“What did Marilyn Loring want?  You seemed in deep confab!”

“She volunteered to initiate us to McCann’s, across the street.”

“Oh!” She skidded about a corner skillfully.  “And—­”

“Well, we bumped into an additional piece of evidence and I thought Jameson and I ought to hurry in to my laboratory instead.”

“I bet”—­Enid giggled, readjusting her hat in the breeze—­“I bet she wanted to know what you’d found, right away.  Didn’t she?”

“Yes!” Kennedy’s face was noncommittal, “Why do you say that?”

“Because she came into my room, just as we were getting ready for work this morning.  Perhaps I’m wrong, but from the way she kept asking me questions about everyone from Manton down I got the idea she was quizzing me, to see how much I knew.  Of course this is only my first day, but it seems to me that Marilyn is talking a great deal, without saying very much.  I’ve come to the conclusion she knows a good deal more than she is telling anyone, and that she’d like to find out just how much everyone else knows.”

Kennedy nodded almost absent-mindedly, without responding further.

“Well”—­Enid speeded up a bit—­“not to change connections on the switchboard, I think I’m going to like it with Manton Pictures.”

“Will they do justice to your work,” Kennedy inquired, “putting you in a partially finished picture in this way?”

“That’s where I’m in luck, real bang-up luck.  Werner has directed me before and knows just exactly how to handle me.”

“What about the story?  That was built for Stella, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but they’re changing it here and there to fit me.  Larry knows my work, too!  That’s luck again for little Enid.”

“How long have you known Millard?” In a flash I realized Kennedy’s cleverness.  This was the fact he had wished to unearth.  The question was as natural as could be.  He had led up to it deliberately.  I was sure of that.

“Four, nearly five years,” she replied, unsuspiciously.  Then suddenly she bit her lip, although her expression was well masked.  “That is,” she added, somewhat lamely—­“that is, in a casual way, like nearly everyone knows nearly everyone else in the film game.”

“Oh!” murmured Kennedy, lapsing into silence.

XV

I BECOME A DETECTIVE

Important as it was to watch Enid and Marilyn, Werner and the rest, Kennedy decided that it was now much more important to hold to his expressed purpose of returning to the laboratory with our trophies of the day’s crime hunt.

“For people to whom emotion ought to be an old story in their everyday stage life, I must say they feel and show plenty of it in real life,” I remarked, as Enid set us down and drove off.  “It does not seem to pall.”

“I don’t know why the movie people buy stories,” remarked Craig, quaintly.  “They don’t need to do it—­they live them.”