The Little Friend

“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.