The Son of John Devlin (5 page)

As he said this, he pressed a button and the window on the Jeep slid up and closed in her face.

She frowned and grew red-faced. “Goddamnit, give me a chance,” she shouted at him. She was so loud that the garage attendant turned, startled.

She pounded on the glass so hard that he thought she might break it. “Just give me a chance to explain!” she shouted as he rolled his window down again. “At least give me that.”

She was breathing hard and there was a vein bulging in the side of her neck. She came quickly around the Cherokee, got in the passenger side, and slammed the door. “Just get off your high horse for a minute and let me explain, will you?” she asked, glaring at him.

But her anger only served to incite Jack. He looked at her in disbelief. “You insult me up there and now you come down here and bark at me because I don’t want to talk to you?” he said. “I have to tell you, I don’t deal well with brats.”

Her eyes widened. “Brats?” she said in astonishment. “That’s lovely,” she added sarcastically. “Very impressive. I come racing all the way down here to apologize to
you, and you get all huffy and call me a brat. Very mature.”

There was a loud honking behind them. She looked back and saw U.S. District Court Judge Henry Weedon looking at her as though to say, What gives?

“Jesus, you’re blocking Judge Weedon,” she said. “You better move.”

Jack waited for her to get out of the vehicle, but she didn’t move.

“Go!” she ordered. “Come on!”

“You better get out,” he said curtly.

But she did not budge.

“Just go, will you, please, before he gets really angry?”

Reluctantly, Jack Devlin put the Cherokee into gear and eased it forward through the garage exit and out onto Congress Street. He drove a block and pulled over, waiting for her to get out. Again she did not move. They sat in a prolonged silence until finally he said, “I need to get moving. I have to be somewhere.”

His tone was cool.

She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. When she spoke, her tone was calm, her voice much quieter than it had been. “If you would let me ride with you, I would appreciate it,” she said. “There’s something I want to say.”

He considered this, shifted the car into drive, and pulled back out onto Congress Street.

“Just go wherever you’re going and I’ll catch a cab back,” she said.

He drove in silence along Congress Street over to Cambridge Street, then to Storrow Drive. Finally, she spoke.

“I want to say that I am sorry for what I said,” she
said, her tone measured, careful. “It was an overheated atmosphere and I was angry that the meeting was destroyed … angry at BPD, and I blurted something that I shouldn’t have said, and I certainly should not have been staring at you when I said it because I realize you probably took it personally, and it was not intended that way. So I am sorry and I hope you’ll accept my apology.”

He glanced across at her as he drove and could see by her expression that she was deadly serious. Her face was flushed still, and strands of hair were out of place and had fallen into her face. She brushed them away as she looked at him. There was no artifice about her.

“Of course I will,” he said softly, graciously. She looked over at him and held his gaze, and he drifted into the passing lane, a cabdriver honking furiously.

He shifted his eyes back to the road, and she looked out to her right across the Charles River toward Cambridge.

“Where are we headed?” she asked.

“Roslindale,” he said.

“Whereabouts?”

He hesitated. He was not sure whether he wanted her to know, but could think of no other response, so he told the truth: “Holy Name Church. Out on the parkway.”

She knitted her brow. “What’s happening there?”

“Mass,” he said, without shifting his eyes from the road ahead.

“Mass?” she repeated, clearly surprised.

He nodded.

“In the middle of the week?”

“Right,” he said.

All right, he thought. She’ll make some wiseass anti-Catholic
comment, and when she does I’ll pull over and kick her ass out of here.

But there was no comment. Merely a brief nod.

Jack turned off Storrow Drive at the Kenmore Square exit and followed the ramp up to Boylston Street behind Fenway Park.

“Pull over here,” she said. “I’ll run in and get us some coffee. Go ahead, pull over.”

He did as instructed, and she disappeared into Dunkin’ Donuts, reappearing minutes later with two cups of coffee.

“You know, I don’t have any money with me,” she said, not the least bit sheepishly. “My bag’s back at the office. Can I borrow a couple of bucks?”

