Jim Brennan shifted in his chair behind the desk in his sanctum sanctorum, the library. Another Cuban cigar—Kennedy’s boycott meant nothing to him. (“Fuck Kennedy’s boycott, look what it got him.”) Devlin knew now that Brennan felt laws were only an inconvenience, when he didn’t want to obey them.

Devlin had been out to a movie with Maryellen. At the door the butler mumbled something to her, and she turned to Devlin, her sudden alarm collapsing into heavy submission and defeat. “My father wants to see you,” she whispered conspiratorially. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”

Brennan was in shirtsleeves, his collar open, his tie undone. According to Gabe Pressman on the local news, Brennan had testified that morning at a New York City Board of Estimate hearing on the impact of low-cost, high-rise Title One housing in Rockaway Beach. Title One housing was a politician’s license to steal, Devlin knew, all the deals done and players satisfied long before the first public hearing. Brennan had come down in favor of the project, banging his palm on the table. If Devlin understood who Jim Brennan really was, his appearance this morning at the B.of E. had been on the order of a holy blessing. Brennan owned or controlled every bus line servicing the Rockaways, he was a member of nearly every commission, board, and charity in the city, and nobody, presumably, knew the situation down there better. It was wonderful window dressing. The public was being shown that Brennan’s private interests were involved. Hilarious nonsense: His skim off the top of the public money when the project went through would amount to ten times his profits from the bus lines for all the years the project would stand. Devlin was getting the Brennan story: he had come up off the streets, using his fists. Big fists they were, too. He had developed his father-in-law’s little jitney line serving North Beach, where La Guardia Airport was located now, into a true feudal duchy with hundreds of buses serving neighborhoods from the East River to the middle of Nassau, and from Long Island Sound to the Atlantic Ocean. You did not do business anywhere on Long Island without the imprimatur of Jim Brennan.

“What do you mean, who am I?” Devlin asked. “I’m a cop.” The air undulated with webs of smoke. “I went to City College—”

“I know all that shit,” Brennan said, looking vaguely pained. “You’re porking my daughter. Do you want me to tell you about the little party at the Commodore you set up for my sons?”

Devlin wanted to smile. “Give me a goddamned break. I knew those girls … They saw me with Jack and Joe.”

Brennan had had him under surveillance? Devlin remembered very quickly what Brennan’s operatives would have seen. “Those girls didn’t pay any attention to me—”