by Ross Thomas
“How does he go about it?”
“With Doctor Constable.”
I must have looked at her questioningly as I moved toward the Pullman kitchen because she said, “Dr. John Constable. He’s Procane’s analyst.”
“What would you like to drink?”
“How’re your martinis?”
“They’ve drawn a few rave notices.”
“I’ll try one.”
The secret of my martinis was that I didn’t put any vermouth in them. None at all. Few seemed to care as long as the gin was cold. I tried to stick to Scotch and water.
She sat in the same chair that Frann had sat in earlier that day and sipped her drink. She wrinkled her nose and said, “Straight gin?”
“I’m out of vermouth.”
She handed the drink back to me. “Put a dash of Scotch in it. That’ll kill the juniper berries.”
I did as told and this time she nodded after taking another sip. “Fine.”
“Procane’s not having a session tonight, is he?” I said.
“No, they like to get together socially. Procane fascinates Constable. And as I told you, Procane needs somebody to talk to.”
“About tomorrow?” I tried to keep the surprise out of my voice. I don’t think I succeeded.
She smiled, but it seemed a little grim. “The sanctity of the couch. It’s almost as good as the confession box.”
“Where’s Wiedstein?”
“With his wife and kiddies.”
“I didn’t know he was married.”
“Very much so. He has three children. Twin girls, a boy, and a nice Italian wife who thinks he’s New York’s most dynamic life-insurance salesman. It gets him out of the house at night.”
“That leaves only you without solace or comfort.”
“I thought I’d come to the right place.”
I put my drink down, rose, and walked over to her. “You did.”
She took a swallow of her martini, a slow swallow, and then carefully set it on a table. I found the move stagey. What she really needed were some long gloves that she could begin to strip off in a careful, thoughtful manner.
She looked up at me and smiled and then smoothed her long hair back with both hands. Then she extended them toward me. “I don’t need too much romancing,” she said. “Just a little.”
I drew her up and kissed her. It was a long, satisfying kiss and the gin that I tasted in her mouth had an erotic flavor to it. She stepped back, did something with her hands behind her neck, and then was out of her dress. She had nothing else on but pantyhose and she began to peel those off slowly, without shyness, as if she were a little proud of the effect that she knew it would have.
It took me a little longer to get rid of my clothes, but not much. Then we were locked together again, trying to devour each other’s mouths, thrusting and squirming against each other, until she gave a little cry and shuddered and looked up at me.
“Hurt me a little first,” she said.
“Where?”
“Here.” She took my hand and guided it to where she wanted to be hurt. “Hard. Again.” She gave another cry. “Oh, God, again! Please, please again!” So I hurt her some more because she wanted me to and she said, “Now with your mouth, please with your mouth, oh please.”
Then we were on the rug between the chairs pounding down and up at each other and I felt her fingernails rake my back, which I didn’t like because she did it again, making me plunge into her brutally and she said, “Oh my God, yes!” and now we came together, or at least almost together, subsiding slowly, and then she whispered, “I needed that,” as if it had been a stiff drink rather than a stiff something else.
So it had been sex with plenty of lust, if not love or even liking, but since that was the only kind that I’d had for some time, I wasn’t going to complain, not even about the raking fingernails. The act seemed to have been a kind of tonic for her and now neither of us owed each other anything except perhaps a fairly polite thank you, but maybe not even that.
She sat up after a while and slipped her dress over her head, shivering a little from what must have been the cold. It couldn’t have been modesty. “What do you think about chili?” she said.
“I have a certain amount of respect for it; at least my stomach does.”
“I know an almost secret place that serves the best in town. I’ll let you in on it because you’re such a good fuck.”
“You’re not bad yourself.”
“I know,” she said as she pulled on her pantyhose.
I got dressed slowly in between swallows of my drink. She watched as she finished her martini which must have been warm, but she didn’t seem to mind.
“How do you keep in shape?” she said.
“I don’t.”
“You look good. What are you, six feet?”
“Five-eleven.”
“One-sixty?”
“About that.”
“Diet?”
I shook my head. “I was born with a happy metabolism.”
“Then you can eat chili.”
“I can eat anything. It’s only afterward that I sometimes wish I hadn’t.”
She looked around the apartment as if seeing it for the first time. “When I was up here before I didn’t think this place looked like you. Now I do.”
“I suppose that’s some kind of a compliment.”
“I mean the poker table and the three million paperbacks and the covered typewriter and all. It looked like a pose.”
“For what?”
“For oh-so-carefully-casual.”
“Oh.”
“But you really are, aren’t you?”
“Carefully casual?”
“No, I mean you just really don’t give a shit.”
“This place came with my alimony payments.”
“What happened?”
“To the payments? She got married again.”
“Any kids?”
“A boy. He’s six.”
“What’s he like?”
