Some Like It Hot-Buttered by JEFFREY COHEN

when I walked in. The very definition of municipal government.
    Luckily, when I closed Dutton’s office door, I walked almost directly into Officer Leslie Levant, who was making her way toward me, having spotted me first.
    “Elliot,” she said, “did the chief call you about Anthony already?”
    “Actually, I was here to see . . .” I almost said, “I was here to see you ,” but instead I finished the sentence with, “if there was any way for me to help Anthony out.” Okay, I’m a coward. Now you know.
    “It doesn’t look good right now,” she answered. “When they find him, I bet he’ll be charged, and piracy can be a federal rap if they prove he sold any outside the state.”
    Well, if officers could be more open than the chief . . . “What changed between this morning and now?” I asked.
    “All they have are some boxes of DVDs in the basement.”
    Leslie looked confused. “Didn’t the chief tell you?”
    “Tell me what ?”
    She pulled me to one side of the corridor to stand closer, a move to which I did not object strenuously. There are some forms of police brutality that are not entirely offensive.
    Leslie spoke very quietly, but with urgency, especially since Dutton chose that moment to walk out of his office. Luckily, he didn’t look in our direction as he walked down the corridor away from us. “What’s changed is that the search warrant for Anthony’s apartment came through this afternoon.”
    “And?”
    “And when they searched the place, they found duplication equipment and empty jewel cases. Not to mention DVDs of four more titles: all the new movies that you’ve shown in your theatre for the past month.”

9
    Leslie walked me outside, clearly concerned that the top of my head might blow off or that I might actually give myself a stroke through sheer will.
    “It doesn’t make sense! I don’t believe that kid would do all this. He never talked about money; he wasn’t the type to rail against the system. He wanted to make his own movies, not copy someone else’s illegally.”
    “You can’t argue with the evidence,” Leslie said in her best police officer voice. “What doesn’t make sense is that he’d have all that stuff in his apartment and all those copies in the theatre and not be pirating copies. You can’t explain it any other way.”
    “Not yet, I can’t. But give me a little more time—”
    We both stood and stared for a long moment. Chained to a rack outside the local police station, a few yards from uniformed and gun-toting people sworn to uphold the laws of the state of New Jersey, was my sole mode of transportation. My bicycle.
    Missing its front wheel.
    “That’s . . . that’s . . .” I said. Sure, now I’d be able to think of something witty to say, but at the time, that was the best I could do.
    “Is that yours?” Leslie asked. “Where’s the front wheel?”
    “That’s . . . that’s . . .”
    “Did you leave it out here so you wouldn’t look like a dork carrying it around in a police station? That’s so cute.”
    Not as cute as it might have been.
    Although I wanted to file an incident report, Leslie convinced me that finding one bicycle wheel might be a little unlikely, even for as crack an outfit as the Midland Heights Police Department, and besides, I had no way to identify the wheel. She offered, since it was the end of her shift, to drive me home in her personal car, a brand-new Toyota that she kept impeccably clean, which I considered evidence of an unbalanced mind. Without its front wheel, the remaining part of my bike just fit in the trunk, which was lucky, as Leslie informed me in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t “about to put that greasy thing on my brand-new seats.”
    We didn’t talk much during the ride. I was overwhelmed, I’ll admit, by the whole day—I’d started out with a vague feeling that the Ansella thing would get worse (although not for Mr. Ansella, who had it about as bad as it gets), and it had. I’d gotten