LOCATION.--Remsen library. Full shot.
ACTION.--The spotlight on the floor reveals the girl sobbing over the body of the millionaire and trying to revive him. She screams and cries out. The portieres are parted and from the lighted hallway we see the young man, the butler, and the maid, who enter. The young man switches on the lights and the room is revealed. The three cry out in horror. The young man, glancing about, leaps toward the partly opened French windows, drawing a revolver. As the girl sees him she screams again and denotes terror.
Finishing the thirteenth scene, Kennedy closed the covers and handed the script to me. Then he confronted Manton once more.
"What became of the locket about the girl's neck? In the manuscript Miss Lamar is supposed to have a peculiar pendant at her throat. There was none."
"Oh yes!" The promoter remained a moment in thought. "The doctor took it off and gave it to Bernie, the prop. boy, who's helping the electrician."
"Is he outside?"
"Yes."
"Now try to remember, Mr. Manton." Kennedy leaned over very seriously. "Just who approached closely to Miss Lamar in the making of that thirteenth scene? Who was near enough to have inflicted a wound, or to have subjected her, suppose we say, to the fumes of some subtle poison?"
"You think that--" Manton started to question Kennedy, but was given no encouragement. "Gordon, the leading man, passed through the scene," he replied, after a pause, "but did not go very near her. Werner was playing the dead millionaire at her feet."
"Who is Werner?"
"He's my director. Because it was such a small part, he played it himself. He's only in the two or three scenes in the beginning and I was here to be at the camera."
While Kennedy was questioning Manton I had been glancing through the script of the picture. My own connection with the movies had consisted largely of three attempts to sell stories of my own to the producers. Needless to remark I had not succeeded, in that regard falling in the class with some hundreds of thousands of my fellow citizens. For everybody thinks he has at least one motion picture in him. And so, though I had managed to visit studios and meet a few of the players, this was my very first shot at a manuscript actually in production. I took advantage of Kennedy's momentary preoccupation to turn to Manton.
"Who wrote this script, Mr. Manton?" I asked.
"Millard! Lawrence Millard."
"Millard?" Kennedy and I exclaimed, simultaneously.
"Why, yes! Millard is still under contract and he's the only man who ever could write scripts for Stella. We--we tried others and they all flivved."
"Is Millard here?"
Manton burst into laughter, somehow out of place in the room where we still were in the company of death. "An author on the lot at the filming of his picture, to bother the director and to change everything? Out! When the scenario's done he's through. He's lucky to get his name on the screen. It's not the story but the direction which counts, except that you've got to have a good idea to start with, and a halfway decent script to make your lay- outs from. Anyhow--" He sobered a bit, perhaps realizing that he was going counter to the tendency to have the author on the lot. "Millard and Stella weren't on speaking terms. She divorced him, you know."
"Do you know much about the personal affairs of Miss Lamar?"
"Well"--Manton's eyes sought the floor for a moment--"Like everyone else in pictures, Stella was the victim of a great deal of gossip. That's the experience of any girl who rises to a position of prominence and--"
"How were the relations between Miss Lamar and yourself?" interrupted Kennedy.
"What do you mean by that?" Manton flushed quickly.
"You have had no trouble, no disagreements recently?"
"No, indeed. Everything has been very friendly between us--in a strictly business way, of course--and I don't believe I've had an unpleasant word with her since I first formed Manton Pictures to make her a star."
"You know nothing of her difficulties with her husband?"
"Naturally not. I seldom saw her except at the studio, unless it was some necessary affair such as a screen ball here, or perhaps in Boston or Philadelphia or some near-by city where I would take her for effect--"
Kennedy turned to Mackay. "Will you arrange to keep the people I have yet to question separate from the ones I have examined already?"
As the district attorney nodded, Kennedy dismissed Manton rather shortly; then turned again to Mackay as the promoter drew out of earshot.
"Bring in Bernie, the property-boy, before anyone can tell him to hide or destroy that locket."
Chapter V
An Emotional Maze
Bernie proved to be as stupid a youth as any I had ever seen. He possessed frightened semi-liquid eyes and overshot ears and hair which might have been red beneath its accumulation of dust. Without doubt the boy had been coached by the electrician, because he began to affirm his innocence in similar fashion the moment he entered the door.
"I don't know nothin', honest I don't," he pleaded. "I was out in the hall, I was, and I didn't come in at all until the doc. came."
"I suppose you were anxious to see if the cable was becoming hot," Kennedy suggested, gravely.
"That's it, sir! We was lookin' at it because it was on the varnish and the butler he says--"
"Where's the locket?" interrupted Kennedy. "The one Miss Lamar wore in the scenes."
"Oh!" in disdain, "that thing!" With some effort Bernie fished it from the capacious depths of a pocket, disentangling the sharp corners from the torn and ragged lining of his coat.
I glanced at it as Kennedy turned it over and over in his hands, and saw that it was a palpable stage prop, with glass jewels of the cheapest sort. Concealing his disappointment, Kennedy dropped it into his own pocket, confronting the frightened Bernie once more.
"Do you know anything about Miss Lamar's death?"
"No! I don't know nothing, honest!"
"All right!" Kennedy turned to Mackay. "Werner, the director."
Of Stanley Werner I had heard a great deal, through interviews, character studies, and other press stuff in the photoplay journals and the Sunday newspaper film sections. Now I found him to be a high-strung individual, so extremely nervous that it seemed impossible for him to remain in one position in his chair or for him to keep his hands motionless for a single instant. Although he was of moderate build, with a fair suggestion of flesh, there were yet the marks of the artist and of the creative temperament in the fine sloping contours of his head and in his remarkably long fingers, which tapered to nails manicured immaculately. Kennedy seemed to pay particular attention to his eyes, which were dark, soft, and amazingly restless.
"Who
