"A mutual friend wanted to make sure that nothing goes wrong when your niece comes in later."
"Nothing will, Paulo. I talked with Gian-Carlo not more than a hour ago."
"I just talked with Mr. S., and he suggested I come down here and explain exactly what has to be done."
Joe Fierello was more than a little curious about that. When GianCarlo Rosselli said something, you knew it was direct from Mr. S. So what was Paulo Cassandro doing here?
"Let me know what I can do," Joe said.
"You know this guy coming is a cop?"
Joe nodded.
"What Mr. S. wants you to do is sell him a really nice car…"
"I was going to."
"…at a special price. Like a thousand, fifteen hundred under Blue Book loan."
The Blue Book was a small, shirt-pocket-size listing of recent automobile transactions, published for the automotive trade. It listed the average retail sale price of an automobile, the average amount of money a bank or finance company had loaned for an installment purchase, and the average price dealers had paid as a trade-in.
"You got it."
"And he wants you to pay him at least a grand more for his tradein than it's worth."
"Any friend of Mr. S.'s…"
"Don't be a wiseass, Joe. This is business."
"Sorry."
"Yeah. You got a Xerox machine, right?"
"Sure."
"We're going to make up a little file on this cop. In it will be copies of this week's Blue Book showing what his trade is worth, and what the car you're going to sell him is worth. And then, on Tuesday, when you run his trade-in through the auction, where you will give it away, we want a Xerox of that too."
"This has all been explained to me, Paulo," Joe said.
"Yeah, well, Mr. S. obviously figured somebody better explain it again, so there would be no mistakes, which is why I'm here, okay?"
"Absolutely."
"And in addition to everything else you're going to do nice for this cop," Paulo went on, "you're going to give him this."
He handed him a printed form. Joe looked at it without understanding. It bore the logotype of the Oaks and Pines Resort Lodge in the Poconos, and it said that the Bearer was entitled to have a room and all meals, plus unlimited free tennis and two rounds of golf.
"What is this?"
"It's what they call a comp," Paulo explained. "This place is owned by a friend of Mr. S.'s. Let's say, for example, they buy a case of soap to wash the dishes. Or two cases, something worth a couple of hundred bucks, Instead of paying them cash, the lodge people give them one of these.Retail, it's worth more than the two hundred.Cost-wise maybe a hundred. So the guy who came up with the soap gets more than the soap is worth, and the lodge people get the soap for less than the guy wanted.Capisce?"
"I seen a comp coupon before, Paulo," Joe said. "What I was asking was, is this cop gonna be a tennis player? Or a golf player?"
"He gets to take the girl to a hotel," Paulo said. "He don't give a fuck about golf.",
Joe still looked confused, and Paulo took pity on him.
"There's a story going around, I personally don't know if it's true or not, that in some of these lodge places in the Poconos you can gamble in the back room."
Joe now nodded his understanding.
"You tell this guy you shoot a little craps at this place from time to time, and they sent you the comp coupon, and you can't use it, so he can have it."
"Right."
"Don't fuck this up, Joe. Mr. S. is personally interested in this."
"You tell Mr. S. not to worry."
"He's not worrying. I'm not worrying. You should be the one that's worrying."
Antoinette Marie Wolinski Schermer had moved back in with her parents when Eddie, that sonofabitch, had moved out on her and Brian, which was all she could do, suspecting correctly that getting child support out of Eddie was going to be like pulling teeth.
That hadn't worked out. Her mother, especially, and her father were Catholic and didn't believe in divorce no matter what a sonofabitch you were married to, no matter if he slapped you around whenever he had two beers in him. What they expected her to do was go to work, save her money, and wait around the house for the time when she could straighten things out with Eddie.
No going out, in other words.
She had met Ricco Baltazari in the Reading Terminal Market on Market Street. She had gone there for lunch, and so had he. She decided later, when she found out that he owned Ristorante Alfredo, which was before she found out that he was connected with the Mob, that he had probably got bored with the fancy food in his restaurant and wanted a hot Italian sausage with onions and peppers, which was what she was having when she saw him looking at her.
She had noticed him too, saw that he was a really good-looking guy, that he was dressed real nice, and that when he paid for his sausage and pepper and onions, he had a wad of fifties and hundreds as thick as his thumb.
It probably had something to do, too, with what people said about opposites attracting. She was blonde (she only had to touch it up to keep it light, not dye it, the way most blondes had to) and fairskinned, and he was sort of dark olive-skinned with really black hair.
The first time she noticed him, she wondered what it would be like doing it with him, never suspecting that she would find out that same night.
The first night, he picked her up outside work in his Cadillac and they went first to a real nice restaurant in Jersey, outside Cherry Hill, where everybody seemed to know him, and the manager or whatever sent a bottle of champagne to the table. Ricco told her right out that he was married, but didn't get along with his old lady, but couldn't divorce her because his mother was old and a Catholic, and you know how Catholics feel about divorce.
After dinner, they went to a motel, not one of the el cheapos that lined Admiral Wilson Boulevard, but to the Cherry Hill Inn, which was real nice, and had in the bathroom the first whatchamacallit that Antoinette had ever seen. She had to ask Ricco what it was for.
The truth of the matter was that when he was driving her back to her parents' house she thought that she had blown it, that she had been too easy to pick up, that she had gone to the motel with him on the First Date, and that once there, she had been a little too enthusiastic. She hadn't been with anybody in months, and the two whiskey sours and then the champagne and then the two Amaretto liqueurs afterward had put her more than a little into the bag.
Antoinette figured, in other words, that Ricco had got what he wanted (probably more than he expected) and that was the last she would ever see of him. She could have played it smarter, she supposed, but the vice versa was also true. She had got what she wanted too, a nice dinner, a nice ride in a Caddy, and then what happened in the motel, which she had needed and wanted from the moment she first saw him trying to look down her blouse.
But then a week later, when she walked out of the building after work, there he was at the curb, looking real nice, and smiling at her, and holding the door of his Caddy open for her.
He told her that he would have called her sooner, but his wife was being a bitch, and he couldn't arrange it. She told him that she understood, she had been married to someone like that herself, a real bastard.
He told her he would like to show her his restaurant, but that she understood why he couldn't do that, with his wife and all, and she told him she understood. The second night, they had gone to the bar in the Warwick Hotel, and then across the street to a bar that had a piano player, and then back across the street to the Warwick, to a nice hotel suite he said a business associate kept all the time so he could use it when he was in town.
When she went home that night, her father and mother were waiting up for her like she was sixteen or seventeen, instead of a woman who was twenty-three and had a kid, and said she looked like a whore and smelled like a drunk and they weren't going to put up with that. And who was the Guinea in the Cadillac, some gangster?