Devlin went out into the rain as a train rolled around the curve of the el toward Court Square. Susan Michaels was going to be one disappointed yuppie princess when she found out there wasn’t going to be an Enquirer check at the end of her newly blooming rainbow. Devlin wanted to talk to Anita Brennan, too. He had never met the woman, and only God knew what she had heard about him over the years. Water poured from the car’s rain gutter onto his knee as he slid behind the wheel. Could he trace Antonucci into his Gotti connections at this point? Probably not. Devlin knew people connected to Gotti, but he had not spoken to them in years. Probably they wouldn’t want to talk to him. Antonucci’s connections to them were thin, Octavio Lopez’s nonexistent. The Quinns had gotten the classic kiss-off, their bodies left in a time-honored gangster dumping ground. That identified Lederer clearly enough. He could have covered his trail completely, but what connected Lederer to the case was only Devlin himself. No, there was the real estate man, who had rented Lederer the Lake Tranquility house, but a guy like him probably would develop brain damage when he saw what kind of people he was dealing with. In that context, the whole thing did make more sense with Devlin dead. Why not an accident on the subway? Why wasn’t he dead already? Everything else had been so carefully choreographed that a misadventure made a certain ironic sense.

Why were things beginning to point to the grandiose conversations of three semiambitious young men, sipping the patriarch’s cognac in a room large enough for them to play catch with a tennis ball? They had done that once, Devlin remembered clearly enough, but he couldn’t remember another specific thing. For months, Joe had talked about the vulnerability of organized crime to the conspiracy statutes, that it would be easy enough to develop evidence, but Devlin could remember no more than that. He might have been bored. Or daydreaming about an intrigue. More likely, contemplating Maryellen’s latest atrocity. Certainly he had been drunk. Perhaps not as drunk on those nights as some others, but drunk nevertheless. No euphemisms, Bill Ward had taught him. Drunk. Drunk is drunk. Drunk!