“Dick! Dick! Come and see!”
Dick jogged across the hall into her room. He knelt to Peterson’s heart, and felt the pulse—the body was warm, the face, harassed and indirect in life, was gross and bitter in death; the box of materials was held under one arm but the shoe that dangled over the bedside was bare of polish and its sole was worn through. By French law Dick had no right to touch the body but he moved the arm a Utile to see something—there was a stain on the green coverlet, there would be faint blood on the blanket beneath.
Dick closed the door and stood thinking; he heard cautious steps in the corridor and then Nicole calling him by name. Opening the door he whispered: “Bring the couverture and lop blanket from one of our beds—don’t let any one sec you.” Then, noticing the strained look on her face, he added quickly, “Look here, you mustn’t get upset over this—it’s only some nigger scrap.”
“I want it to be over.”
The body, as Dick lifted it, was light and ill-nourished. He held it so that further hemorrhages from the wound would flow into the man’s clothes. Laying it beside the bed he stripped off the coverlet and top blanket and then opening the door an inch, listened—there was a clank of dishes down the hall followed by a loud patronizing “Merci, Madame,” but the waiter went in the other direction, toward the service stairway. Quickly Dick and Nicole exchanged bundles across the corridor; after spreading this covering on Rosemary’s bed, Dick stood sweating in the warm twilight, considering. Certain points had become apparent to him in the moment following his examination of the body; first, that Abe’s first hostile Indian had tracked the friendly Indian and discovered him in the corridor, and when the latter had taken desperate refuge in Rosemary’s room, had hunted down and slain him; second, that if the situation were allowed to develop naturally, no power on earth could keep the smear off Rosemary—the paint was scarcely dry on the Arbuckle case. Her contract was contingent upon an obligation to continue rigidly and unexceptionally as “Daddy’s Girl.”
Automatically Dick made the old motion of turning up his sleeves though he wore a sleeveless undershirt, and bent over the body. Getting a purchase on the shoulders of the coat he kicked open the door with his heel, and dragged the body quickly into a plausible position in the corridor. He came back into Rosemary’s room and smoothed back the grain of the plush floor rug. Then he went to the phone in his suite and called the manager-owner of the hotel.
“McBeth ?—it’s Doctor Diver speaking—something very important. Arc we on a more or less private line?”
It was good that he had made the extra effort which had firmly entrenched him with Mr. McBeth. Here was one use for all the pleasingness that Dick had expended over a large area he would never retrace….
“Going out of the suite we came on a dead Negro … in the hall … no, no, he’s a civilian. Wait a minute now—I knew you didn’t want any guests to blunder on the body so I’m phoning you. Of course I must ask you to keep my name out of it. I don’t want any French red tape just because 1 discovered the man.”
What exquisite consideration for the hotel! Only because Mr. McBeth, with his own eyes, had seen these traits in Doctor Diver two nights before, could he credit the story without question.
In a minute Mr. McBeth arrived and in another minute he was joined by a gendarme. In the interval he found time to whisper to Dick, “You can be sure the name of any guest will be protected. I’m only too grateful to you for your pains.”
Mr. McBeth took an immediate step that may only be imagined, but that influenced the gendarme so as to make him pull his mustaches in a frenzy of uneasiness and greed. He made perfunctory notes and sent a telephone call to his post. Meanwhile with a celerity that Jules Peterson, as a business man, would have quite understood, the remains were carried into another apartment of one of the most fashionable hotels in the world.
Dick went back to his salon.
“What happened?” cried Rosemary. “Do all the Americans in Paris just shoot at each other all the time?”
“This seems to be the open season,” he answered. “Where’s Nicole?”
“I think she’s in the bathroom.”
She adored him for saving her—disasters that could have attended upon the event had passed in prophecy through her mind; and she had listened in wild worship to his strong, sure, polite voice making it all right. But before she reached him in a sway of soul and body his attention focussed on something else: he went into the bedroom and toward the bathroom. And now Rosemary, too, could hear, louder and louder, a verbal inhumanity that penetrated the keyholes and the cracks in the doors, swept into the suite and in the shape of horror took form again.
With the idea that Nicole had fallen in the bathroom and hurt herself. Rosemary followed Dick. That was not the condition of affairs at which she stared before Dick shouldered her back and brusquely blocked her view.
Nicole knelt beside the tub swaying sidewise and sidewise. “It’s you!” she cried,“—it’s you come to intrude on the only privacy I have in the world—with your spread with red blood on it. I’ll wear it for you—I’m not ashamed, though it was such a pity. On All Fools Day we had a party on the Zurichsee, and all the fools were there, and I wanted to come dressed in a spread but they wouldn’t let me—”
“Control yourself!”
“—so I sat in the bathroom and they brought me a domino and said wear that. I did. What else could I do?”
“Control yourself, Nicole!”
“I never expected you to love me—it was too late—only don’t come in the bathroom, the only place I can go for privacy, dragging spreads with red blood on them and asking me to fix them.”
“Control yourself. Get up—”
Rosemary, back in the salon, heard the bathroom door, bang, and stood trembling: now she knew what Violet McKisco had seen in the bathroom at Villa Diana. She answered the ringing phone and almost cried with relief when she found it was Collis Clay, who had traced her to the Divers’ apartment. She asked him to come up while she got her hat, because she was afraid to go into her room alone.
