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But there were other videos, with less childlike names. Sodomania 36. Aim to Please. Sluts with Nuts 5. Succubus. Oh My Gush 7.And the ever-popular Bad Mama Jama. Nice. Let’s just hope he never intended to show his daughter Snow White and by accident slipped in Nubian Nurse Orgy instead.

And then there were a series of videocassettes without preprinted labels or covers, cassettes with French words scrawled across white labels, some of the labels badly stained with spots of something that looked like coffee. At least I hoped it was coffee. Yuck. Home movies of birthday parties and the like or something a little less innocent, though no less staged? I remembered the inventory found in the apartment at the time of François’s arrest, the video camera with tripod and lights but no videos. Now here they were, waiting for me.

I turned on the television, powered up the VCR, slipped in one of the self-labeled tapes. While I was waiting to see what was what, I sat down in the chair, pulled a beer from out of the cardboard six-pack holder, blew away the dust, twisted off the cap, took a whiff.

Skunk city. Ugh.

I twisted the cap back on, replaced it, leaned back in the La-Z-Boy, rested my shoes on the conveniently risen footrest.

Static, then the swelling music and HBO logo indicating the showing of a feature presentation, then a blank screen for a moment, before a fixed shot of a bedroom appeared on the screen. I had never seen the bedroom before, but I recognized it right off, what with the same brass lamp with pleated shade, the same headboard, the same ceramic Dalmatian that stood in the piles pushed to the walls. François’s bedroom. No clap from the clapper, no shout of “Quiet on the set and… action,” but it wasn’t needed, was it? First there’s nothing but the bedroom, then an entrance from stage left.

Gad.

60

Beth was waiting for me at the bar of Chaucer’s, a bottle of Bud in front of her.

I had called her from the seat of the La-Z-Boy and asked her to meet me here, and now I slipped in beside her and ordered another beer for her and a Sea Breeze for me.

When the bartender spotted me, he gave me a look. “No trouble tonight, right?”

“No trouble,” I said.

“It was bad enough cleaning up the blood from the last time you were here. Who was that creep anyway?”

“My dentist.”

“Really? Is he any good? Because I’ve been having this trouble with my…”

As the bartender described his dental issues, pulling down his lower lip to show a jumble of stained Chiclets, Beth stared at me as if I had grown a second head.

“Have you ever noticed the teeth in this city?” I said after the bartender, mercifully, had cut off his demonstration and left to get our drinks. “It’s like we’re living in England.”

“How was your trip?” she said.

“Instructive.”

“Anything I should know?”

“Just that our client didn’t do it.”

“I already knew that,” she said, and then she realized what I might have said. “You found proof in Chicago?”

“I found a strange coincidence that might be seen as proof,” I said, “if I can figure out one more thing.”

“What?”

“Why would my dentist murder Leesa Dubé?”

I told her about my trip to the Peppers’, about what I had discovered, about the coincidence of the photograph clutched in the dead woman’s hand. Beth gave me a hug when I was finished, like I had discovered a cure for cancer.

In the midst of her celebrations, the bartender brought our drinks. I lifted my glass. “Cheers,” I said.

We clinked, we drank, I drank fast. I felt suddenly better and gestured for another. Anything to get the sight of that video screen out of my head.

Beth suddenly grew pensive. “Is the coincidence enough?” she said.

“No, but it’s a start. We still have to figure out the why. But there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about. Whitney Robinson dropped in to see me the other day and he said something that troubled me.”

“I know Whit’s your friend, Victor, but I don’t trust him. He’s a little too tweedy, don’t you think?”

“Never trust a man in tweeds, is that it?”

“Yes, actually. A hard-and-fast rule that has held me in good stead over the years. And bow ties trouble me, too.”

“What about George Will?”

“Proves the point on both counts. But there’s something else about Whit, at least as it relates to François. He seems – how do I put this? – a little too interested.”

She might have been right, but just then I didn’t care. “During Whit’s visit,” I barreled on, “he told me something intriguing about François that I thought I ought to pass along.”

“I’m not sure I want to hear it.”

“He said that François, for all his charming surface, is hollow inside.”

“He doesn’t know him.”

“Maybe not. But he said there existed some physical evidence to prove his point. Our client lied about his stuff. It wasn’t all gone. It was in a storage locker. And this afternoon I found it.”

“Oh, I bet you did.”

“Beth, you need to listen-”

“No, I don’t, Victor. I don’t need to listen to anything that Whitney Robinson has to say about François. Or you either, for that matter. You said you wouldn’t give me a lecture.”

“Maybe I care for you too much to stay quiet.”

“Well, try, Victor. Tell me, how’s your friend Carol?”

“She’s fine,” I said.

“I love the enthusiasm in your voice whenever you mention her name.”

“She’s beautiful, well dressed, well mannered, and she doesn’t have cats. In short, she’s everything I’ve ever wanted in a woman.”

“But still, something’s not right.”

“We’re not talking about my love life now.”

“Maybe we should. You think you have the right to lecture me, you with your never-ending line of women, whom you complain about even as you sleep with them, women like your Carol. I might be confused, but at least I feel something. You should try it sometime.”

“And what is it exactly that you’re feeling?”

She took a swig of her beer, thought about it a bit. “Do you know that fizzy sensation you get when you first fall in love, like your brain is floating in champagne?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it’s not like that. It’s not romantic. It’s something different, deeper in a way. It’s as if the reason I went to law school was to someday help François.”

“Beth.”

“As if everything in my life has been leading me to him. I don’t understand it, and I’m not going to act on it now, because I’m a lawyer and he’s our client and he needs us in a different way, but I’m not going to stop feeling it. And, Victor, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

“You sure about that?” I reached down into my briefcase, pulled out one of the videocassettes with French scrawled across the stained label, slid it across the bar until it was in front of her.

She looked down at it for a moment, then shook her head. “I don’t want it,” she said.

“You know what I discovered today? I discovered that you can learn a lot about a man from the pornography he creates. And I’m talking about more than the size of his cock. I’m talking about the cruelty, the pent-up violence, the way the world exists solely to satisfy his depraved needs.”

“Go to hell.”

“You ought to take a gander. This one has quite the cast.”

“People change. He’s not the same person he was before. He’s been in prison now for three years. He hasn’t seen his daughter in three years. That does something to a man. It has to.”

“One viewing.”

She shoved it back at me. “Put it away, Victor. Burn it if you want. I don’t need it.”

“Later you might,” I said.

“Remember years ago, right after your cross-examination of Councilman Moore in the Concannon case, when you told me it was never going to happen between us?”

“I remember.”