The Dark Half Page 11

  Quit it, he told himself. You're not a jumpy man, and there's no need to let this bizarre situation make you into one. The sound you heard--the sound of the birds--is a simple psychological phenomenon called "persistence of memory." It's brought on by stress and pressure. So just get yourself under control

  But some of the terror lingered. The sound of the birds had caused not only deja vu, that sense of having experienced something before, but presque vu as well.

  Presque vu: a sense of experiencing something which has not happened yet but will. Not precognition, exactly, but misplaced memory.

  Misplaced bullshit, that's what you mean.

  He held his hands out and looked fixedly at them. The trembling became infinitesimal, then stopped altogether. When he was sure he wasn't going to pinch Wendy's bath-pink skin into the zipper of her sleep-suit, he pulled it up, carried her into the living room, popped her into the playpen with her brother, then went out to the hall, where Liz was standing with Alan Pangborn. Except for the fact that Pangborn was alone this time, it could have been this morning all over again.

  Now this is a legitimate time and place for a little vu of one kind or another, he thought, but there was nothing funny in it. That other feeling was still too much with him . . . and the sound of the sparrows. "What can I do for you, Sheriff?" he asked, not smiling.

  Ah! Something else that wasn't the same. Pangborn had a six-pack in one hand. Now he held it up. "I wondered if we could all have a cold one," he said, "and talk this over. "

  3

  Liz and Alan Pangborn both had a beer; Thad drank a Pepsi from the fridge. As they talked, they watched the twins play with each other in their oddly solemn way.

  "I have no business being here," Alan said. "I'm socializing with a man who is now a suspect in not just one murder but two. "

  "Two!" Liz cried.

  "I'll get to it. In fact, I'll get to everything. I guess I'm going to spill it all. For one thing, I'm sure your husband has an alibi for this second murder, as well. The State cops are, too. They're quietly running around in circles. "

  "Who's been killed?" Thad asked.

  "A young man named Frederick Clawson, in Washington, D. C." He watched as Liz jerked in her chair, spilling a little beer over the back of her hand. "I see you know the name, Mrs. Beaumont," he added without noticeable irony.

  "What's going on?" she asked in a strengthless whisper.

  "I don't have the slightest idea what's going on. I'm going crazy trying to figure it out. I'm not here to arrest you or even to hassle you, Mr. Beaumont, although I'll be goddamned if I can understand how someone else can have committed these two crimes. I'm here to ask for your help. "

  "Why don't you call me Thad?"

  Alan shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "I think I'd be more comfortable with Mr. Beaumont, for the time being. "

  Thad nodded. "Just as you like. So Clawson's dead." He looked down meditatively for a moment, then up at Alan again. "Were my fingerprints all over the scene of this crime, as well?"

  "Yes--and in more ways than one. People magazine did a write-up on you recently, didn't they, Mr. Beaumont?"

  "Two weeks ago," Thad agreed.

  "The article was found in Clawson's apartment. One page appears to have been used as a symbol in what looks like a highly ritualized murder. "

  "Christ," Liz said. She sounded both tired and horrified.

  "Are you willing to tell me who he is to you?" Alan asked.

  Thad nodded. "There's no reason not to. Did you happen to read that article, Sheriff?"

  "My wife brings the magazine home from the supermarket," he said, "but I better tell you the truth--I only looked at the pictures. I intend to go back and read the text as soon as I can. "

  "You didn't miss much--but Frederick Clawson is the reason that article happened. You see--"

  Alan held up a hand. "We'll get to him, but let's go back to Homer Gamache first. We've rechecked with A. S. R. and I. The prints on Gamache's truck--and in Clawson's apartment, too, although none of them are as perfect as the bubble-gum print and the mirror print--do seem to match yours exactly. Which means if you didn't do it, we have two people with exactly the same prints, and that one belongs in the Guinness Book of World Records. "

  He looked at William and Wendy, who were trying to play pat-a-cake in their playpen. They seemed to be mostly endangering each other's eyesight. "Are they identical?" he asked.

  "No," Liz said. "They do look alike, but they're brother and sister. And brother-sister twins are never identical. "

  Alan nodded. "Not even identical twins have identical prints," he said. He paused for a moment and then added in a casual voice which Thad believed was completely counterfeit: "You don't happen to have a twin brother, do you, Mr. Beaumont?"

