The Procane Chronicle (3 page)

“What do you think?”

Myron Greene decided to examine the ceiling again. “It seems straightforward enough,” he said. “And you can certainly use the ten thousand. Incidentally, it’ll come off the top of the hundred thousand. The thief stipulated that when he asked for you.”

“That’s unusual,” I said.

“Yes. That’s what I thought.”

“All right,” I said after a moment. “I’ll take it. What’s your client’s name?”

“Abner Procane.”

I was trying to swallow some of my drink when Myron Greene said the name and the drink stopped about halfway down and then backed up, a lot of it spurting out of my nose. After I got through coughing and blowing Myron Greene said, “What was all that supposed to mean?”

“It means,” I said, “that your new client is probably the best thief in town.”

D
ETECTIVE DEAL HAD USED
the area code to direct-dial the Darien number and the phone rang nine times before Myron Greene’s voice came on, sleepy and thick, with a muttered, “Hello.”

“This is St. Ives,” I said. “I’m in jail.”

“Ah, Jesus. It’s almost four.”

“If you don’t wake up, it’s going to be five and I’ll still be in jail.”

There was a pause and then Greene said, “All right, I’m awake,” and his voice sounded crisp and alert. Maybe his wife had brought him a cold cloth. “Where are you?”

“The Tenth Precinct on West Twentieth.”

‘“What’s the charge?”

“They’re thinking about two of them. Suspicion of murder one and grand larceny.”

“Jesus,” Myron Greene said again and then asked, “What happened?” I told him what I could, making it as succinct as possible. There was a brief silence while he probably sorted through his bag of legal tricks. “What have you told them?” he finally asked.

“My name and address.”

“All right,” he said. “I’m going to have to call some people and it’s going to take a while. I’ll try to keep our client’s name out of it and that may be difficult and time-consuming, so you’d better plan on spending a little more time right where you are. But I’ll try to get you out before they send the wagon around in the morning to take you downtown.”

“I don’t like it here,” I said, “but I’d like it even less in the Tombs.”

“I’ll get back to you.”

“Do that,” I said and hung up.

“You want to call anybody else?” Deal said.

I shook my head. “No.”

“Then let’s go down and talk to Sergeant Finn.”

Sergeant Finn, the desk officer, still looked bored, even when they told him about the dead body of Bobby Boykins. He perked up a little though when they got around to the ninety thousand dollars and agreed that it wouldn’t do at all to turn me loose upon society and that they should hang on to me for a few more hours. By then they would have talked to someone in the district attorney’s office and the wagon would be around to haul me down to the Complaint Court at 100 Centre Street

After that they made me empty my pockets and an elderly cop sniffed as if to see whether I’d been drinking, apparently decided that I hadn’t, and let me keep my cigarettes and matches. Then they took me back upstairs to the detective squad room.

It was a medium-sized room, about fifteen by twenty, with four gray metal desks, a couple of typewriters, and a tacky-looking bulletin board with a reward poster on it offering $5,000 for the arrest and conviction of somebody who’d stolen $600,000. The walls were two shades of green—medium dark to about halfway up and then light green all the way to the white ceiling. The floor was covered with black asphalt tile and didn’t show the dirt much.

Just off the squad room was another, smaller room with two desks, four chairs, and brown walls. They put me in there, closed the door, and forgot about me.

I sat down in one of the chairs and felt sorry for myself, the way the falsely accused always do. The precinct didn’t have any cells, just a detention cage for the violent cases that was made out of green iron mesh, and I told myself that I was lucky they hadn’t put me in there because it contained nothing to sit on other than the floor.

I had a fairly nice time feeling sorry for myself, smoking cigarettes, and wondering about how frightened I might become. When I got tired of that, I thought about Abner Procane, the thief who kept diaries.

Not too many persons in New York suspected that Abner Procane was a thief. A few cops did, but they had never been able to prove it and after a while they didn’t even bother to try. Some of the racier types that I occasionally palled around with assumed that Procane was a thief, but because they couldn’t figure a percentage for themselves, they weren’t really interested.

When I had got through telling Myron Greene on that pre-Halloween Friday about what I suspected Procane to be, Greene had replied, “Hearsay. That’s all you have. Pure hearsay.”

