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 Harriet. 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.