The Colorado Kid

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 twentytwo, there were people Stephanie would have resented for calling her a girl. This ninetyyearold 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 midtwenties): “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 someoneknew 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 BostonGlobe, we would have broken any story we found on page one of theIslander. We may have beenlittle newspapermen back in ’81, and we may be littleold newspapermen now, but we ain’tdead 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 sixthirty. 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 sweepup 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 Ialso 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.

“Jeesus,” 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 BostonGlobe 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 bywho?”

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 suitcoat 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…whateverthis was. He’d’ve had em in his pants pocket, I think.”

“Then, later, on the beach…” She saw Cogan, her mind’seye 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 fishandchips 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 suitcoat, 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 MooseLookit 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 tenruble coin. Do you think that coin might have been…oh, I don’t know…some sort of identificationthingy, 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 aruble 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 tohim,” 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 seagrass 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—candywrappers 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 lobsterpick, after he was dead. And that’s crossedyour 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 pulpmass.’ 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.

“Healso said that meat chewed to a pulpmass 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 jawpoppin, 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 waswicked 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 bloodgas 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 wedo have the occasional dark thought. And the closest thing to poison on that chunk of chewedup 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.”

“Ayuh,” Dave said, and his tongue rounded the inside of one cheek. “Like the Coast Lights after an hour or two.”

“Or the rest of theLisa Cabot ’s crew,” Vince added.

“And once he got off the ferry, you don’t know where he went.”

“No, ma’am,” Vince said. “We’ve looked off n on for over twentyfive years and never found a soul who claims to have seen him before Johnny and Nancy did around quarter past six on the morning of April 24th. And for the record—not that anyone’s keepin one—I don’t believe that anyone took what remained of that steak from his hand after he choked on his last bite. I believe a seagull stole the last of it from his dead hand, just as we always surmised. And gorry, I reallydo have to get a move on.”

“And I have to get with those invoices,” Dave said. “But first, I think another little reststop might be in order.” That said, he lumbered toward the bathroom.

“I suppose I better get with this column,” Stephanie said. Then she burst out, halflaughing and halfserious: “But I almost wish you hadn’t told me, if you were going to leave me hanging! It’ll beweeks before I get this out of my mind!”

“It’s been twentyfive years, and it’s still not out of ours,” Vince said. “And at least you know why we didn’t tell that guy from theGlobe.”

“Yes. I do.”

He smiled and nodded. “You’ll do all right, Stephanie. You’ll do fine.” He gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze, then started for the door, grabbing his narrow reporter’s notebook from his littered desk on his way by and stuffing it into his back pocket. He was ninety but still walked easy, his back only slightly bent with age. He wore a gentleman’s white shirt, its back crisscrossed with a gentleman’s suspenders. Halfway across the room he stopped and turned to her again. A shaft of late sunlight caught his babyfine white hair and turned it into a halo.

“You’ve been a pleasure to have around,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“Thank you.” She hoped she didn’t sound as close to tears as she suddenly felt. “It’s been wonderful. I was a little dubious at first, but…but now I guess it goes right back at you. It’s a pleasure to be here.”

“Have you thought about staying? I think you have.”

“Yes. You bet I have.”

He nodded gravely. “Dave and I have spoken about that. It’d be good to have some new blood on the staff. Some young blood.”

“You guys’ll go on for years,” she said.

“Oh yes,” he said, offhandedly, as if that were a given, and when he died six months later, Stephanie would sit in a cold church, taking notes on the service in her own narrow reporter’s book, and think: He knew it was coming. “I’ll be around for years yet. Still, if you wanted to stay, we’d like to have you. You don’t have to answer one way or another now, but consider it an offer.”

“All right, I will. And I think we both know what the answer will be.”

“That’s fine, then.” He started to turn, then turned back one last time. “School’s almost out for the day, but I could tell you one more thing about our business. May I?”

“Of course.”

“There are thousands of papers andtens of thousands of people writing stories for em, but there are only two types of stories. There are news stories, which usually aren’t stories at all, but only accounts of unfolding events. Things like that don’thave to be stories. People pick up a newspaper to read about the blood and the tears the way they slow down to look at a wreck on the highway, and then they move on. But what do they find inside of their newspaper?”

“Feature stories,” Stephanie said, thinking of Hanratty and his unexplained mysteries.

“Ayuh. And thoseare stories. Every one of em has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That makes em happy news, Steffi, always happy news. Even if the story is about a church secretary who probably killed half the congregation at the church picnic because her lover jilted her, that is happy news, and why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You better,” Dave said, emerging from the bathroom and still wiping his hands on a paper towel. “You better know if you want to be in this business, and understand what it is you’re doin.” He cast the paper towel into his wastebasket on his way by.

