The Dark Half Page 23

  "Okay, we'll wait and see," Thad agreed. "And while we're waiting and seeing, I hope you'll go ahead and keep your appointment with my doctor. "

  Pangborn as replying, something about making another call first, but all of a sudden Thad didn't much care. The acid was percolating up from his stomach again, and this time it was a volcano. Foxy George, he thought. They think they see through him. He wants them to think that. He is watching them see through him, and when they go away, far enough away, foxy old George will arrive in his black Toronado. And what am I going to do to stop him?

  He didn't know.

  He hung up the telephone, cutting off Alan Pangborn's voice, and went upstairs to help Liz change the twins and dress them for the afternoon.

  And he kept thinking about how it had felt, how it had felt to be somehow trapped in a telephone line running beneath the countryside of western Massachusetts, trapped down there in the dark with foxy old George Stark. It had felt like Endsville.

  3

  Ten minutes later the phone rang again. It stopped halfway through the second ring, and Wes the wireman called Thad to the phone. He went downstairs to take the call.

  "Where are the FBI agents?" he asked Wes.

  For a moment he really expected Wes to say, FBI agents? I didn't see any FBI agents.

  "Them? They left." Wes gave a big shrug, as if to ask Thad if he had expected anything else. "They got all these computers, and if someone doesn't play with them, I guess someone else wonders how come there's so much down-time, and they might have to take a budget cut, or something. "

  "Do they do anything?"

  "Nope," Wes said simply. "Not in cases like these. Or if they do, I've never been around when they did it. They write stuff down; they do that. Then they put it in a computer someplace. Like I said. "

  "I see. "

  Wes looked at his watch. "Me'n Dave are out of here, too. Equipment'll run on its own. You won't even get a bill. "

  "Good," Thad said, going to the phone. "And thank you. "

  "No problem. Mr. Beaumont?"

  Thad turned.

  "If I was to read one of your books, would you say I'd do better with one you wrote under your own name, or one under the other guy's name?"

  "Try the other guy," Thad said, picking up the phone. "More action. "

  Wes nodded, sketched a salute, and went out.

  "Hello?" Thad said. He felt as if he should have a telephone grafted onto the side of his head soon. It would save time and trouble. With recording and traceback equipment attached, of course. He could carry it around in a back-pack.

  "Hi, Thad. Alan. I'm still at the State Police Barracks. Listen, the news is not so good on the phone trace. Your friend called from a telephone kiosk in Penn Station. "

  Thad remembered what the other wireman, Dave, had said about installing all that expensive high-tech equipment in order to trace a call back to a bank of phones in a shopping mall somewhere. "Are you surprised?"

  "No. Disappointed, but not surprised. We hope for a slip, and believe it or not, we usually get one, sooner or later. I'd like to come over tonight. That okay?"

  "Okay," Thad said, "why not? If things get dull, we'll play bridge. "

  "We expect to have voice-prints by this evening. "

  "So you get his voice-print. So what?"

  "Not print. Prints. "

  "I don't--"

  "A voice-print is a computer-generated graphic which accurately represents a person's vocal qualities," Pangborn said. "It doesn't have anything to do with speech exactly --we're not interested in accents, impediments, pronunciation, that sort of thing. What the computer synthesizes is pitch and tone--what the experts call head voice--and timbre and resonance, which is known as chest or gut voice. They are verbal fingerprints, and like fingerprints, no one has ever found two which are exactly alike. I'm told that the difference in the voice-prints of identical twins is much wider than the difference in their fingerprints. "

  He paused.

  "We've sent a high-resolution copy of the tape we got to FOLE in Washington. What we'll get is a comparison of your voice-print and his voice-print. The guys at the State Police barracks here wanted to tell me I was crazy. I could see it in their faces, but after the fingerprints and your alibi, no one quite had the nerve to come right out and say it. "

  Thad opened his mouth, tried to speak, couldn't, wet his lips, tried again, and still couldn't.

  "Thad? Are you hanging up on me again?"

