"I'll say he is!" she exclaimed, the boom returning to her voice for a moment. "You didn't actually think, Phil, did you, that he spent his time peeking through a one-way peephole and working that spring-rubber dingus? And would I be calling him a dumb robot? He just used his own voice to record Old Rubberarm's questions and answers. He gets a kick out of things like that." She lifted her heavy eyebrows. "Don't you know who Moe Brimstine is?"
Phil shook his head.
"Where you been all your life? 'Scuse me, Phil, but Moe Brimstine is ... why, he's on top of the syndicate, right next to Mr. Billig himself!"
When Phil didn't recognize the second name either, she quit trying. "Well, anyway, Phil," she said in her friendly, quiet voice, "there's Moe Brimstine, practically the boss of Fun Incorporated, which runs wrestling and amusement centers, all sales-robots, jukebox burlesque, and a lot of other things they don't talk so much about. And he's worried, real worried. Now I know Moe. He don't worry about nothing but the syndicate. So things must be real bad." She paused, then added cryptically, but with a sort of personal gloominess, "Lots of things are real bad."
Phil nodded. There was a silence.
"Say, Phil," she finally said huskily, watching her big, gravy stained finger rub her near-empty glass. "That really was a—whadya call it?—delusion, wasn't it, this afternoon when you was talking about a green cat?"
"I thought so then," Phil said softly. "Now I'm not sure."
She let out a big breath and looked up at him. "You know," she said with sudden warmth, "neither am I. Say Phil, how valuable is that cat, anyway, if there is a cat. Could it be worth $10,000?"
Phil felt his eyes bug at the same instant he was thinking that Lucky's worth could never be measured in money. "$10,000?" he murmured. "I haven't the faintest idea. What made you think of that figure?"
"Well," Juno said slowly, "after the Akeleys—muck 'em!—had left this afternoon, Jack came in to me and started talking again about how dumb I was about you. Only this time it wasn't because I had let you in, but because I'd let you go. He says to me, 'You're dumb, Juno, you're deductively dopey. You don't recognize opportunity. Now I'm in a position to make $10,000 out of that little squirt, only I'm not going to do it, at least not right away,' he says, 'because there are higher things, Juno, there are higher things.'" And she rolled her eyes as if she were in the ring and approaching her spouse in his character of Swish Jack Jones, the Lady Killer.