It was a swell spot for her, with the Mackay gal there with a knife in her heart. Raines said he figured she’d intended to rub Healey from the start, before he could divorce her — Healey had said she’d sworn to kill him, before he left Chicago. A nice quiet girl — Mrs. Healey. A lady.
She’d dodged Raines on the stairs and he’d chased her down to the car, but by that time Card was back in the car with the engine running and they’d shoved off fast. Then Raines had come back up with the sheriff and his gang to look things over. That’s where I’d seen him.
He’d taken the midnight train for L A and it had taken him all day Tuesday to locate Mrs. Healey. He’d been putting the screws on her and Card for a split of the important money and Card had gone into a wrestling number with him just before I arrived.
By the time Raines had got all that out of his system Card was sitting up straight with his mouth open and his hands moving around fast and that dumb, thoughtful look on his face as if he wanted to say something. When Raines stopped to breathe, Card said that the lady had talked him into driving her up to Caliente because she said she was too nervous to wait for Healey in L A — she said she had to see Healey and try to make their scrap up right away, or she’d have a nervous breakdown or something and Card — the big chump — fell for it.
He said he was the most surprised man in the world when the shooting started, and that when she came galloping down and they scrammed for L A she’d told him that she’d walked in on Mackay ventilating Healey, just like the sheriff said, and that Mackay had shot at her as she ran away. Card had fallen for that, too. She had the poor sap hypnotized.
Card knew I’d been up at Caliente, of course — he’d seen me; so when I walked into his place in the morning he’d figured I had some kind of slant on what it was all about and he’d taken me over to her place so they could put on their “comfort her in her bereavement” turn for my benefit. Then, Tuesday night, when I’d walked in on the shakedown and knocked Raines out, Card, who had had a load of what Raines had to say to Mrs. Healey and who half believed it, calculated that his best play was to take the air with her. He was too much-mixed up in it to beat an accessory rap anyway, so he’d sapped me with a bookend and they’d tied Raines, who was coming to, and he’d helped her pack her things. They were going to light out for New Zealand or some quiet place like that; only she’d sneaked up behind him and smacked him down at the last minute. A lovely lady.
We all stopped talking about that time — Raines and Card and me — and looked at one another.
Card laughed. He squinted at me and said: “You looked silly when I clipped you with the bookend!”
Raines said: “You didn’t look particularly intelligent when our girl-friend let you have it.”
Card snickered on the wrong side of his face and got up and went out into the kitchen for a drink of water. He found a bottle out there — almost a full fifth of White Horse. He brought it in, I untied Raines and we all had a snort.