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 humbleWeekly Islander level—was less about solving than it was delineating whatneeded 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 nostory , 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 cream 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, shedid 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 itwas 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 therewas no jacket…although what he was doing outside on a raw seacoast night in April without one certainly beggarsmy 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, andlong 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 wheredid it come from?”
“That brings us back to Paul Devane,” Vince said, “and Ilike coming back to Paul Devane, because, as I said, there’s a story there, and stories are my business. They’re mybeat , 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 goesasphyxiation 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 knowswhy . 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
