He rested a small-boned hand on my shoulder and lifted a finger to Billy X. His eyes looked sunken under the white brows. I think he may have had something he wanted to say, but immediately he sat down there was a stir rising above the idle talk in the room behind us and Wheeling burst through the lobby arch. He skidded to a halt and stood swinging his head from side to side in a queerly heavy motion. A snowy surgical bandage covered his right cheek, clean against the black of his hair and the flush of his face. He charged the bar like an enraged water buffalo, bellowed for whiskey, and tossed it off.
He glared along the bar at us. “Calls me names — names like a dog you don’t own. In front of everybody — walks off — and tells me I’m not as much of a man as my servant. Took the spurs he gave her — and she cut — I’m—”
His voice strangled in his throat. He pulled himself up, gripping the edge of the teak wood bar to stay erect. A leer stained his face.
“This time, Holden — she — included you. Didn’t guess she’d ever do that, did you? Did somethin’ to her, Holden — you must have done somethin’. This time — she’s — gonna kill herself. She says. I believe her. One damn fight after another — it’s awful. I do believe her — can’t stop her.” He stared at us out of blood-laced blue eyes, lifting his hand in a childlike gesture toward the bandage on his check. “She cut my face.”
Holden and I exchanged glances as Wheeling slipped and caught himself up again on the bar, coming around between us to grip my shoulder.
“Won’t you do something, Merrill? Please won’t you stop her? Left me, Merrill — came down here and up in her room waving my old Army — pistol — radio turned up and the lights out. Drinking and won’t lemme in. I tried, Merrill. Won’t lemme see her. Crazy, I tell you. Please. Please — help—”
Holden turned full on Wheeling while I gingerly removed myself from the big man’s grasp.
“Stop blubbering,” said Holden. “What in God’s name do you think we can do, Jim? House phone over there on the bar. Call her. Talk to her.”
Wheeling showed his teeth again.
“Suits you — fine — doesn’ it?”
“Shut up, Jim.”
“Sure. Shut — up. Big boss — gets — off easy.”
“You’re making it worse.”
“I’ll shut — up. So’ll — Catherine.”
“Good. You’re going home. Both of you.”
“Yeah. Home.”
“You’ll both be happier.”
Wheeling scowled blearily down at him while Holden, poised but taut as a drumhead, took his cigarette case from his jacket pocket. The smooth metal slipped from his fingers. Wheeling scooped the case up in mid-air before it could strike the floor, silently handing it back to Holden after only a moment’s hesitation. An odd sound came up from the throat of the bulky-shouldered man and he stumbled to the telephone sitting on the end of the bar. His broad back toward us, the instrument cuddled against his chest as he crouched over it, he commenced talking after a bit, purring into the receiver, then almost shouting, then pleading, then threatening, then purring again. It was an awful din.
Holden took my arm. “Come along,” he said softly.
We got through the arch, past the curious eyes, and into the high-beamed lobby. Holden halted there at the foot of the wide staircase. He said, “Wait here,” and walked swiftly to the registry desk. I watched him and Wheeling. Wheeling went on talking.
Holden spoke to the slender and dignified old native presiding over both the desk and the telephone switchboard. The native nodded, then shook his head. And Holden came back across the lobby. He glanced briefly at Wheeling still bent over the bar phone.
“Let’s go see Catherine,” he said.
We climbed the steps two at a time, passing at a trot the broad intermediate landing between the interior staircase and the old stone balcony and stairs outside the hotel to seaward. A radio blared continental dance music from the far end of the spacious but shadowed and empty second-floor hall. Moving toward the sound, we came face to face with a lumpy female in bent hair curlers and a vicious pink robe who yanked open her door, tracked us with a pair of eyes as friendly as two gas-tank caps, threw a look toward the music, and slammed the door. Holden ignored her.
Stopping before Catherine Wheeling’s door, he looked up at me and took hold of the knob. It turned easily. He glanced down the hall, then threw the door wide. A blast from the radio hit us and we went in almost shoulder to shoulder. Light was fading in the room and had that peculiar blue tinge you find for a few moments each evening in the tropics. The doors to the tiny balcony were open to the sky and a last bit of twilight touched the figure of Catherine Wheeling. She was sprawled in the depths of a wicker chair, an overturned highball glass on the floor at her feet.
Holden shook his head when I moved to turn off the radio. He stepped back, closed the door and threw the heavy brass bolt, and walked toward Catherine Wheeling. Standing with his thumbs looped in his jacket pockets, making no attempt to touch her, he waited until I joined him. Then he dipped his head and, above the radio’s racket, said: “Look.”
She lay with that fine head turned to the left and against the back of the chair. A small hole with a faintly seared lip broke the smooth plane of her right temple. And a dark stain spread out under the thick black hair, down over the shoulder of her favorite white slack suit. Her right hand lay between her thighs, the long fingers loosely grasping a regulation pistol.
Holden leaned across the body and snapped on a lamp recessed in the wall. He touched the stain on the white shoulder and the skin over a cheekbone with his forefinger. Then he walked slowly around the room, examining without touching everything within the four walls. He stopped at the dressing table. Catherine’s purse was there.
Beside it lay a pair of silver gamecock spurs.
Holden slowly turned his head in my direction. I didn’t speak, didn’t move. He carefully placed the immaculate little punishers in his pocket, took another long tour of the room with his eyes, pausing at the body with a total lack of expression, and walked out onto the balcony.
I followed gratefully, away from the presence of death and the irreverent blatting of the radio, and filled my lungs with the clean air of evening. But Holden prowled. He stopped, grunting lightly, and reached into the soil filling the flower boxes which rimmed the balcony. He probed in the dirt and came up with a cigarette butt. He checked over the entire balcony again, then came back to me, holding the butt in his palm.
“Merrill,” he said softly. “Look here what the fool did.”
He held the warped stub toward me. “It hasn’t been in the soil of that box long enough to even begin to soak or stain,” he said. “And you see there’s no lipstick on it. She didn’t smoke it.”
He turned the remains of the cigarette over with an exploratory finger, closed his fist around ii, and looked out toward the dying light over the hills. Almost reluctantly, his attention came back to me.
“We have a problem,” he murmured, watching me carefully from under the white brows.
There was no answer to that.
Holden dipped his head again. “I suppose this last playful maneuver of hers was just enough to push him over the edge. If — and here’s a sweet little technicality in the moral principle for you to kick around some sleepless night — if he’d pulled the trigger when she went after him with the spurs, it could reasonably be represented as self-defense.” He made an impatient gesture with the hand holding the dead cigarette and his tone took an edge. “But why couldn’t he just let her go?”
“Didn’t he?” I said.
Holden paid no heed to me. “It’s not at all in character for people like Catherine Wheeling to destroy themselves. Certainly she was unhappy — she would always be unhappy in whatever situation. But she’d never destroy herself because of it. She’d destroy others and delight in it.