“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?”