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
