The Colorado Kid

7

“We were in on it almost from the beginning—and bywe I mean Dave and me,The Weekly Islander — although I didn’t print what I was asked by George Wournos not to print. I had no problem with that, because there was nothing in that business that seemed to affect the island’s welfare in any way. That’s the sort of judgment call newspaper folk make all the time, Steffi—you’ll make it yourself—and in time you get used to it. You just want to make sure you never get comfortable with it.

“The kids went back and guarded the body, not that there was a lot of guardin to be done; before George and Doc Robinson pulled up, they didn’t see but four cars, all headed for town, and none of em slowed down when they saw a couple of teenagers joggin in place or doin stretchin exercises there by the little Hammock Beach parkin lot.

“When George and the Doc got there, they sent Johnny and Nancy on their way, and that’s where they leave the story. Still curious, the way people are, but on the whole glad to go, I have no doubt. George parked his Ford in the lot, Doc grabbed his bag, and they walked out to where the man was sitting against that litter barrel. He had slumped a little to one side again, and the first thing the Doc did was to haul him up nice and straight.

“ ‘Is he dead, Doc?’ George said.

“ ‘Oh gorry, he’s been dead at least four hours and probably six or more,’ Doc says. (It was right about then that I came pulling in and parked my Chevy beside George’s Ford.) ‘He’s as stiff as a board.Rigor mortis. ’

“ ‘So you think he’s been here since…what? Midnight?’ George asks.

“ ‘He coulda been here since last Labor Day, for all I know,’ Doc says, ‘but the only thing I’m absolutelysure of is that he’s been dead since two this morning. Because of therigor.Probably he’s been dead since midnight, but I’m no expert in stuff like that. If the wind was coming in stiff from offshore, that could have changed when therigor set in—’

“ ‘No wind at all last night,’ I says, joining them. ‘Calm as the inside of a churchbell.’

“ ‘Well lookit here, another damn country heard from,’ says Doc Robinson. ‘Maybe you’d like to pronounce the time of death yourself, Jimmy Olson.’

“ ‘No,’ I says, ‘I’ll leave that to you.’

“ ‘I think I’ll leave it to the County Medical Examiner,’ he says. ‘Cathcart, over in Tinnock. The state pays him an extra eleven grand a year for educated guttossin. Not enough, in my humble opinion, but each to his own. I’m just a GP. But…ayuh, this fella was dead by two, I’ll say that much. Dead by the time the moon went down.’

“Then for maybe a minute the three of us just stood there, looking down on him like mourners. A minute can be an awful short space of time under some circumstances, but it can be an awful long one at a time like that. I remember the sound of the wind—still light, but starting to build in a little from the east. When it comes that way and you’re on the mainland side of the island, it makes such a lonely sound—”

“I know,” Stephanie said quietly. “It kind of hoots.”

They nodded. That in the winter it was sometimes a terrible sound, almost the cry of a bereft woman, was a thing she did not know, and there was no reason to tell her.

“At last—I think it was just for something to say—George asked Doc to take a guess as to how old the fella might be.

“ ‘I’d put him right around forty, give or take five years,’ he says. ‘Do you think so, Vincent?’ And I nodded. Forty seemed about right, and it occurred to me that it’s too bad for a fella to die at forty, a real shame. It’s a man’s most anonymous age.

“Then the Doc seen something that interested him. He went down on one knee (which wasn’t easy for a man of his size, he had to’ve gone twoeighty and didn’t stand but fivefootten or so) and picked up the dead man’s right hand, the one that’d been lying on the beach. The fingers were curled a little, as if he’d died trying to make them into a tube he could look through. When Doc held the hand up, we could see some grit stuck to the insides of the fingers and a little more dusted on the palm.

“ ‘What do you see?’ George asks. ‘Doesn’t look like anything but beachsand to me.’

“ ‘That’s all it is, but why’s it sticking?’ Doc Robinson asks back. ‘This litter basket and all the others are planted well above the hightide line, as anyone with half a brain would know, and there was no rain last night. Sand’s dry as a bone. Also, look.’

“He picked up the dead man’s left hand. We all observed that he was wearing a wedding ring, and also that there was no sand on his fingers or palm. Doc put that hand back down and picked up the other one again. He tipped it a little so the light shone better on the inside. ‘There,’ he says. ‘Do you see?’

“ ‘What is that?’ I ask. ‘Grease? A little bit of grease?’

“He smiled and said, ‘I think you win the teddy bear, Vincent. And see how his hand is curled?’

“ ‘Yuh—like he was playin spyglass,’ George says. By then we was all three on our knees, as if that litter basket was an altar and we were tryin to pray the dead guy back to life.

“ ‘No, I don’t think he was playing spyglass,’ Doc says, and I realized somethin, Steffi—he was excited in the way people only are when they’ve figured something out they know the likes of them have nobusiness figuring out in the ordinary course of things. He looked into the dead man’s face (at least I thought it was his face Doc was lookin at, but it turned out to be a little lower than that), then back at the curled right hand. ‘I don’t think so at all,’ he says.

“ ‘Then what?’ George says. ‘I want to get this reported to the State Police and the Attorney General’s Office, Chris. What Idon’t want is to spend the mornin on my knees while you play Ellery Queen.’

