“Yes, Elena. Captain. Yes.”
“And wouldn’t you know?”
I nod, conceding the point. “If you had dissembled outright, Captain, yes. I would have caught it.”
“Smelled it,” she says, giving the words a tight contemptuous spin. “Or—sensed it? Isn’t that it?”
“Well—no. Not exactly. But yes. If you were lying outright, yes, I would have known. If there was important context that was left to the side, I would need you to tell me that.” I have a file in my lap. A manila folder, plain cover, unmarked tab. Elena is looking at it closely. “I would need you to tell me that now.”
She sets down the coffee and sits in her chair, glaring at me, and she can be angry if she wants to be, but the woman stood there and made a small proffer that was true but incomplete, and we both know it—at least, I thought I knew it before, but only now, looking at her eyes, feeling the cold fury my questions have inspired, do I know it for sure. She didn’t lie, but she did something just as bad, arguably worse, especially for someone in her position, high on the org chart of the regular police, a pillar of law enforcement just like me: she has not lied, but she has found a way not to have to. She dug herself a rabbit hole of conversational cleverness and leapt inside it. Arlo Vasouvian, the expert, the guru, could tilt his head back, half shut his eyes, and recite the entire statute, the complete philosophical and legislative history of context and omission: If someone says X instead of Y, that is a lie; if someone says X but not Y, we have then a case of relative relevance. Context is everything. Context is infinite.
There is some violation here, but I don’t know yet what it is.
“Was there, possibly, some further information that you might not, in the moment, have thought relevant?”
“Yes,” says Tester immediately. “Possibly there was.”
Her eyes remain on mine. Her body has not relaxed. Captain Tester has conducted many interrogations of her own over the years—I am not the only experienced investigator in the room. I feel conscious of my own bulk, my shape inside the tight space of the chair, the room, the moment. I feel myself in the small wood chair, bent toward Elena, hunched and ursine. We stare at each other like two animals in a forest clearing. There are pictures on her desk: her kids. Her husband, Al, who died in the line a few years back. Her friends. I wonder if there are any pictures of Silvie. I want to look. I won’t look. I don’t.
“The house on Vermont is deeded to a woman named Karen Sampson.”
“Stipulated,” says Tester immediately, but I’m not accepting stipulations. She has to know I won’t be. I open the file I’m holding and take out three pieces of paper, material evidence, and I spread them out on the desk in front of her like a gambler laying down cards. The mortgage deed to the house. The certificate of occupancy. A carbon of the purchase from the previous owner. I ask the question again.
“Karen Sampson owns that house? And she lives there?”
“Yes.”
The next page is a one-sheet backgrounder on Sampson. These documents I didn’t need to pull from the identity office. I simply went downstairs to the twenty-ninth floor, on my way from my office to here. I simply spent half an hour doing public Record searches. Karen Sampson is a notable individual—a lot of this information I’m now producing came right out of the most recent edition of Notable Individuals.
“Ms. Sampson is a producer of recorded music.”
“Yes.”
“And she has a criminal history. She’s spent time in jail. Various drug offenses. A driving-while-drunk, nine months ago.”
Elena’s answers have started to come less readily. “Yes. That’s—correct. She’s—Karen—has struggled. As we all have.”
I am quite aware of Sampson’s troubled past. I have the arrest records. I reviewed them back in my office, half expecting to find Tester’s signature on the arrest reports. But they weren’t there. I was surprised by that.
“What else, Mr. Ratesic?”
“Do you need more coffee, Elena? Do you need to take a break?”
“No.”
“Okay.”
I turn to the final sheaf of papers in my slim file.
“Ms. Sampson is one of your oldest friends.”
“Yes.”
More papers come out of my file, and I can fan them on her desk. Photocopies of pictures of the two old friends together, arm in arm on the beach, a windy day, a much younger and more carefree Elena Tester holding her hat down so it won’t blow away. I array the pictures, six of them, fan them out flat in an order of my devising. A picture of Elena Tester, out of uniform in a peach dress, beaming behind Karen Sampson (née Ambrose) on her wedding day. Elena looks upward, at the ceiling, looking like she wants to fly up through it and escape into the air.
“Elena, listen to me. I don’t think that you killed anyone. I don’t think you had anything to do with any of this. But I have an obligation, now that a case has begun, to dispel any possible anomalies. And your withholding yesterday is one of those. Okay?”
She says something very softly, a sound with no motion of the mouth, as if her lips are refusing to move.
“What?”
“I said go ahead, Laszlo. Ask your fucking questions.”
I sigh. I find the right page in my Day Book and ask my next question. “When you heard the address on the scanner, were you concerned about the potential consequences of a death and subsequent investigation on this property?”
“Yes.”
“Yes what?”
“Yes,” she says, and gives me my words back to me, my words in my voice, like she’s a deck replaying the cued stretch. “When I heard the address on the scanner, I was concerned about the potential consequences of a death and subsequent investigation on this property.”
“So you rushed to the scene to protect your friend Karen.”
That’s it, I think. I’ve arrived at the heart of it, and I will collect my flat fact, gather up the small piece of the truth I’ve come for, and go back to the roofer and his missing boxes.
But she’s not answering. She is staring at me again, the cold fury back in her eyes.
“No,” Tester says flatly, and I blink. “No?”
“No. I did not rush there.”
“So ‘rush’ is imprecise,” I concede, irritated by the quibble, especially now, when she’s in such a hurry to wrap this up, for me to get out of her hair. “I withdraw the ambiguous verb. You went there, with more than typical speed. Okay? To do what? To—”
“I didn’t go there,” says Tester. “Truth. Truth and then context: I was there already.”
“You were… there already?”
I’ve never been a big fan of that figure: the mind races. Minds do not race. At least, mine doesn’t. Thoughts don’t whip in wild circles like small storms, chasing themselves around in pointless frenzies. When I visualize my thoughts I see them emerging half formed from some unseen basal station, bubbling up as if from a seafloor, rising and cohering, gaining mass as they combine. The mind does not race; it conjures, it swells.
“You were already at your friend’s home at six twenty-nine in the morning?”
“Yes,” she says. “I was there.”
“Was Karen in the house?”
“No.”
“Were you alone in the house?”
“No.”
I feel it—I feel it all at once and all over my body, in the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet. Not the distinct atmospheric warp of a lie entering the near air, but something more elemental, something plain: the sick shock of understanding, rushing through me like the world tilting. It’s an astonishing feeling, keen clarity like sunlight. I lean closer, lower my voice, as if there’s any privacy possible. As if the room isn’t capturing every word so each can be transcribed later on, the truth forever bubbling out from itself, the Objectively So endlessly accreting upon itself and growing like life, growing like life grows.