“Good heavens!  Kennedy,” I exploded.  “She was mixed up with just about every man connected with the company.”

“Exactly!” As usual, he seemed calm and unconcerned.

I could regard the case only with increasing amazement—­the bitter, conflicting emotions of Manton and Phelps, of Daring, Shirley, and Millard.  With them all Stella had been the pretty trouble maker.

“How do you suppose they could all remain in the same company?” I showed my surprise at the situation.

Kennedy pondered a moment, then replied: 

“A moment’s reflection ought to give you one answer.  I think, Walter, they were either under contract or they had their money in the company.  They couldn’t break.”

“I suppose so.  What I wonder is, was Marilyn as jealous of Stella as her screen character would make her in a story?  She’s the only one we don’t hear much about.”

Kennedy did not seem, at least at present, to give this phase of it anything like the weight he credited to the frenzied financial relations the case was uncovering.

It was true, as I learned later, that Manton was at that very moment doing perhaps as much as anyone else ever did to discredit the picture game in Wall Street.

X

CHEMICAL RESEARCH

The following morning I found Kennedy up ahead of me, and I felt certain that he had gone to the laboratory.  Sure enough, I found him at work in the midst of the innumerable scientific devices which he had gathered during years of crime detection of every sort.

As usual, he was surrounded by a perfect litter of test tubes, beakers, reagents, microscopes, slides, and culture tubes.  He had cut out the curious spots from the towel I had discovered and was studying them to determine their nature.  From the mass of paraphernalia I knew he was neglecting no possibility which might lead to the hidden truth or produce a clue to the crime.

“Have you learned anything yet?” I asked.

“Those brownish spots were blood, of course,” was his reply as he stopped a moment in his work.  “In the blood I discovered some other substance, though I can’t seem to identify it yet.  It will take time.  I thought it might be a drug or poison, but it doesn’t seem to be—­at least nothing one might ordinarily expect.”

“How about the other spots, not the Chinese yellow?”

“Another problem I haven’t solved.  I dissolved enough of them so that I have plenty of material to study if I don’t waste it.  But so far I haven’t been able to identify the substance with anything I know.  There’s a lot more work of elimination, Walter, before we’re on the road to the solution of this case.  Whatever stained the towel was very unusual.  As near as I can make out the spots are of some protein composition.  But it’s not exactly a poison, although many proteins may be extremely poisonous and extremely difficult to identify because they are of organic nature.”