The Colorado Kid (11 page)

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 jet-stream was in approximately the right place—”

“But as to how
strong
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 Cogan-Almost 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 called
The 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 four-oh-five—we’ll say four-oh-five—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 good-sized 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 fish-and-chips 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 Moose-Lookit 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 sight-seein 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 off-chance that Cogan might have chartered him a second plane, this one a little prop-job 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 plane
could
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 a
week
before I talked to her, let alone a year and a half before.”

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

“Stone blind and one-legged,” 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 time-window 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. “But
why
? 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’t
that
a good question.”

Dave said: “A
rig
of a question.”

Vince said: “The
main
question.”

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

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

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

“Accourse, we ain’t the Boston
Globe
,” Vince said. “We ain’t even the Bangor
Daily News
. But Stephanie, when a grown man or woman goes completely off the rails, every newspaper writer, big town or small one, looks for certain reasons. It don’t matter whether the result is most of the Methodist church picnic windin up poisoned or just the gentlemanly half of a marriage quietly disappearin one weekday morning, never to be seen alive again. Now—for the time bein never mindin where he wound up, or the improbability of how he managed to get there—tell me what some of those reasons for goin off the rails might be. Count them off for me until I see at least four of your fingers in the air.”

School is in session,
she thought, and then remembered something Vince had said to her a month before, almost in passing:
To be a success it the news business, it don’t hurt to have a dirty mind, dear.
At the time she’d thought the remark bizarre, perhaps even borderline senile. Now she thought she understood a little better.

“Sex,” she said, raising her left forefinger—her Colorado Kid finger. “I.e., another woman.” She popped another finger. “Money problems, I’m thinking either debt or theft.”

“Don’t forget the IRS,” Dave said. “People sometimes run when they realize they’re in hock to Uncle Sam.”

“She don’t know how boogery the IRS can be,” Vince said. “You can’t hold that against her. Anyway, according to his wife Cogan had no problems with Infernal Revenue. Go on, Steffi, you’re doin fine.”

She didn’t yet have enough fingers in the air to satisfy him, but could think of only one other thing. “The urge to start a brand-new life?” she asked doubtfully, seeming to speak more to herself than to them. “To just…I don’t know…cut all the ties and start over again as a different person in a different place?” And then something else
did
occur to her. “Madness?” She had four fingers up now—one for sex, one for money, one for change, one for madness. She looked doubtfully at the last two. “Maybe change and madness are the same?”

“Maybe they are,” Vince said. “And you could argue that madness covers all sorts of addictions that people try to run from. That sort of running’s sometimes known as the ‘geographic cure.’ I’m thinking specifically of drugs and alcohol. Gambling’s another addiction people try the geographic cure on, but I guess you could file that problem under money.”

“Did he have drug or alcohol problems?”

“Arla Cogan said not, and I believe she would have known. And after sixteen months to think it over, and with him dead at the end of it, I think she would have told me.”

“But, Steffi,” Dave said (and rather gently), “when you consider it, madness almost
has
to be in it somewhere, wouldn’t you say?”

She thought of James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, sitting dead on Hammock Beach with his back against a litter basket and a lump of meat lodged in his throat, his closed eyes turned in the direction of Tinnock and the reach beyond. She thought of how one hand had still been curled, as if holding the rest of his midnight snack, a piece of steak some hungry gull had no doubt stolen, leaving nothing but a sticky pattern of sand in the leftover grease on his palm. “Yes,” she said. “There’s madness in it somewhere. Did
she
know that? His wife?”

The two men looked at each other. Vince sighed and rubbed the side of his blade-thin nose. “She might have, but by then she had her own life to worry about, Steffi. Hers and her son’s. A man up and disappears like that, the woman left behind is apt to have a damn hard skate. She got her old job back, working in one of the Boulder banks, but there was no way she could keep the house in Nederland—”

“Hernando’s Hideaway,” Stephanie murmured, feeling a sympathetic pang.

“Ayuh, that. She kept on her feet without having to borrow too much from her folks, or anything at all from his, but she used up most of the money they’d put aside for little Mike’s college education in the process. When we saw her, I should judge she wanted two things, one practical and one what you’d call…spiritual?” He looked rather doubtfully at Dave, who shrugged and nodded as if to say that word would do.

