The Colorado Kid

by by Stephen King

  “And we got the scoop,” Vince said. “In large part because Dave Bowie here bought that young man a doughnut and gave him what money can’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 three-quarters 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 self-importance as it approached the Tinnock town dock.

  9

  “Let Paul Devane alone awhile,” Vince said. “Dave can tell you the rest of that part in a few minutes. I think maybe I ought to tell you about the gut-tossing first.”

  “Ayuh,” Dave said. “It ain’t a story, Steff, but that part’d probably come next if it was.”

  Vince said, “Don’t get the idea that Cathcart did the autopsy right away, because he didn’t. There’d been two people killed in the apartment house fire that brought O’Shanny and Morrison to our neck of the woods to begin with, and they came first. Not just because they died first, but because they were murder victims and John Doe looked like being just an accident victim. By the time Cathcart did get to John Doe, the detectives were gone back to Augusta, and good riddance to them.

  “I was there for that autopsy when it finally happened, because I was the closest thing there was to a professional photographer in the area back in those days, and they wanted a ‘sleeping ID’ of the guy. That’s a European term, and all it means is a kind of portrait shot presentable enough to go into the newspapers. It’s supposed to make the corpse look like he’s actually snoozin.”

  Stephanie looked both interested and appalled. “Does it work?”

  “No,” Vince said. Then: “Well…p’raps to a kid. Or if you was to look at it quick, and with one eye winked shut. This one had to be done before the autopsy, because Cathcart thought maybe, with the throat blockage and all, he might have to stretch the lower jaw too far.”

  “And you didn’t think it would look quite so much like he was sleeping if he had a belt tied around his chin to keep his mouth shut?” Stephanie asked, smiling in spite of herself. It was awful that such a thing should be funny, but it was funny; some appalling creature in her mind insisted on popping up one sicko cartoon image after another.

  “Nope, probably not,” Vince agreed, and he was also smiling. Dave, too. So if she was sick, she wasn’t the only one. Thank God. “What such a thing’d look like, I think, would be a corpse with a toothache.”

  Then they were all laughing. Stephanie thought that she loved these two old buzzards, she really did.

  “Got to laugh at the Reaper,” Vince said, plucking his glass of Coke off the railing. He helped himself to a sip, then put it back. “Especially when you’re my age. I sense that bugger behind every door, and smell his breath on the pillow beside me where my wives used to lay their heads—God bless em both—when I put out my light.

  “Got to laugh at the Reaper.

  “Anyway, Steffi, I took my head-shots—my ‘sleeping IDs’—and they came out about as you’d expect. The best one made the fella look like he mighta been sleepin off a bad drunk or was maybe in a coma, and that was the one we ran a week later. They also ran it in the Bangor Daily News, plus the Ellsworth and Portland papers. Didn’t do any good, of course, not as far as scarin up people who knew him, at least, and we eventually found out there was a perfectly good reason for that.

  “In the meantime, though, Cathcart went on about his business, and with those two dumbbells from Augusta gone back to where they came from, he had no objections to me hangin around, as long as I didn’t put it in the paper that he’d let me. I said accourse I wouldn’t, and accourse I never did.

  “Working from the top down, there was first that plug of steak Doc Robinson had already seen in the guy’s throat. ‘That’s your cause of death right there, Vince,’ Cathcart said, and the cerebral embolism (which he discovered long after I’d left to catch the ferry back to Moosie) never changed his mind. He said that if the guy had had someone there to perform the Heimlich Maneuver—or if he’d performed it on himself—he might never have wound up on the steel table with the gutters running down the sides.

  “Next, Contents of the Stomach Number One, and by that I mean the stuff on top, the midnight snack that had barely had a chance to start digesting when our man died and everything shut down. Just steak. Maybe six or seven bites in all, well-chewed. Cathcart thought maybe as much as four ounces.

  “Finally, Contents of the Stomach Number Two, and here I’m talking about our man’s supper. This stuff was pretty much—well, I don’t want to go into details here; let’s just say that the digestive process had gone on long enough so that all Dr. Cathcart could tell for sure without extensive testing was that the guy had had some sort of fish dinner, probably with a salad and french fries, around six or seven hours before he died.

