“Here!” He thrust the binder in my hands.  “Read that first scene,” he directed.  “Meanwhile I am going to phone Mackay to make sure he has had the house guarded and to make double sure no one goes near the library.  We’re going out to Tarrytown again, Walter, and in the biggest kind of hurry.”

“What’s the idea, Craig?” Kennedy’s occasional bursts of mysteriousness, characteristic of him and often necessary when his theories were only half formed and too chaotic for explanations, always piqued me.

He did not seem to hear.  Already he was at the telephone, manipulating the receiver hook impatiently.  “What a dummy I am!” he exclaimed, with genuine feeling.  “What—­what an awful dummy!”

Knowing I would get nothing out of him just yet, I turned to the scene, reading as he told me.  At first I could not see where the detail concerned Stella Lamar in any way.  Then I came to the description of her introductory entrance, the initial view of her in the film.  The lines of typewriting suddenly stood out before me in all their suggestive clearness.

The spotlight in the hands of a shadowy figure roves across the wall and to the portieres.  As it pauses there the portieres move and the fingers of a girl are seen on the edge of the silk.  A bare and beautiful arm is thrust through almost to the shoulder and it begins to move the portieres aside, reaching upward to pull the curtains apart at the rings.

“You think there’s something about the portieres—­” I began.

Then I saw that Kennedy had his connection, that something disturbed him, that some intelligence from the other end had caught him by surprise.

“You say you were just trying to get me, Mackay?  You’ve something to tell me and you want me to come right out—­you have summoned Phelps and he’s on his way from the city also—?”

“What happened?” I asked, as Kennedy hung up.

“I don’t know, Walter.  Mackay said he didn’t want to talk over the phone and that we had just time to catch the express.”

“But—­”

“Hurry!” He glanced about as if wondering whether any of his scientific instruments would help him.

XI

FORESTALLED

On the train Kennedy left me, to look through the other cars, having the idea that Phelps might be aboard also.  But there were no signs of the banker.  We would reach Tarrytown first unless he had chosen to motor out.

Mackay was waiting at the station to meet us and to take us to the house.  The little district attorney was obviously excited.

“Was the place guarded well last night?” asked Kennedy, almost before we had shaken hands.

“Yes—­that is, I thought it was.  That’s what I want to tell you.  After you left with Manton and Werner the rest of the company packed up and pulled out in the two studio cars.  I was a little in doubt what to do about Phelps, but he settled it himself by announcing that he was going to town.  The coroner came and issued the permit to remove the body and that was taken away.  I think the house and the presence of the dead girl and all the rest of it got on Phelps’s nerves, because he was irritable and impatient, unwilling to wait for his own car, until finally I drove him to the station myself.”