The Colorado Kid

16

“That’s what makes this wrong for a newspaper like theGlobe,” Vince said, after a little pause to sip his milky coffee and collect his thoughts. “Even if we wanted to give it up.”

“Which we don’t,” Dave put in (and rather testily).

“Which we don’t,” Vince agreed. “But if we did…Steffi, when a bigcity newspaper like theGlobe or theNew York Times does a feature story or a feature series, they want to be able to provideanswers, or at least suggest them, and do I have a problem with that? The hell I do! Pick up any bigcity paper, and what do you find on the front page? Questions disguised as news stories. Where is Osama Bin Laden? We don’t know. What’s the President doing in the Middle East?We don’t know becausehe don’t. Is the economy going to get stronger or go in the tank? Experts differ. Are eggs good for you or bad for you? Depends on which study you read. You can’t even get the weather forecasters to tell you if a nor’easter is going to come in from the nor’east, because they got burned on the last one. So if they do a feature story on better housing for minorities, they want to be able to say if you do A, B, C, and D, things’ll be better by the year 2030.”

“And if they do a feature story on Unexplained Mysteries,” Dave said, “they want to be able to tell you the Coast Lights were reflections on the clouds, and the Church Picnic Poisonings were probably the work of a jilted Methodist secretary. But trying to deal with this business of the time…”

“Which you happen to have put your finger on,” Vince added with a smile.

“And of course it’s outrageous no matterhow you think of it,” Dave said.

“But I’m willing to be outrageous,” Vince said. “Hell, I looked into the matter, just about dialed the phone off the damn wall, and I guess I have a right to be outrageous.”

“My father used to say you can cut chalk all day, yet it won’t never be cheese,” Dave said, but he was also smiling a little.

“That’s true, but let me whittle a little bit just the same,” Vince said. “Let’s say the elevator doors close at tentwenty, Mountain Time, okay? Let’s also say, just for the sake of argument, that this was all planned out in advance and he had a car standin by with the motor running.”

“All right,” Stephanie said, watching him closely.

“Pure fantasy,” Dave snorted, but he also looked interested.

“It’s farfetched, anyway,” Vince agreed, “but he wasthere at quarter past ten and at Jan’s Wharfside a little more than five hours later. That’s also farfetched, but we know it’s a fact. Now may I continue?”

“Have on, McDuff,” Dave said.

“If he’s got a car all warmed up and waiting for him, maybe he can make it to Stapleton in half an hour. Now he surely didn’t take a commercial flight. He could have paid cash for his ticket and used an alias—that was possible back then—but there were no direct flights from Denver to Bangor. From Denver to anyplace in Maine, actually.”

“You checked.”

“I did. Flying commercial, the best he could have done was arrive in Bangor at 6:45 PM, which was long after that countergirl saw him. In fact at that time of the year that’s after the last ferry of the day leaves for Moosie.”

“Six is the last?” Stephanie asked.

“Yep, right up until midMay,” Dave said.

“So he must have flown charter,” she said. “A charterjet? Are there companies that flew charter jets out of Denver? And could he have afforded one?”

“Yes on all counts,” Vince said, “but it would’ve cost him a couple of thousand bucks, and their bank account would have shown that kind of hit.”

“It didn’t?”

Vince shook his head. “There were no significant withdrawals prior to the fella’s disappearance. All the same, that’s what he must have done. I checked with a number of different charter companies, and they all told me that on a good day—one when the jet stream was flowing strong and a little Lear like a 35 or a 55 got up in the middle of it—that trip would take just three hours, maybe a little more.”

“Denver to Bangor,” she said.

“Denver to Bangor, ayuh—there’s noplace closer to our part of the coast where one of those little burners can land. Not enough runway, don’tcha see.”

She did. “So did you check with the charter companies in Denver?”

“I tried. Not much joy there, either, though. Of the five companies that flew jets of one size n another, only two’d even talk to me. They didn’t have to, did they? I was just a smalltown newspaperman lookin into an accidental death, not a cop investigating a crime. Also, one of em pointed out to me that it wasn’t just a question of checking up on the FBOs that flew jets out of Stapleton—”

“What are FBOs?”

“Fixed Base Operators,” Vince said. “Chartering aircraft is only one of the things they do. They get clearances, maintain little terminals for passengers who are flyin private so they canstay that way, they sell, service, and repair aircraft. You can go through U.S. Customs at lots of FBOs, buy an altimeter if yours is busted, or catch eight hours in the pilots’ lounge if your current flyin time is maxed out. Some FBOs, like Signature Air, are big business—chain operations just like Holiday Inn or McDonald’s. Others are seatofthepants outfits with not much more than a coinop snack machine inside and a windsock by the runway.”

“You did some research,” Stephanie said, impressed.

