The Son of John Devlin (8 page)

That had been a year ago. Since then she’d been unattached, and had made a point of dating no one. She’d avoided social settings, feeling instead the need to recharge her batteries and think about what she wanted from life. And it was so very simple: She wanted love. Children. A family. A chance to do work that meant
something. She wanted a good man who was strong and stable, someone who would be as good a father as he was a husband. She wanted two or three kids and an opportunity to provide them with a good life. She wanted to be a loving mother. She wanted all those things that she thought of as the components of happiness.

Emily Lawrence was a very bright woman, and she knew there would be hard moments. She knew that even the happiest and most fulfilled life was not without struggle or pain.

Now, she took off her windbreaker and black running tights, sat down in her kitchen, and took a long drink from a bottle of water. She dialed into her voice mail and listened to Jack Devlin’s message for a second time.

“Hi, it’s Jack, and I just wanted to say hello and see how you’re doing, so give me a call when you get a chance. I hope all is well so, ah … take care, okay, Em?”

She smiled and saved the message.

So take care, okay, Em?

He said it with sincerity, with an earnestness that she liked. In some ways he seemed like such a simple man, so straightforward. He worked, he played ice hockey with his friends, he went to church. Was it because of his simplicity that she was drawn to him? she wondered. She loved that there was no artifice about him. She thought he was perhaps the least pretentious man she’d ever met. There was a genuine sense of humility about Jack Devlin, and she loved that. She believed in being humble, in recognizing the natural and spiritual forces that dwarfed individual human beings. And Jack Devlin struck her as a genuinely humble man.

She also found him terribly attractive. He was tall and strong, and there was a handsome kindness to his face
that was appealing. She was even intrigued by the scars, one by his left eye and the other over the right side of his lip. The one by his eye gave his face character, she thought. The one by his lip, from certain angles, was all but invisible. But from the side, particularly from the left, it appeared he’d just gotten a fat lip. When she was close to him the other day, she’d caught herself staring at it. The truth was, she thought Jack a very sexy man.

Of all his characteristics, however, Emily was most taken with his perseverance. She was deeply impressed that he’d been able to do what he had, in light of his upbringing. To go on to achieve so much success both athletically and academically, after the traumatic nature of his childhood, was quite extraordinary.

As she cooled down, Emily felt a chill. She went to her room and got into a hot shower. Afterward, she dressed in corduroy slacks, a cotton shirt, and a dark green wool sweater. She returned to the kitchen, drank more water, and peeled an orange, separating the sections on a paper towel spread on the kitchen table.

She thought about Jack as she ate, and wondered whether she was capable of opening up to him. A certain level of efficiency in her social life was important to her now. She had no interest in developing casual dating relationships for the sake of having something to do on a Saturday night. For the sake of companionship. She wasn’t uncomfortable alone. Sometimes she actually had to try and push herself out of those comfortable weekend nights when she would sit at home by the fire with a glass of wine and a good book. The sheer indulgent pleasure of it was alluring, and the time alone relaxed her as nothing else could. If she was going to go out with a man, she’d by now decided, she had to see the reason for it
beforehand. Was that cold-eyed realism? She supposed it was, but what was wrong with that? What was wrong with not wanting to waste her time and energy? If a relationship didn’t have the potential to go anywhere, why pursue it?

She chewed an orange slice and wondered whether there was potential with Jack. Instinctively, she thought there was. They were clearly attracted to each other. And so they would take the first step in trying to get to know each other, and see where it went.

She finished the orange, took another long drink of water, and dialed his number. He answered on the first ring.

“Hey,” she said cheerfully. “Thanks for the message.”

“Emily,” he said, clearly pleased. “How are you? I’m glad you called.”

“You are?” she said. “How come?”

“I just am.”

“Come on,” she said. “It’s okay to tell me you like me.” She laughed.

“I’ll have to work up to it,” he said.

“Listen,” she said. “I have a great idea. Want to hear it?”

“I do.”

