The Secret History (78 page)

One of the shabby middle-aged men at the front spoke up. “It’s not his car, Your Honor.”

The judge glowered at Charles, suddenly fierce. “Is that correct?” he said.

“The owner was contacted. A Henry Winter. Goes to school up at the college. He says he lent the vehicle to Mr. Macaulay for the evening.”

The judge snorted. To Charles he said gruffly: “Your license is suspended pending resolution and have Mr. Winter here on the twenty-eighth.”

The whole business was amazingly quick. We were out of the courthouse by ten after nine.

The morning was damp and dewy, cold for May. Birds chattered in the black treetops. I was reeling with fatigue.

Charles hugged himself. “Christ, it’s cold,” he said.

Across the empty streets, across the square, they were just pulling the blinds up at the bank. “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll go call a cab.”

He caught me by the arm. He was still drunk, but his night of boozing had done more damage to his clothes than to anything else; his face was fresh and flushed as a child’s. “Richard,” he said.

“What?”

“You’re my friend, aren’t you?”

I was in no mood to stand around on the courthouse steps and listen to this sort of thing. “Sure,” I said, and tried to disengage my arm.

But he only clutched me tighter. “Good old Richard,” he said. “I know you are. I’m so glad it was you who came. I just want you to do me this one little favor.”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t take me home.”

“What do you mean?”

“Take me to the country. To Francis’s. I don’t have the key but Mrs. Hatch could let me in or I could bust a window or something—no,
listen
. Listen to this. I could get in through the basement. I’ve done it millions of times. Wait,” he said as I tried to interrupt again. “You could come, too. You could swing by school and get some clothes and—”

“Hold on,” I said, for the third time. “I can’t take you anywhere. I don’t have a car.”

His face changed, and he let go my arm. “Oh, right,” he said with sudden bitterness. “Thanks a lot.”

“Listen to me. I
can’t
. I don’t have a car. I came down here in a taxicab.”

“We can go in Henry’s.”

“No we can’t. The police took the keys.”

His hands were shaking. He ran them through his disordered hair. “Then come home with me. I don’t want to go home by myself.”

“All right,” I said. I was so tired I was seeing spots. “All right. Just wait. I’ll call a cab.”

“No. No cab,” he said, lurching backward. “I don’t feel so hot. I think I’d rather walk.”

This walk, from the courthouse steps to Charles’s apartment in North Hampden, was not an inconsiderable one. It was three miles, at least. A good portion of it lay along a stretch of highway.

Cars whooshed past in a rush of exhaust. I was dead tired. My head ached and my feet were like lead. But the morning air was cool and fresh and it seemed to bring Charles around a little. About halfway, he stopped at the dusty roadside window of a Tastee Freeze, across the highway from the Veterans Hospital, and bought an ice cream soda.

Our feet crunched on the gravel. Charles smoked a cigarette and drank his soda through a red-and-white-striped straw. Black-flies whined around our ears.

“So you and Henry had an argument,” I said, just for something to say.

“Who told you? Him?”

“Yes.”

“I couldn’t remember. It doesn’t matter. I’m tired of him telling me what to do.”

“You know what I wonder,” I said.

“What?”

“Not why he tells us what to do. But why we always do what he says.”

“Beats me,” said Charles. “It’s not as if much good has come of it.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Are you kidding? The idea of that fucking bacchanal in the first place—who thought of that? Whose idea was it to take Bunny to Italy? Who the hell wrote that diary and left it lying
around? The son of a bitch. I blame every bit of this on him. Besides, you have no idea how close they were to finding us out.”

“Who?” I said, startled. “The police?”

“The people from the FBI. There was a lot towards the end we didn’t tell the rest of you. Henry made me swear not to tell.”

“Why? What happened?”

He threw down his cigarette. “Well, I mean, they had it confused,” he said. “They thought Cloke was mixed up in it, they thought a lot of things. It’s funny. We’re so used to Henry. We don’t realize sometimes how he looks to other people.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I can think of a million examples.” He laughed sleepily. “I remember last summer, when Henry was so gung-ho about renting a farmhouse, driving with him to a realtor’s office upstate. It was perfectly straightforward. He had a specific house in mind—big old place built in the 1800s, way out on some dirt road, tremendous grounds, servants’ quarters, the whole bit. He even had the cash in hand. They must’ve talked for two hours. The realtor called up her manager at home and asked him to come down to the office. The manager asked Henry a million questions. Called every one of his references. Everything was in order but even then they wouldn’t rent it to him.”

“Why?”

He laughed. “Well, Henry looks a bit too good to be true, doesn’t he? They couldn’t believe someone his age, a college student, would pay so much for a place that big and isolated, just to live all by himself and study the Twelve Great Cultures.”

“What? They thought he was some kind of crook?”

“They thought he wasn’t entirely above-board, let’s put it that way. Apparently the men from the FBI thought the same thing. They didn’t think he killed Bunny, but they thought he knew something he wasn’t telling. Obviously there had been a disagreement in Italy. Marion knew that, Cloke knew it, even Julian did. They even tricked me into admitting it, though I didn’t tell that to Henry. If you ask me, I think what they really thought was that he and Bunny had some money sunk in Cloke’s drug-dealing business. That trip to Rome was a big mistake. They could’ve done it inconspicuously but Henry spent a fortune, throwing money around like crazy, they lived in a
palazzo
, for Christ sake. People remembered them everywhere they went. I mean, you know Henry, that’s just the way he is but you have to look at it
from their point of view. That illness of his must’ve looked pretty suspicious, too. Wiring a doctor in the States for Demerol. Plus those tickets to South America. Putting them on his credit card was about the stupidest thing he ever did.”

