The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

  Then a horrible idea occurred to her. What if policemen were watching the Trans Am? Wasn’t the car a crime scene, like on television? Wouldn’t cops and photographers be standing around it, keeping guard? And sure, the car was parked a good bit away from the tower—but would Hely have the sense to avoid a crowd, if he saw it? For that matter—would he be able to get near the tower at all? There were the warehouses, sure, closer to where the car was parked, and probably they’d look there first. But eventually they’d spread out toward the tower, wouldn’t they? She cursed herself for not warning him to be careful. If there were a lot of people, he’d have no choice but to turn around and come home.

  Around midmorning, the doctor interrupted these worries. He was Harriet’s regular doctor, who saw her when she had red throat or tonsillitis, but Harriet didn’t like him much. He was young, with a heavy drab face and prematurely heavy jowls; his features were stiff and his manner cold and sarcastic. His name was Dr. Breedlove but—partly because of the steep prices he charged—Edie had given him the nickname (grown popular locally) of “Dr. Greedy.” His unfriendliness, it was said, had kept him from a more desirable post in a better town—but he was so very curt that Harriet didn’t feel she had to keep up a false front of chumminess and smiles as she did with most adults, and for this reason she respected him grudgingly in spite of everything.

  As Dr. Greedy circled her bed, he and Harriet avoided each other’s eyes like two hostile cats. Coolly he surveyed her. He looked at her chart. Presently he demanded: “Do you eat a lot of lettuce?”

  “Yes,” said Harriet, although she did no such thing.

  “Do you soak it in salt water?”

  “No,” said Harriet, as soon as she saw that no was the answer expected of her.

  He muttered something about dysentery, and unwashed lettuce from Mexico, and—after a brooding pause—he hung her chart back on the foot of her bed with a clang and turned and left.

  Suddenly the telephone rang. Harriet—heedless of the IV in her arm—grabbed for it before the first ring was done.

  “Hey!” It was Hely. In the background, gymnasium echoes. The high-school orchestra practiced in folding chairs on the basketball court. Harriet could hear a whole zoo of tuning-up noises: honks and chirps, clarinet squeaks and trumpet blatts.

  “Wait,” said Harriet, when he started talking without interruption, “no, stop a second.” The pay phone in the school gymnasium was in a high-traffic area, no place to have a private conversation. “Just answer yes or no. Did you get it?”

  “Yes, sir.” He was talking in a voice which didn’t sound at all like James Bond, but which Harriet recognized as his James Bond voice. “I retrieved the weapon.”

  “Did you throw it where I told you?”

  Hely crowed. “Q,” he cried, “have I ever let you down?”

  In the small, sour pause that followed, Harriet became aware of noise in the background, jostles and whispers.

  “Hely,” she said, sitting up straighter, “who’s there with you?”

  “Nobody,” said Hely, a little too fast. But she could hear the bump in his voice as he said it, like he was knocking some kid with his elbow.

  Whispers. Somebody giggled: a girl. Anger flashed through Harriet like a jolt of electricity.

  “Hely,” she said, “you’d better not have anybody there with you, no,” she said, above Hely’s protestations, “listen to me. Because—”

  “Hey!” Was he laughing? “What’s your problem?”

  “Because,” said Harriet, raising her voice as far as she dared, “your fingerprints are on the gun.”

  Except for the band, and the jostles and whispers of the kids in the background, there was no sound on the other end at all.

  “Hely?”

  When finally he spoke, his voice was cracked and distant. “I—Get away,” he said crossly, to some anonymous sniggerer in the background. Slight scuffle. The receiver banged against the wall. Hely came on again after a moment or two.

  “Hang on, would you?” he said.

  Bang went the receiver again. Harriet listened. Agitated whispers.

  “No, you—” said someone.

  More scuffling. Harriet waited. Footsteps, running away; something shouted, indistinct. When Hely returned, he was out of breath.

  “Jeez,” he said, in an aggrieved whisper. “You set me up.”

