oysters and took them out on the redwood picnic table under the mimosa tree.
'You sure you don't mind going?' I said.
'No. Why should I mind?'
'Their father may be there. He's terribly disfigured, Boots.'
She smiled. The wind in the mimosa tree made drifting, lacy patterns of shadow on her skin.
'What you mean is, Drew will be there,' she said.
'Well, she will be.'
'I think I can survive the knowledge of your college romances, Dave.' Her brown eyes crinkled at the corners.
I was late getting back to the department. When I walked through my office door the sheriff was sitting in my chair, one of his half-topped boots propped on the corner of my desk. A videotape cassette rested on his belt buckle. He looked at his watch, then his eyes glanced at my damp hair and shirt.
'You look like you just got out of the shower,' he said.
'I did.'
'You go home to take a shower in the middle of the day?'
'I had to change a tire.'
'I'll be,' he said, clicking his nails on the plastic cassette case.
'What's up, sheriff?.'
'An FBI agent dropped this tape by about an hour ago. It was shot last night in front of a home that's under surveillance out by Lake Pontchartrain. The home is owned by one of the Giacanos, the head greaseballs in New Orleans.'
'Yeah?'
'They had a big party there last night. The Vitalis crowd from three states was milling around on the lawn, including Joey the Neck and a couple of his whores. Did you know that he makes his whores carry validated health certificates because he's terrified of catching AIDS from them? That's what this FBI agent said.'
'I didn't know that.'
'Anyway, this FBI agent knew we had a vested interest in Joey's career, and that's why he dropped off this tape.'
The sheriff removed his foot from my desk and swiveled the chair around to face me. 'So I watched the tape. It's quite a show. You don't want to get up and go for popcorn on this one. And while I was watching it, I kept remembering something you said to me the other day.'
He sucked on his bottom lip and stared into my face, his rimless glasses low on his nose.
'Okay, I'll bite, sheriff. What did I say to you?'
'You mentioned something about letting events unfold. So when I finished watching the tape, I got to thinking. Is Dave omniscient? Does he have insight into the future that none of the rest of us have? Or does he know about things that I don't?'
'I'm not good at being a straight man, sheriff. You want to cut to it?'
'Let's take a walk down to my office and stick this in the VCR. These guys do quite a job. It's even got sound. I sure wish we had their equipment.'
As we went down the hallway I kept looking into the faces of other people. But there was nothing unusual in their expressions that I could see.
'I think there should be some screen credits on this,' he said, clicking on his television set and fitting the cassette into the VCR. 'Maybe something like 'Directed by Cletus Purcel and Unnamed Friend.'
'What about Purcel?'
He sucked in his cheeks, and his eyes looked into the corners of mine.
'You don't know?'
'I'm truly lost.'
'Gouza pulled up to the house and parked. A couple of minutes later Purcel cruised by. It looked like he'd been following Gouza.'
'How do they know it was Purcel?'
'A fed made him. Also they ran his tag. Then about twenty minutes later NOPD gets this anonymous phone call that Joey Gouza has got a body in the trunk of his car and his car can be found at this address out on the lake. That's where our film starts, Dave. Sit down and watch, then tell me what you think.'
The sheriff closed the blinds, sat on the corner of his desk, and activated the VCR with a remote control in his palm. In the first black-and-white frames the screen showed an enormous Tudor house with lines of Cadillacs, Lincolns, Mercedes, and Porsches parked in the circular driveway and at the curbs. The oak trees in the side yard were strung with Japanese lanterns, and through the piked fence and myrtle bushes you could see perhaps 'a hundred people milling around the food and drink tables.
Then a solitary city patrol car cruised down the street, its emergency lights off, slowed, and stopped. The driver got out with a clipboard and flashlight and walked up and down the line of cars at the curb, shining his light on the tags. He paused by a white Cadillac limo with black-tinted windows just as a dog unit pulled into the camera lens from the opposite end of the block.
The action was very quick after that. A uniformed cop, with a German shepherd straining at its leash, approached the back of the limo. Then the dog took one sniff and went crazy, leaping against its leash, clacking its nails on the bumper and trunk.
One of the cops used his radio, and moments later city police cars, with emergency lights flashing, poured into the block. They parked sideways in the street and blocked both driveway entrances; then uniformed cops swarmed across lawns and through hedges, shined their flashlights into cars, wrote down the numbers on every license tag in the neighborhood, arrived with more leashed dogs, and turned a quiet residential lakefront street into a carnival.
Two plain-clothes detectives walked up to the rear of the limo and inserted a crowbar in the jamb of the trunk. By now the guests at the lawn party had started drifting out toward the curb, led by Joey Gouza and, behind him, a baldheaded barrel of a man in a white sports coat with a carnation, dark trousers, and white shoes.
'How you enjoying it so far?' the sheriff said.
'It's great stuff.'
He paused the VCR.
'You recognize the guy in the sports coat?' he said.
'No.'
'That's Dominic the Pipe Gabelli. He got his name from bashing a fellow inmate at Lewisberg. He's also a member of the Chicago commission. What do you think those cops are going to find in the trunk?'
I didn't answer.
'It's not a body,' he said.
'You asked me down here to watch this, sheriff. If you want to make an implication about my involvement in the events in a surveillance film, then you should go ahead and do that. But you're going to have to get somebody else to listen to it.'
'That's a little strong, don't you think?'
'No, I don't.'
'Well, let's see what happens.'
He started the tape again and increased the volume. The two plain-clothes cops leaned their weight down on the EMIL crow an you could hear the tip biting into metal, peeling back the lip of the trunk from the latch, snapping bolts loose from a welded surface. Gouza tried to grab one of the plain-clothes cops and was shoved backward by a patrolman.
The audio wasn't the best; the voices of the crowd, the cops, the squawk of radios, the beating of helicopter blades overhead, a peal of thunder out on the lake, sounded like apples rolling around in a deep barrel. But Joey Gouza's furious, artn-waving outrage came through the television set with the painful clarity of a rupturing ulcer. 'What the fuck you guys think you're doing?' he said. 'You got to have a warrant to do that. You got to have probable cause. You get that fucking dog away from me. Hey, I said get him away!'
The trunk sprang open, and the faces of the two plain-clothes cops blanched and snapped back as though they had been slapped. A woman in an evening dress vomited on the grass.
