He pulled the door open and slid across the seat, and then, cursing, lifted the fold-down armrest out of the way and put his finger on the glove compartment button.
Shit, it's locked. I don't remember locking the sonofabitch.
He found the key and unlocked the glove compartment, and exhaled audibly with relief. The Flamingo Hotel amp; Casino envelope was still there, right where he'd shoved it when he got in the car.
He took it out and glanced into it. There was enough light from the tiny glove compartment bulb to see the comforting thick wad of fifties and hundreds. He closed the envelope and stuck it in his pocket.
Not that much of it is still mine anymore.
I know goddamned well 1 didn't lock that compartment. Maybe, this is a Caddy, after all, it locks automatically.
He closed the glove compartment door, slid back across the seat behind the wheel, put the ignition key in, and started the engine.
Starts right fucking off! There really is nothing like a Caddy.
He backed out of the parking slot, noticed that the old Olds the Spic kid drove was still there. Well, at least he knew what he was doing in the Airport Unit. The little fucker was too dumb to pass the detective's exam, and too little to be a real Highway Patrolman, so they eased him out. They tossed him Airport Unit as a bone. He wondered if the little Spic was smart enough to know how lucky he was to be in Airport; they could just as easily have sent him to one of the districts, or somewhere else really shitty.
Vito decided he would be nice to the kid. Make sure he knows what a good deal he had fallen into. He might come in useful sometime.
He drove up South Broad Street and then made an illegal left turn onto Spruce.
What the hell it was after midnight, there was no traffic, and he was in his uniform, nobody was going to give him a ticket, even if some cop saw him.
He did decide to put the Caddy in a parking garage. If he didn't, sure as Christ made little apples, some asshole, jealous of the Caddy, would run a key down the side or across the hood. Or steal the fucking hubcaps.
When he parked the car, he remembered this was the garage where the mob blew away a guy, one of their own, who had pissed somebody off. Tony the Zee DeZego. They got him with a shotgun.
Tony met him at the door of her apartment in a negligee. Nicelooking one. Vito had never seen her in it before.
"You didn't have to wait up for me, baby," Vito said.
"I went to bed," she said, kissing him, but moving her body away when he tried to slip his hand under the negligee, "but Uncle Joe called me, and then I couldn't get back to sleep."
"What did he want?"
"He's worried about those markers you signed at Oaks and Pines Lodge."
"Why should he be worried? I'm good for them. And he set it up too, didn't he?"
"Well, that's what happened. He didn't set it up. They just thought he did. But because he sent you there, they told him they were holding him responsible. So he's worried. Six thousand dollars is a lot of money."
"Hey! I'm good for it. I got it in my pocket. You call him up and ask if he wants me to come over there right now with it, or whether he can wait until the morning."
"I'm sure it will be okay," Tony said.
"Call him!" Vito said. "Tell him the only reason I didn't make those markers good sooner was that I had to work."
"Okay, honey," Tony said. "Whatever you say."
Penelope Detweiler, wearing only the most brief of underpants, her naked bosom bouncing not at all unattractively, was chasing Matthew M. Payne around the upstairs sitting room of the Detweiler mansion in Chestnut Hill when the doorbell, actually a rather unpleasant-sounding buzzer, went off.
Matt Payne sat up in his bed suddenly.
Who the hell is that?
He looked up at the ceiling, where a clever little clock his sister Amy had given him projected the time by a beam of light. It was almost half past one.
Christ, don't tell me Evelyn's come back!
He threw the blankets back angrily and marched naked through the kitchen to the button by the head of the stairs that operated the door lock solenoid and pushed it.
The door opened and Detective Charley McFadden started up the stairs. On his heels was Officer Jesus Martinez, in uniform.
"You took your fucking time answering the doorbell," Detective McFadden said, by way of apology for disturbing Matt's sleep.
"I'll try to do better the next time."
"I thought maybe you had a broad up here," McFadden said as he reached the head of the stairs.
Not anymore. She finally went home, after reluctantly concluding that the only way she was going to be able to make it stand up again was to put it in a splint.
That being the case, where did that erotic dream about Precious Penny come from?
"If there was, you'd still be down there leaning on the doorbell," Matt said. "What do you say, Hay-zus?"
Martinez did not reply.
"You got a beer or something?" McFadden asked. "And why don't you put a bathrobe on or something?"
"Are we going to have a party?"
"No. This is business. We got to talk."
"You know where the beer is," Matt said, and went in the bedroom for his robe.
It smells in here. Essence de Sex.
"You got a Coke or something?" Martinez asked.
"There's ginger ale, Hay-zus," Matt said. "I don't think there's any Coke."
He went to the refrigerator and found a small bottle of ginger ale and handed it to Martinez.
"Thank you."
"Hay-zus thinks he's found a dirty cop at the airport," McFadden said.
Then he probably has. But why tell me?
"Tell Internal Affairs," Matt said.
"I can't go to Internal Affairs. I haven't caught him doing anything, but I got the gut feeling he's dirty," Martinez said.
"I don't understand what you're doing here," Matt said.
"Charley said I should talk to you."
"I don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about," Matt said. "You want to take it from the beginning?"
"Tell him what you told me, Hay-zus," Charley said, lowering himself with a grunt into Matt's upholstered chair.
"There's a corporal out there," Jesus said. "A flashy Guinea named Lanza, Vito Lanza."
Matt did not reply.
"Just bought himself a new Cadillac," Jesus said. "You can't buy a Caddy on a corporal's pay."
"Maybe his number hit," Matt said, slightly sarcastic.
"He said he won the money in Las Vegas," Jesus said.
'That's possible," Matt said.
"Look at him. He won six thousand when he was out there," McFadden said.
"Yeah, I thought about that. But he's not Lanza."
"What does that mean?" Matt asked.
"You're fucking rich. You don't really give a shit whether you win or lose, and you came home with only six thousand."
"Onlysix thousand? I wish to Christ I had won six thousand," Charley said.
"There's more," Jesus said.
"Like what more?"
"He had almost ten thousand in cash, ninety-four hundred, to be exact, in his car tonight."
"How do you know that?"
"I looked."
"What do you mean, you looked?"
"When Charley and I were in Narcotics, we stopped a guy one night and took a car thief's friend from him," Jesus said. "I kept it."
A car thief's friend, sometimes called a "Slim-Jim," was a flat piece of metal, most commonly stainless steel, suitably shaped so that when inserted into an automobile door, sliding it downward in the window channel, it defeated the door lock.
"In other words, you broke into this guy's car, is that what you' re saying?"
"Yeah, and he had ninety-four hundred dollars in an envelope in the glove compartment, an ashtray full of cigarette butts with lipstick on them, and this."