The Dark Half (17 page)

“Previous to this, the publisher never came out and said it was just a pen name?” Alan asked. He sounded genuinely curious. “They took the position that he was a real man all along?”

“Oh yes—Thad insisted. ”

Yes,
he thought, taking the bottles out of the saucepan and testing the milk against the inside of his wrist.
Thad insisted. In retrospect, Thad doesn't know just why he insisted, does not in fact have the slightest idea, but Thad did indeed insist.

He took the bottles back into the living room, avoiding a collision with the kitchen table on the way. He gave a bottle to each twin. They hoisted them solemnly, sleepily, and began to suck. Thad sat down again. He listened to Liz and told himself that the thought of a cigarette was the furthest thing from his mind.

“Anyway,” Liz said, “Clawson wanted to ask more questions—he had a whole truckload of them, I guess—but Ellie wouldn't play. She told him to call Rick Cowley and then hung up on him. Clawson then called Rick's office and got Miriam. She's Rick's ex-wife. Also his partner in the agency. The arrangement's a little odd, but they get along very well.

“Clawson asked her the same thing—if George Stark was really Thad Beaumont. According to Miriam, she told him yes. Also that she was Dolley Madison. ‘I've divorced James, ' she said, ‘Thad is divorcing Liz, and we two shall marry in the spring!' And hung up. She then rushed into Rick's office and told him some guy in Washington, D. C., was prying around the edges of Thad's secret identity. After that, Clawson's calls to Cowley Associates netted him nothing but quick hang-ups. ”

Liz took a long swallow of her beer.

“He didn't give up, though. I've decided that real Creepazoids never do. He just decided that pretty-please wasn't going to work. ”

“And he didn't call Thad?” Alan asked.

“No, not once. ”

“You have an unlisted number, I suppose. ”

Thad made one of his few direct contributions to the story. “We're not listed in the public directories, Alan, but the phone here in Ludlow is listed in the Faculty Directory. It has to be. I'm a teacher, and I have advisees. ”

“But the guy never went directly to the horse's mouth,” Alan marvelled.

“He got in touch later on . . . by letter,” Liz said. “But that's getting ahead of things. Should I go on?”

“Please,” Alan said. “It's a fascinating story in its own right. ”

“Well,” Liz said, “it took our Creepazoid just three weeks and probably less than five hundred dollars to ferret out what he was positive about all along—that Thad and George Stark were the same man.

“He started with
Literary Market Place,
which publishing types just call
LMP.
It's a digest of names, addresses, and business phone numbers for just about everyone in the field—writers, editors, publishers, agents. Using that and the ‘People' column in
Publishers Weekly,
he managed to isolate half a dozen Darwin Press employees who left the company between the summer of 1986 and the summer of 1987.

“One of them had the information and was willing to spill it. Ellie Golden's pretty sure the culprit was the girl who was the chief comptroller's secretary for eight months in '85 and '86. Ellie called her a slut from Vassar with bad nasal habits. ”

Alan laughed.

“Thad believes that's who it was, too,” Liz went on, “because the smoking gun turned out to be photostats of royalty statements for George Stark. They came from the office of Roland Burrets. ”

“The Darwin Press chief comptroller,” Thad said. He was watching the twins while he listened. They were lying on their backs now, sleep-suited feet pressed chummily together, bottles pointed toward the ceiling. Their eyes were glassy and distant. Soon, he knew, they would fall asleep for the night . . . and when they did, they would do it together.
They do everything together,
Thad thought.
The babies are sleepy and the sparrows are flying.

He touched the scar again.

“Thad's name wasn't on the photostats,” Liz said. “Royalty statements sometimes lead to checks, but they're not checks themselves, so it didn't have to appear there. You follow that, don't you?”

Alan nodded.

“But the address still told him most of what he needed to know. It was Mr. George Stark, P. O. Box 1642, Brewer, Maine 04412. That's a long way from Mississippi, where Stark was supposed to live. A look at a Maine map would have told him that the town immediately south of Brewer is Ludlow, and he knew what well-regarded if not exactly famous writer lived there. Thaddeus Beaumont. What a coincidence.

“Neither Thad nor I ever saw him in person, but he saw
Thad
. He knew when Darwin Press mailed out its quarterly royalty checks from the photostats he had already received. Most royalty checks go to the author's agent first. Then the agent issues a new one, which reflects the original amount minus his commission. But in Stark's case, the comptroller mailed the checks directly to the Brewer post office box. ”

“What about the agent's commission?” Alan asked.

“Clipped off the total amount at Darwin Press and sent to Rick by separate check,” Liz said. “That would have been another dear signal to Clawson that George Stark wasn't what he claimed to be . . . only by then, Clawson didn't need any more dues. He wanted hard proof. And set out to get it.

“When it was time for the royalty check to be issued, Clawson flew up here. He stayed at the Holiday Inn nights; he spent his days ‘staking out' the Brewer post office. That's exactly bow he put it in the letter Thad got later on. It was a stakeout. All very
film noir
. It was a pretty cut-rate investigation, though. If ‘Stark' hadn't shown up to collect his check on the fourth day of his stay, Clawson would have had to fold his tent and steal back into the night. But I don't think it would have ended there. When a genuine Creepazoid gets his teeth in you, he doesn't let go until he's bitten out a big chunk. ”

“Or until you knock his teeth out,” Thad grunted. He saw Alan turn in his direction, eyebrows raised, and grimaced. Bad choice of words. Someone had apparently done just that to Liz's Creepazoid . . . or something even worse.

“It's a moot question, anyway,” Liz resumed, and Alan turned back to her. “It didn't take that long. On the third day, while he was sitting on a park bench across from the post office, he saw Thad's Suburban pull into one of the ten-minute parking slots near the post office. ”

Liz took another swallow of beer and wiped foam off 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 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. ”

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

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 . . . ”