each of us with one of the Doc’s little barrel-lights in hand. Only instead of lighting up a work of art, we were going to light up the dead man’s throat so Doc could take a look.
“He got himself into position with a fair amount of gruntin and puffing—woulda been funny if the circumstances hadn’t been so strange, and if I hadn’t been sort of afraid the man was going to have a heart-attack right there—and then he reached out one hand, slipped it into the guy’s mouth, and hooked down his jaw like it was a hinge. Which, accourse, when you think about it, is just what it is.
“ ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Get in close, boys. I don’t think he’s gonna bite, but if I’m wrong, I’ll be the one who pays for the mistake.’
“We got in close and shone the lights down the dead man’s gullet. It was just red and black in there, except for his tongue, which was pink. I could hear the Doc puffin and grunting and he says, not to us but to himself, ‘A little more,’ and he pulled down the lower jaw a little further. Then, to us, ‘Lift em up, shine em straight down his gullet,’ and we did the best we could. It changed the direction of the light just enough to take the pink off the dead man’s tongue and put it on that hanging thing at the back of his mouth, the what-do-you-call it—”
“Uvula,” Stephanie and Dave said at the same time.
Vince nodded. “Ayuh, that. And just beyond it, I could see somethin, or the top of somethin, that was a dark gray. It was only for two or three seconds, but it was enough to satisfy Doc Robinson. He took his fingers out of the dead man’s mouth—the lower lip made a kind of plopping sound as it went back against the gum, but the jaw stayed down pretty much where it was—and then he sat back, puffing away six licks to the dozen.
“ ‘You boys are going to have to help me stand up,’ he says when he got enough wind so he could talk. ‘Both my legs are asleep from the knees on down. Damn, but I’m a fool to weigh this much.’
“ ‘I’ll help you up when you tell me,’ George says. ‘Did you see anything? Because I didn’t see anything. What about you, Vincent?’
“ ‘I thought I did,’ I says. The truth is I knew friggin well I did—pardon, Steff—but I didn’t want to show him up.
“ ‘Ayuh, it’s back there, all right,’ Doc says. He still sounded out of breath, but he sounded satisfied, too, like a man who’s scratched a troublesome itch. ‘Cathcart’ll get it out and then we’ll know if it’s a piece of steak or a piece of pork or a piece of something else, but I don’t see that it matters. We know what matters—he came out here with a piece of meat in his hand and sat down to eat it while he watched the moonlight on the reach. Propped his back up against this litter basket. And choked, just like the little Indian in the nursery rhyme. On the last bite of what he brought to snack on? Maybe, but not necessarily.’
“ ‘Once he was dead, a gull could have swooped in and taken what was left right out of his hand,’ George says. ‘Just left the grease.’
“ ‘Correct,’ Doc says. ‘Now are you two gonna help me up, or do I have to crawl back over to George’s car and pull myself up by the doorhandle?’ ”
8
“So what do you think, Steffi?” Vince asked, taking a throat-cooling swallow of his Coke. “Mystery solved? Case closed?”
“Not on your granny!” she cried, and barely registered their appreciative laughter. Her eyes were sparkling. “The cause-of-death part, maybe, but…whatwas it, by the way? In his throat? Or would that be getting ahead of the story?”
“Darlin, you can’t get ahead of a story that doesn’t exist,” Vince said, and his eyes were also sparkling. “Ask ahead, behind, or sideways. I’ll answer anything. Same with Dave, I imagine.”
As if to prove this was indeed so,The Weekly Islander ’s managing editor, said: “It was a piece of beef, probably steak, and very likely from one of your better cuts—your tenderloin, sirloin, or filet mignon. It was cooked medium-rare, andasphyxiation due to choking was what went on the death certificate, although the man we have always called the Colorado Kid also had suffered a massive cerebral embolism—your stroke, in other words. Cathcart decided the choking led to the stroking, but who knows, it might have been vicey-versa. So you see, even the cause of death gets slippery when you look at it right up close.”
