“Today, you crumb. I need it right now. What in hell are you doing over there?”

“Don’t blow your goddamned stack at me. I’m just telling you. It’s an angle. I’m working on it and I need time.”

“By noon today or don’t bother.”

“Okay, I’m still trying. Take my advice. Lay off until you hear from me.” Benny’s gravelly voice was wheedling.

“It’s noon or nothing.” Big Tom put the telephone back in its cradle and sat there yawning and rubbing the mane of gray hair off his forehead. Three of the cats who had been sleeping on chairs awoke and looked around as if it might be time for breakfast.

Big Tom scratched and yawned himself fully awake and then took stock of the conversation just concluded. Hell, there had been no reason for him to snap Benny off like that. Just because he’d been irritable from interrupted sleep and Benny hadn’t seemed to have anything definite except a request that Big Tom wait.

That was it, he decided. Benny’s desire for a delay, a need for time to search and listen—that had roused the sudden anger.

For a moment Big Tom felt a sense of shock, and then he wanted to laugh at himself. Here he’d been so convinced that there’d never be another job in his life, just this little dump of a house and the plants and the cats—and all the time the hungry impatience had been building in him, the determination to have one more big one.

He was shaking his head over it as he went back to bed, snapped off the light and lay down. The moment of insight passed quickly from his mind, leaving only the crystallized decision to have Stolz’s money at the first opportunity.

CHAPTER NINE

Mrs. Havermann never got out of bed much before nine. She usually came downstairs around nine-thirty, always completely dressed and with her hair combed and pinned high and with a touch of powder on her cheeks. She always paused in the lower hall to look over yesterday’s bouquet on the table there and to make up her mind what she wanted in the vase today. Then, if the mail had come, she inspected that. There was ordinarily very little—ads addressed to Householder, or perhaps a few bills.