“We believed your two hundred dollars.”
“You mean—?” She seemed to not know what he meant.
“I mean that you paid us more than if you’d been telling the truth,” he explained blandly, “and enough more to make it all right.”
Her eyes suddenly lighted up. She lifted herself a few inches from the settee, settled down again, smoothed her skirt, leaned forward, and spoke eagerly: “And even now you’d be willing to—?”
Spade stopped her with a palm-up motion of one hand. The upper part of his face frowned. The lower part smiled. “That depends,” he said. “The hell of it is, Miss—Is your name Wonderly or Leblanc?”
She blushed and murmured: “It’s really O’Shaughnessy—Brigid O’Shaughnessy.”
“The hell of it is, Miss O’Shaughnessy, that a couple of murders”—she winced—“coming together like this get everybody stirred up, make the police think they can go the limit, make everybody hard to handle and expensive. It’s not—”
He stopped talking because she had stopped listening and was waiting for him to finish.
“ Mr. Spade, tell me the truth.” Her voice quivered on the verge of hysteria. Her face had become haggard around desperate eyes. “Am I to blame for—for last night?”
Spade shook his head. “Not unless there are things I don’t know about,” he said. “You warned us that Thursby was dangerous. Of course you lied to us about your sister and all, but that doesn’t count: we didn’t believe you.” He shrugged his sloping shoulders. “I wouldn’t say it was your fault.”