CHAPTER

     I. A camera crime
    II.  The tiny scratch
   III.  Tangled motives
    IV.  The fatal script
     V. An emotional maze
    VI.  The first club
   VII.  Enid Faye
  VIII.  Lawrence Millard
    IX.  White-light shadows
     X. Chemical research
    XI.  Forestalled
   XII.  Emery Phelps
  XIII.  Marilyn Loring
   XIV.  Another clue
    XV.  I become A detective
   XVI.  Enid assists
  XVII.  An Appeal
 XVIII.  The antivenin
   XIX.  Around the circle
    XX.  The banquet scene
   XXI.  Merle Shirley OVERACTS
  XXII.  The stem
 XXIII.  Botulin toxin
  XXIV.  The invisible menace
   XXV.  Itching salve
  XXVI.  A cigarette case
 XXVII.  The film fire
XXVIII.  The phosphorus bomb
  XXIX.  Microscopic evidence
   XXX.  The ballroom scene
  XXXI.  Physostigmin
 XXXII.  Camera evidence

THE FILM MYSTERY

I

A CAMERA CRIME

“Camera!”

Kennedy and I had been hastily summoned from his laboratory in the city by District-Attorney Mackay, and now stood in the luxurious, ornate library in the country home of Emery Phelps, the banker, at Tarrytown.

“Camera!—­you know the call when the director is ready to shoot a scene of a picture?—­well—­at the moment it was given and the first and second camera men began to grind—­she crumpled—­sank to the floor—­unconscious!”

Hot and excited, Mackay endeavored to reenact his case for us with all the histrionic ability of a popular prosecutor before a jury.

“There’s where she dropped—­they carried her over here to this davenport—­sent for Doctor Blake—­but he couldn’t do a thing for her.  She died—­just as you see her.  Blake thought the matter so serious, so alarming, that he advised an immediate investigation.  That’s why I called you so urgently.”

Before us lay the body of the girl, remarkably beautiful even as she lay motionless in death.  Her masses of golden hair, disheveled, added to the soft contours of her features.  Her wonderfully large blue-gray eyes with their rare gift for delicate shades of expression were closed, but long curling lashes swept her cheeks still and it was hard to believe that this was anything more than sleep.

It was inconceivable that Stella Lamar, idol of the screen, beloved of millions, could have been taken from the world which worshiped her.

I felt keenly for the district attorney.  He was a portly little man of the sort prone to emphasize his own importance and so, true to type, he had been upset completely by a case of genuine magnitude.  It was as though visiting royalty had dropped dead within his jurisdiction.

I doubt whether the assassination of a McKinley or a Lincoln could have unsettled him as much, because in such an event he would have had the whole weight of the Federal government behind him.  There was no question but that Stella Lamar enjoyed a country-wide popularity known by few of our Presidents.  Her sudden death was a national tragedy.