The Colorado Kid (12 page)

“And I’ve
got
to get after those invoices,” Dave said. “Seems like there must be a dozen more than there were when we left for the Gull. I swan to goodness when you leave em alone atop a desk, they breed.”

Stephanie gazed at them with real alarm. “You can’t stop now. You can’t just leave me hanging.”

“No other choice,” Vince said mildly. “
We’ve
been hanging, Steffi, and for twenty-five years now. There isn’t any jilted church secretary in this one.”

“No Ellsworth city lights reflected on the clouds downeast, either,” Dave said. “Not even a Teodore Riponeaux in the picture, some poor old sailorman murdered for hypothetical pirate treasure and then left to die on the foredeck in his own blood after all his shipmates had been tossed overside—and why? As a warning to other would-be treasure-hunters, by gorry! Now
there’s
a through-line for you, dearheart!”

Dave grinned…but then the grin faded. “Nothing like that in the case of the Colorado Kid; no string for the beads, don’t you see, and no Sherlock Holmes or Ellery Queen to string em in any case. Just a couple of guys running a newspaper with about a hundred stories a week to cover. None of em drawin much water by Boston
Globe
standards, but stuff people on the island like to read about, all the same. Speakin of which, weren’t you going to talk with Sam Gernerd? Find out all the details on his famous Hayride, Dance, and Picnic?”

“I was…I am…and I
want
to! Do you guys understand that? That I actually
want
to talk to him about that dumb thing?”

Vince Teague burst out laughing, and Dave joined him.

“Ayuh,” Vince said, when he could talk again. “Dunno what the head of your journalism department would make of it, Steffi, he’d probably break down n cry, but I know you do.” He glanced at Dave.

“
We
know you do.”

“And I know you’ve got your own fish to fry, but you must have
some
ideas…some
theories
…after all these years…” She looked at them plaintively. “I mean…don’t you?”

They glanced at each other and again she felt that telepathy flow between them, but this time she had no sense of the thought it carried. Then Dave looked back at her. “What is it you really want to know, Stephanie? Tell us.”

“Do you think he was murdered?”
That
was what she really wanted to know. They had asked her to set the idea aside, and she had, but now the discussion of the Colorado Kid was almost over, and she thought they would allow her to put the subject back on the table.

“Why would you think that any more likely than accidental death, given everything we’ve told you?” Dave asked. He sounded genuinely curious.

“Because of the cigarettes. The cigarettes almost had to have been deliberate on his part. He just never thought it would take a year and a half for someone to discover that Colorado stamp. Cogan believed a man found dead on a beach with no identification would rate more investigation than he got.”

“Yes,”
Vince said. He spoke in a low voice but actually clenched a fist and shook it, like a fan who has just watched a ballplayer make a key play or deliver a clutch hit. “Good girl. Good job.”

Although just twenty-two, there were people Stephanie would have resented for calling her a girl. This ninety-year-old man with the thin white hair, narrow face, and piercing blue eyes was not one of them. In truth, she flushed with pleasure.

“He couldn’t know he’d draw a couple of thuds like O’Shanny and Morrison when it came time to investigate his death,” Dave said. “Couldn’t know he’d have to depend on a grad student who’d spent the last couple of months holdin briefcases and goin out for coffee, not to mention a couple of old guys puttin out a weekly paper one step above a supermarket handout.”

“Hang on there, brother,” Vince said. “Them’s fightin words.” He put up his elderly dukes, but with a grin.

“I think he did all right,” Stephanie said. “In the end, I think he did just fine.” And then, thinking of the woman and baby Michael (who would by this time be in his mid-twenties): “So did she, actually. Without Paul Devane and you two guys, Arla Cogan never would have gotten her insurance money.”

“Some truth to that,” Vince conceded. She was amused to see that something in this made him uncomfortable. Not that he’d done good, she thought, but that someone
knew
he had done good. They had the Internet out here; you could see a little Direct TV satellite dish on just about every house; no fishing boat set to sea anymore without the GPS switched on. Yet still the old Calvinist ideas ran deep.
Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.

“What exactly do you think happened?” she asked.

“No, Steffi,” Vince said. He spoke kindly but firmly. “You’re still expectin Rex Stout to come waltzin out of the closet, or Ellery Queen arm in arm with Miss Jane Marple. If we knew what happened, if we had any idea, we would have chased that idea til we dropped. And frig the Boston
Globe
, we would have broken any story we found on page one of the
Islander
. We may have been
little
newspapermen back in ’81, and we may be little
old
newspapermen now, but we ain’t
dead
little old newspapermen. I still like the idea of a big story just fine.”

