The Dark Half

her upper lip. When her hand came away, she was smiling.

  'Now here's the part I like,' she said. 'It's just d-d-delicious, as the gay fellow in Brideshead Revisited used to say. Clawson had a camera. This little tiny camera, the sort you can cup in the palm of your hand. When you're ready to take your shot, you just spread your fingers a little to let the lens peek through, and bingo! There you are.'

  She giggled a little, shaking her head at the image.

    'He said in his letter he got it from some catalogue that sells spy gear — telephone bugs, goo you swab on envelopes to turn them transparent for ten or fifteen minutes, self- destructing briefcases, stuff like that. Secret Agent X-9 Clawson, reporting for duty. I bet he would have gotten a hollow tooth filled with cyanide, if it was legal to sell them. He was heavily into the image.

    'Anyhow, he got half a dozen fairly passable photos. Not arty stuff, but you could see who the subject was and what he was doing. There was a shot of Thad approaching the post office boxes in the lobby, a shot of Thad putting his key into box 1642, and one of him removing an envelope.'

   'He sent you copies of these?' Alan asked. She had said he wanted money, and Alan guessed the lady knew what she was talking about. The setup did more than smell of blackmail; it reeked of it.

    'Oh yes. And an enlargement of the last one. You can read part of the return address — the letters DARW, and you can clearly make out the Darwin Press colophon above it.'

'X-9 strikes again,' Alan said.

   'Yes. X-9 strikes again. He got the photos developed, and then he flew back to Washington. We got his letter, with the photos included, only a few days later. The letter was really marvelous. He skated up to the edge of threat, but never once over the edge.'

'He was a law student,' Thad said.

   'Yes,' Liz agreed. 'He knew just how far he could go, apparently. Thad can get you the letter, but I can paraphrase. He started by saying how much he admired both halves of what he called Thad's 'divided mind.' He recounted what he'd found out and how he'd done it. Then he went on to his real business. He was very careful about showing us the hook, but the hook was there. He said he was an aspiring writer himself, but he didn't have much time to write — his law studies were demanding, but that was only part of it. The real problem, he said, was that he had to work in a bookstore to help pay his tuition and other bills. He said he would like to show Thad some of his work, and if Thad thought it showed promise, perhaps he might feel moved to put together an assistance package to help him along the way.'

  'An assistance package,' Alan said, bemused. 'Is that what they're calling it these days?'

  Thad threw back his head and laughed.

    'That's what Clawson called it, anyway. I think I can quote the last bit by heart. 'I know this must seem a very forward request to you on first reading,' he said, 'but I am sure that if you studied my work, you would quickly understand that such an arrangement might hold advantages for both of us.'

  'Thad and I raved about it for awhile, then we laughed about it, then I think we raved some more.'

  'Yeah,' Thad said. 'I don't know about the laughing, but we sure did do a lot of raving.'

  'Finally we got down to just plain talking. We talked almost until midnight. We both recognized Clawson's letter and his photographs for what they were, and once Thad got over being angry — '

  'I'm still not over being angry,' Thad interjected, 'and the guy's dead.'

    'Well, once the yelling died down, Thad was almost relieved. He'd wanted to jettison Stark for quite awhile, and he'd already gotten to work on a long, serious book of his own. Which he's still doing. It's called The Golden Dog. I've read the first two hundred pages, and it's lovely. Much better than the last couple of things he churned out as George Stark. So Thad decided — '

  'We decided,' Thad said.

  'Okay, we decided that Clawson was a blessing in disguise, a way to hurry along what was already coming. Thad's only fear was that Rick Cowley wouldn't like the idea much, because George Stark was earning more for the agency than Thad, by far. But he was a real honey about it. In fact, he said it might just generate some publicity that would help in a number of areas: Stark's backlist, Thad's own backlist — '

  'All two books of it,' Thad put in with a smile.

  '— and the new book, when it finally comes out.'

  'Pardon me — what's a backlist?' Alan asked.

   Grinning now, Thad said: 'The old books they no longer put in the big fancy dump-bins at the front of the chain bookstores.'

'So you went public.'

   'Yes,' Liz said. 'First to the AP here in Maine and to Publishers Weekly, but the story popped up on the national wire Stark was a best-selling writer, after all, and the fact that he never really existed at all made for interesting filler on the back pages. And then People magazine got in touch.

  'We got one more squealing, angry letter from Frederick Clawson, telling us how mean and nasty and thankless we were. He seemed to think we had no right to take him out of things the way we had, because he had done all the work and all Thad had done was to write a few books. After that he signed off.'

  'And now he's signed off for good,' Thad said.

'No,' Alan said. 'Someone signed off for him . . . and that's a big difference.'

A silence fell among them. It was short . . . but very, very heavy.

3

Alan thought for several minutes. Thad and Liz let him. At last he looked up and said, 'Okay. Why? Why would anyone resort to murder over this? Especially after the secret had already come out?'

   Thad shook his head. 'If it has to do with me, or the books I wrote as George Stark, I don't know who or why.'

   'And over a pen name?' Alan asked in a musing voice. 'I mean — no offense intended, Thad, but it wasn't exactly a classified document or a big military secret.'

'No offense taken,' Thad said. 'In fact, I couldn't agree more.'

   'Stark had a lot of fans,' Liz said. 'Some of them were angry that Thad wasn't going to write any more novels as Stark. People got some letters after the article, and Thad's gotten a bunch. One lady went so far as to suggest that Alexis Machine should come out of retirement and cook Thad's goose.'

  'Who's Alexis Machine?' Alan had produced the notebook again.

  Thad grinned. 'Soft, soft, my good Inspector. Machine's just a character in two of the novels George wrote. The first and the last.'

  'A fiction by a fiction,' Alan said, putting the notebook back. 'Great.'

  Thad, meanwhile, looked mildly startled. 'A fiction by a fiction,' he said. 'That's not bad. Not bad at all.'

    'My point was this,' Liz said. 'Maybe Clawson had a friend always assuming Creepazoids have friends — who was a rabid Stark fan. Maybe he knew Clawson was really responsible for blowing the story wide open, and got so mad because there wouldn't be any more Stark novels that he . . . '

  She sighed, looked down at her beer—bottle for a moment, then raised her head again.

  'That's actually pretty lame, isn't it?'

    'I'm afraid so,' Alan said kindly, then looked at Thad. 'You ought to be down on your knees thanking God for your alibi now, even if you weren't before. You do realize this makes you look even tastier as a suspect, don't you?'

    'I suppose in a way it does,' Thad agreed. 'Thaddeus Beaumont has written two books hardly anybody has read. The second, published eleven years ago, didn't even review very well. The infinitesimal advances he got didn't earn out; it'll be a wonder if he can even get published again, with the business being what it is. Stark, on the other hand, makes money by the fistful. They're discreet fistfuls, but the books still earn six times what I make teaching each year. This guy Clawson comes along, with his carefully worded blackmail threat. I refuse to cave in, but my only option is to go public with the story myself. Not long after, Clawson is killed. It looks like a great motive, but it's really not. Killing a would-be blackmailer after you've already told the secret yourself would be dumb.'

'Yes . . . but there's always revenge.'