“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.
“Do you…” I say slowly. “Do you, in addition to your relationship with Ms. Sampson, have a relationship with Ms. Sampson’s husband?”
Elena gives her head a small tight nod, but that’s not enough and she knows it’s not enough. I could get up right now, stuff my papers back in my bag, make some apologetic noises, and go. If this is all it is, it’s nothing. A scrap, a tatter of incidental truth, something that slid off the roof along with the roofer, like a dead leaf that tumbled from the gutter as it tore free. And maybe if I didn’t already find the dictionary that was not—maybe if Mose Crane didn’t have days missing from his Record—maybe I’d even do it. Let Elena off the hook and shuffle backward out of her office.
But I can’t do it now. Now it’s too late.
So I make her confirm it for the Record. I make her say it louder, which she does, too loud, pointedly loud. “I have a relationship with Karen’s husband.”
“And what is his name?”
“Barney Sampson,” she says, and in her voice I can hear that it’s all gone, any trace of residual affection between Elena Tester and myself is gone now, never to return. Extramarital affairs aren’t illegal, of course; lying about them is illegal, as all lies are illegal, but Elena didn’t do that either. She was simply doing something in secret, hidden from everyone but not from the Record, because nothing