“Ayuh, enough to know that it isn’t just Colorado pilots and Colorado planes that used Stapleton or any other Colorado airport, then or now. For instance, a plane from an FBO at LaGuardia in New York might fly into Denver with passengers who were going to spend a month in Colorado visiting relatives. The pilots would then ask around for passengers who wanted to go back to New York, just so they wouldn’t have to make the return empty.”

“Or these days they’d have their return passengers all set up ahead of time by computer,” Dave said. “Do you see, Steff?”

She did. She saw something else as well. “So the records on Mr. Cogan’s Wild Ride might be in the files of Air Eagle, out of New York.”

“Or Air Eagle out of Montpelier, Vermont—” Vince said.

“Or Just Ducky Jets out of Washington, D.C.,” Dave said.

“And if Cogan paid cash,” Vince added, “there are quite likely no records at all.”

“But surely there are all sorts of agencies—”

“Yes, ma’am,” Dave said. “More than you could shake a stick at, beginning with the FAA and ending with the IRS. Wouldn’t be surprised if the damn FFA wasn’t in there somewhere. But in cash deals, paperwork gets thin. Remember Helen Hafner?”

Of course she did. Their waitress at the Grey Gull. The one whose son had recently fallen out of his treehouse and broken his arm.She gets all of it, Vince had said of the money he meant to put in Helen Hafner’s pocket,and what Uncle Sam don’t know don’t bother him. To which Dave had added,It’s the way America does business.

Stephanie supposed it was, but it was an extremely troublesome way of doing business in a case like this one.

“So you don’t know,” she said. “You tried your best, but you just don’t know.”

Vince looked first surprised, then amused. “As to tryin my best, Stephanie, I don’t think a person ever knows that for sure; in fact, I think most of us are condemned—damned, even! — to thinking we could have done just a little smidge better, even when we win through to whatever it was we were tryin to get. But you’re wrong—Ido know. He chartered a jet out of Stapleton. That’s what happened.”

“But you said—”

He leaned even further forward over his clasped hands, his eyes fixed on hers. “Listen carefully and take instruction, dearheart. It’s long years since I read Sherlock Holmes, so I can’t say this exactly, but at one point the great detective tells Dr. Watson somethin like this: ‘When you eliminate the impossible, whatever is left—no matter how improbable — must be the answer.’ Now we know that the Colorado Kid was in his Denver office buildin until tenfifteen or tentwenty on that Wednesday morning. And we can be pretty sure he was in Jan’s Wharfside at fivethirty. Hold up your fingers like you did before, Stephanie.”

She did as he asked, left forefinger for the Kid in Colorado, right forefinger for James Cogan in Maine. Vince unlocked his hands and touched her right forefinger briefly with one of his own, age meeting youth in midair.

“But don’t call this finger fivethirty,” he said. “We needn’t trust the countergirl, who wasn’t run off her feet the way she would have been in July, but who was doubtless busy all the same, it bein the supperhour and all.”

Stephanie nodded. In this part of the world supper came early. Dinner—pronounceddinnah — was what you ate from your lunchpail at noon, often while out in your lobster boat.

“Let this finger be six o’clock,” he said. “The time of the last ferry.”

She nodded again. “He had to be on that one, didn’t he?”

“He did unless he swam the reach,” Dave said.

“Or chartered a boat,” she said.

“We asked,” Dave said. “More important, we asked Gard Edwick, who was the ferryman in the spring of ’80.”

Did Cogan bring him tea? she suddenly found herself wondering.Because if you want to ride the ferry, you’re supposed to bring tea for the tillerman. You said so yourself, Dave. Or are the ferryman andthe tillerman two different people?

“Steff?” Vince sounded concerned. “Are you all right, dear?”

“I’m fine, why?”

“You looked…I dunno, like you came over strange.”

“I sort of did. It’s a strange story, isn’t it?” And then she said, “Only it’s not a story at all, you were so right about that, and if I came over strange, I suppose that’s why. It’s like trying to ride a bike across a tightrope that isn’t there.”

Stephanie hesitated, then decided to go on and make a complete fool of herself.

“Did Mr. Edwick remember Cogan because Cogan brought him something? Because he brought tea for the tillerman?”

For a moment neither man said anything, just regarded her with their inscrutable eyes—so strangely young and sweetly ladlike in their old faces—and she thought she might laugh or cry or do something, break out somehow just to kill her anxiety and growing certainty that she had made a fool of herself.

Vince said, “It was a chilly crossing. Someone—a man—brought a paper cup of coffee to the pilot house and handed it in to Gard. They only passed a few words. This was April, remember, and by then it was already going dark. The man said, ‘Smooth crossing.’ And Gard said, ‘Ayuh.’ Then the man said ‘This has been a long time coming’ or maybe ‘I’ve been a long time coming.’ Gard said it might have even been ‘Lidle ’s been a long time coming.’ There is such a name; there’s none in the Tinnock phone book, but I’ve found it in quite a few others.”

