"With who, then?"
"You really don't know, do you?"
"You got me pretty confused, to tell you the truth," Vito confessed.
"Let me make a call," Joe said.
He took a small leather notebook from his jacket pocket, found a number, and dialed it.
"This is Joe Fierello," he said when someone answered. "Could I talk to Mr. Cassandro, please?" He covered the microphone with his hand. "Mr. Cassandro is sort of like the local business agent, you know what I mean?"
Vito nodded.
Business agent, my ass; this Cassandro guy is with the mob.
"Paulo? Joe Fierello. You know those financial documents you were a little concerned about? Well, don't worry. They're good. Mr.Lanza is right here with me now, and he's anxious to take care of them."
He started nodding, and again covered the microphone with his hand. "He says he's sorry, I don't know what the fuck he means."
He removed his hand from the microphone.
"I'm sure Mr. Lanza would be perfectly willing to come wherever you tell him, Paulo," Fierello said, and there was a reply, and then he went on: "Whatever you say, Paulo. He'll be here."
He hung up the telephone and looked at Vito.
"He's coming right over. He said there was some kind of a mix-up, and he wants to make it right. It'll take him five, ten minutes. You got to be someplace else?"
Vito shook his head. "I really don't understand this," he said.
"Neither do I," Joe Fierello said. "So we'll have our cup of coffee, and in five, ten minutes, we'll both know."
Ten minutes later, a silver Jaguar drove up the driveway into Fierello Fine Cars, and stopped beside Joe Fierello's Mercedes-Benz. Paulo Cassandro, wearing a turtleneck sweater and a tweed sports coat with matching cap, got out of the back seat.
He looked toward the window of Joe Fierello's office.
"I think he wants you to come out there," Joe said.
Somewhat uncomfortable, but not quite sure why he was, Vito nodded at Joe Fierello and walked out of the building and down the stairs.
Joe Fierello opened the drawer of his desk, took out a 35-mm camera in a leather case, went to the window, and started snapping pictures.
"Mr. Lanza, I'm Paulo Cassandro," Paulo said. "I'm sorry about this."
"I don't understand," Vito said.
"We thought you were somebody else," Paulo said. "Lanza is a pretty common name. You, Mario the singer, and a lot of other people, right?"
"I guess so."
"I hate to tell you this," Paulo said, draping a friendly arm around Vito's shoulders, "but one of your cousins, maybe a second cousin, is a deadbeat. He owes everybody and his fucking brother. We thought it was you."
"I can't think of who that would be," Vito said.
"It doesn't matter. With a little bit of luck, you'll never run into him."
"Yeah," Vito said.
"We're sorry we made the mistake. We never should have bothered you or Joe with this. I hope you ain't pissed?"
"No. Of course not. I just want to make my markers good."
"There's no hurry. Take your time. Once we found out you wasn' tAnthony Lanza, we asked around a little, andyour credit is as good as gold."
"I always try to pay my debts," Vito said. "I like to think I got a good reputation."
"And now we know that," Paulo said. "So, whenever it's convenient, make the markers good. It don't have to be now. Next month sometime would be fine."
"Let me take care of them now," Vito said. "I already brung the cash."
"You don't have to, but if you got it, and it's convenient, that'd straighten everything out."
Vito handed him the six thousand dollars. Paulo very carefully counted it.
"No offense, me counting it?"
"No. Not at all."
"Watch the fifties, and the hundreds will take care of themselves, right?"
"Right."
Paulo put the money in the pocket of his tweed jacket.
"I want to give you this," he said, and took out a business card. "You want to loan me your back?"
Vito, after a moment, understood that Cassandro wanted to use his back as a desk, and turned around.
"Okay," Paulo said, and Vito turned around again.
Cassandro handed him the card. Vito read it. It said Paulo Cassandro, President, Classic Livery, Distinguished Motor Cars For All Occasions.
"You ever get back up to the Lodge, you just give that to the manager," Paulo said. "Turn it over."
Vito turned it over. On it, Cassandro had written, "Vito Lanza is a friend of mine. And I owe him a big one. "
"You didn't have to do nothing like this," Vito said, embarrassed.
"I don't have to do nothing but pay taxes and die," Paulo said. " Just take that as my apology for making a mistake. Maybe they'll give you a free ice cream or something."
"Well, thank you," Vito said.
"I'm glad we could straighten this out," Paulo said, and wrapped his arm around Vito's shoulder.
Vito felt pretty good until he got to the goddamned plumber's. The sonofabitch was waiting for him, and overnight, he'd gone back on his word. Now he wanted twenty-five hundred before he would fix a fucking thing at the house. That left him with nine hundred. The plumber said it would probably run another thousand, maybe fifteen hundred, for the labor and incidentals.
There isn't a plumber in the fucking world who ever brought a job in for less than the estimate, and even if this sonofabitch did, that would leave me, if he wants fifteen hundred, six hundred short.
I've got eleven, twelve hundred in the PSFS account, and I can always borrow against the Caddy.
Jesus, I hate to put a loan against the Caddy.
Why the fuck didn't I take Cassandro's offer to take my time making the markers good? I really didn't have to pay them off that quick. My credit is good.
The absence of inhabitants in most of the Pine Barrens does not obviate the need for police patrols. The physical principle that nature abhors a vacuum has a tangential application to an unoccupied area. People tend to dump things that they would rather not be connected to in areas where they believe they are unlikely to be found in the near future.
Enterprising youth, for example, who wish to earn a little pocket money by stealing someone's automobile, and removing therefrom parts that have resale value, drive the cars into the Pine Barrens and strip them there.
And, in the winter, more than one passionate back seat dalliance in an auto with a leaking exhaust system has ended in tragedy by carbon monoxide poisoning.
And the Pine Barrens is a good place to shoot someone and dispose of the body. The chances that a shot will be heard are remote, and a shallow grave even desultorily concealed stands a very good chance of never being discovered.
There had been an incident of this nature just about a year before, which Deputy Sheriff Daniel J. Springs was thinking about as he drove, touching sixty, on a routine patrol in his three-year-old Ford, down one of the dirt roads that crosses the Barrens.
Dan Springs, a heavyset, somewhat jowly man who was fifty and had been with the Sheriff's Department more than twenty years, tried to cover all the roads in his area at least once every three days. Nine times out of ten, he saw nothing but the scrubby pines and the dirt road, and his mind tended to wander.
One of Springs's fellow deputies, making a routine patrol not far from here, had come across a nearly new Jaguar sedan abandoned by the side of the road, the keys still in the ignition, battery hot, with half a tank full of gas.
That meant somebody had dumped the car there, and driven away in a second car. They'd put the Pennsylvania plate on the FBI's NCIC (National Crime Information Center) computer and got a hit.
The cops in Philadelphia were looking for the car. It was owned by a rich guy, a white guy, who had been found carved up in his apartment. The cops were looking for the car, and for the white guy's black boyfriend.