“Smart. Like his mother.”
“What was she like?”
“She was a nice girl.”
“But a little ambitious.”
“A lot of wives are.”
“I’ll bet she married money.”
“A great deal of it.”
“I’ll also bet you busted up shortly after she found out.”
“Found out what?”
“That you didn’t want it bad enough to do anything about it.”
“Money?”
“Yes.”
“It wasn’t only money.”
“Social position then.”
“Being married to a columnist is one thing; being married to a go-between is another. She thought it was a step down. A long one.”
“What did you think?”
“I agreed with her.”
“But you took it anyway.”
“I told you I was a little short on ambition.”
“But I didn’t believe you; now I think I do.”
“Maybe I should see Procane’s analyst.”
She looked at me—a little critically, I thought. “I don’t think so. You’re not freaky enough. He likes the real freaky ones, probably because he’s so far out himself.”
“How?”
She shrugged. “I went with him for a while. He had some funny kinks. Really weird.”
“Such as?”
“Costumes, masks, that sort of thing.”
“It didn’t do much for you?”
“Not for me, but he liked it.”
“Is he any good?”
“Professionally?”
“Yes.”
“He thinks so.” She paused a moment and then smiled. “He liked to dress up like Peter Pan best of all. Maybe that tells you something about him.”
“I’ll work on it. You want another drink?”
“No, not now.”
“Then let’s go find that chili.”
It was nearly eig
ht o’clock when we came out of the Adelphi entrance and turned left. We had decided to walk because the chili parlor that Janet Whistler had discovered was over on Fortieth Street, a little more than six blocks away. The weather was somewhere between crisp and cold and I remember thinking that a bowl of chili would taste good, even if I later had to ransack the medicine cabinet for something to put out the fire.
I spotted him sitting behind the wheel of the car that was parked in a no-parking zone. He didn’t look at me and for a moment I thought he may have felt that if he remained absolutely still, it would make him invisible. The car was a three-year-old yellow Camaro with a 327 engine. I gave him a cheery enough wave, but he didn’t wave back.
“Wait a minute,” I said to Janet Whistler and tried to open the door that was next to the curb, but it was locked. I went around to the driver’s side and tried that door, but it was locked, too. I noticed that the keys were in the ignition. The shoulder harness was strapped across his chest. His eyes were open and so was his mouth, the lips just slightly parted, but now that he was dead, they didn’t look quite so girlish.
Janet Whistler was staring at him through the windshield. “Is he dead?”
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
“A cop called Francis X. Frann,”
“Do you know him?”
“Yes and I think we’re going to have to skip the chili.”
She nodded. “Has he got anything to do with us?”
“A little. You’d better find Procane and tell him.”
“What’ll I tell him?”
“That the cop called Francis X. Frann is dead, that he’s parked outside my hotel, that I’m going to have to call the cops, that Procane’s probably going to have to talk to them some time tonight, and that he’d better be able to prove where he’s been.”
“Anything else?”
“You’d better scoot.”
She nodded again, turned, and walked quickly up Forty-sixth Street. I went around in front of the car and wrote down the license number and the fact that it was a New Jersey plate. I went back up to my apartment and asked information for the number of Frank Deal. He lived in Brooklyn and a woman answered the phone. When I asked for Deal I could hear her call, “Frank, it’s for you.”
After he said hello I said, “This is St. Ives.”
“Now what?”
“It’s about Officer Frann again.”
“Me and Oller haven’t been able to run him down. Oller’s here now. What’s the matter, Frann still hanging around?”
“Sort of.”
“Where?”
“He’s in a car parked right outside my hotel.”
“Well, hell, he can keep till tomorrow.”
“He might even keep forever.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means he’s dead,” I said and hung up.
16
A TOW TRUCK CAME for the yellow Camaro, an ambulance came for Officer Frann, and Deal and Oller came for me.
“They say he was stabbed,” Deal said, “right in the heart.” He and Carl Oller sat at the poker table. I wandered around the room, making myself useful by straightening pictures, lining up books, and chain-smoking cigarettes.
“Why don’t you sit down, St. Ives?” Oller said. “You’re giving me the jitters.”
“Have a drink,” Deal said. “You look like you could use a drink.”
“I can,” I said and crossed over to the kitchen to pour myself a Scotch. “You want one?”
“Not me,” Oller said.
Deal shook his head. “Me neither.”
I carried my drink over to the poker table and sat down. “All right,” I said, “I’ve told you all I know about Frann.”
“The way it looks to me is he was gonna try to shake down your client,” Oller said. He was wearing a tweed sport coat that wouldn’t quite button anymore because of his stomach. The jacket had gray suede leather patches on its elbows.
“And you haven’t told us the name of your client,” Deal said.
“Or what it was you were buying back for him this morning.”
“Private papers,” I said. “Personal stuff.”
