"Would you feel up to going out there tomorrow?"
"I'm on sick leave."
"Well, hell, the sheriff wouldn't have to know."
"Yeah," Springs said, after a moment's thought. "I could take you out there tomorrow, I guess."
"I'd appreciate it, Dan. We like to know who's blowing what up."
"Yeah, and so would I."
****
Mrs. Springs insisted that Chuck stay for supper. He said he would stay only if she let him buy them dinner.
At dinner, when he said he would have to head back to Atlantic City, Mrs. Springs said there was no reason at all for him to drive all that way just to have to come back in the morning, they had a spare bedroom just going to waste. He said he wouldn't want to put her out, and she said he shouldn't be silly.
TWENTY-TWO
"Ihave just had one of my profound thoughts," Officer Howard Hansen said to Sergeant Bill Sanders as they watched Corporal Vito Lanza drive his Cadillac into the area reserved for police officers on duty at the airport.
"And you're going to tell me, right?"
"I'm not saying Lanza is a nuclear physicist, but he's not really a cretin, either…"
"What's a cretin?"
"A high-level moron."
"Really?"
"Take my word for it, a cretin is a high-level moron. You want to hear this or not?"
"I wouldn't miss it for the world."
"So for the sake of argument, let's say Lanza is smart enough to know that people, especially other cops, are going to ask questions about that Cadillac of his. 'Where did he get the money?'"
"So?"
"He doesn't seem to give a damn, does he?"
"Howard, what are you talking about?"
"If I were dirty and had bought a Cadillac with dirty money, I wouldn't drive it to work."
"Maybe you're smarter than Lanza."
"And maybe he inherited the money and isn't dirty, and if somebody asks him, he can say 'I got it from my mother's estate,' or something."
"And what about those Guinea gangsters we saw at his house? What were they doing, selling Girl Scout cookies?"
"If I was dirty, I think I'd be smart enough to tell the Mob to stay away from my house. And the Mob, I think, is smart enough to figure that out themselves."
Sergeant Sanders grunted, but did not reply.
After a moment, Hansen said, "Well, what do you think?"
"I think I'm going to call Swede Olsen and tell him that after Lanza bought Girl Scout cookies from Paulo Cassandro, Jimmy the Knees, and Gian-Carlo Rosselli, he went to work, and does he want us to keep sitting on him or what."