The Dark Half (16 page)

“It didn't work?”

“The cops got some lovely prints,” Alan said. “The perp's. The natural oils on the guy's fingers flattened the counterfeit fingerprints, and because the plastic was thin and naturally receptive to even the most delicate shapes, it rose up again in the guy's own prints. ”

“Maybe a different material—”

“Sure, maybe. This happened in the mid-fifties, and I imagine a hundred new kinds of polymer plastic have been invented since then. It could be. All we can say for now is that no one in forensics or criminology has ever heard of it being done, and I think that's the way it'll stay. ”

Liz came back into the room and sat down, curling her feet under her like a cat and pulling her skirt over her calves. Thad admired the gesture, which seemed to him somehow timeless and eternally graceful.

“Meantime, there are other considerations here, Thad. ”

Thad and Liz exchanged a flicker of a glance at Alan's use of the first name, so swift Alan missed it. He had drawn a battered notebook from his hip pocket and was looking at one of the pages.

“Do you smoke?” he asked, looking up.

“No. ”

“He quit seven years ago,” Liz said. “It was very hard for him, but he stuck with it. ”

“There are critics who say the world would be a better place if I'd just pick a spot and die in it, but I choose to spite them,” Thad said. “Why?”

“You did smoke, though. ”

“Yes. ”

“Pall Malls?”

Thad had been raising his can of soda. It stopped six inches shy of his mouth. “How did you know that?”

“Your blood-type is A-negative?”

“I'm beginning to understand why you came primed to arrest me this morning,” Thad said. “If I hadn't been so well alibied, I'd be in jail right now, wouldn't I?”

“Good guess. ”

“You could have gotten his blood-type from his R. O. T. C. records,” Liz said. “I assume that's where his fingerprints came from in the first place. ”

“But not that I smoked Pall Mall cigarettes for fifteen years,” Thad said. “So far as I know, stuff like that's not part of the records the army keeps. ”

“This is stuff that's come in since this morning,” Alan told them. “The ashtray in Homer Gamache's pick-up was full of Pall Mall cigarette butts. The old man only smoked an occasional pipe. There were a couple of Pall Mall butts in an ashtray in Frederick Clawson's apartment, as well. He didn't smoke at all, except maybe for a joint now and then. That's according to his landlady. We got our perp's blood-type from the spittle on the butts. The serologist's report also gave us a lot of other information. Better than fingerprints. ”

Thad was no longer smiling. “I don't understand this. I don't understand this at all. ”

“There's one thing which doesn't match,” Pangborn said, “Blonde hairs. We found half a dozen in Homer's truck, and we found another on the back of the chair the killer used in Clawson's living room. Your hair is black. Somehow I don't think you're wearing a rug. ”

“No—Thad's not, but maybe the killer was,” Liz said bleakly.

“Maybe,” Alan agreed. “If so, it was made of human hair. And why bother changing the color of your hair if you're going to leave fingerprints and cigarette butts everywhere? Either the guy is very dumb or he was deliberately trying to implicate you. The blonde hair doesn't fit either way. ”

“Maybe he just didn't want to be recognized,” Liz said. “Remember, Thad was in
People
magazine barely two weeks ago. Coast to coast. ”

“Yeah, that's a possibility. Although if this guy also
looks
like your husband, Mrs. Beaumont—”

“Liz. ”

“Okay, Liz. If he looks like your husband, he'd look like Thad Beaumont with blonde hair, wouldn't he?”

Liz looked fixedly at Thad for a moment and then began to giggle.

“What's so funny?” Thad asked.

“I'm trying to imagine you blonde,” she said, still giggling. “I think you'd look like a very depraved David Bowie. ”

“Is that funny?” Thad asked Alan.
“I
don't think that's funny. ”

“Well. . .” Alan said, smiling.

“Never mind. The guy could have been wearing sunglasses and deelie-boppers as well as a blonde wig, for all we know. ”

“Not if the killer was the same guy Mrs. Arsenault saw getting into Homer's truck at quarter of one in the morning of June first,” Alan said.