  Thad shook his head slowly. "No," he said. "I don't have any siblings at all, and my folks are dead. William and Wendy are my only living blood relatives." He smiled at the children, then looked back at Pangborn. "Liz had a miscarriage back in 1974," he said. "Those . . . those first ones . . . were also twins, I understand, although I don't suppose there's any way of telling if they would have been identical--not when the miscarriage comes in the third month. And if there is, who would want to know?"

  Alan shrugged, looking a little embarrassed.

  "She was shopping at Filene's. In Boston. Someone pushed her. She fell all the way down an escalator, cut one arm pretty badly--if a security cop hadn't been there to put a tourniquet right on it, it would have been touch and go for her, too--and she lost the twins. "

  "Is this in the People article?" Alan asked.

  Liz smiled humorlessly and shook her head. "We reserved the right to edit our lives when we agreed to do the story, Sheriff Pangborn. We didn't tell Mike Donaldson, the man who came to do the interview, of course, but that's what we did. "

  "Was the push deliberate?"

  "No way to tell," Liz said. Her eyes settled on William and Wendy . . . brooded upon them. "If it was an accidental bump, it was a damned hard one, though. I went flying--didn't touch the escalator at all until I was almost halfway down. All the same, I've tried to convince myself that's what it was. It's easier to get along with. The idea that someone would push a woman down a steep escalator just to see what happened . . . that's an idea guaranteed to keep you awake nights. "

  Alan nodded.

  "The doctors we saw told us Liz would probably never have another child," Thad said. "When she got pregnant with William and Wendy, they told us she'd probably never carry them all the way to term. But she sailed through it. And, after ten years, I've finally gotten to work on a new book under my own name. It'll be my third. So you see, it's been good for both of us. "

  "The other name you wrote under was George Stark. "

  Thad nodded. "But that's over now. It started being over when Liz got into her eighth month, still safe and sound. I decided if I was going to be a father again, I ought to start being myself again, as well. "

  4

  There was a kind of beat in the conversation then--not quite a pause. Then Thad said, "Confess, Sheriff Pangborn. "

  Alan raised his eyebrows. "Beg your pardon?"

  A smile touched the corners of Thad's mouth. "I won't say you had the scenario all worked out, but I bet you at least had the broad strokes. If I had an identical twin brother, maybe he hosted our party. That way I could have been in Castle Rock, murdering Homer Gamache and putting my fingerprints all over his truck. But it couldn't stop there, could it? My twin sleeps with my wife and keeps my appointments while I drive Homer's truck to that rest stop in Connecticut, steal another car there, drive to New York, ditch the hot car, then take a train or a plane to Washington, D. C. Once I'm there, I waste Clawson and hurry back to Ludlow, pack my twin off to wherever he was, and he and I both take up the threads of our lives again. Or all three of us, if you assume Liz here was part of the deception. "

  Liz stared at him for a moment, and then began to laugh. She did not laugh long,
but she laughed hard while she did. There was nothing forced about it, but it was grudging laughter, all the same--an expression of humor from a woman who has been surprised into it.

  Alan was looking at Thad with frank and open surprise. The twins laughed at their mother for a moment--or perhaps with her--and then resumed rolling a large yellow ball slowly back and forth in the playpen.

  "Thad, that's horrible, " Liz said when she had gained control of herself.

  "Maybe it is," he said. "If so, I'm sorry. "

  "It's . . . pretty involved," Alan said.

  Thad grinned at him. "You're not a fan of the late George Stark, I take it. "

  "Frankly, no. But I have a deputy, Norris Ridgewick, who is. He had to explain to me what all the hoop-dedoo was about. "

  "Well, Stark messed with some of the conventions of the mystery story. Never anything so Agatha Christie as the scenario I just suggested, but that doesn't mean I can't think that way if I put my mind to it. Come on, Sheriff--had the thought crossed your mind, or not? If not, I really do owe my wife an apology. "

  Alan was silent for a moment, smiling a little and clearly thinking a lot. At last he said, "Maybe I was thinking along those lines. Not seriously, and not just that way, but you don't have to apologize to your good lady. Since this morning I've found myself willing to consider even the most outrageous possibilities. "

  "Given the situation. "

  "Given the situation, yes. "

  Smiling himself, Thad said: "I was born in Bergenfield, New Jersey, Sheriff. There's no need to take my word when you can check the records for any twin brothers I may have, you know, forgotten. "

  Alan shook his head and drank some more of his beer. "It was a wild idea, and I feel a little like a horse's ass, but that's not completely new. I've felt that way since this morning, when you sprang that party on us. We ran down the names, by the way. They check out. "

  "Of course they do," Liz said with a touch of asperity.