“Me too,” Dave said. He’d gotten up, probably with those invoices on his mind, but had now settled on the corner of his desk, swinging one large leg. “I’ve always dreamed of us havin a story that got syndicated nationwide, and that’s one dream I’ll probably die with. Go on, Vince, tell her as much as you think. She’ll keep it close. She’s one of us now.”

Stephanie almost shivered with pleasure, but Vince Teague appeared not to notice. He leaned forward, fixing her light blue eyes with his, which were a much darker shade—the color of the ocean on a sunny day.

“All right,” he said. “I started to think something might be funny about how he died as well as how he got here long before all that about the stamp. I started askin myself questions when I realized he had a pack of cigarettes with only one gone, although he’d been on the island since at least six-thirty. I made a real pest of myself at Bayside News.”

Vince smiled at the recollection.

“I showed everyone at the shop Cogan’s picture, including the sweep-up boy. I was convinced he must have bought that pack there, unless he got it out of a vendin machine at a place like the Red Roof or the Shuffle Inn or maybe Sonny’s Sunoco. The way I figured, he must have finished his smokes while wanderin around Moosie, after gettin off the ferry, then bought a fresh supply. And I
also
figured that if he got em at the News, he must have gotten em shortly before eleven, which is when the News closes. That would explain why he just smoked one, and only used one of his new matches, before he died.”

“But then you found out he wasn’t a smoker at all,” Stephanie said.

“That’s right. His wife said so and Cathcart confirmed it. And later on I became sure that pack of smokes was a message:
I came from Colorado, look for me there.
”

“We’ll never know for sure, but we both think that’s what it was,” Dave said.

“Jee-
sus
,” she almost whispered. “So where does that lead you?”

Once more they looked at each other and shrugged those identical shrugs. “Into a land of shadows n moonbeams,” Vince said. “Places no feature writer from the Boston
Globe
will ever go, in other words. But there are a few things I’m sure of in my heart. Would you like to hear em?”

“Yes!”

Vince spoke slowly but deliberately, like a man feeling his way down a very dark corridor where he has been many times before.

“He knew he was goin into a desperate situation, and he knew he might go unidentified if he died. He didn’t want that to happen, quite likely because he was worried about leaving his wife broke.”

“So he bought those cigarettes, hoping they’d be overlooked,” Stephanie said.

Vince nodded. “Ayuh, and they were.”

“But overlooked by
who
?”

Vince paused, then went on without answering her question. “He went down in the elevator and out through the lobby of his building. There was a car waitin to take him to Stapleton Airport, either right there or just around the corner. Maybe it was just him and the driver in that car; maybe there was someone else. We’ll never know. You asked me earlier if Cogan was wearing his overcoat when he left that morning, and I said George the Artist didn’t remember, but Arla said she never saw that overcoat no more, so maybe he was, at that. If so, I think he took it off in the car or in the airplane. I think he also took off his suit-coat jacket. I think someone either gave him the green jacket to wear in their place, or it was waitin for him.”

“In the car or on the plane.”

“Ayuh,” Dave said.

“The cigarettes?”

“Don’t know for sure, but if I had to bet, I’d bet he already had em on him,” Dave said. “He knew this was comin along…whatever
this
was. He’d’ve had em in his pants pocket, I think.”

“Then, later, on the beach…” She saw Cogan, her mind’s-eye version of the Colorado Kid, lighting his life’s first cigarette—first and last—and then strolling down to the water’s edge with it, there on Hammock Beach, alone in the moonlight. The midnight moonlight. He takes one puff of the harsh, unfamiliar smoke. Maybe two. Then he throws the cigarette into the sea. Then…what?

What?

“The plane dropped him off in Bangor,” she heard herself saying in a voice that sounded harsh and unfamiliar to herself.

“Ayuh,” Dave agreed.

“And his ride from Bangor dropped him off in Tinnock.”

“Ayuh.” That was Vince.

“He ate a fish-and-chips basket.”

“So he did,” Vince agreed. “Autopsy proves it. So did my nose. I smelled the vinegar.”

“Was his wallet gone by then?”

“We don’t know,” Dave said. “We’ll never know. But I think so. I think he gave it up with his topcoat, his suit-coat, and his normal life. I think what he got in return was a green jacket, which he also gave up later on.”

“Or had taken from his dead body,” Vince said.

