The Son of John Devlin (29 page)

Jack considered this. “Would you be willing to do it?” he asked.

“Is this something that—”

“It would mean a great deal to me,” Jack said. “A great deal.”

Dexter smiled. “Hey, I’m your man.”

“I
f only I had been there, Johnny,” Tom Kennedy had said, hanging his head, shaking it in sorrow. “If only I had been there.”

Jack Devlin remembered it well, remembered clearly how shaken Tom Kennedy was at the memory of Jock Devlin’s death. Jack recalled the conversation as he drove along Commonwealth Avenue.

“I’d seen him over the weekend,” Kennedy had said. “I’d dropped by to say hello, keep him company, try and boost his spirits. He was having an awful time of it. Spirits down in the dumps. Fighting like hell to stay positive and upbeat for you.

“You’d heard about it, of course, from kids in the neighborhood. Some of it was cruel. And you’d asked him questions and he tried the best he could to answer them, and you were okay. You were a tough little kid.

“But he was hurting, obviously. He was hurting very deeply. He was wounded far more than any of us had ever imagined. That’s clear now. Wasn’t so clear then, although there were signs.

“He and I had a couple beers and talked and watched some goddamn thing on TV, some sports, and I went home. And I planned on dropping by—what was it,
Monday night, I guess—but I worked late and wasn’t able to, and then the next thing I know I get a call and Jesus Christ almighty.”

Tom Kennedy had shaken his head at the memory. He’d sighed and sighed again, and Jack thought of those sighs now as … What? Theatrical? But he remembered how they sounded, how they felt, and they felt and sounded as though this man had lost his closest and most trusted friend.

“If only,” Tom Kennedy had said, “I had been there.”

The heels of Jack’s shoes clicked on the cement floor of the hallway that ran beneath the Mugar Library at Boston University. He followed the hallway to the end and turned into a small, well-lit series of offices. It was nearly eleven
P.M
., and the library was quiet and all but deserted.

A young man wearing a black T-shirt and an earring sat behind a desk playing a portable video game. He glanced up as Jack walked into the room.

“Hold on just one second,” he said, focused on the game. “In the next thirty seconds civilization as we know it will either be destroyed or saved.”

“Good luck,” Jack said.

The young man’s face scrunched as he furiously worked the controls, squinting and blinking as the screen showed some unspeakable mayhem.

“Yes!” he declared a moment later. “Perfect.”

“You saved civilization,” Jack said, smiling.

The young man looked at Jack as though he were demented. “I destroyed it,” he said with a grin. “What can I do for you?”

Jack took a letter out of his jacket pocket and handed
it to the young man. The letter, typed on the stationery of the commissioner of the Boston Police Department, requested that Detective John Devlin be permitted to review certain archival records on file at Boston University. The letter cited department regulation F177660, which required that anyone seeking access to archival records was required to have written permission from the commissioner. The letter stated that permission was granted herewith.

The letter, which Jack had composed and typed on a sheet of stationery he’d removed from the commissioner’s office, contained the commissioner’s signature as forged by Jack Devlin.

The student swiveled around in his chair, facing a computer terminal. He began typing rapidly, and soon, a full-screen graphic appeared:
ARCHIVE, BPD
.

These files had for some years been stored on paper in a South Boston warehouse, until Boston University president John Silber offered as a public service to scan them onto a mainframe computer at Boston University. It had been a painstaking process scanning each record, but once that was complete, there was a computerized history going back twenty-five years.

The student typed in the date of the report, and a series of options were listed on the screen. “That’s everything for that particular day,” he said. “So now the question is, which is the file we’re looking for. Any ideas?”

“Is it chronological?” Jack asked.

“Sometimes yes, sometimes no,” he replied. “You don’t want to assume that because you might miss something. But let’s try that if you have time.”

“Late, like eleven o’clock or so,” Jack said.