  "No," he said, and all at once there seemed to be a cricket in the middle of his voice. "Thank you, Alan. "

  "No, don't say that. I know what you're thanking me for, and I don't want to mislead you. All I'm trying to do is follow standard investigatory procedure. The procedure is a little odd in this case, granted, because the circumstances are a little odd. That doesn't mean you should make unwarranted assumptions. Get me?"

  "Yes. What's FOLE?"

  "F--? Oh. The Federal Office of Law Enforcement. Maybe the only good thing Nixon did the whole damn time he was in the White House. It's mostly made up of computer banks that serve as a central clearing-house for the local law-enforcement agencies . . . and the program-crunchers who run them, of course. We can access the fingerprints of almost anyone in America convicted of a felony crime since 1969 or so. FOLE also supplies ballistics reports for comparison, blood-typing on felons where available, voice-prints, and computer-generated pictures of suspected criminals. "

  "So we'll see if my voice and his--?"

  "Yes. We should have it by seven. Eight if there's heavy computer traffic down there. "

  Thad was shaking his head. "We didn't sound anything alike. "

  "I heard the tape and I know that," Pangborn said. "Let me repeat: a voice-print has absolutely nothing to do with speech. Head voice and gut voice, Thad. There's a big difference. "

  "But--"

  "Tell me something. Do Elmer Fudd and Daffy Duck sound the same to you?"

  Thad blinked. "Well . . . no. "

  "Not to me, either," Pangborn said, "but a guy named Mel Blanc does both of them . . . not to mention the voices of Bugs Bunny, Tweetie Bird, Foghorn Leghorn, and God knows how many others. I've got to go. See you tonight, okay?"

  "Yes. "

  "Between seven-thirty and nine, all right?"

  "We'll look for you, Alan. "

  "Okay. However this goes, I'll be heading back to The Rock tomorrow, and barring some unforeseen break in the case, there I will remain. "

  "The finger, having writ, moves on, right?" Thad said, and thought: That's what he's counting on, after all.

  "Yeah--I've got lots of other fish to fry. None are as big as this one, but the people of Castle County pay my salary for fryin em. You know what I mean?" This seemed to Thad to be a serious question and not just a placeholder in the conversation.

  "Yes. I do know." We both do. Me . . . and foxy George.

  "I'll have to go, but you'll see a State Police cruiser parked out in front of your house twenty-four hours a day until this thing is over. Those guys are tough, Thad. And if the cops in New York let down their guards a little, the Bears you got watching out for you won't. No one is going to underestimate this spook again. No one is going to forget you, or leave you and your family to cope with this on your own. People will be working on this case, and while they do, other people will be watching out for you and yours. You understand that, don't you?"

  "Yes. I understand." And thought: Today. Tomorrow. Next week. Maybe next month. But next year? No way. I know it. And he knows it, too. Right now they don't completely believe what he said about coming to his senses and laying off. Later on, they will . . . as the weeks pass and nothing happens, it will become more than politic for them to believe it; it will also become economic. Because George and I know how the world goes rolling around the sun in its accustomed groove, just as we know that, as soon as everybody is busy frying those other fish, George will show up and fry me. us.

  4

  Fifteen
minutes later, Alan was still in the Orono State Police Barracks, still on the telephone, and still on hold. There was a click on the line. A young woman spoke to him in a slightly apologetic tone. "Can you hold a little longer, Chief Pangborn? The computer is having one of its slow days. "

  Alan considered telling her he was a Sheriff, not a Chief, and then didn't bother. It was a mistake everyone made. "Sure," he said.

  Click.

  He was returned to Hold, that latter-twentieth-century version of limbo.

  He was sitting in a cramped little office all the way to the rear of the Barracks; any farther back and he would have been doing business in the bushes. The room was filled with dusty files. The only desk was a grammar-school refugee, the type with a sloping surface, a hinged lid, and an inkwell. Alan balanced it on his knees and swung it idly back and forth that way. At the same time he turned the piece of paper on the desk around and around. Written on it in Alan's small, neat hand were two pieces of information: Hugh Pritchard and Bergenfield County Hospital, Bergenfield, New Jersey.

