He laughed impatiently and said: “Stop waving the hat in my face. Haven’t I offered to do what I can?”
She smiled contritely, returned the hat to the table, and sat beside him on the settee again.
He said: “I’ve got nothing against trusting you blindly except that I won’t be able to do you much good if I haven’t some idea of what it’s all about. For instance, I’ve got to have some sort of a line on your Floyd Thursby.”
“I met him in the Orient.” She spoke slowly, looking down at a pointed finger tracing eights on the settee between them. “We came here from Hong Kong last week. He was—he had promised to help me. He took advantage of my helplessness and dependence on him to betray me.”
“Betray you how?”
She shook her head and said nothing.
Spade, frowning with impatience, asked: “Why did you want him shadowed?”
“I wanted to learn how far he had gone. He wouldn’t even let me know where he was staying. I wanted to find out what he was doing, whom he was meeting, things like that.”
“Did he kill Archer?”
She looked up at him, surprised. “Yes, certainly,” she said.
“He had a Luger in a shoulder-holster. Archer wasn’t shot with a Luger.”
“He had a revolver in his overcoat-pocket,” she said.
“You saw it?”