Forty Jimmy

FORTY

Jimmy

DAVE WOLK IS LIKE somebody talking about all the big games he played in high school, like all the houses they robbed were the highlight of his life.

"Doing it, I mean when we started, was Nick's idea," Wolk says. "He was always bad-ass, from the time we were in junior high."

"I thought he was a fisherman," Jane says.

"Well, a mobbed-up fisherman," Wolk says.

"Excuse me?" Jimmy says. "You must have left that part out before Jane got here."

"His father's brother was this guy named Bobby Salvatore."

I think: And the hits just keep on coming.

Bobby Salvatore, we knew by now, had been Artie Shore's boss. The mob guy with whom Hank Carson was underwater in debt. The guy we now discover is related to the not-so-late Nick Morelli, a star witness in Rob Jacobson's trial until he wasn't.

"You want to know why I didn't rat him out when I was the one who got caught?" Wolk says. "Because who would be stupid enough to rat out anybody related to Bobby Salvatore?"

Jimmy sees Jane texting. He asks her what she's doing. She grins and says that she's telling Dr. Ben to get over to her house and start dinner, she might be a few minutes late.

No stopping our new friend Dave Wolk now.

"So I went to Westbury and did my time in a way I hoped Nick's family would respect."

"I'm sure they were very proud," Jimmy says. "A made man, practically, just like a big boy."

"What I don't get," Jane says, "is what was in this for Eric Jacobson?"

"He fucking hated his father," Wolk says. "Told me he loved that his old man had to buy him out of trouble the way his daddy's old man had done the same when his dad was a kid. Like closing some kind of weirded-out circle."

"Why did he hate him so much?" Jimmy says. "Other than the obvious reason of his old man being an asshole."

Wolk looks down at his glass and seems pleased to find it not quite empty.

"His father had been calling Eric a loser his whole life," Wolk says. "You're not this, you're not that. Be a man. All that dad shit. I mean, I'm a loser, too. But what guy wants to hear that from his father? We'd get drunk on the beach and Eric would get going and talk about how someday he was going to fuck his father up bad. One time I asked, ‘You mean beat his ass?' And he gave me this funny look and said, ‘I mean kill his ass someday.'"

"Where's Eric now?" Jane asks Wolk. "He never showed up for his father's trial. We heard that he was off looking for the perfect wave in Micronesia or someplace."

"Well, yeah," Wolk says. "That's what he wanted everybody to think."