“It’s not as good as giving them the punk,” Spade said. “Cairo’s not a gunman and he carries a smaller gun than Thursby and Jacobi were shot with. We’ll have to go to more trouble framing him, but that’s better than not giving the police anybody.”
Cairo cried in a voice shrill with indignation: “Suppose we give them you, Mr. Spade, or Miss O’Shaughnessy? How about that if you’re so set on giving them somebody?”
Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him evenly: “You people want the falcon. I’ve got it. A fall-guy is part of the price I’m asking. As for Miss O’Shaughnessy”—his dispassionate glance moved to her white perplexed face and then back to Cairo and his shoulders rose and fell a fraction of an inch—“if you think she can be rigged for the part I’m perfectly willing to discuss it with you.”
The girl put her hands to her throat, uttered a short strangled cry, and moved farther away from him.
Cairo, his face and body twitching with excitement, exclaimed: “You seem to forget that you are not in a position to insist on anything.”
Spade laughed, a harsh derisive snort.
Gutman said, in a voice that tried to make firmness ingratiating: “Come now, gentlemen, let’s keep our discussion on a friendly basis; but there certainly is”—he was addressing Spade—“something in what Mr. Cairo says. You must take into consideration the—”
“Like hell I must.” Spade flung his words out with a brutal sort of carelessness that gave them more weight than they could have got from dramatic emphasis or from loudness. “If you kill me, how are you going to get the bird? If I know you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?”