None of the Brennans, children or parents, ever talked to Devlin about the courtship of Jim Brennan and Charlotte Brady. One time—and one time only—Jim Brennan spoke of his affection for Charlotte’s father, saying that Brady “had opened the first door, figuratively and literally,” leading Devlin to the conclusion that Brady had brought his star driver home for dinner one night, a beginning that Devlin reckoned must have been stormy, given what the principals must have been like in their youth. By 1966, thirty years later, the story of the Brennan family was carved on the consciousness of the entire city. The gossip columnists, Sunday magazine articles, and political reporters had gotten it mostly right. Of course they never explained why Charlotte put up with her husband’s flagrant adulteries, affairs, and womanizing. Devlin never was so secure in the family that he felt free to play detective, so the deepening of his understanding of the Brennans and their story was osmotic, when it didn’t come in spine-shivering bursts of revelation.…

The widower Brady died of a sudden heart attack within a year of Jim Brennan’s marriage to Charlotte, and that effectively gave the bus lines not to his daughter, a pregnant eighteen-year-old, but to her husband. From the beginning of their life together, Devlin saw, all the money and power was Brennan’s. If Devlin read between the lines correctly, whenever Charlotte needed that big lesson pounded home, Brennan did it. Maybe with his left hand, but more likely, if Devlin understood Brennan correctly, with his right, or even both fists.

After he took over Brady’s lines, Brennan’s fists made the streets hopelessly unsafe for his competitors, and when their incomes fell, he picked up the paper on their equipment. Bankers were interested only in what they saw in their books, which told them Brennan’s increasing dominance of the market made him a better and better risk. New York in the Depression wasn’t all breadlines and apple vendors, it was also burlesque, rent parties, blind pigs, numbers, and slots. In this climate Brennan was laundering the nickels and pennies from the illegal slot machines and numbers games, getting professional help to enforce control of his bus lines, which were now running all over Queens. When Brennan bought new buses, he brought his own salesmen to the deal, and they kicked the commission back to Brennan. Why not? It was a buyer’s market, cluttered with manufacturers struggling to stay alive.