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

He took a folded note from his pocket, opening it.  It was the memorandum from Manton’s desk which I had mentioned.  In a flash I understood.

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

“Very good, Walter.”  Kennedy’s eyes were dancing in amusement.  “It is true that Werner had the best motive, so far as we know now, but it’s a fantastic one.  Men don’t commit cold-blooded murder just to create a vacancy for a movie star.  If Werner was going to kill Miss Lamar he never 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 to him, 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 best opportunity for the actual performance of the crime and I watched him very closely and made him go through every movement just so I could study him.  I believe he’s innocent—­at least as far as I’ve gone in the case.”

I determined to stick to my opinion.  “I believe it’s Werner,” I insisted.

“By the time you’ve dug up all the gossip about Gordon and Shirley you won’t be so sure, Walter.”

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

At the Goats Club I was lucky to discover a member whom I knew well enough to take into my confidence by stating my errand.  He was one of the Star’s former special writers and an older classman of the college which 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.”