The Son of John Devlin (19 page)

Was it possible that Moloney could be the key to cleaning up the entire department? Possible that he was so emblematic of the corrupt cop that were he to fall, the others would quietly close up their operations? For if Moloney could be brought down—Moloney, who was tougher and smarter and better connected than the rest—then anyone could be brought down.

Was it naive, Jack wondered, to think there might be a domino effect? He knew there were the hard core who would never go straight, but he also suspected that there were a fair number of marginal characters in the department, weak men who did what they did because it was done, it had been done, it could be done. And because it could be justified. Moloney was a big shot and a success, had a drawer full of citations and was respected, and he supplemented his income so they’d say to themselves: Why shouldn’t I?

The Blackthorn was an Irish pub a few blocks out past the hospital district near the Fens. It drew hospital workers from Beth Israel, Children’s, Deaconess, and Brigham & Women’s, as well as students from Simmons, Emmanuel, and art schools near the Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts. It was a small, cramped space set belowground in a run-down building on a block with a Laundromat, a variety store, and a secondhand music shop. The bar attracted a good crowd on weeknights and was packed on weekends. You entered from the street down seven steps to the basement room, long and narrow, no more than twenty feet wide at any point. There was a bar to the left and tables crammed together to the right. The walls were black and dark green with posters and signs evoking Dublin.

The legal capacity was 151 patrons. This number was set by the licensing commission based on a formula that included square footage and available egress. Every public facility in Boston had an assigned capacity, from the Blackthorn to the Ritz ballroom.

Donald Dineen had owned the Blackthorn for five
years. For the first year in business, it had been a cowboy bar operated under the name Valley Ranch. But in that incarnation it had attracted a few country music fans and more bikers than Dineen wanted to deal with. When he switched the club to an Irish motif and renamed it the Blackthorn, the patrons began pouring in.

For Donald Dineen there was but one problem: His capacity was too low to make the kind of money he was sure he could make.

Bar owners had a basic rule of thumb: On weeknights, their patrons turned over twice; on weekends, they turned over three times. In other words, if a hundred people showed up at peak on a weeknight, you could project that a total of two hundred would enter the bar during the course of the night. On average, the per-customer expenditure was twelve dollars on weeknights, fifteen on weekends. Thus, on a weekend, defined by bar owners as Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, Donald Dineen had four hundred customers per night spending fifteen dollars each. That gave him a nightly take of $6,000 or a total of $18,000 gross for the three nights.

Weeknights were not an issue because he rarely reached capacity. But weekends were a problem because there was always a line outside, always more customers clamoring to get into the cigarette smoke and rollicking jukebox and Guinness on draft.

What it boiled down to for Dineen was simple: If he could add another fifty people at peak—for an additional two hundred per night on weekend nights—he could make an additional $9,000 per week. That translated into an extra $468,000 per year merely by adding a few extra people over his capacity three nights out of the week.

And so, some time back, Donald Dineen had found himself dealing with Detective Moloney. They held a series of confidential discussions, and the result had been an agreement: Moloney would make sure that the capacity of 151 was not enforced Thursday through Saturday nights, and guaranteed Dineen protection from any possible sanction. The agreement had lasted three years, and in that period Donald Dineen had grossed an additional $1.4 million as a result. Dineen had paid Moloney and other officers an average of $4,000 per month over that time for a grand total of $432,000, leaving himself $972,000 to the plus side.

Two people in the world had known of this arrangement, had known the full details and story. But now there was only one, for in a cruelly ironic twist, Donald Dineen had died in a fire in the Blackthorn; a death fire that investigators attributed to “severe overcrowding.”

The four buildings that comprised the project were brick, square, five stories. The O’Neil Project was one of the safest and quietest in the city. About a third of the residents were Americans; the rest were immigrants from India, Ireland, Haiti, Belarus, Vietnam, and the Czech Republic. They had joined together over very little, but the death of Jenine O’Connor had affected them all. She’d been just nineteen, a nursing school student who lived in the project with her father, a retired city worker on hundred percent disability.

