The Secret History - Donna Tartt [166]
Charles, beside me, stopped and looked at him blankly.
The man reached in his breast pocket and flipped out a badge. “Agent Harvey Davenport, Northeast Regional Division, FBI.”
For a moment I thought Charles might lose his composure. “What do you want?” he said, blinking.
“We’d like to talk to you, if you don’t mind.”
“It won’t take long,” said the taller man. He was an Italian with stooped shoulders and a sad, doughy nose. His voice was soft and pleasant.
Henry, Francis, Camilla had all stopped and were staring at the strangers with varying degrees of interest and alarm.
“Besides,” said Davenport snappily. “Good to get out of the cold for a minute or two. Bet you’re freezing your balls off, huh?”
After they left, the rest of us were bristling with anxiety, but of course we couldn’t talk and so we continued to shuffle along, eyes on the ground and half afraid to look up. Soon it was three o’clock, then four. Things were far from over, but at the first premature signs that the day’s search was breaking up we headed rapidly and silent for the car.
“What do you suppose they want with him?” said Camilla for about the tenth time.
“I don’t know,” said Henry.
“He gave them a statement already.”
“He gave the police one. Not these people.”
“What difference does it make? Why would they want to talk to him?”
“I don’t know, Camilla.”
When we got to the twins’ apartment we were relieved to find Charles there, alone. He was lying on the couch, a drink on the table beside him, talking to his grandmother on the telephone.
He was a little drunk. “Nana says hi,” he said to Camilla when he got off the phone. “She’s all worried. Some bug or something has got up into her azaleas.”
“What’s that all over your hands?” said Camilla sharply.
He held them out, palms up, none too steadily. The tips of the fingers were black. “They took my fingerprints,” he said. “It was kind of interesting. I’d never had it done before.”
For a moment we were all too shocked to say anything. Henry stepped forward, took one of his hands and examined it beneath the light. “Do you know why they did it?” he said.
Charles wiped his brow with the back of his free wrist. “They’ve sealed off Bunny’s room,” he said. “Some people are in there dusting for prints and putting things in plastic bags.”
Henry dropped his hand. “But why?”
“I don’t know why. They wanted the fingerprints of everybody who’d been in the room on Thursday and touched things.”
“What good will that do? They don’t have Bunny’s fingerprints.”
“Apparently they do have them. Bunny was in the Boy Scouts and his troop went in and was fingerprinted for some kind of Law Enforcement badge, years ago. They’re still on file somewhere.”
Henry sat down. “Why did they want to talk to you?”
“That was the first thing they asked me.”
“What?”
“ ‘Why do you think we want to talk to you.’ ” He dragged the heel of his hand down the side of his face. “These people are smart, Henry,” he said. “A lot smarter than the police.”
“How did they treat you?”
Charles shrugged. “The one called Davenport was pretty brusque. The other one—the Italian—was nicer, but he scared me. Didn’t say much, just listened. He’s much more clever than the other one.…”
“Well?” said Henry impatiently. “What is it?”
“Nothing. We … I don’t know. We’ve got to be really careful, that’s all. They tried to trip me up more than once.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, when I told them Cloke and I had gone down to Bunny’s room around four on Thursday, for instance.”
“That’s when you did go,” said Francis.
“I know that. But the Italian—really, he’s a very pleasant man—began to look all concerned. ‘Can that be right, son?’ he said. ‘Think.’ I was really confused, because I knew we went at four, and then Davenport said, ‘You’d better think about it, because your buddy Cloke told us you two were down at that room for a solid hour before you called anybody.’ ”
“They wanted to see if you and Cloke had anything to hide,” Henry said.
“Maybe. Maybe they just