Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

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 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 dog-catcher. 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.