“Well, the next day I went back to the Saratoga, like everything was normal in my life. There was no way around that. I had to act normally, or suspicion would have fallen on me. As it was, Captain Sánchez marked my card for the murder right from the very beginning. He might have made it stick, too, until I managed to convince Lansky that the murder might not have taken place under cover of the noise from the fireworks—as everyone seemed to think it had. And the police were helpful there. They hadn’t even bothered to search for the murder weapon. I flexed my Adlon Hotel detective muscles and suggested a search of the laundry baskets. Not long afterward, they found the gun.

“As soon as those mobsters saw the silencer on the revolver, they began to think it might be a professional killing—something to do with their business in Havana and probably nothing to do with something that started twenty years ago. Better still, I was able to suggest that the silencer meant that the murder could have happened at any time, not necessarily during the fireworks, as the captain had suggested. Effectively that discredited his theory about my being the killer and left me looking like Nero Wolfe. Anyway, that was Gunther in the clear, I thought, only I’d been too convincing for my own good. Meyer Lansky appreciated the way I’d bested the cop; and since Max had already told him something about my background as a Berlin homicide detective, Lansky decided that, in the interest of avoiding a Mafia war in Havana, I was now the man best qualified to handle the investigation of Max Reles’s death.

“For a moment or two I was horrified. And then I began to see the possibility of putting myself completely in the clear for it. All I needed was somewhere safe to lay the blame that wouldn’t result in anyone else getting killed. I had no idea that they would kill Waxey, Max’s bodyguard, as a sort of insurance policy, just in case he really did have something to do with it. So you could say I killed him, too. That was unfortunate. Anyway, by a stroke of good luck for me, although not for him, one of the pit bosses at the Saratoga, a fellow named Irving Goldstein, was involved with a female impersonator at the Palette Club; and when I found out that he’d killed himself because Max had been on the brink of firing him for being a pansy, well, he seemed made to order to take the blame. So the night before last I went to search his apartment with Captain Sánchez, and I planted the technical drawing I’d made of the Bramit silencer and made sure that Sánchez found it.