“Do you recognize what you’ve just seen?” Laurie asked.

“I’d say it was somebody getting shot,” Jack said.

“It’s Carlo Franconi,” Laurie said. “After watching it, does it remind you of anything?”

“Sort of reminds me of those old tapes of Lee Harvey Oswald getting shot,” Jack said.

“Show it to him again,” Lou suggested.

Jack watched the sequence for the second time. He divided his attention between the screen and watching Laurie and Lou. They were captivated.

After the second run-through, Laurie again turned to Jack and said: “Well?”

Jack shrugged. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Let me run certain sections in slow motion,” Laurie said. She used the remote to isolate the sequence to where Franconi was about to climb into the limo. She ran it in slow motion, and then stopped it exactly at the moment he was shot. She walked up to the screen and pointed at the base of the man’s neck. “There’s the entry point,” she said.

Using the remote again, she advanced to the moment of the next impact when the victim was falling to his right.

“Well, I’ll be damned!” Jack remarked with astonishment. “My floater might be Carlo Franconi!”

Laurie spun around from facing the TV. Her eyes were blazing. “Exactly!” she said triumphantly. “Obviously, we haven’t proved it yet but with the entrance wounds and the paths of the bullets in the floater, I’d be willing to bet five dollars.”

“Whoa!” Jack commented. “I’ll take you up on a five-dollar wager, but I want to remind you that’s a hundred percent higher than any bet you’ve ever made in my presence.”

“I’m that sure,” Laurie said.

“Laurie is so fast at making associations,” said Lou. “She picked up on the similarities right away. She always makes me feel stupid.”

“Get out of here!” Laurie said, giving Lou a friendly shove.

“Is this the surprise you guys wanted to tell me about?” Jack asked cautiously. He didn’t want to get his hopes up.

“Yes,” Laurie said. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you as excited as we are?”

Jack laughed with relief. “Oh, I’m just tickled pink!”

“I can never tell when you are serious,” Laurie said. She detected a certain amount of Jack’s typical sarcasm in his reply.

“It’s the best news I’ve heard in days,” Jack added. “Maybe weeks.”

“All right, let’s not overdo it,” Laurie said. She turned off the TV and the VCR. “Enough of the surprise, let’s eat.”

Over dinner the conversation turned to why no one even considered that the floater might be Franconi.

“For me it was the shotgun wound,” Laurie said. “Which I knew Franconi didn’t have. Also I was thrown off by the body’s being found way out off Coney Island. Now, if it had been fished out of the East River, it might have been a different story.”

“I suppose I was thrown off for the same reasons,” Jack said. “And then, when I realized the shotgun wound was postmortem, I was already engrossed in the issue about the liver. By the way, Lou, did Franconi have a liver transplant?”