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.
“Finally, Contents of the Stomach Number Two, and here I’m talking about our man’s supper. This stuff was pretty much—well, I don’t want to go into details here; let’s just say that the digestive process had gone on long enough so that all Dr. Cathcart could tell for sure without extensive testing was that the guy had had some sort of fish dinner, probably with a salad and french fries, around six or seven hours before he died.
“ ‘I’m no Sherlock Holmes, Doc,’ I says, ‘but I can go you one better than that.’
“ ‘Really?’ he says, kinda skeptical.
“ ‘Ayuh,’ I says. ‘I think he had his supper either at Curly’s or Jan’s Wharfside over here, or Yanko’s on MooseLook.’
“ ‘Why one of those, when there’s got to be fifty restaurants within a twentymile radius of where we’re standin that sell fish dinners, even in April?’ he asks. ‘Why not the Grey Gull, for that matter?’
“ ‘Because the Grey Gull would not stoop to selling fish and chips,’ I says, ‘and that’s what this guy had.’
“Now Steffi—I’d done okay through most of the autopsy, but right about then I started feeling decidedly chuckupsy. ‘Those three places I mentioned sell fish and chips,’ I says, ‘and I could smell the vinegar as soon as you cut his stomach open.’ Then I had to rush into his little bathroom and throw up.
“But I was right. I developed my ‘sleeping ID’ pictures that night and showed em around at the places that sold fish and chips the very next day. No one at Yanko’s recognized him, but the takeout girl at Jan’s Wharfside knew him right away. She said she served him a fishandchips basket, plus a Coke or a Diet Coke, she couldn’t remember which, late on the afternoon before he was found. He took it to one of the tables and sat eating and looking out at the water. I asked if he said anything, and she said not really, just please and thank you. I asked if she noticed where he went when he finished his meal—which he ate around fivethirty—and she said no.”
He looked at Stephanie. “My guess is probably down to the town dock, to catch the six o’clock ferry to Moosie. The time would have been just about right.”
“Ayuh, that’s what I’ve always figured,” Dave said.
Stephanie sat up straight as something occurred to her. “It was April. The middle of April on the coast of Maine, but he had no coat on when he was found. Was he wearing a coat when he was served at Jan’s?”
Both of the old men grinned at her as if she had just solved some complicated equation. Only, Stephanie knew, their business—even at the humbleWeekly Islander level—was less about solving than it was delineating whatneeded to be solved.
“That’s a good question,” Vince said.
“Lovely question,” Dave agreed.
“I was saving that part,” Vince said, “but since there’s nostory, exactly, saving the good parts doesn’t matter…and if you want answers, dear heart, the store is closed. The takeout girl at Jan’s didn’t remember for sure, and no one else remembered him at all. I suppose we have to count ourselves lucky, in a way; had he bellied up to that counter in midJuly, when such places have a million people in em, all wanting fishandchips baskets, lobster rolls, and ice cream sundaes, she wouldn’t have remembered him at all unless he’d dropped his trousers and mooned her.”
“Maybe not even then,” Stephanie said.
“That’s true. As it was, shedid remember him, but not if he was wearing a coat. I didn’t press her too hard on it, either, knowin that if I did she might remember somethin just to please me…or to get me out of her hair. She said ‘I seem to recall he was wearing a light green jacket, Mr. Teague, but that could be wrong.’ And maybe itwas wrong, but do you know…I tend to think she was right. That he was wearing such a jacket.”
“Then where was it?” Stephanie asked. “Did such a jacket ever turn up?”
“No,” Dave said, “so maybe therewas no jacket…although what he was doing outside on a raw seacoast night in April without one certainly beggarsmy imagination.”
Stephanie turned back to Vince, suddenly with a thousand questions, all urgent, none fully articulated.
“What are you smiling about, dear?” Vince asked.
“I don’t know.” She paused. “Yes, I do. I have so goddamned many questions I don’t know which one to ask first.”
Both of the old men whooped at that one. Dave actually fished a big handkerchief out of his back pocket and mopped his eyes with it. “Ain’t that a corker!” he exclaimed.