The Colorado Kid Read online

  “Did he have drug or alcohol problems?”

  “Arla Cogan said not, and I believe she would have known. And after sixteen months to think it over, and with him dead at the end of it, I think she would have told me.”

  “But, Steffi,” Dave said (and rather gently), “when you consider it, madness almost has to be in it somewhere, wouldn’t you say?”

  She thought of James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, sitting dead on Hammock Beach with his back against a litter basket and a lump of meat lodged in his throat, his closed eyes turned in the direction of Tinnock and the reach beyond. She thought of how one hand had still been curled, as if holding the rest of his midnight snack, a piece of steak some hungry gull had no doubt stolen, leaving nothing but a sticky pattern of sand in the leftover grease on his palm. “Yes,” she said. “There’s madness in it somewhere. Did she know that? His wife?”

  The two men looked at each other. Vince sighed and rubbed the side of his blade-thin nose. “She might have, but by then she had her own life to worry about, Steffi. Hers and her son’s. A man up and disappears like that, the woman left behind is apt to have a damn hard skate. She got her old job back, working in one of the Boulder banks, but there was no way she could keep the house in Nederland—”

  “Hernando’s Hideaway,” Stephanie murmured, feeling a sympathetic pang.

  “Ayuh, that. She kept on her feet without having to borrow too much from her folks, or anything at all from his, but she used up most of the money they’d put aside for little Mike’s college education in the process. When we saw her, I should judge she wanted two things, one practical and one what you’d call…spiritual?” He looked rather doubtfully at Dave, who shrugged and nodded as if to say that word would do.

  Vince nodded himself and went on. “She wanted to be shed of the not-knowing. Was he alive or dead? Was she married or a widow? Could she lay hope to rest or did she have to carry it yet awhile longer? Maybe that last sounds a trifle hard-hearted, and maybe it is, but I should think that after sixteen months, hope must get damned heavy on your back—damned heavy to tote around.

  “As for the practical, that was simple. She just wanted the insurance company to pay off what they owed. I know that Arla Cogan isn’t the only person in the history of the world to hate an insurance company, but I’d have to put her high on the list for sheer intensity. She’d been going along and going along, you see, her and Michael, living in a three- or four-room apartment in Boulder—quite a change after the nice house in Nederland—and her leaving him in daycare and with babysitters she wasn’t always sure she could trust, working a job she didn’t really want to do, going to bed alone after years of having someone to snuggle up to, worrying over the bills, always watching the needle on the gas-gauge because the price of gasoline was going up even then…and all the time she was sure in her heart that he was dead, but the insurance company wouldn’t pay off because of what her heart knew, not when there was no body, let alone a cause of death.

  “She kept asking me if ‘the bastards’—that’s what she always called em—could ‘wiggle off’ somehow, if they could claim it was suicide. I told her I’d never heard of someone committing suicide by choking themselves on a piece of meat, and later, after she had made the formal identification of the death-photo in Cathcart’s presence, he told her the same thing. That seemed to ease her mind a little bit.

  “Cathcart pitched right in, said he’d call the company agent in Brighton, Colorado, and explain about the fingerprints and her photo I.D. Nail everything down tight. She cried quite a little bit at that—some in relief, some in gratitude, some just from exhaustion, I guess.”

  “Of course,” Stephanie murmured.

  “I took her across to Moosie on the ferry and put her up at the Red Roof Motel,” Vince continued. “Same place you stayed when you first got here, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Stephanie said. She had been at a boarding house for the last month or so, but would look for something more permanent in October. If, that was, these two old birds would keep her on. She thought they would. She thought that was, in large part, what this was all about.

  “The three of us had breakfast the next morning,” Dave said, “and like most people who haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t had much experience with newspapers, she had no shyness about talking to us. No sense that any of what she was sayin might later turn up on page one.” He paused. “And accourse very little of it ever did. It was never the kind of story that sees much in the way of print, once you get past the main fact of the matter: Man Found Dead On Hammock Beach, Coroner Says No Foul Play. And by then, that was cold news, indeed.”

  “No through-line,” Stephanie said.

  “No nothing!” Dave cried, and then laughed until he coughed. When that cleared, he wiped the corners of his eyes with a large paisley handkerchief he pulled from the back pocket of his pants.

  “What did she tell you?” Stephanie asked.

  “What could she tell us?” Vince responded. “Mostly what she did was ask questions. The only one I asked her was if the chervonetz was a lucky piece or a memento or something like that.” He snorted. “Some newspaperman I was that day.”

  “The chevron—” She gave up on it, shaking her head.

  “The Russian coin in his pocket, mixed in with the rest of his change,” Vince said. “It was a chervonetz. A ten-ruble piece. I asked her if he kept it as a lucky piece or something. She didn’t have a clue. Said the closest Jim had ever been to Russia was when they rented a James Bond movie called From Russia With Love at Blockbuster.”

