Vince said: “Themain question.”
“Accourse it is,” Dave said. “Always was.”
Vince, quite softly: “We don’t know, Stephanie. We never have.”
Dave, more softly still: “BostonGlobe wouldn’t like that. Nope, not at all.”
17
“Accourse, we ain’t the BostonGlobe ,” Vince said. “We ain’t even the BangorDaily News . But Stephanie, when a grown man or woman goes completely off the rails, every newspaper writer, big town or small one, looks for certain reasons. It don’t matter whether the result is most of the Methodist church picnic windin up poisoned or just the gentlemanly half of a marriage quietly disappearin one weekday morning, never to be seen alive again. Now—for the time bein never mindin where he wound up, or the improbability of how he managed to get there—tell me what some of those reasons for goin off the rails might be. Count them off for me until I see at least four of your fingers in the air.”
School is in session, she thought, and then remembered something Vince had said to her a month before, almost in passing:To be a success it the news business, it don’t hurt to have a dirty mind, dear. At the time she’d thought the remark bizarre, perhaps even borderline senile. Now she thought she understood a little better.
“Sex,” she said, raising her left forefinger—her Colorado Kid finger. “I.e., another woman.” She popped another finger. “Money problems, I’m thinking either debt or theft.”
“Don’t forget the IRS,” Dave said. “People sometimes run when they realize they’re in hock to Uncle Sam.”
“She don’t know how boogery the IRS can be,” Vince said. “You can’t hold that against her. Anyway, according to his wife Cogan had no problems with Infernal Revenue. Go on, Steffi, you’re doin fine.”
She didn’t yet have enough fingers in the air to satisfy him, but could think of only one other thing. “The urge to start a brand-new life?” she asked doubtfully, seeming to speak more to herself than to them. “To just…I don’t know…cut all the ties and start over again as a different person in a different place?” And then something elsedid occur to her. “Madness?” She had four fingers up now—one for sex, one for money, one for change, one for madness. She looked doubtfully at the last two. “Maybe change and madness are the same?”
“Maybe they are,” Vince said. “And you could argue that madness covers all sorts of addictions that people try to run from. That sort of running’s sometimes known as the ‘geographic cure.’ I’m thinking specifically of drugs and alcohol. Gambling’s another addiction people try the geographic cure on, but I guess you could file that problem under money.”
“Did he have drug or alcohol problems?”
“Arla Cogan said not, and I believe she would have known. And after sixteen months to think it over, and with him dead at the end of it, I think she would have told me.”
“But, Steffi,” Dave said (and rather gently), “when you consider it, madness almosthas to be in it somewhere, wouldn’t you say?”
She thought of James Cogan, the Colorado Kid, sitting dead on Hammock Beach with his back against a litter basket and a lump of meat lodged in his throat, his closed eyes turned in the direction of Tinnock and the reach beyond. She thought of how one hand had still been curled, as if holding the rest of his midnight snack, a piece of steak some hungry gull had no doubt stolen, leaving nothing but a sticky pattern of sand in the leftover grease on his palm. “Yes,” she said. “There’s madness in it somewhere. Didshe know that? His wife?”
The two men looked at each other. Vince sighed and rubbed the side of his blade-thin nose. “She might have, but by then she had her own life to worry about, Steffi. Hers and her son’s. A man up and disappears like that, the woman left behind is apt to have a damn hard skate. She got her old job back, working in one of the Boulder banks, but there was no way she could keep the house in Nederland—”
“Hernando’s Hideaway,” Stephanie murmured, feeling a sympathetic pang.
“Ayuh, that. She kept on her feet without having to borrow too much from her folks, or anything at all from his, but she used up most of the money they’d put aside for little Mike’s college education in the process. When we saw her, I should judge she wanted two things, one practical and one what you’d call…spiritual?” He looked rather doubtfully at Dave, who shrugged and nodded as if to say that word would do.
Vince nodded himself and went on. “She wanted to be shed of the not-knowing. Was he alive or dead? Was she married or a widow? Could she lay hope to rest or did she have to carry it yet awhile longer? Maybe that last sounds a trifle hard-hearted, and maybe it is, but I should think that after sixteen months, hope must get damned heavy on your back—damned heavy to tote around.
“As for the practical, that was simple. She just wanted the insurance company to pay off what they owed. I know that Arla Cogan isn’t the only person in the history of the world to hate an insurance company, but I’d have to put her high on the list for sheer intensity. She’d been going along and going along, you see, her and Michael, living in a three— or four-room apartment in Boulder—quite a change after the nice house in Nederland—and her leaving him in daycare and with babysitters she wasn’t always sure she could trust, working a job she didn’t really want to do, going to bed alone after years of having someone to snuggle up to, worrying over the bills, always watching the needle on the gas-gauge because the price of gasoline was going up even then…and all the time she was sure in her heart that he was dead, but the insurance company wouldn’t pay off because of what her heart knew, not when there was no body, let alone a cause of death.
“She kept asking me if ‘the bastards’—that’s what she always called em—could ‘wiggle off’ somehow, if they could claim it was suicide. I told her I’d never heard of someone committing suicide by choking themselves on a piece of meat, and later, after she had made the formal identification of the death-photo in Cathcart’s presence, he told her the same thing. That seemed to ease her mind a little bit.
“Cathcart pitched right in, said he’d call the company agent in Brighton, Colorado, and explain about the fingerprints and her photo I.D. Nail everything down tight. She cried quite a little bit at that—some in relief, some in gratitude, some just from exhaustion, I guess.”
“Of course,” Stephanie murmured.
“I took her across to Moosie on the ferry and put her up at the Red Roof Motel,” Vince continued. “Same place you stayed when you first got here, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said. She had been at a boarding house for the last month or so, but would look for something more permanent in October. If, that was, these two old birds would keep her on. She thought they would. She thought that was, in large part, what this was all about.
“The three of us had breakfast the next morning,” Dave said, “and like most people who haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t had much experience with newspapers, she had no shyness about talking to us. No sense that any of what she was sayin might later turn up on page one.” He paused. “And accourse very little of it ever did. It was never the kind of story that sees much in the way of print, once you get past the main fact of the matter: Man Found Dead On Hammock Beach, Coroner Says No Foul Play. And by then, that was cold news, indeed.”
“No through-line,” Stephanie said.
“Nonothing !” Dave cried, and then laughed until he coughed. When that cleared, he wiped the corners of his eyes with a large paisley handkerchief he pulled from the back pocket of his pants.
“What did she tell you?” Stephanie asked.
“Whatcould she tell us?” Vince responded. “Mostly what she did was ask questions. The only one I asked her was if thechervonetz was a lucky piece or a memento or something like that.” He snorted. “Some newspaperman I was that day.”
“Thechevron —” She gave up on it, shaking her head.
“The Russian coin in his pocket, mixed in with the rest of his change,” Vince said. “It was achervonetz . A ten-ruble piece. I asked her if he kept it as a lucky piece or something. She didn’t have a clue. Said the closest Jim had ever been to Russia was when they rented a James Bond movie calledFrom Russia With Love at Blockbuster.”
“He might have picked it up on the beach,” she said thoughtfully. “People find all sorts of things on the beach.” She herself had found a woman’s high-heel shoe, worn exotically smooth from many a long tumble between
