Стивен Кинг - The Colorado Kid

“Now, Steffi, a man doesn’t get to the age I was even then without getting his ass kicked a number of times by fools with a little authority, but I felt terrible for Devane, who was embarrassed not only on his own account but on mine, as well. I could see him looking for some way to apologize to me, but before he could find it (or before I could tell him it wasn’t necessary, since it wasn’t him that had done anything wrong), O’Shanny took the tray of coffees and handed it to Morrison, then the two sacks of pastries from me. After that he told Devane to duck under the tape and take the evidence bag with the dead man’s personal effects in it. ‘You sign the Possession Slip,’ he says to Devane, like he was talking to a fiveyearold, ‘and you make sure nobody else so much as touches it until I take it back from you. And keep your nose out of the stuff inside yourself. Have you got all that?’

“ ‘Yes, sir,’ Devane says, and he gives me a little smile. I watched him take the evidence bag, which actually looked like the sort of accordionfolder you see in some offices, from Dr. Cathcart’s assistant. I saw him slide the Possession Slip out of the seethrough envelope on the front, and…do you understand what that slip’s for, Steffi?”

“I think I do,” she said. “Isn’t it so that if there’s a criminal prosecution, and something found at the crime scene is used as evidence in that prosecution, the State can show an uncorrupted chain of possession from where that thing was found to where it finally ended up in some courtroom as Exhibit A?”

“Prettily put,” Vince said. “You should be a writer.”

“Very amusing,” Stephanie said.

“Yes, ma’am, that’s our Vincent, a regular Oscar Wilde,” Dave said. “At least when he’s not bein Oscar the Grouch. Anyway, I saw young Mr. Devane sign his name to the Possession Slip, and I saw him put it back into the sleeve on the front of the evidence bag. Then I saw him turn to watch those strongboys load the body into the funeral hack. Vince had already come back here to start writin his story, and that was when I left, too, telling the people who asked me questions—quite a few had gathered by then, drawn by that stupid yellow tape like ants to spilled sugar—that they could read all about it for just a quarter, which is what theIslander went for in those days.

“Anyway, that was the last time I actually saw Paul Devane, standing there and watchin those two widebodies load the dead man into the hearse. But I happen to know Devane disobeyed O’Shanny’s order not to look in the evidence bag, because he called me at theIslander about sixteen months later. By then he’d given up his forensic science dream and gone back to school to become a lawyer. Good or bad, that particular course correction’s down to A.G. Detectives O’Shanny and Morrison, but it was still Paul Devane who turned the Hammock Beach John Doe into the Colorado Kid, and eventually made it possible for the police to identify him.”

“And we got the scoop,” Vince said. “In large part because Dave Bowie here bought that young man a doughnut and gave him what moneycan’t buy: an understanding ear and a little sympathy.”

“Oh, that’s layin it on a little thick,” Dave said, shifting around in his seat. “I wa’nt with him more than thirty minutes. Maybe threequarters of an hour if you want to add in the time we stood in line at the bakery.”

“Sometimes maybe that’s enough,” Stephanie said.

Dave said, “Ayuh, sometimes maybe it is, and what’s so wrong about that? How long do you think it takes a man to choke to death on a piece of meat, and then be dead forever?”

None of them had an answer to that. On the reach, some rich summer man’s yacht tooted with hollow selfimportance as it approached the Tinnock town dock.

“Let Paul Devane alone awhile,” Vince said. “Dave can tell you the rest of that part in a few minutes. I think maybe I ought to tell you about the guttossing first.”

“Ayuh,” Dave said. “It ain’t a story, Steff, but that part’d probably come next if it was.”

Vince said, “Don’t get the idea that Cathcart did the autopsy right away, because he didn’t. There’d been two people killed in the apartment house fire that brought O’Shanny and Morrison to our neck of the woods to begin with, and they came first. Not just because they died first, but because they were murder victims and John Doe looked like being just an accident victim. By the time Cathcartdid get to John Doe, the detectives were gone back to Augusta, and good riddance to them.

“I was there for that autopsy when it finally happened, because I was the closest thing there was to a professional photographer in the area back in those days, and they wanted a ‘sleeping ID’ of the guy. That’s a European term, and all it means is a kind of portrait shot presentable enough to go into the newspapers. It’s supposed to make the corpse look like he’s actually snoozin.”

Stephanie looked both interested and appalled. “Does it work?”

“No,” Vince said. Then: “Well…p’raps to a kid. Or if you was to look at it quick, and with one eye winked shut. This one had to be done before the autopsy, because Cathcart thought maybe, with the throat blockage and all, he might have to stretch the lower jaw too far.”

“And you didn’t think it would look quite so much like he was sleeping if he had a belt tied around his chin to keep his mouth shut?” Stephanie asked, smiling in spite of herself. It was awful that such a thing should be funny, but itwas funny; some appalling creature in her mind insisted on popping up one sicko cartoon image after another.

“Nope, probably not,” Vince agreed, and he was also smiling. Dave, too. So if she was sick, she wasn’t the only one. Thank God. “What such a thing’d look like, I think, would be a corpse with a toothache.”

Then they were all laughing. Stephanie thought that she loved these two old buzzards, she really did.

“Got to laugh at the Reaper,” Vince said, plucking his glass of Coke off the railing. He helped himself to a sip, then put it back. “Especially when you’re my age. I sense that bugger behind every door, and smell his breath on the pillow beside me where my wives used to lay their heads—God bless em both—when I put out my light.

“Got to laugh at the Reaper.

“Anyway, Steffi, I took my headshots—my ‘sleeping IDs’—and they came out about as you’d expect. The best one made the fella look like he mighta been sleepin off a bad drunk or was maybe in a coma, and that was the one we ran a week later. They also ran it in the BangorDaily News, plus the Ellsworth and Portland papers. Didn’t do any good, of course, not as far as scarin up people who knew him, at least, and we eventually found out there was a perfectly good reason for that.

“In the meantime, though, Cathcart went on about his business, and with those two dumbbells from Augusta gone back to where they came from, he had no objections to me hangin around, as long as I didn’t put it in the paper that he’d let me. I said accourse I wouldn’t, and accourse I never did.

“Working from the top down, there was first that plug of steak Doc Robinson had already seen in the guy’s throat. ‘That’s your cause of death right there, Vince,’ Cathcart said, and the cerebral embolism (which he discovered long after I’d left to catch the ferry back to Moosie) never changed his mind. He said that if the guy had had someone there to perform the Heimlich Maneuver—or if he’d performed it on himself—he might never have wound up on the steel table with the gutters running down the sides.

“Next, Contents of the Stomach Number One, and by that I mean the stuff on top, the midnight snack that had barely had a chance to start digesting when our man died and everything shut down. Just steak. Maybe six or seven bites in all, wellchewed. Cathcart thought maybe as much as four ounces.