After a few minutes at the table, the girls excused themselves to update each other and gobble more pills. Devlin thought he had a little additional edge if he didn’t bother to tell the Brennans about the pills. Let them wonder why the girls were giddier and giddier; if they tried to keep pace on booze, they’d wind up asleep in a doorway. Devlin still didn’t have an idea how he was going to get away from the Brennans so he could get the little brunette alone. He was far enough into the evening to have decided he wanted that.

She crossed him up. Returning to the table, the little brunette took the seat opposite him. The other girls, following the usual boy-girl, boy-girl seating arrangement, placed themselves on either side of him. The brunette never looked at him—none of them did. On both sides, the other two played kneesies and made random grabs at his crotch under the table. They had worked this out in the bathroom. It was clear enough to Devlin that the little brunette was playing a similar game with both of the Brennans, while the other two girls worked them from the other sides. The Brennans took little notice of him; they had three beautiful women talking to them under the table, as it were. Devlin had not forgotten the pills, or that the Brennan boys would want to keep as happy as the girls—they were going to bag all of them, weren’t they? The little brunette stuck to her game plan, signaling her friends with her eyes, Devlin saw. Crazy stuff, near misses under the table, went on for over an hour. By the end of the meal the Brennans were so drunk and so focused, however blurrily, on the women, they did not see the two flanking Devlin working on him together, not looking at him, pouring a hundred percent of their above table attention on the two brothers. But for everything the Brennans were missing, they had never been involved in anything like this before. Devlin knew it, but whatever “edge” he may have had was long gone, washed down with double Scotches.

After dinner everything went much faster, a cab ride down to the Commodore, raucous laughter in the hallway upstairs, more hilarity, the flash of bodies. Devlin awakened in the morning after ten, everybody else still unconscious. He wasn’t on duty until four, giving him time enough to get himself together, but that didn’t matter: when the Brennans came to their senses, they would run him out of their family on a rail, tarred and feathered.…

Joe Brennan found him on a stakeout in Spanish Harlem before midnight. “Nice friends you have. We’re going to see them again this weekend. Do you want in, or do you have a date for Saturday night?”

Meaning, with his sister Maryellen.

“Who are you?”

“I don’t understand the question.”