Vince nodded himself and went on. “She wanted to be shed of the not-knowing. Was he alive or dead? Was she married or a widow? Could she lay hope to rest or did she have to carry it yet awhile longer? Maybe that last sounds a trifle hard-hearted, and maybe it is, but I should think that after sixteen months, hope must get damned heavy on your back—damned heavy to tote around.

“As for the practical, that was simple. She just wanted the insurance company to pay off what they owed. I know that Arla Cogan isn’t the only person in the history of the world to hate an insurance company, but I’d have to put her high on the list for sheer intensity. She’d been going along and going along, you see, her and Michael, living in a three- or four-room apartment in Boulder—quite a change after the nice house in Nederland—and her leaving him in daycare and with babysitters she wasn’t always sure she could trust, working a job she didn’t really want to do, going to bed alone after years of having someone to snuggle up to, worrying over the bills, always watching the needle on the gas-gauge because the price of gasoline was going up even then…and all the time she was sure in her heart that he was dead, but the insurance company wouldn’t pay off because of what her heart knew, not when there was no body, let alone a cause of death.

“She kept asking me if ‘the bastards’—that’s what she always called em—could ‘wiggle off’ somehow, if they could claim it was suicide. I told her I’d never heard of someone committing suicide by choking themselves on a piece of meat, and later, after she had made the formal identification of the death-photo in Cathcart’s presence, he told her the same thing. That seemed to ease her mind a little bit.

“Cathcart pitched right in, said he’d call the company agent in Brighton, Colorado, and explain about the fingerprints and her photo I.D. Nail everything down tight. She cried quite a little bit at that—some in relief, some in gratitude, some just from exhaustion, I guess.”

“Of course,” Stephanie murmured.

“I took her across to Moosie on the ferry and put her up at the Red Roof Motel,” Vince continued. “Same place you stayed when you first got here, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Stephanie said. She had been at a boarding house for the last month or so, but would look for something more permanent in October. If, that was, these two old birds would keep her on. She thought they would. She thought that was, in large part, what this was all about.

“The three of us had breakfast the next morning,” Dave said, “and like most people who haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t had much experience with newspapers, she had no shyness about talking to us. No sense that any of what she was sayin might later turn up on page one.” He paused. “And accourse very little of it ever did. It was never the kind of story that sees much in the way of print, once you get past the main fact of the matter: Man Found Dead On Hammock Beach, Coroner Says No Foul Play. And by then, that was cold news, indeed.”

“No through-line,” Stephanie said.

“No
nothing
!” Dave cried, and then laughed until he coughed. When that cleared, he wiped the corners of his eyes with a large paisley handkerchief he pulled from the back pocket of his pants.

“What did she tell you?” Stephanie asked.

“What
could
she tell us?” Vince responded. “Mostly what she did was ask questions. The only one I asked her was if the
chervonetz
was a lucky piece or a memento or something like that.” He snorted. “Some newspaperman I was that day.”

“The
chevron
—” She gave up on it, shaking her head.

“The Russian coin in his pocket, mixed in with the rest of his change,” Vince said. “It was a
chervonetz
. A ten-ruble piece. I asked her if he kept it as a lucky piece or something. She didn’t have a clue. Said the closest Jim had ever been to Russia was when they rented a James Bond movie called
From Russia With Love
at Blockbuster.”

“He might have picked it up on the beach,” she said thoughtfully. “People find all sorts of things on the beach.” She herself had found a woman’s high-heel shoe, worn exotically smooth from many a long tumble between the sea and the shore, while walking one day on Little Hay Beach, about two miles from Hammock.

“Might’ve, ayuh,” Vince agreed. He looked at her, his eyes twinkling in their deep sockets. “Want to know the two things I remember best about her the morning after her appointment with Cathcart over in Tinnock?”

“Sure.”

“How
rested
she looked. And how well she ate when we sat down to breakfast.”