“Was Cogan wearing the green coat or the topcoat?”

“Steff,” Vince said, “Gard not only didn’t remember whether or not the man was wearing a coat; he probably couldn’t have sworn in a court of law if the man was afoot or on hossback. It was gettin dark, for one thing; it was one little act of kindness and a few passed words recalled a year and a half downstream, for a second; for a third…well, old Gard, you know…” He made a bottletipping gesture.

“Speak no ill of the dead, but the man drank like a frickin fish,” Dave said. “He lost the ferryman job in ’85, and the Town put him on the plow, mostly so his family wouldn’t starve. He had five kids, you know, and a wife with MS. But finally he cracked up the plow, doin Main Street while blotto, and put out all the frickin power for a frickin week in February, pardon my frickinfranзais. Then he lost that job and he was on the town. So am I surprised he didn’t remember more? No, I am not. But I’m convinced from what hedid remember that, ayuh, the Colorado Kid came over from the mainland on the day’s last ferry, and, ayuh, he brought tea for the tillerman, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. Good on you to remember about that, Steff.” And he patted her hand. She smiled at him. It felt like a rather dazed smile.

“As you said,” Vince resumed, “there’s that twohour timedifference to factor in.” He moved her left finger closer to her right. “It’s quarter past twelve, east coast time, when Cogan leaves his office. He drops his easygoing, justanotherday act the minute the elevator doors open on the lobby of his building. The verysecond. He goes dashin outside, hellbent for election, where that fast car—and an equally fast driver—is waitin for him.

“Half an hour later, he’s at a Stapleton FBO, and five minutes after that, he’s mounting the steps of a private jet. He hasn’t left this arrangement to chance, either. Can’t have done. There are people who fly private on a fairly regular basis, then stay for a couple of weeks. The folks who take them oneway spend those two weeks attending to other charters. Our boy would have settled on one of those planes, and almost certainly would have made a cash arrangement to fly back out with them. Eastbound.”

Stephanie said, “What would he have done if the people using the plane he planned to take cancelled their flight at the last minute?”

Dave shrugged. “Same thing he would’ve done if there was bad weather, I guess,” he said. “Put it off to another day.”

Vince, meanwhile, had moved Stephanie’s left finger a little further to the right. “Now it’s getting close to one in the afternoon on the east coast,” he said, “but at least our friend Cogan doesn’t have to worry about a lot of security rigamarole, not back in 1980 and especially not flyin private. And we have to assume—again—that he doesn’t have to wait in line with a lot of other planes for an active runway, because it screws up the timetable if he does, and all the while on the other end—” He touched her right finger. “—that ferry’s waitin. Last one of the day.

“So, the flight lasts three hours. We’ll say that, anyway. My colleague here got on the Internet, he loves that sucker with a passion, and he says the weather was good for flying that day and the maps show that the jetstream was in approximately the right place—”

“But as to howstrong it was, that’s information I’ve never been able to pin down,” Dave said. He glanced at Vince. “Given the tenuousness of your case, partner, that’s probably not a real bad thing.”

“We’ll say three hours,” Vince repeated, and moved Stephanie’s left finger (the one she was coming to think of as her Colorado Kid finger) until it was less than two inches from her right one (which she now thought of as her James CoganAlmost Dead finger). “It can’t have been much longer than that.”

“Because the facts won’t let it,” she murmured, fascinated (and, in truth, a little frightened) by the idea. Once, while in high school, she had read a science fiction novel calledThe Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. She didn’t know about the moon, but she was coming to believe that was certainly true of time.

“No, ma’am, they won’t,” he agreed. “At four o’clock or maybe fourohfive—we’ll say fourohfive—Cogan lands and disembarks at Twin City Civil Air, that was the only FBO at Bangor International Airport back then—”

“Any records of his arrival?” she asked. “Did you check?” Knowing he had, of course he had, also knowing it hadn’t done any good, one way or another. It was that kind of story. The kind that’s like a sneeze which threatens but never quite arrives.

Vince smiled. “Sure did, but in the carefree days before Homeland Security, all Twin City kept any length of time were their account books. They had a good many cash payments that day, includin some pretty goodsized refueling tabs late in the afternoon, but even those might mean nothing. For all we know, whoever flew the Kid in might have spent the night in a Bangor hotel and flown out the next morning—”

“Or spent the weekend,” Dave said. “Then again, the pilot might have left right away, and without refueling at all.”

“How could he do that, after coming all the way from Denver?” Stephanie asked.

