alexpgp | LJ Idol 6.5: Bearing False Witness...

There was a sustained drizzle in the air when Champ suggested we drive out to Long Island and visit the Glen Cove cops. He wanted to clear up some complaint he had learned about a few days before, involving a car he had rented a while back. "Believe me, you don't ever want to have a cop show up out of nowhere to slap a warrant in your hand and handcuffs on your wrists," he said. It sounded a bit like the voice of experience, but I could only agree.

In those days, the police station in Glen Cove was located inside the city hall, which was a pretty spiffy trick, because the city hall was a dark, tiny building set back about twenty yards from the main drag through town. The structure seemed scarcely wider than its entrance door and didn't look like it could hold much more than two people at a time. I reckoned they'd have to take turns breathing, too. The drizzle had stopped by the time we parked out front, and the two of us went inside.

Champ mumbled something to the uniform at the desk just inside the entryway. The duty cop nodded his head and invited us to take a seat, then he picked up the phone at his elbow. A few moments later, a detective came out front to greet us. He had a manila folder stuffed under his left arm.

“You here about the complaint?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Champ, standing up.

“Who’re you?” asked the detective, looking at me.

“We work together,” I replied. “You mind if I sit in?”

The detective tilted his head in thought, as if he had never heard of such a thing, then said, “Suit yourself. Follow me.”

We trailed after him into a small, narrow room most of the way down the hall that ran down the center of the building. The place looked bigger on the inside.

“You fellows have ID?” asked the detective. Champ handed over his driver’s license and his reservist's military identification card. I did, too, along with a plain-looking business card imprinted with a name, a rank, and a phone number with a Washington, D.C., area code.

“What’s this?” asked the detective, holding up the card.

“In case you want to verify who we are,” I replied. The detective looked at me, then back at the card. “Wait here a sec, will you?” he said, turning toward the door. “Have a seat.”

“What'd you give him the card for?" asked Champ, as we sat down.

“Why not?” I asked, taking my Russian paperback edition of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago out of a pocket of my field jacket. It occurred to me we might be here a while.

“Why not? Because I guarantee you the Major’s not going to say ‘My men are up there to keep an eye on the Russian diplomatic compound in your back yard’," said Champ, a little louder than he had to, as he took off his field jacket. "In fact, he'll probably say ‘I have no idea what they're up to, but the last I heard, those two bozos were working on a film documentary on the lives of sex workers on Second Avenue.'“

I shrugged. Few are those who truly understand what it takes to be a freelance cinematographer. I heard steps coming back down the hall.

“Whatever the Major says, Champ,” I said, “I’m sure he’ll mention the part about us being reservists and part of his Russian-language interrogator-translator team out of Fort Schuyler.” Champ raised an eyebrow, which meant he wasn’t fully convinced, then turned back around in his seat.

The detective came back through the doorway, gave us back our IDs, then sat down like a man about to partake of a fine Thanksgiving dinner. He placed the file he'd been carrying on the table in front of him, opened it, and started right in.

“You rammed your rental car into a chain link fence owned by the city,” he said, addressing Champ and placing some kind of report in front of him. “It’s a pretty open-and-shut case,” he continued. “We’ve got all the evidence we need, so if it comes to trial, you'll be found guilty, take my word for it.”

I gave his try at the "we know all" approach a B-plus, and while Champ read the report he'd been given, I quietly put my book down on the edge of the table and pointed to a photograph. "Can I take a look?" I asked, noticing that the detective was looking at the Cyrillic letters on the cover of the volume. He quickly looked back up at me and said, “Yeah, sure, knock yourself out.” He handed me two photos that had been in the file.

The first photo showed the rental car’s license plate stuck in a pushed-in section of damaged chain link fencing, presumably the aftermath of bring rammed by a car. A New York plate, with the letters and numbers clearly visible. There was no hotspot in the image, which had been taken with a flash; an excellent photo. The second photo was a closer shot of the plate after having been removed from the fence, photographed while lying flat on the ground.

“Where was the license plate found, detective?” I asked.

“Right where you see it,” he said, “stuck in the fence. It came off the car when your buddy, here, backed the car out of the fence.”

“That’s funny,” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if the license plate had come off the car as a result of backing away from the fence,” I said, “shouldn’t the plate be facing into the fence?”

Then I held up the second photo, which showed the license plate lying on the pavement. "And wouldn't the plate itself have gotten a little bent around the edges in all the excitement? Wouldn’t there be some damage, say, around the mounting holes? This plate looks like it just came out of a sheet metal press.” The detective leaned over and took the photos from me and looked at them hard, as if seeing them for the first time.

“You think this was our, uh..., friends?” asked Champ, looking at me.

“I can’t imagine why,” I replied. “That’d make no sense.”

“What’d the rental company have to say?” I asked the detective. He looked through the file.

“The guy we spoke to indicated to us that your associate, here,” he said, nodding at Champ, “had the car rented the night the incident happened. That's how we knew who to look for.”

“How badly was the car damaged, did the guy say?” asked Champ.

The detective rummaged through the file for a few minutes, then said, "I can't tell." His voice told us this interview was not going the way he had planned. Champ and I looked at each other, moving our eyebrows up and down and nodding slightly, as if we were talking things over and now we knew something for sure that the detective didn't.

“Listen,” he said, “are you guys involved in keeping an eye on that compound the Russkies maintain down the road from the high school?” The compound - which the Russians called their dacha, or country retreat - was a sumptuous facility for Soviet diplomatic personnel, and had been the routine target of pickets protesting about human rights. More recently, someone had lobbed a Molotov cocktail over the brick wall onto the grounds from the road, though without effect, as the main house was set almost 100 yards back from the wall.

Champ and I looked at each other for one more long beat, then turned to look at the detective.

“No,” we said, without any particular emphasis, but almost in unison.

A moment or two passed as the detective turned things over in his mind. Then he held out his hand, palm up.

“Why don't you guys hand me back that stuff and go back to doing what you were doing," he said, "and we'll just let this whole thing drop? All of us have too much to do, and life is too short."

We handed back the file contents and shook hands. I jammed my book back in my field jacket while Champ collected some kind of chit from the detective. Then Champ and put our jackets back on and we went out the door to our car.

"We told him the truth," said Champ, as we left Glen Cove behind.

"And the pure, unvarnished truth has set you free," I added, with a smile, as we got back on the Long Island Expressway, heading back to Manhattan and our film studio on Second Avenue.

Nobody followed us.