“Yes, ma’am! I tell you what, Steff: why don’t you pretend you’re drawin for the Tupperware set at the Ladies Auxiliary Autumn Sale? Just close your eyes and pick one out of the goldfish bowl.”
“All right,” she said, and although she didn’t quite do that, it was close. “What about the dead man’s fingerprints? And his dental records? I thought that when it came to identifying dead people, those things were pretty much infallible.”
“Most people do and probably they are,” Vince said, “but you have to remember this was 1980, Steff.” He was still smiling, but his eyes were serious. “Before the computer revolution, andlong before the Internet, that marvelous tool young folks such as yourself take for granted. In 1980, you could check the prints and dental records of what police departments call an unsub—an unknown subject—against those of a person you thought your unsub might be, but checkin em against the prints or dental records of all the wanted felons on file in all the police departments would have taken years, and against those of all the folks reported disappeared every year in the United States? Even if you narrowed the list down to just men in their thirties and forties? Not possible, dear.”
“But I thought the armed forces kept computer records, even back then…”
“I don’t think so,” Vince said. “And if they did, I don’t believe the Kid’s prints were ever sent to them.”
“In any case, the initial ID didn’t come from the man’s fingerprints or dental work,” Dave said. He laced his fingers over his considerable chest and appeared almost to preen in the day’s late sunshine, now slanting but still warm. “I believe that’s known as cuttin to the chase.”
“So wheredid it come from?”
“That brings us back to Paul Devane,” Vince said, “and Ilike coming back to Paul Devane, because, as I said, there’s a story there, and stories are my business. They’re mybeat, we would have said back in the old, old days. Devane’s a little sip of Horatio Alger, small but satisfying.Strive and Succeed. Work and Win. ”
“Piss and Vinegar,” Dave suggested.
“If you like,” Vince said evenly. “Sure, ayuh, if you like. Devane goes off with those two stupid cops, O’Shanny and Morrison, as soon as Cathcart gives them the preliminary report on the burn victims from the apartment house fire, because they don’t give a heck about some accidental choking victim who died over on MooseLookit Island. Cathcart, meanwhile, does his guttossing on John Doe with yours truly in attendance. Onto the death certificate goesasphyxiation due to choking or the medical equivalent thereof. Into the newspapers goes my ‘sleeping ID’ photo, which our Victorian ancestors much more truthfully called a ‘death portrait.’ And no one calls the Attorney General’s Office or the State Police barracks in Augusta to say that’s their missing father or uncle or brother.
“Tinnock Funeral Home keeps him in their cooler for six days—it’s not the law, but like s’many things in matters of this sort, Steffi, you discover it’s an accepted custom. Everybody in the deathbusiness knows it, even if nobody knowswhy. At the end of that period, when he was still John Doe and still unclaimed, Abe Carvey went on ahead and embalmed him. He was put into the funeral home’s own crypt at Seaview Cemetery—”
“This part’s rather creepy,” Stephanie said. She found she could see the man in there, for some reason not in a coffin (although he must surely have been provided with some sort of cheap box) but simply laid on a stone slab with a sheet over him. An unclaimed package in a post office of the dead.
“Ayuh, ’tis, a bit,” Vince said levelly. “Do you want me to push on?”
“If you stop now, I’ll kill you,” she said.
He nodded, not smiling now but pleased with her just the same. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she did.
“He boarded the summer and half the fall in there. Then, when November come around and the body was still unnamed and unclaimed, they decided they ought to bury him.” In Vince’s Yankee accent,bury rhymed withfurry. “Before the ground stiffened up again and made digging particularly hard, don’t you see.”
“I do,” Stephanie said quietly. And she did. This time she didn’t sense the telepathy between the two old men, but perhaps it was there, because Dave took up the tale (such tale as there was) with no prompting from theIslander ’s senior editor.
“Devane finished out his tour with O’Shanny and Morrison to the bitter end,” he said. “He probably even gave them each a tie or something at the end of his three months or his quarter or whatever it was; as I think I told you, Stephanie, there was no quit in that young fella. But as soon as he was finished, he put in his paperwork at whatever his college was—Ithink he told me Georgetown, but you mustn’t hold me to that—and started back up again, taking whatever courses he needed for law school. And except for two things, that might have been where Mr. Paul Devane leaves this story—which, as Vince says, isn’t a story at all, except maybe for this part. The first thing is that Devane peeked into the evidence bag at some point, and looked over John Doe’s personal effects. The second is that he got serious about a girl, and she took him home to meet her parents, as girls often do when things get serious, and this girl’s father had at least one bad habit that was more common then than it is now. He smoked cigarettes.”
Stephanie’s mind, which was a good one (both of the men knew this), at once flashed upon the pack of cigarettes that had fallen onto the sand of Hammock Beach when the dead man fell over. Johnny Gravlin (now MooseLook’s mayor) had picked it up and put it back into the dead man’s pocket. And then something else came to her, not in a flash but in a blinding glare. She jerked as if stung. One of her feet struck the side of her glass and knocked it over. Coke fizzed across the weathered boards of the porch and dripped between them to the rocks and weeds far below. The old men didn’t notice. They knew a state of grace perfectly well when they saw one, and were watching their intern with interest and delight.
“The taxstamp!” she nearly shrieked.“There’s a state taxstamp on the bottom of every pack!”
They both applauded her, gently but sincerely.
10
Dave said, “Let me tell you what young Mr.
Devane saw when he took his forbidden peek into the evidence bag, Steffi—and I have no doubt he took that look more to spite those two than because he actually believed he’d see anything of value in such a scanty collection of stuff. To start with, there was John Doe’s wedding ring; a plain gold band, no engraving, not even a date.”
