I went on downstairs and checked out.
My car was wedged in between a Ford truck and a light-blue Chrysler roadster. There was plenty of room ahead of the roadster, so I went up and snapped off the hand-brake and pushed it ahead about eight feet. Then I got into my car and leaned back and waited.
The whole layout looked pretty bad, what with him scared to death of a deal he admitted was blackmail and all. He said he didn’t want his luggage and then, right on top of it, he had to go up to his room to get something. That would be taking a chance on running into the wife again. I wondered if she was his wife.
I couldn’t figure out how a wife could blackmail a husband while she was jumping from state to state with a man who was “supposed” to be her brother; but then almost anything is possible in Nevada.
After about five minutes I began to get nervous. I opened the door of the car and stepped out on the sidewalk, and as I closed the door there were five shots close together some place upstairs in the hotel.
I can take trouble or leave it alone; only I always take it. Like a sap, I went into the hotel.
The clerk was a big blond kid with glasses. He came out from behind the counter as I went in the door; we went upstairs together, two or three at a time.
There was a man in long woolly underwear standing in the corridor on the third floor and he pointed to a door and we went in. Healey was lying flat on his face in the middle of the room, and beyond him, close to the wall, was the body of a woman, also face downward.
The clerk turned a beautiful shade of green; he stood there staring at Healey. I went over and rolled the woman over on her back. She couldn’t have been much over twenty-two or three; little, gray-eyed, blonde. There was a knife in her side, under the arm. There was a .38 automatic near her outstretched hand. She was very dead.
The man in the woolly underwear peeked in and then hurried across the hall and into another room. I could hear him yelling the news to somebody there.