  “He might have picked it up on the beach,” she said thoughtfully. “People find all sorts of things on the beach.” She herself had found a woman’s high-heel shoe, worn exotically smooth from many a long tumble between the sea and the shore, while walking one day on Little Hay Beach, about two miles from Hammock.

  “Might’ve, ayuh,” Vince agreed. He looked at her, his eyes twinkling in their deep sockets. “Want to know the two things I remember best about her the morning after her appointment with Cathcart over in Tinnock?”

  “Sure.”

  “How rested she looked. And how well she ate when we sat down to breakfast.”

  “That’s a fact,” Dave agreed. “There’s that old sayin about how the condemned man ate a hearty meal, but I’ve got an idea that no one eats so hearty as the man—or the woman—who’s finally been up and pardoned. And in a way she had been. She might not have known why he came to our part of the world, or what befell him once he got here, and I think she realized she might not ever know—”

  “She did,” Vince agreed. “She said so when I drove her back to the airport.”

  “—but she knew the only important thing: he was dead. Her heart might have been telling her that all along, but her head needed proof to go along for the ride.”

  “Not to mention in order to convince that pesky insurance company,” Dave said.

  “Did she ever get the money?” Stephanie asked.

  Dave smiled. “Yes, ma’am. They dragged their feet some—those boys have a tendency to go fast when they’re putting on the sell-job and then slow down when someone puts in a claim—but finally they paid. We got a letter to that effect, thanking us for all our hard work. She said that without us, she’d still be wondering and the insurance company would still be claiming that James Cogan could be alive in Brooklyn or Tangiers.”

  “What kind of questions did she ask?”

  “The ones you’d expect,” Vince said. “First thing she wanted to know was where he went when he got off the ferry. We couldn’t tell her. We asked questions—didn’t we, Dave?”

  Dave Bowie nodded.

  “But no one remembered seein him,” Vince continued. “Accourse it would have been almost full dark by then, so there’s no real reason why anyone should have. As for the few other passengers—and at that time of year there aren’t many, especially on the last ferry of the day—they would have gone right to their cars in the Bay St
reet parkin lot, heads down in their collars because of the wind off the reach.”

  “And she asked about his wallet,” Dave said. “All we could tell her was that no one ever found it…at least no one who ever turned it in to the police. I suppose it’s possible someone could have picked it out of his pocket on the ferry, stripped the cash out of it, then dropped it overside.”

  “It’s possible that heaven’s a rodeo, too, but not likely,” Vince said drily. “If he had cash in his wallet, why did he have more—seventeen dollars in paper money—in his pants pocket?”

  “Just in case,” Stephanie said.

  “Maybe,” Vince said, “but it doesn’t feel right to me. And frankly, I find the idea of a pickpocket workin the six o’clock ferry between Tinnock and Moosie a touch more unbelievable than a commercial artist from a Denver advertising agency charterin a jet to fly to New England.”

  “In any case, we couldn’t tell her where his wallet went,” Dave said, “or where his topcoat and suit-jacket went, or why he was found sittin out there on a stretch of beach in nothin but his pants and shirt.”

  “The cigarettes?” Stephanie asked. “I bet she was curious about those.”

  Vince barked a laugh. “Curious isn’t the right word. That pack of smokes drove her almost crazy. She couldn’t understand why he’d have had cigarettes on him. And we didn’t need her to tell us he wasn’t the kind who’d stopped for awhile and then decided to take the habit up again. Cathcart took a good look at his lungs during the autopsy, for reasons I’m sure you’ll understand—”

  “He wanted to make sure he hadn’t drowned after all?” Stephanie asked.

  “That’s right,” Vince said. “If Dr. Cathcart had found water in the lungs beneath that chunk of meat, it would have suggested someone trying to cover up the way Mr. Cogan actually died. And while that wouldn’t have proved murder, it would’ve suggested it. Cathcart didn’t find water in Cogan’s lungs, and he didn’t find any evidence of smoking, either. Nice and pink down there, he said. Yet someplace between Cogan’s office building and Stapleton Airport, and in spite of the tearing hurry he had to’ve been in, he must’ve had his driver stop so he could pick up a pack. Either that or he had em put by already, which is what I tend to believe. Maybe with his Russian coin.”

  “Did you tell her that?” Stephanie asked.

  “No,” Vince said, and just then the telephone rang. “’Scuse me,” he said, and went to answer it.

  He spoke briefly, said Ayuh a time or three, then returned, stretching his back some more as he did. “That was Ellen Dunwoodie,” he said. “She’s ready to talk about the great trauma she’s been through, snappin off that fire hydrant and ‘makin a spectacle of herself.’ That’s an exact quote, although I don’t think it will appear in my pulse-poundin account of the event. In any case, I think I’d better amble over there pretty soon; get the story while her recollection’s clear and before she decides to make supper. I’m lucky she n her sister eat late. Otherwise I’d be out of luck.”

  “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.”

  18

  “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 ba
ck 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.