The Colorado Kid

11

“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, justmaybe, 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 theyhad come from. He voiced his doubts about whether John Doe was a smoker at all, but said the taxstamp 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, Iwas 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 sixtyfive 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 anink stamp on the bottom, not a postagetype 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 theIslander 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 stickon 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 wedid 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 youthink 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 thumbsup. “Seventyeight, 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 outofpocket expense, even with the postage.”

“And of course we wrote it all off to the business,” said Dave, who doubled as theIslander ’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 DenverPost and the Rocky MountainNews! Becausethen there was only one peculiar thing about it and abeautiful throughline, 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 JimmyJesusknowswhere (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, theyall 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 theCamera 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.”