pivotal · Autumn YDPAH → YDAU
- When: eulogies and investigation from Autumn YDPAH; Gately's "eight months of indescribable psychic cringing" runs through his early Ennet House residency; the federal takeover is discovered before the YDAU present
- What: The dead man's importance surfaces at once: "a certain up-scale Brookline home whose late owner had been eulogized at terrifying length and headline-size in both the Globe and Herald." Gately's signature meter-shunt M.O. marks the job as his, and the case lands in the lap of "a remorseless Revere A.D.A." with a toothbrush grudge, "a patient Get-Even and Cold-Dish man" patiently awaiting his chance — the legal sword hanging over Gately's whole sober arc. Then the strangest turn in the record: the "potential Murder–2 investigation of the botched burglary" is quietly "taken over—pace the loud howls of a certain remorseless Revere A.D.A.—by something federal the addled stenographer called 'Non-Specific Services Bureau,' whereupon the case vanished" from any scene an inquirer could reach — and "rumor had it that current suspicions were being directed at certain shadowy Nucko-political bodies all the way up in Quebec." A federal office with a suspiciously Unspecified-sounding name absorbs the murder of the anti-O.N.A.N. coordinator and points the blame north. Why, and on whose orders, is nowhere stated; the redirection is recorded as the rumor the text gives it, and nothing about the takeover's motive is resolved here.