"Rosselli Brothers, who else?"
"I'll go there in the morning."
"You can get off work? Give me a check, and I'll take it over there."
"I go on four-to-midnight today, Mama. I'll be off in the morning."
"You got two thousand dollars in the bank? After you bought your fancy Cadillac automobile?"
"Don't worry about it, Mama, okay? I told you I would take care of it."
Vito realized that he did not have two thousand dollars in his Philadelphia Savings Fund Society checking account. Maybe a little over a thousand, maybe even twelve hundred, but not two big ones.
Upstairs, under the second drawer in the dresser, of course, there is some real money. Ten big ones.
But shit, I signed a marker for six big ones, which means I got four big ones, not ten. And when I pay the fucking plumber two big ones in the morning, that'll take me down to two.
Jesus Christ, where the fuck did it all go? I got off the airplane from Vegas with all the fucking money in the world, and now I'm damned near broke again.
"You got to take care of it," Magdelana Lanza said. "We got to have a toilet and hot water."
"Mama, I said I'd take care of it. Don't worry about it."
Magdelana Lanza snorted.
"Mama, can you stay with Mrs. Marino tonight? I mean you can't stay here with no water."
"Tonight, I can stay with Mrs. Marino. But I can't stay there forever."
"Okay. One day at a time. I'll see what the plumber says tomorrow, how long it will take him. Now I got to get dressed and go to work. Okay?"
"I'll go ask Mrs. Marino if it would be an imposition."
"You'd do it for her, right? What's the problem?"
"I'll go ask her, would it be an imposition."
She walked out the front door and Vito climbed the stairs to the second floor. He took the second drawer from his dresser, and then took the money he had concealed in the dresser out and sat on his bed and counted it.
It wasn't ten big ones. It was only ninety-four hundred bucks. When there had been twenty-two big ones, six hundred bucks hadn't seemed like much.
Now it means that I don't even have two big ones, just fourteen lousy hundred. Plus, the eleven hundred in PSFS, that's only twentyfive hundred.
Jesus H. Christ!
He changed into his uniform.
The plumber and his helpers will be all over the house. I better take this money with me; it will be safer than here.
SIXTEEN
Officer Jesus Martinez drove into the parking lot of the Airport Police Station in his five-year-old Oldsmobile 98 about two minutes before Corporal Vito Lanza pulled in at the wheel of his not-quite-ayear-old Cadillac Fleetwood.
Martinez would not have seen Lanza arrive had he not noticed that his power antenna hadn't completely retracted. Jesus took great pride in his car, and things like that bothered him. He unlocked the car and got back in and turned the ignition on and ran the antenna up and down by turning the radio on and off.
It retracted completely the last couple of times, which made him think, to his relief, that there was nothing wrong with the antenna, that it was probably just a little dirty. As soon as he got home, he would get some alcohol and wet a rag with it, and wipe the antenna clean, and then lubricate it with some silicone lubricant.
He was in the process of relocking the Olds's door when Corporal Lanza pulled in beside him.