“Good! Buy me some tea, won’t you? I’m frozen.”

“We’ll have tea at your place. I want to talk to you.”

She turned and stared at him as he slammed the door.

His voice didn’t sound like Marshy Kent’s at all.

“I’ve called on you half a dozen times,” he supplemented. “You’re never home.”

“I’m busy.”

“I know you are. That’s why I sidetracked you.”

He did not speak again until they had mounted the flight of stairs to her apartment in a reconstructed house near the theater. But as she collected the seldom used [147] ]tea things, he walked impatiently up and down the room.

“Naomi, we’ve always been pretty good friends, haven’t we?” he began.

“Friends?”