The Film Mystery

  IX

  WHITE-LIGHT SHADOWS

  "What do you think of it?" I asked Kennedy, when we were half throughour meal at a tiny restaurant on upper Broadway.

  "We're still fumbling in the dark," he replied.

  "There's the towel--"

  "Yes, and almost any one on Mackay's list of nine suspects could haveplaced it in that washroom."

  "Well--" I was determined to draw him out. My own impressions, I mustconfess, were gloriously muddled. "Manton heads the list," I suggested."Everyone says she was mixed up with him."

  "Manton may have philandered with her; undoubtedly he takes a personalinterest in all his stars." Kennedy, I saw, remembered the promoter'sclose attentions to Enid Faye. "Nevertheless, Walter, he is first andforemost and all the time the man of business. His heart is in hisdollars and Millard even suggests that he is none too scrupulous."

  "If he had an affair with Stella," I rejoined, "and she becameup-stage--the note you found suggested trouble, you know--then Mantonin a burst of passion--"

  "No!" Kennedy stopped me. "Don't forget that this was a cold-blooded,calculated crime. I'm not eliminating Manton yet, but until we findsome tangible evidence of trouble between Stella and himself we canhardly assume he would kill the girl who's made him perhaps a milliondollars. Every motive in Manton's case is a motive against the crime."

  "That eliminates Phelps, then, too. He nearly owned the company."

  "Yes, unless something happened to outweigh financial considerations inhis mind also."

  "But, good heavens! Kennedy," I protested. "If you go on that wayyou'll not eliminate anyone."

  "I can't yet," he explained, patiently. "It's just as I said. We'refishing in the dark, absolutely. So far we haven't a single basic facton which to build any structure of hypothesis. We must go on fishing. Iexpect you to dig up all the facts about these people; every odd bit ofgossip or rumor or anything else. I'll bring my science to play, butthere's nothing I can do except analyze Stella's stomach contents andthe spots on the towel; that is, until we've got a much more tangiblelead than any which have developed so far."

  "Is there anything I can do to-night?"

  "Yes!" He looked at his watch. "There are two men who were very closeto Miss Lamar. Jack Gordon was engaged to her, Merle Shirley seemed tohave been mixed up with her seriously. All the picture people havenight haunts. See what you can find about these two men."

  "But I don't know where to find them offhand, and--"

  "Both belong to the Goats Club, probably. Try that as a start."

  I nodded and began to hurry my dessert. But I could not resistquestioning him.

  "You think they are the most likely suspects?"

  "No, but they were intimately associated with Miss Lamar in her dailylife and they are the two we have learned the least about."

  "Oh!" I was disappointed. Then I rallied to the attack for a finaltime. "Who is the most likely one. Just satisfy my curiosity, Craig."

  He took a folded note from his pocket, opening it. It was thememorandum from Manton's desk which I had mentioned. In a flash Iunderstood.

  "Werner!" I exclaimed. "They said he was mixed up with her, too. He wasthe first back and out of the car and he had time to clean a needle onthe towel, had a better opportunity than anyone else. More"--I began toget excited--"he was lying on the floor close to her in the scene andcould have jabbed her with a needle very easily, and--and he wasextremely nervous when you questioned him, the most nervous of all,and--and, finally, he had a motive, he wanted to get Enid Faye withManton Pictures, as this note shows."

  "Very good, Walter." Kennedy's eyes were dancing in amusement. "It istrue that Werner had the best motive, so far as we know now, but it's afantastic one. Men don't commit cold-blooded murder just to create avacancy for a movie star. If Werner was going to kill Miss Lamar henever would have written this note about Miss Faye."

  "Unless to divert suspicion," I suggested.

  He shook his head. "The whole thing's too bizarre."

  "Werner was close to her in the dark. All the other things point tohim, don't they?"