“They didn’t leave it on his…” She saw the way the two men were looking at her, and it made her realize that what she was suggesting was foolish. If the man was identified, the ring would be returned. He might then be committed to the ground with it on his finger, if that was what his surviving family wanted. But until then it was evidence, and had to be treated as such.
“No,” she said. “Of course not. Silly me. One thing, though—there must have been a Mrs. Doe somewhere. Or a Mrs. Kid. Yes?”
“Yes,” Vince Teague said, rather heavily. “And we found her. Eventually.”
“And were there little Does?” Stephanie asked, thinking that the man had been the right age for a whole gaggle of them.
“Let’s not get stuck on that part of it just now, if you please,” Dave said.
“Oh,” Stephanie said. “Sorry.”
“Nothing to be sorry about,” he said, smiling a little. “Just don’t want to lose m’place. It’s easier to do when there’s no…what would you call it, Vincent?”
“No throughline,” Vince said. He was smiling, too, but his eyes were a little distant. Stephanie wondered if it was the thought of the little Does that had put that distance there.
“Nope, no throughline t’all,” Dave said. He thought, then proved how little he’d lost his place by ticking items rapidly off on his fingers. “Contents of the bag was the deceased’s weddinring, seventeen dollars in paper money—a ten, a five, and two ones—plus some assorted change that might have added up to a buck. Also, Devane said, one coin that wasn’t American. He said he thought the writing on it was Russian.”
“Russian,” she marveled.
“What’s called Cyrillic,” Vince murmured.
Dave pressed ahead. “There was a roll of Certs and a pack of Big Red chewin gum with all but one stick gone. There was a book of matches with an ad for stampcollectin on the front—I’m sure you’ve seen that kind, they hand em out at every convenience store—and Devane said he could see a strikemark on the strip across the bottom for that purpose, pink and bright. And then there was that pack of cigarettes, open and with one or two cigarettes gone. Devane thought only one, and the single strikemark on the matchbook seemed to bear that out, he said.”
“But no wallet,” Stephanie said.
“No, ma’am.”
“And absolutely no identification.”
“No.”
“Did anyone theorize that maybe someone came along and stole Mr. Doe’s last piece of steakand his wallet?” she asked, and a little giggle got out before she could put her hand over her mouth.
“Steffi, we tried that and everything else,” Vince said. “Including the idea that maybe he got dropped off on Hammock Beach by one of the Coast Lights.”
“Some sixteen months after Johnny Gravlin and Nancy Arnault found that fella,” Dave resumed, “Paul Devane was invited to spend a weekend at his ladyfriend’s house in Pennsylvania. I have to think that MooseLookit Island, Hammock Beach, and John Doe were all about the last things on his mind just then. He said he and the girlfriend were going out for the evening, to a movie or somethin. Mother and Dad were in the kitchen, finishin the supper dishes—‘doin the riddingup’ is what we say in these parts—and although Paul had offered to help, he’d been banished to the living room on the grounds of not knowin where anything went. So he was sittin there, watchin whatever was on the TV, and he happened to glance over at Poppa Bear’s easychair, and there on Poppa Bear’s little endtable, right next to Poppa Bear’sTV Guide and Poppa Bear’s ashtray, was Poppa Bear’s pack of smokes.”
He paused, giving her a smile and a shrug.
“It’s funny how things work, sometimes; it makes you wonder how often theydon’t. If that pack had been turned a different way—so the top had been facing him instead of the bottom—John Doe might have gone on being John Doe instead of first the Colorado Kid and then Mr. James Cogan of Nederland, a town just west of Boulder. But the bottom of the packwas facing him, and he saw the stamp on it. It was astamp, like a postage stamp, and that made him think of the pack of cigarettes in the evidence bag that day.
“You see, Steffi, one of Paul Devane’s minders—I disremember if it was O’Shanny or Morrison—had been a smoker, and among Paul’s other chores, he’d bought this fella a fair smack of Camel cigarettes, and while they also had a stamp on them, it seemed to him it wasn’t the same as the one on the pack in the evidence bag. It seemed to him that the stamp on the State of Maine cigarettes he bought for the detective was anink stamp, like the kind you sometimes get on your hand when you go to a smalltown dance, or…I dunno…”
“To the Gernerd Farms Hayride and Picnic?” she asked, smiling.
“You got it!” he said, pointing a plump finger at her like a gun. “Anyway, this wa’nt the kind of thing where you jump up yelling ‘Eureka! I have found it!’, but his mind kep’ returnin to it over and over again that weekend, because the memory of those cigarettes in the evidence bag bothered him. For one thing, it seemed to Paul Devane that John Doe’s cigarettes certainlyshould have had a Maine taxstamp on them, no matter where he came from.”
“Why?”
“Because there was only one gone. What kind of cigarette smoker only smokes one in six hours?”
“A light one?”
“A man who has a full pack and don’t take but one cigarette out of it in six hours ain’t a light smoker, that’s anon smoker,” Vince said mildly. “Also, Devane saw the man’s tongue. So did I–I was on my knees in front of him, shining Doc Robinson’s otoscope into his mouth. It was as pink as peppermint candy. Not a smoker’s tongue at all.”
“Oh, and the matchbook,” Stephanie said thoughtfully. “One strike?”
Vince Teague was smiling at her. Smiling and nodding. “One strike,” he said.
“No lighter?”
“No lighter.” Both men said it together, then laughed.
11
“Devane waited until Monday,” Dave said, “and when the business about the cigarettes still wouldn’t quit nagging him—wouldn’t quit even though he was almost a year and a half downriver from that part of his life—he called me on the telephone and explained to me that he had an idea that maybe, justmaybe, the pack of cigarettes John Doe had been carrying around hadn’t come from the State of Maine.