The student scrolled down toward the bottom of the
list and hit the Call File key. A record appeared on the screen, the report of a motor vehicle accident from 9:14
P.M
. He stored it, scrolled much farther down the list, and hit the Call File key again. A file appeared marked 11:58
P.M
.

“Nope,” the student muttered, storing the file. He scrolled back up the list and struck Call File again. A report from 10:58
P.M
. Three more tries and an incident report appeared on the screen.

“That’s it,” Jack said immediately. “May I get in there?”

“Why don’t I just print it out?” the student said.

Jack nodded. He quickly turned away from the screen, felt his chest tighten and his hands shake. The printer kicked in, and he looked across the room and saw a sheet of paper moving smoothly out of the machine and settling into a tray. And then there was another. And then a third.

“Can I …?”

“All yours,” the young man said.

Jack went to the printer and retrieved the three sheets of paper. He took them to a nearby table and sat down, laying them flat in front of him. The report had been prepared by Patrolman Hank Regan. It recounted a variety of information about the scene. This was not easy for Jack to read. It went through the phone calls made from the Knights of Columbus hall on Park Street in West Roxbury on the night his father had died. As he read, he came across details with which he was already familiar.

The top sheet represented Patrolman Regan’s report of that night. His father had arrived at the Knights hall early in the evening. He’d played cards with some of his friends for a while, had a beer, then started home. Soon,
though, he returned. There were very few people in the building that night. No one saw him reenter the building. But he had. An hour later, as the custodian had gone to close up, his father had been found dead, a single bullet wound to the head. Ruled self-inflicted.

Perhaps the young officer had been shaken by the events of that evening, as many police officers surely had been. Perhaps that explained why his initial report was not as complete as it might have been. Whether Patrolman Regan had been an ambitious young man or not, Jack did not know. For Regan had died several years earlier. But Regan must have been conscientious, for he’d come back four days later, four days after his father’s death, and written a one-and-a-half-page addendum to his report.

The addendum, which Jack held in his hand, recounted much of what Patrolman Regan had reported originally, and then added a random set of facts and details.

He’d noted, for example, that Jock Devlin had won a small amount of money in the card game. He had noted that, earlier in the evening, another Boston patrolman had been playing cards in the game with Jock Devlin. That man had been Patrolman Daniel Moloney. And Patrolman Moloney had left the Knights hall in the company of Detective John Devlin.

The report noted later that there had been a brief dispute in the bar when someone turned the music up louder than its customary volume. It caused a heated argument involving, in fact, Patrolman Moloney. Patrolman Moloney had insisted the music remain loud for a period of some minutes, the report noted.

What shocked Jack, and yet did not shock him, what
caused him to shut his eyes and draw a deep breath, was one small bit of information: Near the end of the report, as though to fill up space, Patrolman Regan had randomly named a half-dozen people who were at the scene. Five of the names meant nothing to Jack. But one meant everything. One name, for Jack, confirmed so much, spoke so many volumes: the name of Lieutenant Thomas Kennedy. Present at the Knights of Columbus hall.

Present on the night that Jock Devlin had died of a single gunshot wound to the head, ruled self-inflicted.

“If only I had been there, Johnny,” he had said through the years.

But he had been there.

And year after year after year he had lied about it.

K
evin Duffy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation looked across the table at Deputy Commissioner Thomas Kennedy of the Boston Police Department and felt profoundly grateful. Duffy had often felt the sense of frustration that goes with being in the field of law enforcement. So often in his career he had been close to something big, something that mattered, something that would make a splash. So often he had been close to something for which he would be recognized. But those things had never worked out. The truth was that in law enforcement little was ever clear or clean. Rare were the occasions when you were able to score a decisive victory.

But now as Duffy sat in the FBI office at the O’Neill Federal Building in Boston, he felt a sense of anticipation: Something big was about to happen, and he would be at the center of it.

“We think it’s cleaner, better for everyone, if you come in on this now,” Kennedy said. He’d spoken slowly, sorrowfully, ever since the meeting had begun. It was clear to Duffy that this pained him. Shocked him.

