Dundy looked with hard green eyes at Spade and did not answer him.
“Then,” said Spade, “there’s no particular reason why I should give a damn what you think, is there, Dundy?”
Tom said: “Aw, be reasonable, Sam.”
Spade put the cigarette in his mouth, set fire to it, and laughed smoke out.
“I’ll be reasonable, Tom,” he promised. “How did I kill this Thursby? I’ve forgotten.”
Tom grunted disgust. Lieutenant Dundy said: “He was shot four times in the back, with a forty-four or forty-five, from across the street, when he started to go in the hotel. Nobody saw it, but that’s the way it figures.”
“And he was wearing a Luger in a shoulder-holster,” Tom added. “It hadn’t been fired.”
“What do the hotel-people know about him?” Spade asked.
“Nothing except that he’d been there a week.”
“Alone?”
“Alone.”
“What did you find on him? or in his room?”
Dundy drew his lips in and asked: “What’d you think we’d find?”
Spade made a careless circle with his limp cigarette. “Something to tell you who he was, what his story was. Did you?”
“We thought you could tell us that.”