Thad leaned forward.
“Did
he look like me?” he asked.

“She couldn't tell much except that he was wearing a suit. For what it's worth, I had one of my men, Norris Ridgewick, show her your picture today. She said she didn't
think
it was you, although she couldn't say for sure. She said she thought the man who got into Homer's truck was bigger.” He added dryly: “That's one lady who believes in erring on the side of caution. ”

“She could tell a size difference from a picture?” Liz asked doubtfully.

“She's seen Thad around town, summers,” Alan said. “And she
did
say she couldn't be sure. ”

Liz nodded. “Of course she knows him. Both of us, for that matter. We buy fresh stuff at their vegetable stand all the time. Dumb. Sorry. ”

“Nothing to apologize for,” Alan said. He finished his beer and checked his crotch. Dry. Good. There was a light stain there, probably not anything anyone but his wife would notice. “Anyhow, that brings me to the last point. . . or aspect . . . or whatever the hell you want to call it. I doubt if it's even a part of this, but it never hurts to check. What's your shoe-size, Mr. Beaumont?”

Thad glanced at Liz, who shrugged. “I've got pretty small paws for a guy who goes six-one, I guess. I take a size ten, although half a size either way is—”

“The prints reported to us were probably bigger than that,” Alan said. “I don't think the prints are a part of it, anyway, and even if they are, footprints can be faked. Stick some newspaper in the toes of shoes two or even three sizes too big for you and you're set. ”

“What footprints are these?” Thad asked.

“Doesn't matter,” Alan said, shaking his head. “We don't even have photos. I think we've got almost everything on the table that belongs there, Thad. Your fingerprints, your blood-type, your brand of cigarettes—”

“He doesn't—” Liz began.

Alan held up a placatory hand. “
Old
brand of cigarettes. I suppose I could be crazy for letting you in on all this—there's a part of me that says I am, anyway—but as long as we've gone this far, there's no sense ignoring the forest while we look at a few trees. You're tied in other ways, as well. Castle Rock is your legal residence as well as Ludlow, being as how you pay taxes in both places. Homer Gamache was more than just an acquaintance; he did . . . would odd jobs be correct?”

“Yes,” Liz said. “He retired from full-time caretaking the year we bought the house—Dave Phillips and Charlie Fortin take turns doing that now—but he liked to keep his band in. ”

“If we assume that the hitchhiker Mrs. Arsenault observed killed Homer—and that's the assumption we're going on—a question arises. Did the hitchhiker kill him because Homer was the first person to come along who was stupid enough—or drunk enough—to pick him up, or did he kill him because he was Homer Gamache, acquaintance of Thad Beaumont?”

“How could he know Homer
would
come along?” Liz asked.

“Because it was Homer's bowling night, and Homer is—was—a creature of habit. He was like an old horse, Liz; he always went back to the barn by the same route. ”

“Your first assumption,” Thad said, “was that Homer didn't stop because he was drunk but because he recognized the hitchhiker. A stranger who wanted to kill Homer wouldn't have tried the hitchhiking ploy at all. He would have figured it for a long shot, if not a totally lost cause. ”

“Yes. ”

“Thad,” Liz said in a voice which would not quite remain steady. “The police thought he stopped because he saw it was Thad . . . didn't they?”

“Yes,” Thad said. He reached across and took her hand. “They thought only someone like me—someone who knew him—would even try it that way. I suppose even the suit fits in. What else does the well-dressed writer wear when he's planning on doing murder in the country at one o'clock in the morning? The good tweed, of course . . . the one with the brown suede patches on the elbows of the jacket. All the British mysteries insist it's absolutely
de rigueur. ”

He looked at Alan.

“It's pretty goddamned odd, isn't it? The whole thing. ”

Alan nodded. “It's as odd as a cod. Mrs. Arsenault thought he'd started to cross the road or was at least on the verge of it when Homer came poking along in his pick-up. But the fact that you also knew this Clawson fellow in D. C. makes it seem more and more likely that Homer was killed because of who he was, not just because he was drunk enough to stop. So let's talk about Frederick Clawson, Thad. Tell me about him. ”

Thad and Liz exchanged a glance.

