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
