Black Rock Read Free Page B

family were arrested for seven murders in Los Angeles and at the beginning of May 1970 four students at Kent State University were shot and killed by the Ohio National Guard.
    Late on a Saturday night at the end of May, a car coming across the Champlain Bridge into Montreal exploded as it passed the Nuns’ Island exit just past the tollbooths. There were already two squad cars on the scene when Dougherty got there, working alone because Gauthier was taking all his sick days before his retirement, and he ran up to a cop he recognized, Bergeron, who was dropping a road flare a good two hundred feet from the smouldering car.
    â€œWhat’s out here?”
    Bergeron pointed and it took Dougherty a few seconds to make out the severed arm on the pavement. They closed the road, traffic backed up across the bridge and for miles past that, and walked around with flashlights showing the detectives and the tech guys as much of the debris as they could find. It looked like there was only one guy in the car, which looked like an Oldsmobile, a Cutlass, Dougherty figured, by what was left of the roof and the pieces of the front grille.
    Dougherty watched the police photographer, ­Roz­ovsky, take a hundred pictures of the wreckage and dozens of every body part they could find and then stop and change lenses on the camera and then turn and aim it back towards the skyline of Montreal.
    One of the detectives said, “What’s that for?” and Rozovsky said, “It looks like a postcard.”
    â€œYou can’t sell a picture you take while you’re on the clock.”
    Rozovsky snapped off a few more shots and said, “It’s for my personal collection.”
    â€œYeah, your personal collection on the rack in every drugstore in town,” and Rozovsky said, “From your lips …”
    Dougherty was thinking it did look like a postcard; the ships in the port, the big old Sun Life building, the shiny aluminum Place Ville-Marie, the black tower of Place Victoria, all of them under the big cross on Mount Royal.
    The detectives finally arrived, and one of them asked Vachon if it was the FLQ, and the bomb squad guy said,
“Non, c’est la mob.”
    â€œCertains?”
    One of the other bomb squad guys handed Vachon a piece of debris, and Vachon explained to the detectives that it was a radio receiver and that probably the transmitter was in a car behind the Cutlass. “Or over there,” he said, pointing to the row of tollbooths on the southbound lanes.
    The detectives talked among themselves for a while, and Dougherty overheard a little of what they were saying, trying to figure out who would take the case as most of the organized crime squad was working terrorism cases and the homicide squad was also stretched pretty thin.
    One of the detectives looked at Dougherty with that
what are you still doing here?
look on his face, and Dougherty walked back to the other uniformed cops, wondering if anyone was ever going to investigate this.
    The bomb squad wrapped up about four in the morning. Dougherty was moving his car to open up the road and let them head back to their offices at police headquarters when Vachon rolled the window of his station wagon down and said, “Westmount, right away. Number five Lansdowne Ridge, let’s go.”
    Dougherty turned on the flashing light on top of his car and peeled out, driving fast through the city. He took the next exit off the expressway, Atwater Street, and headed up the hill. He didn’t know exactly where Lansdowne Ridge was. Westmount had its own police force right there in the middle of Montreal, no way all those Anglos, the richest of the rich, were going to let Montreal cops in their business. When he got to Sherbrooke, Dougherty turned left and saw the Westmount police car waiting to lead them up the winding streets on the southwest side of Mount Royal.
    Number five Lansdowne Ridge was a big stone house over a hundred years old and