The Colorado Kid (9 page)

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.”

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 damn good snatch 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 damn 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 hell (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.

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—canvassin motels in what Mr. Yeats would have called ‘a widenin gyre’ with Moose-Lookit Island at the center. It would’ve been damn near impossible during the summer season, when there’s four hundred motels, inns, cabins, bed-and-breakfasts, and assorted 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.”

“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-shit 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 shit, 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 glasses. 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.

Vince nodded as if such childishness was exactly what he’d come to expect of his managing editor, then took up the thread of his story once more. “George the Artist, be he Rankin or Franklin, told Arla that Jim had pretty much reached the top end of that which his talent was capable, and he was one of the fortunate people who not only knew his limitations but was content with them. He said Jim’s remaining ambition was to someday head Mountain Outlook’s art department. And, given that ambition, cutting and running for the New England coast on the spur of the moment is just about the last thing he would have done.”

“But she thought that’s what he
did
do,” Stephanie said. “Isn’t it?”

Vince put his coffee cup down and ran his hands through his fluff of white hair, which was already fairly crazy. “Arla Cogan’s like all of us,” he said, “a prisoner of the evidence.

“James Cogan left his home at 6:45 AM on that Wednesday to make the drive to Denver by way of the Boulder Turnpike. The only luggage he had was that portfolio I mentioned. He was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, a red tie, and a gray overcoat. Oh, and black loafers on his feet.”

“No green jacket?” Stephanie asked.

“No green jacket,” Dave agreed, “but the gray slacks, white shirt, and black loafers was almost certainly what he was wearing when Johnny and Nancy found him sittin dead on the beach with his back against that litter basket.”

“His suit-coat?”

“Never found,” Dave said. “The tie, neither—but accourse if a man takes off his tie, nine times out of ten he’ll stuff it into the pocket of his suit-coat, and I’d be willin to bet that if that gray suit-coat ever
did
turn up, the tie’d be in the pocket.”

“He was at his office drawing board by 8:45 AM,” Vince said, “working on a newspaper ad for King Sooper’s.”

“What—?”

“Supermarket chain, dear,” Dave said.

“Around ten-fifteen,” Vince went on, “George the Artist, be he Rankin or Franklin, saw our boy the Kid heading for the elevators. Cogan said he was goin around the corner to grab what he called ‘a real coffee’ at Starbucks and an egg salad sandwich for lunch, because he planned to eat at his desk. He asked George if George wanted anything.”

“This is all what Arla told you when you were driving her out to Tinnock?”

“Yes, ma’am. Taking her to speak with Cathcart, make a formal identification of the photo—‘This is my husband, this is James Cogan’—and then sign an exhumation order. He was waiting for us.”

“All right. Sorry to interrupt. Go on.”

“Don’t be sorry for asking questions, Stephanie, asking questions is what reporters
do
. In any case, George the Artist—”

“Be he Rankin or Franklin,” Dave put in helpfully.

“Ayuh, him—he told Cogan that he’d pass on the coffee, but he walked out to the elevator lobby with Cogan so they could talk a little bit about an upcoming retirement party for a fellow named Haverty, one of the agency’s founders. The party was scheduled for mid-May, and George the Artist told Arla that her mister seemed excited and looking forward to it. They batted around ideas for a retirement gift until the elevator came, and then Cogan got on and told George the Artist they ought to talk about it some more at lunch and ask someone else—some woman they worked with—what
she
thought. George the Artist agreed that was a pretty good idea, Cogan gave him a little wave, the elevator doors slid closed, and that’s the last person who can remember seeing the Colorado Kid when he was still in Colorado.”

“George the Artist,” she almost marveled. “Do you suppose any of this would have happened if George had said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’ll just pull on my coat and go around the corner with you?’ ”

“No way of telling,” Vince said.

“Was
he
wearing his coat?” she asked. “Cogan? Was he wearing his gray overcoat when he went out?”

“Arla asked, but George the Artist didn’t remember,” Vince said. “The best he could do was say he didn’t
think
so. And that’s probably right. The Starbucks and the sandwich shop were side by side, and they really
were
right around the corner.”

“She also said there was a receptionist,” Dave put in, “but the receptionist didn’t see the men go out to the elevators. Said she ‘must have been away from her desk for a minute.’” He shook his head disapprovingly. “It’s
never
that way in the mystery novels.”

But Stephanie’s mind had seized on something else, and it occurred to her that she had been picking at crumbs while there was a roast sitting on the table. She held up the forefinger of her left hand beside her left cheek. “George the Artist waves goodbye to Cogan—to the Colorado Kid—around ten-fifteen in the morning. Or maybe it’s more like ten-twenty by the time the elevator actually comes and he gets on.”

“Ayuh,” Vince said. He was looking at her, bright-eyed. They both were.

Now Stephanie held up the forefinger of her right hand beside her right cheek. “And the counter-girl at Jan’s Wharfside across the reach in Tinnock said he ate his fish-and-chips basket at a table looking out over the water at around five-thirty in the afternoon.”

“Ayuh,” Vince said again.

“What’s the time difference between Maine and Colorado? An hour?”

“Two,” Dave said.

“Two,” she said, and paused, and said it again. “
Two.
So when George the Artist saw him for the last time, when those elevator doors slid shut, it was already past noon in Maine.”

“Assuming the times are right,” Dave agreed, “and assume’s all we can do, isn’t it?”

“Would it work?” she asked them. “Could he possibly have gotten here in that length of time?”

“Yes,” Vince said.

“No,” Dave said.

“Maybe,” they said together, and Stephanie sat looking from one to the other, bewildered, her coffee cup forgotten in her hand.