  "And since you don't have a twin brother anyway, it pretty well closes the subject. "

  "Suppose for a second," Thad said, "just for the sake of argument, that it did happen the way I suggested. It would make a hell of a yarn . . . up to a point.

  "What point is that?" Alan asked.

  "The fingerprints. Why would I go to all the trouble of setting up an alibi here with a fellow who looked just like me . . . then bugger it all by leaving fingerprints at the scenes of the murders?"

  Liz said, "I bet you really will check the birth records, won't you, Sheriff?"

  Alan said stolidly: "The basis of police procedure is beat it until it's dead. But I already know what I'll find if I do." He hesitated, then added, "It wasn't just the party. You came across as a man who was speaking the truth, Mr. Beaumont. I've had some experience telling the difference. So far as I've been able to tell in my time as a police officer, there are very few good liars in the world. They may show up from time to time in those mystery novels you were talking about, but in real life they're pretty rare. "

  "So why the fingerprints at all?" Thad asked. "That's what interests me. Is it just an amateur with my prints you're looking for? I doubt it. Has it crossed your mind that the very quality of the prints is suspect? You spoke of gray areas. I know a little bit about prints as a result of the research I did for the Stark novels, but I'm really quite lazy when it comes to that end of the job--it's so much easier just to sit there in front of the typewriter and make up lies. But don't there have to be a certain number of points of comparison before fingerprints can even be entered into evidence?"

  "In Maine it's six," Alan said. "Six perfect compares have to be present for a fingerprint to be admitted as evidence. "

  "And isn't it true that in most cases fingerprints are only half-prints, or quarter-prints, or just smudgy' blurs with a few loops and whorls in them?"

  "Yeah. In real life, criminals hardly ever go to jail on the basis of fingerprint evidence. "

  "Yet here you have one on the rearview mirror which you described as being as good as any print rolled in a police station, and another all but molded in a wad of gum. Somehow that's the one that really gets me. It's as if the fingerprints were put there for you to find. "

  "It's crossed our minds." In fact, it had done a good deal more. It was one of the most aggravating aspects of the case. The Clawson murder looked like a classic gangland hit on a blabbermouth: tongue cut out, penis in the victim's mouth, lots of blood, lots of pain, yet no one in the building had heard a goddam thing. But if it had been a professional job, how come Beaumont's prints were all over the place? Could anything which looked so much like a frame not be a frame? Not unless someone had come up with a brand-new gimmick. In the meantime, the old maxim still held good with Alan Pangborn: if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and swims like a duck, it's probably a duck.

  "Can fingerprints be planted?" Thad asked.

  "Do you read minds as well as write books, Mr. Beaumont?"

  "Read minds, write books, but honey, I don't do windows. "

  Alan had a mouthful of beer, and laughter so surprised him that he almost sprayed it over the carpet. He managed to swallow, although some went down his windpipe and he began to cough. Liz got up and whammed him briskly on the back several times. It was perhaps an odd thing to do, but it did not strike her as odd; life with two small babies had conditioned her. William and Wendy stared from the playpen, the yellow ball stopped dead and forgotten between them. William began to laugh. Wendy took her cue from him.

  For some reason, this made Alan laugh harder.

  Thad joined in. And, still pounding on his back, Liz also began to laugh.

  "I'm okay," Alan said, still coughing and laughing. "Really. "

  Liz whacked him one final time. Beer splurted up the neck of Alan's bottle like a geyser letting off steam and splatted onto the crotch of his pants.

  "S'okay," Thad said. "Diapers we got. "

  Then they were laughing all over again, and at some time between the moment when Alan Pangborn started coughing and the one when he finally managed to stop laughing, the three of them had become at least temporary friends.

  5

  "So far as I know or have been able to find out, fingerprints can't be planted," Alan said, picking up the thread of conversation some time later--by now they were on their second round, and the embarrassing stain on the crotch of his pants was beginning to dry. The twins had fallen asleep in the playpen, and Liz had left the room to go to the bathroom. "Of course, we're still checking, because up until this morning we had no reason to suspect anything like that might even have been tried in this case. I know it has been tried; a few years ago a kidnapper took imprints of his prisoner's fingerpads before killing him, turned them into . . . dies, I suppose you'd call them . . . and stamped them into very thin plastic. He put the plastic fingertips over the pads of his own fingers, and attempted to leave the prints all over his victim's mountain cabin, so the police would think the whole kidnapping was a hoax and the guy was free. "

  "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. "