“The idea is that I make this pasta dish I saw in a magazine, with scallops and mussels—it really sounds great—and I make that and you come over for dinner. Say, Saturday night?”

Her manner was light and breezy, but she was nervous. She very much wanted him to come, yet feared that he might have other plans.

Jack, meanwhile, felt a sudden sense of excitement.
He’d been thinking about asking her to go out Saturday night but hadn’t yet done it.

“Did you have plans?” she asked.

“I did have plans,” he said. “My plans were to ask you to go out to dinner with me.”

“Really?” she said, clearly pleased.

“Really.”

“Well, sorry,” she said. “Can’t make it. I’m having dinner here with you.”

J
ack felt a sense of anticipation as he drove through the streets of Newton, following Beacon Street out to the Waban section, an affluent residential neighborhood. Emily lived in a modest-size brick Tudor-style home on a quiet street. He was unexpectedly nervous as he approached her front door.

Emily looked quite beautiful, he thought when he saw her. She wore black linen pants and a simple black wool sweater, and was clearly delighted to see him. She ushered him into the kitchen and poured him a glass of red wine. Then when he was seated comfortably by a living room fire, she quizzed him about his days as a hockey player.

“I actually saw you play in college several times,” she said. “My boyfriend at the time—a guy named Jerry Wilkins, did you know him?”

“I knew who he was,” Jack said. “He was a senior when I was a freshman.”

“He was a real hockey nut, and he’d take me to games. I remember watching you because he would talk about how fabulous you were. He said you had the hardest shot in the league.”

“I knew I liked Jerry,” Jack said, smiling.

“I don’t mean to be too personal—if I am crossing some imaginary line, let me know,” she said as she refilled their wineglasses. “But isn’t it something of an odd choice, after going through Harvard, to join the Boston Police Department? I mean, the opportunities available to you …”

Jack shrugged. “It seemed a logical choice to me. I liked the law and wanted to learn it, and I thought I’d practice but then decided I wanted to become a cop.”

“I think you are a very complex man, Mr. Devlin,” she said.

During the course of dinner, he managed to turn the conversation away from himself and on to Emily. She talked about her upbringing in New York, her school years at Wellesley, how she got into the law. Her father had been a partner at a major New York firm, and when she passed the bar exam, he hoped she would join his firm.

“I told him, ‘Dad, you shouldn’t have taken the Justice Department job and exposed me to the public sector.’ He still thinks I might go and join the firm. He still has hope.”

Jack sipped his wine. “You think you might at some point?”

She shook her head dismissively. “Never say never, but I can’t imagine it, to be honest with you. It just doesn’t appeal to me. I find some of the work interesting in a theoretical kind of way, but I can’t imagine doing it day in and day out. What the precise terms of a contract are concerning an offshore offering of stock is not an issue that enthralls me.”

Jack nodded. “I’m the same way,” he said. “I find all
the tort and financial issues interesting as kind of intellectual exercises, but the practicality never appealed to me. When I was done with contracts in school, I was done with contracts. It’s not that I can’t see the appeal of it. I can. I think there’s an intricacy and a sense of vision and anticipation that you need to be a great corporate or contracts lawyer. But it’s not for me.”

“Yeah,” Emily said as she went into the kitchen. Pouring rice into boiling water, she looked back at him through the open doorway. “So what is for you?” she asked.

Jack shrugged. “What I do,” he replied.

She appeared surprised. “Forever?”

“Maybe not forever, but at least for now. For a while.”

Emily returned, popped the cork, and poured more wine into both their glasses. She put the wine down on the coffee table and sat back on the sofa. Jack sat opposite her on an easy chair.

“So let me ask you about business,” she said. “I’ve heard through the grapevine that you busted Moloney. That’s pretty big.”

Jack was surprised, though he knew he shouldn’t have been. “Jeez, I thought that was pretty tightly held,” he said.

“It is,” she replied. “But the commissioner briefed us. He wanted to be on the record as letting us know so there couldn’t ever be an accusation of a cover-up within the department, though he explained that you’re going to try and deal with it internally for the moment.”