  He thought of his last conversation with Thad, half an hour ago. The one where he had told him all about how the brave State Troopers were going to protect him and his wife from the bad old crazyman who thought he was George Stark, if the bad old crazyman showed up. Alan wondered if Thad had believed it. He doubted it; he guessed that a man who wrote fiction for a living would have a keen nose for fairy-tales.

  Well, they would try to protect Thad and Liz; give them that. But Alan kept remembering something which had happened in Bangor in 1985.

  A woman had requested and had received police protection after her estranged husband had beaten her severely and threatened to come back and kill her if she went through with her plans for a divorce. For two weeks, the man had done nothing. The Bangor P. D. had been about to cancel the watch when the husband showed up, driving a laundry truck and wearing green fatigues with the laundry's name on the back of the shirt. He had walked up to the door, carrying a bundle of laundry. The police might have recognized the man, even in the uniform, if he had come earlier, when the watch order was fresh, but that was moot; they hadn't recognized him when he did show up. He knocked on the door, and when the woman opened it, her husband pulled a gun out of his pants pocket and shot her dead. Before the cops assigned to her had fully realized what was happening, let alone got out of their car, the man had been standing on the stoop with his hands raised. He had tossed the smoking gun into the rose bushes. "Don't shoot me," he'd said calmly. "I'm finished." The truck and the uniform, it turned out, had been borrowed from an old drinking buddy who didn't even know the perp had been fighting with his wife.

  The point was simple: if someone wanted you badly enough, and if that someone had just a little luck, he would get you. Look at Oswald; look at Chapman; look what this fellow Stark had done to those people in New York.

  Click.

  "Are you still there, Chief?" the female voice from Bergenfield County Hospital asked brightly.

  "Yes," he said. "Still right here. "

  "I have the information you requested," she said. "Dr. Hugh Pritchard retired in 1978. I have an address and telephone number for him in the town of Fort Laramie, Wyoming. "

  "May I have it, please?"

  She gave it to him. Alan thanked her, hung up, and dialed the number. The telephone uttered half a ring, and then an answering machine cut in and began spieling its recorded announcement into Alan's ear.

  "Hello, this is Hugh Pritchard," a gravelly voice said. Well, Alan thought, the guy hasn't croaked, anyway-that's a step in the right direction. "Helga and I aren't in right now. I'm probably playing golf; God knows what Helga's up to." There was an old man's rusty chuckle. "If you've got a message, please leave it at the sound of the tone. You've got about thirty seconds. "

  Bee-eep!

  "Dr. Pritchard, this is Sheriff Alan Pangborn," he said. "I'm a law-enforcement officer in Maine. I need to talk to you about a man named Thad Beaumont. You removed a lesion from his brain in 1960, when he was eleven. Please call me collect at the Orono State Police Barracks--207. 555-2121. Thank you. "

  He finished in a mild sweat. Talking to answering machines always made him feel like a contestant on Beat the Clock.

  Why are you even bothering with all this?

  The answer he had given Thad was a simple one: procedure. Alan himself could not be satisfied with such a pat answer, because he knew it wasn't procedure. It might have been--conceivably--if this Pritchard had operated on the man calling himself Stark,

  (except he's not anymore now he says he knows who he really is) but he hadn't. He had operated on Beaumont, and in any case, that had been twenty-eight long years ago.

  So why?

  Because none of it was right, that was why. The fingerprints weren't, the blood-type obtained from the cigarette ends wasn't, the combination of cleverness and homicidal rage which their man had displayed wasn't, Thad's and Liz's insistence that the pen name was real wasn't. That most of all. That was the assertion of a couple of lunatics. And now he had something else which wasn't right. The State Police accepted the man's assertion that he now understood who he really was without a qualm. To Alan, it had all the authenticity of a three-dollar bill. It screamed trick, ruse, runaround.

  Alan thought maybe the man was still coming.

  But none of that answers the question, his mind whispered. Why are you bothering with all this? Why are you calling Fort Laramie, Wyoming, and chasing down an old doc who probably doesn't remember Thad Beaumont from a hole in the wall?

