The first night, he picked her up outside work in his Cadillac and they went first to a real nice restaurant in Jersey, outside Cherry Hill, where everybody seemed to know him, and the manager or whatever sent a bottle of champagne to the table. Ricco told her right out that he was married, but didn't get along with his old lady, but couldn't divorce her because his mother was old and a Catholic, and you know how Catholics feel about divorce.

After dinner, they went to a motel, not one of the el cheapos that lined Admiral Wilson Boulevard, but to the Cherry Hill Inn, which was real nice, and had in the bathroom the first whatchamacallit that Antoinette had ever seen. She had to ask Ricco what it was for.

The truth of the matter was that when he was driving her back to her parents' house she thought that she had blown it, that she had been too easy to pick up, that she had gone to the motel with him on the First Date, and that once there, she had been a little too enthusiastic. She hadn't been with anybody in months, and the two whiskey sours and then the champagne and then the two Amaretto liqueurs afterward had put her more than a little into the bag.

Antoinette figured, in other words, that Ricco had got what he wanted (probably more than he expected) and that was the last she would ever see of him. She could have played it smarter, she supposed, but the vice versa was also true. She had got what she wanted too, a nice dinner, a nice ride in a Caddy, and then what happened in the motel, which she had needed and wanted from the moment she first saw him trying to look down her blouse.

But then a week later, when she walked out of the building after work, there he was at the curb, looking real nice, and smiling at her, and holding the door of his Caddy open for her.

He told her that he would have called her sooner, but his wife was being a bitch, and he couldn't arrange it. She told him that she understood, she had been married to someone like that herself, a real bastard.

He told her he would like to show her his restaurant, but that she understood why he couldn't do that, with his wife and all, and she told him she understood. The second night, they had gone to the bar in the Warwick Hotel, and then across the street to a bar that had a piano player, and then back across the street to the Warwick, to a nice hotel suite he said a business associate kept all the time so he could use it when he was in town.

When she went home that night, her father and mother were waiting up for her like she was sixteen or seventeen, instead of a woman who was twenty-three and had a kid, and said she looked like a whore and smelled like a drunk and they weren't going to put up with that. And who was the Guinea in the Cadillac, some gangster?

The next time she saw Ricco, three days later, she told him what had happened, and that if they were going to do anything, they would have to do it early, so she wouldn't get hell when she got home.

He asked her why she still lived at home, and she told him about Eddie and Brian, and how Eddie, that sonofabitch, wasn't paying child support. He told her maybe something could be worked out; he would look into it.

The first thing that happened was that Eddie, out of the goddamned blue, sent a Western Union money order for four hundred bucks, which wasn't all he owed, of course, but was four hundred Antoinette didn't expect to get.

And then she heard from her mother that she had heard from Eddie's mother that Eddie had gotten mugged going home from work, that two white guys had done a real job on him, knocked out a couple of teeth, and broken his glasses and a couple of ribs, and taken all his money.

Antoinette wasn't stupid. She knew that the last thing Eddie would have done if he had got mugged and they took all his money would suddenly decide to send child support. And three days after the Western Union money order came, there was one from the Post Office, what he owed for two weeks child support, plus twenty dollars on account.

The only way Eddie would suddenly decide to start doing what was right was because somebody had convinced him that he better do right, and Antoinette suspected that Ricco was that somebody.

Ricco wouldn't admit it, of course, but what he said was that bastards who won't support their own children deserve whatever happens to them, like losing a couple of teeth.

The second thing that happened was that Ricco said he knew where she could get a nice apartment, a couple of blocks from the Warwick, the only problem being she couldn't have a kid in there. Antoinette told him it didn't matter whether she could have Brian or not, on what the phone company was paying her, she couldn't afford it. He said he would be happy to help out with the whole thing.

Her mother and father threw a fit when she said she was moving out, and her father said he knew it had something to do with that Guinea gangster with the shiny Cadillac, and her mother said she was making the mistake of her life, because Eddie was straightening himself out, like for example paying the child support for one thing. But she moved out anyway, and came to believe that her mother and father were really glad she had, because that way, except when she saw him on weekends, they had Brian all to themselves.

The apartment was nice, and Ricco not only picked up the rent, but was always slipping her a fifty or a hundred and telling her to buy herself something. She knew that she was kidding herself whenever she thought about maybe getting him to marry her. He was going to stay married to his Guinea princess for ever.

The only thing that had ever really bothered her was the first time he told her that he had a friend from Chicago that was coming to town and he wanted her to be very nice to him, and she knew what very nice meant. That made her feel like a hooker, but she had just moved into the apartment, and couldn't just move back home again, so she did it. It wasn't as bad as she thought, the guy was nicer than she thought he would be, and to tell the truth, he was pretty good between the sheets, and when he went back to Chicago, Ricco handed her four fifties and told her to buy herself a cheese-steak or something.

And it didn't happen often, maybe two, three, four times a year. It wasn't as if he was telling her to go stand on a sidewalk someplace and wink at strange men, just be very nice to people who were important to Ricco. That didn't seem to be, considering, all that much for him to ask of her.

This Vito Lanza the cop was something else. This was the first time something like this had happened. But if Ricco wanted her to do it, it was important. And what the hell, the truth was Vito was kind of cute, and not too bad in the bedroom department, either. It wasn't as if he made her want to throw up, like that.

Ricco told her he wanted her to be very nice to Vito the cop until he told her different. He said the cop was in a position to be useful to some business associates of his, and part of that meant getting him to figure that he owed her something.

It was pretty clear to Antoinette that it had something to with his being a cop at the airport. They wanted him to be looking the other way when something happened, something like that. It wasn't as if they wereafter Vito, anything like that. If they were after him, the same thing that had happened to Eddie would already have happened to him.

Vito was waiting for her outside the apartment in his Buick when she got home from work. He acted like he wanted to go up to the apartment with her, and then go see her Uncle Joe, but she told him that her uncle expected them now, before he had to go home, and they could come back to the apartment later.

Take care of business first. Antoinette had learned that from Ricco. Ricco was always saying that.