“But?” Jack said.

“What do you mean?”

“Sounds like there’s a but coming.”

“Well, I mean, if he’s committed a crime, I don’t see how …” She hesitated, catching herself. “Look, I don’t want to be judgmental, because I understand that it’s important to avoid tainting the department, but if someone’s committed a felony and you have evidence to that effect, then the best way to clean the place out is to make an example of him.”

Her face flushed with color as she realized that Jack could take her comment quite personally. He chose not to, however.

“But that’s another subject,” she said. “More to the point, how’d you do it?”

“There’d been talk about him for a while, and some of it involved dealers. I had known a fair number of dealers myself from having been at Narcotics, so it was really a matter of finding someone who would be willing to work with me, and I had this one guy in a tough position.”

She shook her head in admiration, then raised her glass in a toast. “Nice work,” she said seriously.

“Thank you,” he said. “I appreciate that.”

She paused for a moment and studied him. “So what do you hear about the morphine deal?”

He appeared surprised. “Is that why I was invited here tonight?” he asked, a half smile on his face.

“Of course not,” she said. “You were invited here because you are an interesting, attractive, somewhat mysterious man.”

She stood up and reached her hand out to him. “Come on,” she said, smiling. “Here.” She handed him his glass. “Have some wine. I’m sorry. I can’t help myself sometimes. This stuff is important to me. And this idea of not working together drives me absolutely nuts. It is just
so … so absurd. The possibility that you would have information that could be useful, but it isn’t shared with us, just—”

She shut her eyes and shook her head.

“But look,” she said, “I invited you here with no professional ulterior motives. I mean, being with you the other day and getting a glimpse into … into I don’t know what. Into your life! I was touched by it, in a way. I think you are a fascinating man.” She smiled.

“So who’s your source?”

She laughed. “Just kidding, just kidding,” she said.

He laughed as well.

She went to the window and leaned out so she had a view of the sky. “Oh, look,” she said. “Full moon. Come on.” She walked into the kitchen and he followed. In the back hallway she got a black fleece pullover and put it on.

“Put your jacket on and follow me,” she said, and he complied.

They went out the back door and down a stairway, following a flagstone path to the back lawn and across to a cedar fence.

“Here’s the tricky part,” she said, turning sideways and sliding through a narrow opening in the fence. “This is the way I screen men,” she said as he made his way through. “I bring them here, and if they can’t squeeze through, it means they’re too fat and I dump them.”

They stood on a golf course, on the edge of a hole that was wide and long, a ribbon of fairway that wound up a slight hill, then down a gentle slope along a meandering stream. The moon painted a wide yellow pathway across the water, across the fairway to where they stood. In the cold night air the pale yellow light was crisp and bright
enough so they could have hit shots and seen the ball land a hundred yards away. They sauntered side by side along the fairway.

“May I tell you something?” she said.

“Sure,” he replied.

“The other day, at the church, I went to the cabstand, but then it began to pour so I ran inside the church to wait for it to let up. I sat down in the last row.”

She glanced at him to see whether she was crossing some invisible line.

“And I looked at the booklet and saw that your father’s name was not listed. And I wanted to tell you I happened to see that because I think, for you in a way, that’s the heart of the matter, isn’t it?”

He walked a few more steps without reacting, then nodded.

“And I thought about it when I was back at my office, and a very powerful sadness kind of overcame me. I thought about you back all those years ago, and tried to imagine this little boy, nine years old, and his entire universe centers on his parents and his family, and one day the father is at the heart of the biggest scandal in the city and then he’s dead. And someone had told me that your mother had died when you were very young, is that right?”

“My mother died soon after I was born,” Jack said.

“Oh, God.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I was so young that I’m not really sure it’s made much difference in my life. It’s not as though I had her for so many years and then lost her and felt her absence. I never had her, really, so I’ve never felt any real sense of loss in that way. Does that make sense?”