Suddenly I realized that Kennedy was following a very definite procedure, that his seeming indifference, his apparent idle curiosity concerning the scene taking, masked a settled purpose.  When Phelps entered he approached him casually and turned to him with skilled nonchalance, holding up a finger.

“Will you lend me a pocket knife for a moment?” he asked, “to get a hang-nail?”

Phelps produced one, rather grudgingly.  Kennedy promptly went over to the window, as though seeking better light.  Thereafter he avoided Phelps.  Soon the banker had forgotten the incident.

Some time later Manton rushed in from the office.  Kennedy maneuvered his way to the promoter’s side and waited his chance to borrow that man’s pocket knife under conditions when Manton would be the least apt to remember it.  Then he made his way around to Mackay and I saw that both the acquisitions went into little envelopes of the sort used to take the blood smears after the explosion and falling glass.

Kennedy now seemed rather elated.  Millard entered and he borrowed the scenario writer’s knife in exactly the same fashion as the others.  No one of the three men noticed his loss.  I thought it lucky that all three carried the article, and tried to guess how far Kennedy intended to carry this little scheme.

Kauf’s announcement of lunch gave me my answer.  It seemed that there would be just half an hour and that the entire cast was expected to make shift at McCann’s rather than attempt to go to any better place at a greater distance.  Immediately Kennedy turned to me.

“Hurry, Walter!  Twenty minutes’ quick work and then it’s the laboratory and the solution of this mystery.”

With Mackay and the bag we stole to the dressing rooms, waiting until sure that everyone was downstairs.  In Enid’s chamber Kennedy glanced about carefully but swiftly.  When nothing caught his attention he picked up her finger-nail file, gingerly, from the blunt end, slipping it into one of the little envelopes which Mackay held open.  Thereupon the district attorney put his identifying mark upon the outside and we went to the next room.

It proved to be Gordon’s.  The general search was barren of result, but the dressing table yielded another finger-nail file, handled in the same manner as before.  Then we entered Marilyn’s room and left with the file from her dressing stand.  In Shirley’s quarters, the last we visited, we were in greater luck, however.  While Kennedy and Mackay abstracted the usual file, I discovered some bits of tissue paper used in shaving.  There was caked soap left to dry just as it had been wiped from the razor.  More, there was a blood stain of fair [Transcriber’s note:  word(s) missing.]

“Here’s your smear, Kennedy,” I exclaimed.

“Good!  Fine!” He faced Mackay.  “Now I lack just one thing, a sample of the blood of Miss Loring.”

“Is that all?” The district attorney brightened.  “Let me try to get it!  I—­I’ll manage it in some way!”