I have never seen O’Leary showing any feeling or excitement, but there were eighteen rooms in that wing and I don’t think it took him eighteen minutes to examine all the loud speakers in the whole wing. He did not omit one save, of course, that already rifled speaker in Room 18.
When he had finished, still without any results that I could see, he went to Maida.
“Miss Day,” he began, “you took a loud speaker exactly like this one”—he still carried under his arm the instrument that I had so futilely treasured—“from Sonny’s room last night. What did you do with it?”
Maida put back a wisp of black hair that had strayed from under her immaculate cap; her blue eyes regarded us steadily from the weary, dark circles about them.
“I put it on the table in Room 18,” she replied at once. “It was out of order somehow, and I thought likely Room 18 would be unoccupied. So I simply exchanged the speakers.”
“Thank you, Miss Day. You did not—er—examine it closely to see what was wrong with it?”
“No,” she said. “I know nothing of such things; I couldn’t possibly have repaired it.”
She went on about her errand.
“A strange case,” mused O’Leary, his clear, gray eyes following the slim, white-clad figure moving away from us. “The speaker in Room 18 was the right one, after all. The question is, was the radium in it and if so who took it? Who has it now? When we know that answer we will know who shot poor old Higgins.” He went to the window over the chart desk, flung it up to the sash, and took a deep breath of the fog-laden air. His intent young face, his curiously lucid gray eyes, showed no hint of a night without sleep.
“A strange case,” he repeated absently. He turned from the dripping gray orchard beyond the window, fingered idly the bronzed surface of the loud speaker there on the desk.