All they found on Healey were four hundred-dollar bills tucked into his watch pocket, and the usual keys, cigarettes, whatnot. There were no letters or papers of any kind. There was one big suitcase in his room and it was full of dirty clothes. The roll he’d flashed on me was gone.
In the next half-hour I found out a lot of things. The girl had come to the hotel alone. No one else had checked in that day, except myself. The door to the girl’s room was about twenty feet from the top of the back stairs and there was a side-door to the hotel that they didn’t lock until ten o’clock.
It looked like a cinch for the man Healey had told me about, the one who was supposed to be Miss Mackay’s brother.
Healey had probably gone upstairs to take care of the girl. I knew that his being scared of her was on the level because I know bona-fide fear when I see it. She evidently had plenty on him. He’d arranged his getaway with me and then gone up to carve the girl, shut her up forever.
The alleged brother had come in the side-door and had walked in on the knife act and opened up Healey’s back with the automatic at about six feet.
Then he’d grabbed the roll and whatever else Healey had in his pocket that was of any value — maybe a book of traveler’s cheques — had tossed the gun on the floor and screwed back down the back stairway and out the side-door. Something like that. It wasn’t entirely plausible, but it was all I could figure right then.
By the time I’d figured that much out the sheriff had it all settled that Healey had knifed the girl and then she’d plugged him five times, in a ten-inch square in his back. With about three inches of steel in her heart.
That was what the sheriff said so I let it go. They didn’t know about the brother and I didn’t want to complicate their case for them. And I did want a chance to look for that roll without interference.
When I got out to the car the blue Chrysler was gone. That wasn’t important except that I wondered who had been going away from the hotel when it looked like everybody in town was there or on the way there.
I didn’t get much information at the station. The agent said he’d just come on duty; the telegraph operator had been there all afternoon but he was out to supper. I found him in a lunch-room across the street and he said there’d been a half-dozen or so people get off the afternoon train from Salt Lake; but the girl had been alone and he wasn’t sure who the other people had been except three of four home-towners. That was no good.