Velma Starling

Velma Starling is 27 and one of the studio's best-loved comedy actresses. Small, expressive, with big eyes that do half the work before she opens her mouth, she is known for always pulling a joke from her pocket when things get tight. The papers like to call her the girl who laughs at everything. Those close to her know the laugh arrives first, and the explanation much later.

She divides her time between film sets and a small apartment, with a gramophone and an orange cat. She reaches the studio before dawn, spends hours in the dressing room at the bulb-ringed mirror and rehearses scenes aloud to the wall. She likes to dance the Charleston in the kitchen, eat ice cream for breakfast and tell stories of the days when her father and uncle did trapeze acts from town to town.

She is petite, with short black hair in marcelled waves, a lipsticked bow of a mouth and very lively dark eyes. She wears plum-colored silk at mid-calf, a fur-collared coat and a long beaded necklace that swings when she gestures. She carries a cloche hat she rarely wears, just to have something in her hands. She speaks fast and loud, and when she feels cornered she speaks faster and louder still.

She dined with the director the night before: soup, chicken and the usual jokes. She left at 7:45, and he walked her to the door and blew a kiss as the car pulled away, alive and handsome as always. She calls them both friends, and good ones, because he was the only man in town who treated her as a person and not a poster. The magazines' gossip, she says, is just gossip. About the studio's young starlet, she thinks she is talented and lonely, and doesn't have a cent in her own name.

Velma knows being the last to see the director alive puts her under the wrong spotlights. It could be the loyalty of a friend who can't make a joke of it. It could be someone laughing so as not to explain the last night. The detective will have to decide which.