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The hors d’oeuvres were large indeed. There was grilled shrimp, a warm pesto salad with rigatoni, a green salad with oil and lemon, baguettes so good they should be a controlled substance, and the usual plethora of cheeses and little hot pastries with stuffing.

The Reverend Lopes came alone. Though he plays for the other side, as he likes to say, he keeps his private life very private. He joined in the sympathy I received regarding the coins. We waxed philosophical about the difference between a good fake and a bad original. He recalled how a Dutchman, Han van Meergeren, forged Vermeers so well that he sold a fake of The Woman Taken in Adultery to Herman Goering.

Someone tapped a glass. A black woman of regal bearing from the managerial ranks of the Boston PBS station responsible for the film thanked us all for coming. She said her station had been honored to work with Professor Chard, the university, and the Museum of Man. She mentioned the production staff and thanked the Seaboard Players for letting us use their wonderful facilities.

We settled down eventually in the theater itself, which felt like a large living room. Music reminiscent of Villa-Lobos started just as the enormous screen on the stage filled with an expansive aerial view of the Amazon rain forest. Credits rolled, the music faded, the camera closed in on rising ground in the distance, and the authoritative if somewhat unctuous voice of a well-known actor began.

“Professor Cornelius Chard is a modern-day Indiana Jones. The world’s preeminent expert on human cannibalism, he is also an indefatigable explorer who has traveled the world in search of those people who eat people. Not long ago, his search led him to the headwaters of the Rio Sangre, a tributary of the Amazon, and the homeland of the fierce Yomamas, a tribe that has successfully resisted the predations of loggers, miners, and other outsiders by killing and eating them.”

Corny appears on screen laboring up a dense jungle trail following loincloth-clad porters. The cut is taken from the video that Corny sent to me through an intermediary. Breathless from his exertions and reminiscent of that famous British naturalist, Corny stops to describe where he is and where he is going.

The scene changes abruptly to a dizzying flyover view of Seaboard before coming down to street level and driving, as it were, up to the massive front doors of the museum. The voice-over intones, “Meanwhile, back in the quiet coastal city of Seaboard, a drama quite different but related to that of Professor Chard’s was unfolding in the Museum of Man. There, two academics, sane, sober people, appeared to have killed themselves with sex.”

As I watched the documentary with interest, I let my gaze wander around the assembled group, gauging their reaction. They appeared riveted. All except Merissa Bonne, who was on display in a diaphanous number that in certain backlit situations left little need for figural inference. I noticed that she fidgeted, distracted. A bit brazen, I thought, showing up with Max like that. Perhaps too brazen. Too much like a gesture calculated to show that they had nothing to hide. Which didn’t necessarily mean they had something to hide. But they, more than anyone, had a strong motive to murder Heinie von Grümh. Not only that, but Lieutenant Tracy told me that they were each other’s alibi for the time when the murder occurred. A flimsy one at that, something about a drive up the coast.

Merissa caught me looking at her and, judging from her private smile, not altogether mistakenly thought I was thinking of something other than the film.

The documentary moved briskly on, dramatizing with deft strokes the intertwining strands of bizarre murder, drug dealing, Corny’s gruesome adventure, and the all-important videotape. I spend some time myself in front of the camera explicating the development in the Genetics Lab of a powerful aphrodisiac and the attempt by the mobster Freddie Bain, aka Manfred Bannerovich,