She led him past open kitchen-, bathroom-, and bedroom-doors in a cream and red living-room, apologizing for its confusion:
"Everything is upside-down.
I haven't even finished unpacking."
She laid his hat on a table and sat down on a walnut settee.
He sat on a brocaded oval-backed chair facing her.
She looked at her fingers, working them together, and said:
"Mr. Spade, I've a terrible, terrible confession to make."
Spade smiled a polite smile, which she did not lift her eyes to see, and said nothing.
"That—that story I told you yesterday was all—a story," she stammered, and looked up at him now with miserable frightened eyes.
"Oh, that," Spade said lightly.
"We didn't exactly believe your story."
"Then—?"
Perplexity was added to the misery and fright in her eyes.
"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 time 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.
Cf 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."
She said,
"Thank you," very softly, and then moved her head from side to side.
"But I'll always blanie myself."
She put a hand to her throat.
"Mr. Archer was so—so alive yesterday afternoon, so solid and hearty and—"
"Stop it," Spade commanded.
"He knew what he was doing.
They're the chances we take."
"Was—was he married?"
"Yes, with ten thousand insurance, no children, and a wife who didn't like him."
"Oh, please don't!" she whispered.
Spade shrugged again.
"That's the way it was."
He glanced at his watch and moved from his chair to the settee beside her.
"There's no time for worrying about that now."