In a bedroom of a small hotel just off Sixth Avenue Gordon Sterrett
awoke with a pain in the back of his head and a sick throbbing in all
his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the
room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where
it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes
on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The
windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a
dust-filled beam across the sill--a beam broken by the head of the
wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet--comatose,
drugged, his eyes wide, his mind clicking wildly like an unoiled
machine.
It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with
the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the
sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds
after that before that he realized that he was irrevocably married to
Jewel Hudson.
He went out half an hour later and bought a revolver at a sporting
goods store. Then he took a taxi to the room where he had been living
on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table that held
his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just behind the
temple.