The Colorado Kid Read online

  Dave pressed ahead. “There was a roll of Certs and a pack of Big Red chewin gum with all but one stick gone. There was a book of matches with an ad for stamp-collectin on the front—I’m sure you’ve seen that kind, they hand em out at every convenience store—and Devane said he could see a strike-mark on the strip across the bottom for that purpose, pink and bright. And then there was that pack of cigarettes, open and with one or two cigarettes gone. Devane thought only one, and the single strike-mark on the matchbook seemed to bear that out, he said.”

  “But no wallet,” Stephanie said.

  “No, ma’am.”

  “And absolutely no identification.”

  “No.”

  “Did anyone theorize that maybe someone came along and stole Mr. Doe’s last piece of steak and his wallet?” she asked, and a little giggle got out before she could put her hand over her mouth.

  “Steffi, we tried that and everything else,” Vince said. “Including the idea that maybe he got dropped off on Hammock Beach by one of the Coast Lights.”

  “Some sixteen months after Johnny Gravlin and Nancy Arnault found that fella,” Dave resumed, “Paul Devane was invited to spend a weekend at his lady-friend’s house in Pennsylvania. I have to think that Moose-Lookit Island, Hammock Beach, and John Doe were all about the last things on his mind just then. He said he and the girlfriend were going out for the evening, to a movie or somethin. Mother and Dad were in the kitchen, finishin the supper dishes—‘doin the ridding-up’ is what we say in these parts—and although Paul had offered to help, he’d been banished to the living room on the grounds of not knowin where anything went. So he was sittin there, watchin whatever was on the TV, and he happened to glance over at Poppa Bear’s easy-chair, and there on Poppa Bear’s little endtable, right next to Poppa Bear’s TV Guide and Poppa Bear’s ashtray, was Poppa Bear’s pack of smokes.”

  He paused, giving her a smile and a shrug.

  “It’s funny how things work, sometimes; it makes you wonder how often they don’t. If that pack had been turned a different way—so the top had been facing him instead of the bottom—John Doe might have gone on being John Doe instead of first the Colorado Kid and then Mr. James Cogan of Nederland, a town just west of Boulder. But the bottom of the pack was facing him, and he saw the stamp on it. It was a stamp, like a postage stamp, and that made him think of the pack of cigarettes in the evidence bag that day.

  “You see, Steffi, one of Paul Devane’s minders—I disremember if it was O’Shanny or Morrison—had been a smoker, and among Paul’s other chores, he’d bought this fella a fair smack of Camel cigarettes, and while they also had a stamp on them, it seemed to him it wasn’t the same as the one on the pack in the evidence bag. It seemed to him that the stamp on the State of Maine cigarettes he bought for the detective was an ink stamp, like the kind you sometimes get on your hand when you go to a small-town dance, or…I dunno…”

  “To the Gernerd Farms Hayride and Picnic?” she asked, smiling.

  “You got it!” he said, pointing a plump finger at her like a gun. “Anyway, this wa’nt the kind of thing where you jump up yelling ‘Eureka! I have found it!’, but his mind kep’ returnin to it over and over again that weekend, because the memory of those cigarettes in the evidence bag bothered him. For one thing, it seemed to Paul Devane that John Doe’s cigarettes certainly should have had a Maine tax-stamp on them, no matter where he came from.”

  “Why?”

  “Because there was only one gone. What kind of cigarette smoker only smokes one in six hours?”

  “A light one?”

  “A man who has a full pack and don’t take but one cigarette out of it in six hours ain’t a light smoker, that’s a non-smoker,” Vince said mildly. “Also, Devane saw the man’s tongue. So did I—I was on my knees in front of him, shining Doc Robinson’s otoscope into his mouth. It was as pink as peppermint candy. Not a smoker’s tongue at all.”

  “Oh, and the matchbook,” Stephanie said thoughtfully. “One strike?”

  Vince Teague was smiling at her. Smiling and nodding. “One strike,” he said.

  “No lighter?”

  “No lighter.” Both men said it together, then laughed.

