“He’s not going to tell us anyway!” Liam yells.
Pam, looking pale, sits at a table staring at him and Danny can’t even begin to know what’s she’s thinking, feeling. Cassie, she just sits at the bar, staring into the mirror, sipping a Diet Coke and fighting a battle against the booze.
“We don’t know that,” Danny says.
“We do know that,” Liam answers. “I mean, why should he?”
The only reason, Danny thinks, the only reason is that Pasco Ferri might tell him to.
Not tell the cops, of course, that’s not going to happen, even though the cops have already come out and said the chief suspects are two Black males apparently high on drugs. But Pasco might be willing to persuade Sal to give it up to him.
Marty makes the call to his old friend.
“How did this ever get this far?” Pasco asks.
“Pasco, can you help us out here?”
Pasco puts in the call to Sal.
At first Sal stonewalls. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t get me wrong, I ain’t sorry the cocksucker’s dead, but I hear it was some moolies.”
“We’re not animals,” Pasco says. “They just want to bury their son.”
“A lot of people want a lot of things they don’t get,” Sal says. “I wanted a house. I wanted my friend alive. The Murphys got balls, asking me for anything.”
“This is me asking, Sal.”
Pasco Ferri isn’t used to asking for anything twice. Sal doesn’t want to die anymore, he knows he has to do what Pasco asks, but he wants to save face, so he slaps a condition on it. “If John Murphy comes to me personally, asks me personally, maybe I can tell him some things I heard.”
“Fuck that!” Liam yells when he hears about Sal’s demand. “I say we grab him, take him to a warehouse, hitch jumper cables to his balls, crank it up until he tells us where Pat is. Then we kill him.”
Danny would like to grab Liam by the throat, take him to the floor and beat the shit out of him. This is your fault in the first place, he thinks, this is your motherfucking fault!
John says, “Is that what you think we should do, Liam? Let me ask you, how are we going to do that? How are we going to ‘grab’ him?”
Liam don’t have an answer for that.
“In the meantime,” John says, “your brother’s body is rotting someplace and we can’t give him a proper burial.”
“After we bury Pat,” Liam says, “I’m killing that motherfucker.”
“You do that,” John says. “To tell you the truth, son, it’s about time you did something.”
So John Murphy goes. Shows up at Sal’s house and rings the bell like he’s some kind of salesman. When Sal comes to the door, John says, “Thank you for seeing me.”
Sal don’t say nothing.
“My wife,” John says, “can’t sleep, she has dreams.”
Sal has dreams, too. Last night he dreamed that Tony came to him and told him he should tell where Pat Murphy’s body is. Says neither of them can rest until he does. Sal woke up sweating and crying, and now here’s John Murphy at his door. He says, “I don’t know for sure, of course, how could I, but I’ve heard rumors.”
Sal tells him where maybe he’s heard that Pat might be. Then he adds, “But this don’t mean things are settled between us.”
“I just want time to bury my son properly,” John says.
Sal, he just nods and closes the door.
John sends Danny.
Danny can’t help but wonder why not Liam, why not send Liam to fetch his brother’s body because it was Liam’s shit that was behind Pat getting killed in the first place. But he already knows the answer: nobody is going to make baby Liam do anything hard or face up to his responsibilities. And Danny ain’t going to ask John because the man is hurting bad enough already.
What can you say, Danny thinks, about John eating his pride, going personally to Sal Antonucci, hat in hand, to the man who killed his son to ask what he did with the body? What does that take? What does that do to a man? An old man who’s lost his son? Danny is amazed. Awestruck. Realizes for the first time why Murphy runs the docks and his own father doesn’t. It takes a strong, strong man to do what he did.
So Danny don’t ask about Liam. Instead, he swings by and picks up Jimmy Mac because he knows Jimmy would want to do this for Pat.
They go at night, like John promised Sal, even though it’s going to make it a hell of a lot harder to find the grave. Driving out the Plainfield Pike in an old van, Jimmy says, “You ever think we’d be making a trip like this?”