The Dark Half(96)

Pritchard about an ongoing murder investigation in Castle County, Maine. What's his wife's name?'

'Helga.

'Where they from?'

'Fort Laramie, Wyoming.'

'Okay, Sheriff; here comes the hard part. What's your telephone credit card number?'

Sighing, Alan gave it to him.

A minute later he had the shadow-parade marching across the patch of sunlight on the wall again.

The guy will probably never call back, he thought, and if he does, he won't be able to tell me a goddam thing I can use - how could he?

Still, Henry had been right about one thing: he had a hunch. About something. And it wasn't going away.

3

While Alan Pangborn was speaking to Henry Payton, Thad Beaumont was parking in one of the faculty slots behind the English-Math building. He got out, being careful not to bang his left hand. For a moment he just stood there, digging the day and the unaccustomed dozy peace of the campus.

The brown Plymouth pulled in next to his Suburban, and the two big men who got out dispelled any dream of peace he might have been on the verge of building.

'I'm just going up to my office for a few minutes,' Thad said. 'You could stay down here, if you wanted.' He eyed two girls strolling by, probably on their way to East Annex to sign up for summer courses. One was wearing a halter top and blue shorts, the other an almost non-existent mini with no back and a hem that was a strong man's heartbeat away from the swell of her bu**ocks. 'Enjoy the scenery.'

The two state cops had turned to follow the girls' progress as if their heads were mounted on invisible swivels. Now the one in charge - Ray Garrison or Roy Harriman, Thad wasn't sure which - turned back and said regretfully, 'Sure would like to, sir, but we better come up with you.'

'Really, it's just the second floor - '

'We'll wait out in the hall.'

'You guys don't know how much all of this is starting to depress me,' Thad said.

'Orders,' Garrison-or-Harriman said. It was clear that Thad's depression - or happiness, for that matter - meant less than zero to him.

'Yeah,' Thad said, giving it up. 'Orders.'

He headed for the side door. The two cops followed him at a distance of a dozen paces, looking more like cops in their street-clothes than they ever had in their uniforms, Thad suspected. After the still, humid heat, the air-conditioning struck Thad with a wallop. All at once his shirt felt as if it were freezing to his skin. The building, so full of life and racket during the September-to-May academic year, felt a little creepy on this weekend afternoon at the end of spring. It would fill up to maybe a third of its usual hustle and bustle on Monday, when the first three-week.summer session started, but for today, Thad found himself feeling a trifle relieved to have his police guard with him. He thought the second floor, where his office was, might be entirely deserted, which would at least allow him to avoid the necessity of explaining his large, watchful friends.

It turned out not to be entirely deserted, but he got off easily just the same. Rawlie DeLesseps was wandering down the hallway from the department common room toward his own office, drifting in his usual Rawlie DeLesseps way . . . which meant he looked as if he might have recently sustained a hard blow to the head which had disrupted both his memory and his motor control. He moved dreamily from one side of the corridor to the other in mild loops, peering at the cartoons, poems, and announcements tacked to the bulletin boards on the locked doors of his colleagues. He might have been on his way to his office, it looked that way, but even someone who knew him well would probably have declined to make book on it. The stem of an enormous yellow pipe was clamped between his dentures. The dentures were not quite as yellow as the pipe, but they were close. The pipe was dead, had been since late 1985, when his doctor had forbidden him to smoke it following a mild heart attack. I never liked to smoke that much anyway, Rawlie would explain in his gentle, distracted voice when someone asked him about the pipe. But without the bit in my teeth . . . gentlemen, I would not know where to go or what to do if I were lucky enough to arrive there. Most times he gave the impression of not knowing where to go or what to do anyway . . . as he did now. Some people knew Rawlie for years before discovering he was not at all the absent-minded, educated fool he seemed to be. Some never discovered it at all.

'Hello, Rawlie,' Thad said, picking through his keys.

Rawlie blinked at him, shifted his gaze to scan the two men behind Thad, dismissed them, and returned his gaze to Thad once more.

'Hello, Thaddeus,' he said. 'I didn't think you were teaching any summer courses this year.'

'I'm not.'

'Then what can have possessed you to come here, of all places, on the first bona fide dog day of summer?'

'Just picking up some Honors files,' Thad said. 'I'm not going to be here any longer than I have to, believe me.'

'What did you do to your hand? It's black and blue all the way to the wrist.'

'Well,' Thad said, looking embarrassed. The story made him sound like a drunk or an idiot, or both . . . but it still went down a lot easier than the truth would have done. Thad had been dourly amused to find that the police-accepted it as easily as Rawlie did now - there had not been a single question about how or why he had managed to slam his own hand in the door of his bedroom closet.

He bad instinctively known exactly the right story to tell - even in his agony he had known that. He was expected to do clumsy things it was part of his character. In a way, it was like telling the interviewer from People (God rest his soul) that George Stark had been created in Ludlow instead of Castle Rock, and that the reason Stark wrote in longhand was because he had never learned to type.