  Harriet—breathing hard herself—was silent. Her own fingerprints were on the gun too, though certainly there was no point in reminding him of that.

  “Who have you told?” she demanded, after a cold silence.

  “Nobody. Well—only Greg and Anton. And Jessica.”

  Jessica? thought Harriet. Jessica Dees?

  “Come on, Harriet.” Now he was being all whiny. “Don’t be so mean. I did what you told me to.”

  “I didn’t ask you to tell Jessica Dees.”

  Hely made an exasperated noise.

  “It’s your fault. You shouldn’t have told anybody. Now you’re in trouble and I can’t help you.”

  “But—” Hely struggled for words. “That’s not fair!” he said at last. “I didn’t tell anybody it was you!”

  “Me that what?”

  “I don’t know—whatever it was you did.”

  “What makes you think I did anything?”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Who went to the tower with you?”

  “Nobody. I mean …” said Hely unhappily, realizing his mistake too late.

  “Nobody.”

  Silence.

  “Then,” said Harriet (Jessica Dees! was he nuts?), “it’s your gun. You can’t even prove I asked you.”

  “I can so!”

  “Yeah? How?”

  “I can,” he said sullenly, but without conviction. “I can too. Because …”

  Harriet waited.

  “Because …”

  “You can’t prove a thing,” said Harriet. “And your fingerprints are all over it, the you-know-what. So you better go right now and think of something to tell Jessica and Greg and Anton unless you want to go to jail and die in the electric chair.”

  At this, Harriet thought she had strained even Hely’s credulity but—judging from the stunned silence on the other end—apparently not.

  “Look, Heal,” she said, taking pity on him. “I’m not going to tell on you.”

  “You won’t?” he said faintly.

  “No! It’s just you and me. Nobody knows if you didn’t tell ’em.”

  “They don’t?”

  “Look, just go tell Greg and those people you were pulling their leg,” said Harriet—waving goodbye to Nurse Coots, who was sticking her head in the door to say goodbye at the end of her shift. “I don’t know what you told them but say you made it up.”

  “What if somebody finds it?” said Hely hopelessly. “What then?”

  “When you went down to the tower, did you see anybody?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see the car?”

  “No,” said Hely, after a moment of puzzlement. “What car?”

  Good, thought Harriet. He must have stayed away from the road, and come around the back way.

  “What car, Harriet? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Did you throw it in the deep part of the river?”

  “Yes. Off the railroad bridge.”

  “That’s good.” Hely had taken a risk, climbing up there, but he couldn’t have picked a lonelier spot. “And nobody saw? You’re sure?”

  “No. But they can drag the river.” Silence. “You know,” he said. “My prints.”

  Harriet didn’t correct him. “Look,” she said. With Hely you had to just keep saying the same thing over and over until he got the message. “If Jessica and those people don’t tell, nobody’ll ever know to look for any … item.”

  Silence.

  “So what exactly did you tell them?”

  “I didn’t tell them the exact story.”

  True enough, thought Har
riet. Hely didn’t know the exact story.

  “What, then?” she said.

  “It was basically—I mean, it was sort of what was in the paper this morning. About Farish Ratliff getting shot. They didn’t say a whole lot, except that the dogcatcher found him last night when he was chasing a wild dog that ran off the street and back toward the old gin. Except I left out that part, about the dogcatcher. I made it, you know …”

  Harriet waited.

  “… more spy.”

  “Well, go make it some more spy,” suggested Harriet. “Tell ’em—”

  “I know!” Now he was excited again. “That’s a great idea! I can make it like From Russia with Love. You know, with the briefcase—”

  “—that shoots bullets and teargas.”

  “That shoots bullets and teargas! And the shoes! The shoes!” He was talking about Agent Klebb’s shoes that had switchblades in the toes.

  “Yeah, that’s great. Hely—”

  “And the brass knuckles, you know, on the Training Ground, you know, where she punches that big blond guy in the stomach?”

  “Hely? I wouldn’t say too much.”

  “No. Not too much. Like a story, though,” Hely suggested cheerfully.

