the door again, put the keys back in their hiding place, and went back upstairs and turned the television back on.
Maybe he would be lucky, and there would be a decent program for him to watch. Everything these days seemed to be what they called T&A. For Teats and Ass. He thought that was a funny phrase. He knew the T&A offended God, but he thought that God would not be offended because he thought T&A was funny. He had learned words like that in the Army, and he wouldn’t have been in the Army if God hadn’t wanted him to be.
Vito Lanza went back to his room and emptied his pockets, tossing everything on the bed. Everything included the wad of bills he had left over after he’d had the Flamingo cashier give him a check for most of the money he’d won. There was almost five hundred dollars, two hundreds, two fifties, and a bunch of twenties and tens, plus some singles.
It sure looked good.
He unpacked his luggage, dividing the clothing into two piles, the underwear and socks and shirts his mother would wash, and the good shirts and trousers and jackets that would have to go to the dry cleaners.
The money looked good. He collected it all together and made a little wad of it, with the hundreds outside, and stuck them in his pocket.
The one goddamned thing I don’t want to do is stick around here and have Ma give me that crap about not understanding why I have to go somewhere to relax.
He made a bundle of the clothing that had to go to the dry cleaners, and then picked up one of the jackets on the bed and put that on. He went to the upper right-hand drawer of the dresser and took out his Colt snubnose, and his badge and photo ID. From the drawer underneath, he took out a clip holster and six .38 Special cartridges. He loaded the Colt, put it in the holster, and then clipped the holster to his belt.
“You just got home,” his mother said when he went out of the house, “where are you going?”
“To the dry cleaners, and then I got some stuff to do.”
He decided to walk. He had found a place to park the goddamned Buick, and if he took it now, sure as Christ made little apples, there would be no parking place for blocks when he came back.
Vito dropped the clothes off at the Martinizer place on South Broad Street and then headed for Terry’s Bar & Grill. Then he changed his mind. He wasn’t in the mood for Terry’s. It was a neighborhood joint, and Vito was still in a Flamingo Hotel & Casino mood.
He stepped off the curb and looked down South Broad in the direction of the navy yard until he could flag a cab. He got in and told the driver to take him to the Warwick Hotel. There was usually some gash in the nightclub in the Warwick, provided you had the money—and he did—to spring for expensive drinks.
The cab dropped him off at the Warwick right outside the bar. The hotel bar is on the right side of the building, off the lobby. The nightclub is a large area on the left side of the building, past the desk and the drugstore. Vito decided he would check out the hotel bar, maybe there would be something interesting in there, and then go to the nightclub.
He found a seat at the bar, ordered a Johnnie Walker on the rocks, and laid one of the fifty-dollar bills on the bar to pay for it.
Francesco Guttermo, who was seated at a small table near the door to the street in the Warwick Bar, leaned forward in his chair, then motioned for Ricco Baltazari to move his head closer, so that others would not hear what he had to say.
“The guy what just come in, at the end of the bar, he’s got a gun,” Mr. Guttermo, who was known as “Frankie the Gut,” said. The appellation had been his since high school, when even then he had been portly with a large stomach.
Mr. Baltazari, who was listed in the records of the City of Philadelphia as the owner of Ristorante Alfredo, one of Center City’s best Italian restaurants (northern Italian cuisine, no spaghetti with marinara sauce or crap like that), was expensively and rather tastefully dressed. He nodded his head to signify that he had understood what Frankie the