“It might be. At any rate we know that no slicker was found on the porch or about the grounds, so it is likely that the murderer of Dr. Letheny carried it away with him. We had a strict guard on St. Ann’s the day following the murders. It is barely possible that we can yet trace the coat that you wore, Miss Keate.”
“Poor Higgins,” said Jim Gainsay gravely. “I had a hard time getting him to tell me that much. He refused to the last to tell me whose face he saw there in Room 18.”
“But he failed to raise an alarm even though he had reason to think that the radium was being removed,” murmured O’Leary. “Well, that’s all now, thank you, Gainsay.”
Jim Gainsay paused for a moment outside the door and I saw him look carefully up and down the dim corridor. No white uniform was in sight, however. Thinking to facilitate his departure I took the key to the south door from its hiding place and let him out that way. When I returned O’Leary was standing under the green light, studying his small notebook. He slipped it into his pocket as I approached.
“Nothing, Miss Keate, but what you heard,” he said rather wearily. “His explanation of the note to Miss Day and his activities during the night of the murders are identical with what Miss Day tells us. He sticks to the story of his telegram to his business associates that he told at the inquest. He says he took Dr. Letheny’s car and left the grounds of St. Ann’s very soon after you met him in the dark. And that he was at a ‘corner about half a mile from St. Ann’s’ when the storm broke—which does not coincide with what we know. That is, if the lights you saw were the lights of the car he was driving, and it seems reasonable to believe that they were.”
“How about his presence here in St. Ann’s to-night at the time the radium was taken from you?”
“That got a rise out of him,” said O’Leary with an unexpected flash of whimsical satisfaction. “He was angry in a second. Every time Miss Day’s name came up he turned savage. If the radium had not disappeared I should be inclined to think that he came to St. Ann’s in the hope of seeing Miss Day, but with the radium gone again——” he stopped abruptly, his face becoming grave again and dubious.
The green light cast crawling shadows; the black window pane stared impenetrably at us; far down the corridor a light went on with a subdued click, a glass clinked thinly against something metal, and I heard the soft pad-pad of a nurse’s rubber heels.
Presently O’Leary stirred. His eyes, still shining with that very lucent look, met mine intently.
“Corole Letheny is next. Do you want to go to see her with me? Very well, then, suppose we say at eight in the morning. You might just happen into the Letheny cottage and I’ll come. I may be a little delayed.”