“Shnook,” Jigger said gruffly, trying to retain her equilibrium, but it was no good. She felt sorry for him.
Who was he, anyway? You can’t keep calling the object of your pity shnook, it’s inappropriate. Jigger, in an effort to effect a unilateral introduction, went through the shnook’s pockets and found:
One recording apparatus, tape, pocket, Japanese manufacture
One watch, stop
One measure, tape, cloth
One thingamabob, electronic, tiny (with wires)
One lighter, cigarette, butane
One cigarette package, Lucky Strike green (back from war!), open
One ring, key (with keys)
One device, unidentified, black (with red buttons)
Three screws, metal, small
One kit, tool, plastic, tiny (contents: screwdriver regular, screwdriver Phillips, pliers, cutters wire, clamp, tube glue)
One wallet, leather, black
What a pile of junk. Jigger poked through it, picked out the wallet, and proceeded to get to know her new friend.
He wasn’t exactly traveling incognito. Driver’s license, boat registration, even a library card from Glen Cove, Long Island. The name on all these documents was Kelly Bram Nicholas IV.
Could that name possibly be an alias? No, that name could not possibly be an alias.
There was nothing in Kelly Bram Nicholas IV’s wallet to explain all those odd items in his pockets. He seemed to be merely an average young guy, a few years older than herself, who had a boat and liked to read books from the library and liked to take pictures in darkened bedrooms in other people’s houses. With nobody there.
All right, of what was he taking these pictures? Maybe that would explain things.
Jigger got to her feet and went over to the desk and found a small notebook open upon it. The camera, an incredibly compact Japanese contribution to international understanding, was lying on its side nearby, next to the miniature flashgun.
Jigger picked up the notebook, leafed through it, and found it to contain somebody’s itinerary for the eleven days of the film festival. What movies to be seen and where, what parties to attend, what lunches, what meetings, everything. But whose itinerary?
There was no name in the notebook, but it had to belong to whoever was staying in this room. Jigger searched desk and dresser and closet, found nothing but anonymous male clothing with Los Angeles labels, and paused to consider whether the body on the floor could be the legitimate tenant of this room. But why take pictures in the dark in his own room? Why faint like that?
On the closet shelf she spied a suitcase, expensive-looking. On the off chance, she pulled it down and opened it. It was empty, but attached to the handle was a laminated identification sticker reading: “B. B. Bernard, J-K Films, Hollywood, USA.”
B. B. Bernard? Jigger squinted, deep in thought. If he came from Hollywood, USA, B. B. Bernard should be known to her. J-K Films, of course, she knew all about, but B.B. Bernard? Hmmmmmm.
Thinking, going through one of the file drawers in her head, she suddenly noticed the shnook. No longer asleep, he was lying now on his back with his head slightly raised, and was blinking. Open, his eyes had the unfocused look of underdone poached eggs, but with blue yolks.
Jigger shut the file drawer in her head, walked over to the bed, and sat on the foot of it. “Okay, buster,” she said, unconsciously going into her Humphrey Bogard number. “Talk fast.”
He had a terrible squint. “My glasses,” he said, sitting up.
“On the floor there,” she said, pointing. “They’re busted.”
He was blind as a bat. After he’d patted the floor vaguely for a while, not finding the glasses, she finally went over, picked them up, and put them into his waving left hand. He put them on, recoiled from the jagged ruin of glass directly in front of his left eye, shut that eye, looked at her balefully with the other, and said, “What are you doing here?”
It wasn’t a bad bluff, as bluffs go, but Jigger wasn’t buying. “I’m taking pictures of B. B. Bernard’s notebook,” she said.
He reacted nicely, jumping a foot in the air, opening the eye behind the broken glass, looking around frantically, getting pale, the whole thing.
Afraid she’d overdone it and he’d pass out again, Jigger said soothingly, “It’s okay, I didn’t blow the whistle on you. Not yet, anyway.”
He stopped gaping around, looked at her again, and finally caught hold of himself. “This isn’t your room either,” he said. “You’re up to something yourself.”
“Elementary, my dear Watson. I thought this was the bathroom. I walked in, I found you taking those pictures, and I screamed.”
Worry showed in the open eye, the other one being closed again. “You screamed?”
“Not yet,” Jigger said.
It took him a few seconds to get it, and then he said, “Why won’t that work backwards? I’ll do the hollering. Your word against mine.”
“I’ll tell them to search us both,” Jigger said. “All they’ll find on me is me, but on you—” She gestured toward the little pile of goods on the floor.
He saw it, patted his pockets, and became outraged. “You picked my pockets!”
“Everything’s there,” she said. “I wanted to know what name to call you. That’s a lot of funny stuff you’ve got there, Kelly Bram Nicholas Four. You the TV repairman?”
“Yes,” he said. Stuffing things into his pockets while he sat on the floor, he said, “That’s exactly what I am.” He was being very irritable.
“Sure,” she said. “Give me a fast good reason why I shouldn’t go over to that door there and scream.”
He didn’t have a fast good reason. Looking at her with his good eye, his expression twisted all out of shape, he said only, “Uhhh...”
“That’s what I thought,” she said, and got to her feet.
She got halfway to the door when he said, “I’m a reporter.”
She turned and looked at him. “You’re a what?”
“A reporter,” he said, with more assurance. “I’m looking for a scoop.”
“Make mine vanilla,” she said, and headed for the door again.
“Wait!”
The desperation in that cry stopped her once more, and when she looked at him she saw he’d yanked his glasses off and was staring blindly in her general direction. That old maternal urge cropped up again, but she put a lid on it and sat on the lid. “What?” she said.
“I can’t think,” he said, as though being unable to think both enraged and terrified him. “I can’t think without my glasses.”
“You’ve still got one good eye.”
“That’s worse than — I keep opening the other eye and... I can’t... I can’t do it!”
He was really getting shook up. She went back and leaned down and automatically reached out and put her hand on his cheek, saying, “Easy, tiger, easy. Calm down a little.”
His face jerked away from her hand at first, but then it stayed where it was, letting her touch him. The skin was as rigid as an automobile fender, but warmer. “I have more glasses back at the boat,” he said. “Another pair.”
“You want me to help you? Take you back to your boat?”
“Yes.”
“Sure thing,” she said. “As soon as you tell me what this spy jazz is all about.”
“Spy—?” He blinked upward with blind innocence.
“Come on, chum. The pictures. How come you’re taking pictures in B. B. Bernard’s notebook?”