Alice had not done well with her fat guy second husband in Florida. He had not traveled well. Antagonizing the locals led to unemployability, which in turn led to rage, and Alice finally blamed herself. “I pick drunken losers,” she wrote to a Monahan woman who talked regularly to Devlin’s mother. “Something was going to happen,” Devlin’s mother was told. Finally Alice lit out, taking the youngest child, a girl, all she felt she would be able to support, farther south, to Miami, where she moved in with another woman and got a job as a cocktail waitress. In her last letter, she wrote, “They let me wear dark stockings to hide my varicose veins.” She wasn’t thirty-five years old. A month later a pain in the lower back was diagnosed as a kidney infection, but it got worse, and a trip to the hospital led to the discovery of a cancer that had probably started in her uterus and had metastasized into her liver and lungs. Alice lived one more month, not time enough to write another letter. The letter informing the family that she was gone was written by the roommate, whom Alice had entrusted, the roommate said, with her baby girl.…

Devlin’s mother had been right. A dozen years ago, Alice’s death fresh in his mind, thinking of her, or life itself, had made Devlin feel doomed and meaningless. Would anyone ever know that Alice had lived at all? Where was the redemption in such squalid, pointless suffering? Cancer? Devlin had read that women got cervical cancer when their men didn’t keep themselves clean. Was Devlin’s cousin dead because a fat guy had been too lazy to wash his dick?

Devlin knew he was going to have difficulty sitting through lunch. For all he knew, he wasn’t going to get to the entree without some kid from Harry Levine’s office laying a hand on his shoulder, saying, Keep your hands where I can see them, Devlin.

No Cummings. The Nelson tape had been stolen out of his apartment.

He was going to have to wake up!

12:46 P.M. …

12:46 P.M. …