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it every time, an electric spark as real as the orange itself. He knew that making a move on a married woman was a bad idea, especially when you were in the woman’s house and her husband was also in the house and her husband was a cop and the party was a celebration of the birth of the cop’s second child. Cousins knew all of this but as the drinks stacked up he told himself there were larger forces at work. The priest who he’d been talking to earlier out on the back patio wasn’t as drunk as he was and the priest had definitely said there was something out of the ordinary going on. Saying something was out of the ordinary was as good as saying all bets were off. Cousins reached for his cup with his left hand and stopped to roll his right wrist in a circle the way he’d seen Teresa do before. He was cramping up.
    Fix Keating was standing in the doorway, watching him like he knew exactly what he had in mind. “Dick said I was on duty,” Fix said. The cop wasn’t such a big guy but it was clear that his spring was wound tight, that he spent every day looking for a fight to throw himself into. All the Irish cops were like that.
    “You’re the host,” Cousins said. “You don’t need to be stuck back here making juice.”
    “You’re the guest,” Fix said, picking up a knife. “You should be out there enjoying yourself.”
    But Cousins had never been a man for a crowd. If this had been a party Teresa had dragged him to he wouldn’t have lasted twenty minutes. “I know what I’m good at,” he said, and took the top off the juicer, stopping to rinse the buildup of pulp from the deep metalgrooves of the top half before pouring the contents of the juice dish into a green plastic pitcher. For a while they worked next to one another not saying anything. Cousins was half lost in a daydream about the other man’s wife. She was leaning over him, her hand on his face, his hand going straight up her thigh, when Fix said, “So I think I’ve got this figured out.”
    Cousins stopped. “What?”
    Fix was slicing oranges and Cousins saw how he pulled the knife towards himself instead of pushing it away. “It was auto theft.”
    “What was auto theft?”
    “That’s where I know you from. I’ve been trying to put it together ever since you showed up. I want to say it was two years ago. I can’t remember the guy’s name but all he stole were red El Caminos.”
    The details of a particular auto theft were something Cousins wouldn’t remember unless it had happened in the last month, and if he was very busy his memory might go out only as far as a week. Auto theft was the butter and the bread. If people didn’t steal cars in Los Angeles then cops and deputy district attorneys would be playing honeymoon bridge at their desks all day, waiting for news of a murder. Auto thefts ran together—those cars flipped exactly as they were found, those run through a chop shop—one theft as unmemorable as the next but for a guy who stole only red El Caminos.
    “D’Agostino,” Cousins said, and then he repeated the name because he had no idea where that particular gift of memory had come from. That’s just the kind of day this was, no explanation.
    Fix shook his head in appreciation. “I could have sat here all day and not come up with that. I remember him though. He thought it showed some kind of class to limit himself to just that one car.”
    For a moment Cousins felt nearly clairvoyant, as if the case filewere open in front of him. “The public defender claimed an improper search. The cars were all in some kind of warehouse.” He stopped turning the orange back and forth and closed his eyes in an attempt to concentrate. It was gone. “I can’t remember.”
    “Anaheim.”
    “I never would have gotten that.”
    “Well, there you go,” Fix said. “That was yours.”
    But now everything was gone and Cousins couldn’t even remember the outcome. Forget the defendant and the crime and sure as hell forget the cops, but