The Procane Chronicle (4 page)

Rhynes belched. It was a rumbling one that started as a harsh crackle and ended as a mild roar. “Oh, he’ll get caught one of these days,” he said, patting his belly comfortably. There was plenty to pat.

“When?” I said.

“When he finally gets careless,” he said, nodding his head with the absolute certainty that’s born of thirty years’ experience. “They finally all get careless, you know.”

“Bullshit,” Calloway said as politely as it can be said. “I don’t agree with that at all. Not at all. Procane might get himself caught one day, but it won’t be by the cops.”

“Who by?” I said.

“If he doesn’t get himself killed by someone he’s stealing from, he’ll get hurt in a different way and it’ll hurt bad. Real bad.”

“How?”

“Someday,” Calloway said in a voice made thoughtful by five beers, “somebody’s gonna steal something from Mr. Abner Procane because he’s gone and made himself such a big, fat target. And when that day comes I’d like to be around just so I could watch Procane.”

“Watch him do what?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Calloway said. “That’s why I’d wanta watch.”

T
HEY CAME FOR ME
at six o’clock and took me back downstairs without saying a word. They took me into a small room that I hadn’t been in before and a young, uniformed policeman handed me back the contents of my pockets.

“What now?” I said.

“Wait here,” he said and shoved a form at me. “Count your money, check your possessions, and sign this. It’s our receipt.”

I counted the money in my billfold and signed the receipt. “Is it all there?” the young cop said, not because he cared, but because it was what they had told him to say.

“I’m short about ninety thousand.”

“You break me up,” he said, turned and left.

It was another grim, bare room that contained nothing but a gray table and two matching chairs. I sat down in one of them and waited some more. In about fifteen minutes the door opened and Detectives Deal and Oller came in. Deal carried the blue airline bag. Neither of them looked as if they had had any sleep.

“You got nice connections, St. Ives,” Deal said, placing the bag on the table. “Real nice. They’re going to let you walk.”

“When?”

“When you finish counting the money,” Oller said and unzipped the bag. “You can start any time.”

I started counting and they watched. When I was nearly a fourth of the way through, Deal said, “That money kept the kid up all night, you know.”

“What kid?” I said, almost losing my count.

“Officer Frann. You remember Officer Frann. He put the cuffs on you.”

I nodded and kept on counting.

“He stayed up all night making a record of all the serial numbers on the money,” Deal said. “That was before anybody told us what you did for a living. You got quite a reputation downtown, you know.”

“I didn’t,” I said, dropped a thousand in my count, and went back to pick it up.

“Of course, me and Deal being in homicide, we wouldn’t have much call to do any business with you, unless somebody wanted to ransom a dead body, and we haven’t run across one like that yet.”

“Yet,” Deal said and then they were both silent until I finished the count and zipped up the bag.

“It’s all there,” I said, and signed another form that Oller handed me.

“If you go ahead and turn that money over to whoever you were planning to turn it over to, are you going to tell ’em that we got the serial numbers?” Deal said. “That’s strictly an unofficial question. I just got curious.”

“No,” I said. “I’ll get them a new batch.”

“You sort of like to cooperate with thieves, huh?” Oller said.

“I sometimes have to,” I said.

Deal nodded as if trying to show that he found that perfectly understandable. He almost succeeded. “Well, you’re no longer a suspect now that we got it on the very best downtown authority that you’re not the type who’d go around killing anybody like that old guy we found trussed up in the laundromat. But me and Oller were sort of wondering if we might drop by and ask you a few questions? As a witness, I mean, not as a suspect.”

“Any time,” I said and waited for the rest of it, the part that wouldn’t be quite so polite.

“We might drop around more than once,” Oller said and gave me a bleak smile that somehow failed to go with his fat man’s face.

“And you might even drop around to see us,” Deal said and they cracked out the rest of it: “Like tomorrow at ten
A.M.
”

“You want a statement,” I said, seeing no reason to make it a question.

“That’s right,” Oller said.

“Where?”

“You know where Homicide South is?”

“Yes.”

“Just ask for either of us.”

