think much of Marchessi: He had been on the job ten, twelve years, never even thought about taking the examination for corporal or detective and bettering himself, just wanted to put in his eight hours a day doing as little as possible, inside where it was warm, until he was old enough to retire and get a job as a rent-a-cop or something.
And Officer Marchessi did not, in Vito’s opinion, treat him with the respect to which he was entitled as a corporal.
Vito walked up to them. “Whaddaya say, Marchessi?”
“How’s it going, Lanza?”
It should have been “Corporal,” but Vito let it ride.
“You’re Martinez, right?”
“That’s right, Corporal.”
“Well, what do you think of Airport?”
“So far, I like it.”
“It’ll get worse, you can bet on that,” Lanza said.
At least he calls me “Corporal.” He’s got the right attitude. I wonder what makes a little fuck like him want to be a cop?
“You were in Las Vegas, somebody said?” Marchessi asked. “Win any money?”
Vito pulled the wad of bills from his pocket and let Marchessi have a look.
“Can’t complain. Can’t complain a goddamn bit,” Vito said. He saw the little Spic’s eyes widen when he saw his roll.
Vito stuffed the money back in his pocket.
“What was going on just now on the ramp?” he asked.
From the looks on their faces, it was apparent to Corporal Vito Lanza that neither Officer Joseph Marchessi nor Officer Whatsisname Martinez had a fucking clue what he was talking about.
“Lieutenant Ardell come on the plane, American from Vegas, Gate 23, and took a good-looking blonde and some Main Line asshole off it,” Lanza explained. “There was a limousine, one of our cars, and a detective car on the ramp.”
“Oh,” Marchessi said. “Yeah. That must have been the— Whatsername?—Detweiler girl. You remember, three, four months ago, when the mob hit Tony the Zee DeZego in the parking garage downtown?”
Vito remembered. DeZego had been taken down with a shotgun in a mob hit. The word on the street was that the doers were a couple of pros, from Chicago or someplace.
“So?”
“She got wounded or something when that happened. She’s been in a hospital out west. They didn’t want the press getting at her.”
“Who’s they?”
“Chief Lowenstein himself was down here a couple of hours ago,” Marchessi said.
Vito knew who Chief Lowenstein was. Of all the chief inspectors, it was six one way and half a dozen the other if Lowenstein or Chief Inspector Dennis V. Coughlin had the most clout. It was unusual that Lowenstein would personally concern himself with seeing that some young woman was not bothered with the press.
“How come the special treatment?”
Marchessi said, more than a little sarcastically, “I guess if your father runs and maybe owns a big piece of Nesfoods, you get a little special treatment.”
The bell rang, signaling that the luggage conveyor was about to start moving. Vito nodded at Marchessi and Martinez and walked to the conveyor and waited until his luggage appeared. He grabbed it, then went back into the terminal and walked through it to the Airport Unit office. He walked past without going in, and went to the parking area reserved for police officers either working the Airport Unit or visiting it, where he had left his car.
His car, a five-year-old Buick coupe, gave him a hard time starting. He had about given up on it when it finally gasped into life.
“Piece of shit!” he said aloud, and then had a pleasant thought: When he was finished work tomorrow, he would get rid of the sonofabitch. What he would like to have was a four-door Cadillac. He could probably make a good deal on one a year, eighteen months old. That would mean only twelve, fifteen thousand miles. A Caddy is just starting to get broken in with a lousy fifteen thousand miles on the clock, and you save a bunch of money.
Just because you did all right at the tables, Vito Lanza thought, is no reason to throw money away on a new car. Most people can’t tell the fucking difference between a new one and one a year, eighteen months old, anyway.
Corporal Vito Lanza lived with his widowed mother, Magdelana, a tiny, intense, silver-haired woman of sixty-six in the house in which he had grown up. She managed to remind him at least once a day that the row house in the 400 block of Ritner Street in South Philadelphia was in her name, and that he was living there, rent free, only out of the goodness of her heart.
When