The Dark Half(34)

'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.'

'Maybe he just didn't want to be recognized,' Liz said. 'Remember, Thad was in People magazine barely two weeks ago. Coast to coast.'

'Yeah, that's a possibility. Although if this guy also looks like your husband, Mrs Beaumont - '

'Liz.'

'Okay, Liz. If he looks like your husband, he'd look like Thad Beaumont with blonde hair, wouldn't he?'

Liz looked fixedly at Thad for a moment and then began to giggle.

'What's so funny?' Thad asked.

'I'm trying to imagine you blonde,' she said, still giggling. 'I think you'd look like a very depraved David Bowie.'

'Is that funny?' Thad asked Alan. 'I don't think that's funny.'.'Well . . .' Alan said, smiling.

'Never mind. The guy could have been wearing sunglasses and deelie-boppers as well as a blonde wig, for all we know.'

'Not if the killer was the same guy Mrs Arsenault saw getting into Homer's truck at quarter of one in the morning of June first,' Alan said.

Thad leaned forward. 'Did he look like me?' he asked.

'She couldn't tell much except that he was wearing a suit. For what it's worth, I had one of my men, Norris Ridgewick, show her your picture today. She said she didn't think it was you, although she couldn't say for sure. She said she thought the man who got into Homer's truck was bigger.' He added dryly: 'That's one lady who believes in erring on the side of caution.'

'She could tell a size difference from a picture?' Liz asked doubtfully.

'She's seen Thad around town, summers,' Alan said. 'And she did say she couldn't be sure.'

Liz nodded. 'Of course she knows him. Both of us, for that matter. We buy fresh stuff at their vegetable stand all the time. Dumb. Sorry.'

'Nothing to apologize for,' Alan said. He finished his beer and checked his crotch. Dry. Good. There was a light stain there, probably not anything anyone but his wife would notice. 'Anyhow, that brings me to the last point . . . or aspect . . . or whatever the hell you want to call it. I doubt if it's even a part of this, but it never hurts to check. What's your shoe-size, Mr Beaumont?'