  11

  “Devane waited until Monday,” Dave said, “and when the business about the cigarettes still wouldn’t quit nagging him—wouldn’t quit even though he was almost a year and a half downriver from that part of his life—he called me on the telephone and explained to me that he had an idea that maybe, just maybe, the pack of cigarettes John Doe had been carrying around hadn’t come from the State of Maine. If not, the stamp on the bottom would show where they had come from. He voiced his doubts about whether John Doe was a smoker at all, but said the tax-stamp might be a clue even if he wasn’t. I agreed with him, but was curious as to why he’d called me. He said he couldn’t think of anyone else who still might be interested at that late date. He was right, I was still interested—Vince, too—and he turned out to be right about the stamp, as well.

  “Now, I am not a smoker myself and never have been, which is probably one of the reasons I’ve attained the great age of sixty-five in such beautiful shape—”

  Vince grunted and waved a hand at him. Dave continued, unperturbed.

  “—so I made a little trip downstreet to Bayside News and asked if I could examine a package of cigarettes. My request was granted, and I observed that there was indeed an ink-stamp on the bottom, not a postage-type stamp. I then made a call to the Attorney General’s Office and spoke to a fellow name of Murray in a department called Evidence Storage and filing. I was as diplomatic as I could possibly be, Stephanie, because at that time those two dumbbell detectives would still have been on active duty—”

  “And they’d overlooked a potentially valuable clue, hadn’t they?” Steff asked. “One that could have narrowed the search for John Doe down to one single state. And it was practically staring them in the face.”

  “Yep,” Vince said, “and no way could they blame their intern, either, because they’d specifically told him to keep his nose out of the evidence bag. Plus, by the time it became clear that he’d disobeyed them—”

  “—he was beyond their reach,” she finished.

  “You said it,” Dave agreed. “But they wouldn’t have gotten much of a scolding in any case. Remember, they had an actual murder investigation going over in Tinnock—manslaughter, two folks burned to death—and John Doe was just a choking victim.”

  “Still…” Stephanie looked doubtful.

  “Still dumb, and you needn’t be too polite to say it, you’re among friends,” Dave told her with a grin. “But the Islander had no in’trest in makin trouble for those two detectives. I made that clear to Murray, and I also made it clear that this wasn’t a criminal matter; all I was doing was tryin my best to find out who the poor fella was, because someplace there were very likely people missin him and wantin to know what had befallen him. Murray said he’d have to get back to me on that, which I kinda expected, but I still had a bad afternoon, wonderin if maybe I should have played my cards a little different. I could have, you know; I could have had Doc Robinson make the call to Augusta, or maybe even talked Cathcart into doing it, but the idea of using either of them as a cat’s paw kind of went against my grain. I s’pose it’s corny, but I really do believe that in nine cases out of ten, honesty’s the best policy. I was just worried this one might turn out to be the tenth.

  “In the end, though, it came out all right. Murray called me back just after I’d made up my mind he wasn’t going to and had started pullin on my jacket to go home for the day—isn’t that the way things like that usually go?”

  “A watched pot never boils,” Vince said.

  “My gosh, that’s like poitry, give me a pad and a pencil so I can write it down,” Dave said, grinning more widely than ever. The grin did more than take years off his face; it knocked them flying, and she could see the boy he had been. Then he grew serious once more, and the boy disappeare
d again.

  “In big cities evidence gets lost all the time, I understand, but I guess Augusta’s not that big yet, even if it is the state capital. Sergeant Murray had no trouble whatsoever finding the evidence bag with Paul Devane’s signature on the Possession Slip; he said he had it ten minutes after we got done talking. The rest of the time that went by he was trying to get permission from the right person to let me know what was inside it…which he finally did. The cigarettes were Winstons, and the stamp on the bottom was just the way Paul Devane remembered: a regular little stick-on type that said colorado in tiny dark letters. Murray said he’d be turning the information over to the Attorney General’s office, and they’d appreciate knowing ‘in advance of publication’ if we got anywhere in identifying the Colorado Kid. That’s what he called him, so I guess you could say it was Sergeant Murray in the A.G.’s Evidence Storage and filing Department who coined the phrase. He also said he hoped that if we did have any luck identifying the guy, that we’d note in our story that the A.G.’s office had been helpful. You know, I thought that was sort of sweet.”

