“Oh.” The door from the corridor to the bedroom began to swing. I stepped into the living-room where I couldn’t be seen, but could peek at reflections in the bureau mirror.
“Miss Marino.” He was beginning to be irritated. “She’s Miss Hands! We’ve been working our tails off to keep her under cover. All sorts of crackpots try to find out who she is — where she lives — so now you see—”
What I saw was a black jacket, a starched shirt, a thin, pale face — in the mirror. I stepped back into the bedroom.
The weak, watery, china-blue eyes of Auguste, our senior room-service captain, opened very wide. Auguste was around fifty; he must have been carrying a napkin over his arm most of his half century; he had all the professional deformities — stoop shoulders, flat feet, an expression of weary disillusionment.
“Mister Fine! Ah, hello — Mister Fine.”
“What you after, Auguste?”
He wiped the back of his left hand with the long, thin bony fingers of his right. “Nozzing of importance, Mister Fine.”
“No?” I went up to him. He still held the pass key between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand; it wiggled while he massaged the knuckles of the other hand. “You usually bust in a suite like this without knocking?”
“I had been told; Miss Marino told me, there would be no one here at this time. So I do not bozzer to knock.”
Lanerd moved in behind me.