One or the Other (29 page)

He went back into the front of the station and found Delisle and pulled him aside.

Delisle said, “Holy shit, what's going to happen? Are we going to be our own country?”

“We've been our own country for a hundred years,” Dougherty said.

“Shit, you know what I mean.”

“Yeah,” Dougherty said. “That's for the politicians. Right now, look, I put a couple guys in the cells.”

“You didn't process them?”

“I'm going to. In a while. Look, can you just keep them for a while.”

“What are they charged with?”

“Nothing right now,” Dougherty said. “Just let me work something out.”

“You can't just leave them there.”

“They won't say anything.” Dougherty started out of the station and said, “Like you said, it's a big night, no one knows what's going to happen. They can wait a few more minutes.”

Dougherty got back in the squad car and drove over the Champlain Bridge to the south shore. As he drove along Taschereau, he wondered how his parents were doing, if they were as shocked as everyone else. He drove into Longueuil and stopped in front of a small house with a half-finished front porch.

There was a party going on inside.

Dougherty knocked on the front door and a moment later it swung open and a man was standing there with a beer in one hand and a smile on his face, saying, “
Salut, mon ami, bienvenue dans notre nouveau pays!
”

Dougherty said, “
Salut, Réal, Francine est l
à
?”

“Oui, oui, entre. Comment ça va?”

“
Bien
.” Dougherty stepped into the living room full of people and pushed his way through until he saw Legault in the kitchen. As he walked towards her she saw him and smiled. She had a beer in her hand and Dougherty figured she'd had a few before this one.

She spoke French, saying, “Dougherty, did you come to join our side? The winning side.”

Dougherty got close to her and said, “I arrested Martin Comptois and Marc-André Daigneault.”

Legault was still smiling — it didn't seem to register with her for a moment — and she said, “What for?”

Dougherty half-smiled and said, “Nothing. I just saw them and I grabbed them. They're in the cells now. Look,” he paused and then said, “there's never going to be any evidence against these guys.”

Legault said, “I know.”

“They're going to have to confess.”

She said, “Yeah, so?”

“So, I don't think I can get that myself. I need you.”

Legault nodded and put down her beer and said, “Okay, let's go.”

On the way into Montreal, they made up a game plan where Legault would offer each Comptois and Daigneault immunity if they testified against the other. They didn't expect either one would take it so then Dougherty would go in and “do what you do,” as Legault put it.

Dougherty had been feeling that because all he could do, all he was good at, was smacking guys around, his career had peaked and he was where he was going to be forever, but now he was thinking if it worked to put these two bastards away, that was enough to make being a desk sergeant for the next thirty years worthwhile.

He said, “I did see some rope in their car, we could say it matches the piece you found in the pavilion on the Jacques Cartier Bridge, and we could say the partial print matches, but I'm worried if we try that they'll know we don't really have anything and they'll clam up.”

“I think you're right,” Legault said. “I think we talk to them, we play good cop bad cop and we get one to turn on the other.”

Dougherty said, “Save your neck or save your brother, looks like it's one or the other.”

“Is that a song?”

“Yeah,” Dougherty said. “The guys who back up Bob Dylan, I saw them at the Forum a couple of years ago.”

“I was at that concert,” Legault said. “Réal is a big fan of Bob Dylan.”

Dougherty said, “I wouldn't have guessed that.”

“Nothing but Gilles Vigneault in our house?”

“Well, tonight anyway.”

Legault said, “How many houses do you think will be playing ‘Mon Pays' tonight?”

“All the ones that aren't packing.”

Legault turned and looked at Dougherty and then saw the look on his face and smiled. Then she was serious again and said, “
Bien
, let's do this.”

And when they did, it was much easier than they expected. Legault made them both the offer, and Dougherty smacked them both, and the next time Legault went in to talk to them Comptois said it was all Daigneault's idea and Daigneault said it was all Comptois.

