Dave nodded. “It would have been a Wednesday night she asked about, because it was a Thursday mornin Johnny and Nancy found him on. The 24th of April, 1980.”
“You justknow that,” Stephanie marveled.
Dave shrugged. “Stuff like that sticks in my head,” he told her, “and then I’ll forget the loaf of bread I meant to bring home and have to go out in the rain and get it.”
Stephanie turned back to Vince. “Surely hedidn’t register at a motel the night before he was found, or you guys wouldn’t have spent so long calling him John Doe. You might have known him by some other alias, but no one registers at a motel underthat name.”
He was nodding long before she finished. “Dave and I spent three or four weeks after the Colorado Kid was found—in our spare time, accourse—canvassin motels in what Mr. Yeats would have called ‘a widenin gyre’ with Moose-Lookit Island at the center. It would’ve been damn near impossible during the summer season, when there’s four hundred motels, inns, cabins, bed-and-breakfasts, and assorted rooms to rent all competing for trade within half a day’s drive of the Tinnock Ferry, but it wasn’t anything but a part-time job in April, because seventy percent of em are shut down from Thanksgiving to Memorial Day. We showed that picture everywhere, Steffi.”
“No joy?”
“Not a bit of it,” Dave confirmed.
She turned to Vince. “What did she say when you told her that?”
“Nothing. She was flummoxed.” He paused. “Cried a little.”
“Accourse she did, poor thing,” Dave said.
“And what did you do?” Stephanie asked, all of her attention still fixed on Vince.
“My job,” he said, with no hesitation.
“Because you’re the one who always has to know,” she said.
His bushy, tangled eyebrows went up. “Do you think so?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.” And she looked at Dave for confirmation.
“I think she nailed you there, pard,” Dave said.
“Question is, is ityour job, Steffi?” Vince asked with a crooked smile. “I think it is.”
“Sure,” she said, almost carelessly. She had known this for weeks now, although if anyone had asked her before coming to theIslander , she would have laughed at the idea of deciding for sure on a life’s work based on such an obscure posting. The Stephanie McCann who had almost decided on going to New Jersey instead of to Moose-Lookit off the coast of Maine now seemed like another person to her. A flatlander. “What did she tell you? What did she know?”
Vince said, “Just enough to make a strange story even stranger.”
“Tell me.”
“All right, but fair warning—this is where the through-line ends.”
Stephanie didn’t hesitate. “Tell me anyway.”
15
“Jim Cogan went to work at Mountain Outlook Advertising in Denver on Wednesday, April the 23rd, 1980, just like any other Wednesday,” Vince said. “That’s what she told me. He had a portfolio of drawings he’d been working on for Sunset Chevrolet, one of the big local car companies that did a ton of print advertising with Mountain Outlook—a very valuable client. Cogan had been one of four artists on the Sunset Chevrolet account for the last three years, she said, and she was positive the company was happy with Jim’s work, and the feeling was mutual— Jim liked working on the account. She said his specialty was what he called ‘holy-shit women.’ When I asked what that was, she smiled and said they were pretty ladies with wide eyes and open mouths, and usually with their hands clapped to their cheeks. The drawings were supposed to say, ‘Holy shit, what a buy I got at Sunset Chevrolet!’ ”
Stephanie laughed. She had seen such drawings, usually in free advertising circulars at the Shop ’N Save across the reach, in Tinnock.
Vince was nodding. “Arla was a fair shake of an artist herself, only with words. What she showed me was a very decent man who loved his wife, his baby, and his work.”
“Sometimes loving eyes don’t see what they don’t want to see,” Stephanie remarked.
“Young but cynical!” Dave cried, not without relish.
“Well, ayuh, but she’s got a point,” Vince said. “Only thing is, sixteen months is usually long enough to put aside the rose-colored glasses. If there’d been something going on—discontent with the job or maybe a little honey on the side would seem the most likely—I think she would have found sign of it, or at least caught a whiff of it, unless the man was almighty, almighty careful, because during that sixteen months she talked to everyone he knew, most of em twice, and they all told her the same thing: he liked his job, he loved his wife, and he absolutely idolized his baby son. She kept coming back to that. ‘He never would’ve left Michael,’ she said. ‘I know that, Mr. Teague. I know it in my soul.’ ” Vince shrugged, as if to saySo sue me . “I believed her.”
“And he wasn’t tired of his job?” Stephanie asked. “Had no desire to move on?”
“She said not. Said he loved their place up in the mountains, even had a sign over the front door that said hernando’s hideaway. And she talked to one of the artists he worked with on the Sunset Chevrolet account, a fellow Cogan had worked with for years, Dave, do you recall that name—?”
“George Rankin or George Franklin,” Dave said. “Cannot recall which, right off the top of my head.”
“Don’t let it get you down, old-timer,” Vince said. “Even Willie Mays dropped a pop-up from time to time, I guess, especially toward the end of his career.”
Dave stuck out his tongue.
Vince nodded as if such childishness was exactly what he’d come to expect of his managing editor, then took up the thread of his story once more. “George the Artist, be he Rankin or Franklin, told Arla that Jim had pretty much reached the top end of that which his talent was capable, and he was one of the fortunate people who not only knew his limitations but was content with them. He said Jim’s remaining ambition was to someday head Mountain Outlook’s art department. And, given that ambition, cutting and running for the New England coast on the spur of the moment is just about the last thing he would have done.”
“But she thought that’s what hedid do,” Stephanie said. “Isn’t it?”
Vince put his coffee cup down and ran his hands through his fluff of white hair, which was already fairly crazy. “Arla Cogan’s like all of us,” he said, “a prisoner of the evidence.
“James Cogan left his home at 6:45 AM on that Wednesday to make the drive to Denver by way of the Boulder Turnpike. The only luggage he had was that portfolio I mentioned. He was wearing a gray suit, a white shirt, a red tie, and a gray overcoat. Oh, and black loafers on his feet.”
“No green jacket?” Stephanie asked.
“No green jacket,” Dave agreed, “but the gray slacks, white shirt, and black loafers was almost certainly what he was wearing when Johnny and Nancy found him sittin dead on the beach with his back against that litter basket.”
“His suit-coat?”
“Never found,” Dave said. “The tie, neither—but accourse if a man takes off his tie, nine times out of ten he’ll stuff it into the pocket of his suit-coat, and I’d be willin to bet that if that gray suit-coat everdid turn up, the tie’d be in the pocket.”
“He was at his office drawing board by 8:45 AM,” Vince said, “working on a newspaper ad for King Sooper’s.”
“What—?”
“Supermarket chain, dear,” Dave said.
“Around ten-fifteen,” Vince went on, “George the Artist, be he Rankin or Franklin, saw our boy the Kid heading for the elevators. Cogan said he was goin around the corner to grab what he called ‘a real coffee’ at Starbucks and an egg salad sandwich for lunch, because he planned to eat at his desk. He asked George if George wanted anything.”
“This is all what Arla told you when you were driving her out to Tinnock?”
