highway where I could tread on the gas and go.
Ahead of me I could see the massive gates. They were closed, and the two uniformed
guards were standing in front of them, their hands on their hips. I touched the horn button,
slowed down, waiting for them to open up, but they didn’t. They just stood, watching me,
their faces expressionless under the hard peaks of their black caps.
I pulled up.
“What do you expect me to do - drive through those goddamn things ?”
I didn’t recognize my voice. It sounded as harsh as a file on rusty iron.
One of the guards sauntered up to me: a tough-looking bird with close-set eyes and a nose
that spread over his face, as if someone had given him the heel some time in his life.
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“Sorry, Mr. Ricca,” he said. “But I gotta message for you.”
I looked at him, my hands gripping the steering-wheel until the muscles in my arms ached.
“What is it?”
“Mrs. Wertham said if you come this way we were to turn you back. She and Mr. Reisner
want to see you.”
I knew I could take him. He was leaning forward, wide open for a hook to the jaw. My eyes
shifted to his companion. He was standing away to my left, his hand on the butt of a gun he
carried in a holster at his hip. He looked ready to go into action.
“That’s okay,” I said, trying to smile. “I’ve seen them. Get those gates open. I’m in a
hurry.”
The guard’s cold, green eyes sneered at me.
“Then I guess they want to see you again. The call’s just come through. Sorry, but orders is
orders.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing I was licked. “I’ll see what they want.” I slid the gear stick into
reverse.
They stood watching me as I made a U-turn. They were still watching me as I drove back to
the casino.
I parked the Buick below the terrace and got out. I was trembling, and blood hammered
against my temples. I might have guessed I wasn’t going to outsmart her quite so easily. She
thought of everything: even with Reisner bleeding on her rug, she still had time to take care
of me.
I walked down towards the beach. A car sneaked up beside me, and a girl’s voice said, “I’m
going your way. Let’s go together.”
I stopped and looked at her: a cute blonde with bed in her eyes and a pert little face that
knew all the answers, and the questions, too. She was in a yellow, strapless swimsuit that
gripped her curves and set off a figure that’d make a mountain goat lose its foothold. On her
fair, flurry head was a big picture hat of plain straw, with a rose pinned to the under-brim.
She was the kind of girl I wouldn’t have tangled with sober, but the kind I wanted the way I
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was feeling now.
I opened the offside door of the car and got in beside her. She drove on towards the beach,
her small hands patting the steering-wheel in time to the swing that was coming over the car
radio, and she kept looking at me out of the corners of her eyes.
“As soon as I saw you I knew I had to know you,” she said. “I like big men, arid you’re the
strongest, biggest man I’ve ever seen.”
I couldn’t think of anything adequate to say to that one, so I let it ride.
“What are you going to do - swim?” she asked, giving me a cute little smile that was
supposed to have me on my hands and knees begging for favours.
“That’s the idea. Do you swim in that outfit?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“It likes you - I can see that.”
She giggled.
“We can always go somewhere where I needn’t wear it. Shall we?”
“It’s your car,” I said.
She spun the wheel at the next intersection and increased the speed.
“I know a place. We’ll go there.”
I sat staring through the windshield, asking myself if this was what I wanted. I didn’t know.
I didn’t think so, but it had dropped out of the sky into my lap, and it might blunt the edges of
what lay ahead of me.
“You’re Johnny Ricca, aren’t you?” she said as she drove the car along a narrow road lined
on either side by royal palms.
“How did you know that?”
“Everyone is talking about you. You’re the big-time gambler from Los Angeles. Someone
said you were a gangster. I love gangsters.”
“Well, that’s good news. And who are you ?”
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“I’m Georgia Harris Brown. Everyone knows me. My father is Gallway Harris Brown, the
steel millionaire.”
“Does he love gangsters too?”
She laughed.
“I never thought to ask him.”
She swung the car off the road and bumped over grass, over sand and pulled up on a lonely
stretch of beach, screened by blue palmettos and palm trees.
“Nice, isn’t it?” she said, taking off her hat and tossing it on the back seat. She slid out of
the car on to the sand. “Well, I’m going to have a swim. Coming?”
As I got out of the car I suddenly decided I wasn’t going ahead with this. I shouldn’t be
here. I should be where I could be seen; where anyone looking for Reisner could ask me if I
had seen him. I must have been crazy to have come with this blonde in the first place. If I
couldn’t get away from the casino, the least I could do was to try to safeguard my own neck,
and I wasn’t doing that by remaining in this out-of-the-way spot with this blonde who was
one jump lower than an animal.
“I guess not,” I said. “I’ve just remembered I’ve work to do. You wouldn’t like to drive me
back?”
The cute little smile went away as if wiped off by a sponge.
“I don’t get it,” she said, and her voice went shrill.
“Never mind: I’ll walk,” I said. “You go ahead and have your swim.”
I knew she’d take a swing at me, and she did. I gave her the satisfaction of landing on me.
It would have been easy enough to have slipped inside her flying hand, but I didn’t want her
to feel all that frustrated. For her size she carried a good slap. It made my cheek burn.
“So long,” I said, and walked away. I didn’t look back, and she didn’t yell after me.
Instead of keeping to the road I moved through the palmetto thicket, heading back the way I
had come, but not paying much attention to where I was going. After a while I realized I had
been walking for some time and I was still not within sight of the casino.
I paused to look around me. Over to my right I could see the blue, almost motionless ocean
through the trees. To my left was a forest of mangroves. I had no idea now if I were walking
away from the casino or towards it, and knowing I should get back there, I got worried.
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This stretch of beach was as lonely and as deserted as a pauper’s funeral, and I was in two
minds to turn back and make a fresh start when I heard a girl singing. She was singing
Temptation a song that had always given me a creepy sensation whenever I’d heard it.
She wasn’t tearing into it as most singers do, but singing it in an absent-minded kind of
way, as if her mind were only half concentrating on the song.
I moved forward cautiously, wanting to catch a glimpse of her before she saw me. From the
sound of her voice she’d be around the next clump of mangroves.
My shoes made no sound in the soft sand. I got behind a shrub and peered over it.
She was sitting on a camp-stool, an artist’s easel in front of her, and she was painting in
water-colours. I couldn’t see the painting, for she was facing me, and I wouldn’t have
bothered much if I could have seen it. I looked at her: she was the only picture I wanted to
look at.
She wore a blue, and white bolero jacket that left her midriff bare, a pair of white shorts,