They had been selling drugs for a while and sometimes women, girls, would offer them sex instead of money. When they moved from pot to coke not all the girls they knew wanted to make the change, and the first time Comptois forced it Daigneault was surprised and just watched. After that it happened more easily. “I didn't want to,” Daigneault said, “it was the drugs.”

And Legault said, “Then you shouldn't have taken them.”

He said, “Once you start . . .”

Legault waited a moment and then said, “Tell me about Manon and Mathieu, what happened?”

And it was almost exactly what Dougherty had said it was. They thought it was two girls and they stopped them on the bridge, on the sidewalk, and when it turned out one of them was a boy they got mad. “It was the drugs,” Daigneault said. “The coke.”

“No,” Legault said. “It wasn't the drugs it was you. You and Comptois.”

She got them both to write it all down, full confessions, and they both did.

It was almost dawn then, and Legault said she was going home. She phoned her husband and he came and picked her up. When she was leaving, she said to Dougherty, “What happens now?”

“I give all this to Carpentier. It's up to him.”

Legault said, “I will tell the parents. If there are charges or not, at least they'll know the truth.”

Dougherty said, “Yes, but it would be better if there are charges.”

“Yes.”

Dougherty stood on the sidewalk and watched Legault and her husband drive away through the empty streets. The parties — and the mourning — came to an end. Then he went back into the station.

Detective Carpentier said, “You know, without the confession you have nothing.”

Dougherty said, “I know.”

Carpentier tapped the paper and said, “It may not be accepted into court, they could get good lawyers.”

Dougherty didn't say anything.

“It is very detailed,” Carpentier said. “You got them to say all this?”

“Honestly,” Dougherty said, “Sergeant Legault came in from Longueuil and handled most of it. She would appreciate it if we didn't mention that.”

“We may have to,” Carpentier said.

“Understood.”

Carpentier shook his head and let out an exhausted sigh. “It's been quite a night.”

“Yes, sir.”

“This is good work, Dougherty.”

Dougherty didn't say anything.

“Very good police work.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Carpentier stood up. It seemed to Dougherty that the overcoat must weigh a thousand pounds. “This is going to cause a lot of problems for Captain Allard and his detectives in Longueuil. It's going to cause a lot of problems for Olivier, too, with the chief.”

Dougherty nodded. It had been months since his meeting with the assistant director of detectives, Paul-Emile Olivier, and that hadn't gone all that well.

“I'll talk to him,” Carpentier said. “And when this blows over in a couple of months I'll see to it you are transferred to the homicide squad.”

Dougherty wasn't sure he heard right and said, “Pardon me, sir?”

“You're going to be a homicide detective,” Carpentier said. He was walking out of the squad room then, and he stopped at the door and looked back. “Don't worry, you'll hate it as much as you hate working patrol soon enough.”

Dougherty said, “I don't hate working patrol.”

Carpentier winked and said, “I know.”

He walked out, and a few moments later Dougherty realized he'd been holding his breath and let it out in a long exhale. He looked around the squad for someone to shake hands with but there was no one there.

Outside the sun was coming up.

As Dougherty drove to LaSalle he started to wonder what he'd say to Judy. They were settled into such a good routine, they were both working days and having dinner together.

They were going to get married.

He had no idea what he'd say to her.

But when he walked into the apartment and saw Judy sitting at the dining room table eating breakfast he knew it would be okay.

These days if someone brings up the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal, the conversation usually quickly becomes about the debt incurred, the lack of a gold medal for the host country and the unfinished stadium. But from my vantage point as a sixteen-year-old living in LaSalle, the Olympics were great. I attended one event, with my father, a soccer game between Iran and eventual silver medalist Poland, and I watched many hours a day on TV. I also saved the daily insert section in the
Montreal Star
for years afterwards. The highlights for me were Nadia Comǎneci, Caitlyn Jenner (then known as Bruce Jenner), Sugar Ray Leonard, the Spinks Broth
ers, and Greg Joy's silver medal in the high jump.

But in researching
One or the Other
I looked at the summer of 1976 in Montreal as an adult and it seemed quite different. Yes, it was a big party, but big changes were in the air.