  “Right,” said Harriet. “Like a story.”

  ————

  “Lawrence Eugene Ratliff?”

  The stranger stopped Eugene before he got to the stairwell. He was a large, cordial-looking man with a bristly blond mustache and hard, gray, prominent eyes.

  “Where you going?”

  “Ah—” Eugene looked at his hands. He had been going up to the child’s room again, to see if he could get anything else out of her, but of course he couldn’t say that.

  “Mind if I walk with you?”

  “No problem!” said Eugene, in the personable voice that so far that day had not served him well.

  Steps echoing loudly, they walked past the stairwell, all the way down to the end of the chilly hall to the door marked Exit.

  “I hate to bother you,” said the man, as he pushed open the door, “especially at a time like this, but I’d like to have a word with you, if you don’t mind.”

  Out they stepped, from antiseptic dim to scorching heat. “What can I do for you?” said Eugene, slicking back his hair with one hand. He felt exhausted and stiff, from spending the night sitting up in a chair, and though he’d spent too much time at the hospital lately, the roasting afternoon sun was the last place he wanted to be.

  The stranger sat down on a concrete bench, and motioned for Eugene to do the same. “I’m looking for your brother Danny.”

  Eugene sat down beside him and said nothing. He’d had enough commerce with the police to know that the wisest policy—always—was to play it close to the vest.

  The cop clapped his hands. “Gosh, it’s hot out here, aint it?” he said. He rummaged in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes and took his time lighting one. “Your brother Danny is friendly with an individual named Alphonse de Bienville,” he said, blowing the smoke out the side of his mouth. “Know him?”

  “Know of him.” Alphonse was Catfish’s given name.

  “He seems like a real busy fellow.” Then, confidentially: “He’s got a finger in every kind of damn thing going on around here, don’t he?”

  “I couldn’t say.” Eugene had as little to do with Catfish as possible. Catfish’s loose, easy, irreverent manner made him extremely uncomfortable; Eugene was tongue-tied and awkward around him, always at a loss for a reply, and he sensed that Catfish made fun of him behind his back.

  “How does he fit into that little business yall are running out there?”

  Eugene, stiffening inside, sat with his hands dangling between his knees and tried to keep his face composed.

  The cop stifled a yawn, and then stretched his arm out along the back of the bench. He had a habit of nervously patting his stomach, like a man who’s just lost some weight and wants to make sure that his stomach is still flat.

  “Listen, we know all about it, Eugene,” he said, “what yall got going on out there. We got a half-dozen men out at your grandmother’s place. So come on, be straight with me and save us both a little time.”

  “I’m on be honest with you,” said Eugene, turning to look directly into his face. “I’ve got nothing to do with any of that out there in the shed.”

  “You know about the lab, then. Tell me where the drugs are.”

  “Sir, you know more about it than I do, and that’s the truth.”

  “Well, here’s a little something else you might like to know. We’ve got an officer injured out there from one of those … punji sticks yall have rigged up around the place. Lucky for us he fell down hollering before somebody stepped on one of those trip wires and blowed the place up.”

  “Farsh has some mental problems,” said Eugene, after a small, stunned silence. The sun was shining right into his eyes and he felt very uncomfortable. “He’s been in the hospital.”

  “Yes, and he’s a convicted felon, too.”

  He was looking at Eugene steadily. “Listen,” said Eugene, crossing his legs spasmodically, “I know what you’re thinking, I’ve had some problems, I admit it, but that’s all in the past. I’ve asked forgiveness from God and rendered my debt unto the state. Now my life belongs to Jesus Christ.”

  “Uh huh.” The cop was quiet for a moment. “So tell me. How does your brother Danny fit into all this?”

  “Him and Farsh drove off together, yesterday morning. That’s all I know, and nothing more.”

  “Your grandmother says they quarreled.”

  “I wouldn’t say quarled exactly,” Eugene said, after a thoughtful pause. There was no reason for him to make things worse for Danny than they already were. If Danny hadn’t shot Farish—well, then, he’d have an explanation. And if he had—as Eugene feared—well, then, there was nothing that Eugene could say or do to help him.

