Spade suggested. “Maybe he cut himself shaving.”
Cairo spoke quickly, before he could be questioned, and the muscles of his face quivered under the strain of holding his smile in place while he spoke. “I fell. We intended to be struggling for the pistol when you came in, but I fell. I tripped on the end of the rug and fell while we were pretending to struggle.”
Dundy said: “Horse feathers.”
Spade said: “That’s all right, Dundy, believe it or not. The point is that that’s our story and we’ll stick to it. The newspapers will print it whether they believe it or not, and it’ll be just as funny one way as the other, or more so. What are you going to do about it? It’s no crime to kid a copper, is it? You haven’t got anything on anybody here. Everything we told you was part of the joke. What are you going to do about it?”