The Brink's truck robbery happened very much like it is described in the book and the perpetrators were never caught and the nearly three million dollars never recovered. Whether or not the money was used to purchase cocaine to be sold in the city that summer is speculation, but there is no doubt someone brought in a lot of cocaine and sold it in Montreal that summer.

Bob Colacello, the editor of
Interview
magazine, wrote that by the mid-1970s “cocaine suddenly was everywhere . . . It went from something people tried to hide, except among close friends, to something people took for granted, and shared openly . . . None of us thought cocaine was really dangerous, or even addictive, back then. Heroin was off limits in our crowd, but coke was like liquor or pot or poppers, fuel for fun, not self-destruction.”

In 1976 a book came out called
Cocaine Handbook
, with lots of useful information like “testing for purity.” The intro said, “Now that it has come into everyday use . . .” Another phrase that came up a few times in my research was, “Some people have a rule about cocaine: Never buy it, never turn it down.”

Along with cocaine, disco arrived in a big way. Of course, like cocaine it had been around for a while but suddenly that summer it was everywhere. Writing about the large number of discos that opened, the
Montreal Gazette
said, in a way that seems very Montreal to me, “Saying a street is fashionable may sound derogatory but Crescent Street handles it with elegance and spark.” Seeing something fashionable as a negative may be one of the most striking examples of the gap between the two solitudes in Montreal at the time.

Disco did not arrive in the suburbs in 1976. As a teenager I was firmly in the “disco sucks” camp even though sometimes, when no one else was around, I slipped my radio from CHOM-FM to CKGM-AM to hear “Play That Funky Music” or “Car Wash.” Rediscovering and re-evaluating disco was one of the most fun things about writing this book. Dorian Lynskey's book,
33 Revolutions Per Minute
, has a great chapter on disco as protest music, bringing gay rights to the forefront. In retrospect this is easy to see. At the time it was not. And the movie
Funkytown
gives a very good idea of what the club scene was like in Montreal in 1976.

Ulrike Meinhof, of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang), really was found hanged in her maximum-security prison cell in West Germany. Her death was ruled a suicide but immediately many people questioned the circumstances. In July 1976, a member of the RAF, Monika Berberich, and three members of the 2 June Movement, Juliane Plambeck, Gabriele Rollnik and Inge Viett, escaped from prison in West Germany. With the memory of the Munich Olympics still fresh, these events added to the security tension at the Montreal Olympics.

After the Olympics, I headed into my final year of high school, the teachers went on strike (there were a lot of strikes in the 1970s) and Quebec headed into an election. It's usually remembered as the Parti Québécois upset victory, but the real surprise was probably the strong showing of the resurgent Union Nationale party under the leadership of Rodrigue Biron, which led to a three-way split and the PQ majority.

Two teenagers were murdered in 1979, strangled and thrown from the Jacques-Cartier Bridge by two men who had committed many crimes before that night. The two men were picked up quickly by the Montreal police and convicted of the two murders. They are still in prison.

As always, I rely on a lot of people for help with the research, though of course, the mistakes are entirely mine.

My father, though he passed away in 1985, was a Montrealer his whole life and my first guide to the city and I have used a lot of his insights. My uncle Bob, Robert S. McFetridge, though he passed away in 2008 also provided me with a lot of insight into his city (and picking up my tickets for the Olympic soccer game at his corner office on the top floor of Place Ville Marie was a thrill). My cousin Mike Powell took me to the Bob Dylan and The Band concert at the Montreal Forum mentioned in the book. Sadly, Mike was killed in 1990.

Randy McIlwaine, Keith Daniel and Dawn Stark from LaSalle High continue to try to correct my foggy memories of those days, but I resist. Jacques Filippi has once again taken on the task of making my awful French readable. Once again, the mistakes that remain are mine.

Thanks to everyone at ECW Press. I could not imagine writing these so very Canadian novels without the support of a truly Canadian publisher. And especially to Jen Knoch, who once again provided thorough and thoughtful editing.

And, of course, thanks to my wife, Laurie Reid.