Jack Devlin climbed the stairs of building number four, the sound of his shoes echoing on the cold cement stairway. He arrived at the landing on the second floor and knocked on the steel door to apartment 49.

Joe O’Connor peered through the peephole in the door and saw Devlin. “What?” he said.

“Mr. O’Connor, please,” Jack said.

“What is it?” O’Connor asked.

“I’m Detective Devlin,” Jack said. “I’d like to speak with you.”

Joe O’Connor unchained the door. He unsnapped a lock, opened the door, and stared at Jack. O’Connor was five feet nine inches tall and weighed under 150 pounds. He wore a V-neck T-shirt and green work pants. He was bent over slightly, leaning to the side, his stability aided by the use of a cane. His on-the-job back injury had cost him the ability to earn a living.

“You’re a detective?” O’Connor asked.

Jack nodded.

“Got ID?” O’Connor asked.

Jack showed his badge and picture ID.

After O’Connor had confirmed that Jack Devlin was, in fact, a member of the Boston Police Department, he turned sideways, as though to permit Jack into his apartment. Instead, however, O’Connor took his cane in both hands as though it were a baseball bat and was suddenly swinging it wildly in the direction of Jack’s face. Jack reacted instinctively, pulling back and bringing his left hand up to block the blow. But the cane glanced off the knuckles of his left fist and caught him just above the left eye. He went down hard on to the concrete floor of the entryway.

“You fuckin’,” Joe O’Connor said, his jaw clenched, spittle coming from his mouth. O’Connor moved forward, but his disability slowed him and Jack recovered quickly enough to block the next blow with his forearm and, with a quick move of his right hand, to seize control of the cane. As he did so, jerking it away with his vastly
superior strength, Joe O’Connor lost his balance and went spinning to the floor.

The apartment door across the way opened and an elderly man emerged.

“That you, Joe?” the man asked, surveying the scene. When the man realized what was happening he registered alarm. “What the—”

Jack was on his feet, a gash opened over his left eye, dark fresh blood streaming down his face. The cut was right next to the scar Jack had carried for years, the result of a high stick in hockey. While the new wound bled profusely, the scar puffed up, angry and swollen.

The neighbor across the hallway was confused by the scene. Here was a big man, over six feet, powerful-looking, who’d been beaten to the ground by a crippled old man.

Notwithstanding his condition, Jack spoke calmly. “Everything’s okay, sir,” he said, turning to the old man. “I’m a police officer. A misunderstanding.”

The man froze.

Jack nodded assurance to the man.

“You okay, Joe?” the man asked.

O’Connor was breathing hard. He nodded, out of breath. “All right, Arthur,” he said.

Jack reached his hand out to help O’Connor up off the floor. “I’d like to talk privately,” Jack told him.

O’Connor watched him carefully, and finally reached up and permitted Jack to pull him off the floor.

They went inside the apartment, and Jack shut the door. The blood from his forehead was in his right eye now, coming down his face. “May I borrow a dish towel?” he asked.

O’Connor went to a drawer and took out a clean towel. Jack dampened one end under the faucet and dabbed the cut clean.

“Ice?”

O’Connor nodded toward the freezer, and Jack helped himself. He wrapped three cubes into the other end of the towel and placed it against the cut.

Then Jack went to the sofa and sat down. He could see that the easy chair, well-worn, placed in front of the TV set, was O’Connor’s.

“You’re pretty handy with that thing,” Jack said, trying to force a smile as he nodded toward the cane. “Play any hockey?”

O’Connor said nothing.

Jack took a deep breath, looked down at his feet, and nodded. “Listen, I’m really not here in any official way. I would like to ask some things, but I also want to say to you—and this is personal—that I am sorry for what happened. And I’ve heard the rumors just like you have, and if any of our men were in any way involved, I am sorry and ashamed.”

Jack paused for a moment. His head throbbed and he was having only modest success holding back the blood from the cut above his left eye. He held the ice in place with one hand while running the other through his hair, front to back, trying to put it in place. But it was more nervous gesture than anything else, for he was deeply humbled in the presence of this man who had suffered the loss of his only child. Jack believed that whatever emotion he felt, whatever words he offered, were woefully inadequate to the moment. But he had to try.

