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 body-bag. 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, yatta-yatta-yatta.
“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 five-year-old, ‘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 accordion-folder you see in some offices, from Dr. Cathcart’s assistant. I saw him slide the Possession Slip out of the see-through 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 wide- bodies 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 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 Cathcartdid 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 itwas 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 BangorDaily 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
