JК
The Colorado Kid :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 63 из 81I know that Arla Cogan isn’t the only person in the history of the world to hate an insurance company,but I’d have to put her high on the list for sheer intensity. She’d been going along and going along, you see, her and Michael, living in a three— or fourroom apartment in Boulder—quite a change after the nice house in Nederland—and her leaving him in daycare and with babysitters she wasn’t always sure she could trust, working a job she didn’t really want to do, going to bed alone after years of having someone to snuggle up to, worrying over the bills, always watching the needle on the gasgauge because the price of gasoline was going up even then…and all the time she was sure in her heart that he was dead, but the insurance company wouldn’t pay off because of what her heart knew, not when there was no body, let alone a cause of death.
“She kept asking me if ‘the bastards’—that’s what she always called em—could ‘wiggle off’ somehow, if they could claim it was suicide. I told her I’d never heard of someone committing suicide by choking themselves on a piece of meat, and later, after she had made the formal identification of the deathphoto in Cathcart’s presence, he told her the same thing. That seemed to ease her mind a little bit.
“Cathcart pitched right in, said he’d call the company agent in Brighton, Colorado, and explain about the fingerprints and her photo I.D. Nail everything down tight. She cried quite a little bit at that—some in relief, some in gratitude, some just from exhaustion, I guess.”
“Of course,” Stephanie murmured.
“I took her across to Moosie on the ferry and put her up at the Red Roof Motel,” Vince continued. “Same place you stayed when you first got here, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said. She had been at a boarding house for the last month or so, but would look for something more permanent in October. If, that was, these two old birds would keep her on. She thought they would. She thought that was, in large part, what this was all about.
“The three of us had breakfast the next morning,” Dave said, “and like most people who haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t had much experience with newspapers, she had no shyness about talking to us. No sense that any of what she was sayin might later turn up on page one.” He paused. “And accourse very little of it ever did. It was never the kind of story that sees much in the way of print, once you get past the main fact of the matter: Man Found Dead On Hammock Beach, Coroner Says No Foul Play. And by then, that was cold news, indeed.”
“No throughline,” Stephanie said.
“She kept asking me if ‘the bastards’—that’s what she always called em—could ‘wiggle off’ somehow, if they could claim it was suicide. I told her I’d never heard of someone committing suicide by choking themselves on a piece of meat, and later, after she had made the formal identification of the deathphoto in Cathcart’s presence, he told her the same thing. That seemed to ease her mind a little bit.
“Cathcart pitched right in, said he’d call the company agent in Brighton, Colorado, and explain about the fingerprints and her photo I.D. Nail everything down tight. She cried quite a little bit at that—some in relief, some in gratitude, some just from exhaustion, I guess.”
“Of course,” Stephanie murmured.
“I took her across to Moosie on the ferry and put her up at the Red Roof Motel,” Vince continued. “Same place you stayed when you first got here, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Stephanie said. She had been at a boarding house for the last month or so, but would look for something more permanent in October. If, that was, these two old birds would keep her on. She thought they would. She thought that was, in large part, what this was all about.
“The three of us had breakfast the next morning,” Dave said, “and like most people who haven’t done anything wrong and haven’t had much experience with newspapers, she had no shyness about talking to us. No sense that any of what she was sayin might later turn up on page one.” He paused. “And accourse very little of it ever did. It was never the kind of story that sees much in the way of print, once you get past the main fact of the matter: Man Found Dead On Hammock Beach, Coroner Says No Foul Play. And by then, that was cold news, indeed.”
“No throughline,” Stephanie said.