  “Your grandmother says it nearly come to blows. Danny done something to Farish to get him mad.”

  “I never saw it.” Typical of Gum, to say something like that. Farish never let Gum go anywhere near the police. She was so partisan in her relationships with her grandsons that she was liable to start complaining about Danny or Eugene and tattling on them about one thing and another even as she was extolling Farish to the skies.

  “All right, then.” The cop stubbed out his cigarette. “I just want to make something clear, all right? This is an interview, Eugene, not an interrogation. There’s no point in me taking you down to the station and reading you your rights unless I have to, are we agreed on that?”

  “Yes sir,” said Eugene—meeting his eye, looking quickly away. “I appreciate it, sir.”

  “So. Just between the two of us, where do you think Danny is?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now, from what I hear, yall were real close,” said the cop in the same confidential tone. “I can’t believe he’d take off somewhere without telling you. Any friends I should know about? Connections out of state? He can’t have got too far on his own, on foot, not without some kind of help.”

  “What makes you think he took off? How do you know he aint laying dead or hurt somewhere like Farsh?”

  The cop clasped his knee. “Now, it’s interesting you ask that. Because we took Alphonse de Bienville into custody just this morning to ask him the very same thing.”

  Eugene sat pondering this new wrinkle. “You think Catfish done it?”

  “Done what?” said the cop casually.

  “Shot my brother.”

  “Well.” For a moment the cop sat staring into space. “Catfish is an enterprising businessman. Certainly he saw a chance to make a quick buck, moving in on yall’s concern, and that’s what it looks like he planned to do. But here’s the problem, Eugene. We can’t find Danny, and we can’t find the drugs. And we got no evidence that Catfish knows where they are, either. So we’re back to square one. That’s why I was hoping you could maybe help me out a litt
le.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Eugene sat rubbing his mouth. “I just don’t know what I can do for you.”

  “Well, maybe you’d better think about it some more. Since we’re talking murder and all.”

  “Murder?” Eugene sat stunned. “Farish is dead?” For a moment, he couldn’t catch his breath in the heat. He hadn’t been up to Intensive Care in over an hour; he’d allowed Gum and Curtis to go back up by themselves from the cafeteria, after their vegetable soup and banana pudding, while he sat and drank a cup of coffee.

  The cop looked surprised—but whether it was real surprise, or fake surprise, Eugene couldn’t tell.

  “You didn’t know?” he said. “I seen you coming down the hall thataway and I just thought—”

  “Listen,” said Eugene, who had already stood up, and was moving away, “listen. I need to get in there and be with my grandmother. I—”

  “Go on, go on,” said the cop, still looking away, flinging out a hand, “get back in there and do what you need to.”

  ————

  Eugene went in at the side door, and stood dazed for a moment. A passing nurse caught his eye, gave him a grave look and a little shake of her head, and all of a sudden he began to run, shoes slapping noisily, past wide-eyed nurses and all the way down to Intensive Care. He heard Gum before he saw her—a dry, small, lonely-sounding wail that made his heart swell with a sharp pain. Curtis—frightened-looking, gasping for breath—sat in a chair in the hall, clutching a large stuffed animal he hadn’t had before. A lady from Patient Services—she’d been kind when they’d arrived at the hospital, ushered them directly back to Intensive Care with no nonsense—was holding his hand and talking to him quietly. She stood when she saw Eugene. “Here he is,” she said to Curtis, “he’s back, sweetie, don’t worry.” Then she glanced at the door of the next room. To Eugene she said: “Your grandmother …”

  Eugene—arms outstretched—went to her. She pushed by him and staggered into the hallway, crying out Farish’s name in a strange, thin, high-pitched voice.

  The lady from Patient Services caught the sleeve of Dr. Breedlove as he was passing. “Doctor,” she said, nodding at Curtis, who was choking for breath and practically blue in the face, “he’s having some breathing difficulty.”