  Because I don't have anything better to do, he answered himself irritably. Because I can call from here without the town selectmen bitching about the goddam long-distance charges. And because THEY believe it--Thad and Liz. It's crazy, all right, but they seem sane enough otherwise . . . and, goddammit, THEY believe it. That doesn't mean I do.

  And be didn't.

  Did he?

  The day passed slowly. Dr. Pritchard didn't call back. But the voice-prints came in shortly after eight o'clock, and the voice-prints were amazing.

  5

  They weren't what Thad had expected at all.

  He had expected a sheet of graph paper covered with spiky mountains and valleys which Alan would try to explain. He and Liz would nod wisely, as people did when someone was explaining a thing too complex for them to understand, knowing that if they did ask questions, the explanations which followed would be even less comprehensible.

  Instead, Alan showed them two sheets of plain white paper. A single line ran across the middle of each. There were a few groups of spike-points, always in pairs or trios, but for the most part, the lines were peaceful (if rather irregular) sine-waves. And you only had to look from one to the other with the naked eye to see that they were either identical or very close to it.

  "That's it?" Liz asked.

  "Not quite," Alan said. "Watch." He slid one sheet on top of the other. He did this with the air of a magician performing an exceptionally fine trick. He held the two sheets up to the light. Thad and Liz stared at the doubled sheets.

  "They really are," Liz said in a soft, awed voice. "They're just the same. "

  "Well . . . not quite," Alan said, and pointed at three spots where the voice-print line on the undersheet showed through the tiniest bit. One of these show-throughs was above the line on the top sheet, the other two below. In all three cases, the show-through was in places where the line spiked. The sine-wave itself seemed to match perfectly. "The differences are in Thad's print, and they come only at stress-points." Alan tapped each show-through in turn. "Here: 'What do you want, you son of a bitch, just what the fuck do you want. ' And here: "That's a goddam lie and you know it. ' And, finally, here: 'Quit lying, goddammit. ' Right now everyone's focusing on these three minute differences, because they want to hang onto their assumption that no two voice-prints are ever alike. But the fact is, there weren't any stress-points in Stark's part of the conversation. The bastard stayed cool, calm, and c
ollected all the way through. "

  "Yeah," Thad said. "He sounded like he was drinking lemonade. "

  Alan put the voice-prints down on an endtable. "Nobody at State Police Headquarters really believes these are two different voice-prints, even with the minute differences," he said. "We got the prints back from Washington very fast. The reason I'm so late is because, after the expert in Augusta saw them, he wanted a copy of the tape. We sent it down on an Eastern Airlines commuter flight out of Bangor and they ran it through a gadget called an audio enhancer. They use it to tell if someone actually spoke the words under investigation or if they're listening to a voice which was on tape. "

  "Is it live or is it Memorex?" Thad said. He was sitting by the fireplace, drinking a soda.

  Liz had returned to the playpen after looking at the voice-prints. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, trying to keep William and Wendy from rapping their heads together as they examined each other's toes. "Why did they do that?"

  Alan cocked a thumb at Thad, who was grinning sourly. "Your husband knows. "

  Thad asked Alan, "With the little differences in the spikes, they can at least kid themselves that two different voices were speaking, even if they know better--mat was your point, wasn't it?"

  "Uh-huh. Even though I've never heard of voice-prints even remotely as dose as these." He shrugged. "Granted, my experience with them isn't as wide as the guys at POLE who study them for a living, or even the guys in Augusta who are more or less general practitioners--voice-prints, fingerprints, footprints, tire-prints. But I do read the literature, and I was there when the results came back, Thad. They are kidding themselves, yes, but they're not doing it very hard. "

  "So they've got three small differences, but they're not enough. The problem is that my voice was stressed and Stark's wasn't. So they went to this enhancer thing hoping for a fall-back position. Hoping, in fact, that Stark's end of the conversation would turn out to be a tape-recording. Made by me." He cocked an eyebrow at Alan. "Do I win the stewing chicken?"