“That’s sometimes all you need when you’re a reporter.”

“Well, you’re not a reporter now.”

“I was when I first heard about him.”

“Ah, but you didn’t write it, did you?”

I had let that pass and said, “What if he is a thief, would you still be his lawyer?”

“I’ve seen his holdings; the man couldn’t possibly be a thief.”

“But if he were?”

The idea of being a top thief’s counsel had delighted Myron Greene, of course. But he wouldn’t admit it. Instead, he had drawn himself up a little stiffly and said, “Every man is entitled to representation. Of course, I’d be his lawyer.”

“All right then, I’ll be his go-between.”

I’d first heard about Abner Procane some six or seven years back when Billie Fowler came out of retirement to try his skill on a new Mosler 125-S executive wall safe that was supposed to contain twenty-five thousand or so that an eye, ear, nose, and throat doctor had forgotten to report to the Internal Revenue Service.

Billie had opened the safe without too much trouble and was cleaning it out when he was hit by a heart attack. The doctor discovered him the next morning, still sprawled in front of the half-empty safe, his pockets stuffed with fifty-dollar bills. They had made a deal. The doctor agreed to get Billie to a hospital if Billie agreed not to tell the 1RS about the twenty-five thousand dollars.

It was another one of those stories that I couldn’t write and Billie, sensing my disappointment, had tugged at his hospital gown, and said, “Why don’t you do a write-up on Abner Procane?”

“Who’s he?”

“You never heard it from me, unnerstand?”

“All right. Who is he?”

“He’s the best thief in town, that’s who. Maybe the best thief in the whole fuckin world. You wanna know why?”

“Why?”

“Because he never steals nothing but money. But you never got it from me, right?”

“Right.”

I started to poke around a little and the next word I got on Procane came from an old-time con man who liked to boast that he’d helped take J. Frank Norfleet for forty-five thousand dollars in the famous Denver big store back during the twenties. He claimed to have heard that Procane had stolen more than five million dollars in his time. “Now that’s a hell of a lot of money,” the old man had said and after a couple of more drinks, we’d both agreed that it was probably too much.

I had some vague idea of doing a column on Procane so I kept checking on him in a haphazard fashion. One fairly successful ex-thief who had turned Jehovah’s Witness claimed that he had heard of the poor sinner and even prayed for him whenever he thought about it, which wasn’t often.

“But I don’t think it does any good,” he’d added, as we stood there on the corner at Forty-third and Broadway. “The guy’s never taken a fall and I hear that he don’t pull but one job every year or so. Now what kind of a thief is that?” A smart one, we’d both agreed. “I don’t even know what jobs he was supposed to have been in on,” the reformed thief had said as he stuck a copy of
The Watchtower
under the nose of a passing cop.

If the rumors that I heard about Procane were spicy, the facts that I dug up were dull. He had been born to middle-class New Canaan, Connecticut, parents in 1920 and after a totally uneventful childhood and adolescence, had been graduated from Cornell with an engineering degree in 1941. The army had sent him overseas in 1943 as a second lieutenant. He took his discharge in Marseilles in 1945 and remained there until late 1946 when he returned to New York and married Wilmetta Foulkes who died in an airline crash five years later. There were no children and the story about the plane crash was the only time Procane’s name had even appeared in a New York paper.

He had never been arrested. He had never been employed. He lived in a town house on East Seventy-fourth and employed a Negro housekeeper who arrived at 10
A.M.
and left at 7
P.M.,
Monday through Friday. Procane spent most of his weekends at a rundown farm that he owned in Connecticut. His phone number in New York was unlisted. The Connecticut farm had no phone.

I’d kept on checking him out in my own desultory fashion, not pressing too hard because I really wasn’t much of a muckraker, preferring instead to write about the human foibles of our time, probably because I could so easily identify with nearly all of them.

One afternoon, almost six months after I had first heard about Procane, I found myself drinking draft beer in an East Orange, New Jersey, bar with a retired Manhattan detective sergeant and the chief investigator of one of the larger casualty insurance companies. Because we were running out of things to lie about, I brought up the name of Abner Procane.

“I hear he’s a thief,” I said, again demonstrating my faith in the disarming effect of the subtle query.

