Jack for senator: Jack had been five years older than Devlin, but at the time Devlin had known him, Jack had been a lightweight in street smarts. Old Jim was a tougher son of a bitch than either of his boys, but not the kind of conscientious, nose-to-the-grindstone father who would teach his sons how to turn themselves into political powerhouses. But Jack Brennan had learned something somewhere. In fifteen years, Jack Brennan might have picked up a lot more than even perhaps his father could have taught him. Right now New York Democratic party morality was at an all-time low, lower than a roach in Chinatown, where the cellars went three levels down to black, dripping bedrock. The greed slime covered practically everybody: the late, unlamented Donnie Manes, suicided Borough President of Queens; his fat friend Geoffrey Lindenauer; Meade Esposito, party boss of Brooklyn, whose contacts and connections made doing business in that part of the city without him impossible; Stanley Friedman, his counterpart in the Bronx; guys in Staten Island milking a Navy contract; congressmen, judges, their sons and daughters—all of them, one way or the other, caught with their dukes in the tambourine. These people hadn’t stolen millions from the people of New York, they had stolen billions, and now that some of them were heading to jail, they were tripping over themselves in the rush to rat on one another. Jack Brennan must have cut his deals, or he wouldn’t have been made the Democratic senatorial candidate. There was no other possibility: in New York, Jimmy Carter-style straight arrows were lucky if they were allowed to teach high school history on a substitute basis. In South Ozone Park, yet. A bellyache? Devlin had no way of knowing that he would ever hear the truth, but the way things worked in New York and the N.Y.P.D., the story would probably filter down, snake along the grapevine, until Frank Devlin, formerly “Nightclub” Devlin, soon-to-be ex-Brennan in-law (he prayed to God), heard it all.

“You’re going to see the body,” Levine said. “Welts all over it. Beside the bed was a woman’s belt, a thin leather one. The dress the girl must have been wearing—it was on a chair, the only dress in the room—had a belt of the same material still in the loops. So the whipping, if that’s what it was, was planned in advance.”