beach?”
“O’Shanny and Morrison sure didn’t look,” Dave said. “Me n Vince had a hunt all around Hammock Beach after that yella tape was taken down—not specifically for tinfoil, you understand, but for anything that looked like it might bear on the dead man, anything at all. We found nothing but the usual litter—candy-wrappers and such.”
“If the meat was in foil or a Baggie, the Kid might very well have tossed it into the water, along with his one cigarette,” Vince said.
“About that piece of meat in his throat…”
Vince was smiling a little. “I had several long conversations about that piece of steak with both Doc Robinson and Dr. Cathcart. Dave was in on a couple of em. I remember Cathcart saying to me once, this had to’ve been not more than a month before the heart attack that took his life six or seven years ago, ‘You go back to that old business the way a kid who’s lost a tooth goes back to the hole with the tip of his tongue.’ And I thought to myself, yep, that’s exactly right, exactly what it’s like. It’s like a hole I can’t stop poking at and licking into, trying to find the bottom of.
“First thing I wanted to know was if that piece of meat could have been jammed down Cogan’s throat, either with fingers or some sort of instrument like a lobster-pick, after he was dead. And that’s crossedyour mind, hasn’t it?”
Stephanie nodded.
“He said it was possible but unlikely, because that piece of steak had not only been chewed, but chewed enough to be swallowed. It wasn’t really meat at all anymore, but rather what Cathcart called ‘organic pulp-mass.’ Someone else could have chewed it that much, but would have been unlikely to have planted it after doing so, for fear it would have looked insufficient to cause death. Are you with me?”
She nodded again.
“Healso said that meat chewed to a pulp-mass would be hard to manipulate with an instrument. It would tend to break up when pushed from the back of the mouth into the throat. Fingers could do it, but Cathcart said he believed he would have seen signs of that, most likely straining of the jaw ligatures.” He paused, thinking, then shook his head. “There’s a technical term for that kind of jaw-poppin, but I don’t remember it.”
“Tell her what Robinson told you,” Dave said. His eyes were sparkling. “It didn’t come to nummore’n the rest in the end, but I always thought it waswicked int’restin.”
“He said there were certain muscle relaxants, some of em exotic, and Cogan’s midnight snack might have been treated with one of those,” Vince said. “He might get the first few bites down all right, accounting for what was found in his stomach, and then find himself all at once with a bite he wasn’t able to swallow once it was chewed.”
“That must have been it!” Stephanie cried. “Whoever dosed the meat sat there and just watched him choke! Then, when Cogan was dead, the murderer propped him up against the litter basket and took away the rest of the steak so it could never be tested! It was never a gull at all! It…” She stopped, looking at them. “Why are you shaking your heads?”
“The autopsy, dear,” Vince said. “Nothing like that showed up on the blood-gas chromatograph tests.”
“But if it was something exotic enough…”
“Like in an Agatha Christie yarn?” Vince asked, with a wink and a little smile. “Well, maybe…but there was also the piece of meat in his throat, don’t you know.”
“Oh. Right. Dr. Cathcart had that to test, didn’t he?” She slumped a little.
“Ayuh,” Vince agreed, “and did. We may be country mice, but wedo have the occasional dark thought. And the closest thing to poison on that chunk of chewed-up meat was a little salt.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she said (in a very low voice): “Maybe it was the kind of stuff that disappears.”
“Ayuh,” Dave said, and his tongue rounded the inside of one cheek. “Like the Coast Lights after an hour or two.”
“Or the rest of theLisa Cabot ’s crew,” Vince added.
“And once he got off the ferry, you don’t know where he went.”
“No, ma’am,” Vince said. “We’ve looked off n on for over twenty-five years and never found a soul who claims to have seen him before Johnny and Nancy did around quarter past six on the morning of April 24th. And for the record—not that anyone’s keepin one—I don’t believe that anyone took what remained of that steak from his hand after he choked on his last bite. I believe a seagull stole the last of it from his dead hand, just as we always surmised. And gorry, I reallydo have to get a move on.”
“And I have to get with those invoices,” Dave said. “But first, I think another little rest-stop might be in order.” That said, he lumbered toward the bathroom.
“I suppose I better get with this column,” Stephanie said. Then she burst out, half-laughing and half- serious: “But I almost wish you hadn’t told me, if you were going to leave me hanging! It’ll beweeks before I get this out of my mind!”
“It’s been twenty-five years, and it’s still not out of ours,” Vince said. “And at least you know why we didn’t tell that guy from theGlobe .”
“Yes. I do.”
He smiled and nodded. “You’ll do all right, Stephanie. You’ll do fine.” He gave her shoulder a friendly squeeze, then started for the door, grabbing his narrow reporter’s notebook from his littered desk on his way by and stuffing it into his back pocket. He was ninety but still walked easy, his back only slightly bent with age. He wore a gentleman’s white shirt, its back crisscrossed with a gentleman’s suspenders. Halfway across the room he stopped and turned to her again. A shaft of late sunlight caught his baby-fine white hair and turned it into a halo.
“You’ve been a pleasure to have around,” he said. “I want you to know that.”
“Thank you.” She hoped she didn’t sound as close to tears as she suddenly felt. “It’s been wonderful. I was a little dubious at first, but…but now I guess it goes right back at you. It’s a pleasure to be here.”
“Have you thought about staying? I think you have.”
“Yes. You bet I have.”
He nodded gravely. “Dave and I have spoken about that. It’d be good to have some new blood on the staff. Some young blood.”
“You guys’ll go on for years,” she said.
“Oh yes,” he said, off-handedly, as if that were a given, and when he died six months later, Stephanie would sit in a cold church, taking notes on the service in her own narrow reporter’s book, and think:He knew it was coming. “I’ll be around for years yet. Still, if you wanted to stay, we’d like to have you. You don’t have to answer one way or another now, but consider it an offer.”
“All right, I will. And I think we both know what the answer will be.”
“That’s fine, then.” He started to turn, then turned back one last time. “School’s almost out for the day, but I could tell you one more thing about our business. May I?”
“Of course.”
“There are thousands of papers andtens of thousands of people writing stories for em, but there are only two types of stories. There are news stories, which usually aren’t stories at all, but only accounts of unfolding events. Things like that don’thave to be stories. People pick up a newspaper to read about the blood and the tears the way they slow down to look at a wreck on the highway, and then they move on. But what do they find inside of their newspaper?”
“Feature stories,” Stephanie said, thinking of Hanratty and his unexplained mysteries.
“Ayuh. And thoseare stories. Every one of em has a beginning, a middle, and an end. That makes em happy news, Steffi, always happy news. Even if the story is about a church secretary who probably killed half the congregation at the church picnic because her lover jilted her, that is happy news, and why?”
“I don’t know.”
“You better,” Dave said, emerging from the bathroom and still wiping his hands on a paper towel. “You better know if you want to be in this business, and understand what it is you’re doin.” He cast the paper towel into his wastebasket on his way by.
She thought about it. “Feature stories are happy stories because they’re over.”
“That’s right!” Vince cried, beaming. He threw his hands in the air like a revival preacher. “They