“Could have hopped down to Portland,” Dave said, “and filled his tank up there.”

“Why would he?”

Dave smiled. It gave him a surprisingly foxy look that was not much like his usual expression of earnest and slightly stupid honesty. It occurred to Stephanie now that the intellect behind that chubby, rather childish face was probably as lean and quick as Vince Teague’s.

“Cogan might’ve paid Mr. Denver Flyboy to do it that way because he was afraid of leaving a paper trail,” Dave said. “And Mr. Denver Flyboy would very likely have gone along with any reasonable request if he was being paid enough.”

“As for the Colorado Kid,” Vince resumed, “he’s still got almost two hours to get to Tinnock, get a fishandchips basket at Jan’s Wharfside, sit at a table eating it while he looks out at the water, and then catch the last ferry to MooseLookit Island.” As he spoke, he slowly brought Stephanie’s left and right forefingers together until they touched.

Stephanie watched, fascinated. “Could he do it?”

“Maybe, but it’d be awful goddamned tight,” Dave said with a sigh. “I’d have never believed it if he hadn’t actually turned up dead on Hammock Beach. Would you, Vince?”

“Nup,” Vince said, without even pausing to consider.

Dave said, “There’s four dirt airstrips within a dozen miles or so of Tinnock, all seasonal. They do most of their trade takin up tourists on sightseein rides in the summer, or to look at the fall foliage when the colors peak out, although that only lasts a couple of weeks. We checked em on the offchance that Cogan might have chartered him a second plane, this one a little propjob like a Piper Cub, and flown from Bangor to the coast.”

“No joy there, either, I take it.”

“You take it right,” Vince said, and his grin was gloomy rather than foxy. “Once those elevator doors slide closed on Cogan in that Denver office building, this whole business is nothing but shadows you can’t quite catch hold of…and one dead body.

“Three of those four airstrips were deserted in April, shut right down, so a planecould have flown in to any of em and no one the wiser. The fourth one—a woman named Maisie Harrington lived out there with her father and about sixty mutt dogs, and she claimed that no one flew into their strip from October of 1979 to May of 1980, but she smelled like a distillery, and I had my doubts if she could remember what went on aweek before I talked to her, let alone a year and a half before.”

“What about the woman’s father?” she asked.

“Stone blind and onelegged,” Dave said. “The diabetes.”

“Ouch,” she said.

“Ayuh.”

“Let Jack n Maisie Harrington go hang,” Vince said impatiently. “I never believed in the Second Airplane Theory when it comes to Cogan any more than I ever believed in the Second Gunman Theory when it came to Kennedy. If Cogan had a car waiting for him in Denver—and I can’t see any way around it—then he could have had one waiting for him at the General Aviation Terminal, as well. And I believe he did.”

“That is just so farfetched,” Dave said. He spoke not scoffingly but dolefully.

“P’raps,” Vince responded, unperturbed, “but when you get rid of the impossible, whatever’s left…there’s your pup, scratchin at the door t’be let in.”

“He could have driven himself,” Stephanie said thoughtfully.

“A rental car?” Dave shook his head. “Don’t think so, dear. Rental agencies take only credit cards, and credit cards leave paper trails.”

“Besides,” Vince said, “Cogan didn’t know his way around eastern and coastal Maine. So far as we can discover, he’d never been here in his life. You know the roads by now, Steffi: there’s only one main one that comes out this way from Bangor to Ellsworth, but once you get to Ellsworth, there’s three or four different choices, and a flatlander, even one with a map, is apt to get confused. No, I think Dave is right. If the Kid meant to go by car, and if he knew in advance how small his timewindow was going to be, he would have wanted to have a driver standin by and waitin. Somebody who’d take cash money, drive fast, and not get lost.”

Stephanie thought for a little while. The two old men let her.

“Three hired drivers in all,” she said at last. “The one in the middle at the controls of a private jet.”

“Maybe with a copilot,” Dave put in quietly. “Them are the rules, at least.”

“It’s very outlandish,” she said.

Vince nodded and sighed. “I don’t disagree.”

“You’ve never turned up even one of these drivers, have you?”

“No.”

She thought some more, this time with her head down and her normally smooth brow furrowed in a deep frown. Once more they did not interrupt her, and after perhaps two minutes, she looked up again. “Butwhy? What could be so important for Cogan to go to such lengths?”

Vince Teague and Dave Bowie looked at each other, then back at her. Vince said: “Ain’tthat a good question.”

Dave said: “Arig of a question.”

Vince said: “Themain question.”

“Accourse it is,” Dave said. “Always was.”

Vince, quite softly: “We don’t know, Stephanie. We never have.”

Dave, more softly still: “BostonGlobe wouldn’t like that. Nope, not at all.”