I got to take a leak. What did you expect? The minute she tells you the toilet won't flush, you have to piss so bad your back teeth are floating.
He went into the bathroom and looked at the toilet. There was water in the bowl.
Nothing wrong with this toilet. What the hell was she talking about?
He voided his bladder, and pulled the chain. Water emptied from the reservoir into the toilet bowl. It flushed. But there was no rush of clean water. The toilet sort of burped, and when he looked down there was hardly any water in the bowl at all, and none was coming in.
Vito dropped to his knees and looked behind the bowl at the valve on the thin copper pipe that fed water to the reservoir, and then put his hand on it.
There was a momentary feeling of triumph.
The fucking thing's turned off! That sonofabitching plumber! Wait 'til I get my hands on you, pal!
He turned the valve, opening it fully. No water entered the reservoir. He waited a moment, thinking maybe it would take a second or two to come on, like it took a while for the water to come hot when you turned it on.
Nothing! Shit!
Three hours ago, I was in a bathroom with a carpet on the floor and a toilet you couldn't even hear flushing or filling, and now look where I am!
Wait a minute! He wouldn't shut it off here, he 'd shut it off in the basement, where nobody would see. I didn't turn that valve on, I turned it off!
He cranked the valve as far it would go in the opposite direction, and then went down the stairs to the first floor two at a time, and then more carefully down the stairs to the basement, because Mama kept brooms and mops and buckets and stuff like that on the cellar stairs.
His foot slipped on the basement floor, and he only barely kept from falling down. When he finally found the chain hanging from the light switch and got the bare bulb turned on, he saw that the floor was slick wet. Here and there, there were little puddles. And it smelled rotten too, not as bad as a backed-up toilet, but bad.
He found the place at the rear of the basement where the water pipes came in through the wall from the water meter out back. And again there was a feeling of triumph.
There's the fucking valve, and it's off!
It didn't have a handle, like the valve on the toilet upstairs, just a piece of iron sticking up that you needed a wrench, or a pair of pliers, to turn. He turned and started for the front of the basement, where there was sort of a workbench, and where he knew he could find a wrench.
It was then that he saw the water heater had been disconnected, and moved from the concrete blocks on which it normally rested. Both the water and gas pipes connected to it had been disconnected.
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.