He spent thirty minutes inside the station, including ten minutes he spent at the fast-food counter off the main waiting room, sitting at a dirty little table from which he could look around.
The Vice President would certainly want to march right down the center of the main waiting room, after he rode up the escalator from the train platform.
Unfortunately, there were no rows of lockers on the platform itself, which would have simplified matters a great deal. If there had been lockers, all he would have had to do was wait until the Vice President walked past where he could have concealed one of the devices, and then detonate it.
He consoled himself by thinking that if there had been lockers there, the Secret Service, who were not fools, would almost certainly make sure they didn't contain anything they shouldn't
Once the Vice President and his entourage reached the main waiting room level of the station, there were three possible routes to where he would enter his official car. There were east, west, and south entrances.
The logical place would be the east exit, but that did not mean he would use it. There were a number of factors that would be considered by those in charge of the Vice President's movements, and there was just no telling, with any degree of certainty, which one would be used.
All three routes would have to be covered. The east and west routes, conveniently, had rows of lockers. If he placed in each of two lockers on both the east and west routes one device, the lethal zone of the devices would be entirely effective. The south route did not have a row of lockers.
Marion thought that it was entirely likely the Lord was sending him a message via the lockers in the Pine Barrens. In other words, why the symbolism of the lockers if they were not in some way connected with the disintegration of the Vice President?
It was unlikely, following that line of thought, that the Vice President would take the south, locker-less route.
But on the other hand, it was also possible that he was wrong. It was also clear that the Lord expected him to be as thorough as humanly possible. That meant, obviously, that he was going to have to cover the south route, even if the Vice President would probably not use it.
There was, of course, a solution. There was always a solution when doing the Lord's work. One simply had to give it some thought. Often some prayerful thought.
There was a large metal refuse container against the wall in the passage between the main waiting room and the doors of the south exit. All he would have to do is put the fifth device in the refuse container. For all he knew-and there was no way toknow without conducting a test-the metal refuse container would produce every bit as much shrapnel as one of the lockers.
The only problem, which Marion decided could be solved as he left 30^th Street Station, was to make sure the metal refuse container would accept one of the AWOL bags through its opening.
Marion bought one of the last copies of the Sunday edition ofThe Philadelphia Inquirer on sale at the newsstand. He sat down on one of the benches in the main waiting room and flipped through it for three or four minutes. Then he left the station by the south route, stopping at the metal refuse container to place the newspaper in it.
He kept the first section. First he opened it and laid it on the opening horizontally, and then tore the paper to mark how wide the opening was. Then he held the paper vertically, and tore it again, this time marking how tall the opening was.
Then he folded the newspaper, tucked it under his arm, and walked out of the station and home.
He had thirty minutes to spare before Masterpiece Theater came on the television.
****
Magdelana Lanza was waiting for her son Vito on the sidewalk in front of the house on Ritner Street.
"I had to call the plumber," she announced.
"I told you I would go by Sears when I got off work."
"The hot water thing is busted; there was water all over the basement. And the pipes is bad."
"What pipes?"
"What pipes do you think, sonny? Thewater pipes is what pipes."
"What do you mean they're bad?"
"They're all clogged up; they got to go. We have to have new pipes."
That sonofabitch of a plumber! What he did was figure he could sell an old woman anything he told her she needed. I'll fix his ass!
"I'll have a look, Mama."
"Don't use the toilet. There's no water; it won't flush."
"Okay, Mama. I'll have a look."
No water, my ass. What can go wrong with pipes? What I'm going to find when I go in the basement is that this sonofabitch has turned the valve off.
Vito went in the house and went to his room and took off the good clothes he had worn to take Tony to the Poconos and put on a pair of khaki trousers and an old pair of shoes.
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 tha
t 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.
It retracted completely the last couple of times, which made him think, to his relief, that there was nothing wrong with the antenna, that it was probably just a little dirty. As soon as he got home, he would get some alcohol and wet a rag with it, and wipe the antenna clean, and then lubricate it with some silicone lubricant.
He was in the process of relocking the Olds's door when Corporal Lanza pulled in beside him.
That's a new Cadillac. Where the fuck does he get the money for a new Cadillac?
"Whaddaya say, Corporal?"
"Hey! How they hanging, Gomez?"
"It's Martinez, Corporal."
"Sorry."
"Nice wheels."
"Yeah, it's all right. Nothing like a Caddy."
"What's something like that worth?"
"What the fuck is the matter with you? It's not polite to ask people what things cost."
"Sorry, Corporal. Just curious."
"A lot," Lanza said. "Save your pennies, Martinez."
"Yeah."
"Or get lucky, which is how I got that fucker."
"Excuse me?"
"Las Vegas. You want a Caddy like that, you go to Las Vegas and get lucky."
"Yeah, I guess."
"So how do you like the Airport?"
"I haven't been out here long enough to really know. So far it's great. I was in Highway."
How the fuck did a little Spic like you get into Highway? You don' t look big enough to straddle a motorcycle.
"Yeah, I heard. So why did you leave Highway?"
"They made it plain to me that maybe I would be happier someplace else. Which was all right with me. I wasn't too happy in Highway."
They didn't want you in Highway as little as you are. Those fuckers all think they're John Wayne. And John Wayne, you're not, GomMartinez
"Well, walking around an air-conditioned building telling tourists "where they can find the pisser sure beats riding a motorcycle in the rain."
"You said it. Corporal."
"The next time they announce a corporal's exam, you ought to have a shot at it."
"Yeah, well, I'm not too good at taking examinations."
"Some people are, and some people aren't. Don't worry about it."
****
It wasn't until a few minutes after midnight, when he put the key in the Caddy's door, that Vito, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, realized that he had done something really fucking stupid.
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."
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