The Assassin boh-5 Page 7

  "I really wouldn't know. I didn't get to go to town."

  He did not respond.

  "You really gambled all night?" she asked.

  "I took a couple of naps and a shower, but yes, I guess I did."

  "Well, I'm glad you had fun."

  "Thank you."

  "You were the last person I expected to see," Penny said.

  "You could have been knocked over with a fender, right?"

  She smiled dutifully.

  "What are you doing out here, Matt? I mean, why you?"

  The waitress appeared with their drinks. Matt handed her a credit card and waited for her to leave before replying.

  "My father called me up and asked me to have a drink at the Rittenhouse. When I got there, Chief Coughlin was with him…"

  "That's the man you call 'Uncle Denny'?"

  "Right. My father told me it had been decided by your father and Amy that I was the obvious choice to come out here and bring you home. I told him that while the thought of being able to be of some small service to you naturally thrilled me, I would have to regretfully decline, as I had to work. Then Denny Coughlin told me your father had talked to the mayor, and that was no problem. So here I am."

  "You're still a:" Penny asked, stopped just in time from saying " cop," and finished, "…policeman?"

  "No, Precious Penny," Matt said. "I am no longer a simple police officer. You have the great privilege of sitting here with one of Philadelphia's newest detectives. M. M. Payne, East Detective Division, at your service, ma'am. Just the facts, please."

  She smiled dutifully again.

  He smiled back and took a healthy swallow of his beer.

  Matt Payne felt nowhere near as bright and clever as he was trying to appear. As a matter of fact, he could recall few times in his twenty-two years when he had been more uncomfortable.

  "Then congratulations, Matt," Penny said.

  "Thank you, ma'am," he said.

  "But that doesn't answer why you? Out here, I mean?"

  "I think the idea, I thinkAmy's idea, is that I am the best person to be with you as you begin your passage back into the real world. Amy, I hope you know, is calling the shots."

  "She's been coming out here," Penny said.

  "Yeah, I know," Payne said. "For whatever the hell it's worth, Penny, even if she is my sister, the word on the street is that she's a pretty good shrink."

  That was the truth: Amelia Payne, M.D.,was a highly regarded psychiatrist.

  "'The word on the street'?" Penny asked, gently mocking him.

  "The consensus is," he corrected himself.

  "I don't understand:" Penny said.

  "Neither do I," he said, "but to coin a phrase, 'mine not to reason why, mine but to ride into the valley of the hustlers'…"

  "Well, thanks anyway for coming out here, even if you didn't want to."

  "Better me than Madame D, right?"

  Matt Payne had been calling Grace (Mrs. H. Richard) Detweiler " Madame D" since he had been about twelve, primarily because he knew it greatly annoyed her.

  Penny laughed.

  "Oh, God, I don't think I could have handled my mother out here."

  "You better prepare yourself, she'll be at the airport."

  "And then what?"

  "Jesus Christ, Penny, I don't know. Knowing her as I do, I suspect she'll be a pain in the ass."

  "I've always liked your tact and charm, Matt," Penny said, and then, "God, that beer looks good."

  "You want one?"

  "I'm asubstance abuser," Penny said. "Don't tell me you haven't heard."

  "You're a…youwere a junkie, not a drunk."

  "Alcohol is a drug," Penny said, as if reciting something she had memorized.

  "So is aspirin," Matt said, and pushed his beer glass to her.

  She met his eyes, and looked into them, and it was only with a good deal of effort that he could keep himself from looking away.

  Then she picked up his glass and took a swallow.

  "If you're going to start throwing things, or taking your clothes off, or whatever, try to give me a little notice, will you?" Matt said.

  "Go to hell, Matt," Penny said, then almost immediately, first touching his hand, added, "I don't mean that. My God, I was so glad to see you this morning!"

  "You were always a tough little girl, Penny," Matt said after a moment. "I think you're going to be all right."

  Did I mean that, or did I just say it to be kind?

  "I wish I was sure you meant that," Penny said.

  He shrugged, and then looked around for the waitress and, when he had caught her eye, signaled for another beer.

  "On the way to the airplane, we're going to have to get you some Sen-Sen or something. I don't want Amy or your mother to smell booze on your breath."

  "Did they tell you to make sure I didn't get…anything I wasn't supposed to have?"

  "They knew I wouldn't give you, or let you get, anything to suck up your nose."

  "Detective Payne, right?"

  He nodded.

  "And what did they say about talking to me about…about what happened?"

  "About what, what happened?"

  "You know what I mean," she said, somewhat snappishly. "Aboutwho I mean. Anthony."

