Dundy spoke then, quietly:
"We want to talk to you, Spade."
"Well?" Spade stood in the doorway, blocking it.
"Go ahead and talk."
Tom Polhaus advanced saying:
"We don't have to do it standing here, do we?"
Spade stood in the doorway and said:
"You can't come in." His tone was very slightly apologetic.
Tom's thick-featured face, even in height with Spade's, took on an expression of friendly scorn, though there was a bright gleam in his smnall shrewd eyes.
"What the hell, Sam?" he protested and put a big hand playfully on Spade's chest.
Spade leaned against the pushing hand, grinned wolfishly, and asked:
"Going to strong-arm me, Toni?"
Tom grumbled,
"Aw, for God's sake," and took his hand away.
Dundy clicked his teeth together and said through them:
"Let us in."
Spade's lip twitched over his eyetooth. He said:
"You're not coming in.
What do you want to do about it?
Try to get in?
Or do your talking here?
Or go to hell?"
Tom groaned.
Dundy, still speaking through his teeth, said:
"It'd pay you to play along with us a little, Spade.
You've got away with this and you've got away with that, but you can't keep it up forever."
"Stop me when you can." Spade replied arrogantly.
"That's what I'll do."
Dundy put his hands behind him and thrust his hard face up towards the private detective's.
"There's talk going around that you and Archer's wife were cheating on him."
Spade laughed.
"That sounds like something you thought up yourself."
"Then there's not anything to it?"
"Not anything."
"The talk is," Dundv said, "that she tried to get a divorce out of him so's she could put in with you, but he wouldn't give it to her.
Anything to that?"
"There's even talk," Dundy went on stolidly, "that that's why he was put on the spot."
Spade seemed mildly amused.
"Don't be a hog," he said.
"You oughtn't try to pin more than one murder at a time on me.
Your first idea that I knocked Thursby off because he'd killed Miles falls apart if you blame me for killing Miles too."
"You haven't heard me say you killed anybody," Dundy replied.
"You're the one that keeps bringing that up.
But suppose I did.
You could have blipped them both.
There's a way of figuring it."
"Uh-huh.
I could've butchered Miles to get his wife, and then Thursby so I could hang Miles's killing on him.
That's a hell of a swell system, or will be when I can give somebody else the bump and hang Thursby's on them.
How long am I supposed to keep that up?