He took a good close look.
Well, shit, if I was the fucking plumber, I would disconnect the water heater. How the hell would an old lady know whether or not it was really busted? A plumber tells an old lady it's busted, she thinks it's busted.
And then he saw something else out of the ordinary. There were two pieces of pipe, one with a connection on one end, and the other end sawed off, and a second piece, with both ends showing signs of having just been cut, lying on the floor near the water heater:
What the fuck did he have to do that for?
He picked one piece of pipe up, and confirmed that the connection on one end indeed matched the connection on top of the water heater. Then he took the sawed end, and held it up against the pipe that carried the hot water upstairs.
It matched, like he thought it would. Then he saw where there was a break in the cold water pipe, where the other piece had been cut from. Just to be sure, he picked up the other piece of pipe and held it up to see if it fit. It did. And then for no good reason at all, he put the piece of pipe to his eye and looked through it.
You can hardly see through the sonofabitch! What the fuck?
He carried it to the bare light bulb fixture and looked through it again.
And saw that it was almost entirely clogged with some kind of shit. Rust. Whatever.
That's what she meant when she said "the pipes are clogged. They got to go." Jesus Christ! What the fuck is that going to cost?
Magdelana Lanza was waiting at the head of the cellar stairs when Vito came up.
"I told you not to flush the toilet," she said. "That there's no water. So now what am I supposed to do?"
"Use Mrs. Marino's toilet," he said.
"The plumber wants two thousand dollars' deposit."
"What?"
"He says, you don't get him two thousand dollars by nine tomorrow morning, he'll have to go onto another job, and we'll have to wait. He don't know when he could get back."
"Two thousand dollars?"
"He said that'll almost cover materials, labor will be extra, but he won't order the materials until you give him two thousand dollars, and you pay the rest when he's finished."
"Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!"
"Watch your language!"
"And what if I don't have two thousand dollars?"
"Then sell your Cadillac automobile, Mr. Big Shot, you got to have water in the house."
"Who'd you call, Mama, the plumber?"
"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.
That's a new Cadillac. Where the fuck does he get the money for a new Cadillac?
"Whaddaya say, Corporal?"
"Hey! How they hanging, Gomez?"
"It's Martinez, Corporal."
"Sorry."
"Nice wheels."
"Yeah, it's all right. Nothing like a Caddy."
"What's something like that worth?"
"What the fuck is the matter with you? It's not polite to ask people what things cost."
"Sorry, Corporal. Just curious."
"A lot," Lanza said. "Save your pennies, Martinez."
"Yeah."
"Or get lucky, which is how I got that fucker."
"Excuse me?"
"Las Vegas. You want a Caddy like that, you go to Las Vegas and get lucky."
"Yeah, I guess."
"So how do you like the Airport?"
"I haven't been out here long enough to really know. So far it's great. I was in Highway."
How the fuck did a little Spic like you get into Highway? You don' t look big enough to straddle a motorcycle.
"Yeah, I heard. So why did you leave Highway?"
"They made it plain to me that maybe I would be happier someplace else. Which was all right with me. I wasn't too happy in Highway."
They didn't want you in Highway as little as you are. Those fuckers all think they're John Wayne. And John Wayne, you're not, GomMartinez
"Well, walking around an air-conditioned building telling tourists "where they can find the pisser sure beats riding a motorcycle in the rain."
"You said it. Corporal."
"The next time they announce a corporal's exam, you ought to have a shot at it."
"Yeah, well, I'm not too good at taking examinations."
"Some people are, and some people aren't. Don't worry about it."
It wasn't until a few minutes after midnight, when he put the key in the Caddy's door, that Vito, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, realized that he had done something really fucking stupid.