by Ross Thomas
“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.”
“Neither am I,” I said and we looked at each other for a while as if trying to think of something suspicious to say. When we couldn’t, I said, “What did the thief say he’d do, if you didn’t pay up?”
“He’d send them to the police.”
“And you wouldn’t like that?”
“No, Mr. St. Ives, I definitely wouldn’t like that.” He rose, picked up my cup, and poured me another cup of coffee, not forgetting to put in the sugar. When he handed it to me, he said, “I’ve never dealt with a professional go-between before.”
“It’ll probably be your last time,” I said. “I don’t have much repeat business.”
“What I’m trying to ask, I suppose, is whether there’s a code of ethics in your profession?”
“About as much as there is in yours, I’d say. My ethics are my own and they’re not especially rigid or I wouldn’t be in this business. But if they didn’t protect the person who hires me—I guess I would call him a client—then I wouldn’t be in business. I haven’t had too many complaints.”
“I’m paying one hundred thousand dollars to ensure my privacy.”
I shook my head. “You’re paying one hundred thousand dollars to stay out of jail. Your privacy, if you want to call it that, has already been broken. A lot of people know you’re a thief, but none of them can prove it. Those journals can. If you want my guarantee that I won’t peek inside once I get them back, I won’t give it to you. I’m still too much of a snoop. But I can promise you that whatever I learn won’t go any further than me. I don’t know how I can make you believe that, but it’s not really my problem. It’s yours.”
“Yes,” Procane said, “I can see that.”
“I should tell you that when Myron Greene first mentioned your name, I told him that I thought you were a thief.”
Procane frowned. “Was that necessary?”
“Probably not, but it’s done, and after my nice little talk about ethics, I thought you should know.”
“What did Greene say?”
“He said he didn’t care and that it was all hearsay anyhow. Actually, I think Myron likes having a thief for a client.”
Procane looked at his watch. “It’s now ten forty-five. The man said he would call at eleven to give you instructions.”
“How’d he sound when you talked to him?”
“A little nervous, I think, but I couldn’t really tell because his tone was strange.”
“How strange?”
“Tinny.”
“He probably used a distorter,” I said. “They’ve all learned about voice prints from TV so distorters are the latest thing.”
Procane nodded as if he knew all there was to know about distorters, and then said, “Do you always work alone?”
“I do now,” I said. “I tried working with someone else a couple of times and both were disasters.”
“Comegys—the Frenchman I spoke of—encouraged me to work alone whenever possible. But he also told me that as I grew older I would learn of certain opportunities that I’d have to forgo because they were too complex for one man and I would discover there was really no one I could trust. I remember him saying, ‘Find someone and train them just as I found and trained you.’ Two years ago I finally took his advice. I’ve acquired two associates, a young man and a young woman. They’re quite efficient, even brilliant, I think. If you should need assistance, feel free to call on them.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said and then we sat there in a not uncomfortable silence until the phone rang. After Procane said hello, he handed me the phone and I listened carefully. Whoever was on the other end was using a distorter all right and the first thing he wanted to know was whether I had the money,
“I can get it,” I said.
“Okay, now listen good, because this is gonna be a little complicated. In fact, you may want to write it down.”
“Go ahead.”
“There’s an all-night laundromat, the coin-operated kind that almost never has an attendant, over on Ninth Avenue between Twentieth and Twenty-first. It’s called the Neverclose. You got it?”
“I’ve got it.”
“Okay, now here’s whatcha do. You get one of those airline bags and put the money in it.”
“Ninety thousand,” I said.
“Yeah, ninety thousand. I’m letting you take your ten percent off the top so that means you’re kinda working for me, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, put the money in the bag,” he said and then paused as if giving me time to write that down.
“H
ow do you want it?” I said. “Fifties, twenties, tens, or what?”
“Fifties and hundreds will be okay,” he said, “just so they’re old. Hell, a hundred-dollar bill’s nothing anymore.”
“Okay,” I said, doing some rapid calculation. “It’s going to weigh about three and one-fourth pounds.”
“Is that all?” He sounded a little disappointed.
“That’s what sixty thousand dollars in fifties and thirty thousand in hundreds will weigh.”
“If that’s all it’s gonna weigh, then throw in some tens. Say ten thousand in tens.”
