The Colorado Kid (8 page)

Stephanie’s mind, which was a good one (both of the men knew this), at once flashed upon the pack of cigarettes that had fallen onto the sand of Hammock Beach when the dead man fell over. Johnny Gravlin (now Moose-Look’s mayor) had picked it up and put it back into the dead man’s pocket. And then something else came to her, not in a flash but in a blinding glare. She jerked as if stung. One of her feet struck the side of her glass and knocked it over. Coke fizzed across the weathered boards of the porch and dripped between them to the rocks and weeds far below. The old men didn’t notice. They knew a state of grace perfectly well when they saw one, and were watching their intern with interest and delight.

“The tax-stamp!”
she nearly shrieked.
“There’s a state tax-stamp on the bottom of every pack!”

They both applauded her, gently but sincerely.

Dave said, “Let me tell you what young Mr. Devane saw when he took his forbidden peek into the evidence bag, Steffi���and I have no doubt he took that look more to spite those two than because he actually believed he’d see anything of value in such a scanty collection of stuff. To start with, there was John Doe’s wedding ring; a plain gold band, no engraving, not even a date.”

“They didn’t leave it on his…” She saw the way the two men were looking at her, and it made her realize that what she was suggesting was foolish. If the man was identified, the ring would be returned. He might then be committed to the ground with it on his finger, if that was what his surviving family wanted. But until then it was evidence, and had to be treated as such.

“No,” she said. “Of course not. Silly me. One thing, though—there must have been a Mrs. Doe somewhere. Or a Mrs. Kid. Yes?”

“Yes,” Vince Teague said, rather heavily. “And we found her. Eventually.”

“And were there little Does?” Stephanie asked, thinking that the man had been the right age for a whole gaggle of them.

“Let’s not get stuck on that part of it just now, if you please,” Dave said.

“Oh,” Stephanie said. “Sorry.”

“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said, smiling a little. “Just don’t want to lose m’place. It’s easier to do when there’s no…what would you call it, Vincent?”

“No through-line,” Vince said. He was smiling, too, but his eyes were a little distant. Stephanie wondered if it was the thought of the little Does that had put that distance there.

“Nope, no through-line t’all,” Dave said. He thought, then proved how little he’d lost his place by ticking items rapidly off on his fingers. “Contents of the bag was the deceased’s weddin-ring, seventeen dollars in paper money—a ten, a five, and two ones—plus some assorted change that might have added up to a buck. Also, Devane said, one coin that wasn’t American. He said he thought the writing on it was Russian.”

“Russian,” she marveled.

“What’s called Cyrillic,” Vince murmured.

Dave pressed ahead. “There was a roll of Certs and a pack of Big Red chewin gum with all but one stick gone. There was a book of matches with an ad for stamp-collectin on the front—I’m sure you’ve seen that kind, they hand em out at every convenience store—and Devane said he could see a strike-mark on the strip across the bottom for that purpose, pink and bright. And then there was that pack of cigarettes, open and with one or two cigarettes gone. Devane thought only one, and the single strike-mark on the matchbook seemed to bear that out, he said.”

“But no wallet,” Stephanie said.

“No, ma’am.”

“And absolutely no identification.”

“No.”

“Did anyone theorize that maybe someone came along and stole Mr. Doe’s last piece of steak
and
his wallet?” she asked, and a little giggle got out before she could put her hand over her mouth.

“Steffi, we tried that and everything else,” Vince said. “Including the idea that maybe he got dropped off on Hammock Beach by one of the Coast Lights.”

“Some sixteen months after Johnny Gravlin and Nancy Arnault found that fella,” Dave resumed, “Paul Devane was invited to spend a weekend at his lady-friend’s house in Pennsylvania. I have to think that Moose-Lookit Island, Hammock Beach, and John Doe were all about the last things on his mind just then. He said he and the girlfriend were going out for the evening, to a movie or somethin. Mother and Dad were in the kitchen, finishin the supper dishes—‘doin the ridding-up’ is what we say in these parts—and although Paul had offered to help, he’d been banished to the living room on the grounds of not knowin where anything went. So he was sittin there, watchin whatever was on the TV, and he happened to glance over at Poppa Bear’s easy-chair, and there on Poppa Bear’s little endtable, right next to Poppa Bear’s
TV Guide
and Poppa Bear’s ashtray, was Poppa Bear’s pack of smokes.”

