Colorado Kid Part 5

"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 disappeared 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 pa.s.sin 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 d.a.m.n good s.n.a.t.c.h 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 d.a.m.n 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 h.e.l.l (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-"

Stephanie jumped and thought, Maybe now the telepathy goes three ways.

"-but I knew who she was, right away. I waved and she came to me and said, 'Mr. Teague?' And when I said yes, that's who I was, she put down her bag and hugged me and said, 'Thank you for coming to meet me. Thank you for everything. I can't believe it's him, but when I look at the picture, I know it is.'

"It's a good long drive down here-no one knows that better than you, Steff-and we had lots of time to talk. The first thing she asked me was if I had any idea what Jim was doing on the coast of Maine. I told her I did not. Then she asked if he'd registered at a local motel on the Wednesday night-" He broke off and looked at Dave. "Am I right? Wednesday night?"

Dave nodded. "It would have been a Wednesday night she asked about, because it was a Thursday mornin Johnny and Nancy found him on. The 24th of April, 1980."

"You just know that," Stephanie marveled.

Dave shrugged. "Stuff like that sticks in my head," he told her, "and then I'll forget the loaf of bread I meant to bring home and have to go out in the rain and get it."

Stephanie turned back to Vince. "Surely he didn't register at a motel the night before he was found, or you guys wouldn't have spent so long calling him John Doe. You might have known him by some other alias, but no one registers at a motel under that name."

He was nodding long before she finished. "Dave and I spent three or four weeks after the Colorado Kid was found-in our spare time, accourse-canva.s.sin motels in what Mr. Yeats would have called 'a widenin gyre' with Moose-Lookit Island at the center. It would've been d.a.m.n near impossible during the summer season, when there's four hundred motels, inns, cabins, bed-and-breakfasts, and a.s.sorted rooms to rent all competing for trade within half a day's drive of the Tinnock Ferry, but it wasn't anything but a part-time job in April, because seventy percent of em are shut down from Thanksgiving to Memorial Day. We showed that picture everywhere, Steffi."

"No joy?"

"Not a bit of it," Dave confirmed.

She turned to Vince. "What did she say when you told her that?"

"Nothing. She was flummoxed." He paused. "Cried a little."

"Accourse she did, poor thing," Dave said.

"And what did you do?" Stephanie asked, all of her attention still fixed on Vince.

"My job," he said, with no hesitation.

"Because you're the one who always has to know," she said.

His bushy, tangled eyebrows went up. "Do you think so?"

"Yes," she said. "I do." And she looked at Dave for confirmation.

"I think she nailed you there, pard," Dave said.

"Question is, is it your job, Steffi?" Vince asked with a crooked smile. "I think it is."

"Sure," she said, almost carelessly. She had known this for weeks now, although if anyone had asked her before coming to the Islander, she would have laughed at the idea of deciding for sure on a life's work based on such an obscure posting. The Stephanie McCann who had almost decided on going to New Jersey instead of to Moose-Lookit off the coast of Maine now seemed like another person to her. A flatlander. "What did she tell you? What did she know?"

Vince said, "Just enough to make a strange story even stranger."

"Tell me."

"All right, but fair warning-this is where the through-line ends."

Stephanie didn't hesitate. "Tell me anyway."

15.

"Jim Cogan went to work at Mountain Outlook Advertising in Denver on Wednesday, April the 23rd, 1980, just like any other Wednesday," Vince said. "That's what she told me. He had a portfolio of drawings he'd been working on for Sunset Chevrolet, one of the big local car companies that did a ton of print advertising with Mountain Outlook-a very valuable client. Cogan had been one of four artists on the Sunset Chevrolet account for the last three years, she said, and she was positive the company was happy with Jim's work, and the feeling was mutual-Jim liked working on the account. She said his specialty was what he called 'holy-s.h.i.t women.' When I asked what that was, she smiled and said they were pretty ladies with wide eyes and open mouths, and usually with their hands clapped to their cheeks. The drawings were supposed to say, 'Holy s.h.i.t, what a buy I got at Sunset Chevrolet!' "

Stephanie laughed. She had seen such drawings, usually in free advertising circulars at the Shop 'N Save across the reach, in Tinnock.

Vince was nodding. "Arla was a fair shake of an artist herself, only with words. What she showed me was a very decent man who loved his wife, his baby, and his work."

"Sometimes loving eyes don't see what they don't want to see," Stephanie remarked.

"Young but cynical!" Dave cried, not without relish.

"Well, ayuh, but she's got a point," Vince said. "Only thing is, sixteen months is usually long enough to put aside the rose-colored gla.s.ses. If there'd been something going on-discontent with the job or maybe a little honey on the side would seem the most likely-I think she would have found sign of it, or at least caught a whiff of it, unless the man was almighty, almighty careful, because during that sixteen months she talked to everyone he knew, most of em twice, and they all told her the same thing: he liked his job, he loved his wife, and he absolutely idolized his baby son. She kept coming back to that. 'He never would've left Michael,' she said. 'I know that, Mr. Teague. I know it in my soul.' " Vince shrugged, as if to say So sue me. "I believed her."

"And he wasn't tired of his job?" Stephanie asked. "Had no desire to move on?"

"She said not. Said he loved their place up in the mountains, even had a sign over the front door that said hernando's hideaway. And she talked to one of the artists he worked with on the Sunset Chevrolet account, a fellow Cogan had worked with for years, Dave, do you recall that name-?"

"George Rankin or George Franklin," Dave said. "Cannot recall which, right off the top of my head."

"Don't let it get you down, old-timer," Vince said. "Even Willie Mays dropped a pop-up from time to time, I guess, especially toward the end of his career."

Dave stuck out his tongue.