“Oller and Deal.”

“Carl Oller,” Deal said, “and Frank Deal.”

“Can I go now?”

“Sure,” Deal said, “if you don’t mind answering just one little personal question?”

“What?”

“Doesn’t this business you’re in sort of make you a little sick when you look in the mirror?”

“Sure,” I said, “but I usually take something for it.”

“What?”

“Money.”

Myron Greene was waiting for me at the entrance to the Tenth Precinct and we went down the two steps and made our way through the small knot of uniformed cops who were admiring Greene’s new and unticketed de Tomaso Mangusta that he had just traded his Shelby Cobra for. Before that, he had owned an Excalibur until someone had told him it was corny.

We didn’t speak until we had fitted ourselves inside the thing and Myron had revved it up a couple of times to the cops’ delight. Then we streaked off down Twentieth Street for about fifty yards to where the red light was.

“Who’d you have to call?” I said.

“An assistant district attorney and a guy in the mayor’s office that I went to school with.”

Sometimes I felt that Myron Greene had gone to school with half of the nation’s public servants. The other half had gone to Yale.

“Anyone else?”

He turned to look at me. “Procane.”

“What did he say?”

“He was concerned, of course.”

“So am I.”

“He wants to see you.”

“When?”

“Now, if you can make it.”

“I’m pretty scruffy.”

“He thinks it’s quite important, and I agree with him.”

“Why?” I said and grabbed for something to hold on to as Greene drifted his eleven-thousand-dollar machine around the corner and up Sixth Avenue.

“Because,” he said, “he got a call this morning from somebody else who wants to sell him back his diaries.”

I had met Abner Procane for the first time only the day before, but it now seemed weeks ago. Yesterday had been October thirtieth, a Saturday, and there had been just enough bite in the air to make the long walk from Forty-sixth to Seventy-fourth a pleasure instead of an ordeal. I like to walk in New York on Saturday mornings when the weather is fine and the people are few—or relatively so. It reminds me of what the city was like twenty years ago when I first saw it as a visiting teen-ager from Ohio. It had held a lot more promise then. But so had I.

As New York neighborhoods go, Procane’s was fairly clean. At least I didn’t have to wade through the garbage because most of it was neatly tied up in green plastic bags. The bags seem like a good idea to me, but I’m sure there must be something wrong with them, just as there’s something wrong with disposable bottles and flip-top beer cans. It may be that children can crawl into the bags and suffocate. I don’t know that this is true, but it’s something else to worry about.

Myron Greene had set our appointment for ten o’clock and at one minute past ten I was scraping dog shit off my left shoe on the bottom step of Procane’s four-story town house. He must have been waiting for me because he came out to watch.

“I could never understand those who keep large dogs in a city such as this,” he said, much as he might have mentioned it to a neighbor who lived four doors down.

“I’m a cat man myself,” I said. “They like to crap in private.”

After I cleaned off my shoe I went up the steps and shook hands with him. He had a firm, dry shake, much like what you would expect from a CPA or a high school principal.

“You’re a bit younger than I thought you’d be,” he said, and to prove it he let his face display some mild surprise. But then he had a mild face, almost round, with thinning hair the color of old ginger, greenish eyes widely spaced above a broad nose, a moustache of sorts that had more gray in it than did his hair, a pleasant enough mouth that seemed to move around a lot, even in repose, and a round chin that went nicely with everything else.

He opened a wrought-iron gate that barred the way to his front door, which he unlocked with a key, and then we were in a thoughtfully furnished hallway. Procane crossed to a door and held it open. “I think this will be comfortable,” he said.

I entered a rather large room that seemed to be half office and half study. Its windows fronted on Seventy-fourth. There was a fireplace, which was working, a carved desk, a lot of books, some chairs, a leather couch raised at one end like the psychiatrists in cartoons have and which I’ve been unable to find, a large globe, and a number of oil paintings of some pleasant rural scenes.

Procane walked over to an electric coffee pot and filled two waiting cups. “Cream and sugar?” he said.

“A little sugar.”

