The Colorado Kid

8

“So what do you think, Steffi?” Vince asked, taking a throatcooling swallow of his Coke. “Mystery solved? Case closed?”

“Not on your granny!” she cried, and barely registered their appreciative laughter. Her eyes were sparkling. “The causeofdeath part, maybe, but…whatwas it, by the way? In his throat? Or would that be getting ahead of the story?”

“Darlin, you can’t get ahead of a story that doesn’t exist,” Vince said, and his eyes were also sparkling. “Ask ahead, behind, or sideways. I’ll answer anything. Same with Dave, I imagine.”

As if to prove this was indeed so,The Weekly Islander ’s managing editor, said: “It was a piece of beef, probably steak, and very likely from one of your better cuts—your tenderloin, sirloin, or filet mignon. It was cooked mediumrare, andasphyxiation due to choking was what went on the death certificate, although the man we have always called the Colorado Kid also had suffered a massive cerebral embolism—your stroke, in other words. Cathcart decided the choking led to the stroking, but who knows, it might have been viceyversa. So you see, even the cause of death gets slippery when you look at it right up close.”

“There’s at least one story in here—a little one—and I’m going to tell it to you now,” Vince said. “It’s about a fella who was in some ways like you, Stephanie, although I like to think you fell into better hands when it came to putting the final polish on your education; more compassionate ones, too. This fella was young—twentythree, I think—and like you he was from away (the south in his case rather than the Midwest), and he was also doing graduate work, in the field of forensic science.”

“So he was working with this Dr. Cathcart, and he figured something out.”

Vince grinned. “Logical enough guess, dear, but you’re wrong about who he was workin with. His name…whatwas his name, Dave?”

Dave Bowie, whose memory for names was as deadly as Annie Oakley’s aim with her rifle, didn’t hesitate. “Devane. Paul Devane.”

“That’s right, I recall it now you say it. This young man, Devane, was assigned to three months of postgraduate field work with a couple of State Police detectives out of the Attorney General’s office. Only in his case,sentenced might be the better word. They treated him very badly.” Vince’s eyes darkened. “Older people who use young people badly when all the young people want is to learn—I think folks like that should be put out of their jobs. All too often, though, they get promotions instead of pinkslips. It has never surprised me that God gave the world a little tilt at the same time He set it spinning; so much that goes on here mimics that tilt.

“This young man, this Devane, spent four years at some place like Georgetown University, wanting to learn the sort of science that catches crooks, and right around the time he was coming to bud the luck of the draw sent him to work with a couple of doughnuteating detectives who turned him into little more than a gofer, running files between Augusta and Waterville and shooing lookieloos away from carcrash scenes. Oh, maybe once in awhile he got to measure a footprint or take flash photos of a tireprint as a reward. But rarely, I sh’d say. Rarely.

“In any case, Steffi, these two fine specimens of detection—and I hope to God they’re long out to pasture—happened to be in Tinnock Village at the same time the body of the Colorado Kid turned up on Hammock Beach. They were investigating an apartmenthouse fire ‘of suspicious origin,’ as we say when reporting such things in the paper, and they had their pet boy, who was by then losing his idealism, with them.

“If he’d drawn a couple of thegood detectives working out of the A.G.’s office—and I’ve met my share in spite of the goddam bureaucracy that makes so many problems in this state’s law enforcement system—or if his Department of Forensic Studies had sent him to some other state that accepts students, he might have ended up one of the fellas you see on thatCSI show—”

“I like that show,” Dave said. “Much more realistic thanMurder, She Wrote. Who’s ready for a muffin? There’s some in the pantry.”

It turned out they all were, and storytime was suspended until Dave brought them back, along with a roll of paper towels. When each of them had a Labree’s squash muffin and a paper towel to catch the crumbs, Vince told Dave to take up the tale. “Because,” he said, “I’m getting preachy and apt to keep us here until dark.”

“I thought you was doin good,” Dave said.

Vince clapped a bony hand to his even bonier chest. “Call 911, Steffi, my heart just stopped.”

“That won’t be so funny when it really happens, oldtimer,” Dave said.

“Lookit him spray those crumbs,” Vince said. “You drool at one end of your life and dribble at t’other, my Ma used to say. Go on, Dave, tell on, but do us all a favor and swallow, first.”

Dave did, and followed the swallow with a big gulp of Coke to wash everything down. Stephanie hoped her own digestive system would be up to such challenges when she reached David Bowie’s age.

“Well,” he said, “George didn’t bother cordoning off the beach, because that just would have drawn folks like flies to a cowpie, don’tcha know, but that didn’t stop those two dummies from the Attorney General’s office from doin it. I asked one of em why they bothered, and he looked at me like I was a stark raving naturalborn fool. ‘Well, it’s a crime scene, ain’t it?’ he says.

“ ‘Maybe so and maybe no,’ I says, ‘but once the body’s gone, what evidence do you think you’re gonna have that the wind hasn’t blown away?’ Because by then that easterly had gotten up awful fresh. But they insisted, and I will admit it made a nice picture on the front page of the paper, didn’t it, Vince?”

“Ayuh, picture with tape reading crime scene in it always sells copies,” Vince agreed. Half of his muffin had already disappeared, and there were no crumbs Stephanie could see on his paper towel.