  “ ‘I’m no Sherlock Holmes, Doc,’ I says, ‘but I can go you one better than that.’

  “ ‘Really?’ he says, kinda skeptical.

  “ ‘Ayuh,’ I says. ‘I think he had his supper either at Curly’s or Jan’s Wharfside over here, or Yanko’s on Moose-Look.’

  “ ‘Why one of those, when there’s got to be fifty restaurants within a twenty-mile radius of where we’re standin that sell fish dinners, even in April?’ he asks. ‘Why not the Grey Gull, for that matter?’

  “ ‘Because the Grey Gull would not stoop to selling fish and chips,’ I says, ‘and that’s what this guy had.’

  “Now Steffi—I’d done okay through most of the autopsy, but right about then I started feeling decidedly chuck-upsy. ‘Those three places I mentioned sell fish and chips,’ I says, ‘and I could smell the vinegar as soon as you cut his stomach open.’ Then I had to rush into his little bathroom and throw up.

  “But I was right. I developed my ‘sleeping ID’ pictures that night and showed em around at the places that sold fish and chips the very next day. No one at Yanko’s recognized him, but the take-out girl at Jan’s Wharfside knew him right away. She said she served him a fish-and-chips basket, plus a Coke or a Diet Coke, she couldn’t remember which, late on the afternoon before he was found. He took it to one of the tables and sat eating and looking out at the water. I asked if he said anything, and she said not really, just please and thank you. I asked if she noticed where he went when he finished his meal—which he ate around five-thirty—and she said no.”

  He looked at Stephanie. “My guess is probably down to the town dock, to catch the six o’clock ferry to Moosie. The time would have been just about right.”

  “Ayuh, that’s what I’ve always figured,” Dave said.

  Stephanie sat up straight as something occurred to her. “It was April. The middle of April on the coast of Maine, but he had no coat on when he was found. Was he wearing a coat when he was served at Jan’s?”

  Both of the old men grinned at her as if she had just solved some complicated equation. Only, Stephanie knew, their business—even at the humble Weekly Islander level—was less about solving than it was delineating what needed to be solved.

  “That’s a good question,” Vince said.

  “Lovely question,” Dave agreed.

  “I was saving that part,” Vince said, “but since there’s no story, exactly, saving the good parts doesn’t matter…and if you want answers, dear heart, the store is closed. The take-out girl at Jan’s didn’t remember for sure, and no one else remembered him at all. I suppose we have to count ourselves lucky, in a way; had he bellied up to that counter in mid-July, when such places have a million people in em, all wanting fish-and-chips baskets, lobster rolls, and ice crea
m sundaes, she wouldn’t have remembered him at all unless he’d dropped his trousers and mooned her.”

  “Maybe not even then,” Stephanie said.

  “That’s true. As it was, she did remember him, but not if he was wearing a coat. I didn’t press her too hard on it, either, knowin that if I did she might remember somethin just to please me…or to get me out of her hair. She said ‘I seem to recall he was wearing a light green jacket, Mr. Teague, but that could be wrong.’ And maybe it was wrong, but do you know…I tend to think she was right. That he was wearing such a jacket.”

  “Then where was it?” Stephanie asked. “Did such a jacket ever turn up?”

  “No,” Dave said, “so maybe there was no jacket…although what he was doing outside on a raw seacoast night in April without one certainly beggars my imagination.”

  Stephanie turned back to Vince, suddenly with a thousand questions, all urgent, none fully articulated.

  “What are you smiling about, dear?” Vince asked.

  “I don’t know.” She paused. “Yes, I do. I have so goddamned many questions I don’t know which one to ask first.”

  Both of the old men whooped at that one. Dave actually fished a big handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his eyes with it. “Ain’t that a corker!” he exclaimed. “Yes, ma’am! I tell you what, Steff: why don’t you pretend you’re drawin for the Tupperware set at the Ladies Auxiliary Autumn Sale? Just close your eyes and pick one out of the goldfish bowl.”

  “All right,” she said, and although she didn’t quite do that, it was close. “What about the dead man’s fingerprints? And his dental records? I thought that when it came to identifying dead people, those things were pretty much infallible.”