“ ‘See the way his thumb is almost touching his first finger and middle finger?’ Doc asks us, and of course we did. ‘If this guy had died looking through his rolledup hand, his thumb would have beenover his fingers, touching his middle finger and his third finger. Try it yourself, if you don’t believe me.’

“I tried it, and I’ll be damned if he wasn’t right.

“ ‘This isn’t a tube,’ Doc says, once again touching the dead man’s stiff right hand with his own finger. ‘This is apincers. Combine that with the grease and those little bits of sand on the palm and the insides of the fingers, and what do you get?’

“I knew, but since George was the law, I let him say it. ‘If he was eatin somethin when he died,’ he says, ‘where the hell is it?’

“Doc pointed to the dead man’s neck—which even Nancy Arnault had noticed, and thought of as puffy—and he says, ‘I’ve got an idea that most of it’s still right in there where he choked on it. Hand me my bag, Vincent.’

“I handed it over. He tried rummaging through it and found he could only do it onehanded and still keep all that meat balanced on his knees: he was a big man, all right, and he needed to keep at least one hand on the ground to keep himself from tipping over. So he hands the bag over to me and says, ‘I’ve got two otoscopes in there, Vincent—which is to say my little examination lights. There’s my everyday and a spare that looks brandnew. We’re going to want both of them.’

“ ‘Now, now, I don’t know about this,’ George says. ‘I thought we were gonna leave all this for Cathcart, on the mainland. He’s the guy the state hired for work like this.’

“ ‘I’ll take the responsibility,’ Doc Robinson said. ‘Curiosity killed the cat, you know, but satisfaction brought him back snapass happy. You got me out here in the cold and damp without my morning tea or even a slice of toast, and I intend to have a little satisfaction if I can. Maybe I won’t be able to. But I have a feeling…Vincent, you take this one. George, you take the new one, and don’t drop it in the sand, please and thank you, that’s a two hundreddollar item. Now, I haven’t been down on all fours like a little kid playin horsie since I was I’m gonna say seven years old, and if I have to hold the position long I’m apt to fall on top of this fella, so you guys be quick and do just what I say. Have you ever seen how the folks in an art museum will train a couple of pinspots on a small painting to make it look all bright and pretty?’

“George hadn’t, so Doc Robinson explained. When he was done (and was sure George Wournos got it), the island’s newspaper editor knelt on one side of that sittinup corpse and the island’s constable knelt on the other, each of us with one of the Doc’s little barrellights in hand. Only instead of lighting up a work of art, we were going to light up the dead man’s throat so Doc could take a look.

“He got himself into position with a fair amount of gruntin and puffing—woulda been funny if the circumstances hadn’t been so strange, and if I hadn’t been sort of afraid the man was going to have a heartattack right there—and then he reached out one hand, slipped it into the guy’s mouth, and hooked down his jaw like it was a hinge. Which, accourse, when you think about it, is just what it is.

“ ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Get in close, boys. I don’t think he’s gonna bite, but if I’m wrong, I’ll be the one who pays for the mistake.’

“We got in close and shone the lights down the dead man’s gullet. It was just red and black in there, except for his tongue, which was pink. I could hear the Doc puffin and grunting and he says, not to us but to himself, ‘A little more,’ and he pulled down the lower jaw a little further. Then, to us, ‘Lift em up, shine em straight down his gullet,’ and we did the best we could. It changed the direction of the light just enough to take the pink off the dead man’s tongue and put it on that hanging thing at the back of his mouth, the whatdoyoucall it—”

“Uvula,” Stephanie and Dave said at the same time.

Vince nodded. “Ayuh, that. And just beyond it, I could see somethin, or the top of somethin, that was a dark gray. It was only for two or three seconds, but it was enough to satisfy Doc Robinson. He took his fingers out of the dead man’s mouth—the lower lip made a kind of plopping sound as it went back against the gum, but the jaw stayed down pretty much where it was—and then he sat back, puffing away six licks to the dozen.

“ ‘You boys are going to have to help me stand up,’ he says when he got enough wind so he could talk. ‘Both my legs are asleep from the knees on down. Damn, but I’m a fool to weigh this much.’

“ ‘I’ll help you up when you tell me,’ George says. ‘Did you see anything? Because I didn’t see anything. What about you, Vincent?’

“ ‘I thought I did,’ I says. The truth is I knew friggin well I did—pardon, Steff—but I didn’t want to show him up.

“ ‘Ayuh, it’s back there, all right,’ Doc says. He still sounded out of breath, but he sounded satisfied, too, like a man who’s scratched a troublesome itch. ‘Cathcart’ll get it out and then we’ll know if it’s a piece of steak or a piece of pork or a piece of something else, but I don’t see that it matters. We know what matters—he came out here with a piece of meat in his hand and sat down to eat it while he watched the moonlight on the reach. Propped his back up against this litter basket. And choked, just like the little Indian in the nursery rhyme. On the last bite of what he brought to snack on? Maybe, but not necessarily.’

“ ‘Once he was dead, a gull could have swooped in and taken what was left right out of his hand,’ George says. ‘Just left the grease.’

“ ‘Correct,’ Doc says. ‘Now are you two gonna help me up, or do I have to crawl back over to George’s car and pull myself up by the doorhandle?’ ”