Devlin knew as much as the next cop about bondage and discipline. Some powerful men accustomed to ordering people around and being waited on were not happy unless they submitted to an equal and opposite degradation—being spanked, tied up, urinated upon, or worse, the polite words for which were found only in twenty-pound dictionaries. None of it had ever deeply aroused Devlin’s intellectual curiosity, and so he assumed he had no idea how an individual psyche made a connection between pain, suffering, and degradation, and the pleasure and completeness of lovemaking. Had Jack Brennan ever given a sign that his personal circuits were wired funny? The Frank Devlin of fifteen and twenty years ago, “Nightclub” Devlin, had had little way of telling. Too young, too inexperienced, in addition to being a drunk. If a powerful man had secret feelings of unworthiness or inadequacy, just the knowledge he had to deal with them secretly—ultrasecretly, with a woman found for the purpose—would cause him to shift his public behavior even further from what he feared might be discovered about him. Maybe. Jack Brennan hadn’t been anything like a public tyrant. Quieter than his younger brother Joe, Jack had been the family grind, the good student, the one who could be counted on to tend to details and paperwork.…

Harry Levine said, “Tell me about Joe Brennan. All I remember now is reading that he died.”

Again, Devlin wasn’t sure he believed Levine. “Joe Brennan drowned,” he said. “Out at the family place in Southampton. Joe liked to swim before breakfast. He was a powerful swimmer—everybody knew that. It was July eighth, 1978. Mrs. Brennan—Charlotte, Joe’s mother—heard him go out at about seven-thirty. Usually he was inside again in forty minutes, but by eight-twenty, when he hadn’t returned, she roused the household and they went down to the water’s edge to look for him. Everybody knew he’d swim straight out for a quarter mile or so, then come back. It took them only a couple of minutes to find him. He was floating in the surf, facedown. Charlotte was the first to spot him and she knew right away. Everybody else did, too. Jim got rid of the Southampton place before the year was out, and the following spring he had his stroke.”

“How do you know so much about the drowning?”

“What wasn’t in the papers was told to me over the telephone by the flunky who relayed Jim Brennan’s message to stay away from the funeral. Another example, possibly the last, of old Jim’s thoroughness in getting everything exactly the way he wanted it.”

“What kind of a woman is Mrs. Brennan? It was no secret that Jim Brennan cut a swath through this town thirty and forty years ago.”