“Should we bring Moloney in?” Duffy asked.

Kennedy nodded. “Before we do,” he said, “understand that we’ve been watching him for a while, Moloney. I’ve
had my eye on him, but he’s very smart. Devlin was supposed to bring him in. And I think the truth is that Devlin had him, in a way.”

“And it was in having him that Devlin had the leverage he needed …” Duffy said.

“Exactly,” Kennedy said, nodding.

Duffy pressed an intercom. “Bring Detective Moloney in now,” he said.

There was an awkward silence in the conference room as Duffy and Kennedy waited for Moloney to be escorted from a reception area in the back of the FBI offices. As he was brought in, Moloney’s eyes shifted from Kennedy to Duffy and back. He said nothing. His face was pale and beads of sweat covered his forehead and upper lip. His thinning hair was disheveled. He wore a white shirt and tie, loosened at the neck.

When Moloney was seated, Duffy reached over and turned on a tape recorder.

“For the record, I am Special Agent Kevin Duffy of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Boston, on seventeen December 1997. With me is the deputy superintendent of the Boston Police Department, Thomas Kennedy, and Detective Moloney, also of the Boston Police Department.”

Duffy stopped the machine and rewound for a couple of seconds. He hit play and was satisfied that it was functioning properly.

“Detective Moloney,” he said, “it is understood that you are here of your own free will, that you have not been compelled to come here, and that you have been informed that if you wish, your attorney may be present here today, is that correct?”

Moloney gave a curt nod.

“Detective Moloney, you have nodded, but would you please give an audible reply.”

“Yes,” Moloney said tersely.

“Detective Moloney, directing your attention to the night of twenty-six November 1997, when you were apprehended in Jamaica Plain at 322 Arborway at the residence of one Luis Espado Alvarez, would you please explain the circumstances surrounding that event.”

Moloney glanced quickly toward Kennedy, who sat impassively. Moloney thought back to the night before, when he’d rehearsed this with Kennedy over and over again, practicing responses to a variety of questions that Kennedy anticipated would be asked.

“Lookit,” said Moloney. “Let me get right on the table, to begin with, the fact that I fucked—’scuse me—that I screwed up. There were a couple of occasions where we had dealers and cash on the table and we pocketed a few bucks here and there. Nothing serious. A hundred bucks here, a hundred bucks there.

“Anyway, Devlin came to me and said he knew of this situation at this location and he said there was cash involved here and he indicated that we could make some money.”

“And what was your reaction to this, Detective?” Duffy asked.

“I was very surprised,” Moloney said.

“Because?”

“Because he was doing an internal investigation and I thought it was kind of brazen,” Moloney replied.

“Kind of brazen?” Duffy asked.

Moloney nodded.

“And so how did you respond to Detective Devlin?”

“I told him I already knew about the location, and that we were going to tackle it at some point, my partner and me.”

“And you did?”

“Right away,” Moloney said. “I thought what he’d said was strange and I wanted to cover it as soon as possible.”

“So you went there and what happened?”

“We went there and the kid had some dope and some cash and we collected both,” Moloney said.

“But you did not make an arrest,” Duffy said. “Why was that?”

“If you made an arrest every time you busted someone for dope, you’d have the courts shut down for months. No, we will frequently try and work out an arrangement whereby we get some leverage with a lower-level dealer like this kid and possibly use that to ladder up in an organization. Otherwise, you make the arrest, and for what? You have some weasel out of operation for a couple nights, but then they’ve got him replaced before you can turn around. And to get it done we’re in with paperwork and processing and it takes forever. The whole thing takes us off the street longer than the dealer. It makes no sense. So we try and scare the shit out of him and see if we can build up some chits, which we call in later.”

Duffy was taken aback by what he was hearing. He blushed, for he knew he should not have been surprised. He was struck by the huge gulf between the ways the FBI and the local police operated. He was envious. There was a kind of swashbuckling appeal to the lives of these
urban detectives, he thought. Something that was missing in the life of an FBI agent.