “Or where the tunnel starts if you're coming that way.”

Rozovsky said, “The next street is Montcalm, right?” and Dougherty said yeah, and Rozovsky said, “That's funny, isn't it?” but he wasn't smiling like he found it funny, and Dougherty didn't say anything.

“This city named the streets next to each other Montcalm and Wolfe, the generals who fought each other on the Plains of Abraham. You went to school, didn't you?”

Dougherty said, “Yeah, it's funny.” Then he said, “She was just the same, naked but with shoes on, boots I think, and a bedsheet around her neck.”

“You know the date?”

“It was right around the first Expos game, the spring.”

Rozovsky walked across the office to some filing cabinets. “Beginning of April, right? Who was the detective?”

Dougherty said, “Campagnolo,” and Rozovsky stopped with his hand on a drawer handle and said, “Of course,” shaking his head and opening the drawer.

“I was reassigned to Station Ten in May. I never heard anything else about it.”

“Probably because there was nothing to hear.” Rozovsky flipped through files and then pulled one out of the drawer and opened it as he walked back. “These were taken by Geoffrion — he retired in January.” He dropped the file open on the desk. “Nice boots, probably a go-go dancer.”

“That's what Campagnolo figured. That or a prostitute.”

“No reason she couldn't be both,” Rozovsky said. “Hard-working girl from the Gaspé, looks like. Sylvie Berubé. There's no bedsheet.”

“No, it was just like with Brenda Webber, it wasn't really tied, it was just kind of wrapped around her neck.”

“It's not in any of these pictures.”

“I remember it, I saw it.”

“Geoffrion would have taken a picture of it, it's evidence.”

Now Dougherty wasn't sure. “But everything else, it's the same.”

“Close enough,” Rozovsky said.

“I guess we better tell Campagnolo.”

“He's working mad bombers now.”

“Who's working this?”

Rozovsky shrugged. “No one.”

“I guess we better tell Carpentier.”

“We?” He held out the file. “Around the corner and down the hall.”

Dougherty walked down the hall, further than he'd expected, and stopped at the open door to the Homicide Office. He stood there for a moment, too nervous to just walk in but not wanting to knock on the door frame, not sure of the protocol or if there was any protocol. Usually as the uniform cop you didn't say anything to the detectives, just answered their questions.

But Dougherty didn't think any of the detectives were ever going to ask about this, so he cleared his throat and tapped the file against his thigh and walked into the office.

Carpentier was standing by the big window facing Rue St. Louis, the side street behind the police station, and he didn't turn around, he just said,
“Laisse-le sur mon bureau,”
and Dougherty said, “Excuse me?”

Carpentier turned around then and said, “I thought you spoke French?” and Dougherty said he did, and then he said, “I didn't want to just leave it on your desk.”

“That's not coffee.”

Dougherty really wished Rozovsky had come with him. Now he wasn't sure what to say, and just then a woman pushed past him into the office, carrying a coffee mug that she put down on Carpentier's desk. She looked at Dougherty.

Carpentier said, “Would you like a coffee?”

For a moment Dougherty thought, Yeah, I would like a coffee, but he was still nervous being in the homicide office and he didn't say anything. Carpentier nodded at the secretary, and she shrugged and rolled her eyes a little and walked out. Carpentier said, “What is it?”

Dougherty took a couple of quick steps closer to the detective's desk, they were the only two people in the office now and Dougherty said, “There was another murder last year.”

“There were many murders last year.”

“Yes, but this one …” He put the open file on Carpentier's desk and stood back a bit while the detective picked up his cup of coffee.

Carpentier sat down then and looked through all the pictures of the body of Sylvie Berubé and then looked up at Dougherty and said, “You remembered this from …” He looked at the date on the file, “The ninth of April last year?”

“I just remembered it was around the first Expos game; Rozovsky found the file.”

Carpentier sipped his coffee and looked through the whole file and said, “There isn't much.”

Dougherty didn't say anything, just stood there feeling like he was standing in front of the vice-principal.

“This was before Bill,” Carpentier said, “so we didn't know.”

