“Yes, ma’am. Taking her to speak with Cathcart, make a formal identification of the photo—‘This is my husband, this is James Cogan’—and then sign an exhumation order. He was waiting for us.”
“All right. Sorry to interrupt. Go on.”
“Don’t be sorry for asking questions, Stephanie, asking questions is what reportersdo . In any case, George the Artist—”
“Be he Rankin or Franklin,” Dave put in helpfully.
“Ayuh, him—he told Cogan that he’d pass on the coffee, but he walked out to the elevator lobby with Cogan so they could talk a little bit about an upcoming retirement party for a fellow named Haverty, one of the agency’s founders. The party was scheduled for mid-May, and George the Artist told Arla that her mister seemed excited and looking forward to it. They batted around ideas for a retirement gift until the elevator came, and then Cogan got on and told George the Artist they ought to talk about it some more at lunch and ask someone else—some woman they worked with—whatshe thought. George the Artist agreed that was a pretty good idea, Cogan gave him a little wave, the elevator doors slid closed, and that’s the last person who can remember seeing the Colorado Kid when he was still in Colorado.”
“George the Artist,” she almost marveled. “Do you suppose any of this would have happened if George had said, ‘Oh, wait a minute, I’ll just pull on my coat and go around the corner with you?’ ”
“No way of telling,” Vince said.
“Washe wearing his coat?” she asked. “Cogan? Was he wearing his gray overcoat when he went out?”
“Arla asked, but George the Artist didn’t remember,” Vince said. “The best he could do was say he didn’tthink so. And that’s probably right. The Starbucks and the sandwich shop were side by side, and they reallywere right around the corner.”
“She also said there was a receptionist,” Dave put in, “but the receptionist didn’t see the men go out to the elevators. Said she ‘must have been away from her desk for a minute.’” He shook his head disapprovingly. “It’snever that way in the mystery novels.”
But Stephanie’s mind had seized on something else, and it occurred to her that she had been picking at crumbs while there was a roast sitting on the table. She held up the forefinger of her left hand beside her left cheek. “George the Artist waves goodbye to Cogan—to the Colorado Kid—around ten-fifteen in the morning. Or maybe it’s more like ten-twenty by the time the elevator actually comes and he gets on.”
“Ayuh,” Vince said. He was looking at her, bright-eyed. They both were.
Now Stephanie held up the forefinger of her right hand beside her right cheek. “And the counter-girl at Jan’s Wharfside across the reach in Tinnock said he ate his fish-and-chips basket at a table looking out over the water at around five-thirty in the afternoon.”
“Ayuh,” Vince said again.
“What’s the time difference between Maine and Colorado? An hour?”
“Two,” Dave said.
“Two,” she said, and paused, and said it again. “Two. So when George the Artist saw him for the last time, when those elevator doors slid shut, it was already past noon in Maine.”
“Assuming the times are right,” Dave agreed, “and assume’s all we can do, isn’t it?”
“Would it work?” she asked them. “Could he possibly have gotten here in that length of time?”
“Yes,” Vince said.
“No,” Dave said.
“Maybe,” they said together, and Stephanie sat looking from one to the other, bewildered, her coffee cup forgotten in her hand.
16
“That’s what makes this wrong for a newspaper like theGlobe ,” Vince said, after a little pause to sip his milky coffee and collect his thoughts. “Even if we wanted to give it up.”
“Which we don’t,” Dave put in (and rather testily).
“Which we don’t,” Vince agreed. “But if we did…Steffi, when a big-city newspaper like theGlobe or theNew York Times does a feature story or a feature series, they want to be able to provideanswers , or at least suggest them, and do I have a problem with that? The hell I do! Pick up any big-city paper, and what do you find on the front page? Questions disguised as news stories. Where is Osama Bin Laden? We don’t know. What’s the President doing in the Middle East?We don’t know becausehe don’t. Is the economy going to get stronger or go in the tank? Experts differ. Are eggs good for you or bad for you? Depends on which study you read. You can’t even get the weather forecasters to tell you if a nor’easter is going to come in from the nor’east, because they got burned on the last one. So if they do a feature story on better housing for minorities, they want to be able to say if you do A, B, C, and D, things’ll be better by the year 2030.”
“And if they do a feature story on Unexplained Mysteries,” Dave said, “they want to be able to tell you the Coast Lights were reflections on the clouds, and the Church Picnic Poisonings were probably the work of a jilted Methodist secretary. But trying to deal with this business of the time…”
“Which you happen to have put your finger on,” Vince added with a smile.
“And of course it’s outrageous no matterhow you think of it,” Dave said.
“But I’m willing to be outrageous,” Vince said. “Hell, I looked into the matter, just about dialed the phone off the damn wall, and I guess I have a right to be outrageous.”
“My father used to say you can cut chalk all day, yet it won’t never be cheese,” Dave said, but he was also smiling a little.
“That’s true, but let me whittle a little bit just the same,” Vince said. “Let’s say the elevator doors close at ten-twenty, Mountain Time, okay? Let’s also say, just for the sake of argument, that this was all planned out in advance and he had a car standin by with the motor running.”
“All right,” Stephanie said, watching him closely.
“Pure fantasy,” Dave snorted, but he also looked interested.
“It’s farfetched, anyway,” Vince agreed, “but he wasthere at quarter past ten and at Jan’s Wharfside a little more than five hours later. That’s also farfetched, but we know it’s a fact. Now may I continue?”
“Have on, McDuff,” Dave said.
“If he’s got a car all warmed up and waiting for him, maybe he can make it to Stapleton in half an hour. Now he surely didn’t take a commercial flight. He could have paid cash for his ticket and used an alias—that was possible back then—but there were no direct flights from Denver to Bangor. From Denver to anyplace in Maine, actually.”
“You checked.”
“I did. Flying commercial, the best he could have done was arrive in Bangor at 6:45 PM, which was long after that counter-girl saw him. In fact at that time of the year that’s after the last ferry of the day leaves for Moosie.”
“Six is the last?” Stephanie asked.
“Yep, right up until mid-May,” Dave said.
“So he must have flown charter,” she said. “A charterjet ? Are there companies that flew charter jets out of Denver? And could he have afforded one?”
“Yes on all counts,” Vince said, “but it would’ve cost him a couple of thousand bucks, and their bank account would have shown that kind of hit.”
“It didn’t?”
Vince shook his head. “There were no significant withdrawals prior to the fella’s disappearance. All the same, that’s what he must have done. I checked with a number of different charter companies, and they all told me that on a good day—one when the jet stream was flowing strong and a little Lear like a 35 or a 55 got up in the middle of it—that trip would take just three hours, maybe a little more.”
“Denver to Bangor,” she said.
“Denver to Bangor, ayuh—there’s noplace closer to our part of the coast where one of those little burners can land. Not enough runway, don’tcha see.”
