Tom left the sofa and sat on the foot of the bed. His carelessly shaven mud-smeared face was tired and lined.
“Be reasonable, Sam,” he pleaded. “Give us a chance. How can we turn up anything on Miles’s killing if you won’t give us what you’ve got?”
“You needn’t get a headache over that,” Spade told him. “I’ll bury my dead.”
Lieutenant Dundy sat down and put his hands on his knees again. His eyes were warm green discs.
“I thought you would,” he said. He smiled with grim content. “That’s just exactly why we came to see you. Isn’t it, Tom?”
Tom groaned, but said nothing articulate.
Spade watched Dundy warily.
“That’s just exactly what I said to Tom,” the Lieutenant went on. “I said: ‘Tom, I’ve got a hunch that Sam Spade’s a man to keep the family-troubles in the family.’ That’s just what I said to him.”
The wariness went out of Spade’s eyes. He made his eyes dull with boredom. He turned his face around to Tom and asked with great carelessness: “What’s itching your boyfriend now?”
Dundy jumped up and tapped Spade’s chest with the ends of two bent fingers.
“Just this,” he said, taking pains to make each word distinct, emphasizing them with his tapping finger-ends: “Thursby was shot down in front of his hotel just thirty-five minutes after you left Burritt Street.”
Spade spoke, taking equal pains with his words: “Keep your goddamned paws off me.”