“That’ll be another two pounds,” I said.
“Okay. Now at three A.M. sharp tomorrow, Sunday morning, you walk into the Neverclose laundromat. You got that? Three A.M.”
“I’ve got it.”
“At five minutes past three put the airline bag in a dryer. I don’t care which one. They got six of them and they’re the spin kind. They also got a heat control on them so make sure the heat’s turned down low. You with me?”
“All the way.”
“Okay. Now after you got the airline bag inside the dryer, close the door, and put a dime in at exactly six minutes past three A.M. Sharp. Now at exactly seven minutes past three A.M. one of the other dryers is gonna end its twelve-minute cycle. I don’t know which one yet, but one of them will. Okay. So you open it up and take out what looks like a blanket, only the blanket’s gonna be wrapped around the five ledger things I’ve got. You still with me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Okay. Now you got four minutes to look at the ledgers to make sure they’re for real. Then you got one minute to leave. I’m gonna be watching. But if I try a double cross all you gotta do is wait for the dryer that you put a dime in to finish its twelve-minute cycle and then you can take your money back. How do you like it?”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Real clever.”
“I spent a lot of time thinking it up. It protects you and it protects me. You want I should run through it again?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve got it.”
“Okay,” the tinny voice said. “I’ll be watching just like I said so if you got any funny notions about putting cut-up paper in that bag, forget about it.”
“I don’t work that way.”
“Yeah, I know,” the voice said. “That’s why I asked for you. But maybe I should mention that I got some Xeroxed copies of the stuff and it makes real good reading.”
“What are you going to do with the copies?”
“Nothing, if everything goes off like it should. If it don’t, I’ll mail ’em to the cops.”
“How do I know you won’t anyhow?”
“You gotta learn to trust somebody someday, St. Ives,” he said and hung up.
After I put the phone down I told Procane what the thief wanted me to do. He nodded a couple of times while I spoke and when I was through he said, “What do you think?”
“It’s not bad, just a little overly elaborate with the dryers and the split-second timing. But it’ll let him observe me and keep us from bumping into each other. What about the money? It’s Saturday.”
“Yes,” Procane said, “that does present a problem. It’s going to take me several hours to arrange for it.”
I made a list of the denominations I wanted, but I didn’t ask how he was going to arrange for a hundred thousand dollars on Saturday. I suppose people who are worth a million or so can do things like that. On weekends I have a hard time cashing a check at my hotel for twenty dollars, but I’ve only lived there six years. Procane, however, didn’t seem at all concerned about raising one hundred thousand dollars. Maybe he planned to steal it.
6
I THOUGHT ABOUT MY first and only meeting with Abner Procane as Myron Greene showed off his driving skill by speeding up Sixth Avenue as fast as the early Sunday-morning traffic and the red lights would allow, which was about eighteen miles per hour. The fancy car reflected another of his semisecret desires: Myron would like to have been a gentleman racing driver.
When we got to Forty-fifth Street I said, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t want to see Procane until I get rid of this jailhouse smell.”
Myron Greene sniffed. “You weren’t really in jail.”
“It smells that way.”
“It must have been—uh—uncomfortable.”
“Confining, too.”
Myron was explaining how my last comment could be taken as a joke when he drove up in front of the Adelphi and stopped.
“Thanks for getting me out of jail,” I said and started planning my escape from the cockpit of the de Tomaso Mangusta whose midmounted engine popped and spat as it idled at what sounded to me like thirty-five hundred revolutions per minute.
“I must confess that I rather enjoyed rousing those people out of bed at four-thirty in the morning,” Greene said. Being a topflight criminal lawyer was another of his occasional fantasies.
I finally found the lever that opened the car’s door and it only took another fifteen seconds to figure out how I could swing my feet onto the sidewalk without rupturing something. “Thanks for the ride,” I said.
“Be sure to call Procane,” said Myron Greene, the worrier.
“If there’s somebody else who now wants to sell him back his journals, they can wait till I take a shower.”
I had to bend far down from the waist to see the dubious nod that Greene gave me as an answer. Then I slammed the door shut and watched him streak off toward Darien and the $165,000 home that he called a bungalow.