Stephanie shivered. She couldn’t help it. “He rides across to Moose-Lookit Island on the six o’clock ferry, bringing Gard Edwick a paper cup of coffee on the way—what could be construed as tea for the tillerman, or the ferryman.”

“Yuh,” Dave said. He looked very solemn.

“By then he has no wallet, no ID, just seventeen dollars and some change that maybe includes a Russian ten-ruble coin. Do you think that coin might have been…oh, I don’t know…some sort of identification-thingy, like in a spy novel? I mean, the cold war between Russia and the United States would have still been going on then, right?”

“Full blast,” Vince said. “But Steffi—if you were going to dicker with a Russian secret agent, would you use a
ruble
to introduce yourself?”

“No,” she admitted. “But why else would he have it? To show it to someone, that’s all I can think of.”

“I’ve always had the intuition that someone gave it to
him
,” Dave said. “Maybe along with a piece of cold sirloin steak, wrapped up in a piece of tinfoil.”

“Why?” she asked. “Why would they?”

Dave shook his head. “I don’t know.”

“Was there tinfoil found at the scene? Maybe thrown into that sea-grass along the far edge of the beach?”

“O’Shanny and Morrison sure didn’t look,” Dave said. “Me n Vince had a hunt all around Hammock Beach after that yella tape was taken down—not specifically for tinfoil, you understand, but for anything that looked like it might bear on the dead man, anything at all. We found nothing but the usual litter—candy-wrappers and such.”

“If the meat was in foil or a Baggie, the Kid might very well have tossed it into the water, along with his one cigarette,” Vince said.

“About that piece of meat in his throat…”

Vince was smiling a little. “I had several long conversations about that piece of steak with both Doc Robinson and Dr. Cathcart. Dave was in on a couple of em. I remember Cathcart saying to me once, this had to’ve been not more than a month before the heart attack that took his life six or seven years ago, ‘You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.’ And I thought to myself, yep, that’s exactly right, exactly what it’s like. It’s like a hole I can’t stop poking at and licking into, trying to find the bottom of.

“First thing I wanted to know was if that piece of meat could have been jammed down Cogan’s throat, either with fingers or some sort of instrument like a lobster-pick, after he was dead. And that’s crossed
your
mind, hasn’t it?”

Stephanie nodded.

“He said it was possible but unlikely, because that piece of steak had not only been chewed, but chewed enough to be swallowed. It wasn’t really meat at all anymore, but rather what Cathcart called ‘organic pulp-mass.’ Someone else could have chewed it that much, but would have been unlikely to have planted it after doing so, for fear it would have looked insufficient to cause death. Are you with me?”

She nodded again.

“He
also
said that meat chewed to a pulp-mass would be hard to manipulate with an instrument. It would tend to break up when pushed from the back of the mouth into the throat. Fingers could do it, but Cathcart said he believed he would have seen signs of that, most likely straining of the jaw ligatures.” He paused, thinking, then shook his head. “There’s a technical term for that kind of jaw-poppin, but I don’t remember it.”

“Tell her what Robinson told you,” Dave said. His eyes were sparkling. “It didn’t come to nummore’n the rest in the end, but I always thought it was
wicked
int’restin.”

“He said there were certain muscle relaxants, some of em exotic, and Cogan’s midnight snack might have been treated with one of those,” Vince said. “He might get the first few bites down all right, accounting for what was found in his stomach, and then find himself all at once with a bite he wasn’t able to swallow once it was chewed.”

“That must have been it!” Stephanie cried. “Whoever dosed the meat sat there and just watched him choke! Then, when Cogan was dead, the murderer propped him up against the litter basket and took away the rest of the steak so it could never be tested! It was never a gull at all! It…” She stopped, looking at them. “Why are you shaking your heads?”

“The autopsy, dear,” Vince said. “Nothing like that showed up on the blood-gas chromatograph tests.”

“But if it was something exotic enough…”

“Like in an Agatha Christie yarn?” Vince asked, with a wink and a little smile. “Well, maybe…but there was also the piece of meat in his throat, don’t you know.”

“Oh. Right. Dr. Cathcart had that to test, didn’t he?” She slumped a little.

“Ayuh,” Vince agreed, “and did. We may be country mice, but we
do
have the occasional dark thought. And the closest thing to poison on that chunk of chewed-up meat was a little salt.”

She was silent for a moment. Then she said (in a very low voice): “Maybe it was the kind of stuff that disappears.”