“What do you owe us?” John asks.
The question hangs there.
Finally Pat says, “You’re family, Danny.”
“Am I?” Danny asks.
“How many times have you broken bread at my table?” John asks. “How many times did I put food in your mouth when your own father—”
“Enough, Dad,” Pat says.
“I gave you my daughter, for Chrissakes!” John thunders. “My daughter!”
And this is the first time, Danny thinks, the first time you’ve brought me into the back room to sit with the men, with the family.
But he don’t say that.
That night, two Providence homicide detectives bring Danny into the interrogation room. It stinks of cigarette smoke and fear. They sit him down at the table and start in.
“You were with Handrigan when he got shot,” O’Neill says. He’s your classic veteran Irish cop—broad face, nose splintered with red veins, cheeks going to fat, dead eyes.
“Yeah.”
“Who shot him?”
“Didn’t see.”
“Shit,” Viola says. “You got his blood all over you, I heard.”
Viola’s the younger partner—thinner, darker, black hair slicked straight back, a nose like a ferret.
“Didn’t see anything,” Danny says.
Danny knows they’re just going through the motions, and the last thing in the world they want is for him to speak the name Paulie Moretti.
The fix is in.
They do the dance for an hour and then kick him out.
Danny goes home, Terri is waiting.
“What did you tell them?” she asks.
He looks at her like she’s a total fucking idiot. She’s John Murphy’s daughter, she knows what he told them.
Ten
John Murphy drives down to the shore and meets Pasco in the parking lot of Stop & Shop. He gets out of his own car and slides into Pasco’s.
“It breaks my heart,” Pasco says, “that this started at my party.”
“The young are hotheaded.”
“They think with their dicks,” Pasco says. “Hey, were we any different?”
Murphy laughs. “No.”
“I’m sorry about Liam,” Pasco says. “If they had come to me first . . .”
Pasco is fed up with all this. What he wants to do in his old age is sit on the beach, dig quahogs, catch crabs, take siestas, play with his grandkids. He’s made his money, made his bones, now he wants life in the sunshine. Spend summers at his beach house, a few weeks in January and February down in Pompano.
“You won’t respond to this last thing?” Pasco asks.
“It’s over as far as we’re concerned,” John says. A good deal for him—poor, dumb, insignificant Brendan Handrigan takes the bullet in place of his son. “But what about the Moretti brothers? Are they ready to let this go?”
Pasco says, “It would help if Liam would stop seeing that woman.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
Danny is there for the talk. After Sunday roast beef at the Murphys’。 They’re out on the lawn, him and Pat and Liam and the old man, having a couple beers while the women clean up, and Murphy says, “This girl, she’s out of your life.”
“Says who?” Liam asks. “The Morettis?”
“Among other people.”
“Who?” Liam asks, an edge coming into his voice. “Pasco Ferri? What the fuck.”
“Watch your mouth.”
“They tell us who we can love now?” Liam asks. “Who we can’t? Tell you what, Dad, why don’t we just pull down our pants and let them fuck us in the ass?”
“In your mother’s house, on a Sunday.”
“There are thousands of women out there,” Pat argues. “Why her?”
“I love her.”
“More than your own family?” Pat asks.
“Love someone else,” Murphy says. “She’s not for you.”
“I love her, Dad.”
Pat grabs him by the collar and shoves him against the old oak tree. “You selfish prick. We’re going to put Brendan Handrigan in the ground and all you think about is yourself.”
“Let him go, Pat,” Murphy orders.
Pat releases his grip.
“She’s out of your life, Liam,” Murphy says. “End of story.”
Looking at Liam’s face, Danny wonders.
The funeral is wicked sad.
Brendan didn’t have a lot of friends, no wife, no girl. His father died when Brendan was, what, twelve, so there’s just two sisters and the mother. The whole Murphy clan and associates show up, though. Murphy didn’t have to tell them, either.