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.

"Jesus Christ, I don't believe it," somebody said.

"Get a shovel or a broom or something. I ain't picking that up with my hands."

"What the fuck you guys talking about?" the man in the white sports coat said, pushing his way, along with Gouza, to get a better view of the trunk. Then he pressed his hand over his mouth and nose.

"Put in a call for the ME," one of the plain-clothes cops said.

A uniformed sergeant, his hands inside a vinyl evidence bag, reached into the trunk of the car, took out Jewel Fluck's head, and laid it on the grass. Joey Gouza's face was stunned, his mouth dropped open; he stared speechless at the man in the white sports coat. He gestured emptily with both hands at the air.

"I don't know what it's doing there, Dom," he said. "It's a setup. These fuckheads are working with some pisspot cops over in Iberia Parish. I swear it, Dom. They been trying to put an iron hook through my stomach and tear my insides out."

"Shut up, Joey. You're under arrest," one of the plain clothes cops said. "Put your hands on the car and spread your legs. You know the drill. The rest of you people go back to your lasagne."

The uniformed sergeant shoved Joey face-forward against the side of the Cadillac and hit him under both arms. Joey's face went livid with rage, and he whirled and drove his elbow into the sergeant's nose.

Then NOPD went to work with the subtlety of method for which they're famous. While the sergeant tried to cup his hands over the blood that fountained from his nose, two other uniformed cops rained their batons down on Joey's back.

"We got a perp on dust," somebody yelled.

Then as though that one declaration justified any means of restraint, another cop ran from the far side of the street with a Taser gun. The cops flailing with their batons jumped back just as he fired.

But Joey had seen what was coming, too, and he drove sideways and the dart embedded in the thick, fat neck of the man in the white sports coat. He went down as though he had been bludgeoned with an ax, his body convulsing, his arms writhing in the damp grass with the electric shock.

Then a cop garroted Joey across the throat with his baton and lifted him, strangling, to his feet while two other cops cuffed his wrists behind him. The last frames in the film showed Joey being stuffed behind the wire screen of a patrol car, one foot kicking wildly at the window glass.

The sheriff put the VCR on rewind.

"The anonymous call was traced to the Acme Oyster Bar on lberville," he said. "When the arresting plain-clothes got there, they ran into none other than Cletus Purcel, bombed on boilermakers with seven dozen empty oyster shells piled on his table. The plain-clothes don't think it's coincidence that Purcel was sitting in the Acme."

"But they didn't take him in, did they?"

"No."

"They won't, either."

"Why not?"

"Because they don't care, sheriff. Gouza won't go down on a murder beef, but they'll put him away for resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer. The court considers him a habitual. That means this time he goes into lockdown with the big stripes at Angola and they weld the door shut on him. Why should they worry about Clete?"

"You misunderstand me, Dave. I don't care about Purcel. I'm bothered by the possibility that one of my men shaved the dice. You know that was Jewel Fluck's head, don't you?"

"Maybe."

"You want to tell me what really happened with you and Jack Gates?"

I rubbed my palms together between my legs. The sunlight outside was white and hot through the cracks in the blinds.

"The evidence was found on the right person, sheriff. There's no way around that conclusion. You have my word on it."

He picked at his thumbnail, then raised his eyes to mine.

"That's about all I'm going to get from you, huh?" he said.

"Yeah, I guess that's about it."

"Well, maybe it's time I talk to Garrett's family again over in Houston."

I studied his face and waited.

"I think you wrote your signature on this case with a baseball bat, Dave. But anyway we're closing the file on it. The three men who killed Garrett are dead. The man they worked for is in the New Orleans city prison under a two million-dollar bond. I think the slate's wiped clean." He gave me a measured look. "For everybody, you got my drift?"