He paused, giving her a smile and a shrug.

“It’s funny how things work, sometimes; it makes you wonder how often they
don’t
. If that pack had been turned a different way—so the top had been facing him instead of the bottom—John Doe might have gone on being John Doe instead of first the Colorado Kid and then Mr. James Cogan of Nederland, a town just west of Boulder. But the bottom of the pack
was
facing him, and he saw the stamp on it. It was a
stamp
, like a postage stamp, and that made him think of the pack of cigarettes in the evidence bag that day.

“You see, Steffi, one of Paul Devane’s minders—I disremember if it was O’Shanny or Morrison—had been a smoker, and among Paul’s other chores, he’d bought this fella a fair smack of Camel cigarettes, and while they also had a stamp on them, it seemed to him it wasn’t the same as the one on the pack in the evidence bag. It seemed to him that the stamp on the State of Maine cigarettes he bought for the detective was an
ink
stamp, like the kind you sometimes get on your hand when you go to a small-town dance, or…I dunno…”

“To the Gernerd Farms Hayride and Picnic?” she asked, smiling.

“You got it!” he said, pointing a plump finger at her like a gun. “Anyway, this wa’nt the kind of thing where you jump up yelling ‘Eureka! I have found it!’, but his mind kep’ returnin to it over and over again that weekend, because the memory of those cigarettes in the evidence bag bothered him. For one thing, it seemed to Paul Devane that John Doe’s cigarettes certainly
should
have had a Maine tax-stamp on them, no matter where he came from.”

“Why?”

“Because there was only one gone. What kind of cigarette smoker only smokes one in six hours?”

“A light one?”

“A man who has a full pack and don’t take but one cigarette out of it in six hours ain’t a light smoker, that’s a
non
-smoker,” Vince said mildly. “Also, Devane saw the man’s tongue. So did I—I was on my knees in front of him, shining Doc Robinson’s otoscope into his mouth. It was as pink as peppermint candy. Not a smoker’s tongue at all.”

“Oh, and the matchbook,” Stephanie said thoughtfully. “One strike?”

Vince Teague was smiling at her. Smiling and nodding. “One strike,” he said.

“No lighter?”

“No lighter.” Both men said it together, then laughed.

“Devane waited until Monday,” Dave said, “and when the business about the cigarettes still wouldn’t quit nagging him—wouldn’t quit even though he was almost a year and a half downriver from that part of his life—he called me on the telephone and explained to me that he had an idea that maybe, just
maybe
, the pack of cigarettes John Doe had been carrying around hadn’t come from the State of Maine. If not, the stamp on the bottom would show where they
had
come from. He voiced his doubts about whether John Doe was a smoker at all, but said the tax-stamp might be a clue even if he wasn’t. I agreed with him, but was curious as to why he’d called me. He said he couldn’t think of anyone else who still might be interested at that late date. He was right, I
was
still interested—Vince, too—and he turned out to be right about the stamp, as well.

“Now, I am not a smoker myself and never have been, which is probably one of the reasons I’ve attained the great age of sixty-five in such beautiful shape—”

Vince grunted and waved a hand at him. Dave continued, unperturbed.

“—so I made a little trip downstreet to Bayside News and asked if I could examine a package of cigarettes. My request was granted, and I observed that there was indeed an
ink
-stamp on the bottom, not a postage-type stamp. I then made a call to the Attorney General’s Office and spoke to a fellow name of Murray in a department called Evidence Storage and filing. I was as diplomatic as I could possibly be, Stephanie, because at that time those two dumbbell detectives would still have been on active duty—”

“And they’d overlooked a potentially valuable clue, hadn’t they?” Steff asked. “One that could have narrowed the search for John Doe down to one single state. And it was practically staring them in the face.”

“Yep,” Vince said, “and no way could they blame their intern, either, because they’d specifically told him to keep his nose out of the evidence bag. Plus, by the time it became clear that he’d disobeyed them—”

“—he was beyond their reach,” she finished.

“You said it,” Dave agreed. “But they wouldn’t have gotten much of a scolding in any case. Remember, they had an actual murder investigation going over in Tinnock—manslaughter, two folks burned to death—and John Doe was just a choking victim.”

“Still…” Stephanie looked doubtful.

“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 passin resemblance, because she got about that far and then began to cry.”