The Colorado Kid

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 storythatwasnotastory 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 chesspiece in an Agatha Christie whodunit or an episode ofMurder, 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 sixtyfive 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.