“Banana oil, Walter,” he explained, with rather a superior manner.  “I imagine it’s used a great deal in this industry.  Anyway”—­a chuckle—­“don’t expect chance to deliver clues to you in wholesale quantities.  You have done very well for today.”

A sudden whirring noise, from an open door down the hall, attracted us, and we paused.  This, I guessed, was a cutting room.  There were a number of steel tables, with high steel chairs.  At the walls were cabinets of the same material.  Each table had two winding arrangements, a handle at the operator’s right hand and one at his left, so that he could wind or unwind film from one reel to another, passing it forward or backward in front of his eyes.

There were girls at the tables except nearest the hall.  Here a man stopped now and then to glance at the ribbon of film, or to cut out a section, dropping the discarded piece into a fireproof can and splicing the two ends of the main strip together again with liquid film cement from a small bottle.  He looked up as he sensed our presence.

“Isn’t it hell?” he remarked, in friendly fashion.  “I’ve got to cut all of Stella Lamar out of ‘The Black Terror,’ so they can duplicate her scenes with another star, and meanwhile we had half the negative matched and marked for colors and spliced in rolls, all ready for the printer.”

Without waiting for an answer from us, or expecting one, he gave one of his reels a vicious spin, producing the whirring noise; then grasping both reels between his fingers and bringing them to an abrupt stop, so that I wondered he did not burn himself from the friction, he located the next piece to be eliminated.

We followed the hall into the smaller studio and there found a comedy company at work.  Without stopping to watch the players, ghastly under the light from the Cooper-Hewitts and Kliegel arcs, we found a precarious way back of the set around and under stage braces, to the covered bridge leading once more to the corridor outside Manton’s office.

Now the girl was absent from her place in the little waiting room.  Manton’s door stood open.  Without ceremony Kennedy led the way in and dropped down at the side of the promoter’s huge mahogany desk.

“I’m tired, Walter,” he said.  “Furthermore, I think this picture world of yours is a bedlam.  We face a hard task.”

“How do you propose to go about things?” I asked.

“I’m afraid this is a case which will have to be approached entirely through psychological reactions.  You and I will have to become familiar with the studio and home life of all the long list of possible suspects.  I shall analyze the body fluids of the deceased and learn the cause of death, and I will find out what it is on the towel, but”—­sighing—­“there are so many different ramifications, so many—­”

Suddenly his eye caught the corner of a piece of paper slid under the glass of Manton’s desk.  He pulled it out; then handed it to me.