  "It's too bad everyone wasn't searched, at that," Kennedy admitted."Nevertheless, at the time I realized that Werner had had the bestopportunity for the actual performance of the crime and I watched himvery closely and made him go through every movement just so I couldstudy him. I believe he's innocent--at least as far as I've gone in thecase."

  I determined to stick to my opinion. "I believe it's Werner," Iinsisted.

  "By the time you've dug up all the gossip about Gordon and Shirley youwon't be so sure, Walter."

  I was, however. Kennedy was not as familiar with the picture world asI. I had heard of too many actual happenings more strange and bizarreand wildly fantastic than anything conceivable in other walks of life.People in the film game, as they call it, live highly seasoned lives inwhich everything is exaggerated. The mere desire to make a place forEnid might not have actuated Werner, granting he was the guilty man.Nevertheless it could easily have contributed. And it struck mesuddenly, an additional argument, that Werner, of all of them, was themost familiar with the script. He had been able to cast himself for thepart of old Remsen. There was not a detail which he could not havearranged very skillfully.

  At the Goats Club I was lucky to discover a member whom I knew wellenough to take into my confidence by stating my errand. He was one ofthe Star's former special writers and an older classman of the collegewhich had graduated Kennedy and myself.

  "Merle Shirley is not a member here," he said. "As a matter of fact,I've only just heard the name. But Jack Gordon's a Goat, worse luck.That fellow's a bad actor--in real life--and a disgrace to us."

  "Tell me all you know about him?" I asked.

  "Well, to give you an example, he was in here just about a week ago. Iwas sitting in the grill, eating an after-theater supper, when I heardthe most terrible racket. He and Emery Phelps, the banker, you know,were having an honest-to-goodness fight right out in the lobby. It tookthree of the men to separate them."

  "What was it all about."

  "Well, Gordon owes money right and left, not a few hundred or somelittle personal debts like that, but thousands and thousands ofdollars. I got it from some of the other men here that he has beenspeculating on the curb downtown, losing consistently. More than that,he's engaged to Stella Lamar--you knew that?--and he's been blowingmoney on her. Then they tell me his professional work is suffering,that his recent screen appearances are terrible; the result of latehours and worry, I suppose."

  "The fight with Phelps was over money?"

  "Of course! I figure that he kept drawing against his salary at thestudio until the film company shut down on him. Then probably he beganto borrow from Phelps, who's Manton's backer now, until the banker shutdown on him also. At any rate, Phelps had begun to dun him and it ledto the fight."

  "That's all you know about Gordon?"

  "Lord! Isn't it enough?"

  I walked out of the club and toward Broadway, reflecting upon thisinformation. Could Gordon's debts have any bearing upon the case? Allat once one possibility struck me. He had been borrowing from Phelps.Perhaps he had borrowed from Stella also. Perhaps that was the cause oftheir quarrel. Perhaps she had threatened to make trouble--it was aslender motive, but worth bringing to the attention of Kennedy.

  My immediate problem, however, was to obtain some information aboutMerle Shirley. At first I thought I would make the rounds of some ofthe better-known cafes, but that seemed a hopeless task. Suddenly Iremembered Belle Balcom, formerly with the Star. I recollected aprevious case of Kennedy's where she and I had been great rivals in thequest of news. I recalled a trip we had made to Greenwich Villagetogether. Belle knew more people about town than any other newspaperwoman. Now, for some months, she had been connected with Screenings, aleading cinema "fan" magazine, and would unquestionably be posted uponthe photoplayers.

  Luckily, I caught her at home.

  "Bless your soul," she told me ov
er the phone, in delight, "I've justbeen aching for some one to take me out to-night. We'll go to theMidnight Fads and if Shirley isn't there the head waiter will tell youall I don't remember. It was a glorious fight."

  She wouldn't say any more over the phone, but I was hugely curious. Hadthere been another encounter with fists? And who had been involved?

