I worried all day about Maida, however, and when Lance O’Leary turned up about four o’clock, with a polite request for an interview, I did not know whether to be glad or sorry.
We went into the general waiting room to talk. It was a chilly place, with slippery leather-covered furniture and on the wall a none too cheerful picture of the burning of Joan of Arc. The weather had settled into a steady, dripping rain by that time, the clouds were still heavy, and the very concrete steps of the main entrance, just below the windows, oozed moisture. It was an added distress that not once during those strange days did we see the sun. Everything we touched was damp and cold and sweaty.
O’Leary was as meticulously groomed as he had been the day before, but there was about him a sort of quiet but intense concentration that seemed to detach him from ordinary affairs of the world. I have seen the same thing in the face of an artist I used to know—and in the face of a dear and saintly old nun under whom I trained.
There was nothing, however, of the poseur about him. He was ordinarily rather silent, was occasionally oddly boyish and young, was simple and direct—it was his unconscious absorption that marked him. And those extraordinarily clear gray eyes.
He asked a few commonplace questions as to how I felt, and were things going well, and was the policeman of any use. Then, he reached absently into his pocket and drew out the stubby red pencil.
“Miss Day was your assistant in the wing the night of the seventh?”
“Yes. We have second watch together this two weeks.”
“How long has she been here at St. Ann’s?”
“Three years.”
“She is a good nurse, I judge? Cool and restrained?”