She thought about it. “Feature stories are happy stories because they’re over.”

“That’s right!” Vince cried, beaming. He threw his hands in the air like a revival preacher. “They haveresolution! They haveclosure! But do things have a beginning, a middle, and an end in real life, Stephanie? What does your experience tell you?”

“When it comes to newspaper work, I don’t have much,” she said. “Just the campus paper and, you know, Arts ’N Things here.”

Vince waved this away. “Your heart n mind, what do they tell you?”

“That life usually doesn’t work that way.” She was thinking of a certain young man who would have to be dealt with if she decided to stay here beyond her four months…and that dealing might be messy. Probablywould be messy. Rick would not take the news well, because in Rick’s mind, that wasn’t how the story was supposed to go.

“I never read a feature story that wasn’t a lie,” Vince said mildly, “but usually you can make a lie fit on the page. This one would never fit. Unless…” He gave a little shrug.

For a moment she didn’t know what that shrug meant. Then she remembered something Dave had said not long after they’d gone out to sit on the deck to sit in the late August sunshine.It’s ours, he’d said, sounding almost angry.A guy from the Globe, a guy from away—he’d only muck it up.

“If you’d given this to Hanratty, hewould’ve used it, wouldn’t he?” she asked them.

“Wasn’t ours to give, because we don’t own it,” Vince said. “It belongs to whoever tracks it down.”

Smiling a little, Stephanie shook her head. “I think that’s disingenuous. I think you and Dave are the last two people alive who know the whole thing.”

“We were,” Dave said. “Now there’s you, Steffi.”

She nodded to him, acknowledging the implicit compliment, then turned her attention back to Vince Teague, eyebrows raised. After a second or two, he chuckled.

“We didn’t tell him about the Colorado Kid because he would have taken a true unexplained mystery and made it into just another feature story,” Vince said. “Not by changin any of the facts, but by emphasizing one thing—the concept of musclerelaxants making it hard or impossible to swallow, let’s say—and leavin something else out.”

“That there was absolutely no sign of anything like that in this case, for instance,” Stephanie said.

“Ayuh, maybe that, maybe something else. And maybe he would have written it that way on his own, simply because making a story out of things that ain’t quite a story on their own gets to be a habit after a certain number of years in this business, or maybe his editor would have sent it back to him to do on a rewrite.”

“Or the editor might’ve done it himself, if time was tight,” Dave put in.

“Yep, editors have been known to do that, as well,” Vince agreed. “In any case, the Colorado Kid would most likely have ended up bein installment number seven or eight in Hanratty’s Unexplained Mysteries of New England series, something for people to marvel over for fifteen minutes or so on Sunday and line their kittylitter boxes with on Monday.”

“And it wouldn’t be yours anymore,” Stephanie said.

Dave nodded, but Vince waved his hand as if to sayOh, pishtush. “That I could put up with, but it would’ve hung a lie around the neck of a man who ain’t alive to refute it, and that Iwon’t put up with. Because I don’t have to.” He glanced at his watch. “In any case, I’m on my horse. Whichever one of you’s last out the door, be sure to lock it behind you, all right?”

Vince left. They watched him go, then Dave turned back to her. “Any more questions?”

She laughed. “A hundred, but none you or Vince could answer, I guess.”

“Just as long as you don’t get tired of askin em, that’s fine.” He wandered off to his desk, sat down, and pulled a stack of papers toward him with a sigh. Stephanie started back toward her own desk, then something caught her eye on the walllength bulletin board at the far end of the room, opposite Vince’s cluttered desk. She walked over for a closer look.

The left half of the bulletin board was layered with old front pages of theIslander, most yellowed and curling. High in the corner, all by itself, was the front page from the week of July 9th, 1952. The headline readMYSTERY LIGHTS OVER HANCOCK FASCINATE THOUSANDS. below was a photograph credited to one Vincent Teague—who would have been just thirtyseven back then, if she had her math right. The crisp blackandwhite showed a Little League field with a billboard in deep center readingHANCOCK LUMBERALWAYS KNOWS THE SCORE! to stephanie the photo looked as if it had been snapped at twilight. The few adults in the single set of sagging bleachers were standing and looking up into the sky. So was the ump, who stood straddling home plate with his mask in his right hand. One set of players—the visiting team, she assumed—was bunched tightly together around third base, as if for comfort. The other kids, wearing jeans and jerseys with the wordsHANCOCK LUMBER printed on the back, stood in a rough line across the infield, all staring upward. And on the mound the little boy who had been pitching held his glove up to one of the bright circles which hung in the sky just below the clouds, as if to touch that mystery, and bring it close, and open its heart, and know its story.