The Secret History - Donna Tartt [216]
The jail, in Hampden town, was in an annex of the courthouse. It was also the only building in the square that had any lights on that time of night. I told the taxi driver to wait and went inside.
Two policemen were sitting in a large, well-lit room. There were many filing cabinets, and metal desks behind partitions; an old-fashioned water cooler; a gumball machine from the Civitan Club (“Your Change Changes Things”). I recognized one of the policemen—a fellow with a red moustache—from the search parties. The two of them were eating fried chicken, the sort you buy from under heat lamps in convenience stores, and watching “Sally Jessy Raphaël” on a portable black-and-white TV.
“Hi,” I said.
They looked up.
“I came to see about getting my friend out of jail.”
The one with the red moustache wiped his mouth on a paper napkin. He was big and pleasant-looking, in his thirties. “That’s Charles Macaulay, I bet,” he said.
He said this as if Charles were an old friend of his. Maybe he was. Charles had spent a lot of time down here when the stuff with Bunny was going on. The cops, he said, had been nice to him. They’d sent out for sandwiches, bought him Cokes from the machine.
“You’re not the guy I talked to on the phone,” said the other policeman. He was large and relaxed, about forty, with gray hair and a froglike mouth. “Is that your car out there?”
I explained. They ate their chicken and listened: big, friendly guys, big police .38s on their hips. The walls were covered in government-issue posters: FIGHT BIRTH DEFECTS, HIRE VETERANS, REPORT MAIL FRAUD.
“Well, you know, we can’t let you have the car,” said the policeman with the red moustache. “Mr. Winter is going to have to come down here and pick it up himself.”
“I don’t care about the car. I just want to get my friend out of jail.”
The other policeman looked at his watch. “Well,” he said, “come back in about six hours, then.”
Was he joking? “I have the money,” I said.
“We can’t set bail. The judge will have to do that at the arraignment. Nine o’clock in the morning.”
Arraignment? My heart pumped. What the hell was that?
The cops were looking at me blandly as if to say, “Is that all?”
“Can you tell me what happened?” I said.
“What?”
My voice sounded flat and strange to me. “What exactly did he do?”
“State trooper pulled him over out on Deep Kill Road,” said the gray-haired policeman. He said it as if he were reading it.
“He was obviously intoxicated. He agreed to a Breathalyzer and failed it when it was administered. The trooper brought him down here and we put him in the lock-up. That was about two-twenty-five a.m.”
Things still weren’t clear, but for the life of me I couldn’t think of the right questions to ask. Finally I said, “Can I see him?”
“He’s fine, son,” said the policeman with the red moustache. “You can see him first thing in the morning.”
All smiles, very friendly. There was nothing more to say. I thanked them and left.
When I got outside the cab was gone. I still had fifteen dollars from Henry’s twenty but to call another cab I’d have to go back inside the jail and I didn’t want to do that. So I walked down Main Street to the south end, where there was a pay phone in front of the lunch counter. It didn’t work.
So tired I was almost dreaming, I walked back to the square—past the post office, past the hardware store, past the movie theater with its dead marquee: plate glass, cracked sidewalks, stars. Mountain cats in bas-relief prowled the friezes of the public library. I walked a long way, till the stores got sparse and the road was dark, walked on the deep singing shoulder of the highway till I got to the Greyhound bus station, sad in the moonlight, the first glimpse I’d ever had of Hampden. The terminal was closed. I sat outside, on a wooden bench beneath a yellow light bulb, waiting for it to open so I could go in and use the phone and have a cup of coffee.
The clerk—a fat man with lifeless eyes—came to unlock the place at six. We were the only people there. I went into the men’s room and