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my story has no end and we go to the flea market.

What ails St. Petersburg is simple.

People don't say what they mean.

Unless you're City Council member Kathleen Ford, and then people who disagree with you want you bound, gagged and carted off.

Then there's police Chief Go Davis. Over the weekend, in a guest column in the Times defending his record, he complained about finding himself having to "constantly respond to those with negative agendas."

This is Orwell-speak watered down by a bureaucrat.

What Davis means is, he thinks he's being criticized because he's a black chief in a still redneckish southern city that likes being backward, that refuses to tolerate a black man at the top of the heap.

This is -- well, I am in polite company -- horse hooey.

His critics aren't on his case because of Davis' race.

Or because of their race.

They're on his case because he won't play straight.

Not when it comes to Lt. Donnie Williams.

It took more than three months of court papers, hearings, phone calls and various other forms of verbal jousting to get the chief to sit down to a deposition in two lawsuits brought by the strangest duo since Felix and Oscar -- the Times, and the union that the paper's editorial writers love to pick on for being a pack of bigots, the PBA. The suits were brought to try to get what public records were available on the investigation of Davis' promotion of Williams while he was suspected of being a small-time coke dealer. Failing that, we wanted straight -- there's that word again, that marvelously colorblind word -- answers from the chief.

The chief hasn't signed last week's deposition to indicate he absolutely swears every word the court reporter took down is correct, a formality in these matters. But the deposition is the best record available, and it is a testament to his skill at playing verbal dodge ball.

The facts are what he says they are. Never mind if he or others have previously contradicted them.

He has said the Williams investigation was part of a larger federal investigation, one which began without his even knowing about it. In the deposition, matters became more muddled. For instance, the chief said he doesn't now remember when he was told the feds were involved.

He has said there were no separate records of the case. In the deposition, he said there are records. He said he wanted the files maintained separately, so the wrong people couldn't get to them.

When asked where the files were, Davis didn't know. "I'm not privy to how vice maintains their files, but where vice keeps their records is where their records are kept."

(Davis must be getting advice from Harry Lee Coe, Hillsborough's glorious goof of a state prosecutor. Remember how some guns once were found to be missing from the government property room in which evidence was kept? Remember how Harry said that wherever the guns were, they were where they were supposed to be?)

Maybe these are distinctions without differences. But maybe not. Why should even these details be so hard to extract and nail down?

The Williams case has been parsed and reparsed often enough to weary even the closest followers of it. Maybe that's what the chief is hoping for -- that the rest of us will just quit in exhaustion so that we never learn the whole story. In the chief's version, it is okay to promote a police officer while he is under suspicion of dealing in cocaine. In the chief's version, criticizing such a promotion is a racially motivated attack.

Talk about moving backward.

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