  The waitress delivered the beer.

  "Get me the bill, please," Matt said.

  Penny waited until the waitress was out of earshot.

  "I loved him, Matt."

  "Jesus Christ!" he said disgustedly.

  "I'd hoped you would understand. I guess I should have known better."

  "DeZego, Anthony J., 'Tony the Zee,'" Matt recited bitterly, " truck driver, soldier in the Savarese family. I'm not even sure that he had made his bones. And incidentally, loving husband and beloved father of three."

  "You're a sonofabitch!"

  "For Christ's sake, Penny. He's dead. Let it go at that! Be glad, for Christ's sake!"

  She glowered at him. He picked up his beer glass and as he drank from it met her eyes. After a moment she averted hers.

  "I don't know what that means," she said softly, after a moment, " what you said about bones."

  "In order to be a real mobster, you have to kill somebody," Matt said evenly. "They call it 'making your bones.

  "In other words, you really think he was a gangster?"

  "Mobster. There's a difference. He was a low-level mobster. We can't even find out why they hit him."

  "And the people who did it? They're just going to get away with it?"

  He looked at her for a long moment before deciding to answer her.

  "The bodies of two people with reputations as hit men, almost certainly the people who hit your boyfriend, have turned up, one in Detroit and one in Chicago. The mob doesn't like it when innocent civilians, especially rich ones with powerful fathers like you, get hurt when they're hitting people."

  "They're dead?" she asked.

  He nodded.

  "Good!"

  Something between contempt and pity flashed in Matt's eyes. He stood up and looked around impatiently for the waitress. When she came to the table, he quickly signed the bill and reclaimed his credit card.

  "I haven't finished my beer," Penny said coldly.

  "You can have another on the airplane," he said, as coldly. "Let's go."

  "Yes, sir, Mr. Detective, sir," Penny said. The waitress gave the both of them a confused look.

  ****

  "You're in luck, Mr. Lanza," the not-too-bad-looking ticket clerk at the American counter said. "This is the last first-class seat on

  6766."

  "When you're on a roll, you're on a roll," Vito Joseph Lanza said with a smile. He pulled the wad of bills with the hundreds on the outside from the side pocket of his yellow slacks, flicked it open, and waited for her to tell him how much it was going to cost him to upgrade the return portion of his thirty-days-in-advance, touristclass, round-trip ticket to first class. Then he counted out what she told him.

  She made
change, handed him the upgraded ticket and a boarding pass, and said, "Gate 28. They're probably just about to board. Thank you, Mr. Lanza."

  "Yeah. Right. Sure," Vito said, stuffed the wad back in his trousers, and looked around for directions to Gate 28.

  They were not yet boarding Flight 6766, non-stop service to Philadelphia, when he reached Gate 28. He leaned against the wall and lit a Pall Mall with the gold Dunhill lighter he'd bought in the casino gift shop just before going to bed about three that morning.

  I probably could have picked up another couple of grand, if I'd have stuck around, he thought, but the cards had started to run against me, and the one thing a good gambler has to know is when to quit. I certainly wouldn't have lost it all back, but I would probably have lost some, and quitting the way I did, I sort of have the Dunhill to show for quitting when that was the smart thing to do.

  He had taken only a couple of puffs when the ticket lady got on the loudspeaker and announced that they were preboarding. Women with small children, people who needed assistance in boarding, and of course passengers holding first-class tickets, who could board at their leisure.

  Vito had to wait until a couple of old people on canes and what looked like a real Indian-Indian lady with three kids got on, but he was the first passenger in the first-class cabin. He checked his boarding pass, and then found his seat, on the aisle, on the left, right against the bulkhead that separated the first-class compartment from the tourist-class section.

  As soon as he'd dug the seat belt out from where someone had stuffed it between the seats, a stewardess appeared, squatted in the aisle, and asked if she could get him something to drink before they took off.

  They don't do that in the back of the airplane, he thought.

  "Scotch, rocks," Vito said.

  She smiled and went forward and returned almost immediately with his drink. Two things surprised him, first that it came in a plastic cup-Jesus, for what they charge you to sit up here, you'd think they'd at least give you a real glass-and that she didn't hold her hand out for any money. First he thought that they maybe ran a tab, but then he remembered that drinks in first class were on the house.

  He examined his surroundings.

  Class, he decided. The seats are wide and comfortable, and real leather. This is the way to travel.

  He reached up and touched the back of the seat in front of him. That was real leather too.

  He watched the other passengers get on. A lot of them looked, he noticed, at the only passenger in first class. He wondered for a moment if the ticket counter had been handing him a line about being lucky to get the only remaining seat in first class, but then some other first-class passengers got on and he decided that maybe she had been telling him the truth.