He wanted to laugh out loud but instead reached into his wallet and handed her a five. She ran back inside and paid for the coffee. When she was back in the Jeep, she sipped her coffee and spoke in a much brighter, more cheerful voice than before. “You know, it occurs to me that to get a cab—”

He couldn’t help but smile. “Here,” he said, handing her a ten-dollar bill.

“Great,” she said. “Thanks.”

She sipped more coffee and stared at him. “So?” she said.

“So, what?” he replied, pulling into the traffic headed out Boylston to the Riverway.

“So I’m very glad that you accept my apology,” she said. “I can’t stand ungracious people. Speaking of ungracious,” she continued, “I must tell you that I do not think your pal Del Rio was very constructive in that meeting.”

Jack was mildly taken aback. They had just settled an unpleasant conflict and she was jumping back in.

“I really don’t,” she added.

“I believe you,” he said.

“I mean, why be so sophomoric?”

“He has a visceral hatred for Kevin,” Devlin said. “He looks at him and he sees only the FBI putting Steve Burke’s life in jeopardy. He can’t get past that.”

“It’s very counterproductive,” she said. “It doesn’t help.”

“And it would help what, exactly, if we were to work with the FBI?” Jack asked.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“I’m not,” he replied, sipping his coffee.

“Well, obviously—”

“Nothing’s obvious,” he said.

“Okay, Counselor,” she said, sitting up straighter in her seat. “It is asserted that the sum of the law enforcement parts could be—could be—greater than the whole. That there is a synergy that could be achieved by having all the parts working together.”

“If there was mutual trust and confidence, I’d agree,” he said. “But look at it from Del Rio’s point of view. Does he want to send detectives, including those under cover, into an operation in which the FBI has had a hand, given Kevin’s track record? Would that be responsible? Why risk it? Why put your people into situations that someone else controls?”

“He could try and handle it another way so that Kevin isn’t completely humiliated and the meeting ruined,” she said.

“But he
wants
the meeting ruined.”

“Oh, that’s wonderfully mature. So professional. And
you like this guy?” She made a face indicating her distaste.

“He thinks the Fibees are classroom criminologists who don’t really grasp that there are posses out there with big handguns who wouldn’t think twice before blowing a hole in a Boston police detective.”

“But that’s—”

“Entirely rational,” Devlin said. “He wants a bad relationship so we don’t have to work with them.”

“It’s so Machiavellian,” she said as they curved around the Holy Name rotary and pulled into the church parking lot.

“There’s a cabstand across the street,” he said.

“Listen,” she said. “I meant what I said. I am sorry for my stupid comment. I really am.”

As she waited for a cab, the skies opened and a cold, sleeting rain poured down on the city. Emily raced across the street, toward the church, seeking refuge from the storm. She would wait until it passed and then catch a cab.

She quietly entered the back of the church and took a seat in the very last row. It was a cavernous place, with huge stone columns and seats for what must have been a thousand people. She looked up toward the front and saw Jack toward the altar. The crowd was sparse, no more than a few dozen. She noticed that most of them were older men, at or past retirement age.

As the Mass began, a couple of elderly men were finishing their work of going row to row to place booklets at the end of each bench. Emily picked one up and examined it. It was small and printed on cheap white paper. Her curiosity was aroused when she saw the seal of the
police department of the city of Boston on the front of the booklet. She opened it and found that this was a memorial Mass to pray for the departed souls of members of the department “who had served honorably.” The booklet was a listing of all deceased members of the Boston Police Department who had “served honorably.” There must be thousands of names, she thought, as she thumbed through and saw them in column after column, jammed onto the pages.

The booklet was organized into decades—men who had died in the 1990s, for example, were listed alphabetically together. She began thumbing through the various decades, looking, in each section, for the name of Devlin, and she found several Devlins, two of them from the 1950s and another in the 1930s, but none more recent.

She forgot about her cab and sat watching the Mass. Soon it came time for the sermon, and the priest moved to a small podium set at the front of the altar, facing the worshipers.

