“What are you going to do? Walk out with a bundle of money under your arm? The guards
will love it.”
“I’ll take it out in a suitcase in my car.”
“About as safe as jumping out of this window.”
“Now wait a minute. Let’s get this straight. Where do you come in on this deal? What’s
your cut to be?”
She laughed.
“Do I look all that crazy? I wouldn’t touch a dollar of it. You may not think it, but I don’t
take money that doesn’t belong to me. I have other faults, but that’s not one of them. I’m
going to give you the combination because I’d like that black-haired, snooty little bitch to be
well and properly gypped. I hated Reisner, and I hate her. It’s my way of getting even for all
I’ve put up with from both of them. Go ahead, Mr. Ricca, help yourself. The more you take
the better I’ll like it.”
I looked at her-She wasn’t fooling.
“Okay, let’s have it.”
She reached over, opened a drawer in the table near by and gave me a slip of paper.
“It’s been waiting there ever since I first saw you. I knew sooner or later you’d want it.”
I looked at the row of figures, my heart banging against my ribs. Talk about a break! I
could scarcely believe it.
“Well, thanks,” I said, and got to my feet.
“Going after it now?”
176
“Right now.”
“Still going to take it out in your car?”
“Any better ideas ?”
She leaned against me.
“You’re learning, handsome. There’s only one way to get that money out and be sure of it.
Perhaps you don’t know this, but at six every evening the railroad truck calls for luggage or
empty crates, or whatever’s going by rail. There’s always something. Pack the money in a
suitcase, address it to yourself at any station to be called for. The man will give you a receipt.
You’ll find him loading up at the luggage entrance. He handles the stuff himself. There’s
seldom anyone there. It’s the only way, handsome. The guards don’t check his stuff, and
when you go, you’ll go empty-handed.”
I patted her on the shoulder.
“You’re more than smarts you’re brilliant,” I said. “That’s a whale of an idea.”
She leaned more heavily against me.
“Show a little appreciation.”
It took me ten precious minutes to untangle myself from her clutches, a quarter of an hour
to buy a black pigskin suitcase with good locks, five minutes to buy a coil of thin rope and a
big meat hook, and ten minutes to get back to the casino.
As I drove in I asked the green-eyed guard if he had seen Mrs. Wertham.
“Not in yet,” he growled.
I drove fast around to the back of the casino. Twenty feet above me was my office window,
overlooking a walled-in garden that was reserved for the management, and no one else. I set
the suitcase down immediately below the window, ran back to the car and drove around to the
front entrance.
I went up the steps to the terrace three at a time. People said hello, and tried to stop me, but
I grinned at them and kept on.
When Della checked up on me she would learn I hadn’t come in with a suitcase, only a
small brown-paper parcel that contained the rope and the hook.