“They found out about that?” I said, horrified.

“Certainly. When they suspect somebody is dealing drugs, the financial records are the first thing they check—and good God, of all places, South America. Luckily Henry’s dad really does own some property down there. Henry was able to cook up something fairly plausible—not that they believed him; it was a more a matter of their not being able to disprove it.”

“But I don’t understand where they got this stuff about drugs.”

“Imagine how it looked to them. On one hand, there was Cloke. The police knew he was dealing drugs on a pretty substantial scale; they also figured he was probably the middleman for somebody a lot bigger. There was no obvious connection between that and Bunny, but then there was Bunny’s best friend, with
all
this money, they can’t tell quite where it’s coming from. And during those last months Bunny was throwing around plenty of money himself. Henry was giving it to him, of course, but they didn’t know that. Fancy restaurants. Italian suits. Besides. Henry just
looks
suspicious. The way he acts. Even the way he dresses. He looks like one of those guys with horn-rimmed glasses and armbands in a gangster movie, you know, the one who cooks the books for Al Capone or something.” He lit another cigarette. “Do you remember the night before they found Bunny’s body?” he said. “When you and I went to that awful bar, the one with the TV, and I got so drunk?”

“Yes.”

“That was one of the worst nights of my life. It looked pretty bad for both of us. Henry was almost sure he was going to be arrested the next day.”

I was so appalled that for a moment I couldn’t speak. “Why, for God’s sake?” I said at last.

He drew deeply on his cigarette. “The FBI men came to see him that afternoon,” he said. “Not long after they’d taken Cloke into custody. They told Henry they had enough probable cause to arrest half a dozen people, including himself, either for conspiracy or withholding evidence.”

“Christ!” I said, dumbfounded. “Half a dozen people? Who?”

“I don’t know exactly. They might’ve been bluffing but Henry was worried sick. He warned me they’d probably be coming over
to my place and I just had to get out of there, I couldn’t sit around waiting for them. He made me promise not to tell you. Even Camilla didn’t know.”

There was a long pause.

“But they didn’t arrest you,” I said.

Charles laughed. I noticed that his hands still shook a little. “I think we have dear old Hampden College to thank for that,” he said. “Of course, a lot of the stuff didn’t tie up; they figured that out from talking to Cloke. But still they knew they weren’t getting the truth and they probably would’ve kept after it if the college had been a little more cooperative. Once Bunny’s body was found, though, the administration just wanted to hush it up. Too much bad publicity. Freshman applications had gone down something like twenty percent. And the town police—whose business it was, really—are very cooperative about such things. Cloke was in a lot of trouble, you know—some of that drug stuff was serious, they could’ve thrown him in jail. But he got off with academic probation and fifty hours of community service. It didn’t even go on his school record.”

It took me some moments to digest this. Cars and trucks whooshed past.

After a while Charles laughed again. “It’s funny,” he said, pushing his fists deep in his pockets. “We thought we were putting our ace man up front but if one of the rest of us had handled it it would’ve been much better. If it had been you. Or Francis. Even my sister. We could have avoided half of this.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s over now.”

“No thanks to him.
I
was the one who had to deal with the police. He takes the credit, but it was me who actually had to sit around that goddamned station all hours drinking coffee and trying to make them like me, you know, trying to convince them we were all just a bunch of regular kids. Same with the FBI, and that was even worse. Being the front for everybody, you know, always on guard, having to say exactly the right thing and doing my best to size up things from their point of view, and you had to hit exactly the right note with these people, too, you couldn’t drop it for a second, trying to be all communicative and open yet concerned, too, you know, and at the same time not at all nervous, though I could hardly pick up a cup without being afraid of spilling it and a couple of times I was so panicky I thought I was just going to black out or break down or something. Do you know how hard that was? Do you think Henry would lower
himself to do something like that? No. It was all right, of course, for
me
to do it but he couldn’t be bothered. Those people had never seen anything like Henry in their lives. I’ll tell you the sort of thing he worried about. Like if he was carrying around the right
book
, if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas. He was like something from another planet. If he was the only one they’d had to deal with he would have landed us all in the gas chamber.”

A lumber truck rattled past.

“Good God,” I finally said. I was quite shaken. “I’m glad I didn’t know.”

He shrugged. “Well, you’re right. It all came out okay. But I still don’t like the way he tries to lord it over me.”

We walked for a long time without saying anything.

“Do you know where you’re going to spend the summer?” said Charles.

“I haven’t thought about it much,” I said. I hadn’t heard anything about the situation in Brooklyn, which tended to make me think it had fallen through.

“I’m going to Boston,” Charles said. “Francis’s great-aunt has an apartment on Marlborough Street. Just a few doors from the Public Garden. She goes to the country in the summer and Francis said if I wanted to stay there, I could.”