There was a moment’s silence. Then he said, “Sure. Think nothing of it. I’ve always been a
little gabby.”
He increased speed, and the big car raced along the broad highway, skirted on one side by
palmetto thickets and on the other side by the ocean. After a while we began to climb, and
when we got to the top of a steep hill I could see in the distance the lights of a fair-sized
town.
“Lincoln Beach,” Della said.
I sat forward to stare out of the window. The town was laid out in a semicircle, facing the
sea and sheltered by rising ground. We were moving too fast to see much of it, but what I
could see told me it was quite a different proposition from any of the other coast towns I’d
seen up to now. Even at two o’clock in the morning it was brilliantly floodlit. Blue, amber
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and red lights outlined the long promenade. Many of the white buildings were plastered with
neon lights. From the hill road the town looked like something out of fairyland.
“Pretty nice,” I said.
“That’s the casino: the floodlit building at the far end of the bay,” she said, pointing.
“Looks good, Nick.”
“So would I if someone spent a million bucks on me,” Reisner said indifferently.
It took us twenty minutes by the dashboard clock to negotiate the twisting hill road, to drive
through the town and reach the casino.
The fifteen-foot high gates were guarded by two men in black uniforms, not unlike those
Hider’s storm-troopers used to wear. They saluted, their faces expressionless as we drove
through the gateway.
The mile-long, palm-lined drive was floodlit with green lamps that created the
extraordinary illusion of driving under water.
“I had these lamps fixed a couple of months ago,” Reisner said. “There’s scarcely a square
foot of the place now that isn’t lighted. Funny how the mugs go for lights. Business has been
pretty good since I put this lot in.”
His voice was soft and remote, as if he were talking to himself. He didn’t seem to expect
Della or me to make any comments, and when Della began to say how well it all looked, he
interrupted her as if her remarks were of no interest to him to point out a big bed of giant
dahlias that were floodlit by daylight lamps.
“Every flower has its special lighting,” he said. “Paul was crabbing about the cost, but it’s
worth it. We get mugs from miles around coming to gawp at the flowers: then, of course, they
visit the bar and the restaurants and spend their dough.”
The drive suddenly opened on to a vast stretch of lawn, and; facing us was the brilliantly lit
casino. It was the most impressive and ornate building I have ever seen, like something out of
the Arabian Nights: a huge, white building of Moorish architecture^ its six domed towers and
bulbous minarets piercing the night sky.
Amber, white, green and red lights, controlled by automatic time switches, played
alternately on the front of the building.
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“You have nothing like this in Los Angeles, have you, Ricca?” Reisner said. “We spent ten
grand lighting this joint.”
He continued to drive along the broad carriageway, past the casino and on through the
pleasure gardens, past the floodlit swimming-pool where a number of men and women were
still swimming or lounging in hammocks in spite of the late hour through another double
gate, also guarded by two stiff-necked men in uniform, pait a pitch-and-putt course to a
colony of beach cabins built in a semicircle a hundred yards or so from the ocean, each
screened from the other by palms and tropical flowering shrubs.