Dave said, “Devane was there while the Medical Examiner, Cathcart, got a look at the body: the hand with the sand on it, the hand with none, and then into the mouth, but right around the time the Tinnock Funeral Home hearse that had come over on the nine o’clock ferry pulled up, those two detectives realized he was still there and might be getting somethin perilously close to an education. They couldn’t have that, so they sent him to get coffee and doughnuts and danishes for them and Cathcart and Cathcart’s assistant and the two funeral home boys who’d just shown up.

“Devane didn’t have any idea of where to go, and by then I was on the wrong side of the tape they’d strung, so I took him down to Jenny’s Bakery myself. It took half an hour, maybe a little more, most of it spent ridin, and I got a pretty good idea of how the land lay with that young man, although I give him all points for discretion; he never told a single tale out of school, simply said he wasn’t learning as much as he’d hoped to, and seeing the kind of errand he’d been sent on while Cathcart was doing hisin situ examination, I could connect the dots.

“And when we got back the examination was over. The body had already been zipped away in a bodybag. That didn’t stop one of those detectives—a big, beefy guy named O’Shanny—from giving Devane the rough side of his tongue. ‘What took you so long, we’re freezin our butts off out here,’ on and on, yattayattayatta.

“Devane stood up to it well—never complain, never explain, someone surely raised him right, I have to say—so I stepped in and said we’d gone and come back as fast as anyone could. I said, ‘You wouldn’t have wanted us to break any speed laws, now would you, officers?’ Hoping to get a little laugh and kind of lighten the situation, you know. Didn’t work, though. The other detective—his name was Morrison—said, ‘Who asked you, Irving? Haven’t you got a yard sale to cover, or something?’ His partner got a laugh out of that one, at least, but the young man who was supposed to be learning forensic science and was instead learning that O’Shanny liked white coffee and Morrison took his black, blushed all the way down to his collar.

“Now, Steffi, a man doesn’t get to the age I was even then without getting his ass kicked a number of times by fools with a little authority, but I felt terrible for Devane, who was embarrassed not only on his own account but on mine, as well. I could see him looking for some way to apologize to me, but before he could find it (or before I could tell him it wasn’t necessary, since it wasn’t him that had done anything wrong), O’Shanny took the tray of coffees and handed it to Morrison, then the two sacks of pastries from me. After that he told Devane to duck under the tape and take the evidence bag with the dead man’s personal effects in it. ‘You sign the Possession Slip,’ he says to Devane, like he was talking to a fiveyearold, ‘and you make sure nobody else so much as touches it until I take it back from you. And keep your nose out of the stuff inside yourself. Have you got all that?’

“ ‘Yes, sir,’ Devane says, and he gives me a little smile. I watched him take the evidence bag, which actually looked like the sort of accordionfolder you see in some offices, from Dr. Cathcart’s assistant. I saw him slide the Possession Slip out of the seethrough envelope on the front, and…do you understand what that slip’s for, Steffi?”

“I think I do,” she said. “Isn’t it so that if there’s a criminal prosecution, and something found at the crime scene is used as evidence in that prosecution, the State can show an uncorrupted chain of possession from where that thing was found to where it finally ended up in some courtroom as Exhibit A?”

“Prettily put,” Vince said. “You should be a writer.”

“Very amusing,” Stephanie said.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s our Vincent, a regular Oscar Wilde,” Dave said. “At least when he’s not bein Oscar the Grouch. Anyway, I saw young Mr. Devane sign his name to the Possession Slip, and I saw him put it back into the sleeve on the front of the evidence bag. Then I saw him turn to watch those strongboys load the body into the funeral hack. Vince had already come back here to start writin his story, and that was when I left, too, telling the people who asked me questions—quite a few had gathered by then, drawn by that stupid yellow tape like ants to spilled sugar—that they could read all about it for just a quarter, which is what theIslander went for in those days.

“Anyway, that was the last time I actually saw Paul Devane, standing there and watchin those two widebodies load the dead man into the hearse. But I happen to know Devane disobeyed O’Shanny’s order not to look in the evidence bag, because he called me at theIslander about sixteen months later. By then he’d given up his forensic science dream and gone back to school to become a lawyer. Good or bad, that particular course correction’s down to A.G. Detectives O’Shanny and Morrison, but it was still Paul Devane who turned the Hammock Beach John Doe into the Colorado Kid, and eventually made it possible for the police to identify him.”

“And we got the scoop,” Vince said. “In large part because Dave Bowie here bought that young man a doughnut and gave him what moneycan’t buy: an understanding ear and a little sympathy.”

“Oh, that’s layin it on a little thick,” Dave said, shifting around in his seat. “I wa’nt with him more than thirty minutes. Maybe threequarters of an hour if you want to add in the time we stood in line at the bakery.”

“Sometimes maybe that’s enough,” Stephanie said.

Dave said, “Ayuh, sometimes maybe it is, and what’s so wrong about that? How long do you think it takes a man to choke to death on a piece of meat, and then be dead forever?”

None of them had an answer to that. On the reach, some rich summer man’s yacht tooted with hollow selfimportance as it approached the Tinnock town dock.