  When she met me finally, at the Subway station, and when we obtained anout-of-the-way table at the Fads, she explained. It seemed that Shirleyhad met Stella there a number of times and that Gordon, at last, hadgot wind of it. Gordon first had come up himself, quietly, pleadingwith Stella. She had been in a high humor and had refused even tolisten to him. Then he had become insulting. At that Shirley knockedhim down.

  The head waiter, a witness of the affair, ordered Gordon put out, butdid not request Shirley or Stella to leave, because the other man hadbeen the aggressor without any question. After more than an hour Gordonreturned, quietly and unobtrusively, with another girl. From Belle'sdescription I knew it was Marilyn Loring. Taking another table, Marilynhad stared at Shirley reproachfully while Gordon had glared at Stella.

  Shirley put up with this for just about so long. As Belle described it,his face gradually became more and more red and he controlled himselfwith increasing difficulty. Stella, seeing the coming of the storm,tried to get him to go. He refused. She threatened to leave him. Hepaid no attention. All at once he boiled over and with great strideswalked over to Gordon and mauled him all over the place. The leadingman had no chance whatever in the hands of the irate Westerner. Severalwaiters, attempting to intervene, were flung aside. Only when Shirleybegan to cool off were they able to eject the two men. Both Stella andMarilyn had left, separately, before that. Neither of the men or womenhad been at the Fads since, or at least the head waiter, called over byBelle, so informed us.

  Unable to obtain any other facts of interest, I returned finally to theapartment shared by Kennedy and myself. First he listened to myaccount, plainly interested. Then, when I had concluded, he rose andfaced me rather gravely.

  "It's getting more and more complicated, Walter," he exclaimed. "Afteryou left I remembered that there was one point of investigation I hadfailed to cover--Miss Lamar's home here in the city. I got our oldfriend, First-Deputy O'Connor, on the wire and learned that at therequest of Mackay, from Tarrytown, they had sent a man up to the placeand that just an hour or less before I called they had located and wereholding her colored maid. I hurried down to headquarters and questionedthe girl."

  "Yes?" To me it sounded promising.

  "The negress didn't know a thing so far as the crime is concerned,"Kennedy went on, "but I gained quite an insight into the private lifeof the star."

  "You mean--"

  "I mean I know the men who went to Miss Lamar's apartment, althoughbeyond the fact of her receiving them I can tell nothing, for she sentthe maid home at night; there were no maid's quarters."

  "Their visits may have been perfectly innocent?"

  "Of course! We can only draw conclusions."

  "Who were the various callers?"

  "Jack Gordon--"

  "Her fiance!"

  "Merle Shirley--"

  "Shirley admitted it when you questioned him."

  "Manton--"

  "Everyone knows that!"

  "Werner--" A side glance at me.

  I said nothing. My expression spoke for me.

  "And Emery Phelps!"

  At that I did show surprise. Although Mackay had hinted at something ofthe kind, I, for one, had not considered the banker seriously.

  "Good heavens! Kennedy," I exploded. "She was mixed up with just aboutevery man connected with the company."

  "Exactly!" As usual, he seemed calm and unconcerned.

  I could regard the case only with increasing amazement--the bitter,conflicting emotions of Manton and Phelps, of Daring, Shirley, andMillard. With them all Stella had been the pretty trouble maker.

  "How do you suppose they could all remain in the same company?" Ishowed my surprise at the situation.

  Kennedy pondered a moment, then replied:

  "A moment's reflection ought to give you one answer. I think, Walter,they were either under contract or they had their money in the company.They couldn't break."

  "I suppose so. What I wonder is, was Marilyn as jealous of Stella asher screen character would make her in a story? She's the only one wedon't hear much about."

  Kennedy did not seem, at least at present, to give this phase of itanything like the weight he credited to the frenzied financialrelations the case was uncovering.

  It was true, as I learned later, that Manton was at that very momentdoing perhaps as much as anyone else ever did to discredit the picturegame in Wall Street.