“Nothing Julia, his wife, can’t tell you. You’re going to talk to her.” Colyer stood up. “I’ve got connections. Maybe I can get something for you through them later.”...
A small-boned woman of twenty-five or — six opened the apartment door. Her powder-blue dress was trimmed with silver buttons. She was full-bosomed but slim, with straight shoulders and narrow hips, and she carried herself with a pride that would have been cockiness in one less graceful.
Spade said, “Mrs. Haven?”
She hesitated before saying “Yes.”
“Gene Colyer sent me to see you. My name’s Spade. I’m a private detective. He wants me to find your husband.”
“And have you found him?”
“I told him I’d have to talk to you first.”
Her smile went away. She studied his face gravely, feature by feature, then she said, “Certainly,” and stepped back, drawing the door back with her.
When they were seated in facing chairs in a cheaply furnished room overlooking a playground where children were noisy, she asked, “Did Gene tell you why he wanted Eli found?”
“He said if you knew he was gone for good maybe you’d listen to reason.”
She said nothing.
“Has he ever gone off like this before?”
“Often.”
“What’s he like?”
“He’s a swell man,” she said dispassionately, “when he’s sober; and when he’s drinking he’s all right except with women and money.”
“That leaves him a lot of room to be all right in. What does he do for a living?”
“He’s a poet,” she replied, “but nobody makes a living at that.”
“Well?”
“Oh, he pops in with a little money now and then. Poker, races, he says. I don’t know.”
“How long’ve you been married?”
“Four years, almost” — she smiled mockingly.
“San Francisco all the time?”
“No, we lived in Seattle the first year and then came here.”
“He from Seattle?”
She shook her head. “Some place in Delaware.”
“What place?”
“I don’t know.”
Spade drew his thickish brows together a little. “Where are you from?”
She said sweetly, “You’re not hunting for me.”
“You act like it,” he grumbled. “Well, who are his friends?”
“Don’t ask me!”
He made an impatient grimace. “You know some of them,” he insisted.
“Sure. There’s a fellow named Minera and a Louis James and somebody he calls Conny.”
“Who are they?”
“Men,” she replied blandly. “I don’t know anything about them. They phone or drop by to pick him up, or I see him around town with them. That’s all I know.”
“What do they do for a living? They can’t all write poetry.”
She laughed. “They could try. One of them, Louis James, is a... a member of Gene’s staff, I think. I honestly don’t know any more about them than I’ve told you.”
“Think they’d know where your husband is?”
She shrugged. “They’re kidding me if they do. They still call up once in a while to see if he’s turned up.”
“And these women you mentioned?”
“They’re not people I know.”
Spade scowled thoughtfully at the floor, asked, “What’d he do before he started not making a living writing poetry?”
“Anything — sold vacuum cleaners, hoboed, went to sea, dealt blackjack, railroaded, canning houses, lumber camps, carnivals, worked on a newspaper — anything.”
“Have any money when he left?”
“Three dollars he borrowed from me.”
“What’d he say?”
She laughed. “Said if I used whatever influence I had with God while he was gone he’d be back at dinnertime with a surprise for me.”
Spade raised his eyebrows. “You were on good terms?”
“Oh, yes. Our last fight had been patched up a couple of days before.”
“When did he leave?”
“Thursday afternoon; three o’clock, I guess.”
“Got any photographs of him?”
“Yes.” She went to a table by one of the windows, pulled a drawer out, and turned towards Spade again with a photograph in her hand.
Spade looked at the picture of a thin face with deep-set eyes, a sensual mouth, and a heavily lined forehead topped by a disorderly mop of coarse blond hair.
He put Haven’s photograph in his pocket and picked up his hat. He turned towards the door, halted. “What kind of poet is he? Pretty good?”
She shrugged. “That depends on who you ask.”
“Any of it around here?”
“No.” She smiled. “Think he’s hiding between pages?”
“You never can tell what’ll lead to what. I’ll be back some time. Think things over and see if you can’t find some way of loosening up a little more. ’By.”
He walked down Post Street to Mulford’s book store and asked for a volume of Haven’s poetry.
“I’m sorry,” the girl said. “I sold my last copy last week” — she smiled — “to Mr. Haven himself. I can order it for you.”
“You know him?”
“Only through selling him books.”
Spade pursed his lips, asked, “What day was it?” He gave her one of his business cards. “Please. It’s important.”
She went to a desk, turned the pages of a red-bound sales-book, and came back to him with the book open in her hand. “It was last Wednesday,” she said, “and we delivered it to a Mr. Roger Ferris, 1981 Pacific Avenue.”
“Thanks a lot,” he said.
Outside, he hailed a taxicab and gave the driver Mr. Roger Ferris’s address...
The Pacific Avenue house was a four-story, graystone one set behind a narrow strip of lawn. The room into which a plump-faced maid ushered Spade was large and high-ceiled.
Spade sat down, but when the maid had gone away he rose and began to walk around the room. He halted at a table where there were three books. One of them had a salmon-colored jacket on which was printed in red an outline drawing of a bolt of lightning striking the ground between a man and a woman, and in black the words Colored Eight, by Eli Haven.
Spade picked up the book and went back to his chair.
There was an inscription on the flyleaf — heavy, irregular characters written with blue ink:
To good old Buck, who knew his colored lights, in memory of them there days.
Spade turned pages at random and idly read a verse:
STATEMENT
Too many have lived
As we live
For our lives to be
Proof of our living.
Too many have died
As we die
For their deaths to be
Proof of our dying.
He looked up from the book as a man in dinner clothes came into the room. He was not a tall man, but his erectness made him seem tall even when Spade’s six feet and a fraction of an inch were standing before him. He had bright blue eyes undimmed by his fifty-some years, a sunburned face in which no muscle sagged, a smooth, broad forehead, and thick, short, nearly white hair. There was dignity in his countenance, and amiability.
He nodded at the book Spade still held. “How do you like it?”
Spade grinned, said, “I guess I’m just a mug,” and put the book down. “That’s what I came to see you about, though, Mr. Ferris. You know Haven?”
“Yes, certainly. Sit down, Mr. Spade.” He sat in a chair not far from Spade’s. “I knew him as a kid. He’s not in trouble, is he?”
Spade said, “I don’t know. I’m trying to find him.”