“I tell her everything,” Levine said belatedly. He looked up. “Are you going to bed now, too?”

“I’m going to watch this handsome Irishman on the news. When you come upstairs, you’ll tell me everything from here and now. Right, Mr. Devlin?”

“As it should be.”

She kissed her husband on the forehead. “I’ll see you later.”

Levine waited for her to get out of the room. “Why did Brennan have a file on you? Marlene Santana doesn’t know, and neither does the one other person who remembers seeing it. That was his secretary, one of those women with a perfect office mind. She told Gerrity she thought she had done all the filing in that particular cabinet, but that she couldn’t remember that folder. When she saw it, she told Gerrity that she thought, ‘I don’t remember filing that one.’”

“What was in it?”

“She doesn’t know. She didn’t look in it. Confidential file and she didn’t put it there, so she figured she wasn’t supposed to look. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Marlene Santana did.”

“And?”

“Old stuff,” she said. “Some yellowed sheets with old-fashioned typewriting about your private life. Copies of confidential N.Y.P.D. documents. A couple of sealed envelopes with nothing written on the outside. Santana didn’t open them, of course.”

“And this was stolen?”

“Do you have any idea what might have been in those envelopes?”

“No, I don’t.”

“After the robbery, after the secretary went through the files and made an inventory, she remembered the Frank Devlin file. She told Marlene Santana that it was missing, and Santana told Gerrity that when she mentioned it to Jack Brennan, he didn’t know what she was talking about. He didn’t know anything about a file on you.”

“No witnesses to that conversation,” Devlin said. He was thinking of Jack Brennan’s letter to Jane Milburn.

“No, but the two women have the same recollection of their own conversation. Now let’s see what the testimony points to—”

“That the file was planted so it would be stolen. One bad guy is using others to get at me.”

“One enemy,” Levine corrected. “But you say you don’t have an enemy like that.”

“I don’t think I’m at the center of it,” Devlin said. “If somebody hates me that much, why doesn’t he just kill me and get it over with? Did you send someone around to Eileen’s apartment last night to pick up my car key? Really to identify her?”

“Car key? No.” Levine stopped lighting his cigar to look Devlin in the eye. “Last night? Does my office know about this?”

“I told my partner to tell Kevin McQuaid.”

“Should I check? McQuaid thinks I’m coaching him from the sidelines, the little son of a bitch. He’s got another think coming.”