“We gather here this afternoon as we do every month at this time to pause for just a moment from our daily lives to recall the good works of so many of our brothers and fathers and grandfathers and beyond who served as police officers in our city,” the priest said. “This month, as we do each and every month of the year, we add two names to our roll of honor. Patrolman James Manning and Sergeant Warren Gustavson were taken by God this past month, and so we pay special notice to them today and ask God to place them in a special place near him in Heaven for all of eternity. And we pray for all of the others listed in your booklets, available to you in the pews or in the back of the church.”

As the Mass proceeded, she sat stunned at what she’d just witnessed. Jack had come here to this Mass whose express purpose was to memorialize the dead among the police force who had “served honorably,” as the booklet said, as the priest himself had said. And yet Jack’s father’s name was not among those who had rendered such service. As the Mass drew to a conclusion, Emily slipped out the back door and returned to her office.

As was his custom, Jack Devlin lingered inside the church after Mass. He sat in the pew while the others departed and, soon, he was alone. He looked around and felt comforted by this setting that was so familiar to him. The gray stone walls of the church, the heavy steel light fixtures hanging down from the forty-foot ceiling, the dozens of stubby white candles, flames sending shadows shimmering up the walls, the stained-glass windows, the drafty creakiness of the place. He very much liked that the new style of Mass—post–Vatican II—was said in a setting that evoked the old church of the Latin Mass. Now the altar had been turned around so the priest faced the congregation, embraced the congregation, invited the people to participate in this sacrament.

In the empty church, Jack slid off the bench and knelt down, propping his elbows on the bench in front of him. He made the Sign of the Cross and began to pray. He prayed for the repose of his father’s soul. He believed in the afterlife, in the concept of Heaven, and he believed that his father’s spirit existed in that place. And though his father’s body was long dead, his spirit existed, somewhere in the universe, and would for all of eternity. This he believed.

And so he prayed for his father, whom he had loved so dearly.

Then hated so desperately.

Then loved so dearly, yet again.

T
he living room was not particularly large, but its southern exposure had sunlight streaming in on this frigid December Sunday. It was shortly after ten
A.M.
, and already Jack Devlin had been to an early Mass and taken an eight-mile run through the streets of West Roxbury. He’d showered, changed, and lit a fire in the fireplace. The pale, milky light of December filled the room as he brought a storage box of photographs and files out of his basement and set them down in front of the sofa.

Jack was comfortable in his modest home, a Cape Cod–style two-bedroom on a side street off the VFW Parkway. He set a mug of coffee on the side table and leaned forward on the sofa, reaching into the box.

Jack removed a large manila envelope thick with photographs, undid the clasp, and slid the pictures carefully out of the envelope. He set the stack down on the coffee table and picked them up one by one, studying each for a moment or two. Though he hadn’t touched the contents of this box in several years, these were photos with which he was intimately familiar. The instant he looked at one, he would immediately be flooded with recollections of that time or even of that moment. Most of the photos were of himself or of him and his
father. There were a few with his mother, all in black and white. There were a few of just his father or of his father with some friend from the department.

Jack had been nagged by the thought that it was time to organize this material, to pull it out, look through it all, and somehow make sense of it. But how did one organize the remnants of a life? Here were the official papers of his father’s existence: bank and insurance records, pension and Social Security information, letters from lawyers for the city, the police department, the detectives’ union.

As he sifted through it, Jack was struck by how little information was here. He’d read all the documents before, reviewed them with his lawyer’s eye, studied them, processed them. They held little meaning for him now.

It was the photographs that captured him. There was a black-and-white shot of him and his mother standing on the seawall at Nantasket, the water to their backs, looking across at Paragon Park. Her face was freckled, her hair pushed to one side by the wind. Both of them wore bathing suits, hers a one-piece that flattered her, his a droopy one with the drawstring hanging down the front. She was holding his arms, for he was not yet a year old and was unable to stand on his own. It was odd looking at pictures of his mother, for Jack had no recollection of her at all, no memories that evoked her presence, no remembrance of her voice or how she moved or even her smile.