“You hear from who?” said the detective sergeant who for reasons known only to himself and God had selected East Orange as his retirement haven. His name was Seymour Rhynes.

“Other thieves,” I said.

“They don’t know nothing,” Rhynes said. “I bet they can’t even name you one job he’s pulled.”

“I can,” the insurance investigator said. He was a mild-looking South Carolinian who wore rimless glasses, clip-on bow ties, and favored shapeless gray worsted suits, winter and summer. His name was Howard Calloway.

Rhynes let his suspicious blue eyes wander over Calloway. After a while he nodded and said, “Yeah, maybe you can.”

“What was it?” I said.

“About five years ago there was this United States senator that we had a floater policy on,” Calloway said. “Well, it seems that the senator had come into a hundred thousand in cash. He kept it locked away in a suitcase in his suite in the Shoreham down in Washington. Well, one day Procane knocks at his door, sticks a gun in his stomach, handcuffs him to the radiator, gags him, goes right to the closet, takes out the suitcase that holds the hundred grand, nods good-bye, and leaves.

“Well, a maid discovers the senator and when the cops come, he tells them that he has to make an important phone call. So he calls us and wants to know if his floater policy will cover a hundred thousand in cash. So we ask if he’s reported it and he says no, not yet. Then he hems and haws a little and says maybe it wasn’t a hundred thousand after all. He finally tells the cops that he only got hurt for two hundred dollars.”

“How’d you know it was Procane?” I said.

Calloway shrugged. “Luck mostly. One of our men was going back up to New York from Washington and spotted Procane on the shuttle. He kept an eye on him till he caught a cab and he was carrying a fancy bag just like the senator put in a claim for.”

“Where’d the hundred thousand come from?” I said, not really expecting an answer.

Calloway looked into his beer. “I don’t think that’s as interesting as trying to figure out how Procane knew it was in the closet. We settled the senator’s claim for the two hundred cash he lost plus another two hundred bucks for the bag.”

“What’d you do about Procane?”

“Nothing,” Rhynes said. “What could we do?”

“Could the senator identify him?”

“Sure,” Calloway said. “But he wouldn’t, because if Procane knew that the hundred thousand dollars was in the closet, he also knew where it came from, and the senator wasn’t about to bring that out in the open.”

Rhynes picked up the pitcher of beer and filled all three glasses. “They say he knocked over a high-stakes poker game at the Waldorf in fifty-nine for close to seventy-five thousand. They say that in 1964 he took close to a hundred thousand out of the wall safe of a Park Avenue shrink. They say that last fall he stopped more than seventy grand in juice money that was supposed to be on its way to a city councilman. It never got there. They say.”

“I heard about the juice money,” Calloway said. “I never heard about the others.”

“Well, we sure as hell never heard about them officially. I never heard about the senator before either.”

“No complaints, huh?” I said to Rhynes.

He shook his big head that was shaped like a wrinkled bullet and said, “Who’s to complain? The city councilman? The shrink who’s cheating the government? The big-shot muckety-mucks who’re playing high-stakes poker, and one of them the head of a big charity outfit?”

“How do you know it was Procane?” I said.

“What would you say to an eyewitness?” Rhynes said.

“That would be pretty good.”

“Well, this bagman who was carrying the seventy big ones got a little upset, know what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said.

“He didn’t think the guy who’d given him the money to deliver would be too understanding, so he comes to us and asks for protection. Well, what could we do? There wasn’t no evidence, just his story. So we showed him some pictures of Procane that we’d taken with a long-distance lens and he says, ‘That’s the son of a bitch, all right’ But still, what could we do? If we talked to Procane, all he’d have to do is laugh and say, ‘What seventy thousand?’ And the guy who was gonna juice the councilman with it sure as hell wasn’t about to admit anything. So all we had was the bagman’s story, which wasn’t worth nothing, so we finally turned him loose.”

“What happened to him?” I said.

Rhynes took a deep draught of beer and then said, “He sort of went away.”

“I reckon that fella Procane’s my favorite thief,” Calloway said. “One, he never steals anything but money. Two, he never steals it from anyone who’ll make a complaint about it. And three, I’m not so sure he’ll ever get caught.”