“Three!” I gasped. “Three!” In consternation I went over the list of names of that dinner party of ill memory. “But there were only six of us at that dinner to whose personnel you limit your suspects.”
“Seven,” corrected O’Leary. “There is Dr. Letheny, you know.”
“But Mr. O’Leary, it sounds like a club.” I was very much in earnest but the man had the impudence to laugh.
“It does sound like an association of some kind,” he said coolly. “The cuff link and the affair of the disappearing hypodermic needle point to Maida. The presence and continued presence of Jim Gainsay, plus that somewhat ambiguous wire, point to him. Possibility includes you and the two doctors. And as to Miss Letheny, we have several counts against her. So you see it does look rather like a conspiracy.”
“Nonsense,” I said irritably. “I assure you that all six of us did not band together for the purpose of doing away with Dr. Letheny and his patient.”
“Of course not,” agreed O’Leary soothingly. “Though you must admit, Miss Keate, that there are a good many clues—no, we’ll call them merely facts that intrigue the curious mind—that seem to include all of you.”
“Coincidence,” I said with considerable decision.
O’Leary’s eyebrows went up a little.
“Have it as you will,” he agreed amicably.
“You have forgotten the fact that Fred Hajek’s coat was wet that night when I finally aroused him. Why didn’t you inquire about that at the inquest?”
“I had already done so,” said O’Leary. “He explained that the window in his room was open and that the coat was lying across a chair beside the window when the rain began. He did not waken immediately and it rained on his coat.”
“H’m,” said I skeptically. “How about Dr. Balman? Are you going to take his word for it that he was in his own apartment during the time all this took place? What about that bruise on his face that he said he got running through the orchard? Mightn’t he have got it earlier in the night?” Though my heart reproved me as I spoke, for Dr. Balman, torn from his beloved studies, forced into a thousand responsibilities, worn and haggard and tired and troubled, was a pathetic figure.
“Dr. Balman is too busy a man these days to bother much with questions,” said O’Leary simply. “However, since you have inquired, I have proved his statement. According to the elevator man at the apartment house in which Dr. Balman lives, Dr. Balman arrived from the Letheny’s at twelve-fifteen and did not leave until the same elevator man, who also attends the switchboard during the night, gave him a call from St. Ann’s. The elevator man obligingly listened in to the conversation, had the elevator at the door of Dr. Balman’s apartment immediately, and took the doctor down to the first floor at exactly three minutes after two.”
“Now then,” he continued after a short silence, “about this hypodermic needle: I should like to have a little talk with Miss Day. And also I want to visit Room 18 again.”
“There is a patient in Room 18.”
“Already!”
“Yes. I don’t think Dr. Balman, or Dr. Hajek either, wanted to permit the room to be used, but there was no other place for the patient.”
O’Leary’s clear eyes considered me absently for a moment.
“It isn’t likely, then, that there will be a repetition of last night’s affair,” he said finally. “But suppose you let me go over the room again, when I can do so without disturbing the patient.”
A figure moving through the mist caught our eyes. It was Maida, her white cap gleaming above her blue and scarlet cape.
“Good afternoon, Miss Day,” said O’Leary, stepping into the path.
I think Maida was a little startled, for her eyes darkened and she glanced hurriedly along the path toward the bridge.
But: “Good afternoon, Mr. O’Leary,” she answered composedly enough. “Oh, there you are, Sarah,” she went on as her eyes fell on me. “I was wondering where you had gone.” Her eyes travelled to my hair, and she exclaimed: “How wet your hair is! You’ll get neuralgia, won’t you?”
I put a hand to my hair. It was wet and very draggled where the branches from the trees and shrubs under which I had crept had pulled it. I straightened my wilted cap and tucked up the more adventurously straying locks.
“I’ve been looking for something.”
“I think you must have been,” agreed Maida, a flicker of mirth in her blue gaze. “You must have looked for it under the barberry bushes.”
As a matter of fact I had done just that. But before I could say anything O’Leary took up the conversation.
“Did you lose your hypodermic needle, Miss Day?” he asked without prelude.
Maida’s face sobered instantly and she glanced swiftly at him.
“Why, yes, I did lose it,” she said immediately.
“Is this the one you lost?” he asked, holding the syringe toward her in his outstretched palm and keeping his extraordinarily clear eyes on her face so keenly as almost to read her thoughts.
So I am sure he saw her lips tighten, as I did, and her chin go up defiantly.
“It seems to be,” she said. “I had scratched my initial on mine.” She reached for the syringe and turned it so she could see the small plunger with its marked top.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “That is my own syringe.”
“I found it just now in a clump of bushes. Do you know how it got there?”
“No,” said Maida flatly.
“Why, then,” said O’Leary very softly, “did you replace it with Miss Keate’s needle?”
Maida turned toward me at that, her eyes again unfathomable. But before she could reply Jim Gainsay, whose approach we had not noted, swept impetuously
