“And the rest of this! He didn’t ring this room when he tumbled into that phone trick in the bar. He must have held the circuit-breaker down — the desk man told me she checked in here in the middle of the afternoon and there’ve been no calls for her at any time. You saw him talking away into the phone at the very moment I was with the man who would’ve plugged through any such connection. The fellow told me Wheeling inquired at 5 o’clock if his wife had registered, then went upstairs. There have been two subsequent complaints about the radio. If there was another, the management would be regretfully forced to speak to ‘the good lady’!”
Holden’s nostrils spread with disgust as he repeated the accepted native phrase used in referring to white women. His stare cut through the haze of twilight toward me.
“And Wheeling was not drunk, Merrill. Not in the sense that real drinkers get stiff. Witness the lightning athlete’s reflex to the cigarette ease I let fall in the bar.
“He said she wouldn’t let him in — yet he described how she was carrying on and the door was not locked. The blood from the wound is partially dry. You can be sure the radio muffled the sound of the shot for those few persons in residence here. The gift spurs you saw him pocket were with her purse, though that in itself isn’t important. She could’ve repossessed them at the house.
“Then this cigarette. He stood out here and smoked, probably liming his entrance into the bar with the regular 7 o’clock crowd. Sure to find us then. If he smoked before the showdown came and he dealt with her, the butts are over the balcony rail. Where this should be!”
Holden crushed the stub between his palms and rolled it until only a mass of tobacco and paper remained. This he threw over the side and walked stiff-legged back into the room. He carefully smudged without wiping clean every likely interior surface, including the surfaces of the pistol and the glass. Smearing the light switch and its panel, he left the light burning.
Out on the balcony once more, he patted his palms together very lightly and looked about, finally directing his stare at me. Silence. Then —
“Say it!”
His voice lashed at me, and I stiffened.
“I’m wondering,” I told him, “why Wheeling would kill, then attempt to shape it as a suicide — when there were so many likely candidates for the role of murderer.”
“You mean me, of course.”
“You’re the most recent. And Catherine’s reaction to you was the most positive any man ever provoked.”
Holden studied me briefly, then laughed softly. “Why do you suppose she hated you and feared me? Because neither of us could be added to her leash, you because you instinctively dislike the predatory type of woman, and me... well, I enjoyed watching her parade her cheap tricks and felt that some sort of unrecorded justice was being done when I humiliated her as she had humiliated other men.”
“Specifically Jim Wheeling?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a streak in you I never suspected.”
He shrugged. “Call it cruel — if it suits you. Call it foolish. Whatever you call it, understand one thing. Told myself I’d never discuss it — even with you — but you should understand that I never loved Catherine. I’m not sorry she’s dead. But I had nothing to do with her death.”
“Except the suspicion in her husband’s mind.”
Holden moved to the balcony rail. “There’s that, of course,” he said, peering over the side, indrawn again.
The top of an ancient papaw tree just reached the overhanging scroll of the balcony and its flower boxes, near the darkened and seldom-used ballroom. Holden really smiled at me for the first time that evening.
“Have to risk it my friend,” he said. “Messy — but necessary. Damn the architects who go arty with individual balconies! I’ll go first.”
He hopped to the rail, balanced, cleared the flowering boxes, and dropped away into the darkness. I watched him hook a branch with one hand and another with his dark-trousered knee. And he was quickly down, his face and blond hair a lighter patch turned up to me in the gathering murk at the roots of the tree. I followed, not quite so gracefully but just as quickly.
“Suppose we take a blow near the old outside stairs,” said Holden wryly. We rounded the corner of the building and came out on the side nearest the sea. “Anyone happens to ask awkward questions about how we got down after we went up — here we are.”
He sat down on a weather-worn bench and lit a cigarette, offering me the case. We smoked without talking and the night closed in with the hushed speed of all such nights in this part of the world.
Holden stirred after several silent minutes. He flipped his cigarette away into the darkness.
“I don’t suppose,” he sighed, “anyone topside would touch us with a barge pole after this. But they really needn’t know, Merrill. These island police will never embarrass us with inspired bursts of energy. Occasionally takes something better than cocky-caps, shiny boots, and the authority of a gun to punish murder.”
He stood up then, pressing his fists into the muscles at the base of his spine, wearily arching his back. Below us, the foaming white fingers of the sea breaking over the coral reefs was a distant and rhythmical force barely seen and scarcely heard. Holden brushed his handkerchief at a tree-bark smudge on his jacket and wiped tiredly at his hands and face.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s go in and give our man his spurs.”
Eight days after Holden’s stage-setting the police were, as predicted, relapsing into contentment. Catherine was prepared for her last journey. Everything moved along almost precisely, like a polite puppet show, until Jim Wheeling gave force and meaning to Holden’s words on the forfeit for killers not government approved.
Wheeling was to escort his wife’s body home, of course, and the intimate pressures of guilt and remorse, compounded by Harriwell-type yattering over Catherine’s past and her violent end, caused him to drink almost incessantly for the several days preceding his final scene in Robert Holden’s office.
When the unshaven big man burst in upon him in the oppressive heat of late afternoon, Holden had the quick mind 10 open my switch on the interoffice communicator. I caught the sound of breathing near the instrument, the quick silence, and Wheeling’s slurred voice accusing Holden of being Catherine’s most cherished companion, the ultimate cause of her disaffection for him. And as I started to move out for the executive office, there was Holden’s sharp: “Jim! Don’t be an idiot!”
The outer office was mercifully empty, Harriwell having enjoyed an attack of lingering vapors after being shyly questioned two days earlier by a routine group of sleepy police. Holden’s door was standing open. A glance was sufficient to justify quickly entering and closing it.
Leaping across the desk, Wheeling had got by the throat the man who had sought to protect him. Holden was being bent cruelly back and over the arm of the old leather chair, his body writhing beneath the weight of the big man. At the instant I closed in to save him, Holden, not seeing me through eyes already glazing under the strangling grip, managed to twist obliquely toward the desk and reach the native knife he favored as a letter opener.
Down on one knee, with a strangely diminished motion like a death reflex, Holden struck the long bright blade once, twice, three times upward into Wheeling’s abdomen.
Miss Paisley’s cat
by Roy Vickers
There are those who have a special affection for cats, and there are those who hold them in physical and even moral abhorrence. The belief lingers that cats have been known to influence a human being — generally an old maid, and generally for evil. It is true that Miss Paisley’s cat was the immediate cause of that emotionally emaciated old maid reaching a level of perverted greatness — or stark infamy, according to one’s point of view. But this can be explained without resort to mysticism. The cat’s behavior was catlike throughout.