  “Most people do and probably they are,” Vince said, “but you have to remember this was 1980, Steff.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were serious. “Before the computer revolution, and long before the Internet, that marvelous tool young folks such as yourself take for granted. In 1980, you could check the prints and dental records of what police departments call an unsub—an unknown subject—against those of a person you thought your unsub might be, but checkin em against the prints or dental records of all the wanted felons on file in all the police departments would have taken years, and against those of all the folks reported disappeared every year in the United States? Even if you narrowed the list down to just men in their thirties and forties? Not possible, dear.”

  “But I thought the armed forces kept computer records, even back then…”

  “I don’t think so,” Vince said. “And if they did, I don’t believe the Kid’s prints were ever sent to them.”

  “In any case, the initial ID didn’t come from the man’s fingerprints or dental work,” Dave said. He laced his fingers over his considerable chest and appeared almost to preen in the day’s late sunshine, now slanting but still warm. “I believe that’s known as cuttin to the chase.”

  “So where did it come from?”

  “That brings us back to Paul Devane,” Vince said, “and I like coming back to Paul Devane, because, as I said, there’s a story there, and stories are my business. They’re my beat, we would have said back in the old, old days. Devane’s a little sip of Horatio Alger, small but satisfying. Strive and Succeed. Work and Win.”

  “Piss and Vinegar,” Dave suggested.

  “If you like,” Vince said evenly. “Sure, ayuh, if you like. Devane goes off with those two stupid cops, O’Shanny and Morrison, as soon as Cathcart gives them the preliminary report on the burn victims from the apartment house fire, because they don’t give a heck about some accidental choking victim who died over on Moose-Lookit Island. Cathcart, meanwhile, does his gut-tossing on John Doe with yours truly in attendance. Onto the death certificate goes asphyxiation due to choking or the medical equivalent thereof. Into the newspapers goes my ‘sleeping ID’ photo, which our Victorian ancestors much more truthfully called a ‘death portrait.’ And no one calls the Attorney General’s Office or the State Police barracks in Augusta to say that’s their missing father or uncle or brother.

  “Tinnock Funeral Home keeps him in their cooler for six days—it’s not the law, but like s’many things in matters of this sort, Steffi, you discover it’s an accepted custom. Everybody in the death-business knows it, even if nobody knows why. At the end of that period, when he was still John Doe and still unclaimed, Abe Carvey went on ahead and embalmed him. He was put into the funeral home’s own crypt at Seaview Cemetery—”

  “This part’s rather creepy,” Stephanie said. She found she could see the man in there, for some reason not in a coffin (although he must surely have been provided with some sort of cheap box) but simply laid on a stone slab with a sheet over him. An unclaimed package in a post office of the dead.

  “Ayuh, ’tis, a bit,” Vince said levelly. “Do you want me to push on?”

  “If you stop now, I’ll kill you,” she said.

  He nodded, not smiling now but pleased with her just the same. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.

  “He boarded the summer and half the fall in there. Then, when November come around and the body was still unnamed and unclaimed, they decided they ought to bury him.” In Vince’s Yankee accent, bury rhymed with furry. “Before the ground stiffened up again and made digging particularly hard, don’t you see.”

  “I do,” Stephanie said quietly. And she did. This time she didn’t sense the telepathy between the two old men, but perhaps it was there, because Dave took up the tale (such tale as there was) with no prompting from the Islander’s senior editor.

  “Devane finished out his tour with O’Shanny and Morrison to the bitter end,” he said. “He probably even gave them each a tie or something at the end of his three months or his quarter or whatever it was; as I think I told you, Stephanie, there was no quit in that young fella. But as soon as he was finished, he put in his paperwork at whatever his college was—I think he told me Georgetown, but you mustn’t hold me to that—and started back up again, taking whatever courses he needed for law school. And except for two things, that might have been where Mr. Paul Devane leaves this story—which, as Vince says, isn’t a story at all, except maybe for this part. The first thing is that Devane peeked into the evidence bag at some point, and looked over John Doe’s personal effects. The second is that he got serious about a girl, and she took him home to meet her parents, as girls often do when things get serious, and this girl’s father had at least one bad habit that was more common then than it is now. He smoked cigarettes.”

  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.

  10

  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.