“I think,” Thad said, “that my wife might do the job more quickly and concisely than I could. She'll also swear less, I think. ”

“Are you sure you want me to do it?” Liz asked him.

Thad nodded. Liz began to speak, slowly at first, then picking up speed. Thad interrupted once or twice near the start, then settled back, content to listen. For the next half-hour, he hardly spoke. Alan Pangborn took out his notebook and jotted in it, but after a few initial questions, he did not interrupt much, either.

THE INVASION OF THE CREEPAZOID

“I call him a Creepazoid,” Liz began. “I'm sorry that he's dead . . . but that's what he was, just the same. I don't know if genuine Creepazoids are born or made, but they rise to their own slimy station in life either way, so I guess it doesn't matter. Frederick Clawson's happened to be Washington, D. C. He went to the biggest legal snake-pit on earth to study for the bar.

“Thad, the kiddos are stirring—will you give them their night-bottles? And I'd like another beer, please. ”

He got her the beer and then went out into the kitchen to warm the bottles. He wedged the kitchen door open so he could hear better . . . and slammed his kneecap in the process. This was something he had done so many times before that he barely noticed it.

The sparrows are flying again,
he thought, and rubbed at the scar on his forehead as be first filled a saucepan with warm water, then put it on the stove.
Now if I only knew what the fuck that means.

“We eventually got most of this story from Clawson himself,” Liz went on, “but his perspective was naturally a little skewed—Thad likes to say all of us are the heroes of our own lives, and according to Clawson he was more of a Boswell than a Creepazoid . . . but we were able to put together a more balanced version by adding stuff we got from the people at Darwin Press, which published the novels Thad wrote under Stark's name, and the stuff Rick Cowley passed along. ”

“Who is Rick Cowley?” Alan asked.

“The literary agent who handled Thad under both names. ”

“And what did Clawson—your Creepazoid—want?”

“Money,” Liz said dryly.

In the kitchen, Thad took the two night-bottles (only half full to help cut down on those inconvenient changes in the middle of the night) from the fridge and popped them in the pan of water. What Liz had said was right . . . but it was also wrong. Clawson had wanted a great deal more than money.

Liz might have read his mind.

“Not that money was
all
he wanted. I'm not even sure that was the main thing. He also wanted to be known as the man who exposed George Stark's real identity. ”

“Sort of like being the one who finally manages to unmask The Incredible Spider-Man?”

“Exactly. ”

Thad put a finger in the saucepan to test the water, then leaned back against the stove with his arms crossed, listening. He realized that he wanted a cigarette—for the first time in years he wanted a cigarette again.

Thad shivered.

“Clawson was in too many right places at too many right times,” Liz said. “Not only was he a law student, he was a part-time bookstore clerk. Not only was he a bookstore clerk, he was an avid fan of George Stark's. And he may have been the only George Stark fan in the country who had also read Thad Beaumont's two novels. ”

In the kitchen, Thad grinned—not without some sourness—and tested the water in the saucepan again.

“I think he wanted to create some sort of grand drama out of his suspicions,” Liz went on. “As things turned out, he had to work his fanny off to rise above the pedestrian. Once he had decided Stark was really Beaumont and vice-versa, he called Darwin Press. ”

“Stark's book publisher. ”

“Right. He got to Ellie Golden, the woman who edited the Stark novels. He asked the question straight out—please tell me if George Stark is really Thaddeus Beaumont. Ellie said the idea was ridiculous. Clawson then asked about the author photo on the back of the Stark novels. He said he wanted the address of the man in the picture. Ellie told him she couldn't give out the addresses of the publishing company's authors.

“Clawson said, ‘I don't want
Stark's
address, I want the address of the man in the picture. The man posing as Stark. ' Ellie told him he was being ridiculous—that the man in the author photo was George Stark. ”