“Do sit down,” he said and after I chose a comfortable-looking chair next to the fire he handed me a cup. He lowered himself into a chair opposite mine and, what with the fire going, I thought it to be all rather cheery.

“I assume that Mr. Greene filled most of it in for you,” Procane said.

“He told me what he knew,” I said, “but he didn’t mention one thing because he didn’t know it.”

“What was that?”

“That you’re supposed to be the best thief in town.”

I’m still not quite sure what response I expected from Procane. Perhaps nothing more than the cool smile I got.

“You did some checking on me about six or seven years ago when you were still with the paper, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I was pleased, but surprised that you never wrote anything.”

“I could never find a fact to hang it on.”

“Would a fact or two now help things along?”

“It might.”

Procane shifted his gaze from me to the fire. Then he smiled slightly and said, “You’re quite right, Mr. St. Ives; I am a thief.”

A
CCORDING TO ABNER PROCANE,
he never stole anything in his life until he was twenty-five years old. He was in the army then and he stole a truckload of American cigarettes and sold them on the Marseilles black market. He sold them to a man called Marcel Comegys, and if it hadn’t been for Comegys, Procane would be in jail today. At least that’s what Procane thought.

“He was a master thief and he taught me how to steal, what to steal, and whom to steal it from,” Procane said.

Comegys taught Procane to steal only money and to steal it only from those who were in no position to complain about their losses to the police.

“That may be the reason that I’ve never had any professional dealings with you before, Mr. St. Ives,” he said. “One doesn’t ransom money.”

The rest of what Procane told me rounded out the story that I had already put together. He stole but once or twice a year, and then only after the most meticulous planning. He had a high overhead, because he had to pay and pay well for information about his potential victims. And, not surprisingly, he enjoyed his work.

“I like to steal,” Procane said as he rose, picked up a brass poker, and stirred up the logs in the fireplace. “It’s not a compulsion, but from the first there was something about theft that intrigued and excited me. I don’t think there’s anything sexual about it either—not much, at any rate. The nearest thing that I can compare it to is painting, if there were more action in painting. Stealing gives me the same sense of—well, of achievement, except that it’s much more intensified.”

“You seem to have thought about it a lot,” I said.

“Too much probably.” He turned to look at a painting of a much weathered barn that was shaded by trees.

“Yours?” I said.

He nodded. I looked at the painting more carefully. The trees were beeches, I decided. It was a summer scene and I thought he had caught the sunlight rather well.

“Those diaries of yours must be hot stuff,” I said.

“They are more of a journal than a diary,” Procane said. “When I hear the word diary I always think of the wistful hopes of terribly inexperienced young girls. After a little experience, they stop keeping them.”

“What did you keep your journal in?” I said.

“You mean what do they look like?”

“Yes.”

“In ordinary one-hundred-page ledgers, approximately eight and a half by fourteen inches. They’re black with fake red-leather triangles to protect the right-hand corners. You can buy them at any office-supply store. I did.”

“How many of them are there?”

“Five, and they cover twenty-five years.”

“How’d it happen?”

Procane smiled a little. “I suppose it’s a little like the cobbler whose children have no shoes. I have this small farm in Connecticut.” He gestured toward the paintings. “They were all done there. I was at the farm last weekend and when I returned I discovered I’d been burglarized. By an expert.”

“Where did you keep them?”

“In an old safe that came with the house. I’ve been intending to replace it for years, but—” He shrugged.

“Was it punched, peeled or what?” I said.

“Peeled.”

“How’d they get in?”

“Through the front door. They walked in.”

“Your locks look pretty good.”

“They didn’t bother the thief. Or thieves. Neither did my burglar-alarm systems, which are supposed to be the best.”

“When did they call you? I don’t know why I keep saying ‘they.’ ”

“I do it, too,” Procane said. “A man called Wednesday morning and told me he wanted a hundred thousand dollars to return the journals. Then he said that he wanted you to handle the payment and that your services would cost me nothing, because you could take your ten percent off the top. I was surprised when he told me that Myron Greene was your attorney because I had just retained Greene. It was something of a coincidence and I’m not too fond of coincidences.”