  Stephanie leaned forward, eyes shining, totally absorbed. “So what did you do next? How did you proceed?”

  Dave opened his mouth to reply, and Vince put a hand on the managing editor’s burly shoulder to stop him before he could. “How do you think we proceeded, dear?”

  “School is in?” she asked.

  “��Tis,” he said.

  And because she saw by his eyes and the set of his mouth (more by the latter) that he was absolutely in earnest, she thought carefully before replying.

  “You…made copies of the ‘sleeping ID’—”

  “Ayuh. We did.”

  “And then…mmm…you sent it with clippings to—how many Colorado papers?”

  He smiled at her, nodded, gave her a thumbs-up. “Seventy-eight, Ms. McCann, and I don’t know about Dave, but I was amazed at how cheap it had become to send out such a number of duplications, even back in 1981. Why, it couldn’t have come to a hundred bucks total out-of-pocket expense, even with the postage.”

  “And of course we wrote it all off to the business,” said Dave, who doubled as the Islander’s bookkeeper.

  “Every penny. As we had every right to do.”

  “How many of them ran it?”

  “Every frickin one!” Vince said, and fetched his narrow thigh a vicious slap. “Ayuh! Even the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News! Because then there was only one peculiar thing about it and a beautiful through-line, don’t you see?”

  Stephanie nodded. Simple and beautiful. She did see.

  Vince nodded back, absolutely beaming. “Unknown man, maybe from Colorado, found on an island beach in Maine, two thousand miles away! No mention of the steak stuck halfway down his gullet, no mention of the coat that might have gotten off Jimmy-Jesus-knows-where (or might not have been there at all), no mention of the Russian coin in his pocket! Just the Colorado Kid, your basic Unexplained Mystery, and so, sure, they all ran it, even the free ones that are mostly coupons.”

  “And two days after the Boulder newspaper ran it near the end of October 1981,” Dave said, “I got a call from a woman named Arla Cogan. She lived in Nederland, a little way up in the mountains from Boulder, and her husband had disappeared in April of the previous year, leaving her and a son who had been six months old at the time of his disappearance. She said his name was James, and although she had no idea what he could possibly have been doing on an island off the coast of Maine, the photograph in the Camera looked a great deal like her husband. A great deal, indeed.” He paused. “I guess she knew it was more than just a passin resemblance, because she got about that far and then began to cry.”

  12

  Stephanie asked Dave to spell Mrs. Cogan’s first name. In Dave Bowie’s thick Maine accent, all she was hearing was a bunch of a-sounds with an l in the middle.

  He did so, then said, “She didn’t have his fingerprints—accourse not, poor left-behind thing—but she was able to give me the name of the dentist they used, and—”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Stephanie said, putting her hand up like a traffic cop. “This man Cogan, what did he do for a living?”

  “He was a commercial artist in a Denver advertising agency,” Vince said. “I’ve seen some of his work since, and I’d have to say he was a pretty good one. He was never going to go nationwide, but if you wanted a quick picture for an advertising circular that showed a woman holdin a roll of toilet tissue up like she’d just caught herself a prize trout, Cogan was your man. He commuted to Denver twice a week, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, for meetings and product conferences. The rest of the time he worked at home.”

  She switched her gaze back to Dave. “The dentist spoke to Cathcart, the Medical Examiner. Is that right?”

  “You’re hittin on all cyclinders, Steff. Cathcart didn’t have any X-rays of the Kid’s dental work, he wasn’t set up for that and saw no reason to send the corpse out to County Memorial where dental X-rays could have been taken, but he noted all the fillings, plus the two crowns. Everything matched. He then went on ahead and sent copies of the dead man’s fingerprints to the Nederland Police, who got a tech from the Denver P.D. to go out to the Cogan residence and dust James Cogan’s home office for prints. Mrs. Cogan—Arla—told the fingerprint man he wouldn’t find anything, that she’d cleaned the whole works from stem to stern when she’d finally admitted to herself that her Jim wasn’t coming back, that he’d either left her, which she could hardly believe, or that something awful had happened to him, which she was coming to believe.

