When They Said ‘Truth Hurts…’

“Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive.” – Sir Walter Scott

I arrived at my desk around 9, still warm from my morning workout. I was just settling in when my squadron superintendent walked into the room. He was looking purposeful, and worse yet, he was looking purposeful in my general direction. I groaned inwardly as he made eye contact and boldly invaded my deskosphere.

“Call personnel. There’s an investigator who needs to speak with you.” I grimaced at him, loath to begin the week with another round of Grabbyhands-related drama. He quickly added, “You’re not in trouble or anything, it has to do with something that happened before you transferred.” My curiosity piqued, I quickly dialed MPS, who repeated Bradley’s explanation, adding, “It’s about some crime you may have been a witness to.” He gave me directions to a small brick building not far away where a detective was waiting to receive me behind a locked glass door.

I was shown to a small side room, bare but for three hard chairs and a rickety table. I’d seen enough cop shows to know the two-way mirror and security camera eyeing me warily from a high corner meant this was an interview room. I sat quietly and waited, sipping my Burger King coffee and wondering what this could be about. I poked around inside my head for lost mental evidence of felonies and mayhem, but found nothing more exciting than a distant recollection about some stolen laptops in another department. I tried to look relaxed and unconcerned as I watched the camera watching me. I wondered if it was recording, if my image and voice would be replayed for someone on a mission of justice a thousand miles away.

Detective Cowell entered the room, a tall, rangy man with a weathered face and graying hair. He was dressed in a maroon Harley Davidson button-down tucked into black jeans over incongruously small construction boots. He pulled out one of the remaining two chairs and settled his long frame into it as a short, stocky man in a preppy oxford and khakis slipped into the other. Detective Cowell grinned warmly and cocked his head, the tiny diamond stud in his earlobe glinting brightly.

“You have any idea what this is about?”

My eyebrows slid up my forehead in an unspoken question. “Not one clue.”

He nodded, opened a folder and pushed a printout of an email across the table.

“How well did you know Philip Garver*?”

The world tilted sideways a bit as my brain ingested the question, spun it around and started shooting out cannonades of disjointed implications. So that’s it. How do they know? Why now two years after the fact? Who told? Where do I start? I can’t believe I’m being dragged into this. Am I in trouble? Do I look guilty? Can they tell I’m going to lie to them?

I told them we were friends. It was a kneejerk reaction, one I’d rehearsed all throughout my brief, tortured romance with him. Unsure of what they already knew, I stuck close to the truth where I could so I wouldn’t contradict myself or get caught in an obvious lie. The rest of the time I tried to gloss smoothly over the sticky parts, but the short guy in the corner dogged me without mercy. I insinuated, he clarified. I prevaricated, he redirected. I was vague, he was pointed. I was nervous, but I held eye contact as I tried to protect the reputation and career of someone I was once very much in love with. When they left me alone in the room with a blank form to record my official statement, I thought I was home free.

Halfway through the first sheet of paper, it hit me. I stopped and put my pen down. What am I doing? I asked myself. I am about to commit the same offense I just got someone else in trouble for doing to me. And for what? His last words to me rang in my head; “It’s hard to want to be friends with you when all you do it bitch at me.” I remembered the disappointment at the end, how easily he cut me out of his life. Still, I didn’t hate him. I definitely didn’t want to ruin his career. But what about me? What if he’s already confessing while I sign my name to a lie that could do as much damage to me as the truth could to him? Is it down to this – me or him? How in the hell did all we were to one another, all we went through together, all the precautions we took – how did it all boil down to the stark black and white question of ‘my loss or his’?

I sat with my head in my hands, struggling deeply with this question. Even now it hurts to think of it. I don’t love him, I don’t miss him, but I did once and I believe the memories of shared love deserve a certain amount of gentle and trustworthy handling. The nearness of my betrayal sat so hard on my heart I could barely breathe. I picked up my little work of half-wrought fiction and opened the door. The short guy looked up from across the room.

“All finished?”

“Uh, no…I-“

“Oh, you need another sheet of paper? Here let me find one for you.”

“No. No, it’s not that. I just- I need to see Detective Cowell.”

“Oh.” He gave me The Eyebrow. “Okay, hang on.”

A second later Detective Cowell’s tall frame filled the doorway.

“What’s the matter? Did you think of something else?”

“No, I- Yes. Kind of.”

“Need to amend your statement? Change something?”

“All of it.”

He stared. I took a deep breath and inwardly begged him to be understanding.

“You can cross it all out. I need to start over. Is it too late for that?”

He nodded, smiling warmly. “No. But if you’d signed your name it would have been. Now, let’s get a fresh sheet of paper.”

We began again, and this time I searched my memory honestly for the answers to their questions. I told them about how we broke up and made up and broke up again, laughing wryly with Detective Cowell at how he’d managed to time it so as to avoid all major holidays with me. I told how quickly he got over me and moved on, but then kept hanging out on the periphery of my life, never quite letting me get cleanly away. I struggled to remember dates and names and places, while Detective Cowell nodded and the short guy scribbled furiously at his notepad. I was giving them exactly what they wanted, but I wasn’t concerned about their agenda or that of their compatriots pulling the strings from two time zones away. I had cast my lot for full disclosure and could now only hope for the best.

I rewrote my statement, and this time it stretched into four full pages as the two detectives periodically redirected me to add more detail. I wasn’t sure it made any chronological sense, mentioning I’d have to consult my journal for the dates. Detective Cowell leaned back into the room.

“About that. They’d like to know if you’d be willing to submit that diary with your statement.”

The thought of turning over a printout of my old OD nearly made me swallow my tongue. I told him it was mostly just feelings about the breakup and was too personal to hand over. He grinned.

“I was hoping you’d say that. Don’t believe in using ‘em as evidence myself.”

When I was finished, I signed in about a million places, then waited as the statement was faxed back to the requesting unit. Then the detectives handed back my identification, made me swear not to talk about it, and showed me to the door. It was done. There was nothing else I could add, and I couldn’t take any of it back.

I may never know how or if my statement is significant in the ultimate outcome. He may confess and my information may be moot, but the possibility that my act of self-preservation could end his career, ruin his reputation, and change his life still nearly knocks the wind out of me. I don’t want it to be my fault, but more than that, I don’t want him to suffer. I see him in my mind’s eye, a dedicated well of talent on the fast-track to success and I think how horrifying it is that our personal history may forever be blamed for his derailment. I will never be a happy memory for him. I will always, from this day forward, represent a betrayal of his trust.

Still I know that he is a big boy, and he made the choice to be with me in spite of the risks. The detectives surmised he may be in trouble because he took another such risk, and maybe more than one. If that’s true, he’s not stupid enough to be surprised when it catches up to him. He must be wondering if they found me all the way out here, wondering if I’ll tell, and if I do, if I’ll do it out of spite. I wish I could tell him I didn’t, that I had to choose one of us. I wish I could tell him it wasn’t easy, but I can’t. I’m not even allowed to tell him I’m sorry, I’m so very, very sorry it ever came to this.

It probably wouldn’t matter to him now anyway.

*Obviously not his real name. None of them are.