WHEN I RETURNED TO THE SARATOGA the following morning at ten o’clock, as arranged, a very different scene presented itself. There were police everywhere-outside the main entrance of the hotel and in the lobby. When I asked the receptionist to announce my arrival to Max Reles, she told me that no one was being allowed up to the penthouse except the hotel owners and the police.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said the receptionist. “They won’t tell us anything. But there’s a rumor that one of the hotel guests has been murdered by the rebels.”
I turned and walked back to the front door and met the diminutive figure of Meyer Lansky.
“You leaving?” he asked. “Why?”
“They won’t let me upstairs,” I said.
“Come with me.”
I followed Lansky to the elevator car, where a policeman was about to prevent our using it, until his officer recognized the gangster and saluted. Inside the car, Lansky produced a key from his pocket-one like Waxey’s-and used it to take us up to the penthouse. I noticed that his hand was shaking.
“What’s happened?” I asked.
Lansky shook his head.
The elevator doors parted to reveal yet more police, and in the living room we found a captain of militia, Waxey, Jake Lansky, and Moe Dalitz.
“Is it true?” Meyer Lansky asked his brother.
Jake Lansky was a little taller and more coarse-featured than his brother. He had thick, bottle-glass spectacles and eyebrows like a pair of mating badgers. He wore a cream-colored suit, a white shirt and a bow tie. His face had laugh lines, only he wasn’t using them right now. He nodded gravely. “It’s true.”
“Where?”
“In his office.”
I followed the two Lanskys into the office of Max Reles. A uniformed police captain brought up the rear.
Someone had been redecorating the walls. They looked as if Jackson Pollock had come in and actively expressed himself with a ceiling brush and a large pot of red paint. Only it wasn’t red paint that was splashed all over the office; it was blood, and lots of it. Max Reles was going to need a new chinchilla rug, too, except that it wasn’t going to be he who would go to a store to buy a replacement. He was never going to buy anything again-not even a funeral casket, which was what he now needed most. He lay on the floor, still in what seemed to be the same clothes he’d been in the night before, but the blue shirt now had some dark brown spots. He was staring at the cork-tiled ceiling with only one eye. The other eye appeared to be missing. From the look of him, two shots had hit him in the head, but there was a strong case for thinking that at least two or three more had ended up in his back and chest. It seemed like a real gangster-style murder, in that the gunman had done a very thorough job of making sure he was dead. And yet, apart from the police captain who had followed us into the office-more out of curiosity than anything else, it seemed-there were no police in there, no one taking photographs of the body, no one with a measuring tape, nothing of what might normally have been expected. Well, this was Cuba, after all, I told myself, where everything took just that little bit longer to get done, including, perhaps, the dispatching of forensic scientists to the scene of a homicide. Max Reles was already dead, so where was the hurry?
Waxey appeared behind us in the doorway of his dead master’s office. There were tears in his eyes, and in his encyclopedia-sized hand, a white handkerchief that looked as if it might have been tugged off one of the double beds. He sniffed for a moment and then blew his nose loudly, sounding like a passenger ship making port.
Meyer Lansky looked at him with irritation. “So where the hell were you when he got his brains blown out?” he said. “Where were you, Waxey?”
“I was right here,” whispered Waxey. “Like I always am. I thought the boss had gone to bed. After his phone call to F.B. He always had an early night after that. Regular as clockwork. First thing I knew about it was when I came in here at seven o’clock this morning and found him like this. Dead.”
He added the word “dead” as if there had been some doubt about that fact.
“He wasn’t shot with a BB gun, Waxey,” said Lansky. “Didn’t you hear nothing?”
Waxey shook his head, miserably. “Nothing. Like I said.”
The police captain finished lighting a little cigarillo and said, “It’s possible Senor Reles was shot during last night’s fireworks,” he said.
“For Chinese New Year? That would certainly have covered up the sound of any gunshots.”
He was a smallish, handsome, clean-shaven man. His neat olive-green uniform seemed to complement the light brown color of his smooth face. He spoke English with only a trace of a Spanish accent. And all the time he was speaking he leaned casually on the doorjamb, as if doing nothing more pressing than offering a halfhearted solution for fixing a broken-down car. Almost as if he didn’t really care who had murdered Max Reles. And perhaps he didn’t. Even in Batista’s militia there were plenty of people who didn’t much care for the presence of American gangsters in Cuba.
“The fireworks started at midnight,” continued the captain. “They lasted approximately thirty minutes.” He moved through the open sliding glass door and out onto the terrace. “My guess is that during the noise, which was considerable, the assassin shot Senor Reles from out here on the terrace.”