Dougherty looked at the wall of the homicide office where the pictures of the victims were tacked up and he said, “They look like nice girls.”

“I'm sure when Sylvie Berubé went home to her
maman
in Matane, she looked like a nice girl, too. You find out a lot about people in homicide. Too much.”

Dougherty nodded and he was thinking how all the new recruits wanted to get promoted into plainclothes, how they all wanted to work robbery and fraud and homicide but it seemed like they never thought about what that really meant.

Then Carpentier stood up. “We'll have to show this to Detective-Lieutenant Desjardins — he's in charge of the investigation.” He looked at Dougherty and said, “Good work, Constable.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Well, now I have to go to Point St. Charles and talk to the family of Brenda Webber. Would you like to come?”

“Sir?”

“Maybe you could help.”

“Yes sir, it's just … I'm working a four-to-midnight at Station Ten, sir.”

Carpentier motioned to Dougherty's uniform. “You're not on duty now?”

“No, sir.” He didn't know what else to say, so he just stood there and Carpentier shrugged a little and said, “We should be done by four, Constable.”

In the car Carpentier told Dougherty the coroner's report on Brenda Webber would be ready in a few days, but it looked like she was strangled, though probably not with the bedsheet they found around her neck. “Michaelchuk says it was probably a rope.”

“So why the bedsheet?”

“Don't know.”

They drove through the Wellington Tunnel under the Lachine canal and came out the other side in the Point. Turning onto Coleraine Street, Carpentier said,
“Tout le monde est ici,”
and Dougherty said yeah, not surprised by the crowd in front of the Webbers'.

Carpentier parked a few houses down, and as they approached the Webbers' door in the row house, the crowd saw them and seemed to perk up a little. But really nobody moved.

A man said, “What do you want, Dougherty?” and that's when Dougherty realized there were a lot of men in the crowd, more than he expected in the middle of a weekday in June.

Carpentier just pushed his way through the crowd like he owned the place and Dougherty followed. The Webbers' place looked exactly the same as the first-floor house Dougherty grew up in — front room, long hallway, kitchen at the back.

And that's where Millie Webber was sitting, of course, at the kitchen table, smoking and drinking coffee in the middle of another crowd. They all looked up when Carpentier pushed his way into the kitchen, and Millie Webber said, “Oh, you.”

Dougherty hung back in the hallway. He didn't see Arlene anywhere, but he did recognize a few of the faces in the kitchen, mostly women.

Carpentier said, “Perhaps we could speak alone, Mrs. Webber?”

The back door was open and Dougherty saw a couple more people standing outside in the lane, all men it looked like, and again he was surprised to see so many.

The bedroom door off the kitchen opened, and Joe Webber came out saying, “Whatever you've got to say, say it.”

Dougherty watched Carpentier move a little further into the kitchen and speak quietly to Millie, drawing Joe in closer as he spoke, and Dougherty was impressed by the detective and thinking, How do you get good at something as hard as talking to parents whose child has been killed? He heard Millie Webber start to cry softly, and Dougherty felt if he stood there another second he was going to bust open himself, so he backed away down the hall and out onto the front stoop.

Arlene was there then, sitting on the stoop, smoking a cigarette and drinking a cup of coffee. Most of the crowd was gone, and Dougherty looked up and down the street but all he saw was Arlene's boy a few houses down in front of another house with a few other kids playing with Dinky cars.

Dougherty said, “They finally go to work?” and Arlene said, “No, they're on strike.”

“Who is?”

“The port.”

“Since when?”

“Last night, I guess. It's a wildcat.”

“Longshoremen or checkers and coopers?”

Arlene looked up at Dougherty and said, “I don't know, Eddie — what fucking difference does it make?” and Dougherty said, “Yeah, I guess.” He really had no idea what he was doing, what help he could be on a homicide investigation.

After a few minutes of silence, Carpentier came out of the house and nodded to Arlene and then to Dougherty and then started back to the car. Dougherty caught up to him and Carpentier said, “Why don't you drive?” and tossed him the keys.

“Where are we going?”

“That store, what did you call it, Boss?”