“There’s at least one story in here—a little one—and I’m going to tell it to you now,” Vince said. “It’s about a fella who was in some ways like you, Stephanie, although I like to think you fell into better hands when it came to putting the final polish on your education; more compassionate ones, too. This fella was young—twenty-three, I think—and like you he was from away (the south in his case rather than the Midwest), and he was also doing graduate work, in the field of forensic science.”
“So he was working with this Dr. Cathcart, and he figured something out.”
Vince grinned. “Logical enough guess, dear, but you’re wrong about who he was workin with. His name… whatwas his name, Dave?”
Dave Bowie, whose memory for names was as deadly as Annie Oakley’s aim with her rifle, didn’t hesitate. “Devane. Paul Devane.”
“That’s right, I recall it now you say it. This young man, Devane, was assigned to three months of postgraduate field work with a couple of State Police detectives out of the Attorney General’s office. Only in his case,sentenced might be the better word. They treated him very badly.” Vince’s eyes darkened. “Older people who use young people badly when all the young people want is to learn—I think folks like that should be put out of their jobs. All too often, though, they get promotions instead of pink-slips. It has never surprised me that God gave the world a little tilt at the same time He set it spinning; so much that goes on here mimics that tilt.
“This young man, this Devane, spent four years at some place like Georgetown University, wanting to learn the sort of science that catches crooks, and right around the time he was coming to bud the luck of the draw sent him to work with a couple of doughnut-eating detectives who turned him into little more than a gofer, running files between Augusta and Waterville and shooing lookie-loos away from car-crash scenes. Oh, maybe once in awhile he got to measure a footprint or take flash photos of a tire-print as a reward. But rarely, I sh’d say. Rarely.
“In any case, Steffi, these two fine specimens of detection—and I hope to God they’re long out to pasture —happened to be in Tinnock Village at the same time the body of the Colorado Kid turned up on Hammock Beach. They were investigating an apartment-house fire ‘of suspicious origin,’ as we say when reporting such things in the paper, and they had their pet boy, who was by then losing his idealism, with them.
“If he’d drawn a couple of thegood detectives working out of the A.G.’s office—and I’ve met my share in spite of the goddam bureaucracy that makes so many problems in this state’s law enforcement system—or if his Department of Forensic Studies had sent him to some other state that accepts students, he might have ended up one of the fellas you see on thatCSI show—”
“I like that show,” Dave said. “Much more realistic thanMurder, She Wrote . Who’s ready for a muffin? There’s some in the pantry.”
It turned out they all were, and story-time was suspended until Dave brought them back, along with a roll of paper towels. When each of them had a Labree’s squash muffin and a paper towel to catch the crumbs, Vince told Dave to take up the tale. “Because,” he said, “I’m getting preachy and apt to keep us here until dark.”
“I thought you was doin good,” Dave said.
Vince clapped a bony hand to his even bonier chest. “Call 911, Steffi, my heart just stopped.”
“That won’t be so funny when it really happens, old-timer,” Dave said.
“Lookit him spray those crumbs,” Vince said. “You drool at one end of your life and dribble at t’other, my Ma used to say. Go on, Dave, tell on, but do us all a favor and swallow, first.”
Dave did, and followed the swallow with a big gulp of Coke to wash everything down. Stephanie hoped her own digestive system would be up to such challenges when she reached David Bowie’s age.
“Well,” he said, “George didn’t bother cordoning off the beach, because that just would have drawn folks like flies to a cowpie, don’tcha know, but that didn’t stop those two dummies from the Attorney General’s office from doin it. I asked one of em why they bothered, and he looked at me like I was a stark raving natural-born fool. ‘Well, it’s a crime scene, ain’t it?’ he says.
“ ‘Maybe so and maybe no,’ I says, ‘but once the body’s gone, what evidence do you think you’re gonna have that the wind hasn’t blown away?’ Because by then that easterly had gotten up awful fresh. But they insisted,
