“Of course.”
I sit. I pull papers out of my briefcase.
“So. Elena. I have to ask you a few questions.”
“Okay, Laszlo.”
“Four or five questions. Possibly more, depending on your answers.”
She gives out a little impatient puff of air. “Okay, Laszlo. I’m ready. Let’s go.”
I nod and smile. My pinhole is capturing. Her pinhole is capturing. The room is capturing. Captures on the doorframe, captures in the corners. A capture on her desk rotating slow, taking a sweep.
“I am going to read back to you the statement you gave to me yesterday, in Los Feliz. At 3737 Vermont Avenue.”
“Statement?”
“The—what? The statement you gave me this morning, at—”
“We were having a conversation, Laz.”
“Yes.” I clear my throat. “But you did state it. It was a statement.”
“Well, definitionally…” She stops, takes a deep breath. I notice that her hands are tight on the edge of her desk. Holding fast to reality, her reality. “No, it’s okay. You’re right. Of course you are right, Laszlo.” She hops up abruptly. “Hey, do you want coffee?”
“I’ve had some. Thank you.”
“I’ll make myself one, if you don’t mind.”
“I don’t.”
I wait. She drums her fingers on the corner of the little sink along a wall of her office, beneath the wide southerly window, while her machine burbles and brews. We are in two different places at the same time. We are a Speculator and a police captain working together to establish facts, and also simultaneously we are two friends, two people just talking. There are words and there is context; there are declarations and there is the ground in which those declarations are planted.
The coffee maker issues a final small-motor exclamation and hisses out its mud-brown stream. Now that I can smell the coffee I want some after all. Too late now.
“So,” says Elena. “My statement.”
“Yes. I asked you what you were doing at 3737 Vermont Avenue this morning, and you said, ‘I caught it on the scanner.’ You said, ‘I live near here. On Talmadge.’ You said, ‘As long as I was in the area, I thought I’d babysit the homeowner.’” I look up from my Day Book and she’s waiting expectantly. “That was your statement.”
“Okay,” she says flatly, which of course is not an answer.
“Elena. Captain Tester. I’m asking if those are true statements.”
Elena’s astonishment spreads through her body, a tightening fury: her back straightens, her hand curls tightly around the coffee cup, denting the paper sides. The pupils of her eyes narrow to knife ends. “You’re asking me if I’m lying.”
“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