Indifferent, I suppose, was the best word to describe the atmosphere at the Adelphi Hotel because its food, service, and maintenance lay somewhere between fair and awful. The only time the place showed any zip was around the tenth of the month if you hadn’t come up with the rent.
The hotel catered to permanent guests such as myself who lived alone and didn’t demand too much in the way of service. The guests were mostly widows with rather large pensions and very small dogs; a few UN diplomats who didn’t entertain much; three or four industrious call girls who were on the wrong side of thirty and trying to sock a little away; several peripatetic businessmen who muttered to each other in the elevator about the rotten state of the economy, and a couple of rich, quiet alcoholics who smiled a lot and didn’t bother anyone.
The hotel also offered a bar and grill and restaurant called the Continental that had to depend on total strangers for its survival.
Caring for the wants and whims of the guests was a true son of Manhattan, Eddie, the bell captain. He was somewhere in his forties and owned a couple of tenements in Harlem and a taxi that was driven by his two brothers-in-law. He also ran a short string of call girls, accepted all bets, and answered all Questions, including those about the weather, in a whisper that bordered on the conspiratorial.
I carried the blue airline bag over to the desk and watched the day clerk lock it away in the safe. Eddie was waiting for me by the elevator.
“You look like you had a big night,” he said.
“Did you get that jack-o’-lantern to my son?”
“Yeah. You done a good job on it. The kid was real tickled.”
“You saw him?”
“Sure I saw him. I wasn’t gonna turn a ten-dollar pumpkin over to just anybody.”
“What did he say?”
“Aw, it wasn’t what he said, it was the way he looked. You know how kids are.”
I nodded, entered the elevator, and went up to my empty “deluxe” efficiency apartment to see whether I could wash away the precinct grime. I tried to think of something better to use than soap and water, but I couldn’t come up with anything.
I spent at least twenty minutes under the shower, for some reason thinking about the night before when the hundred thousand dollars had been delivered to me by the man and the woman who, if they’d been only a few years younger, I would have thought of as the boy and the girl.
They had knocked at the door about nine-thirty. I was in my favorit
e chair half-watching a movie on television and half-reading all about Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown in Hard Times, a novel that I had never been able to get all the way through. I put Dickens down for what must have been the hundredth time and went over to open the door. The man carried the blue airline bag slung over his left shoulder. He kept his right hand deep in the pocket of his topcoat. The woman stood slightly behind him and to his left, the side that the money was on. He looked at me for a while as if trying to decide whether my face went with the description that someone had given him. He apparently decided that it did because after a moment or two he said, “Do you always open your door like this, Mr. St. Ives?”
“Except when I’m in the shower,” I said. “Then I don’t open it at all.”
“I’m Miles Wiedstein. This is Janet Whistler. Mr. Procane sent us.”
“Come in,” I said.
After they were in they looked around the place as if automatically checking to see whether there was anything worth stealing. I looked, too, and was mildly surprised to find that there wasn’t. The TV set was black and white and more than five years old. The books were mostly paperback, except for the blue leatherbound Oxford edition of Dickens. The best piece of furniture in the place was the poker table, which I also ate on. The silver wasn’t silver at all; it was stainless steel, and I wouldn’t have been embarrassed by an earnest offer of nine hundred dollars for everything.
Wiedstein removed the airline bag from his shoulder and placed it on the poker table. “We’d like you to count it.”
“You want a drink or a cup of coffee while you watch?”
Wiedstein looked at Janet Whistler. She shook her head no. “We’re fine like this,” he said.
They didn’t quite stand over me while I counted the money, but they watched. Carefully. There were a few new bills, mostly hundreds, but not enough to cause any bother. It was all there and when I finished counting, I said, “Do you want a receipt?”
“That would be nice,” Janet Whistler said. She was attractive enough if you liked tall, rangy girls with slender figures and easy, natural movements. I didn’t mind them. She wore a loose gray-tweed coat that ended just above the black, over-the-calf boots that had to be laced all the way up to the top. Her hair was straight, brown, and shiny and fell halfway down her back and sometimes into her eyes so that she had to keep brushing it away. Her face had pleasant features, although some might have called them sharp. I thought of them as finely chiseled—except for her mouth, which was a bit on the wide side. Her eyes were a deep, dark brown and I don’t think she wore any makeup, but nowadays I have a hard time telling.