“The nurses say he was greatly changed,” the superintendent said. “He had been cheerful up to that time. After he heard the news he was morose. He stayed in his room, and he ate little or nothing.”

It was over Evans that Hopper and the city crowd almost split with Jim Conway; the city detectives being inclined to believe he had merely wandered off, and Jim was taking a more sinister view of the disappearance.

“Somebody might have wanted him out of the way,” he maintained. “He couldn’t go far in a pair of hospital carpet slippers. Then, too, he’d been accustomed to sleeping in the daytime and being up at night. It’s only a mile or so from the hospital to the Cloisters. Suppose he’d been out of that window and near the playhouse the night of the murder. He might have seen something.”

He stuck to that. While the state police and the others were searching the hill country he went to Evans’s room that day and went over it carefully.

“If he’d gone by himself, he might have picked up at least a pair of shoes there,” he said. “It was worth looking into, anyhow.”

Evans had lived for years in Andy McDonald’s cottage on the Cloisters grounds. He had a room on the lower floor there, and Jessie, Andy’s wife, offered no objection to the search. The room revealed nothing, however. It was neat and, except for what she had sent to the hospital, much as he had left it. There was writing paper and envelopes in a drawer and a pen and bottle of ink around. But the pen was old and rusty.

“He didn’t write letters,” she said. “I don’t know as he ever got any, either. He didn’t seem to have any people.”

His closet was equally unrevealing. There were two pairs of shoes on the floor, which Jessie said were all he owned. The old trousers he had worn the night he was hurt were still, she thought, down at the police station, but the coat was there, crumpled after its wetting in the pool. She had brought it back from the hospital and hung it up, along with the empty shoulder holster for his gun.

“Did he ever speak to you about his gun?” Jim asked. “When you saw him in the hospital?”

“No, sir. He didn’t mention it.”

“Did he talk about the attack? Had he any idea who did it?”

“He talked about it a lot. He was rather pleased with the attention he was getting. You know what I mean, Mr. Conway. Here was Mrs. Wainwright sending him flowers and things to eat, and everybody looking after him. Then I suppose it was a nice change for him, to be able to sleep at night. He’s been here for years, and he’s never been off duty until now. Except once. Then he was gone for several days. That was a funny thing. He never explained where he’d been. Not to us, anyhow.”