Devlin hurried back to the car, thinking that he was probably still a step or two ahead of Levine’s people. Obviously Levine had lost his argument with the mayor and the commissioner, and so Devlin was to be today’s headline. At the latest, tomorrow’s.

He had an idea already, but first he had to get his car off the street.

1:22 P.M. …

1:22 P.M. …

Sweat ran into his eyes. Devlin was driving Sal’s loaner, a 1964 Falcon with standard shift. The car was uncomfortable and clumsy, bulbous, with imprecise, toylike controls. The windshield was steaming up, not responding to the defroster, and the vent window allowed the rain to splash in on Devlin’s lap. He had had to get out of Sal’s garage, and as of two minutes ago, Father Steve Loncaric had not called back to say he was with Eileen or that the police were on their way to her office to take over.

Devlin was on his way to Susan Michael’s apartment. She wasn’t home, which was the way Devlin wanted it. Her interest in doing business with the supermarket press was all Devlin needed to believe she was wondering if she might actually have something to sell, something half remembered, something tangible. Devlin knew too much about the level of police science skills in the New York Police Department to imagine that detectives searching the apartment had gotten everything. He had heard of one young plainclothesman at a murder scene picking up the telephone before it had been dusted for prints. Another guy who liked to take his own pictures of corpses—a common enough perversion among cops—found one he couldn’t photograph because of an overturned chair, so he righted the chair, took his picture, then turned the chair over again. The existence of a photograph that contradicted the official evidence came to the attention of the prosecutor at a late night dinner during the trial and the Heimlich maneuver was required to save his life.

Devlin took the Queensboro Bridge back into Manhattan. No toll-takers, nobody eyeballing him. The radio wasn’t mentioning his name, but of course that didn’t mean anything. If anybody listening to John Lord talking on the telephone had gotten wise to the identity of the caller, he might have been able to conceal his reaction even from John. And if that were the case, Devlin was going to have to be careful around John, too. Jesus. At least Devlin had the fourteen hundred Major had owed him. He was thinking he’d save it for a lawyer when he thought again about having to be careful around someone as close to him as John. If Devlin really couldn’t trust John Lord, he’d be better off spending the money on a psychiatrist.