  “The fingerprint man said that if Cogan had spent ‘a significant amount of time’ in the room that had been his study, there would still be prints.” Dave paused, sighed, ran a hand through what remained of his hair. “There were, and we knew for sure who John Doe, also known as the Colorado Kid, really was: James Cogan, age forty-two, of Nederland, Colorado, married to Arla Cogan, father of Michael Cogan, age six months at the time of his father’s disappearance, age going on two years at the time of his father’s identification.”

  Vince stood up and stretched with his fisted hands in the small of his back. “What do you say we go inside, people? It’s commencing to get a tiny bit chilly out here, and there’s a little more to tell.”

  13

  They each took a turn at the rest room hidden in an alcove behind the old offset press that they no longer used (the paper was now printed in Ellsworth, and had been since ’02). While Dave took his turn, Stephanie put on the Mr. Coffee. If the story-that-was-not-a-story went on another hour or so (and she had a feeling it might), they’d all be glad of a cup.

  When they were reconvened, Dave sniffed in the direction of the little kitchenette and nodded approvingly. “I like a woman who hasn’t decided the kitchen’s a place of slavery just because she works for a livin.”

  “I feel absolutely the same way about a man,” Stephanie said, and when he laughed and nodded (she had gotten off another good one, two in one afternoon, a record), she tilted her own head toward the huge old press. “That thing looks like a place of slavery to me,” she said.

  “It looks worse than it ever was,” Vince said, “but the one before it was a horror. That one’d take your arm off if you weren’t careful, and make a damn good snatch at it even if you were. Now where were we?”

  “With the woman who’d just found out she was a widow,” Stephanie said. “I presume she came to get the body?”

  “Yep,” Dave said.

  “And did one of you fetch her here from the airport in Bangor?”

  “What do you think, dear?”

  It wasn’t a question Stephanie had to mull over for very long. By late October or early November of 1981, the Colorado Kid would have been very old business to the State of Maine authorities…and as a choking victim, he had been very minor business to begin with. Just an unidentified dead body, really.

  “Of course you did. You two were really the only friends she had in the
state of Maine.” This idea had the odd effect of making her realize that Arla Cogan had been (and, somewhere, almost certainly still was) a real person, and not just a chess-piece in an Agatha Christie whodunit or an episode of Murder, She Wrote.

  “I went,” Vince said, speaking softly. He sat forward in his chair, looking at his hands, which were clasped in a driftwood gnarl below his knees. “She wasn’t what I expected, either. I had a picture built in my head, one based on a wrong idea. I should have known better. I’ve been in the newspaper business sixty-five years—as long as my partner in crime there’s been alive, and he’s no longer the gay blade he thinks he is—and in that length of time, I’ve seen my share of dead bodies. Most of em would put all that romantic poetry stuff—‘I saw a maiden fair and still’—out of your head in damn short order. Dead bodies are ugly things indeed, by n large; many hardly look human at all anymore. But that wasn’t true of the Colorado Kid. He looked almost good enough to be the subject of one of those romantic poimes by Mr. Poe. I photographed him before the autopsy, accourse, you have to remember that, and if you stared at the finished portrait for more’n a second or two, he still looked deader than hell (at least to me he did), but yes, there was something kinda handsome about him just the same, with his ashy cheeks and pale lips and that little touch of lavender on his eyelids.”

  “Brrr,” Stephanie said, but she sort of knew what Vince was saying, and yes, it was a poem by Poe it called to mind. The one about the lost Lenore.

  “Ayuh, sounds like true love t’me,” Dave said, and got up to pour the coffee.

  14

  Vince Teague dumped what looked to Stephanie like half a carton of Half ’N Half into his, then went on. He did so with a rather rueful smile.

  “All I’m trying to say is that I sort expected a pale and dark-haired beauty. What I got was a chubby redhead with a lot of freckles. I never doubted her grief and worry for a minute, but I sh’d guess she was one of those who eats rather than fasts when the rats gnaw at her nerves. Her folks had come from Omaha or Des Moines or somewhere to watch out for the baby, and I’ll never forget how lost n somehow alone she looked when she came out of the jetway, holdin her little carry-on bag not by her side but up to her pouter-pigeon bosom. She wasn’t a bit what I expected, not the lost Lenore—”