O’Connor was a thin, pale man with a two- or three-day
stubble. He stared at Devlin with a mixture of disbelief and confusion.

“If any—” he said, and stopped. He looked off to the side and shut his eyes tightly for a long moment.

There was the smell of something burning, and O’Connor went and flipped open a toaster oven and pulled out a charred English muffin with melted cheese. He plucked it with a fork and held it for a moment as though wondering what to do with it. Suddenly, he flung it hard in the direction of the sink, but it was too high, struck a coffee mug and knocked it against the wall, breaking the handle.

O’Connor turned red with rage and faced Jack.

“God knows what happened,” he said. “God knows the truth. But I believe what I believe, and that is that they were on the fuckin’ take. I believe it!”

Jack nodded. “I’ve heard that,” he said quietly, earnestly. “And if it’s true, I want to know. ’Cause it’s my job to prosecute them.”

O’Connor looked down at the frayed carpet for a moment, then limped to his chair and fell heavily into it. He thought, as he had countless times before, about her last night. His daughter had come home from nursing school having learned her grades for the term, as proud as she could be with her B-plus average.

“If it wasn’t for chemistry,” she had said, “it’d be an A-minus.”

He had been very proud of her indeed, and reality struck home when he saw the report: She really was going to be a nurse; she really was going to make it. One more semester and she would be out, finished, ready for her training.

They had chatted for a while, sitting right here in this space. O’Connor recalled sitting precisely where he was now, and Jenine had been sitting exactly where the detective was now. She’d been wearing a turtleneck shirt, red, with navy-blue sweatpants. And on her feet she’d worn those furry slippers she always wore around the apartment.

It had been one of his favorite times, the early evening on a Friday, when she was done with her schoolwork for the week and looked forward to a night out with friends. She socialized primarily with other nursing students and several girls she’d known in high school. She’d had a couple of boyfriends, but those situations hadn’t worked out, and O’Connor was just as glad. She was only nineteen, after all, and seemed to him so much younger than that.

That had been the night she’d shocked him. He had been enjoying the conversation, enjoying their private, intimate moment, when he could sense her tensing up. She sat on the sofa with her legs tucked underneath her.

“There’s this notice on the board at school,” she said. “They’re recruiting nurses at the big medical center in Jacksonville.”

Jacksonville. He had heard the word, but it had not registered.

“Florida, Dad,” she added.

“Florida?” he said, clearly stunned. “Florida, honey,” he said again, as though it were off somewhere spinning in orbit around Mars.

“They pay really well, Dad, and one of the girls told me they have beautiful condos not far away, a pool and tennis and anything you could want, plus they subsidize
your monthly payments. You get a discount if you’re a nurse at the center.”

He had sat in his chair, openmouthed, speechless. The thought of her leaving, of picking up and going off to Florida to live there and work there. He would be alone, and the thought of not having her was suddenly terribly painful.

“But what’s wrong with …”

What’s wrong with me? was what he’d been thinking. What’s wrong with me? was what he’d wanted to ask. But he hadn’t dared, for he had feared the answer. He had feared she would say, “What’s wrong with you is that you’ve done nothing with your life. What’s wrong with you is that you’ve always been dim-witted and never amounted to anything, and even when you had steady work with the city you fucked it up by getting injured and going out on disability, not when the payments were high, but after there’d been a crackdown and the payments were the lowest they’d ever been. What’s wrong with you is you took the life insurance money after my mother died and blew it on that foolish investment your friend talked you into. What’s wrong with you is that you’re aging too fast and the apartment is too small and it’s in a fucking public housing project and I’m sick of this life and I want to go to a better place, a new place where the sun shines and I might meet someone and start a family and have my own life.”

He wanted to ask the question, but did not dare.

“It’s not something I would jump into,” she had said, shaking her head as though the idea was the furthest thing from her mind. “But it’s something to consider. I mean there aren’t that many good jobs around here. Too many experienced nurses. In Florida and Arizona,
there’s lots of opportunity, and I’ve got to take that into consideration.”