We followed the captain outside.
“Possibly he climbed up from the eighth floor using the scaffolding erected around the hotel sign.”
Meyer Lansky glanced over the wall. “That’s a hell of a climb,” he murmured. “What do you think, Jake?”
Jake Lansky nodded. “The captain is right. The killer had to come up here. Either that or he had a key, in which case he would have to have gotten past Waxey. Which doesn’t seem likely.”
“Not likely,” said his brother. “But all the same, it is possible.”
Waxey shook his head. “No fucking way,” he said. Suddenly his normally whispering voice sounded angry.
“Maybe you were asleep,” said the police captain.
Waxey looked very indignant at this suggestion, which was enough to have Jake Lansky stand between him and the police captain and try to defuse a situation that threatened to get ugly. Anything involving Waxey would have threatened that much.
With one hand placed firmly on Waxey’s chest, Jake Lansky said, “I should introduce you, Meyer. This is Captain Sanchez. He’s from the police station around the corner on Zulueta. Captain Sanchez, this is my brother, Meyer. And this”-he looked at me-“this is…” He hesitated for a moment, as though trying to remember not my real name-I could see that he knew what that was-but my false one.
“Carlos Hausner,” I said.
Captain Sanchez nodded and then addressed all of his remarks to Meyer Lansky. “I spoke to His Excellency the president just a few minutes ago,” he said. “First of all, he wishes me to express his sympathies to you, Senor Lansky. For the terrible loss of your friend. He also wishes me to reassure you that the Havana police will do everything in its power to catch the perpetrator of this heinous crime.”
“Thank you,” said Lansky.
“His Excellency tells me he spoke with Senor Reles on the telephone last night, as was his custom every Wednesday evening. The call commenced at exactly eleven forty-five p.m. and terminated at eleven fifty-five. Which would also seem to suggest that the time of death was during the fireworks, between twelve and twelve-thirty. In fact, I am convinced of it. Let me show you why.”
He held out a mangled-looking bullet in the palm of his hand.
“This is a bullet that I dug out of the wall in the study. It looks like a thirty-eight-caliber round. A thirty-eight would be a lot of gun to keep quiet at any time. But during the fireworks, six shots might easily be fired without anyone hearing.”
Meyer Lansky looked at me. “What do you think of that idea?” he asked.
“Me?”
“Yeah, you. Max said you used to be a cop. Kind of cop were you anyway?”
“The honest kind.”
“Fuck that. I mean what was your area of investigation?”
“Homicide.”
“So what do you think of what the captain says?”
I shrugged. “I think we’ve been jumping over one guess after another. I think it might be an idea to let a doctor examine the body and see if we can pin down the time of death. Maybe that will tie in with the fireworks, I don’t know. But that would make sense, I think.” I glanced over the floor of the terrace. “I don’t see any shell casings, so either the killer used an automatic and picked them up in the dark, which seems unlikely, or the gun was a revolver. Either way, it would seem best to find the murder weapon as a matter of priority.”
Lansky looked at Captain Sanchez.
“We already looked for it,” said the captain.
“Looked?” I said. “Looked where?”
“The terrace. The penthouse. The eighth floor.”
“Maybe he threw it into that park,” I said, indicating the Campo de Marte. “A gun might land there in the dark and nobody would notice.”
“Then again, maybe he took it with him,” said the captain.
“Maybe. On the other hand, Major Ventura was in the casino last night, which meant there were plenty of police in and around the hotel. I can’t see that anyone who had just shot someone dead would risk running into a cop with a gun that had just been fired six or seven times. Especially if this was a professional killer. Frankly, it looks professional. It takes a cool head to fire that many shots and hit the target several times and expect to get away with it. An amateur would probably have panicked and missed more. Maybe even dropped the gun here. My guess is that he just dumped the gun somewhere on his way out of the hotel. In my experience, all sorts of stuff can get smuggled in and out of a hotel as big as this. Waiters walk around with covered trays. Porters carry bags. Maybe the killer just dropped the gun in a laundry basket.”
Captain Sanchez called one of his men and ordered a search to be made of the Campo de Marte and the hotel laundry baskets.
I went back into the office and, tiptoeing around the bloodstains, stared down at Max Reles. There was something covered with a handkerchief: something bloody that had leaked through the cotton. “What’s that?” I asked the captain when he had finished giving orders to his men.
“His eyeball. It must have popped out when one of the bullets exited the victim’s head.”
I nodded. “Then that’s a hell of a thirty-eight. You might expect that with a forty-five, but not a thirty-eight. May I see the bullet you found, Captain?”
