Gard got up slowly. He ran his fingers through his hair and jiggled his shoulders around to straighten his coat and grinned foolishly.
I said: “Fancy, meeting you here.”
I turned around and looked at Mrs Healey. She was still standing against the wall with her hand across her mouth. Then the ceiling fell down on top of my head and everything got dark very suddenly.
Darkness was around me when I opened my eyes, but I could see the outlines of a window and I could hear someone breathing somewhere near me. I don’t know how long I was out. I sat up and my head felt like it was going to explode; I lay down again and closed my eyes.
After a while I tried it again and it was a little better. I crawled towards what I figured to be a door and ran into the wall and I got up on my feet and felt along the wall until I found the light switch.
Raines was lying in the same place I’d smacked him, but his hands and feet were tied with a length of clothesline and there was a red, white and blue silk handkerchief jammed into his mouth. His eyes were open and he looked at me with an expression that I can only describe as bitter amusement.
Gard was lying belly down on the floor near the door into the dining room. He was the hard breather I’d heard in the darkness. He was still out.
I ungagged Raines and sat down. I kept having the feeling that my head was going to blow up. It was a very unpleasant feeling.
In a little while Raines got his jaws limbered up and started talking. The first thing he said was: “What a bright boy you turned out to be!” I was too sick to know very much about what that meant — or care.
He went on like that for some time, talking in a high, squeaky voice, and the idea gradually filtered through the large balloonshaped ache that my head had turned into.
It seems that Raines and the Mackay gal had juggled Healey into a swell spot. One of their angles was that Healey, in an expansive moment, had entirely forgotten about Mrs Healey and married Miss Mackay. They had a lot of material besides; everything from the Mann Act to mayhem. When he’d made the hundred and fifty grand lick in Quebec they’d jumped him in Chicago.
Healey had ducked out of Chi and they’d tailed him, first to Salt Lake, then to Caliente. Monday night, Raines had helped Mackay put on the act in the hotel that Healey had told me about.
Raines hadn’t got off the train with her or checked into the hotel with her because they didn’t want to be seen together in case anything went wrong, but he ducked up that handy back stairway and they’d given Healey the act, showing him exactly the color and size of the spot they had him on.
Then, when Healey came down to my room, Raines had gone down and planted across the street in case Healey tried to powder.
Raines hadn’t been there five minutes before Mrs Healey and a man rolled up in the blue Chrysler. Raines recognized Mrs Healey because she’d spotted Healey with Miss Mackay and Raines in a cabaret in Chicago once and crowned Miss Mackay with a beer bottle. It seems Mrs Healey was a nice quiet girl.
They parked in front of the hotel and the man went in a minute, probably to buy a cigar and get a peek at the register. Then he came out and talked to Mrs Healey a little while and went back in the little alleyway that led to the side door. He was only there a minute; he probably found out that it was practical to go into the hotel that way and came back and told her.
Along about that time in Raines’ yarn I woke up to the fact that he was referring to the man who was with Mrs Healey as “this guy.” I opened my eyes and looked at him and he was looking at Gard.
Gard had stayed in the car while Mrs Healey went back through the alleyway and into the hotel. After a couple minutes he got nervous and got out and walked up the street a little ways, and Raines went across the street and went upstairs to find out what it was all about. That must have been about the time I was checking out.
Gard must have been coming back down the other side of the street and he saw me come out and finagle with his car and get into mine, and he stayed away until hell started popping upstairs and I went into the hotel.
Raines stopped a minute. I got up and went over and rolled Gard over on his back. He groaned and opened his eyes and blinked up at me and then he sat up slowly and leaned against the wall.
Raines said Mrs Healey must have tried Healey’s door and then waited till Healey came up the front stairway after he left me, and she ducked around a corner and watched Healey go into Mackay’s room. By that time Raines was at the top of the back stairway and he watched Mrs Healey take a gun out of her bag and go down and listen at Miss Mackay’s door. When Healey opened the door after whittling Mackay, she backed him into the room and closed the door. Raines said she probably told him a few pertinent truths about himself and relieved him of what was left of the hundred and fifty and then opened him up with the .38.
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 Gard 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 LA and it had taken him all day Tuesday to locate Mrs Healey. He’d been putting the screws on her and Gard for a split of the important money and Gard had gone into a wrestling number with him just before I arrived.
By the time Raines had got all that out of his system Gard 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, Gard 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 LA — 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 Gard — 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 LA 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. Gard had fallen for that, too. She had the poor sap hypnotized.
Gard 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, Gard, 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 Gard and me — and looked at one another.
Gard laughed. He squinted at me and said: “You looked silly when I clipped you with the bookend!”