The Procane Chronicle

by Ross Thomas

  He pulled a chair out from the table, made sure that its seat was clean, and settled into it with the air of a man who wants to talk about something that may take a while. “Draw it first,” he said.

  “The face?”

  “A soft lead pencil’s good.”

  I found an Edo King 503, the last of what must have been a gross or two of pencils that I’d brought home one by one, or two by two, from a long defunct and little mourned newspaper that I’d once worked for, and started to sketch a jack-o’-lantern’s face on the pumpkin’s flame-colored skin.

  “Make the eyes slanted,” Greene said. “You don’t want a happy-looking jack-o’-lantern.”

  I made the eyes slanted and then turned the pumpkin all the way around for his inspection. He nodded. “Sinister,” he said. “That’s how they like them to look. Sinister.”

  “He’s only six.”

  “At six they really like them sinister. When did you last see him, Saturday?”

  I nodded. “This’ll be his first jack-o’-lantern.”

  “How does he like his new stepfather?”

  “Fine,” I said. “When he grows older and realizes how rich his stepfather is, he’ll like him even better.” I rose, moved over to the Pullman kitchen, found the paring knife, and came back to the table. The knife sank easily into the pumpkin. I cut out a triangle for the nose and again turned the pumpkin for Myron Greene’s inspection. He nodded and I turned it back and started to work on the eyes. They were harder to do than the nose.

  “Who do we talk about that you couldn’t talk about over the phone?” I said.

  “I didn’t say we couldn’t; I said I didn’t want to.”

  “How rich is he?”

  “What makes you think he’s rich?”

  “Because you said he was a client and you don’t have any other kind. Except me.”

  “You’re not exactly starving now that she’s remarried and you’re off the alimony hook.”

  “I haven’t worked in a while.”

  “Nine months,” Myron Greene said. “You haven’t worked in nine months.”

  “That’s a while.”

  “You’ve had some opportunities,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t call them that.”

  “That oil company was a most reputable firm,” Myron Greene said as he rose and moved around the table so that he could see how I was coming with the teeth. The teeth were even harder to do than the eyes.

  “I don’t know of many reputable oil firms who go around ransoming kidnapped South American generals,” I said.

  Greene went back to his seat on the other side of the table. “I’m still convinced that the kidnappers would have returned the general, if they’d been paid.”

  I looked up at him and shook my head. “And I’m convinced that the go-between the oil company finally hired was smart to skip with the money. If he hadn’t, the kidnappers would have killed him, just like they killed the general.”

  “Well, this isn’t anything like that.”

  “It’d better not be.”

  “It seems a simple enough transaction.”

  “As long as it has nothing to do with the diplomatic set,” I said. “I don’t know why, Myron, but a call from the State Department can somehow convince you that the Republic will founder unless I’m on the next plane to Belgrade. Well, I tried that once and you know what happened.”

  Myron Greene sniffed, as if he remembered something that smelled bad. “It happened nearer to Sarajevo,” he said, “and the entire scheme was incredibly inept—which I pointed out to the Secretary in my letter, if you remember.”

  “I remember his reply better,” I said. “He said he’d never heard of me.”

  By now I had been Myron Greene’s client for nearly six years. Before that I had written a newspaper column that dealt mostly with the life styles of those New Yorkers who made their livings by doing something or other that the law said they shouldn’t. Most of the people I had written about were small time grifters, con men, hustlers, assorted thieves, and unlucky horse players.

  One of my constant readers had been an occasional thief who had once stolen some jewelry from one of Myron Greene’s clients and then had offered to sell it all back providing that I served as the go-between. Greene had approached me and I had agreed. Shortly after I had bought the jewelry back the paper folded and I was among the unemployed until Greene again approached me, this time to serve as the go-between in a kidnapping.

  Because there seemed to be a better than fair chance that I might get shot or dumped in the East River, I was paid ten thousand dollars for my efforts, which was ten percent of the ransom figure, and quite a bit more than anyone really believed my life to be worth.

  After that, I became Myron Greene’s client—or he became my keeper. He paid my bills, handled my income tax, reluctantly saw me through my divorce, and collected ten percent of whatever I earned in a calling that wasn’t terribly overcrowded and which offered a service that promised to remain in demand as long as thieves stole things from people, or, in some instances, stole people from people.

