The Son of John Devlin by Charles Kenney

Author:Charles Kenney [Kenney, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-77551-1
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-03-15T16:00:00+00:00

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

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