wouldn’t think to look for me in Cuba, and even if she did, and even if she found me, there
was nothing she could do about it.
So when Ginny said, “Just how soon can we get married?” I had part of the answer ready
for her.
I told her I thought in about six weeks.
“My boss has told me if I make a success here,” I said, “he’s going to give me the
manager’s job at our branch in Havana. It’ll be a fine job, Ginny. We’ll have all the money
we need. You won’t have to work any more. How do you like the idea of living in Cuba?”
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She said she didn’t mind where she lived so long as I was with her.
.Every now and then I got scared, wondering how I was going to make good oh the lies I
was telling her, but it was no good worrying about that. The things I had to worry about were
getting the safe open and getting away from Della.
When I wasn’t with Ginny I worked at the casino. I got a big bang out of running the place.
Every morning I called a meeting with Della in the chair. I insisted that Louis, the head chef,
the top croupier, the housekeeper and the wine steward should sit around the conference
table. Della didn’t like the idea, but she soon found I was right. We got ideas from these
people. They had never been consulted before, and they liked being consulted, and they gave
out ideas that meant more money in the kitty. I had ideas, too. I had a piece of ground cleared
and had a helicopter landing-ground constructed. I fixed with a Miami airport for a taxi
service of helicopters to fly a shuttle service from Miami to Lincoln Beach. If our people got
bored with the casino they could hop over to Miami, and if the playboys and girls in Miami
wanted a change, they could hop over to us.
I got that idea going in the first week, and it paid dividends.
Another idea I had was to hook up with the local television station and put the casino on the
air. We had a good band and cabaret every evening, and I fixed it we had a nightly spot which
I gave free in return for the publicity.
“I wouldn’t have believed you had it in you, Johnny,” Della said one night. We were
together in her cabin. She had just got back from Bay Street, and I had just beaten her by five
minutes from Ginny’s place. “That television idea of yours is goingfine.”
“Yeah, it is. How about a token of appreciation? How about that quarter of a million you
promised me - word of honour? I can invest it as well as you.”
She gave me her silky smile. I knew it was a waste of time,
but every so often I punched it home.
“Have patience, Johnny. You’ll get it,”
“When?”
“Come here, darling.”
That was the part I hated. Making love to her when she crooked her finger. But I had to do
it. I had to keep her away from Ginny. So long as I made out I was crazy about her I figured I
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was safe. So I made out I was crazy about her.
There were nights when I slept in my own cabin, and it was then, when I lay alone in the
darkness, that I thought about Reisner. Della had said I’d forget about him after a week, but I
didn’t. I kept thinking of him. I even dreamed about him; imagining him outside the cabin
with his cut eye and smashed face, looking at me through the window.
I thought about Hame, too. He knew the set-up. I could tell; that by the way he looked at
me. He knew the lions hadn’t killed Reisner, although he didn’t say so in so many words.
“It’s a funny thing,” he said to me on the morning after they had found Reisner’s body in
the pit, “but that guy had been dead at least eight hours before those lions mauled him. Isn’t
that a funny thing?”
I said it was.
We stood looking at each other for perhaps half a minute, then he turned and walked away.
I told Della.
“He won’t do anything, Johnny,” she said, completely unruffled. “It’s too late now. He
won’t do anything.”
And he didn’t.
But whenever I met him I knew he knew, and he knew I knew he knew. He was getting
seven-fifty a week from us now, and I wondered how long it would be before he wanted
more. That kind always wanted more sooner or later. Luckily for us we had more to give.
Even if we gave him twice that amount, it wouldn’t hurt us. We were coining money, or
rather she was. I knew she was making much more than she expected, because every now and
then she’d give me an expensive present.
“Conscience money, darling,” she said. “You really are doing a job of work here.”
A couple of weeks later Ginny moved out of the beach cabin. She was going to work at the
store in Miami for a while, and then she was going to Key West to make sketches of the turtle
crawls down there. She wasn’t sure just when she would be going, but she promised to call
me.
Well, that was the set-up nearly five weeks after Reisner had died. I was skating on thin ice,
but up to now the ice wasn’t even cracking. I was feeling pretty confident. I had got away
with murder. I had outsmarted Della. I was in love with Ginny, and, more important, she was
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in love with me. On the face of it, it didn’t look bad.
Then Ricca showed up from Los Angeles.
VI
Della and I knew, sooner or later, Ricca would turn up, and we were ready for him. We had
already had a cable, addressed to Reisner, from Levinsky, saying Wertham hadn’t arrived in
Paris. We guessed a similar cable had been sent to Ricca.
Hoping to gain a little more time, we had cabled back that Wertham had broken his journey
and was in London. We signed the cable Reisner. We had expected Ricca would telephone
from Los Angeles, but he didn’t. He must have suspected something was wrong, for he came
without warning.
I was alone in the office working out a new idea I had for the swimming-pool. I planned to
scrap the overhead lights and put in coloured lights in the floor of the bath. I reckoned that’d
be a novelty, and Della agreed.
It was a half-hour after noon: a good time to work as the staff was busy preparing for the
lunch rush, and the customers were busy in the bar.
I didn’t hear him come in. I learned later he had a trick of moving around like a ghost. I
looked up to find him standing a few feet away from me. He gave me quite a start. He wasn’t
anything like I had imagined him to be, but I guessed at once who he was.
I had formed a picture of him in my mind. I had imagined him to be big and tough the way
I had imagined Reisner would be. But he was nothing like that. He was short and fat: like two
rubber balls; one on top of the other. He was pot-bellied and his legs were thick and short.
His shoulders were nearly a yard wide. He wore his thinning black hair long and plastered to
his head, spreading it out carefully, but there wasn’t nearly enough of it to hide the dark skin
that showed between the strands of hair like the trellis work of a fence. His face was round
and fat and mottled with small veins that stamped him a drunk. He had snake’s eyes, flat,
glittering and as lifeless as glass. His lips were thick and set in a meaningless and perpetual
smile.
“I’m Ricca,” he said. “Where’s Nick?”
My foot touched a button under my desk that connected up with a buzzer in Della’s room.
We had agreed only to use the buzzer as a signal that Ricca had arrived.
“In a little urn on the shelf in the crematorium,” I said, and eased back my chair.
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His expression did not change, nor did his smile go away. He put a pudgy hand on the back
of a chair and pulled it towards him, then he lowered himself into it and puffed breath across
the desk at me.
“You mean he’s dead?”