The Dark Half

had to explain to me what all the hoop-de-doo 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.'

    Smiting 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 WI on the basis of fingerprint evidence.'

    'Yet here you have one on the rear-view 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 goddamn 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.'