Coda 01 - Promises

everything. I had a hard enough time convincing them that we weren’t lovers last summer, and now they’ll all know I spent the night here too. Just tell them I came here after we broke up, and I had one too many, and that I didn’t want to drive home, and so I crashed on your couch.” He looked so scared, and part of me understood, but part of me resented him for it. “Please?”
    But then I realized: Cherie is dead. Cherie, who obviously wasn’t my best friend or anything, but still, I had known her for most of my life. And suddenly it felt awfully petty to begrudge him a little privacy from his coworkers.
    “I promise.”

    I T TURNED out to be the Chief of Police who came to question me.
    “So that’s it? Officer Richards arrived at your house at around nine o’clock, had a few beers, didn’t want to drive home, and slept on your couch the rest of the night?”
    It was funny that he was saying, “That’s it?” He had been questioning me for more than two hours. “That sums it up, yes.” “So he was sleeping on the couch ?”
    I hated the stupid smirk on his face when he asked that question. What I really wanted to say was, What does it matter? If he was here, what does it matter if he was on my couch or in my bed? But I had made a promise.
    “Yes.”
    He looked a little disappointed by the flatness of my response. “Okay, well, I guess that’s everything, then. Thank you for your time, Mr. Thomas.”
    “Chief White, you don’t really think that Matt had anything to do with Cherie’s death, do you?”
    He took a minute to think, debating how much to tell me, but then he sighed and said, “No, not really. One of the neighbors heard a shot, and when she looked out, she saw somebody running away. She thinks it was Dan Snyder, Cherie’s ex-husband. It was dark, and she couldn’t tell for sure. But certainly the description she gave matches Dan more than it does Officer Richards.”
    I thought of Dan, who was shorter than me and had a beer gut, and I thought of Matt’s tall, muscular body. It would be hard to mistake one for the other.
    “That, along with Dan’s history of violence toward his exwife, makes him a much more likely suspect.”

    “Then why go to all this trouble?”
    “The fact that Matt and Cherie had been dating does mean that we have to question him. If we didn’t, it just wouldn’t be due diligence. And the fact that he’s also a police officer means that we have to be extra careful so as not to show favoritism. We don’t want anybody saying that he got away with murder just because he’s an officer of the law.”
    “What about Dan? I assume you’re questioning him too?” “We will, as soon as we find the worthless SOB.”
    He got up to leave but then stopped at the door, with his hand on the knob. “Son, I know it’s none of my business.” Oh shit. Nothing good ever came after an opening like that. “I don’t know what’s going on with you and Matt. I don’t know, and I don’t really care. But let me tell you, not everybody sees it that way. I was on the force in Denver for fifteen years before I came here. I’ve seen other gay cops. And it’s never easy for them.”
    He turned and looked at me now. “I don’t think you realize how much that boy has gone through for you. He had a hard enough time before this, everybody calling him a queer just because he’d been seen around town with you. But now it’s going to get worse. A lot worse.”
    I had no idea what to say. I could try to deny that anything was going on, yet I knew that wasn’t really the point. They were going to think it, whether it was true or not. “Why are you telling me this?”
    “I just thought you should know. A time might be coming when Matt has to make a choice. If you care about him—and I think maybe you do— you won’t do anything to make that choice harder on him than it already is.”

C HERIE ’ S funeral was a couple of days later. Matt insisted on going
    together.
    “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” I asked him. I hadn’t seen him since he’d rushed out of my house after hearing about her death, and I hadn’t told him about my conversation with Chief White. He just shrugged.
    In the movies, it always rains for funerals, but the day of Cherie’s funeral was beautiful. Colorado averages over three hundred days of sunshine per year, and this was one of them. The temperature was in the sixties. Only the bare trees and the dead leaves skittering across the