  A good-looking blonde came into the cabin. Nice ass, Vito thought. For some reason she looked familiar. Not a movie or TV star, he decided. She isn't good-looking enough for that. But I'm almost sure I seen her someplace.

  A Main Line type came on behind her, wearing a tweed jacket and a dress shirt with no tie. He had the boarding pass stubs in his hand. He glanced at them and stopped the blonde at the second row of seats from the front on the right, asked her did she want the aisle or the window. As she was getting in to sit in the window seat, the young guy looked around the cabin and smiled and nodded at Vito.

  I remember him. He was at the craps table in the Flamingo when I was really hot. She wasn't there. I would have remembered her. Neither of them is wearing a wedding ring. She doesn't look like the kind of girl who would go off to Vegas with some guy she isn't married to for a couple of days. Maybe they're brother and sister.

  He watched as the stewardess took their order, and then came back with a couple of cans of beer.

  Jesus, if it's free booze up here, why drink beer?

  ****

  Vito Lanza woke up when his ears hurt because they were coming down to land. His mouth was dry. He remembered-what the hell, it was free-that he'd had a lot to drink before they served dinner, and wine with the dinner, and he remembered that they had started to show the movie, and decided that he had fallen asleep during the movie.

  Ten minutes later, the airplane landed. Vito was a little disappointed, for they had not flown over Philadelphia. The wind was blowing the wrong way or something, and all he could see out the window was Delaware and the oil refineries around Chester.

  When they finally taxied up to the terminal building, Vito looked out the window and saw something that caught his attention. There was an Airport Unit Jeep and a limousine and what looked like an unmarked detective's car sitting down there, with the baggage carts and the other airport equipment.

  What the hell is that all about?

  "Ladies and gentlemen," the stewardess said over the public address system, "the captain has not yet turned off the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign. Please remain in your seats until he does."

  When the stewardess finally got the door open, a stocky, red-faced man wearing the uniform of a lieutenant of the Philadelphia Police Department stepped into the cabin and looked around. Vito knew who he was, Lieutenant Paul Ardell of the Airport Unit.

  Ardell looked around the first-class cabin, did a double take when he saw Vito, and then looked down at the Main Line type in the second row. He said something to him-Vito couldn't hear what-and the Main Line type got up, backed up a little in the aisle to let the blonde with the nice ass out, and then they both followed Ardell out the door.

  A moment later Vito saw the two of them walking toward the limousine. The door opened and a gray-haired guy got out and put his arms around the blonde and hugged her. Then she got into the limousine and the gray-haired guy shook the Main Line type's hand and then gave him a little hug.

  The Main Line type then walked out of Vito's sight, under the airplane. Vito guessed, correctly, that he was going to intercept their luggage before it got from the airplane to the baggage conveyor, but he didn't get to see this. The FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign went off, and the stewardess gave her little speech about how happy American Airlines was that they had chosen American, and hoped they would do so again in the future, and people started getting off.

  ****

  Joe Marchessi, and the new guy, the little Spic, was working the baggage claim room when Vito got there. Until somebody who transferred into the Airport Unit got to know his way around, they paired him with somebody with experience.

  The Airport Unit was different. In other areas you could move a cop from one district to another, and just about put him right to work. But things were different at the Airport; it was a whole new ballgame. You had to learn what to look for, and what you looked for at the Airport was not what you looked for in an ordinary district.

  Airport Unit cops were something special. For one thing, they were sworn in as officers both in Philadelphia and Tinnicum Township, which is in Delaware County. Some parts of the runways and their approaches are in Tinnicum Township, and they need the authority to operate there too.

  The mob, over the years, had found the Tinnicum Marshes a good place to dump bodies. But aside from that, there was not much violent crime at the Airport.

  Most of what you had to deal with was people stealing luggage, and they were most often professional thieves, not some kid who saw something he decided he could get away with stealing and stole it. Or keeping thieves, professional and amateur, from helping themselves to the air freight in "Cargo City."

  Then there was smuggling, but that was handled by the feds, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the Customs Service, and sometimes the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, and they usually made the arrest, and all the Airport Unit had to do was arrange for the prisoners to be transported.

  All things considered, working the job in the Airport Unit was a pretty good job. Most of the time you got to stay inside the terminal, instead of either freezing your balls or getting a heat stroke outside.

  Vito didn't think much of Marchessi: He had been on the job ten, twelve years, n
ever 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 theWhatsername?-Detweilergirl. 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."