  I think Myron Greene kept me on as a client not because he needed the money, but because he felt that anyone who rubbed shoulders with thieves must dwell far beyond the pale of respectability in a land peopled by marvelously free souls who lived swift-moving lives, never grew old, and got up late in the morning. He seemed to find it all rather dashing and because I treasured my own illusions, I saw no reason to destroy his.

  Through Myron Greene the go-between assignments came my way two or three or even four times a year. They paid the rent on my ninth-floor “deluxe” efficiency in the Adelphi on East Forty-sixth, allowed me to patronize, if not frequent, a few of the better saloons, let me travel whenever the mood struck, which it did less and less, and enabled me to ignore the help wanted ads, except for a sneak glance or two on Sunday.

  So now there was the possibility of another assignment and after I finished the jack-o’-lantern’s mouth, I turned the pumpkin around for Greene’s inspection. “Tell me about your client,” I said.

  Greene tilted his head to one side as if trying to make up his mind about whether the jack-o’-lantern was an example of true folk art. “He’s a man of moderate means and—”

  “What’s moderate?”

  He looked up at the ceiling and gave his $12.50 haircut a thoughtful pat “He has some rather nice holdings, but nothing spectacular. He’s worth around two million, I’d say. Possibly three.”

  “Manages to scrape by.”

  “All right, damn it, he’s not poor. If it weren’t for the wealthy, you’d have to find a job.”

  “You’re wrong, Myron. If it weren’t for the thieves, I’d have to find a job.”

  Myron Greene reached for the paring knife, pulled the pumpkin over, and started doing something to its mouth. “Let’s agree that my client is of moderately substantial means. Does that satisfy you?”

  “Perfectly.”

  He turned the pumpkin around. I don’t know what he had done to the mouth, but it looked far more sinister.

  “How’s that?” he said.

  “Much better.”

  Greene leaned back so that he could admire his handiwork. “My new client was recommended to me by his broker, an old friend of mine, who asked me to take him on as a personal favor. That was a little over three weeks ago and I really haven’t done much for the client—just some routine work. He called late yesterday and wanted to know if you were available. I told him I’d find out.”

  “You want a drink?” I said.

  Myron Greene looked at his watch. “It’s a little early, isn’t it?”

  “Probably.”

  “Well—”

  “I’ll make it weak.” I went over to the sink and mixed Greene’s drink and one for myself so he wouldn’t feel that he was sinning alone. “What’s he want?” I said.

  “I’m getting to that.”

  “Here,” I said, handing him his drink.
r />   He tasted it suspiciously. “Well, while my client was away over the weekend, someone broke into his house and stole certain personal documents. Two days ago whoever stole the documents called him and offered to sell them back for a substantial sum.”

  “How much?”

  “One hundred thousand.”

  “What kind of personal documents?”

  “My client would prefer not to say.”

  “Come on, Myron, I can’t handle it unless I know what I’m buying.”

  “Well, I can say that the documents are in the form of a diary that goes back twenty-five years.”

  “Nobody keeps a diary that long unless he’s never grown up.”

  Myron Greene stiffened his face. “My client is just past fifty.”

  I decided to light a cigarette, my first in over an hour. By tapping some heretofore unsuspected reserves of self-discipline, I had cut down to a pack and a half a day. I kidded myself that I would stop altogether by Christmas. Or maybe New Year’s.

  “They must be incriminating,” I said. “If they weren’t, nobody would steal them. And he’d never spend that much just to check back on whether it was the winter of fifty or fifty-one that he caught the tarpon off Bermuda.”

  Myron Greene frowned and the resulting wrinkles were thoughtfully legal and made him look wise and grave beyond his thirty-six years. It was a look that would have gone over well with a jury, but Myron Greene was far too good a lawyer to ever let a case of his be decided by twelve strangers. When he spoke, his tone was as grave as his look.

  “A person,” he said, “can place a high premium on the privacy of his past without it meaning that his past necessarily entails something incriminating.” He paused to frown some more. “Privacy commands its own price, especially if one is a person of means.”

  I thought some of that was arguable, but I shrugged and said, “All right, who suggested me?”

  “The thief. Or thieves.”

  “And your client agrees?”

  “That’s why he called me.”

  “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.”

  3

  DETECTIVE 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 th
roat 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.