flushed with pleasure.
“He couldn’t know he’d draw a couple of thuds like O’Shanny and Morrison when it came time to investigate his death,” Dave said. “Couldn’t know he’d have to depend on a grad student who’d spent the last couple of months holdin briefcases and goin out for coffee, not to mention a couple of old guys puttin out a weekly paper one step above a supermarket handout.”
“Hang on there, brother,” Vince said. “Them’s fightin words.” He put up his elderly dukes, but with a grin.
“I think he did all right,” Stephanie said. “In the end, I think he did just fine.” And then, thinking of the woman and baby Michael (who would by this time be in his mid-twenties): “So did she, actually. Without Paul Devane and you two guys, Arla Cogan never would have gotten her insurance money.”
“Some truth to that,” Vince conceded. She was amused to see that something in this made him uncomfortable. Not that he’d done good, she thought, but that someoneknew he had done good. They had the Internet out here; you could see a little Direct TV satellite dish on just about every house; no fishing boat set to sea anymore without the GPS switched on. Yet still the old Calvinist ideas ran deep.Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.
“What exactly do you think happened?” she asked.
“No, Steffi,” Vince said. He spoke kindly but firmly. “You’re still expectin Rex Stout to come waltzin out of the closet, or Ellery Queen arm in arm with Miss Jane Marple. If we knew what happened, if we had any idea, we would have chased that idea til we dropped. And frig the BostonGlobe , we would have broken any story we found on page one of theIslander . We may have beenlittle newspapermen back in ’81, and we may be littleold newspapermen now, but we ain’tdead little old newspapermen. I still like the idea of a big story just fine.”
“Me too,” Dave said. He’d gotten up, probably with those invoices on his mind, but had now settled on the corner of his desk, swinging one large leg. “I’ve always dreamed of us havin a story that got syndicated nationwide, and that’s one dream I’ll probably die with. Go on, Vince, tell her as much as you think. She’ll keep it close. She’s one of us now.”
Stephanie almost shivered with pleasure, but Vince Teague appeared not to notice. He leaned forward, fixing her light blue eyes with his, which were a much darker shade—the color of the ocean on a sunny day.
“All right,” he said. “I started to think something might be funny about how he died as well as how he got here long before all that about the stamp. I started askin myself questions when I realized he had a pack of cigarettes with only one gone, although he’d been on the island since at least six-thirty. I made a real pest of myself at Bayside News.”
Vince smiled at the recollection.
“I showed everyone at the shop Cogan’s picture, including the sweep-up boy. I was convinced he must have bought that pack there, unless he got it out of a vendin machine at a place like the Red Roof or the Shuffle Inn or maybe Sonny’s Sunoco. The way I figured, he must have finished his smokes while wanderin around Moosie, after gettin off the ferry, then bought a fresh supply. And Ialso figured that if he got em at the News, he must have gotten em shortly before eleven, which is when the News closes. That would explain why he just smoked one, and only used one of his new matches, before he died.”
“But then you found out he wasn’t a smoker at all,” Stephanie said.
“That’s right. His wife said so and Cathcart confirmed it. And later on I became sure that pack of smokes was a message:I came from Colorado, look for me there. ”
“We’ll never know for sure, but we both think that’s what it was,” Dave said.
“Jee-sus ,” she almost whispered. “So where does that lead you?”
Once more they looked at each other and shrugged those identical shrugs. “Into a land of shadows n moonbeams,” Vince said. “Places no feature writer from the BostonGlobe will ever go, in other words. But there are a few things I’m sure of in my heart. Would you like to hear em?”
“Yes!”
Vince spoke slowly but deliberately, like a man feeling his way down a very dark corridor where he has been many times before.
“He knew he was goin into a desperate situation, and he knew he might go unidentified if he died. He didn’t want that to happen, quite likely because he was worried about leaving his wife broke.”
“So he bought those cigarettes, hoping they’d be overlooked,” Stephanie said.
Vince nodded. “Ayuh, and they were.”
“But overlooked bywho ?”
Vince paused, then went on without answering her question. “He went down in the elevator and out through the lobby of his building. There was a car waitin to take him to Stapleton Airport, either right there or just around the corner. Maybe it was just him and the driver in that car; maybe there was someone else. We’ll never know. You asked me earlier if Cogan was wearing his overcoat when he left that morning, and I said George the Artist didn’t remember, but Arla said she never saw that overcoat no more, so maybe he was, at that. If so, I think he took it off in the car or in the airplane. I think he also took off his suit-coat jacket. I think someone either gave him the green jacket to wear in their place, or it was waitin for him.”
“In the car or on the plane.”
“Ayuh,” Dave said.
“The cigarettes?”
“Don’t know for sure, but if I had to bet, I’d bet he already had em on him,” Dave said. “He knew this was comin along…whateverthis was. He’d’ve had em in his pants pocket, I think.”
“Then, later, on the beach…” She saw Cogan, her mind’s-eye version of the Colorado Kid, lighting his life’s first cigarette—first and last—and then strolling down to the water’s edge with it, there on Hammock Beach, alone in the moonlight. The midnight moonlight. He takes one puff of the harsh, unfamiliar smoke. Maybe two. Then he throws the cigarette into the sea. Then…what?
What?
“The plane dropped him off in Bangor,” she heard herself saying in a voice that sounded harsh and unfamiliar to herself.
“Ayuh,” Dave agreed.
“And his ride from Bangor dropped him off in Tinnock.”
“Ayuh.” That was Vince.
“He ate a fish-and-chips basket.”
“So he did,” Vince agreed. “Autopsy proves it. So did my nose. I smelled the vinegar.”
“Was his wallet gone by then?”
“We don’t know,” Dave said. “We’ll never know. But I think so. I think he gave it up with his topcoat, his suit-coat, and his normal life. I think what he got in return was a green jacket, which he also gave up later on.”
“Or had taken from his dead body,” Vince said.
Stephanie shivered. She couldn’t help it. “He rides across to Moose-Lookit Island on the six o’clock ferry, bringing Gard Edwick a paper cup of coffee on the way—what could be construed as tea for the tillerman, or the ferryman.”
“Yuh,” Dave said. He looked very solemn.
“By then he has no wallet, no ID, just seventeen dollars and some change that maybe includes a Russian ten-ruble coin. Do you think that coin might have been…oh, I don’t know…some sort of identification-thingy, like in a spy novel? I mean, the cold war between Russia and the United States would have still been going on then, right?”
“Full blast,” Vince said. “But Steffi—if you were going to dicker with a Russian secret agent, would you use aruble to introduce yourself?”
“No,” she admitted. “But why else would he have it? To show it to someone, that’s all I can think of.”
“I’ve always had the intuition that someone gave it tohim ,” Dave said. “Maybe along with a piece of cold sirloin steak, wrapped up in a piece of tinfoil.”
“Why?” she asked. “Why would they?”
Dave shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Was there tinfoil found at the scene? Maybe thrown into that sea-grass along the far edge of the