“It must have been goddamned personal if he was willing to pay ninety thousand bucks for it,” Deal said.
“We’re going to have to talk to him,” Oller said.
I nodded. “That’s what I told him.”
“What’d he say?” Deal said.
“He didn’t like it.”
“But he agreed to talk.”
“He agreed.”
“When?”
“Tonight.”
Deal looked at Oller who nodded. “Tonight’s good. Who is he?”
I took a long drink of my Scotch and water. “His name’s Procane. Abner Procane.”
The two detectives looked at each other and then Deal shrugged elaborately, bringing his shoulders up high and dropping them. “Never heard of him.”
“What kind of business is he in?” Oller said.
“Investments, I think.”
“Loaded?” Deal asked.
“He’s not poor,” I said.
“I mean really loaded?”
“He’s worth a few million.”
“What I was thinking was if the kid wanted to shake him down for a few thousand, would it bother him enough to do something drastic about it, like sticking a knife in the kid?”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t think he’s much of a suspect.”
“But you’re gonna let us decide that, aren’t you?” Oller said and gave me a slow smile to show how sweetly reasonable he thought his request was.
“Sure,” I said.
“I suppose you can account for where you were this afternoon and evening,” Deal said.
“Here.”
“Alone?”
“Most of the time.”
“Who else was here?”
“Frann for one.”
“And for two?”
“A girl.”
“And you were probably sticking it into her while somebody else was sticking it into poor old Frann.”
“Probably.”
“We may want her name,” Oller said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You know something, St. Ives?”
“What?”
“We don’t really give much of a shit what you think.”
“Look,” I said, “I’ve told you all I know. About the airline terminal, about the buy back and about who my client is. I’m not going to bring anybody else into this unless you charge me with something and I probably wouldn’t even do it then.”
“He’s a real fuckin gentleman, isn’t he, Frank?”
“Knock it off,” Deal said. “What’s this Procane’s number?”
I told him and he said, “Is he home?”
“I think so.”
Deal rose and crossed to the phone, dialed the number, and then identified himself. “We’d like to talk to you, Mr. Procane. I think St. Ives has told you why.” He listened for a moment and then said, “Ten o’clock’ll be fine,” and hung up the phone. He walked around the room looking at pictures and books, even taking down a volume of Kipling’s poetry and thumbing through it, perhaps looking for “If.”
After a while Deal turned and said, “We got ourselves assigned to this one, St. Ives, because we’re pretty sure it’s tied into the Boykins killing. But Frann wasn’t just some two-bit hustler who got himself beat to death. He was a cop and that means that we’re not going to be working it alone. There’s going to be a whole swarm of us because cops don’t like cops getting killed. Am I making myself clear?”
“You’re getting there.”
“Well, what I’m telling you is this: if you haven’t told us every goddamn thing about Frann that you know—I mean if you’re keeping something back about him or about who might have killed him and then somebody finds out that you were keeping it back, well, you’re going to be in one hel
l of a lot of trouble. I mean real bad trouble.”
I thought a moment. “I told you everything he told me.”
“But you’re not sure he was really gonna try to work a shakedown?” Oller said.
“He didn’t come right out and say so. He just said that he thought Procane might like to know who carried that United airline bag into the men’s room this morning. I thought that if he were going to shake somebody down, he’d try it on the guy who carried the bag. But maybe he was planning to work both of them. Or it may even have been because of what he said was the real reason.”
Deal had moved over to the door and Oller was joining him. They both stared at me.
“What real reason?” Deal said.
“That he just wanted to stop riding that motor-scooter.”
Procane called at midnight. “How’d it go?” I said.
“Not too bad; not too bad at all. They were very polite and very considerate, I thought.”
“What did they ask you about Frann?”
“Whether I knew him and whether he’d approached me.”
“What’d you say?”
“That I’d never heard of him. They must have asked me the same question a dozen times in as many different ways.”
“Did they believe you?”
“They seemed to. Eventually.”
“What’d you tell them about the journals?”
“That they were personal papers that could be embarrassing and that I could afford not to be embarrassed. So I bought them back.”
“Did they ask to see them?”
“No, they seemed quite understanding although they said they thought that they could have saved me a lot of money if I’d gone to the police first. I tried to appear a bit crestfallen.”
“Anything else?”
“I simply told them what had happened, how I came to get in touch with you through Myron Greene, and how you bought the journals back this morning after the previous attempt failed.”
“How long were they there?”
“A full two hours. They just left.”
“They took long enough.”
“Well, they really were quite thorough. They asked me to tell the entire story several times and they examined the safe and looked around the house. Most conscientious, I thought.”
“Do they want to talk to you again?”
“They said that they will. I told them I’d be away tomorrow and they said that that was all right because tomorrow was their day off. Or it’s today, now, isn’t it? Wednesday.”