“That’s a fact,” Dave agreed. “There’s that old sayin about how the condemned man ate a hearty meal, but I’ve got an idea that no one eats so hearty as the man—or the woman—who’s finally been up and pardoned. And in a way she had been. She might not have known why he came to our part of the world, or what befell him once he got here, and I think she realized she might not ever know—”

“She did,” Vince agreed. “She said so when I drove her back to the airport.”

“—but she knew the only important thing: he was dead. Her heart might have been telling her that all along, but her head needed proof to go along for the ride.”

“Not to mention in order to convince that pesky insurance company,” Dave said.

“Did she ever get the money?” Stephanie asked.

Dave smiled. “Yes, ma’am. They dragged their feet some—those boys have a tendency to go fast when they’re putting on the sell-job and then slow down when someone puts in a claim—but finally they paid. We got a letter to that effect, thanking us for all our hard work. She said that without us, she’d still be wondering and the insurance company would still be claiming that James Cogan could be alive in Brooklyn or Tangiers.”

“What kind of questions did she ask?”

“The ones you’d expect,” Vince said. “First thing she wanted to know was where he went when he got off the ferry. We couldn’t tell her. We asked questions—didn’t we, Dave?”

Dave Bowie nodded.

“But no one remembered seein him,” Vince continued. “Accourse it would have been almost full dark by then, so there’s no real reason why anyone should have. As for the few other passengers—and at that time of year there aren’t many, especially on the last ferry of the day—they would have gone right to their cars in the Bay Street parkin lot, heads down in their collars because of the wind off the reach.”

“And she asked about his wallet,” Dave said. “All we could tell her was that no one ever found it…at least no one who ever turned it in to the police. I suppose it’s possible someone could have picked it out of his pocket on the ferry, stripped the cash out of it, then dropped it overside.”

“It’s possible that heaven’s a rodeo, too, but not likely,” Vince said drily. “If he had cash in his wallet, why did he have more—seventeen dollars in paper money—in his pants pocket?”

“Just in case,” Stephanie said.

“Maybe,” Vince said, “but it doesn’t feel right to me. And frankly, I find the idea of a pickpocket workin the six o’clock ferry between Tinnock and Moosie a touch more unbelievable than a commercial artist from a Denver advertising agency charterin a jet to fly to New England.”

“In any case, we couldn’t tell her where his wallet went,” Dave said, “or where his topcoat and suit-jacket went, or why he was found sittin out there on a stretch of beach in nothin but his pants and shirt.”

“The cigarettes?” Stephanie asked. “I bet she was curious about those.”

Vince barked a laugh. “Curious isn’t the right word. That pack of smokes drove her almost crazy. She couldn’t understand why he’d have had cigarettes on him. And we didn’t need her to tell us he wasn’t the kind who’d stopped for awhile and then decided to take the habit up again. Cathcart took a good look at his lungs during the autopsy, for reasons I’m sure you’ll understand—”

“He wanted to make sure he hadn’t drowned after all?” Stephanie asked.

“That’s right,” Vince said. “If Dr. Cathcart had found water in the lungs beneath that chunk of meat, it would have suggested someone trying to cover up the way Mr. Cogan actually died. And while that wouldn’t have proved murder, it would’ve suggested it. Cathcart
didn’t
find water in Cogan’s lungs, and he didn’t find any evidence of smoking, either. Nice and pink down there, he said. Yet someplace between Cogan’s office building and Stapleton Airport, and in spite of the tearing hurry he had to’ve been in, he must’ve had his driver stop so he could pick up a pack. Either that or he had em put by already, which is what I tend to believe. Maybe with his Russian coin.”

“Did you tell her that?” Stephanie asked.

“No,” Vince said, and just then the telephone rang. “’Scuse me,” he said, and went to answer it.

He spoke briefly, said
Ayuh
a time or three, then returned, stretching his back some more as he did. “That was Ellen Dunwoodie,” he said. “She’s ready to talk about the great trauma she’s been through, snappin off that fire hydrant and ‘makin a spectacle of herself.’ That’s an exact quote, although I don’t think it will appear in my pulse-poundin account of the event. In any case, I think I’d better amble over there pretty soon; get the story while her recollection’s clear and before she decides to make supper. I’m lucky she n her sister eat late. Otherwise I’d be out of luck.”