The Secret History - Donna Tartt [219]
“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