I went over and tapped the clerk on the shoulder and pointed at the girl. The clerk swallowed a couple of times, said: “Miss Mackay,” and looked back at Healey. He was hypnotized by the way Healey’s back looked. Hamburger.
Then about two dozen people came into the room all at once.
The sheriff had been in the pool-hall across the street. He rolled Healey over and said: “This is Mister Healey,” as if he’d made a great discovery.
I said: “Uh-huh. He’s been shot.”
I guess the sheriff didn’t like the way I said it very well. He glanced at the clerk and then asked me who I was. I told him my name and the clerk nodded and the sheriff scratched his head and went over and looked at the girl. I wanted to say that she’d been knifed, but I restrained myself.
Shaggy underwear was back with his pants on. He said he hadn’t heard anything except somebody swearing and then, suddenly, the shots.
I asked him how long after the shots it had been when he came into the corridor and he said he wasn’t sure, but it was somewhere around half a minute.
The first interesting thing that turned up was that it wasn’t Healey’s room — it was Miss Mackay’s room. His was next door. That probably meant that Healey had deliberately gone into her room; that she hadn’t surprised him in his room while he was getting something he’d forgotten.
Number two was that the knife was Healey’s. Half a dozen people had seen him with it. It was an oversize jack-knife with a seven-inch blade — one of the kind that snaps open when you press a spring. Somebody said Healey had a habit of playing mumblety-peg with it when he was trying to out-sit a raise or scare somebody into splitting a pot.
Number three was the topper. The dough was gone. The sheriff and a couple of deputies searched Healey and went through both rooms with a fine-tooth comb. They weren’t looking for big money because they didn’t know about it; they were looking for evidence.