Devlin snapped on the light and stepped over a pillow and a night table drawer into a pink, high-ceilinged cubicle that, at first glance, looked waist deep in clothing, bed linen, books, bottles, jars, slashed stuffed animals, and a few old, large pieces of furniture, a bedroom set in good condition, possibly a family heirloom. A few magazines were scattered about the mess like tomato slices garnishing a dinner salad, but Devlin could see no papers or personal books, like diaries, journals, or calendars. Levine’s people had all of it. Many young women kept records of their escapades, and if Jane Milburn had been one of those diarists, Levine now had a record, bout-by-bout, of her affair with Jack Brennan. For Devlin, the idea was startlingly spooky. He remembered reading in the Times’s announcements column that Jack had married Anita Walton Brokaw of New York, Newport, and Palm Beach, a graduate of Goucher college, working for Assisi Galleries on the East Side—pretty fancy, for the son of an Irish mug who had put together his empire with his fists. 1975 or ’76—Devlin could remember the new Mrs. Jack Brennan from her wedding photograph, a tall, slim, angular, startled-looking blond society type. Devlin remembered thinking at the time that she looked both opaque and uninteresting. Did that mean something now? At the time of his death, Jack Brennan had been into kinky sex. Why would the Jack Brennan Devlin remembered marry a sex problem so he could go out and develop one of his own? What Devlin remembered of Jack was that he was normal, maybe a little slow on the uptake, and that he was just as nuts about getting laid as his brother and brother-in-law.

Devlin supposed the search team had looked under the night tables. He grinned. He didn’t know which old bull had taught him to do that, back at the start of his plainclothes career, but he did remember a time when the teaching came back to him, inappropriately, and his laughter had made his head ache, and that had made him only laugh louder.…

Drunk with Maryellen one summer weekend out at the Southampton place, the two of them alone. He was trying to live through his hangover on Sunday afternoon when he turned his head on the pillow, to the night table beside him, and suddenly wondered how he knew the table had been built in Chicago. Then a brain cell flickered: at some time during the night before—he had no way of knowing when—he had had his head under the table, face up, his eyes focused on the red label glued on the wood under the tabletop. How had he done it? He didn’t know, and started to laugh. Maryellen had been in the same shape.…